Flailing to distract once-loyal cultists who've turned unexpectedly unruly on the murky matter of bestie Jeffrey Epstein - "The people are revolting!" - Trump is busy shouting "Look! Over there!" about myriad other shiny objects: The "Redskins," the FBI files on MLK, his "Golden Age," star-turn at soccer, "Dollar-Tree-Versailles" Oval Office, more spray tan, less corn syrup, the deranged need to jail "Barack HUSSEIN Obama." Still, MAGA remains wary: "He’s wearing makeup on his hands, so things are just getting weird."

The people's fledgling revolt - Mel Brooks: "They stink on ice" - is reflected in news polls showing Trump's approval plummeting at least 16 points to hover around 40%. On immigration, only about 35% approve of his crackdowns; just 23% support his deportations of undocumented immigrants with no criminal record, a figure likely to drop with news his flunkies gave ICE access to the Medicaid records of nearly 80 million people in another bogus hunt for "illegals," who can't get Medicaid. More smoke and mirrors: For all their performative cruelty, Trump’s ICE raids have led to fewer deportations than under Obama and barely more than under Biden, and the whole gaudy, ghastly spectacle of disappearing hundreds of Venezuelans to CECOT ended in a swap for 10 Americans jailed, intoned Marco Rubio with no trace of irony, "without proper due process."

Americans also hate the tariffs, big ugly bill, rising prices. They're worried about health insurance, also those ankles. And now Dear Leader is calling them "losers" and "bad people" because they wanna know the story behind Jeffrey Epstein's file, which Pam Bondi just said was sitting on her desk, but then she said oops never mind, and Trump keeps saying it's all a "scam” by Dems except if it doesn't exist how could Dems have written it and they "don't understand why (he) would do this - it doesn't make sense." His former bestie Musk chimed in - "Wow, I can’t believe Epstein killed himself before realizing it was all a hoax” - and he even lost Nazi Nick Fuentes. "Fuck you," Fuentes screeched. "You're fat, you're a joke, you're stupid...This entire thing has been a scam. We're gonna look back at the MAGA movement as the biggest scam in history. The liberals were right." Yikes.

Improbably, with all the atrocities he's committed - pussy, racism, Nazis, sedition, grift, seven gazillion lies - the furor over Epstein seems to be sticking, at least for now. About 80% of Americans think the government should release all documents in the case, including 85% of Democrats and three-quarters of Independents and Republicans. Only 4% think it shouldn't. It didn't help when Bondi made a big deal about releasing "raw" video footage outside Epstein's prison cell the night he died to prove nobody offed him, only for Wired to reveal nearly three minutes were missing, sparking MAGA frenzy about a Deep State plot nicely dovetailing with QAnon's insistence Bill Clinton and other Dems lead a child porn cabal Trump will save them from - except maybe for that interview where he said, "I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with."

But Epstein kept re-surfacing. Trump reportedly fought to kill it, but the Wall Street Journal went ahead with publishing their story about a lewd birthday card Trump sent Epstein for his 50th birthday in 2003: Several lines of text framed by the outline of a naked woman, signed by a squiggly “Donald” where her pubic hair would be. "We have certain things in common, Jeffrey," he wrote ominously. "May every day be another wonderful secret." Caught, he said it was fake. He said Obama and Biden made it up. He said, "These are not my words...Also, I don't make drawings." Online, 7,000 people helpfully posted images of his often-auctioned drawings, mostly of cityscapes drawn with a heavy marker. Straight-faced, the New York Times noted, "They are not dissimilar to how The Wall Street Journal describes the birthday note he sent Mr. Epstein."

Trump did what he always does: He threatened to sue for defamation: "Thank you for your attention to this matter." Then he did. In a complaint that misstated the WSJ story and "reads like a press release," he sued WSJ publisher Dow Jones & Co., its parent company News Corp, Rupert Murdoch and others for $10 billion in damages. Then, hoping to end "this SCAM," he asked Pam Bondi to release grand jury testimony on Epstein - "a meaningless trick" because courts tend to prohibit such disclosure, and even if it went ahead he asked the court for "appropriate redactions of victim-related and other personal identifying information." Still, The Good Liars jumped in to help foster transparency by stocking the gift shop display racks at Trump Tower with post cards of the famed image of the two smiling perverts, "up to no good." Next to them, Melania gazes out, robotic.

Sensing a losing fight, Trump's deflection campaign.grew ever more bonkers. Marking the six-month anniversary of "one of the most consequential periods of any President, including ending numerous wars" (say wut?), when "one year ago our country was DEAD" (ditto), he released a cheesy, cringey, AI-generated video declaring, "Day 179 of the “Trump Golden Age." Cue fireworks and fake eagles soaring over the White House while dropping dollar bills to the song Make It Rain Reviews: "Downright embarrassing,” "Really gross," "They need to use AI because we are not seeing tangible evidence of anything good." Musk’s Nazi chatbot Grok: "Where eagles crap cash and fireworks fix everything. Reality check: Golden parachutes for billionaires while the rest dodge inflation hailstones." And, “Why don’t you make it rain Epstein files?”

— (@)

It got wilder Friday after Director of National Intelligence (sic) Tulsi Gabbard announced she's referring Obama officials to the DOJ for prosecution over allegations they “manufactured” intelligence about Russia in the 2016 election. Newly declassified documents show Obama et al "politicized intelligence to lay the groundwork for what was essentially a years-long coup against President Trump"; they must be punished "for the American people to have any sense of trust in the integrity of our democratic republic." MAGA piled on. It was "a pivotal fracture in American trust," it "makes Watergate look like Amateur Hour." Stephen Goebbels was feverish: Gabbard "has exposed the startling depths of a seditious coup against the republic. The forces behind (it) will do anything to protect their grasp (on) illegitimate power. Do not underestimate their capabilities or depravities." Whew.

On her Sunday show, Maria Bartiromo brought up Gabbard’s news 18 times. Epstein: 0. Trump posted about it 17 times; inspired, he's been tirelessly flinging spaghetti at the wall to see what'll stick. He proclaimed, with carefully curated images, "STACKING UP WINS": "Ice Cream makers pledge to remove artificial colors," "Consumer prices rise less than expected." He railed against "thief" Adam Schiff. He said Coke will replace their corn syrup with sugar. (Coke said, wait what?) He posted videos of wacky stunts. (A woman grabbing a snake was fake). Against the wishes of family and colleagues, he released 200,000 pages of records of FBI surveillance of MLK Jr., under seal since 1977. King's two surviving children called it “an invasive, predatory, and deeply disturbing” operation “to discredit, dismantle and destroy” King and the movement he led.

Speaking of "invasive, predatory, and deeply disturbing,” the fragile, petty, vengeful boy-king, feeling he hadn't gone quite far enough to offend and distract, also posted an AI compilation of fake mugshots, dubbed "The Shady Bunch, featuring Democrats - most notably "Barack Hussein Obama" - in orange prison jumpsuits. A day or so later, evidently feeling especially insecure, he went especially crass. The new AI video starts with multiple Democratic pols declaring, "No one is above the law." Then it goes to a fake scenario of FBI agents arresting Obama in the Oval Office as Trump sits, beams, gloats. It moves to Obama, jump-suited in a jail cell, all while the Village People sing YMCA. In response, at least one sick fan of this cretin urged Pam Bondi, "MAKE THIS A REALITY." Truly, you gotta wonder what malignant, hallucinatory reality these fucking creeps inhabit.

— (@)

Meanwhile, their leader keeps flouting laws and probity; in a recent lawsuit brought by watchdog group CREW for refusing to disclose spending decisions as mandated by law - regime flunkies deemed it "an unconstitutional encroachment" on their tinpot's whims - U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivana blasted the mob-boss' "extravagant and unsupported theory of presidential power" and declared, "Defendants are therefore required to stop violating the law!" Alas, arbitrary and often punitive rules still reign. Press Barbie just announced the Wall Street Journal will be banned from the press pool for an upcoming trip to Scotland for their "fake and defamatory conduct" - is fake conduct a thing? - aka committing journalism and reporting the ugly, pubic-doodling truth about the sexual predator now defiling our pimped-up Oval Office.

Still deflecting - and still racist - he also just demanded the Washington Commanders, along with Cleveland Guardians, return to their old, offensive names, Redskins and Indians, witlessly claiming, "Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen." Ever the bully, he even threatened to renege on a plan to build the Washington team a new stadium in D.C. "Indians are being treated very unfairly," he blathered. "MAKE INDIANS GREAT AGAIN (MIGA)!!" Of course Native activists called bullshit on returning to names they fought for years to remove as "a slur." "We are language keepers, land protectors, survivors of attempted genocide and part of sovereign nations," said one. "To equate Native people with cartoonish mascots (is) a gross and ongoing tactic of dehumanization...We are being used as tools for a distraction."

In another cringe move, the sports wannabe made it all about himself at the World Cup Final at New Jersey's MetLife Stadium, where Chelsea won a surprise 3-0 victory against Paris Saint-Germain. The crowd booed Trump before he crashed the postgame ceremony, lumbering onstage to hand over the trophy and then staying put as Chelsea's Captain asked, “Are you going to leave?” and FIFA head Gianni Infantino tried to pull him away to allow the team their victory photo. In the end, there he was - fat, rumpled, cluelessly claiming "I've earned a spot in the shot" - as players whooped around him. The team didn't even get the real trophy; at an earlier photo-op at the White House, Trump claimed that too. But in sports as in life, strategy is key. For hours, no official photo of "the team moment” appeared on Chelsea's website; when it finally did, Trump had been scrubbed out.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Abby Zimet.

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Dr. Phil, the powerhouse TV personality, has long dispensed practical advice to anyone hoping to avoid financial ruin — advice he’s shared with his millions of viewers. “No. 1 is avoid debt like the plague,” he’s said.

On other episodes of his syndicated talk show, he’s urged people to pay off their costliest obligations first: “You got to get rid of that high-interest debt.”

Yet for thousands of people mired in debt, Dr. Phil’s eldest son has been part of the problem, an investigation by ProPublica and the Anchorage Daily News found.

Jay McGraw, a TV producer, became involved in the payday lending industry over a decade ago and has been affiliated with a range of financial services businesses, more recently launching a firm that sells used cars online at costly interest rates and targets Texans with low or no credit.

Earlier this year, McGraw settled a federal civil suit that had accused him of playing a key role in CreditServe Inc., a financial technology consulting firm that helps arrange small-dollar consumer loans online — with interest rates that can exceed 700% — via a company owned by a Native American tribe in Alaska.

The tribal lending operation, Minto Money, is based in the log cabin village of Minto, 50 miles northwest of Fairbanks, and has delivered a new revenue stream to the community since its inception in 2018. But it’s also created a rift within the tribe, as some members are appalled by the burdens inflicted on poor and desperate people.

“It’s bringing in a lot of money. But it’s off the misery of the people on the other end who are taking out these loans,” said Darrell Frank, a former chief of the tribe. “That’s not right. That’s not what the elders set this tribal council up for.”

There’s documented harm. As of July 2024, the Federal Trade Commission had received more than 280 consumer complaints about Minto’s lending operations. That total includes complaints forwarded from the Better Business Bureau, where Minto Money holds an “F” rating. Customers who took out loans — which range from $200 to $3,000 — pleaded for relief from onerous terms that allowed Minto Money to claw back the sums multiple times over through automatic bank withdrawals.

“This loan is outrageous with interest over 700%!” one person complained to the Better Business Bureau about having paid $4,167 on a $1,200 loan from Minto Money. “I am one step away from filing from bankruptcy.”

A federal suit filed in Illinois in November by five Minto Money borrowers contends that McGraw has provided “tens of millions of dollars” in capital for the loans. CreditServe provides the infrastructure to market, underwrite and collect on them while “the Tribe is merely a front” and shares in only a small percentage of the revenue, according to the suit.

It called McGraw the “enterprise’s principal beneficiary,” asserting that he and CreditServe’s CEO, Eric Welch, have collected “hundreds of millions of dollars of payments made by consumers.”

The suit alleged that McGraw and the other defendants, including Minto Money, violated state usury laws and federal prohibitions against collecting unlawful debt. A confidential settlement resolved the lawsuit in early May but left open the possibility that other Minto Money customers could file similar suits in the future.

A. Paul Heeringa, who is representing McGraw, Welch and CreditServe, wrote in an email to reporters that “our clients cannot comment on any of your questions, or the case generally, other than to say that the allegations in the Complaint are not facts and were not proven to be true, and that our clients categorically deny the allegations.”

CreditServe was set up by a Hollywood lawyer who has represented the McGraws, California records show. Its principal address in the Larchmont Village neighborhood of Los Angeles is a box in a mail shop that also has served as the published address for many other McGraw family companies.

There is nothing in the public record linking Dr. Phil — whose full name is Phil McGraw — to the lending businesses, including CreditServe.

A lawyer for Phil McGraw said McGraw declined to comment for this story but shared a short statement from a spokesperson for Merit Street Media, which airs “Dr. Phil Primetime.”

“Dr. Phil knows his son Jay to be a smart, strong, caring human being and while he does not know his business Dr. Phil supports him 100%,” the statement said. “The suggestion that Jay’s business ignores or is even comparable or relevant to advice from Dr. Phil or Dr. Phil Primetime on Merit Street Media is false and only included in your article as click bait.”

Lori Baker, chief of the Minto tribal government, said in an email that the Minto Village Council had no comment in response to questions about the lending operations and members’ concerns.

Among critics of Minto’s lending operation, the idea that outsiders can’t be trusted is central to their opposition.

One Minto elder who no longer lives in the community worries that strangers are taking advantage of the tribe and its loan customers alike. The elder asked not to be named because of concerns about reprisals for criticizing the lucrative business.

“They are exploiting our village,” the elder said. “It is not right taking from poor people to get yourself rich.”

Jay McGraw got into the lending business as he branched out from other ventures. Minto got into it to help the people of the village.

By the time the company that would become CreditServe was formed in 2011, McGraw had obtained a law degree, gone into the film production business with his father, pioneered a highly successful daily syndicated medical advice show called “The Doctors” and written a series of self-help books for teens.

More quietly, he ventured into the high-interest lending business. Corporation papers in 2013 listed McGraw as the president of Helping Hand Financial Inc., a company that offered payday loans online at CashCash.com. “Get the CashCash You Need Fast!” the firm’s website exhorted.

The following year, when CreditServe Inc. filed an amendment to its articles of incorporation with the California secretary of state, it showed McGraw as president and secretary. Helping Hand Financial dissolved in 2017, but CreditServe remained in business. In both ventures, McGraw teamed up with Welch.

McGraw is not currently listed in California records as a top officer at CreditServe. But the federal suit in Illinois describes his role as significant. “McGraw and Welch dominate CreditServe and are responsible for all key decisions made by it,” the complaint states.

Welch declined to comment for this story.

He and McGraw are also named on corporation papers for Cherry Auto Finance Inc., formed in 2021, which offers easy financing for used cars online at cherrycars.com, appealing to subprime borrowers. The site posts estimated annual percentage rates of 22.4%.

Just as desperate borrowers turn to unconventional and high-interest loans, a few dozen Native American tribes in dire need of economic rescue have been drawn to the business side of that same industry.

The community of 160 in Minto faces the same challenges as many Native villages in Alaska, which are set in hard-to-reach places on ancestral hunting and fishing lands. Village leaders have struggled to build an economy in a remote place with few jobs, spotty internet and sky-high costs.

In 2018, Doug Isaacson, a non-tribal member working for Minto’s economic development arm, brought Minto an idea that could help the village. Isaacson — the former mayor of North Pole, a city outside Fairbanks that revels in its association with Christmas — suggested that the tribe get involved in the lending business. Tribes in America are in demand as business partners because they can claim that, as sovereign entities, their operations are exempt from state interest rate caps. Critics of such lending partnerships have called them “rent-a-tribe.”

To the tribal council, the lending business sounded like a way to create jobs and bring in much-needed revenue. The household income in Minto is about 30% lower than the statewide median. But groceries are more expensive and gas costs $7 a gallon.

Minto adopted a Tribal Credit Code, stating that “E-commerce represents a new ray of economic hope for the Tribe and its members.”

The Illinois lawsuit contends that on paper, the tribe appears to control the lending operation, but CreditServe provides the key services, including “lead generation, technology platforms, payment processing, and collection procedures.” Most of the money also flows to CreditServe, which has an office in suburban Austin, Texas, according to the suit.

McGraw’s lifestyle stands in sharp contrast to those living in Minto. He owns a lakeside mansion in the Austin area, valued at over $6 million. A real estate listing noted that the gated home features a “glass ceiling, life-size fireplaces, 2nd floor tower and an 85 foot infinity pool & spa overlooking miles of unobstructed views,” with “guest house, elevator tram and boat dock.”

The Instagram pages for McGraw and his wife, a former Playboy model, portray a life of affluence, with photos of excursions to Paris, Napa Valley, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Cabo San Lucas and Palm Beach. There are golf outings and time on a yacht.

In Minto, people live in single-story log homes. They enjoy trapping wolves and beavers, hunting geese and watching school basketball games. Many worry about protecting the land and wildlife.

“Used to see a lot of moose by the village; right now just two,” minutes of a 2020 Minto fish and game advisory committee meeting state. “Global changes have really affected us.”

There are no outward signs in the village of a massive online lending operation. The headquarters listed on the Minto Money business license is the address of the tribe’s two-story lodge, which houses the tribal council offices, a nutrition program for elders, a community gathering space, and rooms rented to tourists and hunters.

The business license is signed by Shane Thin Elk, listed as commissioner of Minto’s financial regulatory body, tasked with oversight of the lending businesses. Thin Elk is a member of a different tribe and doesn’t live in Alaska. Reached by phone, he hung up on a reporter.

The tribe started with a single lending website — Minto Money — and later launched another, Birch Lending. Neither company lends to people in Alaska.

Once it got underway, the lending business took off. The Illinois lawsuit contends that “McGraw, CreditServe, and Welch have collected more than $500 million dollars from consumers” over the last four years.

Minto’s take was small in comparison. Still, it has made a difference.

ProPublica and the Anchorage Daily News obtained documents for Minto Money showing dramatic growth, from $2 million in annual revenue in 2020 to nearly $7 million in 2022. A former tribal lending manager for the operation, Cameron Winfrey, said that in 2024 that figure reached $12 million for all its lending operations.

Online lending “has thus far surpassed all expectations and provided enormous benefits to our community,” Winfrey wrote to the Minto Village Council in a January 2024 letter.

In an accompanying report, he listed some of the benefits that the lending business generated. He noted that $1.8 million was distributed to the Village Council in 2023, up about 50% from the prior year. Money went to the Minto library and computer lab as well as community organizations.

Winfrey also wrote that $627,000 was paid out in salaries and benefits in 2023 for employees of the tribe’s economic development corporation, known as BEDCO, and its subsidiaries, which includes Minto Money. He told ProPublica and the Anchorage Daily News that only a few people in Minto work for the lending operation.

Notably, the profit enabled the tribe to do what most tribes cannot: help fix its local school.

Yukon-Koyukuk School District Superintendent Kerry Boyd said the Minto tribe’s economic development corporation offered a surprise windfall when district officials discovered rising material and construction costs for a new gymnasium had increased the price tag by millions of dollars.

The tribe paid more than $3.2 million to finish the new gym, she said. A 2024 letter from BEDCO to the Minto tribal council stated that the money donated to the gym came from lending revenue.

In her more than 16 years running the district, Boyd had never seen such a generous donation. “I said, ‘Wow, this is almost unheard of.”

Many residents can’t say for sure where the lending money is going but point to newfound largesse. Folks get their heating fuel tanks filled by the tribal government. Some members receive “hardship” grants. There was money for a youth center. Musical instruments for the worship center. Dogsled races. A holiday party.

Still, some tribal members wonder why more money isn’t spread around. A handful of residents are calling for audits, greater transparency and federal investigations.

Some people thought the lending business would seed other economic development and lead to regular dividend checks. Instead, there is infighting and bitterness about who in the tribe receives the money. The division pits year-round Minto residents against members who live outside the village, in Fairbanks or elsewhere.

“If you don’t live in Minto, you don’t get shit,” said lending opponent Frank, the former chief. He is seeking an audit and a halt to the enterprise.

Once a tribe starts taking in large sums, it’s rare for internal disputes to go public.

“It’s a blessing and a curse,” one tribal member said recently. “We’re blessed that we get all this money, and it’s a curse because with money comes greed.”

“And some people don’t know the difference.”

Isaacson, the non-tribal Alaskan who promoted the idea, has shrugged off concerns about legal problems.

In a 2023 email obtained by reporters, Isaacson wrote, “Lawsuits are the cost of doing business these days.” He noted that “in no century have money lenders ever been revered, but they have always been essential.” (Isaacson told reporters he no longer works on tribal lending operations and could not comment.)

The Minto tribe’s business entities have been sued in federal court by consumers at least 17 times. The tribe has argued that arbitration agreements signed by borrowers, as well as tribal sovereign immunity, protect the businesses from lawsuits. In at least one suit, it expressly denied the characterization of Minto Money as a “rent-a-tribe” operation.

Several federal cases have been dismissed on sovereign immunity grounds, but more often they have settled quickly without reaching the discovery phase that could reveal more details about the lending operation’s structure.

It’s unlikely that the legal risks will end with the private settlement in the Illinois case. Ten days after that settlement, the plaintiffs’ lawyers filed a new federal suit on behalf of three different borrowers, making the same allegations against McGraw, Welch, Minto Money and CreditServe. The latest suit adds a debt collection agency as a defendant.

Across the country, other tribal lending operations have been subject to large settlements in recent years, including a tribe in Wisconsin that also is alleged in federal lawsuits to have partnered with CreditServe, among other outside entities. That tribe, the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, settled a federal class-action lawsuit in Virginia last year for $1.4 billion in loan forgiveness and $37 million in payments to customers and lawyers on the case. Of that, $2 million came from tribal council members named in the suit, while the rest came from business partners. (CreditServe was not named in the Virginia case or settlement.)

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which already had a spotty record of overseeing high-interest lending, is being gutted by the Trump administration. But a handful of states have pushed back against tribal lenders. In December, in response to complaints, the Washington State Department of Financial Institutions issued a warning advising consumers that Minto Money and Birch Lending are not registered to conduct business in the state. And in late April, the Massachusetts Division of Banks publicly advised borrowers to avoid predatory loans “including from tribal lenders,” listing Minto Money and Birch Lending as examples.

Minto Money already avoids lending in 10 states, primarily where attorneys have acted forcefully to protect consumers, though Massachusetts and Washington are not among the states it shuns.

In recent months, the tribal council consolidated its control over the lending business, removing Winfrey from both his position as Minto Money’s general manager and his seat on the council after a bitter dispute. Tribal leaders criticized his performance.

But Winfrey, who said Minto Money ranked among the country’s top-earning tribal lending businesses during his tenure, believed he was ousted because he had started asking too many questions about where the money was going.

He had planned to pitch the idea of tribal lending to other Alaska villages.

“They need the money,” he said one afternoon in February. But by May, he had met with only one community. Leaders there were wary of the idea, and Winfrey said that he, too, had started having second thoughts.

“They said, ‘Isn’t this a rent-a-tribe thing?’ I flat out said, ‘Yes. That’s exactly what it is.’ ”

The “tribe gets pennies,” he told an Anchorage Daily News reporter. “It should be the other way around, where the tribe gets all the funds and CreditServe gets crumbs.”

Mariam Elba contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News, and Megan O’Matz and Joel Jacobs, ProPublica.

Arlo Hemphill, Greenpeace USA Oceans are Life Campaign Lead said: “Opening up the U.S. seabed to deep sea mining runs counter to the long history of leadership in ocean stewardship set by the United States. It’s a destructive act of violence against ocean ecosystems and the Pacific communities whose culture is so closely linked to the deep ocean.”

A Desperate Power Grab by an UnprovenIndustry

Impossible Metals’ application for a deep-sea mining lease in U.S. federal waters is not a sign of industry momentum—it’s a glaring red flag of desperation. The move comes on the heels of a cascade of failures across the deep-sea mining sector that reveal the fundamental instability of the industry.

In February 2025, Impossible Metals itself was forced to postpone its highly publicized 2026 mining test in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, citing that its technology “isn’t ready.” Just weeks later, in March, Loke Marine Minerals, a Norwegian firm once poised to become the world’s largest deep-sea mining operator, filed for bankruptcy—an event that sent shockwaves through investor circles and exposed the financial fragility of the entire sector.

That same month, The Metals Company (TMC) stunned international observers by announcing it would sidestep the United Nations’ regulatory process—governed by the International Seabed Authority (ISA)—and seek a U.S. mining license under the little-known and long-dormant Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act (DSHMRA). The announcement raised serious concerns about regulatory breakdowns and attempts to fast-track exploitation while global safeguards remain unresolved.

Adding to the pressure, in July 2024, American Samoa became the first U.S. territory to enact a moratorium on deep-sea mining, citing threats to marine life, cultural heritage, and the territory’s tuna fishery—the cornerstone of its economy. Greenpeace USA applauded this historic decision, calling it a bold act of ocean stewardship and a model for U.S. policy. That Impossible Metals would now seek a lease in federal waters adjacent to a territory that has explicitly rejected deep-sea mining is not only tone-deaf, but a profound sign of disrespect to Pacific communities and their right to self-determination.

In this context, Impossible Metals’ federal lease bid is less a step forward and more a scramble for relevance—an attempt to salvage investor confidence and secure regulatory footholds while public scrutiny and scientific warnings grow louder.

Solomon Kaho’Ohalahala, Hawaiian elder with the Maui Nui Makai Network said: “In July of last year, American Samoa decided that deep sea mining is not in their territorial interests—including the potential to impact tuna fisheries, currently their territory’s primary economic driver.

The Pacific has spoken clearly: our ocean is not a sacrifice zone. American Samoa’s moratorium reflects a deep cultural, ecological, and economic understanding of what’s at stake. For Impossible Metals to pursue a mining license just beyond those protected waters is not only reckless—it’s a betrayal of the values and sovereignty of Pacific Peoples. We as people of the Pacific do not recognize lines in the ocean drawn by Western governments. The fish can't see those lines, we don't see those lines. All of the Pacific is sacred. The U.S. government must respect the sovereignty and autonomy of Pacific Peoples and let them make decisions for their own waters, and reject any application that threatens our ocean and our way of life.”

No Science, No Safeguards, No Justification

The scientific community remains united: we lack the knowledge to mine the deep sea safely. Over 90% of species in areas like the Clarion-Clipperton Zone remain undescribed. Ecological processes, such as nutrient cycling and newly discovered phenomena like “dark oxygen” production, are only beginning to be understood. There is no adequate environmental baseline, no long-term impact data, and no way to manage what we don’t yet comprehend.

Furthermore, most current “research” is industry-led and profit-driven, not the result of independent, precautionary science. This push for premature mining risks sacrificing biodiversity for short-term speculative gains.

Call for a Moratorium

Greenpeace stands with the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, Indigenous communities, scientists, and governments around the world calling for an immediate moratorium on deep-sea mining. Given the irreversible risks and profound scientific uncertainty, deep-sea mining must not move forward. The deep ocean should remain off-limits to mining—now and for the foreseeable future—until and unless independent science, robust global governance, and clear social consent can truly demonstrate that it can be done without harm.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

A decade ago, strange billboards started showing up, including in New York’s Times Square. They weren’t advertising a product. They were vilifying Connecticut’s then-governor, Dannel Malloy.

And they could be traced to that state’s unusual effort to stop an Oklahoma tribe from offering Connecticut residents short-term consumer loans at exorbitant interest rates.

“Gov. Malloy, Don’t take away my daddy’s job,” read one of the billboards, alongside a picture of a Native American child with braids and traditional garb.

But Malloy was not dissuaded by what he called a “scare tactic.” He said he felt the state’s banking regulations were on his side. The Oklahoma tribe was claiming sovereign immunity as it flouted Connecticut law — charging over 400% interest annually, though the state capped rates on such loans at 12%.

“We knew we could win,” Malloy said. “We knew they were harming people in Connecticut.”

He said he came to believe that the sums Native American tribes were making were paltry compared with the money flowing to the outside investment organizations that had linked themselves to the tribes because of the protections that can come with sovereign status.

Connecticut officials spent years fighting in court, but their eventual victory on behalf of the state’s citizens proved a crucial point about regulation at the local level.

Even as federal authorities have struggled to make an impact on this controversial form of lending, a handful of states have upended the notion that tribes’ sovereign immunity must keep state regulators on the sidelines. The lesson: a little pushback can go a long way.

In addition to Connecticut, five other states — Arkansas, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia — have been remarkably effective at eliminating most tribal loans, which are made online. A ProPublica review of the fine print on more than 80 tribal lending websites shows that the vast majority of tribal lenders now don’t lend in those states.

And a sample of cases filed in federal bankruptcy court bolsters the findings, with few filers in those states listing tribal lenders as creditors. Complaints, too, funneled to the Federal Trade Commission were minuscule in number in these states in recent years.

The six states tend to have strong consumer protection laws overall. Arkansas’ Constitution, for example, limits consumer loans to 17% interest annually. But, more significantly, the states have had aggressive attorneys, working for public agencies or private law firms, who have stepped in to protect consumers from high rates.

“They’d rather stay out than offer a product at a lower rate,” Connecticut Sen. Matt Lesser said of tribal lenders.

“They saw that Connecticut was aggressive in enforcing the law,” said the senator, who helped pass a bill to make such high-interest loans uncollectable in the state.

Minnesota is the latest state to confront tribal lenders.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, Minnesota’s attorney general filed a consent agreement in federal court in which the president of Wisconsin’s Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians promised that their tribal businesses would never again lend to Minnesotans at rates that violate the state’s usury — or lending — laws, which caps many consumer loans at 36% interest annually. The attorney general found LDF companies lending at annual rates between 200% and 800%.

The LDF tribe, which is a leading player in the industry, has said its lending business helps people without access to credit, while the profits provide critical funding for tribal government services. It also has defended a common industry practice of partnering with nontribal entities that conduct many of the day-to-day operations, likening it to outsourcing.

It was the second enforcement action Minnesota had secured against tribal loan executives in 2024. Earlier in the year, a Montana tribal lending operation agreed to the state’s demands to stop making loans in Minnesota.

Loans from tribal lenders can carry astronomical rates because the operations claim that the tribes’ sovereign immunity allows them to be governed by federal but not state laws. There is no federal interest rate limit, aside from a 36% cap on loans to active-duty military members and their families.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison’s office had watched case law develop around tribal lending to the point where the state felt assured that it could enforce its interest rate caps against a sovereign entity offering loans to Minnesota residents.

In a March interview with ProPublica, Ellison said his office would share its knowledge with other states looking to crack down on tribal lending. “If people want to talk, we would love to see more enforcement action around the country,” he said.

Yet there are limits to what states can accomplish. Courts have ruled that states can only obtain injunctions to stop collections and prevent future harm, but they cannot collect fines or claw back money already lost by consumers. Their enforcement actions do not prevent tribes from making loans in other states. And they are only able to sue tribal leaders, not the tribes themselves.

And these legal battles can be lengthy and contentious, as exemplified by what happened in Connecticut.

In October 2014, Connecticut’s banking regulator ordered websites associated with the Otoe-Missouria Tribe of Oklahoma to stop providing loans to Connecticut residents, citing the state’s cap on interest rates and deeming the loans illegal.

The following spring, the Institute for Liberty, a pro-business organization in Washington, D.C., announced a campaign against Malloy. In social media posts, ads and mailings, the institute alleged that Connecticut’s actions were an affront to tribal sovereignty.

It further argued that the enforcement effort against the Oklahoma-based tribe would deprive Native American families of income for health care, education and employment.

But leaders of two Connecticut tribes uninvolved in lending joined state leaders in a press conference to reject the institute’s claims and to call on tribal lenders to stop taking advantage of the state’s consumers. Only a few dozen of the nation’s 574 federally recognized tribes have engaged in online lending.

As a political entity organized as a nonprofit, the institute did not have to publicly disclose its donors and so was considered a dark-money group. IRS records available online show its tax-exempt status has lapsed. Andrew Langer, the institute’s president, declined ProPublica’s request for an interview. “I have absolutely no comment,” he said in a phone call.

John Shotton, chair of the Otoe-Missouria Tribe of Indians, said in an email to ProPublica: “We did not financially support the campaign, the Institute for Liberty, or their executive director in any way. We had no knowledge of the campaign before learning about it from media sources.”

The Oklahoma tribe stopped lending in Connecticut but initiated a long court battle. The state Supreme Court ruled in 2021 that the tribe’s chair could not face civil penalties but could be subject to an injunction preventing future lending. The state also issued cease and desist orders to three other tribally affiliated lenders, which exited the state as well.

Forceful actions by state officials in New York and Pennsylvania targeting short-term lending also pushed out tribal operations.

In 2013, the New York Department of Financial Services sent cease and desist letters to dozens of online payday lenders, including some tribal lenders, and warned banks to cut off access to lenders operating in violation of state law. Two tribes sued the state to stop the crackdown, but were unsuccessful.

In 2014, Pennsylvania’s attorney general brought an ambitious case against Think Finance Inc., a hedge-fund-backed financial technology firm that was allied with three tribes. The state alleged that the arrangement was designed to enable Think Finance to profit from abusive loans by evading state lending laws. In court papers, Think Finance denied wrongdoing and said that it was not the actual lender on the tribal loans, arguing that it was providing “perfectly lawful services” to the tribes.

The litigation spurred additional private lawsuits, ultimately leading Think Finance to declare bankruptcy and resulting in multimillion-dollar settlements with borrowers.

“This is a model of how aggressive enforcement by one state can lend itself to nationwide relief for consumers,” Gov. Josh Shapiro, then attorney general, said in a press release.

In a 2019 deposition in a consumer lawsuit, an attorney previously involved in the tribal lending industry provided insight into tribal lenders’ avoidance of states where they may draw attention. Asked why a tribe might be advised not to lend in certain states, he replied “to avoid the headache of having to deal with an AG that was being aggressive.”

The attorney, Daniel Gravel, noted that the companies in the case believed that they were “engaging in perfectly legal activities” but “it wasn’t worth the time and effort of having to deal with state regulators who disagreed with us.”

In certain states, it’s not attorneys general or banking officials who are forcing out tribal lenders. The feat has largely been accomplished by private attorneys bringing consumer lawsuits, including sweeping class-action claims.

Most settlements remain confidential, but ProPublica tallied at least $2.9 billion in canceled loans and more than $360 million in restitution from class-action suits since 2019. The major settlements were all filed in federal courts in Virginia and were largely driven by consumer attorneys there.

The class-action cases are highly complex because of the difficulty in unraveling the layers of entities and people involved, which is why the circle of private lawyers challenging the tribal lending industry is small. In addition, private attorneys can be stymied by arbitration clauses in loan agreements, which aim to prevent consumers from going to court.

“This is rocket science. This is among the most complicated litigation you can do,” said Margot Saunders, a senior attorney with the National Consumer Law Center who has served as an expert witness in cases.

Tribal lenders now largely steer clear of making loans in Virginia.

They also largely avoid neighboring West Virginia, ProPublica found. That state has strong consumer protection statutes, and private attorneys and a previous attorney general have used them effectively in lawsuits against tribally affiliated lenders.

Bren Pomponio, a West Virginia attorney for Mountain State Justice Inc., a nonprofit legal services firm that brought a lawsuit against a tribal lender and its business partners in 2020, said that the past decade of litigation has cut through the “myth” that sovereign immunity enables tribal lenders to charge excessive interest rates.

“They thought they had a model to avoid state law, but they don’t really,” he said.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Joel Jacobs and Megan O’Matz.

While Biden attempted to cast his foreign policy actions as defending “democracy” against “authoritarianism,” this framing is a lie. The real motive force behind the Biden administration’s bloody foreign policy is a fear of waning hegemony – of losing the benefits the US economy derives from political and economic domination of the global majority.

In that vein, the US is still trying to suffocate the model of socialist Latin American integration forwarded by Cuba and Venezuela. Washington is still arming the Israeli genocide in Palestine, the invasion of Lebanon, and other Israeli aggressions against “Axis of Resistance” forces in the region, namely Iran. On top of this, the US is still supporting or carrying out airstrikes against Yemen and Syria, still hoping to bleed Russia dry in Ukraine, still backing a Pakistani military dictatorship imposed with US backing, still engineering the re-invasion of Haiti, and still plotting an economic war (and perhaps a hot one) against China.

The Biden administration genuinely believed it could remake the world in its vision, and particularly the Middle East à la the neoconservatives of the George W. Bush administration. A Nation article by Aída Chávez laid out Biden’s disturbing plan for the Middle East and wider world, a plan that relies on Israel successfully carrying out the ethnic cleansing of Palestine:

One goal of the “Biden doctrine,” as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman called it, is to achieve the “global legitimacy” necessary to “take on Iran in a more aggressive manner.” With Hamas out of the picture and a demilitarized Palestinian state under the influence of the Gulf regimes, the thinking goes, the US will have Arab cover in the region to be able to counter Iran – and the cheap drones they’re worried about – and then put all of its energy toward a confrontation with China.

Following Israel’s killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, US officials jumped at the chance to push “a much wider agenda – including an opening for the next stage of America’s geopolitical ambitions.” This “next stage” includes the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the signing of a US-Saudi defence treaty, and the Gulf monarchies leading Gaza’s so-called “reconstruction” as a pro-US “emirate,” in the words of Republican Senator Lindsey Graham.

Following the killing of Sinwar, Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal stated, “After recent conversations w/leaders of Israel, Saudi Arabia & UAE, I have real hope that Sinwar’s death creates truly historic opportunities for Israel’s security, cessation of fighting & regional peace & stability through normalization of relations. The moment must be seized.” Lindsey Graham elaborated on the “historic opportunities” of which Washington hopes to take advantage. “MBS and MBZ at the UAE will come in and rebuild Gaza,” he said in a recent interview. “[They will] create an enclave in the Palestine.”

According to Bob Woodward’s new book War, Graham reportedly told Biden, “It’s going to take a Democratic president to convince Democrats to vote to go to war for Saudi Arabia.” To which Biden responded, “Let’s do it.”

While Washington aims to violently remake the Middle East to serve its geopolitical aims – a stark contrast to China’s recent peacemaking between Saudi Arabia and Iran – other targets of imperialism continue to suffer as well.

In April 2022, the Biden administration helped engineer the removal of popular Pakistani president Imran Khan from office. The US wanted Khan ousted because he entertained positive relations with China and Russia, two powers that Washington views as a threat to its hegemony. As Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu stated in a now infamous cypher to the Pakistani military, “if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington.”

Since the US-backed coup against Khan, the Pakistani military has taken extreme measures to prevent the ousted president’s return to power, including legal onslaughts, the arrest of thousands of supporters, crackdowns on social media activists, the imprisonment and torture of independent journalists such as Imran Riaz Khan, the decimation of Khan’s party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), and the rigging of an election earlier this year.

In other words, a de facto military junta has seized total power in Pakistan, and Washington backs them because they have reversed Khan’s non-aligned position and returned the country to the US orbit.

Meanwhile, Haiti has become a target of Washington once more. Earlier this year, the Biden administration courted Kenya’s President William Ruto to lead a US-funded invasion force into Haiti, which is wracked by violence after over a century of exploitation and underdevelopment by the US and allies, including Canada. The mission’s ostensible goal is to free Haiti from warring paramilitary gangs – however, the invasion force and its backers ignore the reality that the paramilitaries are a consequence of the brutally unequal political, economic, and social hierarchies imposed on Haiti by Global North powers. In reality, Haiti requires sovereignty and respect, not a new spiral of bloodshed and misery.

Haiti’s Caribbean neighbours, Cuba and Venezuela, have also endured immense suffering due to Biden’s imperialist policies. Cuba and Venezuela have long been targets of US imperialism – Cuba for over sixty years, Venezuela for twenty-five – and the Biden era continued this brutal interventionism. In the case of Cuba, Biden kept in place the hundreds of additional sanctions and the egregious “state sponsor of terrorism” designation imposed by Donald Trump. The Trump-Biden sanctions are harsher than any previous president’s, depriving the small Caribbean nation of billions of dollars per year. “The sanctions today,” says political scientist William LeoGrande, “have a greater impact on the Cuban people than ever before.” People are going hungry, hundreds of thousands hope to migrate, and most recently, the country’s power grid collapsed under the weight of Biden’s coercive measures.

As Drop Site news contributor Ed Augustin wrote in early October:

Government food rations [in Cuba] – a lifeline for the country’s poor – are fraying. Domestic agriculture, which has always been weak, has cratered in recent years for lack of seeds, fertilizer, and petrol, forcing the state to import 100 percent of the basic subsidized goods. But there’s not enough money to do that. Last year the government eliminated chicken from the basic food basket most adults receive. Last month, the daily ration of bread available to all Cubans was cut by a quarter. Even vital staples like rice and beans now arrive late. Food insecurity on the island is rising, according to a recent report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Vulnerable groups – older people, pregnant women, children and people with chronic illnesses – are most affected by the knock-on effects of US policy.

In all the cases described above, the Biden administration has taken extreme measures to snuff out challenges to its imperialist hegemony – measures that manifest first and foremost in the physical destruction of Palestinians and Lebanese by US-made weapons, the imposition of hunger, desperation, and migration crises on Cuba and Venezuela, the US-backed occupation of Haiti, the violent repression of Pakistanis’ desire for sovereignty and non-alignment, and more. Meanwhile, one-third of the world’s nations – and 60 percent of poor countries – face some type of US sanctions for having displeased the imperial hegemon.

The prevailing world system, a system defined by US imperialism and the imposition of the neoliberal Washington Consensus around the globe, is facing an array of challenges, from Latin America and the Caribbean to Palestine to East Asia.

How is Washington responding? Through the economic strangulation of countries like Cuba and Venezuela that present an alternative model; through a “day after” plan in the Middle East that would reduce Gaza to a neocolony of Washington and the Gulf monarchies; through coups against popular non-aligned leaders like Imran Khan; through the re-invasion of Haiti, a nation whose sovereignty has long been subverted by imperialism; through pressuring the Ukrainian government to lower the draft age so Kyiv can continue sending its young people into the meat grinder on behalf of Washington’s geopolitical aims; and through continuing to trudge the path toward war with China.

Ironically, the US empire’s violent response to its waning hegemony is expediting the emergence of an alternative world order, one marked by the de-dollarization and South-South cooperation of the BRICS group. As Biden leaves office and Trump returns to the White House, we can safely assume that the violence of imperialism will continue, perhaps intensify, and at the same time, the global majority will continue its efforts to forge new relationships outside the umbrella of US unilateralism.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Owen Schalk.

We get another update on Israel’s brutal siege and bombing in the north of the Gaza Strip, where hospitals are desperate for supplies. “Every day is a breaking point. Every day is a desperate rush for food, water, fuel and medicine and shelter,” says Dr. Samer Attar, who has volunteered four times as a surgeon in north Gaza, most recently in June. “It never ends. Every day you wake up to more and more of it. That’s just what makes it so horrifying.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

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The sprawling business empire created by tribal leaders in northern Wisconsin was born of desperate times, as the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians faced financial ruin. Its subsequent success would be built on the desperate needs of others far from the reservation.

The tribe had made some poor choices as it sought to expand its fortunes beyond a modest casino in its home state of Wisconsin two decades ago. Grand plans for a floating casino off Cancun, Mexico, collapsed, and a riverboat gambling venture in Mississippi required more cash than the tribe had on hand.

The resulting loans — $50 million in bonds issued in 2008 at 12% — proved crushing. Struggling to make debt payments, tribal officials soon were forced to slash spending for essential programs on the reservation and lay off dozens of employees.

Protests erupted, with demonstrators barricading themselves inside a government building and demanding audits and investigations. When angry tribal members elected a new governing council, it refused to pay anymore. The tribe defaulted on a loan it had come to regret.

The LDF tribe turned to the one asset that could distinguish it in the marketplace: sovereign immunity.

This special status allowed it as a Native American tribe to enter the world of internet lending without interest rate caps, an option not open to other lenders in most states. The annual rates it charged for small-sum, installment loans frequently exceeded 600%.

Business partners, seeing the favorable math, were easy to find. So, too, were consumers who had run out of options to pay their bills. Their decisions to sign up for LDF loans often made things worse.

ProPublica traced the key decisions that put LDF on the path to becoming a prominent player in a sector of the payday lending industry that has long skirted regulation and drawn controversy.

LDF did not just dabble in this type of lending; it fully embraced it. Like other tribes that have taken this route, LDF built its success on a series of complex business arrangements, with roles and motives difficult to unravel.

Over time, ProPublica found, LDF signed off on deals involving outsiders with histories of predatory practices — associations that carried profound implications for the tribe. Not only did they put the tribe’s reputation at risk, they generated a barrage of costly lawsuits and questions of whether LDF was allowing partners to take advantage of tribal rights to skirt state usury laws.

In Boston, Brian Coughlin initially had no idea that a Native American tribe was involved in the small loan he took out with a high interest rate. He only learned about LDF after he filed for bankruptcy to seek protection from his creditors.

“I was definitely surprised,” he said. “I didn’t think they operated things like that.”

During the bankruptcy process, an LDF partner still hounded him to pay, which Coughlin said pushed him to a breaking point and a suicide attempt. Federal law prohibits chasing debtors who have filed for bankruptcy, and Coughlin sued the tribe in a dispute that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Last year, the court — in a decision with far-reaching implications for tribes — ruled that LDF could be held liable under the Bankruptcy Code.

His and other consumer lawsuits paint LDF as a front for outsiders who take an oversized cut of the proceeds, leaving LDF with only dollars per loan. Interviews and ProPublica’s review of records also show how heavily LDF relies on its partners for most of the essential operations. These descriptions are disputed by LDF, which has told ProPublica that it merely is outsourcing for much-needed expertise while still maintaining control.

In a statement to ProPublica this year, John Johnson Sr., LDF’s president, described the tribe’s lending business as “a narrative of empowerment, ethical business practice, and commitment to community enrichment.” He has declined to be interviewed and did not respond to written questions for this story.

Over time, LDF has set up at least two dozen internet lending companies and websites, ProPublica determined. Its loans are so pervasive the LDF tribe showed up as a creditor in roughly 1 out of every 100 bankruptcy cases sampled nationwide, as ProPublica reported in August.

This year, LDF and some of its business affiliates agreed to a federal class-action settlement in Virginia that, if finalized, will erase $1.4 billion in consumer debt and provide $37 million in restitution. Tribal defendants are responsible for $2 million of that; the tribe in a statement has indicated that its business arm would pay.

Tribal officials have consistently denied wrongdoing. A newsletter to tribal members as LDF was starting up its venture said the tribe “is not practicing any type of predatory lending.” In his statements to ProPublica for the August story, Johnson stressed that the tribe complies with tribal and federal law, that its lending practices are transparent, that its collections are done ethically and that the loans help distressed borrowers who have little access to credit.

LDF leaders have not publicly stated any desire to alter their business practices, even as some community members express concern.

“Feeding greed with unscrupulous business practices is crushing us,” one LDF member recently wrote on a community Facebook page.

After the bond debacle in the 2000s, LDF leaders felt stung by their outside financial advisers, believing they were deceived about the terms of the transaction and risks involved.

Moving forward, they wanted someone they could trust. They found that in Brent McFarland.

McFarland was not a tribal member, but he grew up near the reservation and had friends on the Tribal Council. McFarland, an investment adviser who’d run a restaurant and worked in real estate, offered some helpful advice to the tribe, and the council eventually hired him for a wider role. He helped it establish the Lac du Flambeau Business Development Corporation in 2012, governed by a board answerable to the Tribal Council. And he looked for ways LDF could make money, apart from gaming.

“I ended up meeting some people that were doing online lending,” he said in an interview.

Tribes could get into the industry — attracting willing partners with expertise in lending — without putting up any capital because sovereign immunity was its own bounty.

But as certain as LDF was that state laws wouldn’t apply to its operations, the tribe took a careful approach. LDF decided it would not lend to people in Wisconsin, including its own members. “It keeps our relationship with the state of Wisconsin healthy,” McFarland told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Peter Bildsten, who ran the state Department of Financial Institutions then, remembers visiting the reservation as it was embarking on the new venture. He recalled that he met some of LDF’s business partners, who recognized that the lending operation would be extremely lucrative but also potentially controversial.

“They talked about yeah, we are doing it, and we know there’s virtually nothing you can do about it and especially if we don’t lend to any people in Wisconsin. You can’t do anything,” Bildsten said. “It was almost kind of a dare.”

Many tribes, still suffering from a legacy of racism and inadequate federal resources, struggle to find economic solutions for their people. McFarland, who no longer works for LDF but does consulting for tribes, defended LDF’s decision to move into high-interest loans as a legitimate option.

“The business is offering a service where the interest rates and cost of borrowing are well disclosed to consumers,” he told ProPublica in an email. “It’s expensive, but if used responsibly can be more affordable than many other options. The costs and risks are not hidden from consumers.”

Johnson, LDF’s president, has said there was a rational reason for the tribe’s business partnerships: It needed outside expertise as it entered a new industry.

“But let me be more specific: Zero I.T. enterprise architects, data analysts, or marketing strategists lived on the Lac Du Flambeau reservation when the Tribal Council decided to enter this industry,” he wrote in an email to ProPublica in August.

LDF’s partners run their operations far from tribal land. ProPublica identified several Florida lawsuits that allege a straight-forward process: “The LDF Tribe mints a new ‘tribal’ limited liability company, supposedly organized under Tribal law, for each new investor. Each new investor then runs his or her own ‘tribally owned’ website, offering consumers loans at interest rates between 450% and 1100% annually.”

Those cases were settled or dismissed without LDF addressing the allegations.

LDF does not publicly disclose its partners. ProPublica identified one of them as RIVO Holdings, a fintech firm based in a high-rise in downtown San Diego that has serviced two LDF websites.

RIVO is an acronym for respect, integrity, value and opportunity. The company’s founder and CEO is Daniel Koetting. His personal website touts his employment of “over 200 local employees at RIVO.” His brother Mark, of Kansas, managed a separate lending portfolio for the tribe.

The brothers entered the tribal lending industry after facing regulatory scrutiny for previous lending operations. In 2006, Califonia issued a cease-and-desist order to both men for unlicensed lending; Daniel Koetting received a similar demand from New Hampshire in 2011.

Initially, the Koettings partnered with the Big Lagoon Rancheria tribe in California to offer high-interest loans beginning in 2013. But that relationship began to fall apart several years later.

The tribe alleged that the Koettings surreptitiously pushed customers to new lending companies set up with LDF, and an arbitrator awarded Big Lagoon Rancheria $14 million in 2018. Years of litigation followed as the Koettings fought the decision. The case is still pending.

“I actually called Lac du Flambeau and warned them and informed them that they were getting into business with Big Lagoon’s client list,” Virgil Moorehead, Big Lagoon Rancheria’s chairperson, told ProPublica.

Joseph Schulte Jr., who once worked at RIVO, likened one area of the company’s San Diego office to a Wall Street trading floor, with exuberant staff celebrating short-term wins, such as meeting daily sales goals. To keep the staff pumped up, he said, management brought in pallets of free Celsius energy drinks.

“People were making a lot of money working there,” Schulte said of RIVO Holdings.

Although figures for LDF’s loan portfolios are private, Daniel Koetting’s previous venture with the Big Lagoon Rancheria amassed approximately $83 million in revenue over five years, according to a legal filing.

Court papers, including divorce filings, show Daniel Koetting enjoying a lavish lifestyle in recent years, living in a five-bedroom, five-bath house in La Jolla, an affluent seaside enclave of San Diego. He owned thoroughbred horses, drove a Porsche and dabbled in motion pictures. He and his wife had three children. In the divorce, he reported household expenses in 2021 that included an average of $7,000 a month on groceries and eating out, plus an additional $5,000 a month for “entertainment, gifts and vacation.”

Daniel and Mark Koetting did not reply to emails, calls or letters from ProPublica seeking comment.

Meanwhile, the two companies that RIVO and LDF run — Evergreen Services and Bridge Lending Solutions — are associated with more than 200 complaints from customers since 2019, frequently about onerous interest rates and payment terms. “I just don’t understand how people can do this,” a California resident protested to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “This is a predatory lender and I am a victim.”

Bildsten, the former Wisconsin department head, believes that LDF tribal leaders are trying to help the reservation improve services, such as dental care, for its members and that the lending business is part of that laudable goal.

“They’re able to do some good stuff,” Bildsten said, “but the money is dirty.”

Brian Coughlin lit a cigar. Sitting in his Chevy Malibu with the sunroof open to let out the smoke and a bottle of pills next to him, he wondered: When will this end?

He’d faced many hurdles in life, from serious physical and mental health issues to the loss of his father. He’d also used bad judgment, overspending and loading up on multiple credit cards as he blew through a decent paycheck as head of trash collection for the city of Boston.

Like many other Americans with little to no savings and poor credit scores, he was enticed by online pitches for quick cash — offers that came with exorbitantly high interest rates.

Months earlier, in December 2019, he’d filed for bankruptcy, expecting relief. There would be payment plans and a court injunction halting contact from creditors — a key protection laid out in U.S. bankruptcy law. But one creditor would not give up.

Lendgreen, one of LDF’s initial companies, had loaned Coughlin $900 at an annual percentage rate of 741%. At the time of the bankruptcy, he owed $1,595. The company continued to call, email and text him, fueling his anxiety. A phone log shows Lendgreen called Coughlin 50 times during one four-month period.

“This is all for nothing,” Coughlin recalls thinking of the bankruptcy process.

That night in his Chevy, Coughlin took a fistful of pills and ended up in the hospital. Lendgreen still was calling him while he recovered. But now he was ready to fight.

Coughlin’s attorney filed a motion with the bankruptcy court in March 2020 asking a judge to order Lendgreen, the LDF tribe and LDF Business Development Corporation to stop harassing him.

The case was about more than just harassment, however. Coughlin wanted compensation for all that had happened. He asked the court to award him attorneys fees, medical costs, expenses for lost time from work while hospitalized and punitive damages.

To Coughlin’s surprise, LDF told the court that sovereign immunity protected it even in a federal bankruptcy case, and the bankruptcy judge in Massachusetts agreed. When Coughlin took the case to the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and won, the tribe appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

As they dug into who actually violated the collections ban, Coughlin’s attorneys needed to unravel the business relationships surrounding Lendgreen, which no longer has an active website. That led them on an international paper chase from Wisconsin to Ontario, Latvia and Malta, an island in the Mediterranean, where an entity that provided capital for Lendgreen appeared to be based.

In gathering evidence, Coughlin’s lawyers obtained an agreement between Lendgreen and another company — Vivus Servicing Ltd. of Canada — showing Vivus was to handle most all operations of issuing and collecting the loans made in Lendgreen’s name. It also would retain most of the profits.

For each new or renewed loan, the contract called for Vivus to share $3.25 with LDF as well as $3.25 per loan payment, or not less than $10,000 a month.

Vivus Servicing had subcontracted certain administrative functions of the Lendgreen loans to 4finance Canada, an affiliate company of a European lending conglomerate based in Latvia, court records show. An attorney who represents Vivus and 4finance declined to comment.

“There’s money flowing to all sorts of places,” Coughlin’s attorney Richard Gottlieb said.

As he began to better understand the web of connections, Gottlieb concluded that LDF’s role in its lending operations was minimal. The partners, he said, performed all the key functions — “from the creation of the loans themselves to the maintenance of the computer software and internet sites to the collections personnel to the customer service reps to the management.”

Even though LDF fought in court to be able to pursue collections against people in bankruptcy, internal documents indicate that the head of LDF Holdings, which oversees the tribe’s lending enterprise, was not pleased with how a business partner treated Coughlin.

Coughlin inquires with Lendgreen about why its phone calls have not ceased.

Jessi Lorenzo, president of LDF Holdings at the time, communicated in May 2020 with 4finance Canada about Coughlin’s loan. Why had they not stopped soliciting repayment once notified that Coughlin had filed for bankruptcy, she asked in an email.

“Everything should have ceased then,” wrote Lorenzo, who was based in Tampa.

In a brief interview on her porch, Lorenzo declined to comment on the Coughlin case and said she did not want to be part of a tribal lending story that might be negative. Later, in an email, she wrote that she was proud to have worked for LDF as it “built a business that benefited their community, providing modern careers with upward mobility and good benefits in a remote part of Wisconsin.”

LDF tribal leaders don’t talk much about their business with outsiders. But there is little doubt that the lending business has altered the shape of the tribe’s finances, allowing LDF to move past its costly mistake of issuing $50 million in bonds for the Mississippi casino boat.

The Tribal Council agreed in 2017 to pay $4 million and finance an additional $23 million to settle claims against it after defaulting.

But the tribe and its partners continue to face new threats from a range of legal actions.

The attorneys in the Virginia case have promised future litigation against more LDF partners. And as LDF keeps lending, it opens its companies up to additional consumer lawsuits. Dozens of such cases have been filed since 2019, most of which end quickly, with undisclosed settlements.

McFarland takes issue with these types of cases against tribes. “The law firms filing class action lawsuits seek to paint tribes as either victims or villains in online lending,” he said in an email. “This approach has been employed against tribes since Europeans came to the Americas, whether Tribes are entering gaming, cannabis, selling tobacco, and a host of business opportunities.”

When Coughlin’s suit reached the Supreme Court, some of the issues involving tribal-lending partnerships were touched on, if only briefly.

During a hearing in April 2023, Justice Samuel Alito interrupted LDF’s lawyer as he was talking about sovereign immunity and the Constitutional Convention. Alito inquired about the tribe’s relationship with Lendgreen.

“Who actually operates this?” he asked.

“The tribe does, Your Honor,” replied attorney Pratik Shah, representing LDF. “This is not a rent-a-tribe situation.”

Shah said the enterprise employed 50 to 60 people working out of a headquarters on the reservation, though “they use third-party vendors, servicers and all, like any other business.”

Shah added: “This is a fully tribal operation.”

But the central issue was whether the tribe could be held liable for violating bankruptcy rules.

“What the tribe is saying is you can’t sue them for hundreds of thousands of dollars of actual damages,” Shah told the court. “That’s at the core of sovereign immunity.”

In June of last year, the high court sided with Coughlin, ruling 8-1 that there’s no sovereign immunity for tribes when it comes to the Bankruptcy Code.

Justice Clarence Thomas concurred in the ruling, not because of his reading of the Bankruptcy Code, but because he held that sovereign immunity does not apply to lawsuits arising from a tribe’s commercial activity conducted off-reservation.

Back in Bankruptcy Court, Coughlin continued to pursue LDF and Lendgreen for damages and legal fees. In mid-August, in the midst of settlement talks, Coughlin asked the court to pause the process required to unmask the outside entities involved with LDF as all sides tried to resolve the dispute. In September, a judge approved a settlement in which the tribe and Lendgreen agreed to pay Coughlin $340,000. LDF denied liability as part of the agreement.

At the same time, pressure is mounting on the tribe’s business partners. As part of the deal, the tribe will give Coughlin documents “with respect to the culpability and responsibility” of the outside partners, according to the settlement. That will enable Coughlin’s lawyers to dig further. LDF also will make a corporate representative available to testify in legal actions against their former business allies, if necessary.

“I want to see all the actors that are actually part of this scheme brought to justice, in a way,” said Coughlin, who now lives in Florida.

“I don’t necessarily believe the tribe is the orchestrator of this whole mess. I think they’re a pawn, unfortunately.”

To do the best, most comprehensive reporting on this opaque industry, we want to hear from more of the people who know it best. Do you work for a tribal lending operation, either on a reservation or for an outside business partner? Do you belong to a tribe that participates in this lending or one that has rejected the industry? Are you a regulator or lawyer dealing with these issues? Have you borrowed from a tribal lender? All perspectives matter to us. Please get in touch with Megan O’Matz at megan.omatz@propublica.org or 954-873-7576, or Joel Jacobs at joel.jacobs@propublica.org or 917-512-0297. Visit propublica.org/tips for information on secure communication channels.

Mariam Elba contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Megan O’Matz and Joel Jacobs.

Prior to that, on June 18, the Chandigarh-Dibrugarh Express derailed near Gonda in Uttar Pradesh claiming four lives and leaving over 40 injured. The accident occurred at Pikaura, halfway between Gonda and Jhilahi.

Just a day before that, on June 17, a goods train hit the Kanchanjunga Express travelling from Agartala to Sealdaha, near New Jalpaiguri in the Darjeeling district of West Bengal resulting in the derailment of two coaches of the passenger train. At least 11 people were killed and 60 injured.

A number of accidents were reported in October-November, 2023. The worst of them on October 29 when the Visakhapatnam-Rayagada passenger train rammed into the stationary Visakhapatnam-Palasa passenger at Kantakapalli station on the Howrah-Chennai line in the Vizianagaram district of Andhra Pradesh, resulting in the derailment of four bogies. At least 11 lives were lost and 60 people injured. Earlier that month, four people were killed and 40 injured as the North East Superfast Express derailed near the Raghunathpur railway station in Bihar’s Buxar district on October 11.

These accidents were reported at a time when the memory of the Odisha train mishap — one of the deadliest in India’s history — was still fresh in everyone’s mind. At least 293 passengers were killed and 1,100 injured on June 2, 2023, when the Chennai-bound Shalimar-Chennai Coromandel Express hit an iron ore-laden stationary goods train derailing 10 to 12 coaches of Coromandel which fell over on another track. The Bengal-bound Bengaluru-Howrah Superfast Express, plying on that line, subsequently collided with those coaches, derailing three to four of its own coaches. The accident took place near the Bahanaga Bazar railway station in Balasore on the Kharagpur–Puri line under South Eastern Railway’s Kharagpur division.

Often after these accidents, sabotage and conspiracy theories have been floated on social media. For example, within hours of the Balasore tragedy, a section of the Right Wing gave it a communal spin by highlighting the day of the occurrence of the mishap — it was a Friday —  and the alleged existence of a mosque near the accident site. Alt News found in its probe that the building described as a mosque was actually an ISKCON temple. Days later, it was again claimed that the station master’s name was Sharif and he had been absconding. Both the claims were found to be false by Alt News.

‘Rail Jihadi Gulzar Sheikh’

On August 1, BJP national spokesperson Shehzad Poonawala tweeted about a person named Gulzar Sheikh who, Poonawala claimed, put “stones, cycles, obstacles on rail tracks”. “Identify these anti nationals who create railway accidents… God knows who all and how many such elements are doing it to cause train accidents.” he wrote in his tweet which contained visuals of a man carrying and placing objects such as a bicycle and a small cylinder near a railway track.

Identify these anti nationals who create railway accidents

There have been several instances of sabotage / signals being covered with paper/ deliberate obstacles being put on tracks

Look at Gulzar Sheikh.. putting stones, cycles, obstacles on rail tracks

God knows who all… pic.twitter.com/2CMg6E0Mfc

— Shehzad Jai Hind (Modi Ka Parivar) (@Shehzad_Ind) August 1, 2024

Squint Neon on X, who uses his social media handles to amplify communal hate and harass interfaith couples, tweeted the video of the same man placing a bicycle on rail tracks and wrote, “Will @Uppolice arrest Gulzar Shaikh for planning & instigating railway accidents across the country?”

Will @Uppolice arrest Gulzar Shaikh for planning & instigating railway accidents across the country? pic.twitter.com/tcHDWm4WME

— Squint Neon (@TheSquind) August 1, 2024

While both these users directly claimed that Gulzar Sheikh or the likes of them were causing train accidents across the country, others also tweeted the same clips and photos of Sheikh with less direct claims. An X handle named Trains of India was one of them. This user said Sheikh, who hailed from Lalgopalganj in Uttar Pradesh, was putting the lives of thousands in danger.

This is Mr Gulzar Sheikh from Lalgopalganj, UP who puts random things Infront of trains for YouTube Money, He is putting lives of 1000s of passengers in danger.
Strict action should be taken against him, @RailwayNorthern @rpfnr_ @drm_lko Sharing all the information Below pic.twitter.com/g8ZipUdbL6

— Trains of India (@trainwalebhaiya) July 31, 2024

Among other who tweeted on this was Amitabh Chaudhary, who amplifies communal propaganda on a regular basis. He wrote that what the likes of Sheikh did was in known as an act of terrorism in a civilized world.

Subsequently, an X user named Legal Hindu Defence (@legalhindudef) which describes itself as a ‘Volunteer legal group’ filing ‘cases on Hindu hate’, tweeted that a police complaint had been filed against Sheikh. In another tweet about Sheikh’s activities, they wrote, “पहले लव जिहाद, फिर थूक जिहाद और अब रेल जिहादअपने मज़े के लिए ये “72” तरीकों से जिहाद की खोज पर निकले हैं”. [First Love Jihad, then Thook Jihad, now Rail Jihad. For his own fun, he is in search of ’72’ ways of jihad.]

The official X handle of DCP Ganganagar under Prayagraj commissionerate tweeted on August 1 that an FIR (No. 233/2024) under Section 147/145/153 of the Railway Act had been registered by the Railway Protection Force in this regard and the accused was arrested by Nawabganj police. Poonawala also tweeted about the arrest saying, “Rail Jihadi in jail now”.

Done Rail Jihadi in jail now https://t.co/8c9dngp9I1 pic.twitter.com/ApbIik5ePm

— Shehzad Jai Hind (Modi Ka Parivar) (@Shehzad_Ind) August 1, 2024

The Union ministry of railways, too, tweeted about Sheikh’s arrest and his photos, urging people to report such behaviour.

सभी से अपील है कि कोई भी ऐसी गतिविधि करता दिखे तो उसे तुरंत रोकें एवं रेलवे या लोकल पुलिस को सूचित कर देश सेवा का कार्य करें।
भारतीय रेल की ओर से जन हित में जारी। pic.twitter.com/E2sBJI8I1K

— Ministry of Railways (@RailMinIndia) August 2, 2024

Did Gulzar Sheikh Cause Train Accidents?

No.

According to reports, Sheikh was arrested from his home in Khandrauli village in Kaurihar Block of Allahabad district in Uttar Pradesh. We checked his Facebook page and saw that multiple videos were posted from Lalgopalganj, which is about 13 km from Khandrauli. The tweet by Trains of India, too, identified the location of several of Sheikh’s videos as Lalgopalganj railway station, which is under the Lucknow-Charbagh division of Northern Railway.

We looked for reports of train accident from this area since January 2024 (this is when the YouTube channel was created) and did not find any.

However, according to the Railway Property (Unlawful Possession) Act, 1966, “if any railway servant (whether on duty or otherwise) or any other person obstructs or causes to be obstructed or attempts to obstruct any train or other rolling stock upon a railway by squatting or picketing or during any rail roko agitation or bandh; or by keeping without authority any rolling stock on the railway… He shall be punishable with imprisonment for a term which may extend to two years, or with fine which may extend to two thousand rupees, or with both.”

Besides, The Railways Act, 1989, says in Section 150, “if any person unlawfully puts or throws upon or across any railway, any wood, stone or other matter or thing… or does or causes to be done or attempts to do any other act or thing in relation to any railway, with intent or with knowledge that he is likely to endanger the safety of any person travelling on or being upon the railway, he shall be punishable with imprisonment for life, or with rigorous imprisonment for a term which may extend to ten years.”

Hence, prima facie, there is ample ground for the law enforcement agencies to take action against Sheikh. The charges pressed against him pertain to “entering upon or into any part of a railway without lawful authority”, “wilfully or without excuse interfering with any amenity provided by the railway administration so as to affect the comfortable travel of any passenger” and “by any unlawful act or by any wilful omission or neglect, endangering or causing to be endangered the safety of any person travelling in railway”. The first two offenses are punishable with one to six months’ imprisonment and fine of Rs 100 to 500. The third entails imprisonment up to five years.

However, to set the narrative that it was act of ‘Jihad’ and that Gulzar Sheikh or the likes of him was “planning & instigating railway accidents across the country” or to claim that “he was an anti-national who create rail accidents” or his activities pertained to “terrorism”, and the collective social media clamor to slap the National Security Act against him seem exaggerations meant to divert the attention from the real reasons behind frequent train accidents in this country.

Was a Single Recent Train Accident Caused by an Object on the tracks?

No.

Alt News went through several reports on the investigations into each of the recent train accidents. According to information available at this point, none of them was caused by an object placed on the tracks.

The Balasore accident, the deadliest in recent times, was caused by a combination of technical and human errors. According to the report of the commissioner of railway safety (CRS), south eastern circle, “lapses” at various levels in the signal and telecommunication department were responsible for the mishap accident. The report also states, “Notwithstanding the lapses in signalling work, if the SM/BNBR [station master] had informed the repeated unusual behaviour of the crossover 17 A/B [the loop line—main UP line interface] to the S & T staff, they could have traced the false feed extending to the EI logic for the circuit for crossover 17 A/B.” This essentially suggests that though the primary reason was a fault in signalling, the station master, too, was partially at fault. However, officials and sources Frontline spoke to told the magazine that “this was a tall order: Station Masters were too overburdened to stretch themselves to do more…”

Significantly, Page 38 of the report states, “It is also learned from the PCSTE/SER’s letter that there was a similar incident of mismatch between the intended route set by signals and the actual route taken by the train on 16.05.2022 at BKNM (Bankra Nayabaj) station in the Kharagpur division of South Eastern Railway, due to wrong wiring and cable fault. Had corrective measures been taken after this accident to address the issue of wrong-wiring, the accident at BNBR (Bahanaga Bazar) would not have taken place.”

The CRS report into the Kanchenjunga Express accident in North Bengal stated that the mishap was ‘waiting to happen’ because of multiple lapses in train operations management in automatic signal zones and ‘inadequate counselling’ of loco pilots and station masters.

Preliminary inquiry by the CRS found that a “wrong paper authority or TA 912 to cross defective signals had been issued to the loco pilot of the goods train involved in the crash. The paper authority failed to specify the speed the goods train should adhere to while crossing the defective signal.” [TA 912 is a type of a on-paper order issued by railway authorities to loco pilots in case of a signal failure. This document authorizes the pilot to cross a red signal, which would otherwise indicate that the train must stop.]

In case of the Andhra Pradesh accident in October 2023, the CRS report blamed “systemic safety lapses, including the failure of the anti-telescopic features in the coaches of both trains and the malfunctioning of an automatic signalling system.”

There was no mention of any object placed on the tracks as a possible reason for these accidents. After the Odisha tragedy, Railway Board chairman Vivek Sahai told BBC, “A train can derail for a number of reasons – “a track could be ill-maintained, a coach could be faulty, and there could be an error in driving”.” Digital news platform Indiaspend asked Swapnil Garg, professor of strategy management at the Indian Institute of Management, Indore, what could cause derailments. He replied, “One particular incident cannot cause a derailment. It has to be a combination of three, four or five different mistakes before a derailment happens. When there is a signalling failure, mechanical failures and civil engineering failures, we find that these collectively result in a derailment.”

In view of this, the massive hullabaloo around Gulzar Sheikh’s mindless videos and the concerted campaign leading to his arrest seem not only an exaggeration, but also a case of misplaced priority. What appears far more pressing is holding the authorities responsible for the ‘systemic lapses’ underlined time and time again by the inquiries into the recent accidents. On the other hand, a far easier thing to do, particularly if one is holding a brief to save the image of the government, is floating a sabotage theory and finding a scapegoat. Gulzar Sheikh fits the bill perfectly.

Is Gulzar Sheikh the Only Such Content Creator?

No.

Alt News found that there were hundreds of railway-related channels on YouTube and several of them posted content similar to the page run by Sheikh. A channel named Super Express posts videos by placing objects like tooth paste, candy, chocolates, green chilies on the tracks. Another channel named Rj Facts has almost 80,000 viewers and posts short videos exclusively on placing objects railway tracks. The objects in the case of this creator include chocolate bars, lozenges and biscuits. Such YouTube channels are not limited to India. An US-based page named Train Experiments posts similar videos and has 75,000 subscribers.

Another channel named IND Vlogs posted a video June 11, 2018 which, unlike most of the videos in the above channels, actually shows some stones being crushed under moving train wheels. The short video has garnered 10 Lakh views.

Alt News Examined Sheikh’s Videos

Gulzar Sheikh has a YouTube channel GULZAR INDIAN HACKER. It has 2,36,000 subscribers and 4 videos at the moment. As many as 218 videos were deleted on August 2, most of them showing him placing objects on railway tracks. The following screenshot taken on August 1 shows 222 videos.

The ‘About’ section of the channel says “Since Experiment video Banata hu all Experiment Ye video kewal naram cheej rakh ta hu Aur kadak cheej nahi rakh ta hu.” [Since I make experiment videos, these are all experiments. I only keep soft objects. I do not put hard objects (on the tracks)].

We watched at least 20 videos posted by Sheikh before they had been deleted. Not a single video we watched actually showed a train passing over an object placed on the tracks. In every video, the creator places something on the tracks and then steps back. And then there is a cut after which a train can be seen coming down the tracks. In the following video which shows him placing a few eggs on the track, there is a cut at the 0.32-minute mark. Then the train appears. After it leaves, there is no sign of the eggs, smashed or whole.

The cycle video and the cylinder video, which raised the maximum number of eyebrows, were no different. At no point, did they show a train hitting these objects or these object actually lying on the tracks when the train arrives. The condition of the cycle seen at the end of the video makes it apparent that it was not hit by the train. It remains in tact with its paddles functioning. Here is a screen recording of the now-deleted video:

The 53-second clip that users like Squint Neon or Trains of India tweeted shows Sheikh placing or trying to place several objects on the tracks — the cycle, a few stones, a small cylinder (which he can’t place on the tracks because of its shape), a slab of stone or concrete, a bar of dishwashing soap and a chicken with its legs tied. Only the soap bar is seen in the video coming under a moving train. It splinters off in the impact. BJP national spokesperson Shehzad Poonawalla wants you to believe it is an act of terrorism the likes of which cause frequent train accidents in India.

The post Train accidents: The desperate search for a sabotage theory ends in YouTuber Gulzar Sheikh appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Indradeep Bhattacharyya.

When a group of volunteer doctors with the Palestinian American Medical Association traveled to Gaza last month, they were prepared to treat some of the most horrific injuries caused by Israel’s relentless assault on civilians in Gaza. But they were not prepared to be stranded under the bombardment for over a week after the Israeli military seized and closed the border crossing into the southern end of the besieged region, preventing people and supplies from getting in or out. Dr. Adam Hamawy, a plastic surgeon and Army veteran from New Jersey, has now evacuated Gaza after he was trapped at European Hospital in Khan Younis with dwindling supplies. Hamawy, who previously treated Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth for a life-threatening injury while both were in the Army, was offered evacuation along with another group of American doctors days earlier, but refused to leave without first securing the release of his entire volunteer medical team. He now emphasizes that he and his colleagues must be immediately replaced with additional humanitarian relief workers. “It was never a condition for our exit to have other people come in — it was an expectation,” he says. “A hospital cannot run on just a few doctors alone. It also needs nurses, it needs staff.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The plastic film and other farm supplies such as fertilizer are in short supply as imports from China have not picked up after the shutdown in trade during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“In rural areas of our country, where farming material shortages are chronic, the number of thieves of plastic film from farms increases every spring,” a resident from the northwestern province of North Pyongan told RFA Korean on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

The rice seedlings, often laboriously planted by hand due to a scarcity of machinery, can die if they go just one cold night without the protective cover, he said. During the day, the plastic sheets are removed so that the plants can absorb the warmth and sunshine.

Theft of crops and farming equipment is a common problem in North Korea so the government usually stations guards near fields. 

Beefed up security

But because plastic film theft can ruin an entire field, authorities are doubling the number of guards, the source said.

Police were looking for the plastic film thieves, but it is unlikely that they will be caught because it's virtually impossible to tell if a plastic cover has been stolen from somewhere else, he said.

RFA’s sources estimate that the government has only been able to supply about a third of the fuel, fertilizer and plastic film that the farmers need.  Some farms have the plastic film and others don’t. 

Each farming security guard, most of whom were in their 60s, has been replaced by two younger ones, a resident of nearby South Pyongan province told RFA on condition of anonymity to speak freely.

The first source said he noticed the same thing: That an influx of younger guards have replaced fewer, older guards.

“The sudden increase in security personnel on the farms is due to the fact that recently three seedbeds had the plastic film stolen in the middle of the night,” he said. 

Even with the enhanced security, some thieves stole the plastic film from a seedbed in the vicinity, the second source, from South Pyongan, said. 

“So the guard removed the plastic film from the seedbed of another work unit that night and placed it on the seedbed where its plastic film had been stolen.”

The thieves are not to blame though, he said.

“Ultimately, the reality of this country, … is a product of the self-reliance policy emphasized by the authorities,” he said, referring to the cash-strapped government’s mantra that state enterprises should procure what they need on their own. 

Translated by Leejin J. Chung. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Son Hyemin for RFA Korean.

“If you are keen on coming to Australia, you’d better choose a legal way,” said the part-time laborer from Hanoi, who was duped into paying an immigration service company to apply for an entry visa on his behalf.

“Arriving with a student or skilled labor visa is OK, but you should think twice about using a tourist visa,” he said.

For years, Hung made ends meet in Hanoi on a monthly income of 10 million dong (US$400), but was unable to build any savings due to the high cost of living in Vietnam’s capital.

After hearing stories of other Vietnamese landing good-paying jobs while visiting Australia, Hung, who spoke to RFA Vietnamese using a pseudonym due to security concerns, decided to travel the 5,000-odd kilometers (3,100 miles) southeast to try his luck.

He hoped to earn a better salary Down Under – where minimum wage workers earn AU$70,000 (US$48,000) a year, or 14 times the average income in Vietnam – and save money to improve his living standard back home.

Vietnamese who are unable to obtain work visas for Australia are eligible for a Work and Holiday Visa, which allows people to work while traveling in the country for up to one year.

Applicants must be between the ages of 18 and 30, have no criminal record and provide evidence that they have completed at least two years of undergraduate study. They must also show that they can support themselves financially while in Australia and have attained a certain level of English proficiency.

In debt and desperate

Hung, who did not disclose his age, had no employer to sponsor a work visa and was unable to meet either the education or English proficiency requirements for a Work and Holiday Visa. But a Vietnamese immigration services company told him that he could legally work in Australia as a tourist.

Australian tourist visas have a significantly lower barrier to obtain. They are good for three months and can be extended to a full year in special circumstances. However, entrants are not eligible to work during their visit.

Unfamiliar with the application process, Hung took on debt to pay 100 million dong (US$4,000) – a substantial amount for the average Vietnamese laborer – to the immigration services company to handle his visa, as well as purchase an airline ticket, and he flew to Australia in July 2023.

Hung had hoped to live and work in Australia for up to two years, to pay off what he had borrowed in getting there and to build wealth. Instead, by October, his tourist visa was about to expire and he had only accrued more debt while supporting himself for three months in a nation with a vastly higher cost of living.

Increasingly desperate, Hung sought help from fellow Vietnamese through social media, and was advised to apply for an Australian Onshore Protection Visa (Subclass 866) as a political refugee, which would allow him to stay in Australia for longer and work legally.

He paid someone AU$1,000 (US$650) to prepare his application, went to the local immigration department to be fingerprinted, and was granted a bridging visa (BVE 050) that allows him to lawfully reside in the country while awaiting a decision on his status.

While Hung will be required to present evidence of his asylum claim, it is unclear when he will be called for an interview, due to the large backlog of applications.

Topping the list for asylum seekers

According to the Australian Department of Home Affairs, 2,905 Vietnamese nationals applied for the Australian Onshore Protection Visa in 2023, making them the largest ethnic group to do so and accounting for 12% of the total number of applicants.

Vietnamese topped the list of asylum applicants in Australia, beating out Indians and Chinese, in each of the last five months of 2023, and ranked second in three other months last year.

Many of them end up in situations like Hung’s, nervously awaiting a verdict on their claim to learn whether they will be granted residential status or forced to return home.

The bridging visa does not expire and grants holders the right to work and access a national health insurance assistance program so that they can receive medical care in Australia.

However, if asylum status is denied, the bridging visa will be automatically canceled within 28 days, and the holder will be required to leave the country. Those denied status have the right to appeal the decision with an immigration court.

The chances of being awarded political asylum in Australia are fairly low. In 2023, the Australian Department of Home Affairs processed nearly 1,000 asylum applications, of which only 53, or 5.6%, were approved.

The stakes are considerably higher for applicants who have fled persecution in Vietnam, where the one-party communist state brooks no dissent. Being forced to return home can often mean a jail sentence, or worse.

‘Extraordinary surge’ in applications

Vietnamese-Australian immigration attorney Le Duc Minh told RFA that his law firm has helped many “genuine” Vietnamese political asylum seekers successfully apply for status in Australia.

But he acknowledged that he regularly hears stories like Hung’s from people who ended up in debt after trying to work illegally in the country.

“Some people simply ask me, ‘Please find a way for me to stay longer to earn money and pay off my debts. I borrowed hundreds of millions of dong in Vietnam to make this trip. I cannot go home empty-handed,’” he said.

Minh said he was surprised by what he called an “extraordinary surge” in applications by Vietnamese for political asylum in Australia in the second half of 2023.

He said that refugee applications tend to increase after political upheavals or government crackdowns on rights activists, but described last year as “very politically stable” in Vietnam. There were no mass demonstrations and most of the arrests were only of prominent activists and outspoken individuals on social media.

Instead, Minh posited, last year’s surge was likely the result of “large-scale fraudulent activities” in Vietnam, including individuals and companies providing false information about work opportunities for foreigners in Australia in order to sell them forged documents and useless services.

He cited an advertisement from one company claiming that applicants could take advantage of a program in Australia that would allow them to “take agricultural jobs without any expertise or English skills.”

After arriving in Australia only to learn that they would be unable to work or pay off their debts, most feel that they have no other choice but to double down, with applying for political asylum as their only option to stay in the country.

Supporting legitimate claims

Immigration attorney Kate Hoang, the former president of Australia’s Vietnamese community, stressed that “not all asylum applicants [from Vietnam] are those who want to extend their stay.”

Many, she said, were targeted by Vietnam’s government for speaking out about social injustices and were lucky just to have been able to travel to Australia to seek asylum at all.

Hoang urged the Australian government to make changes to the way it processes asylum visas to prevent those without legitimate claims from exploiting the system.

Meanwhile, Hung’s future remains uncertain as he awaits the ruling on his asylum application, and he has come to regret his journey to the southern continent.

“I paid a huge amount of money to come here, so I now have no choice but to work hard to pay off my debts, and I’ll probably just have to return home with nothing to show for it,” he said. “If I could make the decision again, I would never have gone.” 

Translated by Anna Vu. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese.

Alaa Shatila and her family had been sheltering at a hospital in southern Gaza for 40 days when they made the decision. Their house and accessories shop in Gaza City had long been flattened by Israeli warplanes. They had survived an airstrike in Rafah in October and moved to Khan Younis. But even in their new refuge, the European Hospital, they could feel the bombings getting more and more intense. It was time to leave Gaza. They needed to find a way out. These days, that’s almost impossible. 

In most cases, it takes having a foreign passport to be evacuated from Gaza into neighboring Egypt, though some people with serious injuries are sometimes allowed to exit as well. As Israel threatens to invade Rafah, where more than 1 million people from across Gaza have been displaced, Palestinians are increasingly desperate to get out. With no other options, they are turning to unofficial channels instead: paying what is known as a “coordination” fee for a travel permit. These days, that can cost $5,000 to $7,500 per person — an exorbitant markup of the prewar cost of $250 to $600.

Shatila’s family estimates that they need £30,000, or about $38,000, to pay the travel fees for six people. Having lost everything during the war, they don’t have anything close to that kind of money. So like many others in Gaza, they are now reluctantly raising funds online to support their escape.

“Even affording the basics now is beyond our means here,” said Shatila, whose sister urgently needs medical care after being injured in an airstrike. They launched a crowdfunding campaign, with the help of another sister who lives outside of Gaza — out of hopes that they can someday soon “sleep without fear or anxiety and wake up without the sound of warplanes and missiles,” Shatila said.

Palestinians who are able to scrape together the money pay the fees to a travel agency, which takes a commission before sending the remainder to officials in Egypt with connections to the state intelligence agency, according to people in Gaza with knowledge of the process. Within 10 days, the traveler’s name appears on a “coordination register,” separate from the official Gaza government register — allowing the traveler swift processing at the border. Mada Masr, an independent Egyptian news outlet, reported in a detailed investigation last month that a well-connected businessman with close ties to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is running the show.

Officials in both Gaza and Egypt have denied the existence of a system to collect fees from would-be travelers. “We have nothing to do with imposing any fees on citizens for travel, and we listen to complaints, but we do not have any authority in this matter,” an official on the Hamas-controlled side of the crossing told Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper. An Egyptian intelligence official, meanwhile, asked Palestinians to “notify the Egyptian security authorities at the crossing if they are blackmailed or under pressure from anyone profiting from their case.”

It’s an open secret in Gaza that travel agencies coordinate with Egyptian authorities to buy passage for people seeking to leave the Gaza Strip. The process dates back to at least 2015, according to an employee of a Gaza travel agency, who spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity. By that point, Gaza had been under a punishing Israeli blockade that was reinforced by Egypt for nine years. The prolonged closure of the Rafah border crossing (which continues to this day) meant that people waited for months for government permission to leave the Gaza Strip, giving rise to coordinators who facilitated travel permissions for about $3,000, the travel agency source said.

The Hamas-run government has long officially opposed the practice, which is illegal, but it is commonplace nonetheless. “The government used to require some travel agencies that had worked in coordination, to sign an agreement stating that if they were caught breaking the rules again, their business would be shut down,” the employee said. “Then the government turned a blind eye.”

For Gazan youth who face travel restrictions to Egypt, paying the fee has long been one of the only ways out: a path to medical treatment, an education, or better economic opportunities abroad. The coordination fee has fluctuated over time, generally more expensive in the summer than during winter months. In the months preceding the current war, the fee was around $250 to $600, according to the worker and Palestinians who paid such fees last summer.

“The Egyptian side determines the coordination fees, but sometimes Gazan coordinators manipulate prices,” the worker said. He added that the local fixers send the money to Egyptian officials through a currency exchange office in Gaza or another cash transfer service.

For the Egyptian public and others sympathetic with the people of Gaza, the idea of Egyptian officials pocketing thousands of dollars in coordination fees is unforgivable.

As those prices have skyrocketed in recent months, and as fundraisers for Palestinians hoping to cross into Egypt have proliferated online, the Egyptian government has faced increased scrutiny for its management of the border crossing. Keeping the border closed and ceding to Israeli restrictions on humanitarian aid is controversial enough; for the Egyptian public and others across the Muslim-majority world who are strongly sympathetic with the people of Gaza, the idea of Egyptian officials pocketing thousands of dollars in coordination fees is unforgivable. The Egyptian government, for its part, has continually denied that such an arrangement exists.

Yet a retired security source who used to work with Egypt’s military intelligence in North Sinai, a province that is near the border with Gaza, confirmed to Middle East Eye that there is a network of mediators connected to different parts of the state’s security apparatus who were facilitating the entrance of foreigners from Egypt’s eastern borders.

In its recent investigation, Mada Masr reported that a travel agency called Hala Consulting and Tourism Services, owned by Ibrahim al-Argany, has usurped control of the coordination process, effectively becoming the only agency capable of ensuring travel permits. Human Rights Watch scrutinized Argany’s dealings back in 2022, reporting that Hala “has strong links with Egypt’s security establishment and is staffed largely by former Egyptian military officers.”

In a recent post, a Facebook page affiliated with the travel agency advertised prices of $5,000 for adults and $2,500 for those younger than 16.

“Hala agency’s offices in Cairo are overcrowded,” Asil, a Palestinian woman who recently paid $24,000 for her family’s travel, told The Intercept. “They are willing to pay any amount to get their families out of Gaza.”

Two-thirds of people in Gaza have been displaced since the start of the war. Most of them, some 1.3 million, are now caught in Rafah, a city in southern Gaza that Israel had declared a safe zone.

The Shatila family’s displacement journey began in the first week of the war. Residents of Gaza City, they had moved south to Rafah to shelter at a relative’s house. On October 17, they were sleeping when an Israeli air raid struck an adjoining house, wounding all of Shatila’s siblings and father.

“Suddenly, the house roof fell on us, and a large stone struck my head. I was bleeding from my head and nose, vomiting blood. We were screaming for rescue,” Shatila said. “I didn’t find my eyeglasses and couldn’t see anything to look for my family. I was screaming and calling my family, but I didn’t find them.”

Nearly three months after launching the fundraising campaign, the family is still stuck in Gaza, having raised just over half the money they need for the six of them to leave the country.

“I know we may not raise the whole amount as it’s very high, hoping it goes down soon,” she said.

Hana Khater, another Gaza resident whose family was displaced by Israeli bombings, fled to Egypt after paying $6,000 per person. Asking to be identified by a pseudonym for safety reasons, she said she and her family took shelter in Khan Younis when the war erupted. A week later, the city came under intense bombing.

“All of a sudden, a huge missile hit a neighboring building. Stones and windows fell on us,” she said. Everyone inside was injured, and her mom took a particularly hard hit to the back. Their faces were covered in dust, their clothes torn as they screamed for help. “The scary blaring sirens of ambulances added to the chaos.”

After the attack, they took shelter in an office where they had little access to food or clean drinking water.

“The polluted water and food made me sick, but we didn’t have any choice,” Khater recounted. “We used to eat one meal to save food. We couldn’t take a shower or wash our clothes daily. Then things got worse and worse.”

“It is unbelievable to pay $36,000 to travel.”

Since October 7, her family had debated whether to leave Gaza. Her father was opposed at first, fearing another Nakba, or catastrophe, an Arabic word that is commonly used to describe the events of 1948, when armed Zionist militias forcibly expelled 750,000 Palestinians from their lands and established the state of Israel.

By early December, they made up their minds. On December 5, they paid the fees, and five days later, the six of them exited the strip through the Rafah crossing.

“It is unbelievable to pay $36,000 to travel. One has to sell all his belongings to pay for coordination,” Khater said.

The Egyptian government is obligated to evacuate its citizens from Gaza, but some have been unable to get out through official channels and turned to coordination instead. The fees for them are considerably lower than those imposed on Palestinians: $1,200 per person, according to one Egyptian national who has gone this route.

Yasmine Khaled, a Palestinian from Gaza who asked to be identified by a pseudonym, tried to travel to Egypt on October 10 with her family, as her mother is Egyptian. As they waited in Rafah for a bus to cross into Egypt, travelers were instructed to seek shelter as Israel was preparing to bomb the crossing.

“They bombed the crossing with three missiles. There wasn’t any place to hide. You can’t imagine the crying and horrors. The situation was very difficult. Then we were told to stay until the next day to travel. We stayed awake in the crossings,” Khaled told The Intercept.

Her family, along with hundreds of other people, were prevented from crossing by Egypt and had to go back to Gaza. They moved from shelter to shelter four times before finding somewhere to settle, an overcrowded house in Khan Younis, where several U.N. employees were residing with their families.

“There were around 80 people, including infants and children, in the house. We didn’t have water for most of the time and we had to line up to use the bathroom,” she recalled.

Desperate to leave, and unable to afford exorbitant coordination fees, they reached out to officials in the West Bank and Egypt for help evacuating. Those efforts went nowhere, but they eventually learned that there was a separate coordination process for Egyptians and their families in Gaza. Ten days after applying, they traveled to Egypt. Khaled’s dad and her brother were denied entry at the time, she said, but paid $10,000 in mid-February and eventually made it to Egypt.

Both Khaled and Khater said that the traumas of the war have traveled with them to Egypt.

When Khater hears an airplane overhead, her instinct is to anticipate a bombing. “I doubt we can fully recover from our fears,” said Khater, who is now trying to learn German so she can travel to Germany for grad school. Khaled, for her part, said she is constantly thinking about those they left behind in Gaza, as well as the uncertainty of what will happen when their tourist visa expires.

“My nephews and nieces become frightened when they hear the sounds of planes,” she said. “We have no plans for the future. It’s completely vague. I don’t know what we’ll do after our 45-day stay here, or what I’ll do with my job. We have a lot to be concerned about.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Khalid Mohammed.

As Israel continues to threaten to invade Rafah, where over a million Palestinians have sought refuge, we speak to a surgeon who recently returned from a humanitarian mission at the European Hospital in Khan Younis in Gaza. “What I saw in Khan Younis were the most horrific scenes in my entire life,” says Canadian ophthalmologist Dr. Yasser Khan. He describes the dire conditions of injured civilians in Gaza, the majority of whom are children. “The genocidal intent of Israeli politicians, the Israeli army, is really clear. What is really bizarre is that they haven’t hid it,” says Khan. “The killing machine that Israel has unleashed on the healthcare system, I think, is unprecedented. … If the bombings are not going to get you, then disease will surely get you.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

As Palestinian health officials say overnight Israeli strikes killed dozens in Rafah, where over 1 million Palestinians have sought refuge, we speak with a teacher trying to evacuate Rafah with her young children, who urges the U.S. government to stop the bloodshed. “My message to President Biden: We are innocent civilians, and we have no fault in what is happening,” says Duha Latif. “Our children deserve to live a normal life like the rest of the world’s children.” Latif is fundraising to gather the money she needs to enter Egypt. The latest Israeli bombardment was conducted as part of an operation to free two Israeli hostages and came amid warnings from U.S. President Joe Biden and other world leaders against Israel’s expected ground invasion of Rafah. Aid agencies fear the offensive would cause massive casualties.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The post The Increasingly Desperate and Delusional Donald appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by George Ochenski.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Chloe Atkinson.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Amy Westervelt.

“Merck is claiming the U.S. constitution requires the U.S. government and people to be suckers. That’s not true.”

“There’s no Sucker Clause in the 1st Amendment, 5th Amendment, or anywhere else in the Constitution.”

“This lawsuit is a desperate attempt by the industry to beat back popular legislation that would curtail Big Pharma’s ability to price gouge Medicare and secure monopoly profits. Full stop.”

“While Big Pharma’s litigation gambit plays out, it is critical that the federal government continue its preparation for price negotiations. Delay in the commencement of long overdue negotiations will result in billions of dollars in excess costs for taxpayers and consumers.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

The travelers stood atop the steep, rolling hill. They were just a few steps north of the border wall, having passed through a gap in the towering steel barrier. They gathered beneath Coches Ridge, a remote feature of the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge in southern Arizona where, last summer, a white nationalist border vigilante chased an unarmed man into Mexico at gunpoint.

The group was small. A man, two women, and two children, a boy and a girl. Their bright shirts made them easy to spot against the green and gold of the desert. The boy waved his arms above his head as I drove nearer, like a shipwreck survivor on a deserted island. I rolled down my window. He looked to be about 8 years old, maybe 9. Just tall enough to peek over my door, he said hello in English. The man beside him looked exhausted and desperate. I asked if they needed help. They did.

It was the morning of Friday, May 12. Roughly 12 hours had passed since President Joe Biden lifted a public health order known as Title 42, which had strangled asylum access at the border for more than three years. He replaced the measure with a new suite of border enforcement policies that would have much the same effect.

Across the country, the headline was chaos. The details didn’t matter as much as the perception. Title 42 created a massive backlog of asylum-seekers south of the border, and now it was going away. The president’s critics did the smugglers’ advertising for them, repeating ad nauseam the lie that the border was now open and Biden wanted the migrants to become Americans.

In a press conference earlier in the week, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, outlined the new enforcement framework. “Our overall approach is to build lawful pathways for people to come to the United States and to impose tougher consequences,” he said. Simply showing up at the nation’s doorstep was no longer enough. Asylum-seekers could download an app and to join an electronic line now. Those who failed to seek asylum in another country first would not get in. Deportations would be fast-tracked, and new tweaks to the asylum interviews were aimed at making them harder to pass.

How it would all play out remained to be seen. “I think DHS is just absolutely terrified and clueless,” a senior asylum officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the press, told me while Mayorkas spoke on Thursday. The administration had reason to be concerned: The estimated arrival numbers were historic, and Republicans clearly smelled blood.

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“When you’re 75, eh — it’s just like, don’t mess with an old woman. I’m not afraid.”

“A family might get two people registered and then it’s shut down because all the appointments have been taken. So it’s separating families.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Devereaux.

Why have milk sales fallen for decades? In addition to the public’s growing awareness of the dairy industry’s cruelty and pollution, many people have lactose intolerance, milk allergies and a taste aversion to milk. Add to that the wide availability of nondairy milks without dairy’s cholesterol and calories—soy, rice, oat, coconut, pea, hemp, flax, quinoa, garbanzo bean, sesame seed, tapioca, potato and at least seven nut milks—and it is easy to see why the milk lobby is running scared.

Milk marketers have tried everything to reverse falling sales. Long before the ubiquitous Got Milk mustache ads, they conducted a “Milk: It Does a Body Good” campaign which targeted young women with the message that milk would prevent osteoporosis in later life. The problem was: osteoporosis was not on the fear radar of teens, tweens and young women.

Then, taking a cue from the cartoon character Joe Camel who R.J. Reynolds used to market Camelcigarettes (until the American Medical Association objected), milk marketers redesigned milk bottles into hand-friendly, “fun” bottles called the Chug that didn’t look like something your mother told you to drink.

Next, milk marketers tried positioning milk as a cure for PMS. TV ads showed bumbling boyfriends and husbands rushing to the store for milk to detoxify their stricken women. The campaign did not work and was even seen as sexist.

Undaunted, milk marketers alighted on the idea of milk as a diet food “Studies suggest that the nutrients in milk can play an important role in weight loss,” said milk ads that kicked off the Great American Weight Loss Challenge in 2006. There was even a related school program called “Healthiest Student Bodies,” which recognized twenty-five schools around the country for providing “an environment that encourages healthy choices for students.”

The milk as a diet food campaign had many names: Milk Your Diet, Body By Milk, Think About Your Drink, Why Milk?, 24oz/24hours, 3-A-Day (servings, that is) and of course Got Milk? Milk was even positioned as a health promoter at the 2016 Rio Olympics.

“Got Milk” mustache campaign with celebrities appeared in youth-oriented magazines like Sports Illustrated for Kids, Spin, Electronic Gaming, CosmoGirl, Blender and Seventeen to hopefully get ‘em young. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) shipped posters of mustache wearing actors, sports figures, musicians and models to 60,000 US elementary schools and 45,000 middle and high schools and students were told if they visited bodybymilk.com, they could win an iPod, a Fender guitar and their schools could qualify for sports gear, classroom supplies and musical instruments.

There was also in-class selling, using the type of peer-to-peer pressure that has worked so well for Pharma with key opinion leading doctors. Students at three California high schools got a chance to create their own Got Milk campaigns aimed at their peers in a seven-week advertising and marketing class. Winners got $2000, an all-expense-paid trip to San Francisco to present their ideas to the milk campaign’s main ad agency at the time, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, and to milk officials and the chance to have their campaign used in future milk marketing. Whee!

Milk marketers also rolled out White Gold and the Calcium Twins, a spoof-y musical group rocking out about milk’s benefits to hair, teeth, nails and biceps on YouTube and social media. There was an animated cartoon called the “Moo Factory” depicting happy cows, chickens, ducks and pigs while milk cartons move by on a conveyor belt and a helium balloon appeared reading “Tell Your Friends.”

Now milk marketers are at it again with a youth-oriented campaign called “Gonna Need Milk.” Tapping into the “fat acceptance” movement, overweight and unhealthy-looking models are now featured—milk marketers apparently scrapping the previous milk-as-diet-food spin.

Will the new campaign work? No according to the web site Hustle in an article called “Gen Z just doesn’t like milk, OK?” Generation Z, born between 1995 and 2012, dislike the taste of milk, “worry about the dairy industry’s impact on climate change” and realize “Big Milk” is a “big liar” and that “milk isn’t as crucial for bones as previously thought,” says Hustle.

No kidding. And one look at the new campaign images should establish that milk does a body No good.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Martha Rosenberg.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by George Ochenski.

The article titled: "Save us! A Hengshui No. 2 High School student speaks up," was deleted after it appeared on the Zhihu platform, but remains visible on overseas websites.

"The team is currently investigating the content of the online report ... We will take the matter seriously according to the law and regulations," the government said via its official Weibo account.

The article details a litany of physical and mental abuse suffered by students at the school, where students have previously taken their own lives.

"I am currently on leave of absence due to depression and am in hospital with a diagnosis of a broken toe on my left foot," said the article, a copy of which was posted to the overseas-based China Digital Times website.

"This school engages in corporal punishment at will, seriously beating and verbally abusing students, and forcing them to stand [in stress positions] against the wall with no time limit," the post said.

"I have seen a classmate sent flying ... by a single kick from an enraged class teacher ... for not doing their cleaning duties when it was their day," said the post, which claimed to be written by a boarding student at the prestigious secondary school.

"I've seen another student pressed up against the wall by the chest for turning up a second late to our 15-minute mealtime," it said.

Another high-schooler from Henan province, student A, who asked to remain anonymous said the issue of bullying and abuse in schools is so widespread that he had set up a social media group to provide support for student victims, that now has hundreds of members from all over the country.

"They are basically high school students and college students from all over the country," he said. 

When students at his school had tried to complain, they were subjected to retaliation by the principal, then warned by their class teacher not to use the local education bureau hotline.

"The homeroom teacher said they didn't think it would be safe to call the reporting line, because the school can also call up the police station [and find out who it was]," student A said.

Even when complaints started to trickle out onto social media, and some phone calls were made to report abuses, nothing changed. "The municipal education bureau still did nothing about it in the end," he said.

"I want a better human rights situation for high-schoolers in mainland China, but I also want democracy and constitutional government for the whole country," he said. "This is my personal wish and vision."

The ‘Hengshui model’

The Zhihu article was met with widespread recognition by online commentators, with posts referring to the "Hengshui model" of hothousing students by fair means or foul to get the best possible scores in the college entrance exams.

"This model has blossomed everywhere and has many imitators," columnist Zhang Feng wrote in an article on the overseas-based news site Neiwen. "Yet society is unlikely to pay much attention to this cry for help because it is nothing new."

Zhang said private, high-pressure senior high schools are used to target enrollment from poorer, rural locations, where they skim off the most promising students from state-run junior high schools.

A similar scenario is being played out in his hometown in Henan province, where students have accused schools of "not caring whether they live or die, and all for the sake of grades," he wrote, adding that college entrance exam results are the be-all and end-all for such schools.

Like student A, the deleted Zhihu post also said the authorities clamp down hard on anyone who complains publicly about their treatment at the school.

"Anyone posting negative information about the school online is immediately expelled, while they can find the phone numbers of anyone who reports them to the [local] education bureau," it said. "That's why students daren't say anything."

The post detailed further abuses of children, who it said are routinely assaulted by staff for minor infractions of discipline such as being narrowly late for their next timetabled event.

Verbal abuse is also the norm at the school, with screams of "you're all a waste of space," "moron" and other epithets commonly hurled at students, the post said.

Human rights lawyer Wu Shaoping said such treatment is illegal under Chinese law.

"High school students are still minors, so they are protected by legislation," Wu said. "It seems as if the Hengshui model of school management just does away with that law."

The post isn't the first time the school has been in the public eye, with three students taking their own lives there between 2014 and 2015, leading it to install safety nets on the roof of the teaching blocks.

Teachers themselves are put under huge pressure by management, who turn a blind eye when they pass on that pressure to the students, the post said.

"The school's goal isn't to teach or to educate but to attract more students and bring in more money," it said.

Weibo user @yeyeyeye said they are also an alumnus of the school.

"The management is a law unto itself, and ... the teachers whip students with their belts," the user wrote. "They make them run with tires on their backs, reduce their rations to nothing but plain rice or buns, or nothing at all."

"All messages, letters and phone calls are monitored by the teachers, so the truth can't get out," the user wrote.

‘Internet addiction’ boot camp

Meanwhile, reports were emerging of extreme bullying and abuse of young people at a military-style boot camp designed to wean them off "internet addiction" and other social ills.

The Zhongmu county government said it had set up a joint investigation team to probe the allegations of horrific physical abuse made by an inmate at the Yashensi education camp in Henan's Zhongmu county, which promises to treat "internet addiction" among young people.

A student who has been to a similar camp in Guangdong province said there was a culture of violence and abuse there, too.

"You need to ask permission even if you want to get water to drink or go to the toilet, and the instructors usually don't allow it," student B, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals, told Radio Free Asia. "I wasn't even allowed to phone home."

"They make you run between eight and 15 kilometers a day, and do at least 300 push-ups, 300 sit-ups and at least 500 squats," student B said. 

"There was a lot of cruel corporal punishment including the airplane [stress position]."

Student B said the camp had been shut down following complaints about its treatment of young people. Calls to the listed number rang unanswered during office hours on Tuesday.

Lawyer Wu Shaoping said neither the boot camps nor the Hengshui model of schooling is likely to end anytime soon, given the level of collusion between local governments and companies running the schools.

"This management model is spreading all over the country," lawyer Wu Shaoping said. "It has become particularly serious during the past five or six years."

Twitter user @PigeonMaBond commented: "Chinese people are only now starting to get it. [Remember] how many people were defending the Hengshui model 10 years ago," while Twitter-based Marxist commentator Ma Aiguo said the Hengshui model was a "deformed bourgeois model of education ... that doesn't treat people as people but as tools and commodities."

Translated by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Kai Di for RFA Mandarin.

Photograph Source: Tomas Castelazo – CC BY-SA 2.5

Just a month ago we finished President Biden’s first midterm election and, as predictably as the sun rises in the east, right around election time and for the months afterward a wave of refugees and immigrants have shown up at our southern border.

This happens every two years when a Democratic President is in office. And finally the US news media seems to be getting a clue as to why. More about that in a moment.

Notwithstanding Fox “News” hysteria about a “caravan” of immigrants heading for the border during Obama’s last year as president, in the months leading up to the 2016 election, by that time, as Politico noted:

“In fiscal year 2017, the last year of the Obama administration and the first of Trump’s, 303,916 migrants were arrested by the Border Patrol. This was the lowest level in more than three decades.”

The last big “surge” was two years earlier, five months before President Obama’s second 2014 midterm elections. You may remember when the southern border was suddenly overwhelmed by an unexpected wave of immigrants and refugees and it was all over the news with apprehensions at 220,000, up from just 96,000 the non-election year before.

The crush of people “somebody” had sent to the United States was so intense Obama had to declare it an “urgent humanitarian situation,” thus enabling him to mobilize more resources to block or deal with the seemingly-unending stream of desperate humanity.

The same thing happened, mysteriously, during Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign; the severity of the border crisis during that election year led to President Obama taking executive actions that included creating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and an expansion of provisional waivers.

Who sent them and why do they so conveniently and predictably arrive just in time for elections (and echo for a few months afterwards)?

During Obama’s first midterm election, the fall and winter of 2010, another “sudden wave” of immigrants provoked Arizona to put into law the notorious “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act.”

It famously allowed Arizona police to stop and even arrest people they suspected may look like “illegal immigrants,” and required police to investigate the immigration status of all persons detained. It was so odious that four of its major provisions were declared unconstitutional two years later by fellow Republicans on the US Supreme Court.

The wave of immigrants who hit our border in 1998, Bill Clinton’s last midterm election, was so severe that he initiated the Border Safety Initiative (BSI) and cut a joint-cooperation deal with Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo.

Four years earlier, the surge that showed up for the 1994 midterm election caused Clinton to produce and implement the first Border Patrol Strategic Plan.

Who on Earth would want to send desperate thousands of people to our Southern border just in time for every midterm facing a Democratic president? Who would be that crass and cynical?

ABC host and reporter Martha Raddatz interviewed Texas Governor Greg Abbott last weekend. As if on cue, he insisted the sudden tsunami of immigrants and refugees on his state’s southern border was all Biden’s fault.

But — finally, after decades! — a reporter had heard enough Republican bullshit about immigration and the border.

“You talk about the border wall, you talk about open borders,” Raddatz said to Abbott, “but I don’t think I’ve ever heard President Biden say, ‘we have an open border, come on over.’

“But people I have heard say it are you, are former President Trump, Ron DeSantis; that message reverberates in Mexico and beyond. So they do get the message that it is an ‘open border,’ and smugglers use all those kinds of statements.”

Bingo.

Whenever there’s a Democrat in the White House, literally hundreds of Republican politicians step up to the microphone or tell their local newspapers and radio stations about how the president has suddenly “opened up America’s southern border!!!”

It’s a lie, but they amplify it as hard as they can.

Those news stories and press releases make their way via social media and the internet to desperate people in Venezuela, Central America, and Mexico. Impoverished people there aren’t knowledgeable enough about American politics to see the message for the cynical political ploy it is, so they abandon home and family to begin the dangerous and often deadly trek to the US.

Democrats don’t say our borders are open, and, as far as I can tell, never have. In March of 2021 the rightwing Washington Examiner newspaper went on a search for Democrats proclaiming that we’d “opened!” the southern border in the first months of Joe Biden’s presidency.

They found nothing. Well, they found that both Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema had called the situation on our southern border “a crisis,” as well as a Democratic congresswoman from Michigan who was merely acknowledging the surge of immigrants. And a single Democratic mayor in Texas who also said it was a crisis. That’s it.

But literally hundreds of Republican politicians, just like they do every two years, have spent the past few months proclaiming to every despairing potential refugee south of our border that the door is wide open. Just google “open border” and “congressman,” “congresswoman,” or “senator” and you’ll get a list too long to print.

At the top of that list just from the past few months, of course, you’ll find the most contemptible Republican demagogues:

— Ted Cruz wants everybody south of our border to know that the “Biden Open Border Policy [is] A Very Craven Political Decision”;
— Rick Scott wants everybody to know that “Americans Don’t Want [Biden’s] Open Borders”;
— Marco Rubio says there’s “Nothing Compassionate About Biden’s Open Border Policies”;
— Rand Paul is so extreme he tells us Senator Rubio “is the one for an open border”;
— Josh Hawley says “Biden’s Open Border Policy Has Created a Moral Crisis”;
— Tom Cotton “Insists the Border is Wide Open”;
— Ron Johnson wants the world to know that “Our National Security is at Risk Because Democrats have Turned Border Security into a Partisan Issue”;
— Marjorie Taylor Greene “BLASTS Open Border Hypocrites”;
— Mo Brooks opposes “Socialist Democrats’ Open Border Policies for Helping Kill Americans”;
— Lauren Boebert says the “Root Cause” of the open border crisis “is in the White House”;
— Matt Gaetz “revealed a complex and deceitful agenda by Joe Biden’s Democrat administration to evade our Southern Border law enforcement”;
— Gym Jordan says “Biden’s Deliberate Support of Illegal Immigration Could Lead to Impeachment”;
— Kevin McCarthy says the Biden Administration has “Utterly Failed” to secure the “open border”;
— Elise Stefanik proclaims “Biden’s Open Border Policies have been a Complete Disaster.”
— Tom Cole’s website features “Biden’s Open Border America”;
— Bob Goode brags about introducing legislation named the “Close Biden’s Open Border Act”;
— John Rose “Calls Out Biden’s Open Border Policies”;
— Paul Gosar claims Biden is “Destroying America with His Open Border Policies”;
— Roger Williams complains about the “Democrats’ Open Border Problem”;
— Tom Cole wants the world to know that Biden’s “open border policies have given the green light to migrants and bad actors from around the world…”;
— Gus Bilirakis “Denounces Dangerous Open Border Policies on the House Floor”;

The list goes on and on.

Democrats, on the other hand, only want people coming into the country legally and have tried to deal with the issue responsibly. That’s why they don’t shout so loud it can be heard in Venezuela that the US border is “open.” Most, in fact, refuse to even use the phrase, because it’s a naked political lie.

Every two years, this misanthropic Republican crew provokes a crisis on America’s southern border because it plays into their narrative that Democrats are encouraging more Brown people — “soon-to-be Democrat voters” they call them on rightwing hate radio — to come to the USA to “replace” good upstanding white people.

Lest you think this biennial Republican rhetoric isn’t a cynical political ploy but is, instead, a good-faith effort to identify and fix a problem, look at the vote recently on legislation that would update our immigration system and fund a more effective border patrol. Only five Republicans could bring themselves to say “yes” to doing something about this situation.

Republicans are playing a dirty game with people’s lives. Somebody needs to ask these degenerate political SOBs:

“What it would take for you to leave your home with all your possessions in a small bag and travel a thousand miles on foot risking rape, robbery, kidnapping, torture, and the murder of yourself and your family members?”

There’s not a single Republican in Congress with half the courage of these men, women, and children who have risked everything — including their own lives — to answer the “Open Borders!!!” call the GOP puts out every two years just to score political points against Democratic presidents.

Thank G-d for Martha Raddatz. Hopefully more reporters will start asking Republicans why they hang out the welcome sign every two years and then blame Democrats when desperate people answer their call.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Thom Hartmann.

The Pacific nation of Tuvalu is planning to create a version of itself in the metaverse, as a response to the existential threat of rising sea levels.

Tuvalu’s Minister for Justice, Communication and Foreign Affairs, Simon Kofe, made the announcement via a chilling digital address to leaders at COP27.

He said the plan, which accounts for the “worst case scenario”, involves creating a digital twin of Tuvalu in the metaverse in order to replicate its beautiful islands and preserve its rich culture:

The tragedy of this outcome cannot be overstated […] Tuvalu could be the first country in the world to exist solely in cyberspace – but if global warming continues unchecked, it won’t be the last.

Tuvalu’s “digital twin” message. Video: Reuters

The idea is that the metaverse might allow Tuvalu to “fully function as a sovereign state” as its people are forced to live somewhere else.

• READ MORE: What is the metaverse, and what can we do there?
• The internet consumes extraordinary amounts of energy. Here’s how we can make it more sustainable
• Ending the climate crisis has one simple solution: Stop using fossil fuels

There are two stories here. One is of a small island nation in the Pacific facing an existential threat and looking to preserve its nationhood through technology.

The other is that by far the preferred future for Tuvalu would be to avoid the worst effects of climate change and preserve itself as a terrestrial nation. In which case, this may be its way of getting the world’s attention.

What is a metaverse nation?
The metaverse represents a burgeoning future in which augmented and virtual reality become part of everyday living. There are many visions of what the metaverse might look like, with the most well-known coming from Meta (previously Facebook) CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

What most of these visions have in common is the idea that the metaverse is about interoperable and immersive 3D worlds. A persistent avatar moves from one virtual world to another, as easily as moving from one room to another in the physical world.

The aim is to obscure the human ability to distinguish between the real and the virtual, for better or for worse.

Kofe implies three aspects of Tuvalu’s nationhood could be recreated in the metaverse:

• territory — the recreation of the natural beauty of Tuvalu, which could be interacted with in different ways
• culture — the ability for Tuvaluan people to interact with one another in ways that preserve their shared language, norms and customs, wherever they may be
• sovereignty — if there were to be a loss of terrestrial land over which the government of Tuvalu has sovereignty (a tragedy beyond imagining, but which they have begun to imagine) then could they have sovereignty over virtual land instead?

Could it be done?
In the case that Tuvalu’s proposal is, in fact, a literal one and not just symbolic of the dangers of climate change, what might it look like?

Technologically, it’s already easy enough to create beautiful, immersive and richly rendered recreations of Tuvalu’s territory. Moreover, thousands of different online communities and 3D worlds (such as Second Life) demonstrate it’s possible to have entirely virtual interactive spaces that can maintain their own culture.

The idea of combining these technological capabilities with features of governance for a “digital twin” of Tuvalu is feasible.

There have been prior experiments of governments taking location-based functions and creating virtual analogues of them.

For example, Estonia’s e-residency is an online-only form of residency non-Estonians can obtain to access services such as company registration. Another example is countries setting up virtual embassies on the online platform Second Life.

Yet there are significant technological and social challenges in bringing together and digitising the elements that define an entire nation.

Tuvalu has only about 12,000 citizens, but having even this many people interact in real time in an immersive virtual world is a technical challenge. There are issues of bandwidth, computing power, and the fact that many users have an aversion to headsets or suffer nausea.

Nobody has yet demonstrated that nation-states can be successfully translated to the virtual world. Even if they could be, others argue the digital world makes nation-states redundant.

Tuvalu’s proposal to create its digital twin in the metaverse is a message in a bottle — a desperate response to a tragic situation. Yet there is a coded message here too, for others who might consider retreat to the virtual as a response to loss from climate change.

The metaverse is no refuge
The metaverse is built on the physical infrastructure of servers, data centres, network routers, devices and head-mounted displays. All of this tech has a hidden carbon footprint and requires physical maintenance and energy. Research published in Nature predicts the internet will consume about 20 percent of the world’s electricity by 2025.

The idea of the metaverse nation as a response to climate change is exactly the kind of thinking that got us here. The language that gets adopted around new technologies — such as “cloud computing”, “virtual reality” and “metaverse” — comes across as both clean and green.

Such terms are laden with “technological solutionism” and “greenwashing”. They hide the fact that technological responses to climate change often exacerbate the problem due to how energy and resource intensive they are.

So where does that leave Tuvalu?
Kofe is well aware the metaverse is not an answer to Tuvalu’s problems. He explicitly states we need to focus on reducing the impacts of climate change through initiatives such as a fossil-fuel non-proliferation treaty.

His video about Tuvalu moving to the metaverse is hugely successful as a provocation. It got worldwide press — just like his moving plea during COP26 while standing knee-deep in rising water.

Yet Kofe suggests:

Without a global conscience and a global commitment to our shared wellbeing we may find the rest of the world joining us online as their lands disappear.

It is dangerous to believe, even implicitly, that moving to the metaverse is a viable response to climate change. The metaverse can certainly assist in keeping heritage and culture alive as a virtual museum and digital community. But it seems unlikely to work as an ersatz nation-state.

And, either way, it certainly won’t work without all of the land, infrastructure and energy that keeps the internet functioning.

It would be far better for us to direct international attention towards Tuvalu’s other initiatives described in the same report:

The project’s first initiative promotes diplomacy based on Tuvaluan values of olaga fakafenua (communal living systems), kaitasi (shared responsibility) and fale-pili (being a good neighbour), in the hope that these values will motivate other nations to understand their shared responsibility to address climate change and sea level rise to achieve global wellbeing.

The message in a bottle being sent out by Tuvalu is not really about the possibilities of metaverse nations at all. The message is clear: to support communal living systems, to take shared responsibility and to be a good neighbour.

The first of these can’t translate into the virtual world. The second requires us to consume less, and the third requires us to care.

Dr Nick Kelly, senior lecturer in interaction design, Queensland University of Technology and Dr Marcus Foth, professor of urban informatics, Queensland University of Technology. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Adam Bychawski.

Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia held a press conference and delivered a speech on the Senate floor Tuesday making the case for federal permitting reforms and defending his proposed changes from progressive criticism, an indication that he's feeling the heat as opposition to what critics have dubbed the senator's "dirty deal" continues to build.

"Manchin is getting desperate, it's the only reason he'd host a press conference like this," argued Jamie Henn, the director of Fossil Free Media. "But the more he defends his dirty deal, the clearer it is this is just a grab bag of handouts to his fossil fuel industry donors. Today's performance only strengthens our opposition."

"The more he defends his dirty deal, the clearer it is this is just a grab bag of handouts to his fossil fuel industry donors."

During his press conference, the West Virginia senator announced that the full text of permitting legislation that he's hoping to attach to a must-pass government funding package will be released Wednesday ahead of a potential vote next week. The Senate Democratic leadership and President Joe Biden agreed to give Manchin a vote on the permitting changes in exchange for the oil and gas ally's support for the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act.

Manchin complained to reporters Tuesday that his permitting proposal—which aims to accelerate environmental reviews of fossil fuel projects such as the Mountain Valley fracked gas pipeline—is coming under fire from both progressive climate champions such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Republicans eager to deny Manchin and the Democratic Party any legislative wins, even if they back the specific policies.

"It's like a revenge politics," said Manchin, the top recipient of oil and gas money in Congress. "Basically revenge towards one person: Me."

On Twitter, Sanders pushed back against Manchin's comment and said that "defeating the Big Oil side deal is not about revenge."

"It's about whether we will stand with 650 environmental and civil rights organizations who understand that the future of the planet is with renewable energy and energy efficiency not approving the Mountain Valley Pipeline," Sanders wrote. "The Mountain Valley Pipeline would generate emissions equivalent to 37 coal plants or putting 27 million more cars on the road."

"It's hard for me to understand why anyone concerned about climate change would consider voting to approve such a dirty and dangerous fracked gas pipeline," he added.

Manchin insists that permitting changes would carry benefits for both fossil fuel projects and renewable energy development, but climate campaigners and a growing number of Democratic lawmakers warn the plan laid out in draft legislative language would weaken bedrock environmental laws and endanger communities in the paths of pipelines and other polluting fossil fuel infrastructure.

Sanders tweeted Tuesday that "the Big Oil side deal requires the president to prioritize 25 energy projects for expedited environmental reviews."

"Of those, 19 could be dirty fossil fuel or mining projects and ZERO are required to be renewable energy projects that would reduce emissions," the Vermont senator wrote. "That is unacceptable."

In a Monday letter to Sens. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), and Tom Carper (D-Del.)—the founding members of the Senate Environmental Justice Caucus—a coalition of nearly 80 frontline organizations and climate advocacy groups called on the trio to reject Manchin's "pernicious" permitting legislation and any amended versions.

"We firmly believe that nothing can improve a bill that would deregulate landmark environmental laws like [the National Environmental Policy Act] and [the Clean Water Act]," the letter reads.

A floor fight over the permitting reforms could come as soon as next week, when Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is expected to attach the Manchin-backed proposal to a continuing resolution that must pass by September 30 to avert a government shutdown.

Survey data released Monday by Data for Progress shows that 59% of likely U.S. voters believe that "lawmakers should consider permitting legislation as a standalone bill, and separate it from a must-pass government spending package."

Thus far, just one member of the Senate Democratic caucus—Sanders—has vowed to vote against any continuing resolution that includes fossil fuel-friendly permitting reforms.

On the House side, 77 Democrats have warned House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) not to allow the inclusion of permitting reforms in the continuing resolution—but only Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) has pledged to vote no if the "dirty deal" ultimately ends up in the package.

"If we were to pass this side deal, it would mean more plants like that harming Black and Brown communities, putting pollution in the air where kids can't be in their backyards," Khanna told The Young Turks earlier this month. "We're not just talking about some abstract policy here. We're talking about allowing refineries, fossil fuel projects, and heavy industry to destroy neighborhoods."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Democratic U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman hit back Thursday after the campaign of Dr. Mehmet Oz, his Republican opponent, misleadingly accused the Pennsylvania frontrunner of employing two convicted murderers on his staff.

"Does Dr. Oz believe that the wrongfully convicted should die in prison? Does this man have any compassion?"

Oz's campaign failed to mention that the brothers, Dennis and Lee Horton, were granted clemency after successfully arguing they were wrongfully convicted of second-degree murder and spent 27 years behind bars.

"This smear is a sad and desperate attack from Dr. Oz's shambolic campaign," Fetterman said in a statement. "Going after two campaign staffers is a new low for Dr. Oz. Dennis and Lee, who were wrongfully convicted, are two of the kindest, hardest-working people I know—fighting for their release was one of the proudest moments of my career and I'm honored to have them on this team."

"Does Dr. Oz believe that the wrongfully convicted should die in prison? Does this man have any compassion?" he asked. "He's making a predictable and fear-mongering

attack against two men who spent 27 years in prison for a crime they didn't commit."

Oz's calumny—which came as aggregate polling showed him trailing the Democrat by eight points with just about two months until the November midterm elections—follows another dubious attack in which the TV doctor made comments many observers said mocked Fetterman's recent stroke.

"I survived a stroke. Plenty of others have dealt with health challenges too," Fetterman said Wednesday during a campaign event. "Can you imagine if you had a doctor who mocked you for it?"

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Jess O'Thomson.

Photograph Source: sasastro from Suffolk – Newmarket Jubilee Parade & Party-005 – CC BY 2.0

A hereditary monarch is as absurd a proposition as a hereditary doctor or mathematician.

 – Thomas Paine

When she became Queen, Britain still had loads of colonies and she seemed fine with that. Then that largely stopped and she also seemed fine with that. Analysis of all the mutually contradictory things she has seemed fine with over her exceptionally long reign isn’t going to help the country and is very unfair on an elderly woman who has handled the frankly surreal circumstances of her existence with stoicism and dignity.

– David Mitchell

Mercifully, I was not in Ukania for the queen’s 70^th anniversary as the reigning monarch. If I was, I’d spend the extra holidays in a pub with my republican pals, rather than focus on the endless media obsequies.

In any event this jubilee represents a sombre occasion for my family.

On 3 July 1953, when Princess Elizabeth was crowned as queen, we lived in a then British colony. (Elizabeth became queen the moment her father, King George VI, died on 6 Feb, 1952, though her Coronation took place in 1953.)

On Coronation Day in 1953 my 4-year-old younger brother Patrick was seriously ill in hospital with diphtheria. His lungs were clogged with fluid, which could only be unblocked with a manually operated device (these days such devices are of course electronic and monitored by computer).

As Patrick’s lips turned blue my mother, who was with him, hunted desperately for a nurse to clear his lungs. The nurses’ station had no nurses on duty.

Apparently, most of the hospital staff had been given the day off to celebrate the Coronation. My frantic mother (forever an ardent fan of the royal family) found a nurse eventually, in another ward, but by then it was too late for Patrick.

Which only poses the question: what is at stake, and for whom, when such officially-orchestrated events, with their attendant and incessant media hype, take place? We can be sure there were thousands of others in the British Empire who were grief-stricken like my mother on Coronation Day in 1953.

But media-focused flummery is the order of the day in 2022.

The pivot of attention was the celebratory service in St Paul’s Cathedral, at which the queen was not present— the festivities of the previous day attended by her had tired her out. It was more comfortable for her to watch her show on TV, and who can blame any 96-year-old for doing this?

Also not in attendance was the queen’s favourite child, the disgraced Andrew, said to be recovering from Covid.

Meghan Markle, dutifully accompanied by her husband Harry, made what was deemed a low-key reentry into the royal family after a 2-year absence, and quickly became the centre of tabloid-driven attention, albeit short-lived because of the incessant 24/7 news cycle, when she arrived in London. Each succeeding Jubilee event monopolized the news cycle for its proverbial 15 minutes or so.

The queen also passed on the Jubilee concert the next day. It featured Rod Stewart, Brian May of Queen, Elton John via video, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Alicia Keys, Duran Duran (as a concession to “younger” tastes), with Diana Ross as the closing act. Most music commentators complimented Her Majesty on declining to appear at an event that barely deserved to be called a “concert”.

Of more potential political import were the loud boos and jeers which greeted Boris “BoJo” Johnson when he entered the cathedral for the Jubilee Thanksgiving. This was a staunchly royalist crowd, many camping overnight for a good vantage point, who would normally have a reflexively tribal affiliation with the Tory party.

BoJo read one of the lessons at the service (from Philippians 4:8): “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right … think about such things”.

Many on all forms of media noted that whoever chose the readings for the service, BoJo’s especially, had a profound sense of humour.

BoJo being booed by his own side was seen by some commentators as a particularly damning verdict on his prime ministership.

BoJo was caught lying to the queen (over Brexit) — small potatoes for those of us who have long been accustomed to his inveterate lying, but something amounting to treason for royalists. Lying to plebs can be forgiven, but lying to Her Maj is the horror of horrors for diehard royalists.

The jubilee celebration could only be personal—as a country Ukania had nothing to celebrate.

The NHS is on its knees, thanks to Tory cuts, and Brexit causing many staff from EU countries to leave the service and return home. It has “lost” 25,000 beds, and an astounding 14 million patients face delayed surgery, including 300,000 for heart ailments.

A third of its general practitioners say they plan to leave the NHS in the next 4 years, citing intrusive bureaucracy and disheartenment at the terms and conditions of their work.

Where crime is concerned, police failure to investigate burglaries has increased twofold, and prosecutions for rape have plunged by 70%. In the final quarter of 2021, 96 criminal trials were aborted for lack of a judge, against just 4 the year before. The judicial system is a shambles.

Brits have had to cancel their already paid-for summer vacations because the privatized passport office took months to deliver their new passports. Processing visas for Ukrainian refugees has been scandalously slow for the same reason.

Crossing the Channel at Dover requires a minimum wait of 4 hours.

The Tory privatizations since Mrs Thatcher have been a bust.

Half the children’s homes in England are now in the clutches of offshore private equity operators, raking in profits from their ability to fleece local councils by charging exorbitant fees with no fear of regulation while the Tories are in power.

The civil service has been pared to the bone, with more staff cuts in the offing. BoJo wants to cut the civil service workforce by a fifth, amounting to 91,000 jobs, in a misguided attempt to “save taxpayer money” in the midst of the cost-of-living crisis. Services managed by the civil service are becoming increasingly substandard, and will decline further when the latest cuts take effect.

In the midst of these cuts BoJo just increased the staff of Chequers, the prime ministerial country retreat, where he is reported to spend more than his predecessors in living memory.

For the sybaritic BoJo, the pleasures of life have always been an absolute priority.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

Photograph Source: sasastro from Suffolk – Newmarket Jubilee Parade & Party-005 – CC BY 2.0

A hereditary monarch is as absurd a proposition as a hereditary doctor or mathematician.

 – Thomas Paine

When she became Queen, Britain still had loads of colonies and she seemed fine with that. Then that largely stopped and she also seemed fine with that. Analysis of all the mutually contradictory things she has seemed fine with over her exceptionally long reign isn’t going to help the country and is very unfair on an elderly woman who has handled the frankly surreal circumstances of her existence with stoicism and dignity.

– David Mitchell

Mercifully, I was not in Ukania for the queen’s 70^th anniversary as the reigning monarch. If I was, I’d spend the extra holidays in a pub with my republican pals, rather than focus on the endless media obsequies.

In any event this jubilee represents a sombre occasion for my family.

On 3 July 1953, when Princess Elizabeth was crowned as queen, we lived in a then British colony. (Elizabeth became queen the moment her father, King George VI, died on 6 Feb, 1952, though her Coronation took place in 1953.)

On Coronation Day in 1953 my 4-year-old younger brother Patrick was seriously ill in hospital with diphtheria. His lungs were clogged with fluid, which could only be unblocked with a manually operated device (these days such devices are of course electronic and monitored by computer).

As Patrick’s lips turned blue my mother, who was with him, hunted desperately for a nurse to clear his lungs. The nurses’ station had no nurses on duty.

Apparently, most of the hospital staff had been given the day off to celebrate the Coronation. My frantic mother (forever an ardent fan of the royal family) found a nurse eventually, in another ward, but by then it was too late for Patrick.

Which only poses the question: what is at stake, and for whom, when such officially-orchestrated events, with their attendant and incessant media hype, take place? We can be sure there were thousands of others in the British Empire who were grief-stricken like my mother on Coronation Day in 1953.

But media-focused flummery is the order of the day in 2022.

The pivot of attention was the celebratory service in St Paul’s Cathedral, at which the queen was not present— the festivities of the previous day attended by her had tired her out. It was more comfortable for her to watch her show on TV, and who can blame any 96-year-old for doing this?

Also not in attendance was the queen’s favourite child, the disgraced Andrew, said to be recovering from Covid.

Meghan Markle, dutifully accompanied by her husband Harry, made what was deemed a low-key reentry into the royal family after a 2-year absence, and quickly became the centre of tabloid-driven attention, albeit short-lived because of the incessant 24/7 news cycle, when she arrived in London. Each succeeding Jubilee event monopolized the news cycle for its proverbial 15 minutes or so.

The queen also passed on the Jubilee concert the next day. It featured Rod Stewart, Brian May of Queen, Elton John via video, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Alicia Keys, Duran Duran (as a concession to “younger” tastes), with Diana Ross as the closing act. Most music commentators complimented Her Majesty on declining to appear at an event that barely deserved to be called a “concert”.

Of more potential political import were the loud boos and jeers which greeted Boris “BoJo” Johnson when he entered the cathedral for the Jubilee Thanksgiving. This was a staunchly royalist crowd, many camping overnight for a good vantage point, who would normally have a reflexively tribal affiliation with the Tory party.

BoJo read one of the lessons at the service (from Philippians 4:8): “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right … think about such things”.

Many on all forms of media noted that whoever chose the readings for the service, BoJo’s especially, had a profound sense of humour.

BoJo being booed by his own side was seen by some commentators as a particularly damning verdict on his prime ministership.

BoJo was caught lying to the queen (over Brexit) — small potatoes for those of us who have long been accustomed to his inveterate lying, but something amounting to treason for royalists. Lying to plebs can be forgiven, but lying to Her Maj is the horror of horrors for diehard royalists.

The jubilee celebration could only be personal—as a country Ukania had nothing to celebrate.

The NHS is on its knees, thanks to Tory cuts, and Brexit causing many staff from EU countries to leave the service and return home. It has “lost” 25,000 beds, and an astounding 14 million patients face delayed surgery, including 300,000 for heart ailments.

A third of its general practitioners say they plan to leave the NHS in the next 4 years, citing intrusive bureaucracy and disheartenment at the terms and conditions of their work.

Where crime is concerned, police failure to investigate burglaries has increased twofold, and prosecutions for rape have plunged by 70%. In the final quarter of 2021, 96 criminal trials were aborted for lack of a judge, against just 4 the year before. The judicial system is a shambles.

Brits have had to cancel their already paid-for summer vacations because the privatized passport office took months to deliver their new passports. Processing visas for Ukrainian refugees has been scandalously slow for the same reason.

Crossing the Channel at Dover requires a minimum wait of 4 hours.

The Tory privatizations since Mrs Thatcher have been a bust.

Half the children’s homes in England are now in the clutches of offshore private equity operators, raking in profits from their ability to fleece local councils by charging exorbitant fees with no fear of regulation while the Tories are in power.

The civil service has been pared to the bone, with more staff cuts in the offing. BoJo wants to cut the civil service workforce by a fifth, amounting to 91,000 jobs, in a misguided attempt to “save taxpayer money” in the midst of the cost-of-living crisis. Services managed by the civil service are becoming increasingly substandard, and will decline further when the latest cuts take effect.

In the midst of these cuts BoJo just increased the staff of Chequers, the prime ministerial country retreat, where he is reported to spend more than his predecessors in living memory.

For the sybaritic BoJo, the pleasures of life have always been an absolute priority.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with THE CITY. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Sara Taylor felt the knot in her stomach pull tighter even before she answered the phone. The call was from the hospital taking care of her 11-year-old, Amari. And she knew what they were going to say: Amari was being discharged. Come pick her up right away.

Taylor was sure that Amari — that’s her middle name — wasn’t ready to come home. Less than two weeks earlier, in March 2020, she threatened to stab her babysitter with a knife and then she ran into the street. Panicked, the babysitter called 911. Police arrived, restraining Amari and packing her into an ambulance, which rushed her to the mental health emergency room at Strong Memorial Hospital, not far from her home in Rochester, New York.

This had all become a sickeningly familiar routine. Amari had struggled since she was little, racked by a terrible fear that Taylor — who is her great-aunt and has raised her for most of her life — would leave her and not come back. She often woke up screaming from nightmares about someone hurting her family. During the day, she had ferocious tantrums, breaking things, attacking Taylor and threatening to hurt herself.

Taylor searched desperately for help, signing Amari up for therapy and putting her on waitlists for intensive, in-home mental health services that are supposed to be available to New York kids with serious psychiatric conditions. But the programs were full, and it took months to get in.

During Amari’s worst episodes, Taylor had little choice but to call 911 — which Taylor, who is Black, said made her nauseous with fear. She and Amari live just a few miles from the block where Daniel Prude, a Black man with a history of paranoia and erratic behavior, was hooded and pinned to the ground by police until he stopped breathing, in a 2020 incident that began after his brother called 911 for help. Prude died days later at the hospital. In 2021, a video went viral that showed Rochester police officers handcuffing a 9-year-old Black girl and pepper-spraying her in the face while she sat, sobbing, in the back of a squad car. Every time police entered her home, Taylor was terrified that Amari would end up hurt or dead.

“We know that Black children with mental illness are criminalized,” Taylor said. “When you have men with guns coming into your house to handle your sick child, that’s frightening.”

Several months earlier, in 2019, Taylor had filled out paperwork to apply for a place where she thought Amari would be safe: a residential treatment facility for kids with very serious mental health conditions. But the application was still pending in March 2020, and Taylor had no idea how long it might be before Amari got a spot.

Since the early 1980s, New York’s residential treatment facilities have served as an option of last resort for very sick children and adolescents, after outpatient and community-based services have failed. Like psychiatric hospitals, they provide round-the-clock medical and mental health care, but they are designed for much longer stays. Kids typically end up in them after cycling through emergency rooms and hospital beds without getting better. Often, they’ve had multiple encounters with police and their families see residential treatment as a last-ditch chance to get help before they end up in a juvenile lockup — or worse.

In the past 10 years, however, more than half of New York’s residential treatment facility beds for kids have shut down, with the total bed count plummeting from 554 in 2012 to just 274 this year. Sick kids often wait months to get into the remaining beds, despite a 2005 federal court settlement in which the state agreed to cut waitlists and make admissions faster.

State officials, who license and regulate residential treatment facilities, have done little to fix the problems, an investigation by ProPublica and THE CITY found. Instead, the officials made bed shortages worse, greenlighting facility closures even as the number of kids in psychiatric crisis soared. In recent years, the state also made the admissions system even more complex, keeping sick kids in limbo while they wait for care.

“Years ago, when you needed to move a kid up” to a residential treatment facility, “it just got done,” said James Rapczyk, who directed mental health programs for kids on Long Island for more than a decade. In the last several years, “the system just froze up.”

The residential treatment facility closures are part of a larger trend. New York has repeatedly promised to fix a mental health care system that officials have acknowledged to be broken, but in fact the state has made it even harder for the sickest kids to find treatment. As we reported in March, New York has shut down nearly a third of its state-run psychiatric hospital beds for children and adolescents since 2014, under a “Transformation Plan” rolled out by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. At the same time, the state promised to massively expand home-based mental health services designed to prevent kids from getting so sick that they needed a hospital or residential program at all. In reality, those services reach a tiny fraction of the kids who are legally entitled to them.

That’s why, when the hospital called to say that Amari was ready for discharge, Taylor made one of the most difficult decisions of her life: She refused to pick Amari up. Taylor knew that she would be reported to child protective services and investigated for abandoning Amari — and that there was a chance she could lose custody of her altogether. But she was banking on the hope that, if Amari had nowhere else to go, state officials would fast-track her into residential care.

“The last thing I wanted to do was send my little girl away from home,” Taylor said. “But I couldn’t keep her safe.”

Up through the 1930s, children who were violent or psychotic — or even suicidal — were likely to either spend their lives in state-run asylums or be labeled as delinquents and sent to reform schools on the theory that they could be punished into good behavior.

Residential treatment programs appeared in the 1940s, founded on the premise that kids with mental health and behavioral problems were sick, rather than criminal, and needed specialized treatment. Over the next several decades, the model evolved to include a sprawling assortment of group homes, boot camps and therapeutic boarding schools — some with horrific histories of abusing and neglecting children. As of 2020, just under 19,000 kids were living in close to 600 residential treatment centers in the United States, according to federal data.

A few of those programs are run directly by states, but the vast majority are operated by independent providers that survive on a mix of public funds, private insurance reimbursements and patients with deep pockets. Often, insurance covers a stay of a month or two, and then families may be on the hook for anywhere from $50,000 to $200,000 for a year of treatment.

New York created its residential treatment facility program in the early 1980s as an option for young people who tend to get kicked out of other settings. In a typical year, more than 80% of kids in the facilities are physically aggressive; about 60% have histories of running away. When young people are admitted, the state nearly always enrolls them in Medicaid, the public insurance program, which reimburses providers $500 to $725 for each day of stay. Kids live in dorms, attend full-day schools and do art and recreational therapy, in addition to traditional counseling.

After a surge in the use of residential treatment in the 1980s and 1990s, however, advocates and the federal government have pushed to reduce the number of kids in institutions. This is partly because of new research: Studies show that young people who receive intensive mental health services at home have better outcomes — at far lower costs — than those who are removed from their families and communities. It’s also because kids in institutions are especially vulnerable to abuse. New York’s residential treatment facility providers have been sued at least five times in the past 10 years by kids who say they were sexually or physically abused by staff or other patients. (Four of the cases are still open; one was closed with no finding on the facts.)

A decade ago, the Cuomo administration announced a plan to cut psychiatric hospital beds. Residential treatment facilities warned state officials that they might have to close beds down, too. Reimbursement rates hadn’t gone up in years, and providers couldn’t pay enough to attract employees, according to a 2013 report commissioned by a coalition of mental health care agencies.

Rich Azzopardi, a spokesperson for Cuomo, told THE CITY and ProPublica that facility closures were part of “a national movement away from one-size-fits-all institutionalization and redirecting resources toward out-patient treatment.”

This year, thanks to a budget surplus and an infusion of federal money, the state legislature approved increases to funding for residential treatment facilities — up to about $25 million, in addition to nearly $9 million for COVID-19 relief and employee recruitment. The state also earmarked funds to open 76 new beds where kids can stay short-term during emergencies, according to the Office of Mental Health. But much of that new money has yet to reach providers, some of whom have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on the programs in recent years.

Keeping staff in place is a persistent challenge. Residential treatment facilities rely on workers who earn as little as $15 per hour — not enough to convince most people to work with kids who are confrontational and sometimes violent, said Cindy Lee, the CEO of OLV Human Services, which runs a residential treatment facility in Lackawanna, New York. “Our wages are not competitive with Walmart, Tim Hortons, Burger King. You can go work an eight-hour shift at Target for more money, no mandated overtime and not be challenged by children with trauma.”

The 2013 report’s alarm bell went unheeded. By 2020, three facilities had shut down, while others cut back on beds. Then, in 2021, the system went into freefall when The Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services — one of the state’s largest providers of mental health care for kids, and one of just a few agencies to run residential programs in or near New York City — got out of the residential treatment facility business altogether, closing three sites in the Bronx and Westchester County.

In addition to budget deficits, the facilities had faced several “programmatic concerns,” including excessive use of restraints, kids going AWOL and allegations of serious abuse, according to The Jewish Board’s closure application. But the model had also become obsolete, Dr. Jeffrey Brenner, the agency’s CEO, told ProPublica and THE CITY. The Jewish Board is expanding other programs that keep kids close to their families and get them home faster, Brenner said.

By law, proposed residential treatment facility closures must be reviewed by a state oversight board called the Behavioral Health Services Advisory Council, which hears petitions and makes recommendations to New York’s mental health commissioner. In September 2021, when The Jewish Board presented the council with its closure plan, however, all of the residents had already been discharged. At the Bronx site, staff had vacated the premises and the parking lot was stacked with moving boxes.

During the council meeting, members discussed their concerns about the disappearance of residential treatment facility beds. Michael Orth, the commissioner of the Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health, said that referrals had increased in the region, and that facility closures left “significant gaps” in care.

In the end, however, the council unanimously voted yes on The Jewish Board’s closure proposal. “Telling folks to stay open when it’s fiscally unfeasible makes no sense,” another council member said.

In response to questions about the timing of the closure application, a Jewish Board spokesperson wrote that the agency had worked with the Office of Mental Health, “diligently obtaining the required approvals at every stage of the process of closing down our three RTF programs.”

The Office of Mental Health did not address the timing of the closure application submission, but said that all of the children from the Jewish Board facilities were appropriately discharged.

Amari was 11 months old when she came to live with Taylor. Her biological mother — Taylor’s niece — was 18 and “so smart and capable,” Taylor said, but she was also alone and struggling with a depression that seemed to suffocate her after Amari was born. She had dropped out of high school and was bouncing from house to house when her sisters — Amari’s aunts — asked Taylor to take the baby in.

Taylor’s own son was grown. The idea of raising another child seemed unimaginable, but she didn’t want to see Amari end up in foster care. On Memorial Day weekend in 2009, she met her nieces, with Amari, in Erie, New York. “They gave me a $100 bill, a child carrier and a gym bag and said, ‘Here she is.’ I cried like a baby,” Taylor said.

At first, Amari saw her mom by video every night, but the calls faded away. She started calling Taylor “mommy.”

From the beginning, she had a terrible fear of separation. She sobbed inconsolably when Taylor left her at day care in the mornings, and she threw toys and hit other kids. As she got older, she seemed to have trouble focusing and following simple instructions. Her pediatrician prescribed her medication for ADHD when she was 4.

Later, social workers would make lists of Amari’s strengths. She loves her family and has a great sense of humor. Even at her most recalcitrant, she likes showing off her gymnastics moves. And she has very big ambitions: When she grows up, she plans to be a rapper, a nurse and an actor, she said in one clinical interview. But she was also lonely. At school, she sat by herself most of the time. At home, her tantrums spun wildly out of control. She’d exhaust herself, sobbing, “I want my mom. Why doesn’t she want me?”

When Amari was 9, Taylor took her to a therapist, who helped to get her approved for in-home mental health services, including a crisis-response team that would come during emergencies and a specialist who would work with her on coping and social skills. But the waitlist was more than six months long, and by the time Amari finally got into the program, everything had fallen apart.

It was the spring of 2019, and Amari was 10 years old. Her mother came for a visit, but when she left, she didn’t answer or return Amari’s phone calls. The family’s pastor, whom Amari had known since she was a baby, died suddenly. And then Taylor went on a business trip, leaving Amari with a cousin. When Taylor came back, Amari told her that the cousin’s boyfriend had molested her.

Over the next 11 months, “our lives were chaos,” Taylor said. Amari had always been a bad sleeper; now she refused to get up in the mornings. When Taylor dragged her out of bed, she’d throw things, punch the walls, grab onto Taylor’s neck and refuse to let go. Sometimes, she told clinicians later, a “bad emoji” would tell her to do things like run out of the house, into the street. More than once, she jumped out of Taylor’s car and into traffic.

After Daniel Prude’s death, the City of Rochester — along with many other jurisdictions, including New York City — promised to transform how emergency services responded to people experiencing mental health crises. Carlet Cleare, a spokesperson for the City of Rochester, told THE CITY and ProPublica that police officers participate in numerous mental health courses and training activities, and that all uses of force are reviewed by supervisors. In the coming year, the city will add staff to its crisis intervention programs, Cleare wrote in a statement.

Those efforts, however, remain small and limited. The reality for most families is that, if they can’t physically contain a child who is threatening to hurt themselves or someone else, there is no option except to call 911 and wait for police.

What happens next depends on who shows up at the door, Taylor said. Once, she and Amari got lucky. An officer who happened to have an autistic child saw Amari rushing at Taylor. Instead of putting his hands on her, he got between the two of them and talked Amari down.

Other police officers got physical far too fast, Taylor said. “They would handcuff her, manhandle her. I would be crying.”

By 2020, Taylor had left her job in order to take care of Amari. She started organizing support groups and advocating for families of color with kids in the mental health system, who are often reluctant to seek help because they are afraid that they’ll be reported to child protective services or that their kids will be treated like criminals, she said.

After Prude’s death, “Black and brown parents were terrified,” Taylor said. “Nobody with a Black child with a mental health condition was calling the police.”

Taylor, too, decided that no matter what happened with Amari, she would handle it on her own. But then, just two months after the video of Prude came out, Amari called 911 herself, intending to report Taylor for refusing to let her out of the house. When police arrived, Taylor could feel her heart pounding, she said. She tried to force the image of Prude, face down on the sidewalk and suffocating, out of her mind.

“I went to the door as articulate as I can be, because I can’t have them coming in my house harming my child,” Taylor said. “I said, ‘My child is highly dysregulated. This is not a criminal justice issue; this is mental health. I need you to take it easy when you come in my house.’”

At first, the officers tried to talk to Amari, but when she ran toward Taylor, they grabbed her and forced her into handcuffs, Taylor said. “I’m frantic, begging them to take it easy, telling her to calm down, saying, ‘Don’t touch her like that.’ They take her outside — rough, like a criminal. I’m crying, ‘Stop, stop!’”

Amari struggled, refusing to get in the police car, Taylor said. “I’m watching them physically wrestle each other. It was like flashbacks. What’s going to happen when they get her in the car?”

Eventually, an ambulance arrived, and Amari climbed into it, unhurt. But Taylor thinks a lot about what it must have been like for Amari — how much it must have scared her, and what it taught her about herself — to be physically overpowered, again and again, by adults with guns, nearly all of them men, most of them white.

It’s damage that can’t be undone, Taylor said. “If I’m traumatized as a parent when they handcuff her and take her out like a criminal, can you imagine how she feels? This child who from the age of 10 has had multiple restraints and arrests? I can’t even imagine what that’s like for her.”

New York’s application system for residential treatment facilities has been a subject of contention for a long time. In 1999, the Legal Aid Society filed a lawsuit against New York state’s Department of Health and its Office of Mental Health on behalf of kids who were sitting on waitlists for residential care. Many kids waited more than five months for a bed, the lawsuit alleged; some waited over a year. During that time, they were either locked in restrictive hospital units or left unsafe at home. Some ended up in juvenile or adult jails.

The state settled with plaintiffs in 2005, with a requirement that the state must place kids in residential treatment facilities within 90 days of certifying them as eligible. A judge encouraged officials to solve the problem by opening more beds. Instead, providers and advocates say, the state created a complex, multilayered application system that slows down applications and keeps kids off the waitlist.

“If you deem a kid eligible, you have some responsibility for providing services,” said Jim McGuirk, who recently stepped down as the executive director of Astor Services, which operates a residential treatment facility in Rhinebeck, New York. The state evades that responsibility by doing “whatever you can to reduce the waiting list by not approving people. By making it harder,” he said.

Two years ago on Long Island — in the far corner of New York state from Rochester — a 16-year-old named M (his first initial) spent more than a year in the limbo of the application process. As a little boy, M had watched his dad abuse his mom for years, according to treatment records. After his parents split up, M got violent with his mom, hitting her and threatening to kill her when she didn’t give him what he wanted. It got so bad that his mom would lock herself in the bathroom to hide.

When M was 12, the Office of Mental Health placed him in a community residence — a group home that’s less restrictive and has fewer services than a residential treatment facility. As M got older, however, his behaviors only got worse. He attacked workers and bullied kids who were smaller than him. M “will conduct himself in a charming manner to get what he wants,” according to notes from mental health professionals who treated him, but he “displays no remorse” and “has no empathy.”

In June 2020, M’s treatment team submitted an application for a residential treatment facility. He urgently needed intensive treatment — in a more controlled environment — before he became an adult, his providers said. The first step was to bring his case to a regional outpost of the Office of Mental Health, where a local committee would decide whether to forward it to a second committee, which can authorize kids to be placed in residential treatment facilities.

The rationale for the multiple layers of screening is that these facilities are such restrictive environments that, under federal law, it’s the state’s responsibility to try everything else first. In practice, providers say, the result is constant deferral and delay. If a committee doesn’t make it through all of its pending applications, “Well, wait until next month,” said Christina Gullo, the president of Villa of Hope, a nonprofit mental health care agency in Rochester that closed its residential treatment facility this year because it was running at an annual deficit of over $500,000.

Rather than referring M’s application to the authorization committee, the local committee said that he should try to find a spot at a residential school, paid for by the state Education Department. The schools, however, rejected M because he was too aggressive and his mental health needs were too great. M’s team came back to the Office of Mental Health in October 2020. This time, the local committee declined to advance the application because it had questions about M’s physical health: Was it possible that his neurological issues or sleep apnea caused the behavior problems? Had the family tried getting services through the Office for People With Developmental Disabilities? (The answer was yes — it had turned M down too.)

“My jaw just dropped at that one,” said a family advocate who worked with M’s mom through the process. “It’s a sin that they’re not helping this boy. He’s just falling through the cracks, and he has been for years.”

Finally, on the third submission, the local committee agreed to pass M’s application to the authorization committee, which approved M for placement and sent his information to individual providers. By that time, however, three residential treatment facilities in the region — run by The Jewish Board — were getting ready to close. The shutdowns hadn’t yet been made public, but the facilities were discharging the kids they had, not taking new ones. One by one, the facilities turned M down.

State data shows that delays and denials are common. While the number of applications for spots in residential treatment facilities has gone up since 2018, the share of applications that the committees approved has dropped, from close to 70% in 2018 to just over 50% in the first half of 2021. The percentage that were denied nearly doubled, from 16% to 29%. Close to 20% of committee reviews resulted in a deferral.

And even when kids are authorized for admission, many don’t end up entering residential treatment facilities. In 2020, for example, 444 young people were approved by the authorization committees, but only 364 were actually admitted.

Some of those kids may have gotten the treatment they needed in the community, according to James Plastiras, a spokesperson for the Office of Mental Health. In that case, “the family may decline to proceed with an RTF admission, or the child may no longer meet RTF eligibility criteria,” Plastiras wrote in a statement.

No one would disagree that it’s best for kids to live at home whenever possible, said Rapczyk, who directed the Long Island community residence where M lived. But it doesn’t make sense to close beds when young people still can’t find outpatient care, Rapczyk said. “It was so crazy to me that they were closing all of these places without any contingency plan, in a pandemic, without any hospital beds available and kids’ mental health skyrocketing,” he said. “It was just crazy to me that this was going on.”

For M, time ran out. He aged out of the group home and moved into an adult housing program, which — unlike in the kids’ system — can kick him out if his behavior is too disruptive.

The next stop would be a homeless shelter or jail, M’s mom said. “He never got the help he needed, so what do you expect? The system says, ‘Oh, we’re here to help you,’ but it’s such bullshit. They just give you the runaround.

“My fear is that it’s gonna be a complete train wreck and my son will have a truly horrible life,” she continued. “I think his evils will take him over.”

What Taylor did in the spring of 2020 — refusing to pick Amari up from the hospital — is not so unusual, said Dr. Michael Scharf, chief of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Rochester Medical Center, which encompasses Strong Memorial Hospital.

Amari first went to Strong Memorial in April 2019. She’d woken up in the middle of the night, shaking uncontrollably. Taylor took her to the emergency room, where a security guard scanned her with a wand for potential weapons and escorted her to the hospital’s Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program. A heavy steel door locked shut behind them. Staff sat behind thick glass.

Once kids are inside, they wait — sometimes for hours, sometimes for days. The setup delivers the message that kids with mental health problems are bad rather than sick, Taylor said. “Children with medical conditions — they treat them completely different than children with psychiatric disorders. Our families are blamed; our children are blamed.”

Scharf agrees that the emergency room is not a good place for kids in crisis. But like the rest of New York, Rochester faces a crisis-level shortage of outpatient mental health care. The hospital’s outpatient clinic — the largest in the region — gets calls from about 100 families a week looking for services, and it typically has at least 125 kids on a waiting list, according to a hospital spokesperson.

Without access to outpatient care, the sickest kids often cycle in and out of hospital beds, where providers focus on treating their most acute symptoms, not on addressing long-term behavioral problems.

The cycle is exhausting and scary for kids and their families, Scharf said. Often, hospital staff get involved in the search for residential treatment, but there are never enough beds available. “It’s almost silly to be in some of these meetings” with the Office of Mental Health, Scharf said. “They will say, ‘This child is on our highest-needs, crisis list.’ The parent thinks, ‘OK, that means something is going to happen.’ But there’s 70 people on that list. That list doesn’t necessarily mean a bed is coming.”

In a way, Amari was fortunate. In April 2020, less than a month after Taylor refused to pick her up from the hospital, the Office of Mental Health worked with a social service agency called Hillside Family of Agencies to get her into a residential treatment facility in Rochester.

For Taylor, it was an excruciating victory. She believed that if the mental health system had done its job, Amari would never have had to leave home. But she also blamed herself. Amari’s worst fear was being abandoned, and now Taylor was dropping her off and driving away.

She remembers sobbing all the way home. At one point, she pulled the car over to throw up. “The guilt and shame runs so deep,” she said. “I was sick in bed for two days.”

At the facility, Amari cried for Taylor and begged to go home. Many of her behaviors got worse. Counselors wrote that she frequently tried to run away, was aggressive with her peers and made homicidal threats. She would yell and swear, pounding on the walls and flipping tables. She told an evaluator that she often wanted to hurt herself. After a few weeks, she was placed on a “prevent from leave” status, meaning that staff should physically restrain her if she tried to leave a building without permission. Even so, there was a night when she ran out of the facility and was left outside, unsupervised, with a 17-year-old boy, until morning.

To Taylor, it seemed like she was constantly getting calls from staff saying that Amari had been restrained. She thought about bringing Amari home, but then what? Ending up in a juvenile justice facility would surely have been worse, she thought.

Maria Cristalli, Hillside’s CEO, told THE CITY and ProPublica that staff rely on nonphysical interventions whenever possible, using restraints only as a last resort. “Hillside is committed to maintaining therapeutic environments that are free of violence and coercion,” Cristalli wrote. “We do not tolerate unnecessary, inappropriate, or excessive physical intervention.”

In November 2020, Amari was in such constant crisis that the residential treatment facility staff applied to get her into a state-run psychiatric hospital for acute care. The hospital was full, so Amari waited more than a month to get in. When she came back to Hillside, the facility told Taylor that Amari needed an even higher level of supervision. They wanted to transfer her to their Intensive Treatment Unit — a residential treatment facility that was more restrictive, with a lower staff-to-resident ratio.

At first Taylor said no. She spent weeks trying to secure in-home mental health services, but no one could promise her anything other than what Amari had been getting before. Eventually, she gave up and agreed to the higher-level facility. Beds were full there, too. It took six months before a spot opened up for Amari.

Last month marked two years since Amari left home. Taylor hopes she’ll come back in the fall, in time to start a new school year. She’s given up the idea that Amari will get the services she needs at home — or that anyone, really, will be there to help her.

“At this point, I’m just trying to keep her alive,” Taylor said, her voice breaking. “I have a very sick child. She wants to come home. How do I keep her alive?”

Mollie Simon contributed research.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Abigail Kramer, THE CITY.

In this interview with the UN’s Julia Dean, recorded earlier this month, Mr. Mosby described the devastating effects of the rising sea levels and extreme weather events in recent years, and his fears for the future.

He started by describing the deep connection that he and his community have to the islands, which have been home to his people for some 70,000 years.

This content originally appeared on UN News and was authored by United Nations.