Ponsonby’s post office is shutting shop next month despite push back from the local community.

A sign on the storefront, which is at the College Hill end of Ponsonby Road, said the closure would take place on 4 July but the post boxes would be “staying put”.

Ponsonby local and author John Harris said New Zealand Post’s decision to close the store was “ill-considered” and it should “try harder” to cater for the people who use the shop’s services.

• READ MORE: Ponsonby community up in arms over impending post office closure
• New Zealand Post to close 79 shops: ‘I do have concerns’ – PM

“They’ve got to be mindful of the vital role that post shops like this one play in glueing the community together,” Harris said.

“If you go down to the post shop you’ll see it’s buzzing with activity; people popping in to post parcels or to get forms filled out and so forth . . .  they’ve got to think about the effect on small communities and this is like gutting the Ponsonby community.”

Viv Rosenberg, a spokesperson for the Ponsonby Business Association, said the group is saddened by the decision to close the shop.

”Our local post office has been part of the fabric of our community in Three Lamps for several years and we regard the team there as part of our Ponsonby family. We are working alongside others to try and keep it open.”

Plan but no timeframe
In 2018, NZ Post announced its plan to close its remaining 79 standalone post offices but did not give a timeframe on when the final store would be shut.

NZ Post general manager consumer Sarah Sandoval said customer data and service patterns were analysed to determine where NZ Post services were best placed.

“The Ponsonby area is well serviced by existing postal outlets, and to remove duplications of services, we’ve decided to make this change.”

She also said that there were nearby options available, including on Hardinge Street 1.4km away, and NZ Post Herne Bay, 1km away.

The NZ Post website said “store closures are given very careful consideration”.

“[Reasons for closure] can include a decline in customer numbers or services which significantly affect the economic viability of the store,” NZ Post said.

Harris emailed NZ Post CEO David Walsh expressing his disapproval of the decision to close the shop and requesting it be reconsidered.

He said a response by the NZ Post general manager consumer stated the closure followed a close look at customer data and that there were other stores serving the Ponsonby community, which was an unsustainable way for the business to operate.

“Herne Bay, Hardinge Street and Wellesley Street are either a challenging walk or you hop in the car and add to the grid,” Harris said.

“They’re only thinking about the sustainability of the New Zealand Post itself not the community.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

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

Ponsonby’s post office is shutting shop next month despite push back from the local community.

A sign on the storefront, which is at the College Hill end of Ponsonby Road, said the closure would take place on 4 July but the post boxes would be “staying put”.

Ponsonby local and author John Harris said New Zealand Post’s decision to close the store was “ill-considered” and it should “try harder” to cater for the people who use the shop’s services.

• READ MORE: Ponsonby community up in arms over impending post office closure
• New Zealand Post to close 79 shops: ‘I do have concerns’ – PM

“They’ve got to be mindful of the vital role that post shops like this one play in glueing the community together,” Harris said.

“If you go down to the post shop you’ll see it’s buzzing with activity; people popping in to post parcels or to get forms filled out and so forth . . .  they’ve got to think about the effect on small communities and this is like gutting the Ponsonby community.”

Viv Rosenberg, a spokesperson for the Ponsonby Business Association, said the group is saddened by the decision to close the shop.

”Our local post office has been part of the fabric of our community in Three Lamps for several years and we regard the team there as part of our Ponsonby family. We are working alongside others to try and keep it open.”

Plan but no timeframe
In 2018, NZ Post announced its plan to close its remaining 79 standalone post offices but did not give a timeframe on when the final store would be shut.

NZ Post general manager consumer Sarah Sandoval said customer data and service patterns were analysed to determine where NZ Post services were best placed.

“The Ponsonby area is well serviced by existing postal outlets, and to remove duplications of services, we’ve decided to make this change.”

She also said that there were nearby options available, including on Hardinge Street 1.4km away, and NZ Post Herne Bay, 1km away.

The NZ Post website said “store closures are given very careful consideration”.

“[Reasons for closure] can include a decline in customer numbers or services which significantly affect the economic viability of the store,” NZ Post said.

Harris emailed NZ Post CEO David Walsh expressing his disapproval of the decision to close the shop and requesting it be reconsidered.

He said a response by the NZ Post general manager consumer stated the closure followed a close look at customer data and that there were other stores serving the Ponsonby community, which was an unsustainable way for the business to operate.

“Herne Bay, Hardinge Street and Wellesley Street are either a challenging walk or you hop in the car and add to the grid,” Harris said.

“They’re only thinking about the sustainability of the New Zealand Post itself not the community.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

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

Enforcement of the 50 percent rule largely falls to local officials in flood-damaged regions, who are charged with ensuring that their constituents aren’t rebuilding in flood zones. In exchange for this diligence, the federal government subsidizes low-cost flood insurance for homes in communities that certify their compliance with the rule, goosing red hot real estate markets in Florida and other scenic but climate-threatened regions.

As Florida continues rebuilding from 2022’s devastating Hurricane Ian, however, the Biden administration may be signaling that this era of easy money is over. Late last month, FEMA sent an explosive letter to local officials in Lee County, Florida, where over 750,000 people live near some of South Florida’s most prized coastal land. FEMA claimed that almost 600 homeowners in the city of Cape Coral and other nearby towns had rebuilt vulnerable homes in the flood zone over the 18 months since Hurricane Ian, violating the 50 percent rule as well as local construction laws. 

The agency had long given the county and its cities a 25 percent discount on flood insurance in recognition of the county’s efforts to control flood risk, which saved residents millions of dollars a year. The letter threatened to yank away that discount, arguing that the county’s lax approach to the Hurricane Ian rebuild had negated those earlier efforts. The message was clear: After decades of risky construction in floodplains, the feds were putting their foot down. 

This new effort to penalize floodplain construction is yet another sign that the long-hidden costs of climate change and development are starting to catch up with homeowners in coastal states — and at the very same time that housing costs more broadly are increasing for many Americans. FEMA has already raised flood insurance premiums across the country in recent years to keep up with mounting risk, and private home insurance companies have also hiked premiums for wind insurance in several states along the Gulf Coast. 

The crackdown in Lee County represents an attempt by FEMA to shift the cost burden of climate risk away from the federal government (and the public that funds it) and onto local homeowners. This will test the strength of the area’s white-hot real estate market, potentially forcing many homeowners to walk away from their waterfront properties. As the federal government and private insurers both try to reduce their exposure to climate change, Lee County and its cities could be canaries in the coal mine for a housing market disfigured by mounting flood risk.

The reaction from these canaries has been swift and furious. Elected leaders from the county and the city blasted FEMA as “villains” and accused the agency of hampering Florida’s hurricane recovery at the behest of President Joe Biden. Lee County’s board of commissioners mulled suing the agency at a tense meeting a few days after the announcement. Local TV stations ran dozens of stories about the impact FEMA’s decision would have on homeowners, who are already dealing with a steep rise in both flood insurance and traditional property insurance, which covers wind damage. 

“It’s almost like revenge politics,” said Cecil Pendergrass, a Lee County commissioner, during the county meeting after the announcement. “Our citizens, our taxpayers are being held hostage here.”

FEMA soon put its decision on pause, giving the county an extra 30 days to prove it hadn’t let homeowners break the 50 percent rule or build in the floodplain. It is unclear whether Lee County or cities like Cape Coral will be able to do that. Federal and local officials declined to provide Grist with details about the post-Ian violations, citing privacy concerns, but if homeowners have already rebuilt their destroyed properties, the county won’t be able to fix that within a month.

The bigger question for communities around the country is whether FEMA is changing how it enforces the 50 percent rule in an effort to force homeowners out of flood-prone areas.

“The floodplain management community is tracking this very closely,” said Susanna Pho, the founder of a flood risk firm called Forerunner, which helps flood-prone communities with FEMA compliance.

Lee County has long been a poster child for risky waterfront development. The city of Cape Coral sits on artificial filled land in what used to be a swampy section of Florida shoreline, with no barrier between the city’s urban landscape and the Gulf of Mexico. When hurricanes strike, as Ian did in 2022, they can push as much as 15 feet of storm surge through the city, inundating thousands of homes. Nearby cities such as Bonita Springs, which also caught a penalty from FEMA, aren’t much safer.

The 50 percent rule is supposed to reduce this risk over time by ensuring that flood-prone homeowners don’t rebuild the same vulnerable properties over and over. If a county determines that a home has suffered what FEMA calls “substantial damage,” it must force the homeowner to tear it down and elevate a new home above flood level, often on concrete pilings. If a county doesn’t comply, FEMA can kick it out of the federal flood insurance program, rendering homes more or less uninsurable, or downgrade its discounts as it did with Lee County. This rule acts as a de facto tax on risky property: Flood insurance payouts max out at $250,000 per home, which means homeowners are often on the hook for tearing down their houses and building new ones.

The problem is that determining what counts as “substantial damage” is a complicated process. Local officials conduct basic “windshield assessments” in the first few weeks after a storm, logging damage information that they can see from the street as they clear debris. They only do detailed examinations for the 50 percent rule when homeowners request permits to rebuild. But many homeowners never request permits from their city or county. Instead, they come back and patch up homes that they should be tearing down and rebuilding at higher elevations, and the local government either never catches them or looks the other way.

This mandate puts local governments in a tough political situation: They have FEMA on one side, urging them to enforce strict flood rules, and displaced homeowners on the other side, trying to get back in their homes without going broke. It’s unclear how much Lee County and its cities knew about the hundreds of rebuilt homes that FEMA alleges were noncompliant after Ian, but attempts to flout the 50 percent rule have been a scourge for the agency going back decades.

Albert Slap, a coastal planning consultant in Florida, said he understood why Lee County or cities like Cape Coral might have allowed homeowners to repair their homes without elevating.

“It’s pretty clear that the motivation is voters,” he said. “The people who got damaged are voters, and they’re going, ‘If you make me build back better, I’m not gonna be able to do it, and I’m leaving. I voted you guys into office and you’re screwing me.’”

Lee County says it followed normal protocol after Hurricane Ian, conducting basic damage assessments in the immediate aftermath of the storm and inspecting homes only later on when homeowners requested permits. Flood and disaster experts who spoke to Grist said this protocol is more or less standard across Florida and other hurricane-prone states, which raises the question of whether FEMA is changing the way it enforces the 50 percent rule and cracking down harder on rogue rebuilds.

FEMA didn’t answer questions about its enforcement strategy. In response to questions from Grist, a spokesperson said the agency is “committed to helping communities take appropriate remediation actions” to fix the rebuild violations. A spokesperson for Lee County said the county “will work with its partners at FEMA during a 30-day extension period.”

Adam Botana, a Republican state representative whose district encompasses much of Lee County, said he had faith that Lee County and other local governments would address the violations that FEMA identified and take action against homeowners who rebuilt without following FEMA regulations.

“Nobody likes the 50 percent rule, but I understand there have to be rules,” he told Grist. “Some municipalities may be a little more lax than others, but we have to keep everybody in line.” He added that he thinks the county will be able to prove many of the alleged violations didn’t take place.

Even if Lee County manages to contest the decision, homeowners in Southwest Florida are almost guaranteed to suffer more financial pain as a result of this enforcement effort. If FEMA stays the course and removes the discount, it will raise flood insurance costs for homeowners in unincorporated parts of the county between $14 and $17 million per year, equating to a $300 annual hit for each flood insurance customer in the area. But if Lee County cracks down on the 50 percent rule and FEMA restores the discount, homeowners who rebuilt in flood zones may have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to elevate their homes.

This new penalty comes on top of a much larger rate hike that FEMA has rolled out over the past few years as part of an effort to fix issues with the flood insurance program. This new system, called Risk Rating 2.0, will triple insurance costs in Lee County by the time it takes full effect, raising the average annual premium from around $1,300 to almost $4,000, with some of the most extreme bills ballooning well over $10,000 per year. Florida’s private insurance market for wind damage is also in a tailspin: More than 30 private carriers have pulled back from the state over the past two years, thanks in part to mounting hurricane risk. Those that have stuck around have doubled or tripled their prices.

Lisa Miller, a veteran Florida political consultant and former state insurance regulator, said the burden of rising costs shouldn’t trump the need to ensure that Lee County homes are resilient to future disasters.

“When I hear someone tell me they don’t want to pay $12,000 a year, I remind them, ‘we live in Florida,’” she said. “Our catastrophe risk is higher than almost anywhere in the world. What matters is, the homes that were repaired when they should have been torn down and rebuilt — will they withstand the next storm? That’s the question.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline FEMA is making an example of this Florida boomtown. Locals call it ‘revenge politics.’ on Apr 16, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

But the multibillion-dollar project raises complicated feelings for many in the working-class, largely Black communities that dot the farm country and marshy bottoms of west Tennessee. They pride themselves on a slower way of life, and feel lucky to have good drinking water from a reliable aquifer. Development on such a large scale will, they fear, change the community, suck up water and electricity, and prompt an influx of newcomers and development. 

They are only the latest to face uncertainties with energy transition projects, which, from solar fields to wind farms, have prompted reservations about their size, industrial activity, and environmental impacts. But rather than accept their fate, the constellation of towns orbiting Stanton are sitting down with Ford and SK to negotiate a binding agreement that will ensure they benefit from Blue Oval City as much as the companies do. 

During a series of community meetings held over the past few months, the coalition has drafted a list of stipulations, called a community benefits agreement, that it wants Ford/Blue Oval SK to abide by. It is asking for community resources like youth facilities, support for road maintenance, and apprenticeship pathways run by local union chapters. It also seeks a binding assurance that the joint venture will dispose of its waste properly. And although Ford has announced many community programs, local residents want the automaker to give them some say in such things. 

“They didn’t really reach out,” Michael Adriaanse, who serves on the committee drafting the agreement, said of Ford’s efforts. “I know a lot of people who feel like it happened overnight.” 

So how does such a process begin? Generally with meetings that bring stakeholders together to draw up a list of demands in a broad public conversation the company cannot ignore. 

“The argument a community can make is, ‘If you want our resources, you have to contribute back to the health and welfare of the community you’re gonna be a part of now,’” said Kathleen Mulltigan, who leads the National Labor Leadership Initiative at Cornell University. “What we’re really trying to do is bring real democracy into the economic realm, because a lot of the work of shaping the economy happens without workers having any voice in it.”

Ultimately, community benefits agreements, or CBAs, are a contract between a corporation and coalition of local organizations that gives the community, through binding arbitration, leverage to ensure the commitments are kept.

Historically, CBAs have been used by those impacted by the entertainment and sports industries, which tend to get big municipal tax breaks and public funding. Some of the first were negotiated in Los Angeles in the early 2000s to address, separately, a sports arena and an entertainment district. After exhaustive negotiations, residents achieved many of their goals, including higher wages, guaranteed affordable housing, and revolving loans for local business. CBAs have since spread nationwide, with folks in Nashville negotiating a high wage floor, onsite childcare, and other provisions at Geodis Park, a $275 million stadium being built for the Nashville SC soccer team.

Now, CBAs are increasingly being used to address clean energy developments. According to the Sabine Climate Change Law Center at Columbia University, more than a dozen have been signed since 2015, many of them in the last three years. The contracts resulted in projects agreeing to give preference to local hires, and in companies sharing revenue with the county in which they operate. An offshore wind facility in Maine even underwrote rural broadband access.

Vonda McDaniel, the president of the Central Labor Council of Nashville and Middle Tennessee, is helping to formulate Blue Oval agreement and plan town halls. The process has been lively. “We haven’t had a whole lot of wilting flowers that have showed up at our meetings, to be honest,” she said.

One reason for that is that locals already see changes. “The community is feeling a bit squeezed; there’s heavy equipment up and down the road every day,” said McDaniel.

Farmland counties in the region known as Middle Tennessee endured rapid urbanization when automakers arrived in Spring Hill, south of Nashville. As investment increased and people began moving in, housing costs skyrocketed. They’re beginning to creep up around Stanton, too. McDaniel says a CBA could forestall that.

“Community benefits agreements are based on the power and leverage that communities build within themselves,” she said. “They’re not just gonna give you a list of things you say you want.” In her mind, these agreements help ensure a measure of democracy in a part of the country where voter disenfranchisement, especially in rural, Black communities, is high and private interests have the ear of state government.

The Blue Oval project received a $9.2 billion loan from the Department of Energy. As clean energy funding and incentives have proliferated under the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, much investment has gone to the Southeast and America’s vaunted EV “Battery Belt.” The region’s famously climate-unfriendly governors have opened their doors wide, with Tennessee Governor Bill Lee seemingly keen on snatching the automaking mantle from the Great Lakes. With $900 million in public incentives approved by the Tennessee legislature, it’s the largest single manufacturing investment in the state’s history.  

Amidst the green boom, many have speculated that a part of the South’s draw is its generally lax environmental and safety regulations. Tennessee is a  “right-to-work” state; such locales typically support lower average wages. Tennessee’s preemption ordinance also prevents municipalities from enacting worker standards beyond what state law requires.  

This does not mean publicly supported clean energy projects in the South are doomed to a lower standard than those in other places. The president of the Nashville chapter of the United Auto Workers Union has promised that Blue Oval City will be a “union facility.” The Inflation Reduction Act and bipartisan infrastructure law require those seeking federal funding to submit a “community benefits plan” outlining how they will invest in domestic labor, local communities, and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Although similar to CBAs, they’re not the same. Advocates of such arrangements say CBAs are needed to secure accountability and transparency, and to give communities direct input into projects that impact them.

Will Tucker works as the Southern Programs Manager with Jobs to Move America, a national labor advocacy nonprofit. It recently negotiated a CBA with New Flyer, an electric bus manufacturer in Anniston, Alabama, and Tucker feels confident this approach to the transition can work in the South.

“What sets a real community benefits agreement apart from a dressed up community outreach program by another name is the element of negotiations with the company,” he said. Though many companies will set aside funding for local sports leagues, schools, and the like, Tucker considers such moves more of a PR strategy than a way of giving the community power.  

If community organizations can present a united front, that pressure usually pushes the company to negotiate, though in some cases, protests and demonstrations heighten the stakes. Michael Adriaanse hopes such pressure will send the Blue Oval City CBA over the finish line. 

Ultimately, for a CBA to work, the company in question must sit down with the community. Adriaanse said the coalition invited Ford representatives to a town hall to discuss preliminary demands, but it didn’t work out. McDaniel speculated that the company’s ongoing negotiations with United Auto Workers, which recently concluded a strike, may have slowed some things down. There’s a long road ahead, but Adriaanse and McDaniel are hopeful that with a strong enough coalition, the company won’t be able to dodge any longer.

The coalition still plans to go to the table with Ford, with a complete draft of the agreement in hand, early in the new year. Even if the effort is not immediately successful, community members say, the relationships they’ve built with one another will only get stronger, leaving possibilities for further organizing open down the road.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A huge EV factory is coming to west Tennessee. Here’s how locals are ensuring they benefit. on Dec 18, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Katie Myers.

Junta troops killed a People’s Defense Force member and two civilians in Sagaing region’s Pale township this week, Pale People’s Administration Group told Radio Free Asia on Thursday.

Residents of Nyaung Kone village fled ahead of a morning raid by around 80 soldiers on Tuesday.

When some returned later in the day, troops arrested and killed three of them, according to the administration group’s Kyaw Soe Win.

“[Some locals] were watching to see if the junta troops would leave the village. They entered the village to have a look,” he said.

 “When we entered the village on Wednesday morning, we saw some locals and a People’s Defense Force soldier had been brutally killed. Their hands were cut off and they were beheaded.”

Kyaw Soe Win said three People’s Defense Force members managed to escape but were hit and injured by artillery fragments.

Pro-junta Telegram messaging channels said three defense force soldiers were killed.

The junta spokesperson for Sagaing, Sai Naing Naing Kyaw, told RFA he was not aware of the incident.

It's not known if the latest raid was carried out by the junta’s notorious Ogre Column although the method of killing was similar to their tactics.

In March and April this year, Ogre Column troops raided Sagaing, Ye-U, Khin-U, Myinmu, Taze and Myaung townships in Sagaing region, cutting off limbs and beheading people they captured.

More than 800,000 people have been forced to abandon their homes in Sagaing region to escape the fighting, according to the United Nations.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn and Elaine Chan.

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

“No, brah, we got to go,” he yelled. He couldn’t believe they hadn’t woken him up, or the dog who had been lounging in his room, that they were attempting to hose down the fast-growing flames instead of getting away from them as fast as possible. “We got to go!” He ran into the street. It was Tuesday, Aug. 8, and in the town of Lahaina in West Maui, people were screaming and running as the sky rained embers. 

There was no warning from anyone about the fast-moving fire — no text, no officials knocking on his door, no sirens. 

“It was just, boom!” he said later. “You saw a fire and you’re going to die. That’s how fast it happened. Run for your life.”

That’s what he did. 

He jumped in a car with a panicked driver who drove the wrong direction, straight into the flames, where she got stuck in back-to-back traffic along the two-lane highway. David clutched the door handle to get out but it was so hot that it burned his fingers. The flames were 60 feet high and five feet away on either side of them. The cars in front of them were on fire. He yelled that they should run but he was the only one in the car who jumped out. Everyone else was frozen. He threw open the door and ran until the flames were far behind.

In the days since, he hasn’t been able to stay still. Every day he cries and keeps moving, sleeping along the road, by the park, at a friend’s and in a shelter. He can’t stop thinking about what he saw and questioning if he could’ve done more.

No one he was with that day survived — not his roommates, none of the other passengers in the car, not even the dog with whom he had been sleeping before waking up to a literal nightmare.

Just over a week later, the depth and breadth of the fire is still only just growing clear. Dozens of cadaver-sniffing dogs have been flown in from the continent to scour the fire zone. Less than half of the burned area has been searched, and with more than 100 dead, the fire is already the deadliest in modern U.S. history, yet 1,000 people are still missing. Family members are submitting their saliva to identify loved-ones’ remains, many of which are so badly burnt that they crumble when touched. It may not even be possible to identify or recover all bodies as some drowned at sea trying to escape while others succumbed to the flames.

But while the inferno happened shockingly fast for the people of Lahaina, it didn’t come out of nowhere. It had been building for years, like the dry grasses that caught alight and fueled the blaze. The enormity of the catastrophe speaks to both the challenges of preparing for the unimaginable and the incredibly high stakes of inaction.

Susanne Moser, a New England-based climate change resilience expert, says communities and governments are going to have to confront that reality as climate change makes disasters like Maui’s more likely to occur. It may be expensive, but if people don’t pay for it upfront, they may pay later in lives. 

“I think what’s happening now is that climate change is essentially coming back at us with its bill much more ferociously and rapidly and in a much more integrated, systematic sort of way than we have tried to understand it,” Moser said.

Lahaina, in Hawaiian, translates to “cruel sun.” The area was once home to 14 acres of wetland, including a large fishpond and a one-acre sandbar where high chiefs, and, later, Hawaiian royalty lived.

Katie Kamelamela, an assistant professor at Arizona State University who specializes in forest restoration and Indigenous practices, says the tragedy in Lahaina can trace its origins to the privatization of land in 1848, known as the Great Mahele, that eventually led to huge swaths of land sold to large agricultural companies.

Sugar became the dominant industry in Lahaina in the latter part of the 19th century, and to irrigate their fields, plantation owners diverted streams that once flowed from the mountains to the sea. Lahaina’s royal fishpond devolved into a stagnant marsh, and plantation owners filled it in with coral rubble. 

When Lahaina burned last week, the former fishpond had long been buried under a baseball field and parking lot.

The dominance of the sugar industry was cemented with the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. American and European businessmen backed the removal of Queen Liliʻuokalani and succeeded with the support of United States Marines and Navy sailors. The last of Mauiʻs sugar plantations closed in 2016, as tourism and real estate superseded agriculture as the state’s most lucrative land uses. 

Water is still a finite resource. Firefighters battling the Lahaina flames found themselves pulling from dry hydrants until they were eventually overwhelmed. A state official has come under scrutiny for delaying the release of water in West Maui, though it’s not clear whether his decision actually affected the hydrants. 

What is clear is that instead of a wetland cultivated by Indigenous caretakers or a sugar plantation irrigated for crops, the Lahaina that the fire met last week was dry and primed to burn. A third of Maui was in drought and a hurricane passing south of the islands whipped up 80 mph winds. Non-native grasslands had proliferated after the closing of the sugar and pineapple fields, but many thinly walled wooden plantation homes still stood.

Local wildfire experts like Clay Trauernicht for years had been sounding the alarm on the risks. When brush fires scorched 10,000 acres in Maui in 2019, Trauernicht wrote articles, testified in public hearings, and held meetings letting people know that fires were getting worse and Hawaiʻi needed to be prepared.

It was difficult to get people to care about fires when the main casualties were native forests and structures, Trauernicht told Grist this week.

It didn’t help that the neighborhoods most likely to burn statewide were communities like Oahu’s Waianae, drier west side communities with lower property values and more Native Hawaiian residents, rather than the lush, green wealthier enclaves on the windward coasts. 

What’s frustrating to Trauernicht is how easy it would have been to prevent non-native grasslands from running rampant. “Almost anything other than what we are doing — which is nothing — will reduce fire risk,” he said.

But much easier than pinpointing problematic land use decisions is condemning whoever lit the spark. And so far, many are blaming the Hawaiian Electric Company. No official cause has yet been determined, but at least four lawsuits have already been filed against the utility, sending its stock value plunging by $1 billion and casting doubt on the future of the company established in 1891 – two years before the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom.

Attorneys point out that the utility recognized in a public filing last year that its risk of sparking a wildfire was “significant” and argue that the company was too slow to implement reforms. “The need to adapt to climate change is undeniable and urgent,” the company acknowledged in a public filing.

Planning document after planning document suggests Hawaiʻi officials both knew this tragedy could happen, and yet couldn’t imagine it actually happening. A 2020 hazard mitigation plan identified Lahaina as a high risk area for wildfires. Maui’s draft climate change action plan notes that wildfire burn areas quadrupled in the last century. But in a state report on emergency planning, officials said wildfires were considered a “low risk” to human life. 

The more pressing concerns were hurricanes or tsunamis, so much so that although the state had invested in a state-of-the-art siren system — “the largest single integrated public safety outdoor siren warning system in the world” — local emergency officials didn’t turn it on even after learning that firefighters were being overwhelmed by the blaze.

On Wednesday, Herman Andaya, then Maui’s top emergency management official, defended that call, saying the system would not have saved lives because people would not have heard the sirens if they were indoors, and that the sirens may have prompted people to flee inland, toward the fire, as the blaring sound is intended to push people to find higher ground. Andaya resigned Thursday.

Instead, county officials sent out emergency phone and social media alerts – alerts that many, like David, never received.

The next day, Hawaii Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke told news media that officials hadn’t anticipated that a hurricane that never made landfall on the islands could have wrought such destruction. But five years before Lahaina’s historic Front Street was incinerated — almost to the date — the periphery of another hurricane was stirring up strong winds on Maui, fueling another conflagration that was stopped just yards away from homes.

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“There was a very, very strong possibility that the entire Lahaina town could have gone up in flames yesterday,” then-Mayor Alan Arakawa told a local news crew as rain poured down behind him on Aug. 26, 2018. The mayor said he’d been on the phone with federal emergency officials trying to figure out how to evacuate 20,000 people in the Lahaina area if needed. 

There was no guarantee such an evacuation was even possible. “If the hurricane had generated the kinds of winds and surf that we had been anticipating — 15 to 20 plus feet — it would’ve buried Honoapiʻilani Highway and we would not have had access in and out of Lahaina,” he said. 

Burned-out cars now line that same two-lane highway where people abandoned them in desperation or were caught by the roaring flames.

One cruel irony is Hawaiʻi has been a national leader in climate change preparedness. While states like Montana have banned agencies from considering climate change in their decisions, Hawaiʻi was the first state to set a 100% renewable energy goal, the first to declare a climate emergency, funding climate commissions and offices and pledging to go net-carbon neutral by 2045.

But what local officials may have overlooked was the incredible risk of what scientists call compound hazards, the intersection of multiple disasters — such as how hurricane-fueled winds can combine with a brush fire to erase an entire town. 

Even Trauernicht, the state’s Cassandra, describes what happened last week as “unimaginable.” Moser from New England says she hears that word over and over again when she works with emergency preparedness officials in the wake of a disaster. 

“The strong takeaway for me is that if you want to get prepared, you have to open the taboo, the unimaginable, to think about it,” said Moser. “Everybody should be thinking about multiple system failures at the same time and multiple hazards coinciding because that’s the kind of world that we live in.”

What has been heartening to her is seeing how on Maui, Native Hawaiians and other locals have come together to help one another emerge from the wreckage. She’s much more concerned about places where there’s not as much social cohesion, where people may go hungry longer without concerned neighbors knocking on their doors. 

But nothing can erase from David’s memory the scenes he keeps replaying over and over. After he ran from the car, he joined a caravan of survivors that walked south for miles until they hit the next town of Olowalu. A friend of his eventually picked him up, and they went to Costco where they drank alcohol, covered in soot, trying to comprehend what had just happened. 

He also replays the scenes of the Lahaina he knew. The waves and the harbor and the boats and the ocean. The chickens and birds he passed when riding his bike down Front Street to make loco moco and pancakes for patrons at the cafe where he worked.

“It was just the most beautiful place you’ve ever been,” he said. “All of a sudden it looks like literally a nuclear bomb went off.” 

He would give anything to go back. 

Grist climate solutions writer Gabriela Aoun Angueira contributed reporting to this story.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Locals have been sounding the alarm for years about Lahaina wildfire risk on Aug 17, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Anita Hofschneider.

A mile away, outside the entrance to the shelter at War Memorial Gym, a steady stream of cars pulled up along pallets stacked high with supplies. Drivers called out through their windows how many people they were delivering to, their ages and needs. An assembly line of volunteers led by Kanaka Maoli, or Native Hawaiians, stuffed each vehicle with donations before moving on to the next.

And on a corner lot in a neighborhood near Maui High School, a Hawaiian family turned their front yard into a distribution center, collecting necessities for the dozens of people crammed into the homes of family or friends or living in their cars nearby. The family had taken to affectionately calling a large trailer in front of the house, where people could sift through carefully organized boxes of clothing, the “walk-in closet.”

Across Maui, community hubs like these have cropped up with dizzying speed in the days since wildfires swept through Maui on August 8, killing at least 99 (with the death toll expected to rise), destroying more than 2,200 buildings, and displacing thousands. They are led by the community, and grounded in the deeply held Hawaiian values of caring for, and sharing with, one another. But they are also driven by a growing concern that the people still in their homes around Lahaina and displaced across Maui are not getting enough help from authorities.

“A lot of people are mobilizing,” Leo Nahenahemailani Smith, one of the volunteers at the canoe club, said Sunday. “With aloha, you give whether people ask or not, it’s in our nature.” 

In Wisconsin on Tuesday, President Joe Biden, noting that the wildfire was the deadliest the nation has seen in more than a century, vowed that the people of Maui will get all the help they need. “Every asset, every asset they need will be there for them, and we’ll be there on Maui as long as it takes, as long as it takes and I mean that sincerely.” 

But in the week since the fires ravaged West Maui, much of the burden of helping survivors has fallen on local volunteers, with government assistance noticeably absent in some places. 

On Sunday, volunteers arrived at the canoe club at 7:30 a.m. to put out boxes of donations. Others made calls to area shelters to see what they needed, then dispatched drivers with supplies. Most had been working for five days straight, sometimes 12-hour shifts. A few had set to work after helping neighbors and relatives fend off the fires that burned upcountry Maui.  

A steady flow of people passed through the hale dropping off donations. A family from Hana, a two-hour drive away, stopped by on their way to Costco, asking what they could provide. They returned a couple hours later with propane and ice. A young man offered some two-way radios. A group of firefighters from Honolulu filled a truck with cases of water before heading off to a shelter. A couple with a baby strapped into the back seat of their car dropped off gas cans they’d filled themselves.

Others came seeking items for themselves or for those they were caring for. A woman asked about baby wipes, which she hadn’t been able to find. A man who lost his home picked out a few shirts and shorts. A couple whose house had been spared in the upcountry fires filled their truck with supplies for their neighbors, all of whom had lost their homes. 

Sunday afternoon, volunteers cooked and packed up hot meals before a convoy of pickup trucks arrived to transport food, gasoline, propane, and coolers of ice to Lahaina and the surrounding areas. 

It is unclear how many people remain in Lahaina, but two sources estimated the number might exceed 1,000. Access to West Maui remains restricted, and the few entry points have at times been chaotic and tense. At first, residents were told they would not be allowed back if they left, so many chose to stay. Some had no other choice.

“They have nowhere else to go,” said Tiare Lawrence, one of the volunteers at the Hawaiian Canoe Club. Many of her relatives lost their houses, including one that had been in the family for four generations. 

Others have been afraid to leave their homes for fear of looters and thieves. “A lot of people are hunkering down just to protect their homes,” Lawrence said.  

Supplies are being taken into West Maui by people who can prove they live there or who have special passes. Those without them are finding workarounds. In the first days of the recovery, brigades of boats and jet skis ferried supplies. 

So many deliveries of clothes and household goods have arrived that some are being turned away. But with power still out in portions of West Maui, volunteers have shifted their focus to the supplies needed to sustain residents in the long-term, like fuel for generators, ice, solar lamps, batteries, and water. West Maui residents have been warned against drinking the water even if it’s boiled because of wildfire contaminants. “That’s the hardest stuff to find right now, and it’s the stuff we most need,” said Chase Pico, a volunteer at the distribution site outside the War Memorial shelter.

Hubs inside the restricted zone offer food, water and other essentials, but volunteers worry they are not reaching people who can’t leave their homes or who live in more remote areas. They’re driving on back roads, going neighborhood by neighborhood to find people who aren’t being reached by state and federal authorities. Many told Grist they’re not seeing any indications of government aid around Lahaina beyond the disaster area.

“I haven’t seen people in uniform, only locals in trucks [making deliveries],” said Cheyanne Kaawa, who has spent days shuttling supplies into Lahaina and couldnʻt understand why Governor Josh Green had not yet requested U.S. military assistance. The Hawaii National Guard is on the ground on Maui, but the governor has not yet requested active-duty troops. The governor’s office did not return two requests for comment.

With multiple storms forecast to hit the area this week, Kaawa worried that the prolonged wait is endangering survivors, especially ones that lost their roofs. “Today is day eight, three fires are still going, our water is contaminated, and a lot of people still have no power or ways to communicate,” she said. “Vulnerable homes and lives that were spared in the first fire might not make it through the next storm.”

Read Next

How Maui’s wildfires became the country’s deadliest in more than a century

Max Graham

Paul Kaʻuhane Luʻuwai, head coach of the canoe club and one of the convoy drivers who had made multiple delivery trips, said on Sunday that he also had not seen anyone from FEMA in the neighborhoods. His family lost seven houses in the fire. “I want to know where the hell is the government,” he said. “Yes, theyʻre looking for remains, but it’s been five days. Where are they?”

A FEMA spokesperson said that the agency was providing the services that the state had requested of them, including facilitating shelter and registering residents so that they can receive aid, and that FEMA would enter Lahaina upon the state’s request.

Asked why the Red Cross had not yet gone into the restricted area to distribute aid and check on residents, a spokesperson for the agency, which is managing several shelters, also said they needed permission from state officials to do so.

The need for aid extends well beyond those who remain in Lahaina. Around 2,100 people entered shelters after the fire, but countless evacuees remain dispersed across the island, staying with loved ones, in their cars, or even in tents in yards. Those who are hosting them are straining to support the displaced in addition to their own families.

Kekane and Josh Kuloloio set up a distribution center in their front yard after realizing that many people had taken shelter in homes and in parked cars around their neighborhood. Kekane said she knew of one house hosting 24 people. Theyʻd also met a man who was living in his car with his son. 

The situation has put stress on the Kuloloios too, who have five children, two of them younger than 3. It’s been hard to find diapers because of the concentrated demand. “Itʻs an island-wide crisis,” said Josh Kuloloio.

He’s also frustrated by how difficult the government had made it to bring help or to even volunteer at official shelters.

“FEMA knows nothing about our culture of taking care of everybody, of nobody left behind,” he said. “They’re butting up against who we are.” 

Similar frustrations came up at the canoe club. A woman appeared with boxes of homemade fruit cups that she tried to donate at the War Memorial Gym shelter but had been turned away. “The aunties in there are tired of eating canned food, but they won’t even let me give them fruit,” she said.

Despite restrictions that many residents say limit them from caring for their own, community volunteers continue finding ways to offer whatever solace they can. When a little boy arrived at the canoe club missing the toy trucks he’d lost in the fire, volunteers rummaged through donations until they found a Hot Wheels car for him.

“Itʻs just a little bit of normalcy, a tad of comfort,” said Tahina Kinores, one of the coordinators. That evening, she stayed three hours past when the hub was scheduled to close, so that families who didn’t want to be seen asking for help could come get supplies in private. 

Around 8:30 p.m. Kinores and some close friends who had been there for 13 hours moved all the boxes back into the hale. Someone turned on a reggae song, they opened beers, and swayed to the music. It was only a brief reprieve. The next morning, they’d do it all over again. 

Grist senior staff writer Anita Hofschneider contributed reporting to this story.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘Where are they?’ With government aid largely absent, locals funnel supplies to West Maui on Aug 15, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Gabriela Aoun Angueira.

Carolyn Shafer spread the maps out on her patio table. Another sun-dappled Saturday morning under her backyard trees in the picturesque border town of Patagonia, Arizona. Shafer wasn’t relaxing though. She was getting to work.

Birds chirped as the 76-year-old traced the 75,000 acres of mining claims on the edge of her community with her finger. She wore a black T-shirt emblazoned with a fearsome wolf hovering above a rugged mountain range. The wolf is the calling card of the Patagonia Area Resource Alliance, or PARA. The local group monitors industrialized mining in the Patagonia Mountains, one of the most biodiverse places on Earth. Schafer is president of the board.

“This is our new logo,” she said, picking up a pamphlet with the wolf on the front. The old mascot — a cute cartoon dog — no longer matched the moment. A vigilant pack animal sent a more appropriate message.

“We think of ourselves as local watchdogs,” Schafer told me. “We pay attention to what’s going on with the companies and the agencies, and then we bark really loudly to the big dogs, who have the staff, the knowledge, and the experience to do what is necessary.”

The big dogs, Shafer and her allies believe, are needed now more than ever. Last month, the Biden administration announced the “first-ever” inclusion of a mine in a federal program that expedites permitting for high-priority projects. In this case, it was the extraction of minerals from the Patagonia Mountains to support the president’s green energy agenda — manganese and zinc, specifically, for producing electric vehicle batteries and fortifying renewable energy installations, among other purposes. In the weeks since the announcement, the Forest Service has issued permits advancing large-scale drilling in the area.

The operation is the Hermosa project, which encroaches on the Coronado National Forest, an hour southeast of Tucson. The company is South32, an Australian spin-off from global mining giant, BHP Billiton. The program, FAST-41, was created in 2015 to streamline the federal permitting process. The Permitting Council, an agency with a nearly $100 billion portfolio in government infrastructure projects, oversees the program.

The administration’s support for the mine follows President Joe Biden’s 2022 determination invoking the Defense Production Act, which ordered an increase in domestic mining of “critical” materials sufficient to create a large-scale battery supply chain and move the nation away from fossil fuels and foreign production lines. Manganese was singled out as critical. Congressional passage of the Inflation Reduction Act also called for increased domestic mining in the name of green energy.

With an initial estimated outlay of $1.7 billion, South32 anticipates a lifespan of 22 years for Hermosa’s zinc deposit and 60 years for its manganese deposit. Full production is slated to begin in 2026 or 2027. Company executives celebrated their FAST-41 inclusion with the Permitting Council’s director in a press call last month. Hermosa project President Pat Risner drew a direct line between Washington’s goals and his company’s aims.

“These policies pave the way for a vast domestic expansion in electric vehicles, batteries, and renewable power production,” he said. “South 32’s Hermosa project is the only advanced mine development project in the U.S. currently that could produce two federally designated critical minerals as its primary products, those being manganese and zinc.”

Shafer was blindsided by the news. “That really wasn’t on our radar screen at all,” she said the first time we spoke. In the month that followed, PARA cranked up its advocacy like never before, organizing with larger NGOs and telling any reporter who would listen about the project’s extraordinary ecological stakes.

Carolyn Shafer, board president of Patagonia Area Resource Alliance, points out locations on maps outside her home in Patagonia, Ariz., on June 17, 2023.

Photo: Molly Peters for The Intercept

PARA’s Lawsuit

Last Tuesday, the calls for help became a call for action. PARA, with support from the nonprofit advocates of Earthjustice and the Western Mining Action Project, filed a lawsuit in federal court against the U.S. Forest Service and the supervisor of the Coronado National Forest, where the mining activity is concentrated. Several of the region’s environmental organizations — and its most experienced litigators — joined as co-plaintiffs, including the Center for Biological Diversity, the Tucson Audubon Society, and Earthworks.

The groups alleged a series of Forest Service violations of the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act, resulting in the rushed release of two permits for exploratory drilling projects in the Patagonias last month. One of the projects is overseen by South32 in conjunction with the high-priority Hermosa project. According to the lawsuit, the permits impede recovery of the threatened Mexican spotted owl and the yellow-billed cuckoo, as well as disrupt federally protected migration corridors for endangered jaguars and ocelots. (The Forest Service declined to comment on the pending litigation.)

“Drilling could begin at any time.”

Hermosa project at South32 is not named in the lawsuit. In an email, Risner suggested PARA’s ecological concerns were overstated.

“With a surface footprint of just 600 acres, the Hermosa project is a fraction of the size of most mining projects and keeps sustainability at the core of our approach,” he said before the lawsuit was filed. “Hermosa has also had in place for more than a decade a robust biological monitoring program.”

PARA and its supporters called on the court to declare that the Forest Service broke the law and quash the agency’s authorizations. The moment demands urgency, they argued: “Drilling could begin at any time.”

View of the Patagonia Mountains from the Borderlands Wildlife Preserve in Patagonia, Ariz., on June 20, 2023.

Photo: Molly Peters for The Intercept

A Sky Island

The weekend before PARA and its allies filed their lawsuit, Shafer and her partner, Robert Gay, an architect and journalist, invited me on a bumpy drive deep into the mountains to survey the Patagonias’ rivers and canyons and offered their take on current fight and its wider implications.

The Patagonias are an iconic member of the “sky islands,” a network of mountain ranges that rise up out of the desert of southern Arizona and northern Mexico. Home to an estimated 100 endangered or threatened species, the mountains contain the largest cluster of mammal species anywhere north of Mexico, more than 500 species of birds, the highest density of breeding raptors on the planet, the most reptile and ant species in North America, and the most bee species on Earth.

The virtually unmatched biodiversity has made the town of Patagonia — with a population of around 900 residents — a world-class birding and wildlife research destination for generations. The town is also a launching point for the famed Arizona Trail, an 800-mile hike that traverses the state from north to south. More recently, it’s become home to a growing gravel bike scene, with riders pedaling through the mountains to reach the stunning San Rafael Valley, one of the last unbroken stretches of grassland ecosystems in the American Southwest.

Together with the unique abundance of flora and fauna, outdoor recreation has made Patagonia a hub in the “nature-based restorative economy” of Santa Cruz County. According to a 2021 University of Arizona study that PARA and other conservation groups in the area helped produce, the attractions generate tens of millions of dollars for local businesses and residents.

Though the battle over mining in the Patagonias goes back generations, this latest iteration is frustrating activists on the ground for reasons particular to the present moment.

Shafer and Gay are both diehard environmentalists. An “Earth Day is every day” flag hangs outside their home. They are deeply concerned about the climate crisis and would never say otherwise, but they are just as concerned about biodiversity loss and the planet’s unfolding sixth extinction. For them, a mine that would accelerate one cataclysm in the name of combatting another is unacceptable.

The minerals needed for a green energy revolution can be found elsewhere in the world, Shafer argued: “There’s no other place to go for Mexican spotted owl. Yellow-billed cuckoo. Jaguar. Ocelot.” The frustration in her voice rose as she ticked off the names.

Harshaw Creek runs through Patagonia, Ariz., on June 17, 2023.

Photo: Molly Peters for The Intercept

Wild West

In the U.S., mining is governed by a law President Ulysses Grant signed in 1872. With scant regulations, the Wild West-era statute has undergone little substantive change in the century and a half since. Technology, however, has changed. The lone Civil War veteran busting his back hoping to strike it rich in a national forest has been replaced by multibillion-dollar corporations with the most advanced extraction tools money can buy.

In the Patagonias, the main hub of activity centers around an old mine water treatment site run by the American Smelting and Refining Company, or ASARCO. In the 1960s, the endeavor collapsed in a storm of bankruptcy and environmental damages, including pollution of Patagonia’s water.

Decades later, Arizona Mining Inc., owned by billionaire mining tycoon Richard Warke, purchased the land. South32 bought out Arizona Mining in 2018, in a $2 billion sale that marked one of the biggest mining deals of the year.

The area surrounding the old ASARCO site is largely national forest land, which South32 is actively exploring, as well as ranches and other parcels of private property. The privately held land is shrinking though, with South32 buying up properties one by one in recent years.

“It’s very, very active out here right now,” Shafer said. “These mountains, unfortunately, are chalked full of valuable minerals.”

For Shafer, the heart of the matter is water. Patagonia relies on the mountains entirely for its water, but the range’s hydrological significance doesn’t stop there. The mountains are the headwater of Sonoita Creek, which flows into the Santa Cruz River that provides water for more than a million people.

“The community’s concern is: What is this going to do to that ecosystem?”

When ASARCO was running its mine in the 1960s, the company’s chief problem was water; it would fill the mine’s shaft and the company lacked the technology to keep it out. Facing the same challenge today, South32 has received permission from the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality to run up to 4,500 gallons of water per minute through one of its two water treatment plants, then dump that water into Harshaw Creek, a tributary to Sonoita Creek. At max capacity, Shafer noted, that would mean more than 6.4 million gallons of water flowing into the Harshaw on a potentially daily basis.

“We don’t know how much water they’re taking out and using on site, but that’s how much they are permitted to discharge into the Harshaw Creek,” Shafer said. “The community’s concern is: What is this going to do to that ecosystem?”

“This is my version of tree-hugging,” Carolyn Shafer, board president of Patagonia Area Resource Alliance, said in Humboldt Canyon in Patagonia, Ariz., on June 17, 2023. “My favorite canyon is whichever one I’m in,” but Humboldt Canyon holds a special place in her heart.

Photo: Molly Peters for The Intercept

“Desiccate and Saturate”

A small stretch of the Harshaw has perennial water. Monsoon season aside, the water tends to lap around a person’s ankles. The rest of the creek is typically dry. What 6.6 million gallons of water a day would do — and more when the heavy rains of late summer hit — is difficult to fathom.

To put the town at ease, South32 released a video last year. The minerals the U.S. government seeks lie below the water table under the Patagonia Mountains, the company explained. South32 would drop the table by pumping water out. The water would then pass through a treatment plant before being dumped into the Harshaw. This would create “a cone of depression” around the well site, allowing safe underground work.

“Most of the discharged water will soak back into the ground. Some will evaporate or be used by vegetation, but most will recharge the aquifer without ever reaching the town of Patagonia,” the company said. Even in the event of a 100-year, 24-hour flood, the increase would not have an “adverse effect” on the hamlet, South 32 said, nor did the company “expect that wildlife would be negatively affected.”

PARA consulted with hydrological experts and responded with a video of its own. Noting that South32 planned to pump “the equivalent of 10 Olympic-size swimming pools per day” into the Harshaw every day for up five years, the experts predicted the creek would quickly go from almost entirely dry to constantly flowing, carrying any undetected contaminants from the mine wherever it ran and heightening flood risks during monsoon season.

As we prepared to head out for our drive into the mountains, Gay pulled out a poster he made, detailing the expanse of water South32 expects the town of Patagonia to receive in the event of the 100-year flood — and how it would cover the town’s properties. “When you look at that closely,” he said, “it’s 70 percent of the lots now.”

In Patagonia, the problem would be too much water. In the mountains, it would be the opposite. “My fear is it’s going to dewater the mountain,” Shafer said. “If it dewaters the mountain, it kills the plant life. If it kills the plant life, there’s no place for this incredible biological diversity to survive. That’s my bottom line, but that’s not speaking as the organization. That’s speaking as Grandmother Carolyn.”

“It’s feast or famine,” Gay added. “I call it desiccate and saturate.”

A dewatering and water treatment facility at the South32 Hermosa mining project along Harshaw Creek in Patagonia, Ariz., on June 17, 2023.

Photo: Molly Peters for The Intercept

Hoping for a Miracle

Patagonia’s paved roads disappeared in the rear-view mirror. Gay’s beat-up 4Runner crept slowly over the rough terrain. Approaching the old ASARCO site from the north, we passed abandoned mining tunnels from decades before, ranches that had been sold to the mining company, and others that soon might be.

“It is a patchwork of extreme complexity,” Gay said, leaning forward on the wheel. “Just a snarl, between the bumpiness of the land and the irregularity of the property lines.”

At a town council meeting last month, South32 presented its plan for managing the convoys of trucks that would run these roads, hauling minerals for green energy out of the mountains. In the early stages, it would be 62 heavy trucks, 26 buses, and 139 passenger vehicles daily. The flow would increase as the project became fully operational, at which point more than 200 heavy-duty trucks — in addition to the buses and passenger vehicles — would come through.

Given the landscape, traffic at that scale would require significant road work and with it, the obliteration of the mountains’ otherwise serene quiet. Like the water in Harshaw Creek, the change was difficult to imagine.

“Patagonia in 10 or 15 years won’t be recognizable anymore,” Patagonia Vice Mayor Michael Stabile said in an interview in the Patagonia Regional Times. Stabile was a founding member of PARA, though he no longer works with the organization. “They’re going to flood us with water,” he said. “And they’re going to flood us with trucks.”

“Patagonia in 10 or 15 years won’t be recognizable anymore.”

Days before we met up, Shafer had a similar moment of unsettling clarity. “I just realized I have shifted into grief about what is happening here,” she said. “Because of the realization of how special this is to me and that I will not be able to come out here for at least seven years, and when I do get to return, what will it be like?”

South32’s assurances about safeguarding the ecological systems were cold comfort for Shafer. “There’s nothing legally we can do to stop it. What we can legally do is mitigate the potential damage. That’s what we’re working very hard to do,” she said. “But unless something under the definition of miracle happens, there will be destruction by industrialized mining in these mountains.”

“The disaster of that,” Shafer said, “is that this is one of the regions of the world most in need of protection for species survival.”

A flag outside Carolyn Shafer’s home declares “Earth Day is every day.”

Photo: Molly Peters for The Intercept

The Cathedral

There was little to see at the old ASARCO site. A locked gate. A handful of “no trespassing” signs. We turned around and headed west into Humboldt Canyon, where work is currently overseen by Barksdale Capital Corp., a Canadian company specializing in mineral exploration — the kind that precedes a company like South32.

“I am in a stronger relationship with the natural world in this canyon than I am in any other canyon,” Shafer said, as we passed under a majestic spire of twisted rock. “This is a spiritual experience for me — full of experiences of dear friends of mine.”

Years back, Shafer officiated her friends’ wedding in the canyon. The couple was among PARA’s original founders. The groom was Glen Goodwin, an old-school Arizona cowboy who, in 2014, detected extensive water contamination stemming from the Patagonias’ old mine sites — including sites that are revving back up again today. Goodwin died last year. His ashes were spread in Humboldt Canyon.

The road twisted deeper into the mountains until coming to a stop in a clearing. Shafer got out and leaned against a tall pine tree, listening to the birds. “For me,” she said, “this meets the classic definition of a cathedral.”

On our way off the mountain, we stopped to watch mule deer grazing in a field. We dropped Gay off in town before leaving for the tour’s final destination: the perennially flowing stretch of Harshaw Creek.

Willow trees lined the way, along with massive Arizona sycamores. We walked down to a particularly beautiful bend in the creek. Shafer mentioned a paper she recently heard about discussing the mental health benefits of birdsongs.

“When you live with something all the time, you don’t think much about it,” she said. “But I have birdsong all day long, and it is something I do appreciate.”

Shafer is the last of PARA’s original core still living and working in Patagonia. “Two are now dead, two have moved out of country,” she said. She knows that stopping the mine is next to impossible, but then, the same could be said of her.

Shafer’s mission now is making the cost of doing business in the Patagonias match the value of the place. “I’m sorry if you’re not going to get a 25 percent profit margin,” she said. “If you have to live with 5 percent to honor what is here and you don’t like that, then go away.”

She leaned forward, smiling, and added in a whisper, “It wouldn’t hurt me if you left.”

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

This correspondent received the video in a WhatsApp group late on April 17 night. The conversation that followed can be seen below:

[Translation:

Person 1: It is so warm that people entered a mall. This happened in a Kolkata mall.

Person 2: Are you sure this is in Kolkata? Then it’s pretty bad.

Person 1: No. Hence I wrote ‘forwarded as received’.

person 2: But writing that doesn’t end your responsibility. However, you are right. That is Quest Mall.]

The readers should note that the Quest Mall is an upscale shopping mall in Central Kolkata’s Park Circus area built by the Sanjiv Goenka-led RP Sanjiv Goenka Group, which also runs CESC, the public limited company that supplies power to most of Kolkata and Howrah.

Video Goes Viral with Communal Twist

Over the next couple of days, the video went viral with captions that claimed/insinuated the incident was communal in nature.

Bengal BJP activist Keya Ghosh, whose Twitter bio says ‘Honoured to be followed by Prime Minister of India, Shri @narendramodi’, was one of the first users to share the clip on the micro-blogging site. She wrote: “This is the much hyped Quest Mall; Sanjeev Goenka’s dream project which showcases London high street brands. Currently taken over by lungis. Question is can Goenkas do anything about it?” (Archive)

This is the much hyped Quest Mall; Sanjeev Goenka’s dream project which showcases London high street brands. Currently taken over by lungis.
Question is can Goenkas do anything about it? pic.twitter.com/N2QldSjcjZ

— Keya Ghosh (@keyakahe) April 17, 2023

Another user, @vishnuguptuvach, whose bio says he is thankful to his forefathers for keeping him a Hindu while fighting against the Mughals and Christians, shared the video claiming that it was a case of ‘goondaism’ and ‘extortion’ He added the claim that the men ‘demanded free food from Food Court, Eid free gift from Armani/Gucci etc stores’. He was retweeted close to 600 times and the video shared by him received close to 1 lakh views. (Archive)

Kolkata:
Today in Quest Mall at 10:30 am, 200-250 local peaceful goons barged into the mall “because it is too hot outside”. And then they demanded free food from Food Court, Eid free gift from Armani/Gucci etc stores.

Laughing & joking, they do not seem to be in any distress. A… pic.twitter.com/porqE2slnJ

— विष्णुगुप्त उवाच (@vishnuguptuvach) April 19, 2023

Quote-tweeting filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri, the national in-charge of BJP’s information technology cell Amit Malviya shared the video. He wrote that neither Goenka (referring to the mall owner) nor the police could do anything about it. (Archive)

Not surprising. Earlier this week, local Muslim residents barged into Sanjeev Goenka’s fabled Quest Mall with London high street brands, demanding they be allowed to take ‘shelter’ in the mall as Kolkata was reeling under a heat wave. Goenka could do nothing. Police did nothing… https://t.co/htL9oqF2Ow pic.twitter.com/B1Wyo3XJ4x

— Amit Malviya (@amitmalviya) April 20, 2023

A user named Meera Singh tweeted the clip while asking rhetorically if Bengal had already been lost. She said in the caption that about 250 slum dwellers from a specific community entered the mall and demanded free food at food plaza, and Eid gifts from shops. “Owner of the mall Sanjeev Goenka is helpless as police has rufused to lodge the FIR. Sonar Bangla?? Really?” she added. She was retweeted close to 3000 times and her tweet was viewed over 4.7 lakh times. (Archive)

Are we losing #Bengal or have already lost it?

In Kolkata, about 250 slum dwellers from a specific community entered Air-conditioned ‘Quest Mall’ because temp outside was very high.

They barged into d mall demanding dt they be given permission to stay as Kolkata is reeling

— Meera Singh (@meeraremi11) April 20, 2023

Other users who made similar claims while tweeting the video include Amitabh Chaudhary, @siingh777 and @PaapiPunyatma.

Alt News received requests for fact-checking the video on WhatsApp. The forwarded message had a longish caption. It said: “Today in Quest Mall at 10:30 am … about 250 local slum dwellers from a particular religion  (jihadis) barged into the mall demanding that they should be given permission to stay as the city of Kolkata is reeling at 43°C. The video taken by a guard was objected to by the trespassers who wanted free food from the food court after sun down and free gift for Eid from Armani, Gucci, Paul Smith etc. The squatters have even threatened the mall manager of Quest Mall and the owner of the mall Mr Sanjiv Goenka of CESC. He was helpless as police was not registering FIR and not cooperating with him. Isn’t that great !! End result of secularism..Today it’s shopping mall.. tomorrow it shall be your residence.”

Reports in Local Media

To find out what actually transpired, we first looked at available news reports, and found that several media houses reported on the issue. On April 18, The Telegraph did a story on power cuts across Kolkata caused by electricity ‘usage beyond sanctioned load’. The report carried a collage of two screenshots of the viral video. The incident was narrated in the caption.

According to The Telegraph, Radha Gobindo Saha Lane and Dilkhusha Street were without electricity for over 12 hours from the evening of April 16. This led the residents of these areas to go inside the mall.

The Telegraph report quoted Avijit Ghosh, the executive director of the Calcutta Electric Supply Corporation, as saying that the area surrounding the Quest Mall for over 12 hours. “As our team was working on the repair of the cable fault, a generator was arranged sometime between 3.30 am and 4 am on Monday and installed in the area for power supply. The fault was repaired and the connection was restored later in the day,” he told the paper.

Gangetic West Bengal was reeling under a heatwave in the second and third week of April. On April 16, chief minister Mamata Banerjee ordered educational institutions to be shut for one week in view of the severe heat. The official order can be seen here.

Claims Absurd, False and Malicious: Quest Mall Vice-President

Alt News reached out to Quest Mall vice-president Sanjeev Mehra to find out what exactly transpired on the intervening night of April 16 and 17.

“About 25 locals entered the mall around midnight. Their area was without power for hours. They just wanted us to hear their grievances. They left at 1.10 am,” he said.

“There is no question of them demanding anything as gifts or free food because every outlet in the mall was closed way before that time. This is an absurd claim. Only the multiplex was running. The entry gate was closed. The exit gates were open. They entered by removing the barricades at the entrance.”

“After they entered, the mall security, the mall manager and a few policemen talked to them and asked them to leave. They left after about 40 minutes. There was no confrontation. We have everything on CCTV recording,” he added.

“There is no report of them causing any damage to the mall or anything else.”

“They are locals. It was about 42 degrees that day. there was an electrical fault. You need to have some empathy,” Mehra added.

Mehra said the next day he had gone and spoke to elders of the local community. “I told them this can not happen everyday. And they agreed. All of it ended amicably,” he added.

“Most of what is being claimed on social media is false and malicious. We have lodged a complaint with the cyber cell of Kolkata police. It is now up to them,” he concluded.

Alt News spoke to a local stationery shop owner whose establishment is in the lane behind the mall. “My shop was closed at that time, so I am not a witness. But what I heard the next morning was that some local youths entered the mall at night after everything was shut. They left after the mall management and police asked them to. One must realize that many of the security and sanitation staff members of the mall are locals. So, almost everyone knows everyone. There was no clash or anything,” he told us.

Alt News could not independently verify if all the ‘intruders’ hailed from the Muslim community.

The Indian Express reported on April 22 that a police complaint was filed “against alleged attempts to spread false information regarding an incident wherein it was claimed that some youths from the neighbourhood demanded food and gifts from shops in the complex on April 16.” The Times of India said the viral claims were a “deliberate misrepresentation of an incident… to stoke tension.” A report in news outlet ETV Bharat quoted a top police officer as saying that those who shared misinformation regarding the incident would be identified.

How the Narrative Changed

If one pays attention, one would notice that the viral claims on social media left out the part that the area was hit by a prolonged power cut, which apparently caused the locals to enter the mall. In stead, words and phrases like ‘taken over by lungis‘, ‘jihadis‘, ‘are we losing Bengal?” were used. To make the incident look menacing, sentences like ‘today it’s shopping mall, tomorrow it can be your residence‘ were added.

More importantly, from the words of the Quest Mall management, media reports, police statements and our on ground investigation, it became clear that most of the claims made around the incident were false and baseless. The false claims and actual facts have been presented here in a table:

To sum up, around 25 people residing around Kolkata’s Quest Mall had entered the mall on the intervening night of April 16 and 17 after their area was without electricity for several hours and the city was already reeling under severe heat. They left after about an hour on being requested by the mall management and local police. On the basis of some unfounded claims and a communal spin, the social media posts around the incident took on a hateful, Islamophobic tone.

The post Locals taking shelter in Kolkata mall: How a viral video metamorphosed into hateful, Islamophobic social media post appeared first on Alt News.

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

He identified the men as 25-year-old Nyi Nyi; 25-year-old Law Shote; 38-year-old Aung Min Thike; 38-year-old Nay Lin Tun; and 48-year-old Poe Shan, all from Man He village.

The men, discovered in a nearby forest Monday, were arrested when a junta column entered the village on March 24. The Indaw Revolution official, who declined to be named for security reasons, told RFA troops had claimed the men were PDF members killed in battle.

“The military council announced on March 24 that five PDF personnel were killed but there was no fighting at that time,” the official said. 

“A month later, when we found the burned bodies on the ground, we realized that these bodies were the five villagers.”

RFA called Aye Hlaing, the junta spokesman for Sagaing region, on Wednesday for comment on the claims that troops had killed villagers rather than defense force members, but the calls went unanswered.

Sagaing region has seen some of the fiercest fighting in the country, with junta troops carrying out air raids on civilian targets and razing villages thought to support the People’s Defense Forces who have been fighting for the restoration of democracy in the country, following the February 2021 coup.

On Sunday troops tortured and beheaded a man they arrested in Sagaing region’s Ta Pa Yin Kwe, setting fire to homes there in the second raid on the village this year.

Nearly 3,500 civilians have been killed across the country since the coup, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.

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

A column of around 100 troops staged a dawn raid on Myin Daung village on Wednesday killing five defense force members, according to a PDF official who declined to be named. The defense force responded by detonating mines and exchanging gunfire with junta forces.

A resident of nearby Aung Thar said that after the battle, the junta column shelled other villages in Khin-U township, destroying a monastery and burning down three houses in his village.

He added that five men who were farming outside the village were taken by troops to act as human shields when they left Aung Thar village.

A resident of Myin Daung, who also requested anonymity, said thousands of residents of nearby villages fled their homes

“There are more than 10 villages to the south of Myin Daung with a population of about 18,000 people,” the local said. 

“Along with the people leaving villages to the north there will be more than 20,000 people fleeing.”

A People’s Defense Force member who also declined to give his name told RFA that 21 villages are now empty.

RFA called Sagaing region junta spokesperson Aye Hlaing but no one answered.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.

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

Defenders of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on Monday welcomed ExxonMobil's statement to shareholders that the fossil fuel giant has no plans for drilling in ANWR but also renewed calls for Congress to pass legislation to protect the region once and for all.

"This is a significant win for the Arctic and for the climate. Don't just take our word for it, take Exxon's: Oil and gas drilling in the Arctic is bad business," declared Sierra Club senior campaign representative Mike Scott, urging President Joe Biden to "seize this opportunity to permanently protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the people who depend on it."

Congressional Republicans and then-President Donald Trump opened up ANWR to fossil fuel development with their 2017 tax package. After taking office in 2021, Biden issued an executive order to halt drilling activity in the refuge, and later that year, his administration launched a new environmental review of the leasing program for the area.

However, neither Biden nor Congress has heeded calls from Indigenous and climate leaders who want to protect the refuge from fossil fuel development that would endanger local wildlife, sacred land, and the warming planet.

"ExxonMobil is recognizing what others have been saying for years: High-risk drilling for Arctic oil on land that is sacred to Indigenous people is bad business."

ExxonMobil's new comments about ANWR came in a proxy statement sent to shareholders last week ahead of the May 31 annual meeting. The company's board of directors urged shareholders to vote against a Green Century Capital Management proposal that would require a new report on the pros and cons of not engaging in oil and gas exploration and production in the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP) region, particularly within the refuge.

Explaining its opposition to the proposal, ExxonMobil's board called the Green Century Capital Management's motives "disingenuous" and argued that its existing reporting is sufficient. The board also highlighted that "ExxonMobil does not hold any active leases and is not pursuing any active developments within the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR)."

Additionally, the board said, "our current investment plans do not include exploration activity within the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP) region, and we plan relatively limited investment to sustain our existing interests in the region."

Noting that ExxonMobil's statement comes after "Chevron, Hilcorp, and 88 Energy canceled their Arctic Refuge leases last year," Environment America Public Lands campaign director Ellen Montgomery urged Congress and the Biden administration "to act to permanently protect this special place."

Karlin Itchoak, Alaska regional director for the Wilderness Society, similarly said that "ExxonMobil is recognizing what others have been saying for years: High-risk drilling for Arctic oil on land that is sacred to Indigenous people is bad business."

"The calving ground of the porcupine caribou herd is not only a beautiful, wild place that is worthy of protection. It is vital to the food security and cultural survival of local communities," Itchoak added. "Other industry leaders should follow ExxonMobil's example, and Congress must act to protect for future generations."

Bernadette Demientieff, executive director of the Gwich'in Steering Committee, also urged "all companies—and their investors—to reject development in ecologically sensitive and biologically rich areas that would threaten lands, water, wildlife and a way of life for the Indigenous peoples that have occupied these lands for thousands of years—including Iizhik Gwats'an Gwandaii Goodlit (the sacred place where life begins)."

"Many of these are not only important to protect for our future generations but are sacred to the people who have cared for these lands since time immemorial," Demientieff added. "Companies or money cannot divide our people from our lands that are sacred. We are asking for ExxonMobil and all companies to respect our rights, including our right to free, prior, and informed consent."

While acknowledging that ExxonMobil's current position "addresses the concerns of the Gwich'in," First Peoples Worldwide executive director Kate Finn stressed that "without a comprehensive policy to operationalize free, prior, and informed consent, companies remain exposed to economic and legal risks that come from a failure to respect Indigenous peoples' rights."

Kristen Miller, executive director of Alaska Wilderness League, also welcomed ExxonMobil's move and pointed out that it "fits with the larger trend," before highlighting other fights related to climate-wrecking fossil fuel development.

"Exxon's response to this shareholder resolution demonstrates clearly that big corporations have read the handwriting on the wall. Arctic oil extraction isn't worth the risks," said Miller. "We now look to ConocoPhillips, which has yet to make a final investment decision on the Willow project, and urge them to see that investing in Arctic oil is a bad business decision."

The Biden administration came under fire last month for greenlighting the 30-year Willow project, which green groups are challenging in court. The administration faced further criticism last week for approving a proposed liquified natural gas project in Alaska.

"Right after the horrific Willow decision," said Center for Biological Diversity attorney Liz Jones, "it's painful to see Biden officials greenlight an even bigger fossil fuel project that will destroy Arctic habitat and feed the climate crisis."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

Residents and officials in Harris County, Texas have expressed alarm since learning that contaminated water used to extinguish a fiery train crash in East Palestine, Ohio has been transported more than 1,300 miles to a Houston suburb for disposal.

Houston's Coalition for Environment, Equity, and Resilience tweeted Thursday: "We are disturbed to learn that toxic wastewater from East Palestine, Ohio will be brought to Harris County for 'disposal.' Our county should not be a dumping ground for industry."

The Norfolk Southern-owned train that derailed and ignited near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border on February 3 was carrying vinyl chloride and other carcinogenic chemicals. After ordering evacuations, authorities released and burned hazardous materials from several tanker cars to avert a catastrophic explosion. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of water used to put out the flames have been collected and trucked to Texas Molecular, a private company in Deer Park that specializes in injecting hazardous waste underground.

"There has to be a closer deep well injection," Deer Park resident Tammy Baxter toldABC13 on Wednesday night. "It's foolish to put it on the roadway. We have accidents on a regular basis. Do they really want to have another contamination zone? It is silly to move it that far."

ABC13 reported that Baxter "first heard that the waste may be transported to the city she lives in from a video circulating on social media." After calling the mayor's office in Deer Park—one of 34 communities in Harris County—"she expected a return phone call dispelling the rumor. Instead, it was confirmed."

"I am disturbed," said Baxter. "I am shook by the information."

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality told ABC13 that Texas Molecular "is authorized to accept and manage a variety of waste streams, including vinyl chloride, as part of their [Resource Conservation and Recovery Act] hazardous waste permit and underground injection control permit."

George Guillen, a biology and environmental science professor at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, told the local news outlet that deep well injection is a typical practice that poses minimal risks to the health of current Deer Park residents.

"This injection, in some cases, is usually 4,000 or 5,000 feet down below any kind of drinking water aquifer," said Guillen, who also serves as the executive director of the Environmental Institute of Houston. "Could it come up someday? Yes, maybe, but hundreds of years from now or thousands of years from now."

But he shared Baxter's concerns about the dangers of transporting toxic wastewater hundreds of miles across the country.

So too did U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), a member of the House Homeland Security Committee who represents Harris County. She toldKHOU11 that the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) contracted a company to move contaminated liquid from the East Palestine derailment site to Deer Park, some 1,350 miles away.

"I'm not clear on who has the full picture of what is happening here and that is a problem."

The Ohio EPA said Thursday that more than 1.7 million gallons of toxic wastewater have been removed from the disaster zone, where nearly 44,000 animals, most of them small fish, have died over the past three weeks.

"Of this, 1,133,933 gallons have been hauled off-site, with most going to Texas Molecular," said the agency. "A smaller amount of waste has been directed to Vickery Environmental in Vickery, Ohio."

Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said at a Thursday night press conference that Texas Molecular had received roughly 500,000 gallons of wastewater since the middle of last week, from up to 30 trucks per day.

According toThe Houston Chronicle, "Texas Molecular president Frank Marine in a statement Thursday said the company is keeping the city of Deer Park and Harris County updated on water management efforts related to the Ohio derailment fire."

Hildago, however, said she first learned that hazardous waste from East Palestine is being disposed of in Deer Park from a journalist on Wednesday, "not from a regulatory agency, not from the company," a fact she called "unacceptable."

She said the amount of toxic wastewater, and the length of time it had been moving through Harris County, was unknown to her and other county officials until Thursday.

As the Chroniclereported: "Hidalgo said there was no law requiring her office to be informed about wastewater but said she was upset local officials were kept out of the loop by a 'fundamentally broken' system. She said her office had been in contact with the company, the U.S. Department of Transportation, the [U.S.] Environmental Protection Agency, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, and outside industry and environmental experts."

"This is a wake-up call," Hidalgo said. "It doesn't look like any regulations necessarily were broken by the fact that nobody told us. But it doesn't quite seem right."

“The government officials have readily provided the information they have, but what we’re learning is that they themselves don't seem to have the full information. I'm still not sure why," Hidalgo continued. "I'm not clear on who has the full picture of what is happening here and that is a problem."

"There are many things we don’t know that we should know," she added. "That doesn't mean that something is wrong, but it's worth noting."

Per the Chronicle: "Hidalgo said she wanted more information about the material being injected into the wells and how it could affect other material already injected in the wells or surface water. She also said she wanted clear information about how the water was being moved from Ohio to Texas and what precautions were being taken to protect it. Finally, she also wanted information on why the water was taken to Texas instead of wells closer to Ohio."

As The Associated Pressreported, Hildago noted that "Harris County has around 10 injection wells capable of receiving hazardous commercial waste, making the area one of the few places where the materials could be disposed. But she said there are similar facilities in Vickery, Ohio, and Romulus, Michigan, that also could handle the wastewater and are located closer to the crash site."

"There may be logistical reasons for all of this. There may be economic reasons. Perhaps Texas Molecular outbid the Michigan facility," said Hidalgo. "It doesn't mean there's something nefarious going on, but we do need to know the answer to this question."

Deer Park Mayor Jerry Mouton, for his part, told residents on Thursday that they need not worry about the safety of their drinking water.

"It goes through a water treatment plant and there's no possible scenario where there's any contamination to do with industry," said Mouton.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

A spokesman, who didn’t want to be named, said a column of troops entered five villages in Kanbalu township over the weekend.

“Before the troops entered Pon Nar Gyi village, they fired heavy artillery and a man in the village was hit by shell fragments,” he said. “The residents of nearby villages also had to flee because the troops were getting close.”

After raiding Pon Nar Gyi on Saturday troops moved on to nearby Chat Lel. The following day they moved on to three other villages, including Pi Tauk Pin which has more than 100 homes, burning 12 of the houses there, the activists’ group said.

Locals told RFA the military column comprised about 120 troops from junta Infantry Battalion 368 and the junta aligned Pyu Saw Htee militia.

Calls to Sagaing region junta spokesman Aye Hlaing went unanswered Tuesday. In the past he told RFA he is not able to comment on security issues.

Last month troops burned down 274 houses in Kanbalu and Kyunhla townships, according to the Kyunhla-Kanbalu Activists Group. It said seven people were burned to death.

The military has stepped up a scorched earth campaign in Sagaing region this year, torching 4,271 houses in January and killing 17 civilians, Myanmar’s ousted National Unity Government said last week.

In the last five months of 2022, the number of people in Sagaing region fleeing fighting and arson attacks rose 17% to 616,500 the Market Analysis Unit said on Jan. 29. That accounts for half of the newly displaced persons nationwide between August and December, according to the unit of the Myanmar Information Management Unit, which supplies data to the humanitarian and development community.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.

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

Residents said more than 1,000 people have fled Kawt Nwe village since an artillery bombardment started on Dec. 20, killing a woman on Tuesday and a man the following day.

Kawt Nwe is three miles (4.8 kilometers) away from Ta Dar Kyoe village where junta troops have been fighting the Karenni National Liberation Army (KNLA) and People’s Defense Forces since Dec. 16.

“Civilian deaths are almost daily,” said a resident who wished to remain anonymous for safety reasons.

“Most of the dead are from Kawt Nwe village, which is close to the fighting. Most of them died when shells landed on their houses.”

The Myawaddy-Kawkareik Asia Highway was closed on Thursday morning as fighting intensified, the local told RFA.

The junta has not issued a statement on the fighting and calls to Saw Khin Maung Myint, the junta spokesman and economic minister for Kayin state, went unanswered.

The KNLA is the military wing of the Karen National Union (KNU) which represents ethnic Karen in Myanmar.

According to data from KNU Central, there have been nearly 7,000 battles between junta troops and the KNLA in KNU controlled areas of Kayin and Mon States, and Bago and Tanintharyi regions since the military seized power in a Feb. 1, 2021 coup.

More than 91,100 people have become internally displaced persons (IDPs) after being forced to flee their homes due to fighting in Kayin State that predates the coup, according to a United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) report on Wednesday.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Written in English by Mike Firn.

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

Residents of Nan Chaung village in Kale township identified him as 50-year-old Byat Za Lain and said he was unable to leave because of leg problems.

“He was left behind when everyone fled. I thought that nothing could have happened to him but only his charred body was found when the junta troops left,” said a resident who didn’t want to be named for safety reasons.

He said the body was so badly burned it was impossible to tell whether Byat Za Lain died in the blaze, or whether troops shot him and set fire to his body.

Nan Chaung has around 400 houses and almost 2,000 residents according to township authorities. Locals said most people fled their homes as a column of 70 soldiers descended on the village and occupied it on Monday and Tuesday. They discovered Byat Za Lain’s body when they returned on Wednesday.

RFA phoned the junta spokesman and social affairs minister for Sagaing region, Aye Hlaing, to seek comment on the attack but the calls went answered.

Junta chief Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing has often denied his troops burn houses and repeated the claim during a meeting with the U.N. Special Envoy to Myanmar Noeleen Heyzer.

A total of 27,496 homes in Sagaing region were burned down by junta troops in the 22 months following the Feb. 1, 2021 military coup, according to a Dec. 10 report by Data for Myanmar, which compiles figures from a variety of online sources.

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

A Taiwanese army colonel on the frontline island of Kinmen has been accused of pledging allegiance to China and even promising, on the record, to surrender in the event of a Chinese attack.

Kinmen is an outlying archipelago less than 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) from China’s Fujian province but more than 180 kilometers (112 miles) from Taiwan’s mainland. In recent months it has seen frequent flyovers by Chinese drones, and military experts say Kinmen could be the first target of a Chinese invasion in the future.

The official Central News Agency (CNA) citing Taiwanese prosecutors reported that Col. Hsiang Te-en, 49, who held several important positions at the Kinmen Garrison Division and the Eighth Army Corps Operations Division until his suspension this year, was “recruited” to work for China for money totaling NT$560,000 (U.S.$18,000) since late 2019.

The recruiter, Shao Wei-chiang, is a retired journalist in Kinmen who also previously served in the army. An investigation into Shao’s alleged “collaborators” network is continuing.

Hsiang was seen in a photo wearing a Taiwanese army officer’s uniform and holding a note of “Surrender Commitment.”

The note says “I hereby swear to support the peaceful reunification of the two sides of the Strait and to be loyal to the motherland. In the event of a war between the two sides of the Strait, I will do my best to serve the motherland in my job and complete the glorious peaceful reunification.”

During questioning, Hsiang reportedly said he was not the only army officer who signed such a note. 

Hsiang was detained in September and charged with taking bribes in violation of the Anti-Corruption law that could lead to a prison sentence of up to 12 years. He is also being investigated for passing classified information to China and might face additional charges under the National Security Act.

‘Shocking case of treason’

“This is the most despicable treason,” Timothy Tsai, a Kinmen resident, told RFA.

“Really shocking!” said another resident, who wished to stay anonymous.

CNA quoted lawmaker Lo Chih-cheng from the ruling Democratic Progressive Party as saying the case “exposed major negligence in the military's internal espionage prevention and detection system.”

In the past ten years, at least 21 serving or retired Taiwanese officers with the rank of captain or above have been convicted of spying for China, according to Reuters.

Taiwan’s Military Trial Act was amended in 2013 to eliminate military trials of officers in peacetime but Hsiang’s case has led to some calls to reinstate them in order to better deter espionage.

Kinmen has been in the spotlight since the visit to Taipei by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in August as cross-Strait tensions rose and China conducted large-scale military drills around Taiwan.

There were talks about the risk of armed conflict at the time amid speculation that outlying islands such as Kinmen, Penghu and Matsu may be under threat.

Kinmen was a key battlefield at the beginning of the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1958 when Chinese troops fired nearly half a million artillery shells on the archipelago, which is roughly the size of Brooklyn.

Intrusions into Kinmen by Chinese drones, including suspected military unmanned aerial vehicles, occurred frequently in September and led to a presidential order to strengthen Taiwan’s drone defense systems.

This story has been updated to add the date Hsiang was allegedly recruited to work for China.

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

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.

On a Saturday in late March, the woman who runs elections in the rural hills of Surry County, North Carolina, was pulling another weekend shift preparing for the upcoming primary, when she began to hear on the other side of her wall the thunder of impassioned speeches. She was dismayed that the voices were questioning the election she’d overseen in 2020 and implying that corrupted voting machines had helped steal it. She also believed it was no coincidence that the Surry County GOP convention — the highlight of which was a lecture from a nationally prominent proponent of the stolen-election myth — was taking place in a public meeting room right next to her office.

The elections director, 47-year-old Michella Huff, who’d lived in the county since high school and knew many voters by name, considered it ludicrous that anyone could think the election had been rigged in Surry County. Donald Trump had received upward of 70% of the roughly 36,000 votes cast. Huff, a registered Republican for most of her adult life, had personally certified the vote.

Yet people had begun approaching Huff in church recently, saying things like, “I know you didn’t do anything, but that election was stolen.” In February, a longtime acquaintance of Huff’s cornered her in a bluegrass music store and berated her with complaints rooted in conspiracy theories. Huff started limiting her trips to town, even doing her grocery order online. “I didn’t want to have to deal with that,” she said of the election backlash. But it was hard to live in partial hiding. “I’m not that kind of person. I’m a people person.”

Unbeknownst to Huff, a national network of election deniers had been making inroads in Surry County, on the fringe of Appalachia. In early 2022, several members of the Surry County GOP had attended a training, put on by North Carolina Audit Force, which describes itself as a group that forms grassroots coalitions to “reveal election irregularities.” There, they were taught to “canvass” for election fraud by door-knocking to check for inaccuracies in public records, such as if a different person lived at an address than was listed on voter rolls. Discrepancies, canvassers claim, can indicate fraud — though experts say that canvassers often misinterpret normal imperfections in difficult-to-maintain voter lists, such as someone failing to update their address when moving. By early March, canvassers were crisscrossing Surry County, following “walk books” put together by data analysts associated with North Carolina Audit Force, who mapped routes for efficiency.

The featured lecturer at the Surry County GOP convention, Douglas Frank, is the face of the nationwide canvassing movement and claims to have established campaigns with the help of “supermoms” in at least 40 states. Frank and other speakers spent hours at the convention blaming corrupted voting machines and collusion among Democrats, Big Tech and nefarious forces for stealing the election. The assembly ultimately passed resolutions to create an election integrity task force and push for an audit, tactics espoused by Trump supporters.

The following Monday morning, Frank showed up at the service window of Huff’s office with William Keith Senter, the new chair of the Surry County GOP, and a woman who signed the guestbook as “NC Audit Force.” Huff believed that the group wanted to get inside her office — where voting equipment was kept — so she stepped into the cramped lobby with them, letting the door to her office automatically lock behind her.

The bowtie-wearing Frank began complaining to Huff about “phantom voters” discovered through canvassing and declaring that if he could just take an electromagnetic field meter tool to her DS200 ballot tabulators, he could reveal a minuscule modem that had helped switch votes from Trump to Joe Biden. It wasn’t the first time that Frank had encouraged an election official to let outsiders access election equipment. About 11 months before, he’d offered to help bring in a “team” to “audit” machines for Colorado officials, according to an affidavit for an arrest warrant of an official charged in the incident and to Frank himself. In September, Frank posted on Telegram that his phone had been seized by FBI agents investigating the incident, according to The Washington Post. Frank has not been charged.

“My objective is to help the clerk understand how they’re being hacked and what they need to do to fix it,” Frank said when asked about Colorado, using another term for election officials. In reference to Huff, he said: “I was there trying to offer a service to the clerk. I always assume clerks want to have clean elections, which is why I offered to help her find out if her machines were online or not.” Frank claimed to have convinced “dozens” of other election and county-level officials of the need to probe voting machines, “and that’s why counties all across the country are taking the machines out of the election process.”

It was not Frank who most concerned Huff, however, but Senter — a high school auto shop teacher and cattle farmer with a mechanic’s callused hands and baseball hat declaring “Pray for America” atop his silvering hair. The new GOP chair — who, according to three members of the Surry County GOP, replaced a predecessor who hadn’t sufficiently backed claims of election fraud — would remain in Huff’s orbit long after the barnstorming Frank left town. Indeed, Senter was only at the beginning of a campaign that would include efforts to drastically cut Huff’s pay and call into question even the most mundane functions of her office.

Huff told ProPublica that, as the men pressured her for more than an hour, Senter threatened that she should comply with their demands or the county commission would fire her. (She initially described this incident in an article by Reuters.) She feared that her reddening face and neck gave away her fear. (The commission has no authority to fire Huff; she is appointed by and answers to the county and state boards of elections. Senter denied threatening Huff’s job and wrote to ProPublica that “I speak loudly because I do not hear well. I drove a loud race car for years and have shot high powered rifles all of my life, so I have high frequency hearing loss.” Frank said that descriptions of Senter as threatening were “overblown,” and that “he might have been emphatic, but never, like, threatening.”)

But Huff refused to give in.

Huff is hardly the only election official struggling to stand up to those who believe the voting system is rigged; such confrontations have dramatically unfolded across the country, from Hood County, Texas, to Floyd County, Georgia, to Nye County, Nevada. Her circumstances illustrate how the efforts to target her are part of a larger playbook, with tactics that are replicated throughout the country.

“Election officials in small rural offices are absolutely more vulnerable,” said Paul Manson, who studies the demography of election officials and serves as the research director for the Elections & Voting Information Center at Reed College. Because such offices have fewer resources, Manson said, they have a harder time adapting to the increasingly controversial nature of election administration in the United States. These types of offices also represent the vast majority of the nation’s roughly 10,000 election jurisdictions, according to Manson’s research, with 48% of offices staffed by only one or two people and an additional 40% having between two and five. (Huff’s office has four full-time staff members, including her.)

As she juggled budget challenges and harassment, Huff has sought help from the North Carolina State Board of Elections, but that agency has faced struggles of its own. The GOP-dominant legislature has deprived the board of federal funding it had intended to use to hire and retain staff, instead sending it directly to counties. Moreover, groups claiming election fraud have organized campaigns against the agency, leaving it straining to support the 100 far-flung county boards of elections it oversees, officials say.

Laws and regulations were not written for the hostile environment of today, said Richard L. Hasen, a professor and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at the University of California, Los Angeles. Many of the individuals challenging election officials are even using the law itself, such as overwhelming those offices with public records requests, a practice that Senter would soon take up in Surry County and that “election integrity” groups would employ against the North Carolina State Board of Elections.

Hasen warned: “The country’s election infrastructure isn’t designed to stand up to one of its two major parties turning against it.”

When Michella Huff accepted the job as Surry County’s elections director in 2019, she thought she knew what she was getting into. On her first day, in October, she parked at a strip mall neighbored by corn fields, a hunting supply store and a chicken processing plant, and walked into a former grocery store, which had closed as the region bled jobs and had been renovated to house the county’s tax, agricultural and elections divisions. After more than two decades as the head of groundskeeping for Mount Airy, population roughly 10,500 and the largest town in the county, located about 100 miles north of Charlotte, she was giving her aching back a rest and working in an air-conditioned office.

Each fall, for most of her adult life, she’d taken a few weeks off from mowing and planting to be a poll worker during early voting and then run a polling site as a chief precinct judge on Election Day. Though the days could be long and the pay little, she loved how some people kept their “I Voted” stickers pristine to add to lifetime collections and how others brought in homemade grape jelly for poll workers. Most of all, she was motivated by the certainty that she was making American democracy function.

After the 2020 presidential election went off smoothly, Huff was aware of the “Stop the Steal” movement promoted by Trump, but, given her knowledge of how election security worked, she knew that its claims of Venezuelan software flipping votes from Trump to Biden were baseless. In the aftermath of Jan. 6, she assured herself that that kind of chaos would never come to sleepy Surry County.

But instead of the conspiracy theories dying down, they intensified. Soon after taking the job, she had switched her party status to independent “to reflect the way that this office must be portrayed in a nonpartisan manner.” It wasn’t until Biden took office that people in the community began to ask her about this. Huff recalls that one afternoon in early March 2021, she was surprised by a visitor at her office: Kevin Shinault, her former elementary school teacher and a GOP precinct chair, who she said accused her of participating in a debunked conspiracy theory known as “Zuckerbucks.”

In 2020, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had provided grants to election officials through the Center for Tech and Civic Life to help with unexpected pandemic expenses, and critics held that this had been part of a plot to throw the election to Joe Biden. Huff happily explained that the $48,584 she’d received from the group had been used for straightforward expenses, like hiring a Spanish-language interpreter. Nearly every election office in North Carolina had accepted such grants. Shinault, however, argued that hiring a Spanish-language interpreter had nefariously boosted Hispanic participation to the Democrats’ advantage. Huff assured him that helping Spanish-speaking voters wasn’t partisan. (Shinault did not respond to requests for comment.)

That night, Huff attended the biweekly county commissioners meeting, at which the chair of the county Elections Board asked the five county commissioners to split $20,000 left over from the previous year’s federal grants between Huff and her staff as belated hazard pay for their efforts during the pandemic. Huff figured it was a routine request. Numerous other counties had used the money this way; Surry’s bipartisan Elections Board had already signed off on it; and records show that about two months earlier, commissioners had reviewed the grants without comment.

The county commissioners, however, sharply questioned the chair of the Elections Board for nearly an hour, implying that unless more county employees got such pay, it wasn’t fair. Eddie Harris, a commissioner who works at a luxury saddle-making company his family owns, declared, “I will never take one penny from Mark Zuckerberg or any of his ilk,” calling the Meta CEO “a left-wing radical extremist bigot.” (Senter wrote to ProPublica, “As a party, we approached the commissioners and ask [sic] them to send the Zuckerbucks back, and they agreed.” Harris did not respond to requests for comment.)

Huff realized that her decadeslong relationships with people wouldn’t prevent them from envisioning her as part of some dark conspiracy. The next month, the commissioners unanimously voted to return nearly $100,000 in pandemic grant money, including the Center for Tech and Civic Life grant and around $60,000 from the USC Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy, named for the former Republican governor of California. They also returned the $20,000 in federal funding, rather than divvying it up among the elections staff.

Huff felt that returning the money was “very unfair,” but she resolved not to let it affect her performance. The best way to rebut conspiracy theories was to run her elections perfectly. She hoped the election conspiracy theories “would be a dead issue after the money was sent back.”

But once Senter and Frank confronted her in March 2022, she realized the target on her back was permanent.

After that heated visit, Senter kept showing up at the elections office. With the service window between them, Huff helped him file public records requests, which he insisted on scrawling by hand. (He explained to ProPublica that the handwritten requests were necessary, “so they could not be doctored by anyone else.”) Huff politely did her duty, but whenever she saw him, “My gut flipped. It makes me angry that he has that power — I can’t help how my body reacts.” When Huff and her staff finished work late in the evening, police escorted them to their cars, past campaign-style signs that Senter had put up reading “The People’s Trust is SHATTERED” and “We DEMAND a Full FORENSIC Audit.” Huff repeatedly took them down, until the sheriff decided the signs should stay up, as they were legal political expression on public property.

In March and April, Senter sent numerous emails and texts to the county commissioners, which ProPublica obtained through public records requests. On March 31, he emailed the commissioners asking them to “please consider our recommendations that are in the attachment,” which included a suggestion to reduce her pay and stated that “there is NO requirement to fund any additional election support staff.” Though Huff answers to the county and state elections boards, the county commissioners set her budget and salary.

Later that day, Senter texted the commissioners, “Y’all might better get Michella in check,” complaining about her charging 5 cents per copy for public records. “It’s gonna get ugly if she don’t jump on board. Cut her salary to 12 bucks an hour like the law says you can do.” (Senter told ProPublica: “The ugly part is in reference to the phone calls, text, threats and pressure I was receiving due to her lies and deceit that she reported to the media”; but his message to the commissioners made no reference to those things, and Huff said she had not spoken to the media about Senter as of the end of March.)

North Carolina law does specify that elections directors can be paid a minimum of $12 an hour (less than $25,000 annually), but two lawyers specializing in elections told ProPublica that any attempt to drastically reduce Huff’s salary, which was $71,000 as of March, would almost certainly be struck down, as courts have found that elections director salaries must be in line with those of their peers; a ProPublica review of elections director salaries in North Carolina found that the average is about $61,000.

Commissioners responded only occasionally to Senter’s messages about Huff, according to the documents ProPublica received from public records requests, such as the commission chair texting Senter instructions for how to avoid paying for public information requests to Huff’s office. (Only one of the county commissioners responded to a request for comment. Mark Marion said, “We have signified that we are behind our elections department.” When pressed for specific instances, he pointed to “our day-to-day conversations and visits” with elections staff.)

At an April 18 commissioners meeting, Senter asked the panel during the public comment period to consider not using the county’s voting machines in the upcoming May primary because of his and others’ suspicions that they had been corrupted. He was backed by a parade of speakers, among them Shinault.

At a commissioners meeting the following month, the room was filled, with the overflow watching on a livestream. Essentially, the whole meeting was given over to election deniers, some of whom traveled from elsewhere in North Carolina and the nation and presented slideshows on the vulnerabilities of voting machines and the so-called evidence from canvassing efforts.

Near the end of the meeting, a commissioner read prewritten remarks explaining that the requests to discard the voting machines were outside their power.

Afterward, the crowd assembled on the courthouse lawn, alongside a memorial to Confederate soldiers. People chanted, “Hell no, the machines gotta go!” A succession of speakers promised to fight on, with one declaiming so vehemently that he tore his lips on the microphone mesh, spotting it with blood.

In late August, Senter traveled to Missouri for a weekendlong gathering of hundreds of election deniers put on by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO who claims to have spent at least $35 million of his fortune on efforts to prove the 2020 election was fraudulent. At Lindell’s event, activists from all 50 states touted their campaigns, which often involved pressuring county and state election officials. “We’ve had a few victories,” Senter told the crowd when he presented as the representative for North Carolina. “We feel like if you’ve got a committed group of patriots, and some county commissioners that are not afraid to face the establishment and do their job, and local law enforcement that will hear the evidence that you produce to them, we can actually get something done in your county. So if you’d like that strategy, hit us up in North Carolina, and we’ll help you out with it.”

After returning home, Senter submitted to Huff’s office a time-consuming public records request similar to one that Lindell had promoted, which required one of Huff’s three full-time staff members to spend 60 hours at a scanner uploading 2020 “poll tapes,” the physical receipts from tabulators. Across North Carolina and nationwide, short-staffed offices reported being overwhelmed with often identical requests. Senter’s requests to Huff came atop dozens of others from different sources, including a sweeping request from a lawyer for the Republican National Committee. Before 2020, Surry County’s elections office had received an estimated half-dozen public records requests a year; in the first 10 months of 2022, it received 81.

An ally of Senter’s filed requests for court-ordered mediation and a lawsuit against Huff, seeking the same records that Lindell’s campaign has recommended asking for. While none of the legal actions have so far been successful, shortly before Surry County’s 2020 elections-related paper records were to be routinely discarded, the county Board of Elections agreed to preserve them for three more years. Huff said that each legal action resulted in her and her staff having to spend significant time with lawyers and on paperwork, rather than on actual elections administration.

Most laws and regulations that govern public records requests and elections do little to ease the disruptions that Huff and others were enduring — and offer few means to hold anyone accountable. “I don’t think there’s a silver bullet solution, unfortunately,” said Lawrence Norden, the senior director of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit law and public policy institute. He noted that public records laws are necessary tools to ensure government transparency. “In a lot of cases, if election officials had more resources available to them, it would be easier to push back on some of these things.” He said that officials in smaller jurisdictions often need to turn to professional associations, nonprofits or their state election agencies for help.

The organization most responsible for supporting Huff is the North Carolina State Board of Elections, which is responsible for statewide election infrastructure, such as its voter registration database, and which provides oversight and help for county offices. It had dispatched staff to back up Huff when election deniers were holding rallies in the county and offered legal advice and support over the phone.

But the state board, too, was being overwhelmed by public information requests. Before 2020, only several dozen requests would come in per year, said Patrick Gannon, its public information director. In 2021, there were 380, with some coming from the same people who submitted requests to Huff. Meanwhile, the number of people on the communications team had dwindled from four to two, in large part due to reductions in federal funding and the GOP-led legislature not meeting budgeting requests, according to board officials. By late October, the officials said, five employees had accepted buyout offers. To make payroll, the agency also let two people go and did not fill 17 positions — reducing its staff by more than 20% during its busiest time and limiting the services it could provide counties.

Huff’s experiences with so-called election integrity activists were more intense than what other North Carolina election workers were facing, though many of them were also enduring their own challenges. After the May primary, at least 14 counties reported complaints to the state board about aggressive poll observers, according to an internal survey obtained through a public records request. The complaints and additional documentation from one of the counties described two instances in which observers tailed election workers in their cars, among other examples of observers “intimidating poll workers.” This led the agency to pass rules to ensure that observers — the individuals assigned by political parties to monitor election officials — didn’t do things like stand so close to voting equipment that they could see confidential information. However, these rules were nullified when they were sent for approval to a board appointed by the GOP-controlled state legislature.

Even states considered to be on the forefront of election administration — such as Colorado, where legislators have passed laws addressing rising security risks, and Kentucky, where the Republican secretary of state has pushed back against conspiracy theories — have experienced significant disruptions as a result of the organized campaigns by 2020 election deniers. “It’s the new normal, until we have our political leaders in both parties pushing back strongly against it,” Norden said.

One of the individuals helping Senter in his Surry County campaign is Carol Snow, the North Carolina Audit Force leader who accompanied Senter and Frank to the elections office during their March confrontation with Huff. In a May email from Snow to Senter with the subject line “Surry Co Dirt,” which ProPublica obtained through public records requests, she provides him with a PowerPoint presentation. Its 61 slides outline supposed errors in North Carolina’s voter registration database. In an August email Snow sent to the county commissioners, copying Senter, she presented them with supposed evidence of voter-registration fraud in Surry County assembled through canvassing. She also suggested that law enforcement could subpoena information inaccessible through public records requests, which she claimed might reveal “individual voter fraud” or systemwide “election fraud.” She concluded, “We will get to the bottom of this or die (or be imprisoned for) trying.” The commissioners did not respond to the email.

(Snow declined to comment on the emails; in response to earlier questions about North Carolina Audit Force’s efforts in Surry County, Snow wrote: “Americans have every right to oversee our election process. That’s what should happen in a free society.”)

Until recently, Snow was also a leader in the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, a statewide affiliate of the nationwide Election Integrity Network, which has trained thousands of activists in the battleground states to scrutinize election officials. The network’s goal is to make sure there are “local election integrity task forces organized at every local election office in America,” according to its training manual, and it lays out how to aggressively scrutinize officials in ways that are similar to what Huff has experienced, such as through filing public records requests and investigating voting machines and voter lists. “The goal is for the task force members to be ever-present at the election office and board meetings,” it reads.

Jim Womack, the head of the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, told ProPublica that the group had nothing to do with the events in Surry County and that Snow’s actions there were “her business.” He and Snow said she had recently left the organization.

Womack estimated that as of August, the North Carolina Election Integrity Team had trained more than 1,000 volunteers, who would be present in most major North Carolina counties in November, including Surry. “As long as” election officials are “doing things in accordance with the law and the books, they shouldn’t have anything to worry about,” Womack said. “And if that causes stress, I'm sorry.”

In the months before the November 2022 midterm election, Huff decided to go on the offensive against misinformation, giving speeches to various civic groups about how elections actually work, like the local real estate agents association.

One afternoon toward the end of the summer, she showed up at a country club for what she had believed was a concerned citizens meeting — and found waiting for her eight local conservative leaders, including county commissioner Harris, who had fiercely criticized the Center for Tech and Civic Life money. For two and a half hours, Huff answered the Republicans’ questions, largely about election security, explaining the safeguards that kept voting tabulators from being hacked. The discussion was tense but civil, and while Huff kept her hands clasped atop a table, her feet compulsively kicked an orange golf tee beneath it. As Huff headed for the door, she reminded her hosts, “The people who work in the elections office, we’re real people who love our community too.”

Afterward, a ProPublica reporter asked an attendee, Earl Blackburn, a Republican candidate for a local school board, if Huff’s presentation had made him feel better about election security. Though Huff had taken more than 15 minutes to explain directly to Blackburn how the voting machines couldn’t be hacked, he said, “I don’t know that she has satisfactorily answered my question.” To explain how the machines could be hacked anyway, Blackburn referenced a badly reviewed Sean Connery heist movie that hinges on thieves dodging a laser beam alarm system to break into a global bank.

On Sept. 19, Huff hosted a watch party in the public meeting room next to the elections office for a livestream of speeches in which experts and North Carolina State Board of Elections members explained election security, hoping that some of the Surry County GOP might attend — or at the very least some skeptical citizens. But the only people who came were longtime poll workers who already understood how elections worked.

As September turned to October, she and her staff hosted another event at which they publicly tested the dozens of voting machines that would be used in November to prove their accuracy. She hoped some of the election deniers might assuage their fears at the event, but none showed up.

No matter how many questions she answered or how many times she proved the soundness of the voting machines, it wasn’t clear that she was convincing anyone.

When Huff had taken the job in 2019, she had told the Board of Elections that she expected to stay 20 years. But recently there had been many nights she had wondered how she could continue. She said, “If this is what every day and every night looks like, how could anyone keep this up for 17 more years?” She wasn’t just thinking of herself but also about how the stress she brought home and the controversies surrounding her would affect her children, who are in high school and college, and her husband.

Coming home late from work each night, Huff parked beside a plot that was normally filled with heirloom tomatoes, cucumbers, herbs and peppers, but which was now just dirt. Instead of tending her garden, she was trapped all day in the halogen-lit office. Still, in her most hopeful moods, she could imagine that instead of cultivating the land she was cultivating democracy. “It’s a seed. You plant it. It grows. It flowers. It fruits,” she said. “It takes careful tending to make sure that it survives and becomes something beautiful.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Doug Bock Clark.

Acting police station officer Saw Naing Oo was killed on Oct. 9, while township administrator Kyaw Moe Oo was murdered on Oct. 17. The Wundwin Township resistance claimed responsibility for both killings.

Most of those arrested were rounded up between Oct. 10 and Oct 27 and the majority of them are still being detained, said a local speaking on condition of anonymity for safety reasons.

“After the death of the acting police station officer, people were arrested on suspicion,” the local said.

“[Junta troops] checked people’s phones and, if they found something related to politics, they were arrested.

“The detainees were not just from the town, but villagers from Wundwin township were among the arrested.

"About 190 people were arrested but 40 were released. There are now around 150 people still in custody.”

The detainees are from Wundwin city and eight villages in the area, the local added.

Wundwin township residents said over 100 soldiers in plain clothes carried out searches arresting locals and patrolling the area.

RFA contacted U Thein Htay, the State Administration Council’s Economic Minister and Mandalay region spokesman for comment but our calls went unanswered.

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

Acting police station officer Saw Naing Oo was killed on Oct. 9, while township administrator Kyaw Moe Oo was murdered on Oct. 17. The Wundwin Township resistance claimed responsibility for both killings.

Most of those arrested were rounded up between Oct. 10 and Oct 27 and the majority of them are still being detained, said a local speaking on condition of anonymity for safety reasons.

“After the death of the acting police station officer, people were arrested on suspicion,” the local said.

“[Junta troops] checked people’s phones and, if they found something related to politics, they were arrested.

“The detainees were not just from the town, but villagers from Wundwin township were among the arrested.

"About 190 people were arrested but 40 were released. There are now around 150 people still in custody.”

The detainees are from Wundwin city and eight villages in the area, the local added.

Wundwin township residents said over 100 soldiers in plain clothes carried out searches arresting locals and patrolling the area.

RFA contacted U Thein Htay, the State Administration Council’s Economic Minister and Mandalay region spokesman for comment but our calls went unanswered.

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

Acting police station officer Saw Naing Oo was killed on Oct. 9, while township administrator Kyaw Moe Oo was murdered on Oct. 17. The Wundwin Township resistance claimed responsibility for both killings.

Most of those arrested were rounded up between Oct. 10 and Oct 27 and the majority of them are still being detained, said a local speaking on condition of anonymity for safety reasons.

“After the death of the acting police station officer, people were arrested on suspicion,” the local said.

“[Junta troops] checked people’s phones and, if they found something related to politics, they were arrested.

“The detainees were not just from the town, but villagers from Wundwin township were among the arrested.

"About 190 people were arrested but 40 were released. There are now around 150 people still in custody.”

The detainees are from Wundwin city and eight villages in the area, the local added.

Wundwin township residents said over 100 soldiers in plain clothes carried out searches arresting locals and patrolling the area.

RFA contacted U Thein Htay, the State Administration Council’s Economic Minister and Mandalay region spokesman for comment but our calls went unanswered.

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

As a military column entered the villages on the eastern side of Khin-U township at around 1:30 a.m. on Wednesday morning, more than 2,000 households from Thi Ha Taw, Shwe Min Gan, Thin Paung, Ka Bwet, Koke Tet and Yone Pin villages abandoned their homes.

“Early in the morning, before dawn, we all ran away with carts,” a local told RFA.

“Both children and elderly people were suffering. I heard that they [junta troops] entered Yone Pin village this morning and two local residents were arrested.”

Villages in western Khin-U also targeted

Residents said that in the western part of Khin-U township another military column was raiding villages forcing nearly 3,500 locals to flee. Three locals were arrested in Ywar Thit village, they said.

The State Administration Council (SAC) has not released any statement on the raids.

People’s Defense Force (PDF) members said they resisted the military council troops using landmines on Monday and Tuesday causing heavy casualties on the junta side. The troops have started raiding villages as a consequence, they said.

Northwestern Sagaing region has seen some of the fiercest fighting between junta forces and PDFs since the Feb. 1, 2021 coup.

According to the Bangkok-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, authorities in Myanmar have killed 2,299 civilians and arrested 15,571 since last year’s coup.

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

As a military column entered the villages on the eastern side of Khin-U township at around 1:30 a.m. on Wednesday morning, more than 2,000 households from Thi Ha Taw, Shwe Min Gan, Thin Paung, Ka Bwet, Koke Tet and Yone Pin villages abandoned their homes.

“Early in the morning, before dawn, we all ran away with carts,” a local told RFA.

“Both children and elderly people were suffering. I heard that they [junta troops] entered Yone Pin village this morning and two local residents were arrested.”

Villages in western Khin-U also targeted

Residents said that in the western part of Khin-U township another military column was raiding villages forcing nearly 3,500 locals to flee. Three locals were arrested in Ywar Thit village, they said.

The State Administration Council (SAC) has not released any statement on the raids.

People’s Defense Force (PDF) members said they resisted the military council troops using landmines on Monday and Tuesday causing heavy casualties on the junta side. The troops have started raiding villages as a consequence, they said.

Northwestern Sagaing region has seen some of the fiercest fighting between junta forces and PDFs since the Feb. 1, 2021 coup.

According to the Bangkok-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, authorities in Myanmar have killed 2,299 civilians and arrested 15,571 since last year’s coup.

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

The post France’s Influence in Africa Faces Strains From Locals and Foreign Competitors appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John P. Ruehl.

Troops entered Ba Wa Pin village in Dawei township at the start of the month, after fighting erupted between military council forces and local defense groups on the road to Htee Khee, which is on the Thai border.

Among the nearly 180 junta troops, local battalion Numbers 401, 402 and other joint forces are still stationed in the village, a member of the Ah Shae Taw (East Forest) People’s Defense Force (PDF) told RFA.

“Among the arrested are local villagers and displaced people from other villages. They arrested children and adults and are holding them hostage,” a local PDF member said.

“They [the junta forces] have another army column that is fighting with Kaw Thoo Lei’s army on the Dawei-Htee Khee road. They are planning to join that army column. They told us that if we start shooting, they will kill the villagers.”

RFA has not been able to independently verify these comments, and the State Administration Council (SAC) has not released any statement on the situation.

A local PDF has warned residents to stop using the road due to the ongoing fighting. The Kaw Thoo Lei Army is stationed on the border between Tanintharyi and Htee Khee.

At least 214 civilians have been killed and 89 injured in Tanintharyi region since last year’s coup, local research group Southern Monitor said at the end of last month.

It said at least 17,415 people had been forced to flee their homes, while 93 homes were destroyed in arson attacks since Feb. 1, 2021.

Residents of the region told RFA that armed resistance in the region picked up in Aug. last year in response to the junta’s crackdowns on civilians.

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

Middlemen working on behalf of the Kings Roman Casino in the SEZ in Bokeo province have actively recruited young Loatian women to work as “chat girls” to scam men on social media platforms into buying shares of the company.

Those who fail to meet their sales quotas have been detained against their will by their employers and in some cases physically abused or sold off to work in the zone’s sex industry, RFA reported in December 2021.

Bokeo province is home to the SEZ, a gambling and tourism hub catering to the Chinese situated along the Mekong River where Laos, Myanmar and Thailand meet. In 2018, the U.S. government sanctioned the Chinese tycoon who is said to run the SEZ as head of a trafficking network.

The province’s Bokeo Committee for Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone Management   issued the notice on July 19 for casino owner Dok Ngiew Kham Group, the zone’s board of directors, and other companies and businesses in the SEZ.

“We’re requesting cooperation from all companies, including the Dok Ngiew Kham Group, in the SEZ in inspecting the companies that use Lao workers as online chatters,” a provincial official who serves on the committee told RFA on Monday.

“We’d like also to reeducate both Lao workers and the employers not to use violence,” he said, citing recent cases of Lao workers who were physically abused by their employers because they couldn’t meet the harsh requirements of their jobs. 

“The discipline used is over the line,” said the official, who declined to be named so he could speak freely. “The employers should cut off their salaries instead of beating them.”

Lao authorities will inspect the companies that use workers as online chatters and educate Lao workers and employers about fair labor practices, he said. 

An official of the Planning and Investment Department of Bokeo province, who requested anonymity for the same reason, said the latest measure would help stamp out the abuse of workers in the SEZ.

“The action is good!” he said “The authorities of the SEZ management committee are going to stop the companies from importing workers, and they will inspect the labor practice.”

Long hours, night shifts

A Lao worker in the SEZ told RFA on Monday that a friend who has worked as an online chat girl for seven months initially signed a labor contract for six months.  

“During that time, she wasn’t able to do the job properly; so, she now wants to get out and do something else with another company,” he said. “But she can’t, [and] her employer has asked her to pay back the money the company paid to a middleman to get her here.”

The chat girl told her friend that her employer increased her work time to 14 hours a day and made her work night shifts.

“I wonder why the provincial labor department would never inspect this kind of labor practice,” said the friend, who declined to be named for safety reasons.

Another SEZ worker told RFA that she also witnessed abuse.

“Recently, I’ve seen more and more Lao workers being disciplined for not performing well on the job, like running around the building,” she said. “If any workers want to quit their company and go to another, they’ll have to pay back debt. Many women sell themselves to pay off the debt and then quit.”

But a 20-year-old online chat girl said some workers appreciate the opportunity to make money in the SEZ.

“Some of my friends who work for my company just came back from visiting their parents, and they paid bribes to officials and security guards to get back to work in the SEZ,” she said.

RFA reported on July 14 that a Lao worker from Luang Namtha province had been hospitalized for several days after being beaten up by a security guard of the Golden Triangle SEZ for not being able to do his job as an online chatterer. He said the security guard hit him several times with a metal baton.

On Feb. 22, 2022, the Bokeo Committee also requested the companies and workers in the SEZ to sign labor contracts detailing all duties and responsibilities of the workers and employers as a protective measure.

Lao authorities have complained that they cannot easily enter the zone, which operates largely beyond the reach of Lao laws, creating friction with locals. Provincial police officers have been able to rescue workers being held against their will by their employer only after the women have contacted the authorities.

As of May, police had rescued nearly 500 trapped SEZ workers during the previous 12 months, including about 200 women who were victims of human trafficking, RFA reported earlier.  

Translated by Max Avary for RFA Lao. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

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

Around 10 people were arrested and others injured in clashes between locals and riot police in Vietnam's Nghi Loca district on Wednesday morning, locals told RFA.

"There were about 1,000 riot policemen, policemen in uniform and plain clothes officers," a local told RFA on condition of anonymity. "About 10 people were arrested and others injured in clashes between locals and riot police."

Locals said the Nghe An provincial government sent police to Nghi Thuan commune to stop them preventing  the destruction of the road connecting Khanh Thien hamlet to the N5 road. They say the road has been there for a long time but the government wants to destroy it in order to build an industrial park.

“The two sides were pushing each other." Nguyen Van Hien from Binh Thuan parish told RFA. "People opened the police barricades to get to the part of the road that was being demolished. Police used tear gas and the people ran away. The police arrested a few people and I don't know where they were taken."

Facebook live streams show locals removing the fence and clashing with police. One policeman was dragged away by protesters who punched and kicked him, while many of the locals were attacked and arrested. Riot police fired tear gas grenades while some locals fought back with petrol bombs.

Father Nguyen Dinh Thuc, who is from Binh Thuan but works as a pastor inf a nearby parish, said he saw a lot of policemen on his way home from morning service.

 "People said that when they heard the road was closed they went to protest and were brutally beaten by riot police, officers in uniform and civilians. The police used tear gas, smoke bombs and light weapons," he said "Then the riot police entered the village and went  into the homes of some families ...to beat people.They even went upstairs to beat people, even those in their sixties and seventies.. They beat them brutally and took away five people whose fates are unclear.”

The priest said police remained in the commune for hours after protesters dispersed and confiscated dozens of motorcycles, electric bikes and bicycles.

Some locals say although people were seriously injured no-one could leave the village to get medical help because police had blocked off the neighborhood.

Creation of new industrial park

Citing information from a leader of Nghi Loc district, Wednesday's Giao Thong Online newspaper said workers from Nghe An province are completing the demolition of the old residential road running from National Highway 7C through the WHA Industrial Park to Nghi Thuan commune. It said in the process several policemen were attacked and injured by extremists.

The newspaper said police arrested a number of people for attacking officers.

On Wednesday morning RFA called Dang Thanh Tung, Chief of the Office of the People's Committee of Nghe An province, but he hung up when the reporter identified himself. 

All attempts to call the chairman of the Provincial People's Committee, Nguyen Duc Trung, Standing Vice Chairman, Le Hong Vinh, and agencies such as the People's Committee and the Nghi Loc District Police were unsuccessful.

 RFA emailed the People's Committees of Nghe An province and Nghi Loc district and some local leaders but did not receive replies.

State media say the road being destroyed in Phase 1 of the 498 hectare WHA Industrial Zone 1 project, which is being carried out by a Thai company, is around 520 meters long and 3.5 meters wide. It was approved by the prime minister in 2017.

The government says it is necessary to remove the road, which runs through the industrial park, to build new links between plots for new factories and to install drains.

At the end of 2019, WHA Industrial Zone Nghe An Joint Stock Company built a bypass to replace the residential road. It was 6.5 meters wide and made of reinforced concrete.

Locals prefer the road they have used for more than 100 years. They also suspect the government wants to destroy the road in order to get the upper hand in future negotiations if it wants to take the land where the residents of Nghi Thuan commune are living in order to expand the industrial park.

According to priest Nguyen Dinh Thuc, on May 20, Nghi Loc district held a discussion with the people of Nghi Thuan commune at the hall of the commune People's Committee to ask people's opinions on the closure of the route from N5 road to Khanh Thien hamlet.

About 20 locals opposed the road closure for a variety of reasons. Some objected because the new road belongs to a private firm. Others felt unsafe because the road is bordered by a high steel fence.

At the meeting the government confirmed it had consulted people and named some those who had signed forms to show their attendance. The named people objected saying they had not discussed the road or approved the destruction of the old road to create company land.

The government held no further consultation before sending police to enforce the old road's closure on Wednesday.

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

 Hundreds of riot police sealed off the road with barbed wire and steel frames, blocking the road while workers destroyed it. When locals heard the news they flocked to the area to try to remove the fence.

“The two sides were pushing each other." Nguyen Van Hien from Binh Thuan parish told RFA. "People opened the police barricades to get to the part of the road that was being demolished. Police used tear gas and the people ran away. The police arrested a few people and I don't know where they were taken."

Facebook live streams show locals removing the fence and clashing with police. One policeman was dragged away by protesters who punched and kicked him, while many of the locals were attacked and arrested. Riot police fired tear gas grenades while some locals fought back with petrol bombs.

Father Nguyen Dinh Thuc, who is from Binh Thuan but works as a pastor inf a nearby parish, said he saw a lot of policemen on his way home from morning service.

 "People said that when they heard the road was closed they went to protest and were brutally beaten by riot police, officers in uniform and civilians. The police used tear gas, smoke bombs and light weapons," he said "Then the riot police entered the village and went  into the homes of some families ...to beat people.They even went upstairs to beat people, even those in their sixties and seventies.. They beat them brutally and took away five people whose fates are unclear.”

The priest said police remained in the commune for hours after protesters dispersed and confiscated dozens of motorcycles, electric bikes and bicycles.

Some locals say although people were seriously injured no-one could leave the village to get medical help because police had blocked off the neighborhood.

Creation of new industrial park

Citing information from a leader of Nghi Loc district, Wednesday's Giao Thong Online newspaper said workers from Nghe An province are completing the demolition of the old residential road running from National Highway 7C through the WHA Industrial Park to Nghi Thuan commune. It said in the process several policemen were attacked and injured by extremists.

The newspaper said police arrested a number of people for attacking officers.

On Wednesday morning RFA called Dang Thanh Tung, Chief of the Office of the People's Committee of Nghe An province, but he hung up when the reporter identified himself. 

All attempts to call the chairman of the Provincial People's Committee, Nguyen Duc Trung, Standing Vice Chairman, Le Hong Vinh, and agencies such as the People's Committee and the Nghi Loc District Police were unsuccessful.

 RFA emailed the People's Committees of Nghe An province and Nghi Loc district and some local leaders but did not receive replies.

State media say the road being destroyed in Phase 1 of the 498 hectare WHA Industrial Zone 1 project, which is being carried out by a Thai company, is around 520 meters long and 3.5 meters wide. It was approved by the prime minister in 2017.

The government says it is necessary to remove the road, which runs through the industrial park, to build new links between plots for new factories and to install drains.

At the end of 2019, WHA Industrial Zone Nghe An Joint Stock Company built a bypass to replace the residential road. It was 6.5 meters wide and made of reinforced concrete.

Locals prefer the road they have used for more than 100 years. They also suspect the government wants to destroy the road in order to get the upper hand in future negotiations if it wants to take the land where the residents of Nghi Thuan commune are living in order to expand the industrial park.

According to priest Nguyen Dinh Thuc, on May 20, Nghi Loc district held a discussion with the people of Nghi Thuan commune at the hall of the commune People's Committee to ask people's opinions on the closure of the route from N5 road to Khanh Thien hamlet.

About 20 locals opposed the road closure for a variety of reasons. Some objected because the new road belongs to a private firm. Others felt unsafe because the road is bordered by a high steel fence.

At the meeting the government confirmed it had consulted people and named some those who had signed forms to show their attendance. The named people objected saying they had not discussed the road or approved the destruction of the old road to create company land.

The government held no further consultation before sending police to enforce the old road's closure on Wednesday.

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

करौली और जोधपुर के बाद अब ‘धौलपुर’ में शांतिप्रिय समुदाय की पत्थरबाज़ी..

अब कौन भड़काऊ नारेबाजी हो रही थी या कौनसा रामनवमी का DJ बज रहा था जो पत्थरबाज़ी हो रही है ?@TajinderBagga @beingarun28 @MODIfiedVikas @IamAjaySehrawat @AjiHaaan @AnujBajpai_ pic.twitter.com/7OZ3DrkQis

— Vikas Faujdar (@VikasFaujdar) May 26, 2022

करौली और जोधपुर के बार अब धौलपुर में शांतिप्रिय समुदाय की पत्थरबाज़ी..

अब कौनसा रामनवमी का DJ बज रहा था जो पत्थरबाज़ी हो रही है @ashokgehlot51 जी?@DrSatishPoonia @gssjodhpur pic.twitter.com/4rPnmZ3mEZ

— BJP Bharatpur (@bjp4btp) May 26, 2022

Journalist Pradeep Bhandari and certain BJP supporters shared the video on Twitter with different captions essentially implying the same. These tweets now stand deleted.

Fact-check

We performed a keyword search in Hindi and came across a tweet by Giriraj Agrawal, editor of Dainik Bhaskar. As per Giriraj, the clash broke out over alleged police brutality.

धौलपुर के बाड़ी में बवाल; पुलिस कस्टडी में युवक की बेरहमी से पिटाई को लेकर फूटा लोगों का गुस्सा, जमकर हुआ पथराव। पुलिस कर्मियों ने भी फेंके पत्थर। pic.twitter.com/hXrpB42tZP

— Giriraj Agrawal (@girirajagl) May 26, 2022

Upon doing a keyword search on Google, we came across a news report by News NCR, which provided a detailed account of the events. As per News NCR, the public gathered at around 11 am after they received information about the alleged assault of a youth who was accused of ‘rape’ and was under police custody.

According to Dainik Bhaskar, Bari and Basedi roads were blocked by the public using stones and wood. ASP Bachchan Singh Meena of Dholpur, accompanied by the police of Sarmathura, Kanchanpur, Basedi, Sadar police stations, reached the spot and tried to control the situation using mild force, which made the public angrier, leading to the clash.

The report further adds, that Krishna, son of Hari Singh, was accused of attempted rape by his younger brother’s wife about three months ago. He was arrested at that time but released on bail. Two days ago, when police officers went to his house for questioning, he was nowhere to be found and his family members were asked to send the youth to the police station.

While locals claim that the accused was beaten in police custody, the police’s version differs. A statement by SP Narayan Togas was shared by journalist Avdhesh Pareek. According to the SP, Krishna reached the Bari Kotwali police station under the influence of alcohol. He started abusing police officials and was taken to the Bari Hospital for medical treatment. During this treatment, Krishna fell unconscious, after which he was further taken to the Dholpur Hospital. The SP also added that he spoke to the medical examiner and the doctor has confirmed that the youth is in good health.

धौलपुर SP नारायण टोगस – pic.twitter.com/Ac225msZ32

— Avdhesh Pareek (@Zinda_Avdhesh) May 26, 2022

Therefore, a clash broke out between the police and locals in Rajasthan’s Dholpur due to allegations of police brutality. There are no reports that suggest that the violence was communally-motivated.

The post Video of locals in Rajasthan’s Dholpur stone-pelting at cops given false communal spin appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Kalim Ahmed.

The facility would pull vast amounts of groundwater from the same aquifer as Miller’s. “I highly expect if they actually do this, my well would run dry,” he said.

The mine in the rural township of Evart has been in the works since 2012, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has raised the stakes. With its close ally Belarus, the two countries produce 40 percent of the world’s potash, which is rich in potassium, one of three essential plant nutrients. Prices were already on the rise, and shutting off major providers from global markets is expected to keep pushing them up. So the U.S., which imports nearly all of its potash, is looking to support domestic sources, like the planned mine next to Miller’s property. 

For the Denver-based Michigan Potash & Salt, with 15,000 acres of mineral rights across Osceola and Mecosta counties, the Russian conflict is the latest reason why it needs to get its operations up and running ASAP. “Michigan Potash stands ready to support American farmers by replacing one-to-one all the potash imported from Russia,” said Theodore Pagano, the company’s founder and CEO, in a statement. In March, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a $250 million investment to support all-American fertilizer companies like Pagano’s. Once it’s operating, Michigan Potash’s site is expected to be the largest source in the country by far. 

To Miller and others in the area, the risks of mining and pumping out all that groundwater to extract the potash simply aren’t worth it. They worry about the potential damage to sensitive wetlands as well as their drinking water. They question whether the U.S. really needs potash from central Michigan when there’s plenty at well-established facilities just across the U.S.-Canada border.

“All of a sudden you get a war overseas, and he’s fanning the flames that we have to have domestic production,” said Ken Ford, a forester in Osceola County, referring to Pagano. 

While the U.S. relies heavily on international potash — importing 94 percent of its annual use — 83 percent of it comes from Canada, home to the largest mines in the world and directly connected by rail to the Corn Belt. (In March, a union strike shut down the railway for two days, stoking concerns about the tenuous supply chain.) Russia and Belarus each represent 6 percent. 

In December, Michigan Potash obtained the last of the permits it needs to begin construction. The company would use solution mining to free the potash from the deep earth, valued at $65 billion. That involves injecting pressurized streams of hot saltwater, or brine, underground to dissolve the salt beds. Then, that brine would be pumped back to the surface, where it’s dried at high heat to extract the crystallized potash. Table salt is a byproduct of the process, which the company would sell, too.

This form of mining requires a lot of water: The Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, or EGLE, has already granted permission for Michigan Potash to extract 725 million gallons of groundwater each year. That amounts to some 2 million gallons a day — far exceeding the withdrawal allotted to the Nestlé bottled water plant just a few miles away. 

Michigan Potash says it would recycle as much water as possible, calling its system a “closed loop.” Their production would capture the hot steam from boiling the potash out of the brine, which would supplement their water use. But only so much can be recycled. When the brine can’t be reused anymore, they’d inject the wastewater back underground into deep wells. Overall, the company has proposed boring 11 wells: eight for mining and three for waste.

Ford, who’s on the board for the Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation said the site is unsuitable for mining. It slopes on all sides. And it’s in the middle of four creeks that wander through a large freshwater marsh before flowing into the Muskegon River. “They literally could not have picked a worse location for this,” Ford said. 

Members of the Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation fear the strain it would put on their watershed. They worry the sheer quantity of water used will dry up their wells and restrict water flows into the marsh. Sucking out vast quantities of water could force aquifers to migrate up, shuttling minerals and salts that would taint groundwater in a region where residents depend on private wells. “I don’t know what we’re supposed to do if the aquifer’s destroyed,” Miller said. “We’re out in the boondocks here. There’s no way we’re gonna get a municipal water source.” 

A leak of the salty brine could also devastate their water supply, as well as the surrounding wetlands and waterways. Under high pressure, waste from injection wells can force its way out through cracks in the bedrock or old wells nearby, of which there are 36 around the proposed wells, according to an EPA survey. A ProPublica investigation found such leaks are fairly routine, growing more common as systems age.

In 2018, the Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation filed a complaint with the state environmental department, challenging Michigan Potash’s permits. A state judge rejected it last fall, clearing one of the company’s last hurdles. The group says the state hasn’t properly assessed the environmental impacts of the mining project. For instance, the state approved the company’s water permits through an online tool, without any formal review. That tool assesses how withdrawing water affects streamflow and fish population, but not the surrounding wetlands or underlying aquifers. Now, the environmental group is concerned Michigan Potash has no contingency plan for leaks or spills. (Calls and emails to the company and Pagano were not returned.)

Antoine Allanore, a metallurgy professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sympathized with the locals’ concerns. Mining ventures demand high initial investments, and the price to keep mines running safely is steep. To guarantee profits, “some shortcuts will have to be taken,” he said. “That’s my experience in every mining project. If the risk is high, even though the risk is unlikely, I don’t know if any community will accept it.” 

Potash mining isn’t new in Michigan, nor even in Osceola County. A husk of a mine built in the 1980s sits just a few miles away from the Evart site. The mine exchanged hands over the years, passing through Mosaic — one of the world’s biggest fertilizer producers — before its current owner, the global agricultural conglomerate Cargill, took over. But today, the facility is only used to produce salt, not potash. Major companies have struggled to turn a profit from mining potash in the area, Ford said, explaining why he and his colleagues are skeptical of Pagano’s ability to do so. That skepticism grew when they learned about a past failed potash venture of Pagano’s in North Dakota.

According to Ford, who also sits on the Osceola County Planning Commission, the commission has invited Michigan Potash to discuss the project, but the company declined the meeting. 

With the necessary permits for construction in hand, Michigan Potash says it’s securing the last funds before breaking ground on the site that borders Miller’s property. The company scored a $50 million boost from Michigan lawmakers in March when they approved a $4.8 billion spending plan, including the subsidy for potash-mining.

The land surrounding Miller’s home of 50 years is filled with forests, seeps, and springs. The marsh nearby is a pitstop for many migrating waterfowl like geese, cranes, and trumpeter swans, and the ducks have just arrived for spring. Miller worries that it could all be spoiled by one brine-filled pipeline springing a leak. “This thing is carrying tens of thousands of gallons per minute,” he said. “That kind of scenario would just be a disaster.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The country’s largest potash mine is coming to Michigan. Here’s why locals are worried. on Apr 5, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Lina Tran.

Good news — an Australian parliamentary review recommends a more “expansive” media presence in the Pacific.

Bad news — little of that expansion envisions a role for island media.

Instead, the committee endorsed a proposal for “consultation” and the establishment of an independent “platform neutral” media corporation, versus the existing “broadcasting” organisation.

• READ MORE: Televising Australian soft power in the Pacific

That proposal was among several points raised at two public hearings and nine written submissions as part of Australia’s “Pacific Step Up” programme, aimed at countering the growing regional influence of China.

Former long-time Pacific correspondent Sean Dorney last month told the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade that Australia was previously leading regional media spaces.

“But the vacant space that was left there when Australia Network disappeared, as people have said, has really been taken over by China,” he said.

“Throughout my time as the Pacific correspondent for the ABC, I saw this Chinese influence growing everywhere.”

Local media delivery
Dorney suggested local media ought to deliver news content in any future media expansion.

“I’ll just end off by saying that, if we did boost broadcasting again, it does require greater collaboration.

“There are excellent journalists out there in the Pacific that we could work with to create content for both of us. It’s our region, and I think we should embrace it.”

Similar points were made by Free TV Australia.

“Key to the success of the PacificAus TV initiative has been Free TV’s ability to work with our Pacific broadcast partners to ensure that the programming made available meets the needs of the Pacific communities.”

However recommendations for local staff were not picked up in the final findings of the standing committee.

Only “consultation” was called for.

Relatively comprehensive
Taking up ten of 176 pages, the report’s media section is nonetheless seen as relatively comprehensive compared with the dismantling of broadcasting capacity in recent years.

This includes the literal dismantling of shortwave equipment in Australia despite wide protest from the Pacific region.

Nearly three years previously, a 2019 Pacific Media Summit heard that discontinuation of the shortwave service would save Australia some $2.8 million in power costs.

A suggestion from a delegate that that amount could be spent on $100,000 for reporters in each of 26 island states and territories was met with silence from ABC representatives at the summit.

However, funding would be dramatically expanded if the government takes up suggestions from the submissions to the joint committee.

Members of the Australia Asia Pacific Media Initiative (AAMPI) called for the “allocation of a total of $55-$75 million per year to ensure Australia has a fit-for-purpose, multi-platform media voice in the Asia Pacific region.”

Overall, submissions called for greater recognition of the media in “soft power” calculation.

Public diplomacy tool
AAPMI member Annmaree O’Keeffe said that “international broadcasting and its potency is not recognised at government level as a public diplomacy tool.”

Consultancy group Heriot Media and Governance cautioned against trying to use media as a policy messenger.

“A substantial body of research internationally supports the view that audiences are likely to invest greater trust in an international media service if they perceive it to be independent of political and other vested interests.”

Heriot also noted the loss of radio capacity, submitting that “shortwave [radio] had been the only almost uninterruptible signal when local media had been disabled by natural events or political actions.”

ABC told the inquiry that around 830,000 Pacific Islanders access their various platforms each month.

Off-platform, there were 1.6 million views of ABC content via social media such as YouTube.

Jason Brown is a long-time Pacific reporter based in Aotearoa New Zealand and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

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

Authorities started the greenhouse farm project, the first of its kind in North Korea, in Jungphyong village, which is part of Kyongsong county in the northeastern province of North Hamgyong. The farm sits on 490 acres of land and includes about 300 greenhouses.

“The authorities loudly propagated that the residents of North Hamgyong and Kyongsong county would greatly benefit from the greenhouse construction project, but the vegetables ended up not being for people like us,” a resident of the county told RFA’s Korean Service.

“Last week, the Rodong Sinmun newspaper reported that the Jungphyong Vegetable Greenhouse Farm had produced about 10,000 tons of fresh produce, including cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce and crown daisy,” said the source. Crown daisy is a popular leafy vegetable.

The newspaper report said that the vegetables were delivered to the people of the province last year, according to the source, who requested anonymity for security reasons.

“But in actuality, ordinary residents of Kyongsong county have never been given a single vegetable grown from those greenhouses,” he said.

The dismay is all the greater because authorities relied on residents of the county to build the project.

“They worked for over a year. Not many people complained because they had the hope that they would be able to eat their fill of vegetables in the very near future,” the source said.

“None of the vegetables went to the province. I heard from a friend who works at the greenhouse farm that most of the vegetables were selected as a No. 9 product and loaded onto the train to Pyongyang,” he said, using the government designation for items intended for use by the Kim family.

The Jungphyong Vegetable Greenhouse Farm was a pilot program. Now that it has been consistently producing, the government has plans to expand the program.

Another greenhouse farm is already under construction in nearby South Hamgyong province’s Hamju county, another Kyongsong resident told RFA.

“The residents of Hamju county have been mobilized for the construction work. Even when they complete their new greenhouse farm, they will never have a chance to eat any of the veggies,” said the second source, who requested anonymity to speak freely.

“When they were building the greenhouse farm up here in Jungphyong, the local housewives supported the construction effort, even sending in homemade soil for use in the farms. Despite their personal sacrifices, the housewives never received any vegetables,” she said.

High-ranking officials who live nearby instead call up the farm and take the vegetables as they please, the second source said.

“They never lifted a shovel, but they are taking full advantage of the farms. Even in the middle of winter, a car will come to their house every few days loaded with fresh cucumbers, crown daisy and lettuce from the greenhouses,” she said.

“Occasionally, if you pass in front of a greenhouse farm, you will see vehicles with license plates from powerful organizations. … As with everything in North Korea, the greenhouse farm wasn’t really for the local people as they said. It is only for the privileged and the elite,” the second source said.

The authorities have plans to expand greenhouse farms to other provinces.

“Following North and South Hamgyong, they are talking up how they will have these greenhouse farms in every province in the near future. No matter how many they build, what will change? For ordinary folks like us, vegetables are still a pie in the sky dream,” she said.

Translated by Claire Lee and Leejin Jun. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chang Gyu Ahn.