Chris Hedges's Blog, page 143

Syria Demands Withdrawal of All U.S., Turkish Forces

UNITED NATIONS—Syria’s top diplomat on Saturday demanded the immediate withdrawal of American and Turkish forces from the country and said his government reserves the right to defend its territory in any way necessary if they remain.

Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem’s remarks to the United Nations General Assembly were made as Turkey and the United States press ahead with a deal to create a safe zone along Syria’s border with Turkey.

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On the political front, he reaffirmed the government’s support for the recently agreed committee to draft a new constitution for the country. As has been the government’s tone since the start of the 2011 uprising in Syria, the foreign minister took a hard line, stressing there must be no interference from any country or timeline imposed on the process.

Al-Moallem’s speech highlighted the enormous challenges to achieve reconciliation in Syria, where over 400,000 people have been killed during the conflict and millions more have fled.

The more than eight-year conflict has also drawn numerous foreign militaries and thousands of foreign fighters to Syria, many to support the now-defeated Islamic State extremist group and others still there backing the opposition and battling government forces.

“The United States and Turkey maintain an illegal military presence in northern Syria,” al-Moallem said. “Any foreign forces operating in our territories without our authorization are occupying forces and should withdraw immediately.”

If they refuse, he said, “we have the right to take any and all countermeasures authorized under international law.”

There are around 1,000 U.S. troops in Syria on a mission to combat Islamic State militants. The United States also backs and supports Kurdish groups in the northeast that are opposed to the Syrian government and have fought against Sunni extremist groups.

U.S. President Donald Trump had said he wants to bring the troops home, but military officials have advocated a phased approach.

Al-Moallem described Turkey and the United States as “arrogant to the point of holding discussions and reaching agreements on the creation of a so-called ‘safe zone’ inside Syria” as if it was on their own soil. He said any agreement without the consent of the Syrian government is rejected.

The deal between the U.S. and Turkey keeps U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish fighters, considered terrorists by Turkey, away from Syria’s northeastern border with Turkey. It involves an area five to 14 kilometers deep (three to eight miles), as well as the removal of heavy weapons from a 20-kilometer-deep zone (12 miles). The length of the zone has not yet been agreed to by both parties but will likely stretch hundreds of kilometers.

Most of Syria is now under the control of the Syrian government, which is backed by Russia and Iran. However, Syrian rebels and extremists still hold Idlib in the northwest, and U.S-backed Kurdish groups hold parts of the oil-rich northeast.

The Syrian government maintains that Idlib remains a hotbed for “terrorists” and al-Moallem vowed that its “war against terrorism” will continue “until rooting out the last remaining terrorist.”

In a breakthrough on the political front, earlier this week U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres announced the formation of the committee that would draft Syria’s new constitution, which he said could be an important step toward ending the war.

The U.N. chief announced Saturday that the committee will meet for the first time in Geneva on Oct. 30. Its rules state that a new constitution will be followed by “free and fair elections under United Nations supervision.”

The committee was authorized at a Russian-hosted Syrian peace conference in January 2018, but it took nearly 20 months for the sides to agree on the 150 members — particularly on a 50-member civil society of experts, independents, tribal leaders and women to serve alongside 50 members from the government and 50 members from the opposition. The U.N. was authorized to put together the civil society list but the choices faced objections, mainly from the Syrian government.

Under the newly announced terms, the “Syrian-led and Syrian-owned” committee, with U.N. envoy Geir Pedersen as facilitator, will amend the current 2012 constitution or draft a new one.

Al-Moallem stressed that the committee will operate without preconditions, its recommendations must be made independently, and “no deadlines or timetables must be imposed on the committee.”

On another long-simmering dispute, al-Moallem accused Israel of starting “another phase of escalation” through its repeated attacks on Syrian territory and the territory of other neighboring countries.

He stressed that “it is a delusion” to think that the Syrian conflict would force the government to forfeit its “inalienable right” to recover the Golan Heights which Israel captured during the June 1967 war. The annexation is not recognized under international law.

The Trump administration in March signed a proclamation recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, reversing more than a half-century of U.S. policy in the Middle East. He also moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem in recognition of Israel’s claims of the city as its capital.

“It is a delusion,” al-Moallem stressed, “to think that the decisions of the U.S. administration on the sovereignty over the Golan would alter historical and geographical facts or the provisions of international law.”

“The Golan has been and will forever be part of Syria,” he said.

Subpoenas Mark First Concrete Steps for Trump Impeachment

WASHINGTON — House Democrats took their first concrete steps in the impeachment investigation of President Donald Trump on Friday, issuing subpoenas and demanding documents from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and scheduling legal depositions for other State Department officials.

At the end of a stormy week of revelation and recrimination, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi framed the impeachment inquiry as a somber moment for a divided nation.

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“This is no cause for any joy,” she said on MSNBC.

At the White House, a senior administration official confirmed a key detail from the unidentified CIA whistleblower who has accused Trump of abusing the power of his office. Trump, for his part, insisted anew that his actions and words have been “perfect” and the whistleblower’s complaint might well be the work of “a partisan operative.”

The White House acknowledged that a record of the Trump phone call that is now at the center of the impeachment inquiry had been sealed away in a highly classified system at the direction of Trump’s National Security Council lawyers.

Separately, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway told reporters that the whistleblower “has protection under the law,” something Trump himself had appeared to question earlier in the day. He suggested then that his accuser “isn’t a whistleblower at all.”

Still at issue is why the rough transcript of Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s president was put on “lock down,” in the words of the whistleblower. The CIA officer said that diverting the record in an unusual way was evidence that “White House officials understood the gravity of what had transpired” in the conversation.

The whistleblower complaint alleges that Trump used his office to “solicit interference from a foreign country” to help himself in next year’s U.S. election. In the phone call, days after ordering a freeze to some military assistance for Ukraine, Trump prodded new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to dig for potentially damaging material on Democratic rival Joe Biden and volunteered the assistance of both his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and U.S. Attorney General William Barr.

Pelosi refused to set a deadline for the probe but promised to act “expeditiously.” The House intelligence committee could draw members back to Washington next week.

Pelosi said she was praying for the president, adding, “I would say to Democrats and Republicans: We have to put country before party.”

At the White House, it was a senior administration official who acknowledged that the rough transcript of Trump’s conversation with Ukraine’s Zelenskiy had been moved to a highly classified system maintained by the National Security Council. The official was granted anonymity Friday to discuss sensitive matters.

White House attorneys had been made aware of concerns about Trump’s comments on the call even before the whistleblower sent his allegations to the intelligence community’s inspector general. Those allegations, made in mid-August, were released Thursday under heavy pressure from House Democrats.

All the while, Trump was keeping up his full-bore attack on the whistleblower and the unnamed “White House officials” cited in the complaint, drawing a warning from Pelosi against retaliation.

Late Thursday, Trump denounced people who might have talked to the whistleblower as “close to a spy” and suggested they engaged in treason, an act punishable by death. Then on Friday, he said the person was “sounding more and more like the so-called Whistleblower isn’t a Whistleblower at all.”

He also alleged without evidence that information in the complaint has been “proved to be so inaccurate.”

Pelosi told MSNBC, “I’m concerned about some of the president’s comments about the whistleblower.”

She said the House panels conducting the impeachment probe will make sure there’s no retaliation against people who provided information in the case. On Thursday, House Democratic chairmen called Trump’s comments “witness intimidation” and suggested efforts by him to interfere with the potential witness could be unlawful.

Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, a member of the intelligence committee, said the president calling whistleblowers spies is “obscene … just grotesque.”

“If you ask me, I’d like to hear from everybody that was mentioned in that whistleblowers report. I like to hear from Rudy Giuliani, from the attorney general. I think Mike Pompeo has explaining to do as well as the State Department.”

Trump’s Friday comment questioning the whistleblower’s status seemed to foreshadow a possible effort to argue that legal protection laws don’t apply to the person, opening a new front in the president’s defense, but Conway’s statement seemed to make that less likely.

The intelligence community’s inspector general found the whistleblower’s complaint “credible” despite finding indications of the person’s support for a different political candidate.

Legal experts said that by following proper procedures and filing a complaint with the government rather than disclosing the information to the media, the person is without question regarded as a whistleblower entitled to protections against being fired or criminally prosecuted.

“This person clearly followed the exact path he was supposed to follow,” said Debra D’Agostino, a lawyer who represents whistleblowers. “There is no basis for not calling this person a whistleblower.”

Lawyers say it also doesn’t matter for the purposes of being treated as a whistleblower if all of the allegations are borne out as entirely true, or even if political motives or partisanship did factor into the decision to come forward.

Giuliani, already in the spotlight, was scheduled to appear at a Kremlin-backed conference in Armenia on Tuesday, but he said Friday he would not be attending. The agenda showed him speaking at a session on digital financial technologies. Russian President Vladimir Putin also was scheduled to participate in the conference.

Republicans were straining under the uncertainty of being swept up in the most serious test yet of their alliance with the Trump White House.

“We owe people to take it seriously,” said Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., a onetime Trump rival who is now a member of the intelligence committee.

“Right now, I have more questions than answers,” he said. “The complaint raises serious allegations, and we need to determine whether they’re credible or not.”

A swift resolution to the impeachment inquiry may not be easy. The intelligence committee is diving in just as lawmakers leave Washington for a two-week recess, with the panel expected to work while away. One person familiar with the committee’s schedule said that members might return at the end of next week.

Findings will eventually need to be turned over to Rep. Jerrold Nadler’s Judiciary Committee, which is compiling the work of five other panels into what is expected to be articles of impeachment. The panel will need to find consensus.

Meanwhile, Trump’s reelection campaign took to accusing Democrats of trying to “steal” the 2020 election in a new ad airing in a $10 million television and digital buy next week.

The ad also attacks Democrat Biden, highlighting his efforts as vice president to make U.S. aid to Ukraine contingent on that country firing a prosecutor believed to be corrupt. The ad claims that the fired prosecutor was investigating the former vice president’s son.

In fact, the prosecutor had failed to pursue any major anti-corruption investigations, leaving Ukraine’s international donors deeply frustrated. In pressing for the prosecutor’s ouster, Biden was representing the official position of the U.S. government, which was shared by other Western allies and many in Ukraine.

___

AP writers Lisa Mascaro, Laurie Kellman, Mary Clare Jalonick, Alan Fram, Matt Lee, Padmananda Rama and Matthew Daly contributed to this report.

Can Literature Really Be an Agent of Political Resistance?

“Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment”

A book by Juliana Spahr

Can literature be an agent of political resistance? Has literature been an effective vehicle of social movements in the past? Today we often think of poetry as activism, but does even the most radical poetry really do anything to challenge oppressive forms of nationalism or to propose meaningful alternatives to the nation-state? To all these questions, Juliana Spahr’s new book, “Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment,” answers clearly: no, not really.

The titular telegram is one that W. E. B. Du Bois sent to the Congress of Black Writers and Artists in 1956 after he was prevented from attending. The telegram — which he asked to be read at the event — exposed that he was detained and silenced by the US State Department because of his political convictions. It goes on to warn that “[a]ny Negro-American who travels abroad must […] not discuss race conditions in the United States” or make any declarations which could be deemed controversial or against a US nationalist agenda, lest they be silenced too.

Taking Du Bois’s telegram as a concise statement of facts, Spahr is deeply skeptical of previous arguments that assert that literature can play a role in political resistance. Although such arguments might be made with theoretical sophistication, she claims that, with a couple notable exceptions, they rest on an optimistic ahistoricism that lacks analysis of structural issues, or, even worse, sees resistance itself as static. So, partially as a corrective, Spahr focuses on specific historical examples in order to investigate her hunch that literature has indeed become more nationalist in the last 100 years, and, in any case, not the actual place where resistance to the state happens.

Click here to read long excerpts from “Du Bois’s Telegram” at Google Books.

Across the book, Spahr tracks moments in US literature that began as autonomous and politically resistant and illustrates how this potential was squashed, co-opted, suppressed, or watered down by various forms of government intervention including cultural diplomacy, harassment, the institutionalization of private foundations, or direct financial influence from the State Department. This interest in the way government has shaped and redirected literature toward its nationalist agendas is a proxy for a larger question about the relationship between literature and politics. Drawing from formulations of nationalism set by Myung Mi Kim, Benedict Anderson, and Pascale Casanova, Spahr’s study assumes that there are standard-language forms of literature that reinforce state agendas. Her interest, however, is in literature that uses nonstandard techniques to push against these conservative forms; her argument is that even these works wind up reinforcing the power of the state.

In the book’s most endearing moments, this historical materialist approach is also a personal fall-from-grace story. Spahr was trained to love leftist avant-garde literature in her PhD program at SUNY Buffalo, and there she cultivated the conviction that literature that used English in non-standard ways had the potential to change the world. But then, after her involvement in pro-sovereignty protests in Hawai’i in the 1990s and Occupy Oakland in the 2010s, she feared that it all was for naught. She began to question the conviction that literature could do anything, then she became increasingly sure of it, and finally she set out to investigate, ultimately realizing that her mission with “Du Bois’s Telegram” was to use historical examples to illustrate the impossibility of literature embodying resistance.

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The historical examples that Spahr illuminates in her study stretch from avant-garde modernism at the turn of the 20th century, through movement literatures of the 1960s and ’70s, to literature in English that includes other languages (published en masse at the turn of the 21st century), and ends with nationalist literature of the Bush era. The way the book is structured is telling. The first chapter is entitled “Turn of the Twenty-First Century: A Possible Literature of Resistance” and the last is entitled “Turn of the Twenty-First Century: The National Tradition.” Indeed, not only does the book start out with a sort of hopeful revolutionary potential that Spahr then illustrates is usurped into nationalism, but each chapter also follows this structure.

Spahr’s first example of “Stubborn Nationalism” is avant-garde modernism, which she describes as a response to “the large sweeping changes that colonialism brought to Europe.” This diverges from the more common story that casts modernism as a total political and aesthetic revolution (against, for example, the conservatism of the agrarian New Criticism). Instead, Spahr places modernism within a global framework that was at least working through issues of imperialism, even if it wasn’t anti-imperialist.

In line with many scholarly arguments about this period, “Du Bois’s Telegram” pinpoints a turn after World War II. If Gertrude Stein’s early writing is autonomous or resistant (Spahr thinks maybe it is in “Tender Buttons”), then her later work is unabashedly nationalist and also used directly for cultural diplomacy during the Cold War in the 1950s. Spahr connects studies about how private foundations worked with the State Department to studies exposing the FBI’s surveillance of black writers, to research on the larger impact of the cultural Cold War. For example, she describes how the CIA, taking a special interest in abstract modernism, used anticommunist advocacy groups and private foundations as conduits to fund little magazines, exhibitions, and conferences. Much of this ground has been covered by critics like Frances Stonor Saunders, Andrew Rubin, and Greg Barnhisel, but Spahr draws a bigger picture, illustrating how these phenomena affected decolonial movements in Africa, for example.

Part of her strategy of creating a more global account includes citing some scholarship (Lynn Mally’s “Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia,” for example) to show that US cultural diplomacy and Soviet cultural diplomacy were not so different from each other:

As the Soviet Union federalized support for the arts, the United States established the Works Progress Administration. As the Soviet Union tended to fund and organize not only national events such as the Soviet Writers’ Congresses, but also events like 1949’s Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace that was held in New York and the First International Peace Conference held in Paris, so the Congress for Cultural Freedom organized the International Day of Resistance to Dictatorship and War in Paris the same year.

Putting these histories together is one of the many ways that Spahr refuses to either celebrate or condemn. The book never blames or takes sides. The tone is factual — even the most autonomous and resistant literature could not stay that way for long. This is not because individual writers grow greedy, complacent, or eschew previous commitments once the government supports them. Whether someone is a puppet for the state or whether she tries to use state funds to resist state agendas is not the point of Spahr’s study. Rather, the way that potentially revolutionary or resistant literature is neutralized or repressed through its nationalist packaging is what is at stake here. This focus is important for rebutting arguments about artists’ individual “agency,” even if they are part of conferences, cultural centers, and publications funded by the government.

The factual, blameless tone is also helpful for examining our contemporary moment, when nationalist projects have begun to incorporate literature that could be considered both avant-garde and political. (An emblematic moment of this trend is when Fluxus artist Alison Knowles and conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith read at the White House in 2011.) Spahr attributes this transformation of the avant-garde into nationalism to a few factors, notably the ways that higher education (and MFA programs in particular) have helped to consolidate nationalist literature. She also highlights the influence of literary nonprofits and foundations that support leftist missions with government funds.

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Perhaps the biggest contribution of “Du Bois’s Telegram” is its research and writing on movement literatures. The revolutionary potential of literatures of the 1960s and ’70s that worked in tandem with Black Power or the Chicano movement, for example, is strong, and Spahr nourishes the flames on these pages. Spahr beautifully explicates Gwendolyn Brooks’s “RIOT” and Rodolfo Gonzales’s “I Am Joaquin,” illustrating their autonomy, their political impact, and their importance. She writes that they “very literally change the map” of the divide between modernism and the New Critical conservatism by offering a separate form and possibility. This moment of revolutionary resistance is short-lived, but instead of claiming that it died off, Spahr illustrates how, due to private funding, co-optation, gentrification, and privatization, it morphs into multicultural literature concerned with inclusion but not resistance. Spahr illustrates this process most clearly in her discussion of Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School, which ended up funded and monitored by both the CIA and FBI, ultimately going from an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist arts space to a riot prevention program.

Just before she tells the story of how this organization and others were neutralized, Spahr makes what I consider to be a radical move for a scholar: she argues for not just more scholarly attention to this type of literature, but also that scholars allow the potential of movement literature to remain alive within their scholarship. She writes, “If scholars considered movement literature as a whole, rather than as a series of racially segregated subcategories such as Black Arts and Nuyorican and so on, it would be the dominant U.S. literary tradition in the last half of the twentieth century.” This provocation is immense in that it would change the way we read, teach, and study. Spahr continues,

In short, the moment that produced not only Gonzales’s “I Am Joaquin” and Brooks’s “Riot” is a moment when a more militant politics put a certain pressure on U.S. literary production and out of this pressure came works that were calls for revolution that challenged racialized and gendered universalism, were frequently contestatory towards capitalism, and refused accommodationist inclusions.

We should see these works as dominant, Spahr argues; we should amplify them in our works today, perhaps allowing them to live continuously.

I teach a class about literature and politics that jumps around the 20th century to cover politically resistant texts even though it is listed as a survey period coverage class for “American Literature: Post-Civil War to Present.” In this class, we read a few of the texts Spahr is also interested in here: Stein’s “Tender Buttons,” some works from the Black Arts Movement. I do what many teachers do; I try to allow these moments of potential to build on each other. It sounds like Spahr does this in her classes also. The parts of “Du Bois’s Telegram” that discuss students and classrooms are revelatory. For example, Spahr learns the importance of polyvocality in Stein’s work from her students at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, who point out that it is written in a sort of pidgin that uses techniques from oral literary traditions. These insights activate modernist texts anew.

It is in these small moments in the classroom and in the scholarly ignition of seemingly dead works that I see glimmers of revolution, or at least hopeful possibility of one. Without attention to these moments, “Du Bois’s Telegram” can be construed as so deeply pessimistic, not only about the potential of literature, but also about the possibilities of literary scholarship, that the whole project rings of a sort of conservativism. In this book, Spahr takes her job as a critic to mean reporting the facts, and the facts might be summarized this way: literature has not done anything in the 20th century, and in this current climate, it is impossible to see how it could make change in the future. Spahr admits that her matter-of-fact tone about the inner workings of the poetry world seems as if she has “been visiting from a foreign land,” and this can feel somewhat disconcerting, especially since in addition to being a scholar, Spahr is a poet of leftist resistance.

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Spahr’s first scholarly book, “Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity” (University of Alabama Press, 2001) argued that there are certain works of formal innovation — works that use non-standard English — that are politically resistant, even “anarchic,” because they suggest a certain type of reading. There she argues that works by authors like Gertrude Stein, Harryette Mullen, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, “[allow] readers self-governance and autonomy, where the reading act is given as much authority as the authoring act.” These sorts of texts “concentrate on possibilities of response to various forms of oppression”; Spahr argues that they present a “way out of the abyss” by creating autonomous communities of reader-authors. This notion of autonomy is very different from the way she defines the same term in “Du Bois’s Telegram.” Whereas in “Everybody’s Autonomy” it could be a potential collective practice of literary production and study, in the newer book autonomous literature is “free from outside interference, from the market, from the government.” The interlocutors and influences in “Du Bois’s Telegram” are scholars like Anderson, Casanova, and Franco Moretti, who are interested in large-scale shifts rather than reading practices or the potential of individual works of literature.

This is where the personal narrative threaded into “Du Bois’s Telegram” is helpful. What happened between then and now is a deep leftist melancholia for Spahr and many of us; this bleak moment requires new methods. But is there some way to keep both impulses? Can we celebrate the potentiality of literary works — even activate them through scholarship — while also remaining attentive to larger structures and social formations that work to neutralize or redirect that potential? Is the pessimism in “Du Bois’s Telegram” a crucial part of the dialectic of revolutionary thought or is it a stagnant factuality that forecloses revolution altogether?

There are some answers at the end of “Du Bois’s Telegram” when Spahr combats claims about the revolutionary potential of books like Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen: An American Lyric,” Layli Long Soldier’s “Whereas,” and Solmaz Sharif’s “Look” (works that could seemingly fall under the celebratory argument of “Everybody’s Autonomy”). Spahr explains that though these meaningful avant-garde and political books are getting more attention from the general public than works like these have in the past, their reach is still limited. She points out that they are all published by one press, all the writers came out of MFA programs, and “[t]he audience for this work is institutional and professional.”

Her claims about audience rely on recent NEA reports that show that Americans do not read much literature (she leans on the decade study which spans 2002–2012). However, more recent NEA studies have shown that poetry reading has rebounded. Between 2012 and 2017, 76 percent more adults reported that they read poetry and that number seems to have the highest concentration in young people (adults 18–24). My guess is that this number has to do with Instapoets, but also with politically resistant poets like Claudia Rankine. “Citizen” made its way into the public sphere in a much larger way than “Du Bois’s Telegram” acknowledges, charting best-seller lists, earning awards outside of the poetry category, and even provoking news stories with a flash of its cover at a Trump rally. The moments created around contemporary political poetry are akin to what Ernst Bloch calls concrete utopias, and what José Esteban Muñoz takes up as the realm of educated hope, “an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.” It is possible for critics to take up this mantle and show how literature can at times successfully skirt an Adorno-esque notion that non-political art is actually fostering political awareness. But that doesn’t mean that they have to argue that merely reading “Citizen” or “Look” will decolonize or instantiate liberation either.

The last chapter of “Du Bois’s Telegram” asserts, “[l]iterature has been sequestered into irrelevance. The FBI no longer has to develop files on writers because the terms on which literature is written, who it is written for, and where it is possible to write it have changed.” Certainly, the book has masterfully told the story of the terms, ownership, and location of literary production. But irrelevance? Spahr does not quite let this be the last word, lightly reminding us that “[t]here are all these things literature can do,” even if it hasn’t yet, and ends the book with a short conclusion containing just a shard of something else. The educated hope that ends “Du Bois’s Telegram” is based on a nod to Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s theory of the undercommons and Kristin Ross’s writing about the Paris Commune. If only all those MFAs without secure academic jobs — a similar situation to that which helped spark the Paris Commune when more than two-thirds of the graduates from the École des Beaux-Arts could not get work as artists — would start the revolution today, perhaps they could change these formations, Spahr suggests. I can’t help but think of all those disgruntled literature PhDs in and outside the academy who take the category of scholarship as a site of potentiality and autonomy, too. Whether we call it “study,” scholarship, literature, or some form of utopia imbued in any of these forms, revolutionary potential is not only a matter of facts but of collective imagination.

This review originally appeared on the Los Angeles Review of Books .

 

Judge Blocks Trump Rules for Detained Migrant Kids

LOS ANGELES — A U.S. judge on Friday blocked new Trump administration rules that would enable the government to keep immigrant children in detention facilities with their parents indefinitely.

U.S. District Court Judge Dolly Gee in Los Angeles said the rules conflict with a 1997 settlement agreement that requires the government to release immigrant children caught on the border as quickly as possible to relatives in the U.S. and says they can only be held in facilities licensed by a state.

Gee said the Flores agreement — named for a teenage plaintiff — will remain in place and govern the conditions for all immigrant children in U.S. custody, including those with their parents.

“The agreement has been necessary, relevant, and critical to the public interest in maintaining standards for the detention and release of minors arriving at the United States’ borders,” the judge wrote in her decision.

“Defendants willingly negotiated and bound themselves to these standards for all minors in its custody, and no final regulations or changed circumstances yet merit termination of the Flores agreement.”

The Trump administration sought to end the agreement and issued the new rules with the hope of detaining immigrant children in facilities with their parents. The move came as part of a broader crackdown on asylum seekers arriving on the Southwest border, many of them families with children from Central America.

The Flores agreement allows for the settlement to be phased out when rules are issued for the custody of immigrant children that are consistent with its terms.

Attorneys who represent detained immigrant children welcomed Gee’s position, which she initially conveyed to them in a draft ruling during a court hearing Friday. They said they wouldn’t let the administration use young immigrants to try to deter migrants fleeing desperate conditions from seeking asylum in the United States.

“We will continue vigorously to defend the rights of detained immigrant children,” Neha Desai, director of immigration at the National Center for Youth Law, told reporters.

The Department of Justice said the administration is disappointed with the ruling because it did what was required to implement the new rules.

Attorneys for both sides said they would be willing to meet and discuss whether some aspects of the rules aren’t subject to the settlement. Gee gave them until Oct. 4 to do so.

More than 400,000 immigrants traveling in family groups with children have been stopped on the Mexico border in the past year.

In its crackdown, the Trump administration has had migrants await immigration court hearings in Mexico and required those who cross through a third country to seek refuge there before applying for asylum in the U.S.

Immigrant advocates have decried the changes, which threaten asylum for many people fleeing violence in their countries.

What Isn’t Mentioned About the Trump-Ukraine ‘Scandal’

This article was originally published on Consortium News.

The most crucial aspects of the Trump-Ukraine “scandal,” which has led to impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump, are not being told, even by Republicans.

Trump was very likely motivated by politics if he indeed withheld military aid to Ukraine in exchange for Kiev launching an investigation into Democratic presidential frontrunner Joe Biden, though the transcript of the call released by the White House between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelinsky does not make certain such a quid-pro-quo.

But what’s not being talked about in the mainstream is the context of this story, which shows that, politics aside, Biden should indeed be investigated in both Ukraine and in the United States.

We know from the leaked, early 2014 telephone conversation between Victoria Nuland, then assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, and Geoffrey Pyatt, then U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, that then Vice President Biden played a role in “midwifing” the U.S.-backed overthrow of an elected Ukrainian government soon after that conversation.

That’s the biggest crime in this story that isn’t being told. The illegal overthrow of a sovereign government.

As booty from the coup, the sitting vice president’s son, Hunter Biden, soon got a seat on the board of Ukraine’s biggest gas producer, Burisma Holdings. This can only be seen as a transparently neocolonial maneuver to take over a country and install one’s own people. But Biden’s son wasn’t the only one.

A family friend of then Secretary of State John Kerry also joined Burisma’s board. U.S. agricultural giant Monsanto got a Ukrainian contract soon after the overthrow.  And the first, post-coup Ukrainian finance minister was an American citizen, a former State Department official, who was given Ukrainian citizenship the day before she took up the post.

After a Ukrainian prosecutor began looking into possible corruption at Burisma, Biden openly admitted at a conference last year that as vice president he withheld a $1 billion credit line to Ukraine until the government fired the prosecutor. As Biden says himself, it took only six hours for it to happen.

Exactly what Biden boasted of doing is what the Democrats are now accusing Trump of doing, and it isn’t clear if Trump got what he wanted as Biden did.

Threats, Bribes and Blackmail

That leads to another major part of this story not being told: the routine way the U.S. government conducts foreign policy: with bribes, threats and blackmail.

Trump may have withheld military aid to seek a probe into Biden, but it is hypocritically being framed by Democrats as an abuse of power out of the ordinary. But it is very much ordinary.

Examples abound. The threat of withholding foreign aid was wielded against nations on the UN Security Council in 1991 when the U.S. sought authorization for the First Gulf War. Yemen had the temerity to vote against. A member of the U.S. delegation told Yemen’s ambassador: “That’s the most expensive vote you ever cast.” The U.S. then cut $70 million in foreign aid to the Middle East’s poorest nation, and Saudi Arabia repatriated about a million Yemeni workers.

The same thing happened before the Second Gulf War in 2003, as revealed by whistleblower Katharine Gun (who will appear Friday night on CN Live!). Gun leaked an NSA memo that showed the U.S. sought help from its British counterpart in signals intelligence to spy on the missions of Security Council members to get “leverage” over them to influence their vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq.

In 2001 the U.S. threatened the end of military and foreign aid if nations did not conclude bilateral agreements granting immunity to U.S. troops before the International Criminal Court.

More recently, the U.S. used its muscle against Ecuador, including dangling a $10 billion IMF loan, in exchange for the expulsion of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from its London embassy.

This is how the U.S. conducts “diplomacy.”

As former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali wrote:

“Coming from a developing country, I was trained extensively in international law and diplomacy and mistakenly assumed that the great powers, especially the United States, also trained their representatives in diplomacy and accepted the value of it. But the Roman Empire had no need for diplomacy. Nor does the United States. Diplomacy is perceived by an imperial power as a waste of time and prestige and a sign of weakness.”

This fundamental corruption of U.S. foreign policy, which includes overthrowing elected governments, is matched only by the corruption of a political system that exalts partisan political power above all else. Exposing this deep-seated and longstanding corruption should take precedence over scoring partisan scalps, whether Biden’s or Trump’s.

Immigration Officials’ Unholy Reliance on Google Translate

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.

It’s a common internet experience: throw a foreign phrase into Google Translate or any other online translation tool and out comes a farcical approximation of the real thing.

That’s why many experts — even Google itself — caution against relying on the popular Google Translate for complex tasks. Google advises users that its machine translation service is not “intended to replace human translators.”

Yet the U.S. government has decided that Google Translate and other machine translation tools are appropriate for one task: helping to decide whether refugees should be allowed into the United States.

An internal manual produced by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency charged with admitting immigrants, instructs officers who sift through non-English social media posts of refugees that “the most efficient approach to translate foreign language contents is to utilize one of the many free online language translation services provided by Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines.” The manual includes step-by-step instructions for Google Translate.

The manual was obtained by the International Refugee Assistance Project through a public records request and shared with ProPublica.

Language experts said the government’s reliance on automatic translation to dig into refugee social media posts was troubling and likely to be error-filled since the services are not designed to parse nuance or recognize slang. The government may misconstrue harmless comments or miss an actually threatening one.

“It’s naive on the part of government officials to do that,” said Douglas Hofstadter, a professor of cognitive science and comparative literature at Indiana University at Bloomington, who has studied language and analogies. “I find it deeply disheartening and stupid and shortsighted, personally.”

Asked about the agency’s use of machine translation tools, USCIS spokeswoman Jessica Collins said in an emailed statement that review of publicly available social media information “is a common sense measure to strengthen our vetting procedures.”

USCIS has stated that “information collected from social media, by itself, will not be a basis to deny refugee resettlement.”

In 2017, Facebook apologized after its machine-translation service translated a post by a Palestinian man that said “good morning” as “hurt them” in English or “attack them” in Hebrew.

As a test, ProPublica asked language professors to copy and paste tweets written in casual language into Google Translate and compare the results with how they would interpret the tweets.

One recent Urdu-language post on Twitter included a sentence that Mustafa Menai, who teaches Urdu at the University of Pennsylvania, translated as “I have been spanked a lot and have also gathered a lot of love (from my parents).”

Google translated the sentence as “The beating is too big and the love is too windy.”

The Trump administration has vastly expanded the role of social media in deciding whether people can move or travel to the United States. Refugee advocates say the government’s reliance on machine-translation tools raises further concerns about how immigration officers make important decisions affecting applicants’ lives and U.S. national security.

USCIS has itself found that automated translation falls short in understanding social media posts. An undated draft internal review of a USCIS pilot social media vetting program concluded that “automatic foreign language translation was not sufficient.”

A separate pilot review conducted in June 2016 stated that “native Arabic language and subject matter expertise in regional culture, religion, and terrorism was needed to fully vet” two cases in which potentially derogatory social media information was found. The documents were published by the Daily Beast in January 2018.

The manual, much of which is redacted, only addresses procedures for a narrow subset of refugees: people whose spouses or parents have already been granted refugee status in the U.S., or so-called follow-to-join cases. In 2017, 1,679 follow-to-join refugees were admitted to the U.S., about 3% of total refugee admissions, according to government data.

“It defies logic that we would use unreliable tools to decide whether refugees can reunite with their families,” said Betsy Fisher, strategy director at IRAP. “We wouldn’t use Google Translate for our homework, but we are using it to keep refugee families separated.”

In a federal lawsuit in Washington state that is now in the discovery phase, IRAP is challenging the Trump administration’s suspension of the follow-to-join refugee program.

It is unclear how widely the manual’s procedures are used throughout USCIS, or if its procedures are identical to those used for vetting all refugees or other types of immigrants.

The manual is undated, but it was released to IRAP in response to a request for records created on or after Oct. 23, 2017.

USCIS did not respond to questions on whether the manual’s procedures are used to vet other refugees, when it was put into use or if it is still in use.

“The mission of USCIS first and foremost is to safeguard our homeland and the people in it,” Collins said. “Our first line of defense in these efforts is thorough, systematic vetting.”

In the 2018 fiscal year, USCIS conducted 11,740 social media screenings, according to an agency presentation.

The USCIS manual acknowledges that “occasionally,” online translation services may not be adequate for understanding “foreign text written in a dialect or colloquial usage,” but it leaves it up to individual officers to decide whether to request expert translation services.

Without foreign language fluency, an officer is unlikely to know whether a post needs additional review, said Rachel Levinson-Waldman, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice.

Google and Verizon, which owns Yahoo, did not respond to questions about the use of their services when vetting refugees. Emily Chounlamany, a Microsoft spokeswoman, said “the company has nothing to share on the matter.”

Language experts say satire is another problematic area. A recent satirical Persian-language tweet showed a picture of Iranian elites raising their hands, with text stating, “Whose child lives in America?” (The tweet is commentary on a recent controversy in Iran regarding high-ranking officials’ close relatives living in the West.) The text was translated by Google as “When will you taste America?” Microsoft’s result was: “Who is the American?”

“The thing about Persian and the Iranian culture is that people love to make jokes about anything,” said Sheida Dayani, who teaches Persian at Harvard University and instructs her students to avoid using Google Translate or similar tools for their assignments. “How are you going to translate it via Google Translate?”

Automated translation services are the “absolute wrong technology” for immigration officers making important decisions, Dayani said.

The use of translation tools has come up in other contexts. After a highway patrol trooper in Kansas conducted a warrantless search of a Mexican man’s car in 2017 by asking the man for consent to do so in Spanish via Google Translate, a U.S. district judge threw out the search evidence, finding that the defendant did not fully understand the officer’s commands and questions.

Google has touted improvements in its translation tool in recent years, most notably its use of “neural machine translation,” which it has gradually rolled out for more languages. Researchers in the Netherlands have found that while the neural machine translation method improves quality, it still struggles to accurately translate idioms.

One major problem with machine translation is that such tools do not understand text in the same way that a person would, Hofstadter said. Rather, they are engaged in “decoding” or “text substitution,” he said.

“When it involves anything that is subtle, you can never rely on it because you can never know if it’s going to make grotesque errors,” Hofstadter said.

Machine-translation services are typically trained by using texts that have already been translated, which tend to use more formal speech, for instance official United Nations documents, said David Guy Brizan, a professor at the University of San Francisco who researches natural language processing and machine learning.

Language iterates too quickly, especially among young people, for even sophisticated machine-translation services to keep up, Brizan said. He pointed to examples of English-language phrases currently popular on social media such as “low-key” or “being canceled” as ones that automated services could struggle to convey.

He added that nontextual context like videos and pictures, the parties involved in a conversation and their relationship, and cultural references would be completely lost on machine translation.

“It requires a cultural literacy across languages, across generations, that is sort of impossible to keep up with,” he said. “You can think of these translation programs acting as your parents or grandparents.”

Rachel Thomas, director of the Center for Applied Data Ethics at the University of San Francisco, said that while machine-translation capabilities are improving, anyone depending on algorithms or computers should think carefully about the recourse for people wronged by those systems’ mistakes.

Refugees rejected for admission can request a decision review, but advocates say they are typically given little detail as to why they were rejected.

Efforts to scrutinize social media posts of some people trying to enter the United States began under the Obama administration, and they were encouraged by Democrats and Republicans in Congress. USCIS launched a social media division within its Fraud Detection and National Security division in July 2016, building on pilot programs operating since 2015.

The Trump administration has dramatically increased social media collection as part of a push for “extreme vetting” of people entering the country. In May, the State Department updated its visa forms to request social media identifiers from most U.S. visa applicants worldwide.

In September, the Department of Homeland Security published a notice stating it intended to request social media information from a broad swath of applicants, including people seeking U.S. citizenship or permanent residence, refugees and asylees.

Jeff Kao contributed to this story.

Protest Alone Won’t Save Our Planet

We can all use a shot of hope. I got one from 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and the disproportionately youthful masses—4 million across 150 cities worldwide—who came out for climate sanity last week. I listened online to the speech Thunberg delivered to more than 300,000 mostly young people in lower Manhattan on Friday. She spoke eloquently about the supreme ecological danger we face, thanks to the relentless pursuit of profit and to the insincere assurances and pathetic inaction of politicians and policymakers the world over:

We have not taken to the streets, sacrificing our education, for the adults and politicians to take selfies with us and to tell us that they really, really, really admire what we do. We are doing this to wake the leaders up. We are doing this to get them to act. We deserve a safe future. Is that really too much to ask? … We will hold those who are most responsible for this crisis accountable and we will make the world leaders act. … Why should we study for a future that is being taken away from us? That is being sold for profit. … Everywhere I have been, the situation is more or less same. The people in power, their beautiful words are the same. … The empty promises are the same. The lies are the same, and the inaction is the same.

Thunberg inspired me to walk out of my Chicago apartment building and make my way to the student climate strike at the Loop. There, I beheld a vast procession of mostly young people, including high school and even grade-school students, chanting and holding up signs with pithy slogans expressing a passionate desire to help keep the planet safe for humans and other living beings. The young people’s chants and cheers drowned out the roar of the L-trains above. I got in the middle of the march, talking to kids, asking them how their teachers felt about their afternoon off school (many were supportive), querying them, not as a journalist looking for a story, but as an old guy seeking an infusion of hope and energy from people who haven’t become as jaded, cynical and defeated as most of my generational cohorts.

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It was good to take a cue from the kids, to turn off the computer and come out into the streets. When I first came of “radical” political age in the late 1970s, my fellow late new lefties and I were all about ecology, sensing that humanity was entering a period of environmental crisis. We read Rachel Carson, Edward Abbey and Barry Commoner, among other clarion voices telling us that Homo sapiens needed to call off its capital- and government-led war on a livable planet.

Many of us got lost, turning away from the earth that bears ever angrier witness to our destructive capitalist and industrial ways. I got caught up in the quest for a career and working on important issues that aren’t going to matter all that much if we don’t act soon to avert environmental collapse; after all, there’s no social justice or democracy on a dead planet. This was a mistake.

Still, I am not utterly devoid of lessons worth passing on to younger people from previous decades of political engagement and observation. One chant that history would not let me join in on Friday channeled popular anger into the nation’s empty, savagely time-staggered and corporate-captive electoral rituals. “Politicians take note,” the chant went, “students will rise up and vote.”

To what end? There has been no greater progressive delusion and no bigger graveyard of social movements in American history than U.S. candidate-centered electoral politics. Voting for a Democrat who sounds like he or she cares about the environment fixes nothing. It can actually make things worse, by creating an illusion that one has meaningfully advanced hope and change when one has really just helped put deceptive new clothes on the soulless empire of ecocide. Candidate Barack Obama claimed he would help stop global warming and thereby make the ocean stop rising. As president, Obama stealthily championed fracking and offshore drilling, along with the national surveillance and police state that dismantled the Occupy camps and cordoned off the Standing Rock water and climate protectors. Since leaving office, “clean power” Obama has boasted to oil company executives and managers about his role in boosting so-called American energy independence by expanding domestic U.S. oil and gas production. He was a green president, all right—green, as in serving those with money and reaping the cash rewards after leaving office. He helped green-wash capital’s war on a livable planet, giving it counterfeit progressive cover. Now he tells Thunberg that he and she are “a team.”

A president Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren will not seriously confront climate collapse. Only a Bernie Sanders presidency holds serious promise in that regard, and the carbon-invested and addicted corporate and financial powers that be, within and beyond the Democratic Party, are not going to let such a thing occur.

Impeachment also won’t get us out of our environmental mess. In fact, in the days since Thunberg’s speech in Battery Park, the now distinctly possible coming impeachment of Donald Trump took over the news cycle. The climate issue was trumped yet again in the dominant media-politics culture of the world’s most powerful and environmentally ruinous nation. (Even on Friday, the massive student climate protests were not mentioned until 10 minutes into “CBS Evening News,” preceded by reports of a bus crash and the New England Patriots’ firing of its star wide receiver, Antonio Brown.)

The president richly deserves impeachment, but the Republican-controlled Senate is too afraid of his white nationalist base to remove him, and removing him would only put the Christian fascist Mike Pence in the White House. The notion of impeaching the eco-fascist Trump for his most egregious sin—accelerating the project of turning the planet into a giant greenhouse gas chamber—is, of course, completely off the table.

Protests are not without limits. They can move one forward on the path to seriously confronting concentrated wealth and power, but they can also serve as pressure-reducing safety valves, providing emotionally potent illusions of popular power and functioning as strange vehicles of incorporation and co-optation. The deadly system marches on, without serious disruption of its inner workings. As Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges reflects, protests “can also be empty political theater” and “can be used to distance ourselves from a repugnant political figure such as Donald Trump, while leaving us silent and complicit when the same policies are carried out by a supposed progressive such as Barack Obama.”

Things get serious when you go beyond protest to resistance by deciding, to use the young Free Speech activist Mario Savio’s words more than a half-century ago, that “the operation of the machine [has] become so odious … [that] you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus—and … make it stop. … You’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”

If that time hasn’t arrived by now, it never will. The machine—“modern” global and militarized state capitalism—has gone far beyond odious. It is literally exterminist, placing prospects for a decent and organized human existence at terminal risk. Capital and its allies and servants within and beyond governments are pushing us ever closer to irreversible environmental tipping points.

“You have stolen my dreams and childhood with your empty words,” Thunberg told world leaders Monday at the United Nations. “Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”

Poignant and heartbreaking words, truthful words, but the grim rulers are not moved. The audacity of their cynicism is boundless. Their corporations and financial institutions are pathological by design. “Speaking truth to power” is a waste of time. It is dysfunctional. It isn’t about waking up our so-called leaders. Whatever their varying subjective standpoints, our money-mad masters’ objective position renders them annihilationist and thus evil. The world capitalist system depends on constant and relentless growth, the endless pillaging and commodification of the earth, to sustain their holy rate of profit. Accumulation is the reigning investor-class god. The rulers can no more break free from its addictive power than Ahab could break free from his compulsion to slay Moby Dick. If humanity must become the Pequod, capital says, so be it.

Ecocide is a capital crime. Power must be shifted from the national and global directorate of money to the popular and natural commons. The owners won’t give it up of their own accord. It will have to be taken from them. We will rebel radically, deeply and widely, and over a sustained period of time, or we will pass from the earth, killed off by our failure to confront class rule. It isn’t, contra Savio, just about showing “the people who run and own the machine” that you want to be free. It’s about achieving freedom by dismantling the class-rule machine and replacing it with a new democratic social and environmental order, a new set of social relations working within and for, not against, the web of life.

U.K.’s Boris Johnson Denies He’s Inciting Violence Against Brexit Foes

LONDON — British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Friday rebuffed allegations that he was inciting violence by accusing his Brexit opponents of “surrender” and “betrayal,” saying the only way to calm the simmering tensions was to stop delaying and leave the European Union.

Johnson, a Conservative, took power two months ago with a “do-or-die” promise that Britain will leave the EU on the scheduled date of Oct. 31, even if there is no divorce deal to cushion the economic consequences.

With talks between the U.K. and the EU showing little sign of progress, Johnson’s foes in Parliament are determined to avoid a no-deal exit. Economists say leaving without an agreement would disrupt trade with the EU, plunge the country into recession and — according to Britain’s government watchdog — potentially interrupt the supply of essential medicines for patients in Britain.

During raucous, ill-tempered parliamentary debates this week, Johnson said postponing the country’s departure would “betray” the people, referred to an opposition law ordering a Brexit delay as the “Surrender Act” and brushed off concerns that his forceful language might endanger legislators as “humbug.”

Opponents said Johnson’s language could incite violence. But he said the country’s social tensions were being caused by Britain’s failure to leave the EU more than three years after voting in a referendum to do so.

“Once you do that, then so much of the heat and the anxiety will come out of the debate,” Johnson said Friday as he visited a hospital — part of unofficial campaigning for an election that looks set to come soon. “Get it done and then we will all be able to move on.”

In Parliament, Johnson was repeatedly reminded that a Labour lawmaker, Jo Cox, was stabbed and shot to death a week before the 2016 Brexit referendum by a far-right attacker shouting “Death to traitors!” Many British lawmakers say they routinely receive death threats now.

On Friday, a 36-year-old man, Michael Roby, was charged with a public order offense after a disturbance outside the office of Labour lawmaker Jess Phillips, an outspoken critic of Johnson. She said her staff had to be locked inside when a man kicked the door and tried to smash the windows on Thursday.

Amber Rudd, who served in Johnson’s Conservative Cabinet until she quit three weeks ago, said she was “disappointed and stunned” by Johnson’s dismissal of their concerns. She told the Evening Standard newspaper that the incendiary language used by Johnson and his aides “does incite violence.”

Johnson said that all threats to politicians were “absolutely appalling,” but defended his use of the term “Surrender Act.”

“The use of that kind of metaphor has been going on for hundreds of years,” he said.

Johnson argues that he is safeguarding the will of the public against the interests of the political establishment, which wants to remain in the EU. In truth, the British public and its politicians are both bitterly divided over how, or even whether, to leave the 28-nation bloc.

Church of England bishops appealed for calm amid the growing acrimony.

“We should speak to others with respect,” the bishops said in a statement. “And we should also listen … We should not denigrate, patronize or ignore the honest views of fellow citizens, but seek to respect their opinions, their participation in society, and their votes.”

Johnson’s divisive senior adviser Dominic Cummings also dismissed concerns that politicians’ heated rhetoric was polarizing society, and said the government’s plan to deliver Brexit on Oct. 31, come what may, would succeed.

“We are going to leave and we are going to win,” he said.

Meanwhile, the National Audit Office said in a report Friday there was still a “significant amount” of work to do to make sure Britain has enough medical drugs if it leaves the EU on Oct. 31 without a divorce deal.

It said additional shipping capacity chartered by the government might not be operational until the end of November, a month after the Brexit deadline. Of the more than 12,300 medicines licensed in the U.K., about 7,000 arrive from or via the EU, mostly across the English Channel.

Alan Boyd of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges said people with epilepsy were a particular concern in the event of any drug shortages, noting that “one seizure can have a life-changing impact.”

Johnson insists he wants to strike a deal, but is demanding significant changes to the withdrawal agreement negotiated by his predecessor, Theresa May. That deal was rejected three times by Britain’s Parliament.

Talks continued Friday with a meeting between U.K. Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay and EU negotiator Michel Barnier in Brussels.

The EU, however, says it is still waiting for concrete proposals from Britain on maintaining an open border between the U.K.’s Northern Ireland and EU member Ireland — the key sticking point.

Barnier said after the meeting that “it is essential that there is a fully operational solution in the Withdrawal Agreement to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland.”

Barclay said a Brexit agreement was possible, but “I think we are coming to a moment of truth in these negotiations.”

“We will see if there is political will on both sides,” he said.

Britain says it doesn’t want to submit detailed proposals too early, in case they leak, but plans to do so before an EU summit on Oct. 17-18.

EU Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker said a no-deal Brexit would be a “catastrophe” for both the U.K. and Europe — but if it happened, “the responsibility for this lies on the British side alone.”

Johnson’s political opponents have passed a law compelling the government to ask the EU for a delay to the U.K.’s exit if no deal has been struck by late October. Johnson is adamant he won’t do that — but also says he will comply with the law.

A former Conservative prime minister, John Major, said he feared the government would use constitutional trickery to get around the law by suspending it until after the Oct. 31 Brexit deadline.

International Development Secretary Alok Sharma refused to say whether the Cabinet had discussed such a tactic.

“We are absolutely going to comply with the law, we are working incredibly hard to get a deal and we will be leaving on Oct. 31,” he said.

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Maria Cheng in London, Raf Casert in Brussels and Geir Moulson in Berlin contributed to this report.

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Follow AP’s full coverage of Brexit and British politics at: https://www.apnews.com/Brexit

2nd Wave of Protests Caps Week Focused on Climate Action

BERLIN — Students took to the streets across the globe in the hundreds of thousands Friday for a second wave of worldwide protests demanding swift action on climate change.

The protests were inspired by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, who spoke to world leaders this week at a United Nations summit in New York.

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Friday’s rallies kicked off in New Zealand, where young people marched on Parliament in Wellington, holding one of the largest protests ever held there. Organizers in the capital were forced to change their security plans to accommodate the crowds, while thousands more marched in Auckland and other parts of the country.

On the other side of the planet, more than 100,000 rallied in Italy’s capital, Rome, where protesters held up signs with slogans such as “Change the system, not the climate” or just the word “Future.”

Marches took place in about 180 locations across Italy, including the country’s financial hub of Milan where one banner read “How dare you!” — the accusation Thunberg, 16, leveled at world leaders during her U.N. speech in New York on Monday. The Italian Education Ministry said students attending the event would not be penalized for missing school.

Fears about the impact of global warming on the younger generation were expressed by schoolchildren in Dharmsala, India. South Asia depends heavily on water from the Himalayan glaciers that are under threat from climate change.

In Berlin, activists from the Fridays for Future group braved persistent rain to protest against a package the German government recently agreed for cutting the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. Experts say the proposal falls far short of what’s needed if the world’s sixth biggest emitter is to meet the goal of the Paris climate accord.

Actor Javier Bardem joined dozens of young people in San Sebastian in one of several early demonstrations and rallies held across Spain on Friday morning ahead of evening demonstrations to be held in the major towns and cities. They are expected to draw big crowds, especially in Madrid and Barcelona.

Bardem was in San Sebastian to promote a documentary he worked on with Greenpeace.

Thunberg said she planned to attend a protest in Montreal.

“New Zealand leading the way into Friday nr 2 in #WeekForFuture,” she tweeted. “Good luck everyone striking around the world. Change is coming!!”

In Wellington, 18-year-old university student Katherine Rivers said it was great to see young people taking action and personal responsibility by marching.

“We need to stop pandering to some of the people who are making money off climate change. The big oil companies, the dairy industry etc.,” she said. “And make a change for the future of these kids that are here.”

While thousands of high school students elected to take time off school to protest, many adults also joined the marches. One of them was 83-year-old grandmother-of-three Violet McIntosh.

“It’s not my future we’re thinking about,” McIntosh said. She said it was time politicians should listen to young people like Thunberg, whom she described as “amazing.”

“She stood out there by herself to start it all. Millions of people are following her now,” McIntosh said. “She should be very proud of herself.”

In the Netherlands, where thousands joined a protest in The Hague, some participants acknowledged that getting politicians to take action against global warming was only part of the story.

“It’s also about then leading sustainable lives and making changes to make your life more sustainable,” said Utrecht University student Beth Meadows.

German government spokesman Steffen Seibert said part of the government’s plan is to encourage citizens to shift their behavior.

“People, and businesses too, know that over the coming years, step by step, behavior that harms the climate (and) causes a lot of emissions will have a higher price than before,” Seibert told reporters in Berlin.

___

Zampano reported from Rome. Nick Perry in Wellington, New Zealand, Mike Corder in The Hague, Netherlands, and Ciaran Giles in Madrid contributed to this report.

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Follow AP’s climate coverage at https://www.apnews.com/Climate

10 Ways the Climate Crisis and Militarism Are Intertwined

The environmental justice movement that is surging globally is intentionally intersectional, showing how global warming is connected to issues such as race, poverty, migration and public health. One area intimately linked to the climate crisis that gets little attention, however, is militarism. Here are some of the ways these issues—and their solutions—are intertwined.

1. The US military protects Big Oil and other extractive industries. The US military has often been used to ensure that US companies have access to extractive industry materials, particularly oil, around the world.The 1991 Gulf War against Iraq was a blatant example of war for oil; today the US military support for Saudi Arabia is connected to the US fossil fuel industry’s determination to control access to the world’s oil. Hundreds of the  US military bases spread around the world are in resource-rich regions and near strategic shipping lanes. We can’t get off the fossil fuel treadmill until we stop our military from acting as the world’s protector of Big Oil.

2.  The Pentagon is the single largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels in the world. If the Pentagon were a country, its fuel use alone would make it the 47th largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world, greater than entire nations such as Sweden, Norway or Finland. US military emissions come mainly from fueling weapons and equipment, as well as lighting, heating and cooling more than 560,000 buildings around the world.

3. The Pentagon monopolizes the funding we need to seriously address the climate crisis. We are now spending over half of the federal government’s annual discretionary budget on the military when the biggest threat to US national security is not Iran or China, but the climate crisis. We could cut the Pentagon’s current budget in half and still be left with a bigger military budget than China, Russia, Iran and North Korea combined. The $350 billion savings could then be funneled into the Green New Deal. Just one percent of the 2019 military budget of $716 billion would be enough to fund 128,879 green infrastructure jobs instead.

4. Military operations leave a toxic legacy in their wake. US military bases despoil the landscape, pollute the soil, and contaminate the drinking water. At the Kadena Base in Okinawa, the US Air Force has polluted local land and water with hazardous chemicals, including arsenic, lead, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), asbestos and dioxin.Here at home, the EPA has identified over 149 current or former military bases as SuperFund sites because Pentagon pollution has left local soil and groundwater highly dangerous to human, animal, and plant life. According to a 2017 government report, the Pentagon has already spent $11.5 billion on environmental cleanup of closed bases and estimates $3.4 billion more will be needed.

5. Wars ravage fragile ecosystems that are crucial to sustaining human health and climate resiliency. Direct warfare inherently involves the destruction of the environment, through bombings and boots-on-the-ground invasions that destroy the land and infrastructure. In the Gaza Strip, an area that suffered three major Israeli military assaults between 2008 and 2014. Israel’s bombing campaigns targeted sewage treatment and power facilities, leaving 97% of Gaza’s freshwater contaminated by saline and sewage, and therefore unfit for human consumption. In Yemen, the Saudi-led bombing campaign has created a humanitarian and environmental catastrophe, with more than 2,000 cases of cholera now being reported each day. In Iraq, environmental toxins left behind by the Pentagon’s devastating 2003 invasion include depleted uranium, which has left children living near US bases with an increased risk of congenital heart disease, spinal deformities,  cancer, leukemia, cleft lip and missing or malformed and paralyzed limbs.

6. Climate change is a “threat multiplier” that makes already dangerous social and political situations even worse. In Syria, the worst drought in 500 years led to crop failures that pushed farmers into cities, exacerbating the unemployment and political unrest that contributed to the uprising in 2011. Similar climate crises have triggered conflicts in other countries across the Middle East, from Yemen to Libya. As global temperatures continue to rise, there will be more ecological disasters, more mass migrations and more wars. There will also be more domestic armed clashes—including civil wars—that can spill beyond borders and destabilize entire regions. The areas most at risk are sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and South, Central and Southeast Asia.

7. US sabotages international agreements addressing climate change and war. The US has deliberately and consistently undermined the world’s collective efforts to address the climate crisis by cutting greenhouse gas emissions and speeding the transition to renewable energy. The US refused to join the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 Paris Climate Accord was the latest example of this flagrant disregard for nature, science, and the future. Similarly, the US refuses to join the International Criminal Court that investigates war crimes, violates international law with unilateral invasions and sanctions, and is withdrawing from nuclear agreements with Russia. By choosing to prioritize our military over diplomacy, the US sends the message that “might makes right” and makes it harder to find solutions to the climate crisis and military conflicts.

8. Mass migration is fueled by both climate change and conflict, with migrants often facing militarized repression. A 2018 World Bank Group report estimates that the impacts of climate change in three of the world’s most densely populated developing regions—sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America—could result in the displacement and internal migration of more than 140 million people before 2050. Already, millions of migrants from Central America to Africa to the Middle East are fleeing environmental disasters and conflict. At the US border, migrants are locked in cages and stranded in camps. In the Mediterranean, thousands of refugees have died while attempting dangerous sea voyages. Meanwhile, the arms dealers fuelling the conflicts in these regions are profiting handsomely from selling arms and building detention facilities to secure the borders against the refugees.

9. Militarized state violence is leveled against communities resisting corporate-led environmental destruction. Communities that fight to protect their lands and villages from oil drills, mining companies, ranchers, agribusiness, etc. are often met with state and paramilitary violence. We see this in the Amazon today, where indigenous people are murdered for trying to stop clear-cutting and incineration of their forests. We see it in Honduras, where activists like Berta Caceres have been gunned down for trying to preserve their rivers. In 2018, there were 164 documented cases of environmentalists murdered around the world. In the US, the indigenous communities protesting plans to build the Keystone oil pipeline in South Dakota were met by police who targeted the unarmed demonstrators with tear gas, bean-bag rounds, and water cannons—intentionally deployed in below-freezing temperatures. Governments around the world are expanding their state-of-emergency laws to encompass climate-related upheavals, perversely facilitating the repression of environmental activists who have been branded as “eco-terrorists” and who are subjected to counterinsurgency operations.

10. Climate change and nuclear war are both existential threats to the planet. Catastrophic climate change and nuclear war are unique in the existential threat they pose to the very survival of human civilization. The creation of nuclear weapons—and their proliferation—was spurred by global militarism, yet nuclear weapons are rarely recognized as a threat to the future of life on this planet. Even a very “limited” nuclear war, involving less than 0.5% of the world’s nuclear weapons, would be enough to cause catastrophic global climate disruption and a worldwide famine, putting up to 2 billion people at risk. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has set its iconic Doomsday Clock to 2 minutes to midnight, showing the grave need for the ratification of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The environmental movement and the anti-nuke movement need to work hand-in-hand to stop these threats to planetary survival.

To free up billions of Pentagon dollars for investing in critical environmental projects and to eliminate the environmental havoc of war, movements for a livable, peaceful planet need to put “ending war” at the top of the “must do” list.

Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. For a full understanding of the intersection between war and the climate, read Gar Smith’s War and Environmental Reader.