Chris Hedges's Blog, page 357

Facing Populist Assault, Global Elites Regroup in Davos

DAVOS, Switzerland—As the world’s financial and political elites convene here in the Swiss Alps for the World Economic Forum, their vision of ever-closer commercial and political ties is under attack — and the economic outlook is darkening.

Britain’s political system has been thrown into chaos as the country negotiates a messy divorce from the European Union.

Under President Donald Trump, the United States is imposing trade sanctions on friend and foe alike, and the government is paralyzed by a partial shutdown over immigration policy that forced Trump and a high-level U.S. delegation to cancel the trip to Davos.

A year after getting a standing ovation from the elites at Davos, French President Emmanuel Macron is sinking in the polls as he contends with “yellow vest” protesters who have taken to the streets to call for higher wages and fairer pensions. Nationalist political movements are gaining strength across Europe.

And the economic backdrop is worrying: experts are downgrading their forecasts for global growth this year amid rising interest rates and tensions over trade.

“Judging by the state of the world right now 10 years on from the financial crisis, and the dysfunctional state of global politics I would suggest that these annual events have achieved the sum total of diddly squat,” said Michael Hewson, chief market analyst at CMC Markets UK.

The collective worries have sent a shudder through global financial markets: The Dow Jones industrial average is down nearly 9 percent from Oct. 3.

David Dollar, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, said the buckling market “represents a lot of anxiety that we’re seeing from the corporate elite who meet at Davos.”

How times have changed.

For most of the past quarter century, the worldview symbolized by the World Economic Forum — of ever-freer world trade and closer ties between countries — had dominated. Then came a backlash from Americans and Europeans whose jobs were threatened by low-wage competition from countries like China and who felt alienated at home by wealth inequality and immigration.

In 2016, U.S. voters elected Trump, who advocated restricting immigration and scaling back free trade, and the British chose to leave the EU.

“The winners from globalization have had the megaphone,” said Paul Sheard, a senior fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard University’s Kennedy School. “The losers have been somewhat silent, but now are starting to express themselves through the ballot box and through the political process.”

The Davos confab has always been vulnerable to snark: hedge fund billionaires flying into Davos in fuel-guzzling private jets to discuss the threat of climate change; millionaire CEOs discussing inequality while downing cocktails; endless conversations between people who describe themselves as “thought leaders.”

First among them, perhaps, is WEF founder Klaus Schwab. In an interview Sunday, he stressed the need for more global, “forward-looking” cooperation and a “human-centered” approach to technology as populism feeds on fears of a possible economic downturn in many parts of the globe.

Globalization produced millions of “winners” over the years, but also “has left certain people behind,” Schwab said at the Davos conference center, where his teams gave pre-event tours to delegations ahead of the formal start on Tuesday.

“In the age of social media, you cannot afford any more to leave anyone behind,” he said.

Access to the elite gathering, for businesspeople anyway, doesn’t come cheap. It requires WEF membership, which starts at 60,000 Swiss francs ($60,259) and rises up to the “Strategic Partner” level at 600,000 ($602,605). Getting into the Davos event requires an invitation and an extra fee, which WEF spokesman Oliver Cann said is 27,000 francs ($27,117) per person.

That’s just for corporate chieftains. Civil society, non-governmental groups, U.N. leaders and governmental officials don’t pay: They get in free. Lodging during high-rent Davos week, however, is another matter.

Although Davos is seen as a redoubt for global elites, populists have come, too. Trump got a polite reception when he showed up in 2018, and he had planned to come again this year before the shutdown intervened. Brazil’s newly installed president, the populist Jair Bolsonaro, will attend this year.

Even with some key Western leaders missing, organizers say a record 300 government ministers and nearly 60 heads of state or government including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan will attend. About 3,000 people attendees overall are expected this week.

Davos serves as a global stage for world leaders and executives, and the conference center transforms into a warren of public and private meetings. Executives talk possible deals. Government leaders either meet and greet each other or seek to iron out differences — mostly quietly. Academics and chiefs of non-governmental groups speak out in webcast panel sessions or comb corridors looking to rub elbows with decision-makers.

“They make the trek up to Davos, yes, to drink champagne and to wheel and deal and everything else,” said Sheard, who participates in WEF projects. “But there is sort of an attempt at purification and thinking, ‘We need to do a better job.’”

Gabriel Sterne, head of global macro research at Oxford Economics, argues that top economic decision-makers have much to atone for.

In a report this month, Sterne noted that most major economies performed dramatically worse than expected after the 2007-2009 Great Recession. He blames many central banks — besides the U.S. Federal Reserve — for not responding to sluggish growth more aggressively with easy money policies. And, Sterne says, politicians should have juiced growth with tax cuts and higher government spending.

“There was genuine underperformance by the big institutions,” he said. The result is a populist backlash. “If you don’t do anything about your failings, they can come back and bite you.”

Sterne worries that the populist response “could trigger radical and ill-conceived” policies that overshoot and drive up inflation and swell government budget deficits.

The ride could get even bumpier. The World Economic Forum is focusing on what it calls the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” — a series of rapid advances in technology and medicine expected to transform society. Advances in robotics and artificial intelligence could further threaten jobs and feed the populist revolt.

“We seem to be on the cusp of an incredible new era of automation and critical breakthroughs in health sciences,” Sheard said. “But how do we manage this process? And how do we manage it in a way that doesn’t leave millions of people behind?”

___

Wiseman reported from Washington. Pan Pylas in London contributed to this report.

The Battery Boom Heralds the End of Fossil Fuels

Billions of dollars are being invested worldwide in the developing battery boom, involving research into storage techniques to use the growing surpluses of cheap renewable energy now becoming available.

Recent developments in batteries are set to sweep aside the old arguments about renewables being intermittent, dismissing any need to continue building nuclear power plants and burning fossil fuels to act as a back-up when the wind does not blow, or the sun does not shine.

Batteries as large as the average family house and controlled by digital technology are being positioned across electricity networks. They are being charged when electricity is in surplus and therefore cheap, and the power they store is resold to the grid at a higher price during peak periods.

According to Bloomberg, around US $600 billion will be invested in large-scale batteries over the next 20 years to provide back-up to the grid and power for the expected boom in electric cars.

The cost of batteries is also expected to fall by 50% in the next decade, following the same pattern as the drop in cost of solar panels.

“The generally-held belief that there was no way to store electricity has been disproved. The battery boom means it is now just a question of finding the easiest and most economic way of doing it”

It is already financially viable for individual businesses to install batteries to buy electricity when it is cheap, so as to use it during peak periods. Two recent examples are the English premier league club Arsenal FC and a hotel in Edinburgh, the Scottish capital.

For Arsenal it makes sense to have a giant battery under its London stadium to store cheap power for use when its floodlights are needed during matches which are usually played when electricity prices are at their peak.

In Edinburgh, where there is often a surplus of wind power at night, the batteries provide cheap power for the 200-bedroom Premier Inn hotel in the morning and evening rush. In both cases the capital cost of the batteries is soon repaid in lower power costs.

Currently most large batteries are made of lithium, a relatively scarce and expensive mineral. Large investments are being made to find a way of making lithium batteries cheaper and more efficient, and the search is on for less expensive materials that can also be used to store electricity in battery form.

In Belgium, ironically on the site of a former coalmine, five large experimental batteries have been installed near Brussels to test the best technologies.

New possibilities

One of the latest advances is to use another rare metal, vanadium. Vanadium flow batteries are large static batteries that last for decades and can be charged and discharged completely thousands of times. They are not portable, but last for years without deterioration and are increasingly being deployed by national grids to boost supply during peak demand. A Canadian company, CellCube, has just sold a large battery plant to France.

This has been hailed as one of the most promising technologies in energy storage, but there are many other possibilities under development including high-energy magnesium batteries and lithium-air batteries, which are an advance on the current lithium-ion versions used in electric cars and for grid storage.

There are also new types of chemical batteries under trial as large-scale static installations which allow the grid to pump out more power at peak times.

The key battle for all these technologies is beating rivals on price. This means not just other battery types, but other options under development for storing energy. Surplus energy from renewables is also being used to produce hydrogen, while the surplus from solar power is often stored as heat.

In the first few years of this century the generally-held belief that there was no way to store electricity has been disproved. The battery boom means it is now just a question of finding the easiest and most economic way of doing it, and in doing so making a giant step towards a carbon-free future.

Trump Cannot Be Allowed to Use Immigrants as Bargaining Chips

Update: Confirming earlier reports, President Donald Trump on Saturday announced a proposal to end his shutdown that includes $5.7 billion for his “border wall” in exchange for temporary protections for DACA and TPS recipients—a proposal one advocacy group deemed a “cynical ploy” issued by “a president who makes false claims about violence at the border and demonizes immigrants, regardless of status, at every opportunity.”

In his address from the White House, which began just after 4pm ET, Trump said the nearly $6 billion would allow for “steel barriers” in “high priority areas,” and asserted that “walls are the opposite of immoral.” In addition to the three-year reprieve for TPS recipients and uncertainty extension for Dreamers,  his proposal includes over $800 million in “drug detection technology” and over 2,700 agents to further militarize the southern border.

“Trump’s cynical ploy to get his $5.7 billion for his vanity wall in exchange for temporary relief for DACA and TPS recipients is a non-starter and should be immediately rejected by congressional leaders,” Richard Morales, policy and program director for Faith in Action’s immigrant rights campaign.

The partial government shutdown, Morales argued, “exists because of Trump’s white supremacist agenda.” Moreover, “Even if the shutdown were to suddenly end, the deeper crises created by Trump at the border and in the interior would still need to be addressed by Congress.”

“This week,” he continued, “we received proof the administration planned months in advance to separate thousands of children from their parents and jail them as a deterrence to stop immigrants from seeking refuge in the U.S. Children have died while in U.S. custody; some have been tear-gassed by U.S. border agents; asylum seekers are being denied access to the legal system to apply.”

Trump said that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) would bring the proposal to Congress this week, but Morales says the response from lawmakers should be a resounding “no.”

“No wall. No deals. Congress must not take the bait from a president who makes false claims about violence at the border and demonizes immigrants, regardless of status, at every opportunity.”

Ahead of the speech, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) had called the reported plan “a non-starter.”

Amnesty International was also dismissive of the plan.

“People on both sides of the border continue to be caught in a crisis of the administration’s own making,” said Joanne Lin, national director of advocacy and government affairs at the human rights organization. “While the president continues his political posturing, thousands of children and families are being forced to wait in dangerous conditions in Mexico. It’s time to get the government back to working order and pass a spending bill that protects the human rights of children and families along the southern border.”

Earlier: Immigrant rights activists on Saturday expressed concern that President Donald Trump is about to propose a “deal” to end his government shutdown—and fund his border wall obsession—that would be merely “another trick to hurt even more immigrant families.”

Trump is expected to make the announcement from the White House in a 4pm ET address.

According to Axios, which first reported on the proposal, the main crafters of the deal were Trump’s son-in-law and White House advisor Jared Kushner and Vice President Mike Pence.  The proposal, Axios reported,

is expected to include Trump’s $5.7 billion demand for wall money in exchange for the BRIDGE Act—which would extend protections for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)—and also legislation to extend the legal status of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) holders, according to a source with direct knowledge.

As multiple news outlets noted, the compromise mirrors one floated in December by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

“As for the timing,” CNN adds,

the White House wants it to look like they had a valid reason for canceling House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Afghanistan, and feared that if there was no movement this weekend—no meetings, no negotiations, or no speeches—they would look bad, two people familiar with the schedule told CNN.

In a Twitter thread, advocacy group United We Dream rebuked the reported proposal. It noted that the administration has put “millions of once protected immigrants in danger” with its attacks on TPS and DACA, and argued that the White House should instead move to create permanent protections for those groups and end the disastrous shutdown immediately.

As immigrant youth in cities across the nation join the #WomensMarch to call for an end to the Trump shut down and to protect immigrants, rumors began circulating in Washington, DC that Trump may offer a new “deal” to get billions for his Wall and other unknown changes.

— United We Dream (@UNITEDWEDREAM) January 19, 2019

And after months of broken compromises and demands from the White House for extreme immigration changes that would hurt immigrant families.

— United We Dream (@UNITEDWEDREAM) January 19, 2019

“For months, Trump has tried to use our lives to get his Wall and increase his deportation agents to hurt immigrants.”

— United We Dream (@UNITEDWEDREAM) January 19, 2019

“We will need to see the details but we are deeply skeptical that this is not just another trick to hurt even more immigrant families.”

— United We Dream (@UNITEDWEDREAM) January 19, 2019

The shutdown, now in its 29th day, has left hundreds of thousands federal workers suffering.

A new Pew Research Center poll, meanwhile, shows that the majority of Americans—58 percent—oppose expanding the wall on the southern border, and of that group, 88 percent said a bill to end the shutdown that includes the president’s request for wall funding is unacceptable.

Remembering Our Nuclear Past as We Speed Toward an Apocalyptic Future

Landing at Nagasaki Airport last November, I joined a line of Japanese men, women, and children waiting to disembark from our plane. Most were likely returning home on this holiday weekend or arriving to visit family and friends. I wondered how many of them remembered or thought about the nuclear annihilation of this city 73 years ago — within, that is, their own lifetimes or those of their parents or grandparents.

From the airport, I took a bus along the jagged coast through small mountain villages toward Nagasaki, entering the city from the north on a route used by rescue and relief workers on August 9, 1945, and by bewildered family members racing into the smoldering city to search for their loved ones. For months after the bombing, no public transportation could penetrate the ruins of this northern part of the city. My bus, on the other hand, moved seamlessly into a metropolis that showed no sign of its obliteration three-quarters of a century ago.

Much of Nagasaki and the world have, of course, moved on from that terrible morning when a five-ton plutonium bomb plunged at 614 miles per hour toward the city of 240,000 people. Forty-three seconds later, it detonated a third of a mile above Nagasaki’s Urakami Valley. A super-brilliant blue-white flash lit the sky, followed by a thunderous explosion equal to the power of 21,000 tons of TNT. The entire city convulsed. Within hours it was engulfed in flames.

Based on my book, Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War, I often give talks in America about that unforgettable (or now often-too-forgettable) day when, for only the second time in history, human beings deemed it right to assault their own species with apocalyptic power. At these book talks, I’ve learned to be prepared for someone in the audience to say that the Japanese deserved what they got. It’s still hard to hear. At its “burst point,” the Nagasaki blast reached temperatures higher than at the center of the sun and the velocity of its shock wave exceeded the speed of sound. Within three seconds, the ground below had reached an estimated 5,400 to 7,200 degrees Fahrenheit. Directly beneath the bomb, infrared heat rays instantly carbonized human and animal flesh and vaporized internal organs. Did the men, women, and children of Nagasaki really deserve that?

As the mushroom cloud rapidlyascended two miles over the city and eclipsed the sun, the bomb’s vertical blast pressure crushed much of the Urakami Valley. Horizontal blast winds tore through the region at two and a half times the speed of a Category 5 hurricane, pulverizing buildings, trees, animals, and thousands of people. The blazing heat twisted iron, disintegrated vegetation, ignited clothing, and melted human skin. Fires broke out across the city, burning thousands of civilians alive. And though no one knew it yet, larger doses of radiation than any human had ever received penetrated deeply into the bodies of people and animals.

Defining Terror, 1945-Style

“What about Pearl Harbor?” American supporters of the bomb write me, referring to the Japanese attack that began the Pacific War. “What about Japan’s atrocities in China?” a man screamed at me at a reading. “And,” veterans ask, “what about the Allied POWs who were tortured and killed by Japanese soldiers?”

Yes, I say to them. Yes, I understand your outrage, even so many decades later. I can fathom the courage of those who fought, the profound loss so many American families experienced during that long and costly war, and how desperately everyone wanted it to end.

But other truths exist as well. Japan did attack the United States and committed countless other military aggressions and horrific war crimes — andthe United States bombed and incinerated all or parts of 66 Japanese cities, killing, maiming, or irradiating more than 668,000 civilians. In Nagasaki alone, by the end of 1945 when a first count was possible, 74,000 men, women, and children were dead. Of those, only 150 were military personnel. Seventy-five thousand more civilians were injured or irradiated. Today, this kind of indiscriminate killing and harm to civilians would be called “terrorism.”

Despite the history most Americans have learned — that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were military necessities that ended World War II and saved a million American lives by obviating the need for an invasion of Japan’s home islands — there is no historical evidence that the Nagasaki bombing had any impact on Japan’s decision to surrender. What we aren’t taught are the political and military complexities of the last few months of the war or how, in the post-war years, our government crafted this end-of-war narrative to silence public opposition to the atomic bombings and build support for America’s fast-expanding nuclear weapons program. What many don’t realize is that this misleading version of history allows us to turn away from what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and continue to support the development and proliferation of nuclear weapons without ever having to think about what those weapons do.

Still, so many decades later, in a world in which the Trump administration is preparing to withdraw from a key Cold War nuclear agreement with Russia and the U.S. nuclear arsenal is being modernized to the tune of up to $1.6 trillion, it’s worth recalling the other side of the story, the kind of suffering the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings caused in August 1945 and long after. Within weeks, people in both cities began experiencing mysterious symptoms: vomiting, fever, dizziness, bleeding gums, and hair loss from what doctors would later understand as radiation-related sickness. Purple spots appeared all over their bodies. Many died in excruciating pain within a week of the first appearance of such symptoms. Fear gripped Nagasaki. From one day to the next, no one knew when his or her time might come.

In those first nine months, pregnant women suffered spontaneous abortions, stillbirths, or the deaths of their newborn infants. Many of the babies who survived would later develop physical and mental disabilities.

Five years after the bombings, thousands more began dying from leukemia and other illnesses caused by high-dose radiation exposure, initiating cycles of higher than normal cancer rates that would last for decades. The bombs had, from the survivors’ perspective, burned their bodies from the inside out. Parents exposed to radiation feared possible genetic defects in their children and hovered over them year after year, terrified that what looked like a simple cold or stomach ache would lead to severe illness or death.

Even today, radiation scientists are still studying second and third generation hibakusha (atomic-bomb-affected people) for genetic effects passed down from their parents and grandparents, reminding us how much we still don’t understand about the insidious nature of radiation exposure to the human body.

Hibakusha Stories

It’s essential for us to remember such grim details, not just for the sake of history, but for our future, because nuclear weapons far more powerful and devastating than the Nagasaki bomb are now commonplace.

In a small area of Nagasaki that includes Hypocenter Park, the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, and Peace Park, dedicated teams of Japanese men and women still work tirelessly to counter the world’s inclination to forget what happened. For the past 35 years, one organization, the Nagasaki Foundation for the Promotion of Peace, has assembled cadres of hibakusha speakers — typically about 40 at any time — willing to tell their stories. They are now aging women and men with unique memories of the day of that bombing and the weeks, months, and years that followed.

Sixteen-year-old Taniguchi Sumiteru was delivering mail on his bicycle about a mile from the hypocenter when, a split-second after the bomb detonated, its tremendous force and searing heat blew him off his bicycle and slammed him face-down onto the road. His entire back was burned off. By all rights, he should never have survived.  Three months later, he finally received medical treatment. Still in constant pain ten years after the bombing, he became one of Nagasaki’s earliest anti-nuclear activists.

Wada Koichi, an 18-year-old streetcar driver at the time of the bombing, decided to speak out when he held his first grandchild and flashed back to the charred corpse of a baby he’d stepped over as he searched for his missing colleagues. Do-oh Mineko, then 15, suffered critical injuries to her head and lingered near death for months. Though those injuries eventually healed, radiation exposure had caused all her hair to fall out. For nearly a decade, she hid in her house until her hair finally grew back. As an adult, she kept her identity as a hibakusha secret until, in her late sixties, she found new meaning for her life by telling her story to schoolchildren. Yoshida Katsuji, only 13, was looking up in the direction of the bomb at the moment it exploded. His entire face was scorched. Years later, as friends and colleagues told their stories publicly, he remained silent, afraid of looks of disgust from audiences due to his disfigurement. He finally began speaking out in his late sixties after deciding that being shy was not a good reason to keep silent when it came to the terrorizing impact of nuclear weapons.

These four and many others dared to cross boundaries in Japanese culture to tell their personal stories of suffering and help others grasp what nuclear war would mean for the world. Unfortunately, most hibakusha — at least those who were old enough to have vivid memories of the bombing and its aftermath — have died or are reaching the end of their lives. They are the only people capable of telling us firsthand about the experience of nuclear war, and each year their numbers diminish.

A David-and-Goliath Nuclear World

With that in mind, I returned to Nagasaki in November to participate in the city’s 6th Global Citizens Assembly for the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. Specifically, I was invited to present on a panel tasked with exploring ways to carry forward the hibakusha stories. What made the conference unique was the participation of both hibakusha and other citizens of Nagasaki, including high school and university students, scholars, activists, artists, musicians, writers, and interpreters. All of them were intent on exploring new ways to communicate stories of survival, from August 1945 to now, experiences that should remind us why the vision of a world without nuclear weapons matters.

Both panelists and participants again confronted the intensity of nuclear war. As hibakusha Kado Takashi, 83, prepared to stand before the assembly and tell his story for the very first time, he turned to me and pounded his heart with his hands to show me how terrified he was. Then, summoning his courage, he began to speak.

Yamanishi Sawa, 17 years old, tenderly told her grandmother’s story of survival and her own tale of teenage activism both at her school and in meetings with anti-nuclear activists in Geneva, Switzerland. Everyday citizens adopted the stories of hibakusha no longer with us, using the survivors’ own words to recall the hell — and humanity — of nuclearized Nagasaki. All of this, and more, reminded us of what those survivors have long known but the rest of the world seldom stops to grasp: that there’s nothing abstract about nuclear war and that nuclear weapons can never be instruments of peace.

They know what the world’s top nuclear physicists (and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists with its doomsday clock) have been telling us for decades: whether by intentional use, human error, technological failure, or an act of terrorism, our world remains at high risk of a nuclear conflagration that could leave Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the shade. Rather than a great power war, even a regional nuclear conflict between, say, India and Pakistan could create a planetary “nuclear winter” that might, in the end, kill up to a billion people.

Keep in mind, as these Nagasaki activists do, that today there are nearly 15,000 weapons in the nuclear arsenals of nine countries. Of these, almost 4,000 are actively deployed across the globe. Theoretically, they are meant to deter another country from launching a nuclear attack, but the success of such deterrence policies relies, in part, on both technological invulnerability and relatively rational decision-makers. Need more be said in the age of Trump, Kim Jong-un, and others? Most important, for nuclear deterrence to work, a nation must be committed to — and believed by other nations to be committed to — the mass murder, injury, and irradiation of huge civilian populations. We rarely consider what this really means.

It was difficult to tell an audience like the one in Nagasaki that many Americans still wholeheartedly support both the atomic bombings of Japan and their country’s continuing development of its nuclear arsenal. To mitigate this discouraging truth, I cited something Wada Kōichi told me years ago.

Now 91, Wada was inside Nagasaki’s streetcar terminal when the bomb brought the building crashing down on top of him and his coworkers. If you can call anything about surviving nuclear war lucky, he was one of the lucky ones. He suffered only minor injuries and mild radiation sickness, and all of his family members survived. The rest of them evacuated Nagasaki after the bombing, but he stayed to work, day after day, on rescue and recovery teams. He watched his best friend die, lighting the match to the boy’s makeshift funeral pyre. In November 1945, when seven streetcars resumed operation on a few routes in the city, he drove the fourth one, thrilled to be a part of Nagasaki’s recovery.

Sixty years after the bombing, Wada would awaken every morning at 5:00 a.m., open his bedroom window, and look out onto the Urakami Valley, marveling at how the city had been rebuilt from those atomic ruins. “One person can’t do anything,” he told me, “but if many people gather together, they can accomplish unimaginable things. If it’s possible to rebuild this city out of nothing, why isn’t it possible for us to eliminate war and nuclear weapons, to create peace? We can’t not do it!”

Before I left Nagasaki, I visited the hypocenter memorial and looked up into the blue sky at the spot where, I imagined, the atomic bomb had exploded, changing human history forever. I spent 12 years writing Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War, and the stories of that city and its hibakusha remain part of every breath I take. The hibakusha of Nagasaki and Hiroshima and the other anti-nuclear activists across the globe — including members of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which won the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize for their work in passing the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons — are the Davids of our world. They face the Goliaths — those nuclear-weapons states that cling to arsenals capable of destroying humanity.

In the face of such resolute, immensely powerful Goliaths, the Davids are the next generation of energetic, passionate, creative thinkers who single-mindedly refuse to let us forget or rationalize Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and who believe in a world of mutually supported international safety without nuclear weapons. On behalf of Wada Koichi, all hibakusha past and present, and the entire human race, my bet is on them.

Portraits From the Women’s Wave

Thousands of protesters persevered through finger-numbing weather at Washington, D.C.’s Freedom Plaza for the third annual Women’s March. Adorned with pink “pussy hats” and handcrafted picket signs, an estimated 10,000 gathered to march, rally and lend their ears to select speakers. This year’s protest, deemed the #WomensWave, takes strong issue with the Trump administration while encouraging women to exercise their political rights.

The movement, which prides itself on inclusivity, recently came under scrutiny after accusations of anti-Semitic remarks and connections to black nationalist Louis Farrakhan by some of the Women’s March leaders were brought forward. Despite these allegations, the movement continued to speak on the importance of diversity and inclusivity when it comes to  religion, race, gender and sexual orientation. Such ideals remained a key aspiration espoused by speakers and march-goers alike. Nevertheless, protesters had varying opinions on how close the Women’s March was to achieving this goal.  

The women depicted in the photo essay give a multidimensional voice to the wide spectrum of issues and goals the Women’s March represents while turning a critical eye to the faults of the movement.

PHOTO ESSAY | 11 photosphoto essay

 

A Scaled-Down, but Still Angry, Women’s March Returns

WASHINGTON—Amid internal controversies and a capital city deeply distracted by the partial government shutdown, the third Women’s March returned to Washington on Saturday with an enduring message of anger and defiance aimed directly at President Donald Trump’s White House.

The original march in 2017, the day after Trump’s inauguration, flooded the city with pink-hatted protesters. The exact size of the turnout remains subject to a politically charged debate, but it’s generally regarded as the largest Washington protest since the Vietnam era.

This year was a more modest affair for multiple reasons. An estimated 100,000 protesters packed several blocks around Freedom Plaza, just east of the White House, holding a daylong rally. The march itself took about an hour and only moved about four blocks west along Pennsylvania Avenue past the Trump International Hotel before looping back to Freedom Plaza.

Organizers submitted a permit application estimating up to 500,000 participants even though it was widely expected that the turnout would be smaller. The original plan was to gather on the National Mall. But with the forecast calling for snow and freezing rain and the National Park Service no longer plowing snow because of the shutdown, organizers on Thursday changed the march’s location and route.

As it turned out the weather was chilly but otherwise pleasant, and the mood among the marchers a now-familiar mix of sister-power camaraderie and defiant anger toward Trump and the larger power structure. As always the Trump administration was the direct target of most of the abuse — with fresh bitterness stemming from more recent events like Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s successful confirmation last fall despite a direct accusation of sexual misconduct when he was in high school.

One sign declared, “Strong women only fear weak men.” Another stated, “MOOD: Still pretty mad about Kavanaugh.”

Parallel marches took place in dozens of cities around the country.

In Los Angeles, a few hundred demonstrators gathered in Pershing Square downtown and marched to Grand Park.

“Democracy is not a spectator sport and I came out to continue to stand for that proposition,” said Ellen Klugman of Marina Del Rey. “If I don’t go, who will?”

In Denver, protester Jacquelynn Sigl said it’s a mistake to focus solely on Trump.

“It’s not OK, the rhetoric the president has today, but it’s also important to know this isn’t an anti-Trump rally,” she said. “This isn’t about him. It’s about the thought that’s running across the country right now.”

Preparations for this year’s march were roiled by an intense ideological debate among the movement’s senior leadership. In November, Teresa Shook, one of the movement’s founders, accused the four main leaders of the national march organization of anti-Semitism.

The accusation was leveled at two primary leaders: Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian-American who has frequently criticized Israeli policies, and Tamika Mallory, who has maintained a public association with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

Shook, a retired lawyer from Hawaii, has been credited with sparking the movement by creating a Facebook event that went viral and snowballed into the massive protest on Jan. 21, 2017. In a recent Facebook post, she claimed Sarsour and Mallory, along with fellow organizers Bob Bland and Carmen Perez, had “steered the Movement away from its true course” and called for all four to step down.

The four march organizers have denied the charge, but Sarsour has publicly expressed regret that they were not “faster and clearer in helping people understand our values.”

Despite pleas for unity, the internal tensions were most keenly felt in New York. An alternate women’s march organization held a parallel rally a few miles away from the official New York Women’s March protest, and one activist actually disrupted the main protest.

As New York march director Agunda Okeyo was making her opening remarks, an activist named Laura Loomer came on stage and shouted that the march “does not represent Jewish people” and called it “the real Nazi march.”

Loomer is a longtime political provocateur whose previous protests have included handcuffing herself to a Twitter office after the service banned her and jumping a fence at a home owned by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

As Loomer was ushered from the stage, Okeyo challenged her.

“This is not a negative day,” Okeyo said. “You’re not coming with that. We’re not doing that today. What we’re doing today is we’re going to uplift each other and we’re going to make sure we stay positive.”

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Associated Press writers Michael Sisak in New York, Dan Elliott in Denver and Daisy Nguyen in San Francisco contributed to this report.

Students in ‘MAGA’ Hats Mock Native American After Rally

FRANKFORT, Ky. — A diocese in Kentucky has apologized after videos emerged showing students from an all-male Catholic high school mocking Native Americans outside the Lincoln Memorial after a rally in Washington.

The Indigenous Peoples March in Washington on Friday coincided with the March for Life, which drew thousands of anti-abortion protesters, including a group from Covington Catholic High School in Park Hills.

Videos circulating online show a youth staring at and standing extremely close to Nathan Phillips, an elderly Native American man singing and playing a drum.

Other students, some wearing Covington clothing and many wearing red “Make America Great Again” hats and sweatshirts, surrounded them, laughing and jeering.

In a joint statement to the Cincinnati Enquirer, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Covington and Covington Catholic High School apologized to Phillips. Officials said they are investigating and will take “appropriate action, up to and including expulsion.”

“We extend our deepest apologies to Mr. Phillips,” the statement read. “This behavior is opposed to the Church’s teachings on the dignity and respect of the human person.”

According to the “Indian Country Today” website, Phillips is an Omaha elder and Vietnam veteran who holds an annual ceremony honoring Native American veterans at Arlington National Cemetery.

“When I was there singing, I heard them saying ‘Build that wall, build that wall,'” Phillips said, as he wiped away tears in a video posted on Instagram. “This is indigenous lands. We’re not supposed to have walls here. We never did.”

He said he wished the group would put their energy into “making this country really great.”

State Rep. Ruth Buffalo, a North Dakota state lawmaker and member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, said she was saddened to see students showing disrespect to an elder who is also a U.S. military veteran at what was supposed to be a celebration of all cultures.

“The behavior shown in that video is just a snapshot of what indigenous people have faced and are continuing to face,” Buffalo said.

She said she hoped it would lead to some kind of meeting with the students to provide education on issues facing Native Americans.

U.S. Rep. Deb Haaland of New Mexico, who had been at the rally earlier in the day, sharply criticized what she called a display of “blatant hate, disrespect, and intolerance.”

“This Veteran put his life on the line for our country,” she tweeted Saturday. “Heartbreaking.”

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Melley contributed to this story from Los Angeles.

Trump Offers a ‘Dreamers’ Deal for Border-Money Proposal

WASHINGTON — In a bid to break the shutdown impasse and fund his long-promised border wall, President Donald Trump on Saturday offered to extend temporary protection for young people brought to the U.S. illegally as children. But while Trump cast the move as a “common-sense compromise,” Democrats were quick to dismiss it as a “non-starter.”

Trump declared from the White House that “both sides in Washington must simply come together,” adding that he was there “to break the logjam and provide Congress with a path forward to end the government shutdown and solve the crisis on the southern border.”

Hoping to put pressure on Democrats, the White House billed the announcement as a major step forward. But Trump did not budge on his $5.7 billion demand for the wall and, in essence, offered to temporarily roll-back some of his own hawkish immigration actions — actions that have been blocked by federal courts.

Democrats dismissed Trump’s proposal even before his formal remarks. Reacting to the anticipated announcement earlier in the day, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the proposal was “a compilation of several previously rejected initiatives, each of which is unacceptable.” The California Democrat said Trump’s expected offer was “not a good-faith effort” to help the immigrants and could not pass the House. She again called on Trump to reopen the government, shut for a record 29 days.

Democrats made their own move late Friday to break the impasse when they pledged to provide hundreds of millions of dollars more for border security.

Partisan clashes between Trump and Pelosi marked the fourth week of the shutdown. It was not clear if the fresh offers would lead to serious steps toward resolving the partisan fight or if they were just acts of political posturing. The maneuvering came as hundreds of thousands of federal workers go without paychecks, with many enduring financial hardship. Many public services are unavailable to Americans during the closure.

Seeking to cast the plan as a bipartisan way forward, Trump said Saturday he had support from “rank-and-file” Democrats, as top Democrats made clear they had not been consulted. He also said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would bring the legislation to a vote this week, though Democrats appeared likely to block it. McConnell had previously stated that no vote should be held in the Senate until Trump and Democrats agreed on a bill.

Trump’s remarks from the Diplomatic Room marked the second time he has addressed the nation as the partial shutdown drags on. On this occasion, he sought to strike a diplomatic tone, emphasizing trust and the need to work across the aisle. But he still maintained that a border barrier was needed to block what he describes as the flow of drugs and crime into the country, though he described it as a “steel barriers in high-priority locations.”

To ensure wall funding, Trump said he would extend protections for young people brought to the country illegally as children, known as “Dreamers,” as well as for those with temporary protected status after fleeing countries affected by natural disasters or violence.

Administration officials said the protections would apply only to those currently in the Obama-era program shielding them from deportation, and the temporary protected status would apply to those who currently have it and have been in the U.S. since 2011. That means people from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Haiti — countries that saw the status revoked since Trump took office — would get a reprieve.

Democrats criticized Trump’s proposal because it didn’t seem to be a permanent solution for those immigrants and because it includes money for the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, which the party strongly opposes. Democrats also want Trump to reopen government before talks can start.

Trump’s son-in-law and senior aide, Jared Kushner, has led the work on the proposals, said three people familiar with White House thinking who were not authorized to speak publicly. Some said Vice President Mike Pence and chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen were involved, too.

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Associated Press writers Alan Fram and Matthew Daly in Washington and Colleen Long in Brooklyn, New York, contributed to this report.

At Least 66 Killed as Pipeline Explosion Rocks Central Mexico

Local residents were advised to take precautions from a lingering toxic cloud on Saturday as authorities in the central Mexican state of Hildalgo said the death toll from a gasoline pipeline explosion had risen to 66.

The deadly fireball on Friday night in the town of Tlahuelilpan left another 76 wounded, seven of whom were less than 18 years old, said Gov. Omar Fayad.

The cause of the explosion, said state oil company Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex), was a rupture caused by illegal tapping of the pipeline. Video posted to social media shows the moments when the explosion happened:

BREAKING UPDATE: 66 deaths registered from pipeline explosion in Mexico – state governorhttps://t.co/Zk72Ef18rE pic.twitter.com/abUzEjht5D

— RT (@RT_com) January 19, 2019

Aerial view of fire following deadly pipeline explosion#Mexico #Thlahuelilpan pic.twitter.com/v21IyGb0Ej

— Ruptly (@Ruptly) January 19, 2019

From the Associated Press:

On Saturday, several of the dead lay on their backs, their arms stretched out in agony. Some seemed to have covered their chests in a last attempt to protect themselves from the flames; another few black-charred corpses seemed to embrace each other in death.

“What happened here,” said municipal health director Jorge Aguilar Lopez, “should serve as an example for the whole nation to unite behind the fight that the president is carrying out against this ill.”

That “ill” is fuel theft, which newly-sworn in President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said he is now even more determined to crack down on.  Yet, as Agence France-Presse reports, “the strategy to fight the problem led to severe gasoline and diesel shortages across much of the country, including Mexico City, forcing people to queue for hours—sometimes days—to fill up their vehicles.”

Indeed, villagers from Tlahuelilpan had come to the scene of the leak ahead of the explosion to gather fuel. According to the New York Times, citing information from Mexico’s defense secretary, Luis Cresencio Sandoval, there were as many as 800 villagers at the site of the rupture to gather fuel, who faced 25 troops attempting to stop them from taking the resource.

“A lot of people arrived with their jerry cans, because of the gasoline shortages we’ve had,” said 55-year-old Martin Trejo, who was looking for his son, who had gone to collect the fuel.

The fire has now been extinguished, and forensic experts are working with the burned bodies as the fallout from what is said to be one of the nation’s deadliest pipeline-related disasters continues to unfold.

Austin Police Order More Inquiry After Findings on Misclassified Rapes

The Austin Police Department will ask a third party to examine how it handles rape investigations from start to finish, following a state audit that found some cases were misclassified in a way that made it appear the department had solved more cases than it had.

The announcement follows the APD’s release of the full findings of a review by the Texas Department of Public Safety, which audited the department following an investigation by Newsy, Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica. The news report showed how Austin and dozens of other police departments across the country frequently use “exceptional” clearances to close rape cases, increasing clearance rates while leaving suspects on the streets.

The initial findings from the DPS audit, which looked at three months of Austin rape reports from 2017, concluded that nearly one-third of the cases the APD had exceptionally cleared were misclassified.

The full report reveals Austin police often failed on multiple fronts. To clear a case exceptionally, the FBI requires police to have enough evidence to make an arrest, to know who and where the suspect is, and for there to be a reason outside their control that prevents an arrest. Cases that fail to meet all four requirements cannot be cleared exceptionally. The DPS report shows that out of 95 exceptionally cleared rapes auditors reviewed, Austin police had failed to meet the FBI requirements 30 times. In 17 of those cases, police failed to meet at least two of the FBI’s tests. In five cases, police did not meet any of the four criteria.

“While we’re glad this audit has been completed, it confirms that we have serious issues and we need to take quick action that corrects the patterns that allowed these cases to be handled improperly,” Austin Mayor Steve Adler said in a joint statement with Mayor Pro Tem Delia Garza.

At a press conference Wednesday, Austin Police Chief Brian Manley said the department does not yet know who the third-party investigator will be, but he intends for the entity to look into how his department investigates rape from the earliest stages when a 911 call is received until a case is closed by investigators.

“We will welcome this outside review,” he said. “If there are things we can be doing differently or better to implement best practices, we will do so and we will look forward to doing so.”

Manley also announced he had ordered other changes, including the addition of another supervisor to the sex crimes unit and new policies for clearing crimes.

He said the APD has already completed the retraining of its detectives, a task the department said this month it would do after receiving preliminary findings from the state’s audit. Manley said one of the most significant reforms will be the introduction of a new computer system that requires detectives to answer four questions to show a case meets the FBI requirements before they can clear a case exceptionally.

The announcement of a new, more comprehensive review of the entire rape investigation process comes in the wake of pressure from rape survivors, advocates and City Council members following the investigation by Newsy, Reveal and ProPublica.

Some advocates were skeptical about Austin police choosing who investigates the department’s handling of rape cases.

“APD should not get to decide who grades them,” said Kristen Lenau, co-founder of the Survivor Justice Project. “In order for this to be a truly independent evaluation that builds much needed trust in this community, survivors and advocates need to be a part of the selection process.”

The department’s decision pre-empts an anticipated resolution from City Council member Alison Alter, who has said she is working with advocates to determine the most effective, credible way to dig into why so many rape investigations end with no arrest in Austin. The police department reported a 2016 rape clearance rate of 51 percent, well over the national average of 37 percent. But only 17 percent of rape investigations led to an arrest, according to internal records reviewed by Newsy.

A spokeswoman for Alter said she expects her resolution to be posted for public review by late Friday and to be voted on at the council’s next meeting on Jan. 31.

The spokeswoman said the resolution will direct the city manager to conduct a retrospective, comprehensive evaluation of the last seven years of documented sexual assault cases in Austin, to be carried out by a nongovernmental entity, one that doesn’t have a relationship with the APD.

Alter’s spokeswoman says the resolution “will not solely gather data, but also will direct the city manager to evaluate the health of our public safety system” and report back to the council with recommendations for how to better align with national best practices.

Many communities facing similar problems with rape investigations have adopted the “Philadelphia Model,” a process initiated by former Philadelphia Police Commissioner John Timoney, who approached the Women’s Law Project and other community advocates to ask for help in reviewing cases and restoring community faith in the police.

When Newsy, Reveal and ProPublica showed Manley the results of our data analysis last fall, he maintained that APD was correctly using exceptional clearance, pointing to an internal review.

However, the review – obtained by KXAN-TV in Austin – shows that police found about one-quarter of cases were improperly classified. Still, police maintained to us that they had discovered no problems until this week. Manley pointed to confusion among those on his staff who did the audit.

“I don’t believe they recognized the significance of the findings,” Manley said. “Most of us are police officers and not a lot have a background in statistics.”

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Scripps Howard Foundation Journalism Fellows Kenny Jacoby and Sophie Chou contributed to this story.

This article was produced by the nonprofit news outlet Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a collaboration with Newsy and ProPublica. Subscribe to its newsletter: revealnews.org/newsletter.