Chris Hedges's Blog, page 405

Scientists Warn Brazil’s New President May Smother Rainforest

SAO PAULO — Scientists warn that Brazil’s president-elect could push the Amazon rainforest past its tipping point — with severe consequences for global climate and rainfall.

Jair Bolsonaro, who takes office Jan. 1, claims a mandate to convert land for cattle pastures and soybean farms, calling Brazil’s rainforest protections an economic obstacle.

Brazilians on Oct. 28 elected Bolsonaro, a far-right candidate who channeled outrage at the corruption scandals of the former government and support from agribusiness groups.

Next week global leaders will meet in Poland for an international climate conference to discuss how to curb climate change, and questions about Brazil’s role in shaping the future of the Amazon rainforest after Bolsonaro’s election loom large. New Brazilian government data show the rate of deforestation — a major factor in global warming — has already increased over the past year.

Brazil contains about 60 percent of the Amazon rainforest, and scientists are worried.

It’s nearly impossible to overstate the importance of the Amazon rainforest to the planet’s living systems, said Carlos Nobre, a climate scientist at the University of Sao Paulo.

Each tree stores carbon absorbed from the atmosphere. The Amazon takes in as much as 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year and releases 20 percent of the planet’s oxygen, earning it the nickname “the lungs of the planet.”

It’s also a global weather-maker.

Stretching 10 times the size of Texas, the Amazon is the world’s largest rainforest. Billions of trees suck up water through deep roots and bring it up to their leaves, which release water vapor that forms a thick mist over the rainforest canopy.

This mist ascends into clouds and eventually becomes rainfall — a cycle that shapes seasons in South America and far beyond.

By one estimate, the Amazon creates 30 to 50 percent of its own rainfall.

Now the integrity of all of three functions — as a carbon sink, the Earth’s lungs, and a rainmaker — hangs in the balance.

On the campaign trail, Bolsonaro promised to loosen protections for areas of the Brazilian Amazon designated as indigenous lands and nature reserves, calling them impediments to economic growth. “All these reserves cause problems to development,” he told supporters.

He has also repeatedly talked about gutting the power of the environmental ministry to enforce existing green laws.

“If Bolsonaro keeps his campaign promises, deforestation of the Amazon will probably increase quickly — and the effects will be felt everywhere on the planet,” said Paulo Artaxo, a professor of environmental physics at the University of Sao Paulo.

Bolsonaro’s transition team did not respond to an interview request from the Associated Press.

Brazil was once seen as a global environmental success story. Between 2004 and 2014, stricter enforcement of laws to safeguard the rainforest — aided by regular satellite monitoring and protections for lands designated reserves for indigenous peoples — sharply curbed the rate of deforestation, which peaked in the early 2000s at about 9,650 square miles a year (25,000 square kilometers).

After a political crisis engulfed Brazil, leading to the 2016 impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff, enforcement faltered. Ranchers and farmers began to convert more rainforest to pastureland and cropland. Between 2014 and 2017, annual deforestation doubled to about 3,090 square miles (8,000 square kilometers). Most often, the trees and underbrush cut down are simply burned, directly releasing carbon dioxide, said Artaxo.

“In the Brazilian Amazon, far and away the largest source of deforestation is industrial agriculture and cattle ranching,” said Emilio Bruna, an ecologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

Now observers are parsing Bolsonaro’s campaign statements and positions as a congressman to anticipate what’s next for the Amazon.

Bolsonaro — who some call “tropical Trump” because of some similarities to U.S. President Donald Trump — is a former army captain with a knack for channeling outrage and generating headlines. As a federal congressman for 27 years, he led legislative campaigns to unravel land protections for indigenous people and to promote agribusiness. He also made derogatory comments about minorities, women, and LGBT people.

Much of his support comes from business and farming interests.

“These farmers are not invaders, they are producers,” said congressman and senator-elect Luiz Carlos Heinze, a farmer and close ally of Bolsonaro. He blamed past “leftist administrations” for promoting indigenous rights at the expense of farmers and ranchers.

“Brazil will be the biggest farming nation on Earth during Bolsonaro’s years,” said Heinze.

Indigenous-rights advocates are worried about the new direction signaled. “Bolsonaro has repeatedly said that indigenous territories in the Amazon should be opened up for mining and agribusiness, which goes completely in the opposite direction of our Constitution,” said Adriana Ramos, public policy coordinator at Social Environmental Institute in Brasilia, a non-governmental group.

In a Nov. 1 postelection interview with Catholic TV, Bolsonaro said, “We intend to protect the environment, but without creating difficulties for our progress.”

Bolsonaro has repeatedly said that Brazil should withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord, a treaty his predecessor signed in 2016 committing to reduce carbon emissions 37 percent over 2005 levels by 2030. After the election, he has publicly wavered.

Meanwhile he has named a climate-change denier, Ernesto Araujo, to become the next foreign minister.

Nelson Ananias Filho, sustainability coordinator at Brazil’s National Agriculture and Cattle Raising Confederation, which backed Bolsonaro’s campaign, said, “Brazil’s agribusiness will adapt to whatever circumstances come.”

Whether or not Brazil formally remains in the Paris Climate Accord, the only way for the country to make its emission targets is to completely stop deforestation by 2030 and to reduce agricultural emissions, said Nobre, the climate scientist. “If Bolsonaro keeps moving in the current direction, that’s basically impossible.”

There’s another danger lurking in deforestation.

Aside from the oceans, tropical forests are the most important regions on the planet for putting water vapor in the air, which eventually becomes rainfall. “It’s why we have rain in the American Midwest and other inland areas — it’s not just the Amazon, but it’s the largest tropical rainforest,” said Bill Laurance, a tropical ecologist at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia.

Carlos Nobre and Thomas Lovejoy, an environmental scientist at George Mason University, have estimated that the “tipping point for the Amazon system” is 20 to 25 percent deforestation.

Without enough trees to sustain the rainfall, the longer and more pronounced dry season could turn more than half the rainforest into a tropical savannah, they wrote in February in the journal Science Advances.

If the rainfall cycle collapses, winter droughts in parts of Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Argentina could devastate agriculture, they wrote. The impacts may even be felt as far away as the American Midwest, said Laurance.

Bolsonaro’s rhetoric about potentially dismantling the environmental ministry and rolling back indigenous rights worries Nobre who says, “I am a scientist, but I am also a Brazilian citizen, and a citizen of the planet.”

This Prominent Anti-Vaxxer Has a Chilling New Crusade

This story is a collaboration between ProPublica and The New Yorker.

On the morning of April 19, 2016, Melanie Lilliston received an urgent call from the Little Dreamers day care center, in Rockville, Maryland. Her 6-month-old daughter, Millie, was being rushed to the hospital. Doctors there found that Millie had fractured ribs, facial bruises and a severe brain injury. Melanie watched as her daughter was loaded onto a helicopter for emergency transport to Children’s National Medical Center, in Washington, D.C., where doctors discovered more injuries: a fractured leg and arm, as well as bleeding in her eyes. Millie died three days later.

The day care operator, Kia Divband, told police that Millie had started choking while drinking a bottle of milk and lost consciousness. The Montgomery County medical examiner, however, determined that her injuries were caused by blunt force. Investigators discovered, on Divband’s phone and computer, internet searches for “broken bones in children” and “why are bone fractures in children sometimes hard to detect.” A former employer of Divband’s told them that the day before Millie was hospitalized, Divband had called to inquire about a job, and a baby could be heard wailing in the background. Divband told him the baby wouldn’t stop crying and that “he just couldn’t take it anymore,” the former boss recalled. Divband was arrested and charged with fatally abusing Millie.

At Divband’s trial, last year, a radiologist named David Ayoub testified for the defense. Ayoub, who is a partner in a private radiology practice in Springfield, Illinois, told jurors he had reviewed X-rays and other medical records, and concluded that Millie had rickets, a rare condition that causes fragile bones. The disorder, which is usually brought on by a prolonged and severe lack of vitamin D, could explain Millie’s injuries, Ayoub said.

Seeking to cast doubt on Ayoub’s credibility, the prosecutor brought up a different issue. Was it true, she asked, that Ayoub believed Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, a charity funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to increase vaccination rates in poor countries, was committing genocide? “That’s right,” Ayoub said.

The prosecutor asked if Ayoub believed that Gavi — along with the World Health Organization, the Gates Foundation and UNICEF — were using vaccinations to force sterilization on people in third-world countries. “Yes, that’s my belief,” Ayoub said.

As evidence, he cited a 1972 report of a commission headed by the philanthropist John D. Rockefeller III and a 1974 study overseen by then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, warning about the dangers of population growth. It’s “no leap of faith” to believe that vaccination is being used to carry out this agenda, Ayoub said.

The prosecutor also questioned Ayoub about a speech he delivered in 2005 in which he said his views on vaccination — including his belief that it has contributed to a rise in autism — put him in a “fringe group” and even in the “fringe of that fringe.” Ayoub acknowledged making the statement. “Thinking that vaccines were associated with autism, you’re clearly a minority view if you’re a physician,” Ayoub testified. “If you think it’s done intentionally for nefarious purposes, you’re clearly another level of — you know — different.”

In an email, Ayoub said he did not mean to accuse the alliance or the Gates Foundation of intentional genocide, though he realized that his 2005 lecture might give that impression. “I was concerned by confirmed sporadic reports that some vaccines distributed in third-world countries contained fertility-reducing substances,” he said. “Regardless of whether this was deliberate, careless, unintentional or a cost-cutting measure, I felt that there was a potential for abuse and that this should be investigated.”

Over the last decade, Ayoub, who is 59, has become one of the most active expert witnesses in the United States on behalf of accused child abusers. He estimates that he has testified in about 80 child abuse cases in the United States, Sweden and the United Kingdom. He has consulted or written reports in hundreds more.

Prior to his child abuse work, Ayoub was a prominent supporter of a movement that blames the rise in autism — the neurological and developmental disorder that starts in early childhood — on vaccinations that contain mercury, aluminum or other substances. These claims are mostly dismissed by scientists, but they have nonetheless spurred a burgeoning worldwide “anti-vaxxer” movement, which has fueled a decline in vaccination rates. Both positions reflect a deep suspicion of government and mainstream medicine as well as a rising backlash against scientific consensus in an era when misinformation quickly spreads online.

Ayoub, in a series of interviews, said his criticism of vaccines is no longer a significant part of his work and has no bearing on his credibility as a witness in child abuse cases. (The Divband trial ultimately ended in a mistrial, after jurors could not agree on a verdict. Prosecutors later retried the case and Divband was convicted on child abuse charges and sentenced to 50 years in prison; Ayoub did not testify in the second trial.) Ayoub said that his testimony in each abuse case is based on a careful review of the medical evidence. He simply wants to see justice done and does not charge for his services as an expert witness, he said. “Parents are being accused and families torn apart based on fractures and/or other boney irregularities that are in fact attributable to bone fragility, not abuse,” he said in an email. If rickets, vitamin D deficiency and other explanations are not addressed, he added, “parents cannot receive fair trials, and families will be destroyed based on a misunderstanding of the radiology and pathology.”

Ayoub, though, doesn’t specialize in treating children. He is not a pediatrician or a pediatric radiologist. Much of his knowledge about rickets in infants comes from reading studies and textbooks, he has said on the stand, rather than formal training. His frequent diagnosis of rickets is questioned by specialists in the field. Peter Strouse, the chief of pediatric radiology at the University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, who has served as a prosecution witness in about eight child abuse cases, and consulted in cases where Ayoub was a defense expert, described Ayoub’s views as “a complete fabrication. It’s sad they can get away with that in court.”

Growing up in Peoria, Illinois, Ayoub was a track star who set the state high school record in the 880-yard run in 1977. As an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, he was the Big 10 conference champion in the 1,000-yard run before attending medical school there. Following an interventional radiology fellowship at the University of Iowa, Ayoub returned to Illinois in 1991 and began practicing radiology in Springfield.

Ayoub told me that he became interested in vaccines about 15 years ago after researching treatment for a bothersome knee. He was reading about alternative therapies and ended up subscribing to a newsletter from Joseph Mercola, a proponent of alternative treatments with a large online following and a website that frequently features pieces criticizing vaccination. Mercola has promoted other controversial views, including that fluoridated water can give children ADHD. (In 2016, Mercola agreed to pay up to $5.3 million in customer refunds to settle a complaint by federal regulators that he made false claims about the health benefits and safety of tanning beds he sold. Mercola did not respond to requests for comment.)

Opposition to vaccination is almost as old as vaccination itself. But websites like Mercola’s have helped drive the modern anti-vaccination movement. Most scientists consider vaccination one of the greatest public health advances of the 20th century, helping to control or even eradicate diseases such as smallpox, polio and measles in the U.S. Studies have found that vaccines can have side effects, but they are almost always minor, like redness and swelling.

Anti-vaxxers blame vaccines for an increase in rates of autism diagnosed in American children. From 2000 to 2014, the number of children diagnosed with autism-spectrum disorder increased to one in 59 from one in 150. Ayoub and others have argued that vaccines are one reason for this increase, though the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has concluded that “studies have shown that there is no link between receiving vaccines and developing ASD,” and the World Health Organization issued a similar finding. Prominent anti-vaxxers include celebrities such as the actress Jenny McCarthy and the lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Before becoming president, Donald Trump weighed in, tweeting in 2014 that “healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines, doesn’t feel good and changes – AUTISM. Many such cases!”

A study published in September found that Russian trolls and sophisticated Twitter bots tried to foment confusion about vaccination and create a false equivalency between pro- and anti-vaccination arguments. The authors, from George Washington University and other research institutions, warned, “Such strategies may undermine the public health: normalizing these debates may lead the public to question long-standing scientific consensus regarding vaccine efficacy.”

After discovering Mercola’s site, Ayoub said he went down a “rabbit hole” and read thousands of studies and documents about vaccination as he would later about rickets and child abuse. “I was that guy with Birkenstocks mumbling down the hallway,” he told me.

Ayoub found particularly persuasive a 2003 report by a subcommittee of the House Committee on Government Reform, which said thimerosal, a mercury-based vaccine additive, was “likely related to the autism epidemic” and posed a risk to infants and children. The subcommittee was headed by Dan Burton, an Indiana Republican and later a Tea Party member, who said his own grandson became autistic shortly after being vaccinated. Studies have repeatedly found no link between thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism. Thimerosal was also eliminated from all childhood vaccines in the U.S., except for some flu shots, in the early 2000s.

In a 2005 speech for the Radio Liberty Conference, titled “Mercury, Autism and the Global Vaccine Agenda,” which the prosecutor in the Divband case cited, Ayoub discussed the idea that vaccination could be a cost-effective way to wage “a war on population.” He showed one slide that read, “Syringes cheaper than guns,” and another indicating that the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan totaled $300 billion, while worldwide immunization efforts were initially funded at $1 billion to $2 billion. “So it’s a cheap deal and people don’t run from these bullets,” he said. “They run toward these bullets, so it’s ideal.”

Ayoub flung himself into the anti-vaccination cause. He served as the medical director for two groups alleging safety problems with vaccines; wrote letters to newspapers; lectured at conferences; testified at legislative hearings; and was the registered agent for a political action committee funded by prominent anti-vaxxers. Its mission was to advocate for people with autism “caused by exposure to neurological toxins,” according to a filing.

Mercola interviewed him at least twice for his website. In 2014, Ayoub suggested on Mercola’s site that a desire for high profits drove pharmaceutical companies to promote vaccines and state child welfare agencies to accuse parents of child abuse. “Now, as you know, there’s science that links vaccines with autism,” Ayoub said. “Why isn’t that science believed? Well, it’s attacked. It’s marginalized because there are competing papers, generally very flawed papers, which refute their claims. [They] design studies in order to give the answer that they want. That’s going to happen when you have an industry this strong. The government is a big industry. Child Protection Services is a behemoth, believe me. There’s a lot of money generated from the job of protecting children from abuse.”

David Gorski, a surgical oncologist in Michigan and the managing editor of the online publication Science-Based Medicine, has described Ayoub as an “anti-vaccine loon” and his conspiracy theories as “paranoia.” In an interview, Gorski said he had no idea that Ayoub worked as an expert in child abuse cases. “How on earth is he qualified as an expert?” Gorski asked. “He is looked at as a total joke. It’s disturbing he is effective in this world.”

In 2008, Edward Yazbak, a Massachusetts physician and fellow anti-vaxxer who was also served as a frequent expert witness for accused child abusers, asked Ayoub to look at a case he was consulting on in which the baby had multiple fractures. (Yazbak said he isn’t opposed to vaccination, but “every good thing has bad things.”) Ayoub said the baby, who lived in Florida, had “terrible bones.” He wrote a report to the court and the case was dismissed. Soon Ayoub shifted his target from vaccinations to child abuse allegations.

Besides Yazbak and Ayoub, a handful of prominent vaccination skeptics have served as expert witnesses for child abuse defendants. The Australian hematologist Michael Innis has written that many alleged cases of shaken-baby syndrome — shaking a baby out of anger or frustration — are actually vaccine-related injuries. Innis has written letters to medical journals urging doctors to refuse to vaccinate children and contending that vaccines are associated with autism. (Innis did not respond to a request for comment.) Shaken-baby syndrome has been a controversial diagnosis; in some cases, courts have overturned child abuse convictions after medical issues attributed to the syndrome were later found to result from illness or infection.

In the U.S., the pathologist Mohammed Ali Al-Bayati — the author of the 1999 book “Get All the Facts: HIV Does Not Cause AIDS” — has created a business called Toxi-Health International, which provides analysis and expert testimony in child abuse cases that he says are instances of babies hurt by vaccines. Al-Bayati said he does “not have an opinion” on vaccines and simply investigates cases that are brought to him. In some cases, he said, he has determined that a vaccine caused the injuries attributed to child abuse. “I look for all the possible causes and I use functional diagnosis to eliminate all causes based on medical finding not theory,” he said.

Ayoub told me that he sees ulterior motives behind many child abuse allegations. There is a “child abuse industry” that is “part of something very incomprehensible,” he said. He likened it to an organized crime ring, with social workers, doctors and prosecution experts working together to feed foster care systems engaged in a form of “for-profit child trafficking.” He said that state and county child welfare workers have a financial motive to accuse parents of child abuse because federal funding for some programs is determined by the number of cases they handle. Another reason, he said, was pedophilia. “I think there are pedophiles that are child abuse pediatricians. Some of these people are absolutely bizarre.” He added that he had read of several doctors at one prestigious U.S. hospital sexually abusing children. “Can you think of a better place to hide evil than under benevolence?” he said.

Battling the scientific consensus requires “a certain intestinal fortitude,” Ayoub said, because “it is very uncomfortable to go against popular opinion.” He added that it can be dangerous to oppose the child abuse industry. “People have been murdered over this,” he said. “Look up Nancy Schaefer.” Schaefer was a Georgia state legislator who was critical of child protective services there, calling them corrupt. She died in 2010. According to the final investigative summary prepared by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, her husband killed her and then committed suicide. The report states he left several notes confessing to the crime.

In almost all of Ayoub’s hundreds of cases, he has attributed a child’s injuries to a bone disorder. In particular, he believes that a condition known as infantile rickets is often responsible for broken bones and is dramatically underdiagnosed; many doctors fail to even explore the possibility when examining a child. Ayoub asserts that babies with infantile rickets can suffer fractured bones from “everyday handling,” such as a parent bouncing a child on his legs or changing clothes, and the condition can also result in abnormalities that are sometimes misdiagnosed as fractures. (He said he is careful to note in his court testimony that it is possible that children with bone diseases may also be victims of abuse.) Ayoub said that most of his free time is spent studying and investigating rickets. He said the infantile form of the disease starts around 5 weeks of age, peaks around 4 months and is rarely seen in children older than 8 months. It is less obvious on X-rays than rickets in older children, he said.

In 2014, Ayoub co-authored an article in the American Journal of Roentgenology suggesting that a type of fracture commonly associated with child abuse was, in many cases, the result of infantile rickets. Ayoub reached this conclusion after comparing radiographic images of what were classified as fractures from abuse with those of rickets patients from other studies. The journal published three responses from pediatricians and pediatric radiologists, warning that Ayoub’s article could endanger children by mistakenly labeling instances of abuse as bone disease. “Given the stakes involved, we think that the approach of Ayoub et al. is less ‘critical’ than dangerous and that children and families deserve better,” three doctors from children’s hospitals in Boston, Philadelphia and Atlanta wrote in one letter.

Ayoub’s article caught the attention of lawyers for James Duncan, a Floridian who had been convicted, in 1996, of 13 counts of aggravated abuse of his infant son Kody and given a 70-year prison sentence that even prosecutors considered unusually stiff. In 2015, his lawyers filed a motion to reopen the case, arguing that new information, including Ayoub’s article, proved Duncan did not hurt his son. An appeals court last year ordered an evidentiary hearing to determine whether Duncan deserved a new trial. The effort to free Duncan, who has served 22 years in prison, was the subject of an hourlong CNN special this past February. The special included an interview with Ayoub, but did not mention his anti-vaccination views. CNN did not respond to a request for comment.

At the hearing last month, in Clearwater, before Circuit Judge Michael Andrews, Duncan wore an orange prison jumpsuit with a name badge clipped to his chest, and sat at a table with his lawyers. A large group of friends and relatives filled the spectator area behind him. CNN set up three cameras to record the proceedings from multiple angles. As an expert witness for Duncan, Ayoub came across as confident and practiced. Balding with a thin beard with patches of gray, he often turned to talk directly to the judge and used comparisons to everyday items — the ashes at the end of a cigarette, and a shaved carrot — to describe various bone structures.

Ayoub testified that his review of the Duncan case indicated the baby likely had rickets and perhaps other deficiencies that resulted in weak, easy-to-break bones. “I think there is a good alternative explanation for the pattern that we see,” Ayoub told the judge. He speculated that fractures of the baby’s skull, collarbone and ribs may have occurred during birth, when a suction device was used. Ayoub testified that other injuries — fractures of the left arm, shin bone and thigh bone — likely occurred when Kody was being vaccinated. “All those date back to the doctor’s office visit,” he said. “Restrained child and what would normally be an innocuous event where you expect a child to fight and could be held down.”

Andrews was skeptical. “Did I hear that an immobile infant, a child who is 2 months or less, has to be held down to be able to be immunized?” he asked. Duncan’s lawyer, Lisabeth Fryer, responded that when an infant is given a vaccination shot, “there’s a reflex, with my children anyway, that required support. … There wasn’t just a splayed-out child patiently waiting.“

Kody Duncan, who is now 25 years old and a tennis coach at a Pennsylvania college, testified in defense of his father. Kody said that he did not believe that James Duncan abused him. He said the two talk by phone every week.

The state’s two expert witnesses, including the doctor who had evaluated Kody’s injuries at All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida, testified that the medical evidence of abuse was clear and the baby did not have rickets. After being separated from his father, Kody suffered no further fractures, exposing a potential weakness in Ayoub’s analysis: How could a baby who suffered more than a dozen fractures from his head to his leg owing to dangerously weak bones not have a single accidental break in the ensuing weeks, months and years?

Ayoub offered several possible explanations. He said the foster parents who cared for Kody Duncan were likely more careful with him because they were told he had been injured; that it was possible Kody suffered more fractures, but they were not symptomatic and went undetected, or that his vitamin D levels rose significantly, which Ayoub said is natural among children at that age, and his bones strengthened. “So there is a window of fragility there,” Ayoub said.

Shortly after starting to cross-examine Ayoub, the state prosecutor Paul Bolan asked him: “You also have some other opinions that are not in mainstream medical view as well, correct? You believe vaccines are related to autism, correct?” Ayoub never had to answer. Duncan’s attorney immediately objected to the questioning. She argued that the inquiry was “impeachment on a collateral issue.” Andrews, who is expected to rule soon on whether Duncan deserves a new trial, agreed that Ayoub’s views on vaccination were irrelevant.

Other judges have also blocked prosecutors from asking Ayoub about his beliefs regarding vaccination. When Ayoub testified last year in a Massachusetts state court on behalf of a father accused of murdering his 5-month-old son, the prosecutor asked Ayoub if vaccines and autism were something he worked extensively on. The defense objected, and the judge ordered the lawyers to a sidebar where jurors could not hear them. The judge wanted to know why she should allow the prosecutor to continue asking about Ayoub’s vaccination work, according to a trial transcript. The prosecutor said Ayoub had lectured extensively on “the link between vaccines and autism in an area that he really had no training or expertise in. And the Commonwealth is seeking to show that he flits from subject to subject. He was an autism-vaccine guy and now he’s the metabolic-bone-disease guy.” The judge instructed the prosecutor to drop the subject.

Ayoub went on to testify in the case that ordinary handling of a child with a “severe bone-fragility disorder,” namely rickets, could have caused the fractures. The jury sided with Ayoub over the prosecution’s medical expert, Paul Kleinman, a pediatric radiologist who has produced much of the mainstream research on fractures and child abuse, and acquitted the father of assault and battery related to the fractures. A mistrial was declared on a murder charge.

In response to questions about Ayoub, Jeffrey Brown, the defense attorney in the case, said in an email that he had not been worried about Ayoub’s vaccination beliefs hurting his credibility on the stand. “It was not relevant,” he wrote. “Dr. Ayoub was a very effective and helpful witness.” Brown said he agrees with Ayoub that bone disorders are frequently misdiagnosed as abuse. “It is plain as day to me that the child abuse pediatrician establishment has gotten it wrong. … Those who try to trash him and his colleagues are scared of the consequences of being exposed.”

Ayoub’s zealousness in disputing child abuse allegations troubled a judge last year in the United Kingdom. In upholding a local agency’s determination that a 5-month-old baby with 26 fractures was abused, Judge Peter Jackson of the Royal Courts of Justice wrote that Ayoub’s testimony was “shot through with the dogma that child abuse is over-diagnosed” and didn’t meet the legal standard for objectivity. “Having taken up a position, he advanced it with the tenacity of an advocate and was dismissive of alternative possibilities,” the judge wrote. “He entertained no doubts about the correctness of his opinion, a dangerous mindset for any expert witness.”

Trump Widely Denounced After Rejecting Latest Climate Report

President Donald Trump was panned on Monday for his dismissal of his own administration’s recently released climate assessment.

Speaking to reporters outside the White House, Trump said of the National Climate Assessment (NCA4), “I’ve seen it, I’ve read some of it, and it’s fine.” Asked about the report’s conclusions on the climate crisis’s economic impact on the country, Trump declared, “I don’t believe it.”

“We cannot afford a leader who sticks his head in the sand while people suffer the consequences,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club.

“The climate assessment, put forth by Donald Trump’s own administration,” Brune added, “makes it clearer than ever that if we don’t act now, the catastrophic effects of climate change will reshape the United States and the world to the detriment of those alive today, and for generations to come.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), for his part, said on Twitter the comment made the president “an international embarrassment and incredibly dangerous”:

The fact that we have a President of the United States who doesn’t believe in science is an international embarrassment and incredibly dangerous.

Climate change is already causing devastating consequences. We need bold action, not denials. https://t.co/SEpIA7YYAb

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) November 26, 2018

“Given what we know about the president’s reading habits, I wonder if the report has any pictures,” said Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, in response to Trump claiming he “read some of” the government’s assessment.

“By now it’s the safest bet in town that when President Trump doesn’t believe something is true, it is,” said Cook. “None of the president’s policy positions are grounded in facts, and his unfortunate decision to dismiss his own government’s alarming study further demonstrates his utter ignorance when it comes to the threats climate change presents to every American.”

Meteorologist Eric Holthaus weighed in on social media as well, calling “the willful denial and obfuscation by Trump on climate change… a crime against humanity”:

In all seriousness, the willful denial and obfuscation by Trump on climate change is a crime against humanity. Billions of people will bear incalculable harm for generations to come.

Much, much, much worse than possibly colluding to steal an election.https://t.co/IFZzlbRwfz

— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) November 26, 2018

Another lawmaker commenting on Trump’s denial was Rep. Pramila Jayapal:

How can @realDonaldTrump still think climate change is a “hoax”?

Fact: climate change could cost the US economy upward of $500 BILLION a year. The climate crisis is a threat to our communities, economy and planet. https://t.co/K6NoqPnqnI

— Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@RepJayapal) November 26, 2018

“We have the moral responsibility to #ActOnClimate, NOT bury our heads in the sand,” tweeted the March for Science in response to Trump’s comments:

And ignoring it will only bring suffering to us all, especially our most vulnerable communities. We have the moral responsibility to #ActOnClimate, NOT bury our heads in the sand.#ScienceNotSilence

— March for Science (@ScienceMarchDC) November 26, 2018

Some observers had already expressed outrage even before the 1,500-page report was released, saying the timing of the release—the Friday following Thanksgiving—was a ploy by the adminstration to limit news covereage of it.

Following its release, Brenda Ekwurzel, the director of climate science at the Union of Concerned Scientists and one of the NCA4 report authors, said, “In light of the report’s findings, it’s critical that federal, state, and local governments take aggressive action to protect U.S. residents by both reining in emissions and helping communities adapt to the climate impacts that are now inevitable.”

“While the report doesn’t offer policy recommendations,” she continued, “the findings certainly make a convincing case that the White House should stop rolling back climate policies and recognize that a much larger scale response is required to keep people safe.”

Defeated Republican Rep. Mia Love Delivers Rebuke to Trump

SALT LAKE CITY — The first and only black Republican woman in Congress delivered a sharp rebuke Monday to President Donald Trump and her party’s relationship with African-Americans in her first remarks since her midterm defeat.

Mia Love was narrowly defeated by Democrat Ben McAdams for the suburban Salt Lake City House seat. The Associated Press called the race for McAdams on Nov. 20.

At a post-Election Day news conference earlier this month, Trump prematurely declared Love the loser, grouping her with other embattled Republican incumbents who failed to fully embrace him in their re-election bids.

“She gave me no love — and she lost,” Trump quipped.

Speaking to reporters Monday, Love said the president’s comments reflect the GOP’s larger failure to fully embrace minority communities, further solidifying their allegiance to Democrats.

“Because Republicans never take minority communities into their home . and into their hearts, they stay with Democrats and bureaucrats in Washington, because they do take them home, or at least make them feel like they have a home,” Love said.

Her ouster came as the Congressional Black Caucus swelled to its largest numbers ever and Congress overall became significantly more diverse, adding a record number of women and people of color in the midterm elections.

“This is a matter of fact, that Republicans lost in this regard,” Love said.

Democrats flipped more than three dozen Republican-held seats across the country to win control of the U.S. House of Representatives this year, though the party lost two seats in the Senate.

Trump’s comments about Love “gave me a clear vision of his world as it is,” she said. “No real relationships; just convenient transactions.”

The White House did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

After the 2012 elections, the Republican National Committee said in an autopsy of the race: “If we want ethnic minority voters to support Republicans, we have to engage them, and show our sincerity,” warning, “Unless the RNC gets serious about tackling this problem, we will lose future elections.”

The midterm elections featured racist rhetoric in several high-profile contests in states including Georgia, Florida, Mississippi and Texas. Trump campaigned in competitive Senate races with a fearful message about dangerous migrant caravan and has raised the specter of voter fraud — both tactics that many minorities have found offensive.

Love said Monday she believes conservative policies are the best way to lift people out of poverty, but those messages have a harder time reaching minority voters.

“The problem is not the policy; it’s that we are never taken into hearts and homes,” she said.

Love says her defeat means she’s now “unleashed” to speak her mind. She declined to say if she will run again, or detail plans for the future.

She also took a shot at her opponent on Monday, calling McAdams a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” and decrying the “horrible” criticism of her in the hard-fought race.

The McAdams campaign said he appreciated a congratulatory call she placed to him over the weekend and “it’s time to put the election behind us.”

Vote-counting was drawn out in the razor-thin race, and in the end McAdams defeated Love by fewer than 700 votes.

He was well-known in the district as the mayor of Salt Lake County and pitched himself as a moderate who could work with Trump, and is vowing to oppose Nancy Pelosi as House speaker.

Love, touted as a rising GOP star when she was elected in 2014, distanced herself from Trump during the race on issues including trade and immigration.

The daughter of Haitian immigrants who stood behind her on Monday, Love highlighted times she stood up to the president, like when Trump used an expletive to describe her parents’ home country.

Though Utah is deeply conservative, voters have long been uncomfortable with Trump’s brash style and comments about women and minorities. Her district also includes a large part of the suburbs of blue-leaning Salt Lake City.

Artificial Intelligence May Destroy Humanity by Accident (but It Won’t Apologize)

The U.S. military has quietly said it wants 70 unmanned self-driving supply trucks by 2020. And seeing as $21 trillion has gone unaccounted for at the Pentagon over the past 20 years, when the Pentagon wants something, it tends to get that something.

Of course supply trucks in and of themselves don’t sound so bad. Even if the self-driving trucks run over some poor unsuspecting saps, that will still be the least destruction our military has ever manifested. But because I’ve read a thing or two about our military, I’ll assume that by “supply trucks,” they mean “ruthless killing machines.” In fact, it’s now clear the entire “Department of Defense” is just a rebranding of “Department of Ruthless Killing Machines.”

And even if they do mean simple supply trucks, once those unmanned trucks are commuting themselves around the Middle East like a cross between “Driving Miss Daisy” and “Platoon,” how long do you think it will be until some a-hole general blurts, “Why don’t we put a missile or two on those things?”

The answer is 17 minutes. (Fifteen minutes if Trump is still president.)

Plus, these trucks are not the military’s only venture into artificial intelligence. The Navy wants $13.5 million to go toward rapid advances in AI. The Air Force is looking for $87 million to experiment with it. The Army has requested $6.5 million more for it. And the Marine Corps says it needs $7.1 million. (These are just the publicly stated numbers. Much like a vampire, our military does 95 percent of its best work in the dark.)

So this brings up a pressing question that we will see again and again in the coming years: How much do we need to fear artificial intelligence—or is it simply a great technological advancement?

Let me answer that question with a bit of a tangent. Human beings are notoriously unreliable. But there are two things you can always rely on humans for:

1. Humans will advance technology in every way possible.

2. Other humans will strap explosives to that technology.

Think about it: The automobile eventually became the tank. The airplane became the bomber. The printing press became the semi-automatic assault printing press. And so on.

But maybe I’m being paranoid. Maybe artificial intelligence is here to help us. One of the top AI geniuses at Google says the world is currently screwed (climate change, pollution, auto-tune). To save it, he says, “either we need an exponential improvement in human behavior—less selfishness, less short-termism, more collaboration, more generosity—or we need an exponential improvement in technology. … I don’t think we’re going to be getting an exponential improvement in human behavior. … That’s why we need a quantum leap in technology like AI.”

Basically, he’s saying we’re horrible, shitty people who are not going to change, BUT the bots will arrive soon to show us the way!

And there is some truth to this. AI will one day be able to tap into basically the entire internet simultaneously and learn everything that has ever been learned far quicker than troglodytes like us. So it will be incredibly, unimaginably smart, and will always be three moves ahead of us. On top of that, it won’t have the things that get in the way of our mental advancement as a species, such as:

hunger
fear
insecurity
superstition
religion
the drive to stick one’s penis in anything that moves

Artificial intelligence doesn’t have to deal with any of that.

So maybe AI will indeed save us from ourselves. … Orrrr, maybe with its infinite knowledge it will decide the planet would be better off without the ape-like creatures who keep trying to tell it what to do. Tesla CEO Elon Musk had an exciting and upbeat response when he was recently asked about how fast artificial intelligence is advancing.

“I tried to convince people to slow down. Slow down AI, to regulate AI. This was futile. I tried for years.”

(If you happen to have a cyanide tablet nearby, now would be the time to chomp down on that.)

Musk believes artificial intelligence is a far greater threat to humanity than nuclear weapons. Keep in mind, in order for AI to do great harm to our dopey species, it doesn’t necessarily have to be out to get us. It could simply come up with “solutions” that humans aren’t really prepared for. Here’s an example from The Atlantic of an AI mistake:

“One algorithm was supposed to figure out how to land a virtual airplane with minimal force. But the AI soon discovered that if it crashed the plane, the program would register a force so large that it would overwhelm its memory and count it as a perfect score. So the AI crashed the plane, over and over again, killing all the virtual people on board.”

That particular bot got a perfect score on landing a plane by killing all the imaginary humans. It kind of reminds me of the time I stopped my younger brother from beating me in “The Legend of Zelda” video game by throwing our television in a creek.

So now, dear reader, you may be thinking, “That’s terrifying—the AI was given an objective and basically just did ANYTHING to get there.” However, is that so different from humans? In our society, we are given the objective of “accumulate wealth and power,” and now we have people like weapons contractors and big oil magnates achieving the objective by promoting and fostering war and death around the world. It’s almost like they don’t care how they achieve the objective.

I’m not saying I know whether AI will save us all or kill us all, but I am saying these are the types of questions that need to be asked, AND SOON, because we won’t be the smartest beings on this planet much longer. (As it is we’re barely holding on to the top spot. A solid 50 percent of us are just glorified butlers to our dogs and cats. One can’t really claim to rule the world when one is carrying another species’ poop.)

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Also check out Lee Camp’s new comedy special, which one review called “the new standard for political stand-up comedy.” It’s only available at LeeCampComedySpecial.com.

This column is based on a monologue Lee Camp wrote and performed on his TV show “Redacted Tonight.”

U.K. and Ecuador Conspire to Deliver Julian Assange to U.S. Authorities

The accidental revelation in mid-November that U.S. federal prosecutors had secretly filed charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange underlines the determination of the Trump administration to end Assange’s asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been staying since 2012.

Behind the revelation of those secret charges for supposedly threatening U.S. national security is a murky story of a political ploy by the Ecuadorian and British governments to create a phony rationale for ousting Assange from the embassy. The two regimes agreed to base their plan on the claim that Assange was conspiring to flee to Russia.

Trump and his aides applauded Assange and WikiLeaks during the 2016 election campaign for spreading embarrassing revelations about Hillary Clinton’s campaign via leaked DNC emails. But all that changed abruptly in March 2017 when WikiLeaks released thousands of pages of CIA documents describing the CIA’s hacking tools and techniques. The batch of documents published by WikiLeaks did not release the actual “armed” malware deployed by the CIA. But the “Vault 7” leak, as WikiLeaks dubbed it, did show how those tools allowed the agency to break into smartphones, computers and internet-connected televisions anywhere in the world—and even to make it look like those hacks were done by another intelligence service.

The CIA and the national security state reacted to the Vault 7 release by targeting Assange for arrest and prosecution. On March 9, 2017, Vice President Mike Pence called the leak tantamount to “trafficking in national security information” and threatened to “use the full force of the law and resources of the United States to hold all of those to account that were involved.”

Then came a significant change of government in Ecuador—an April 2, 2017, runoff election that brought centrist Lenin Moreno to power. Moreno’s win brought to an end the 10-year tenure of the popular leftist President Rafael Correa, who had granted Assange political asylum. For his part, Moreno is eager to join the neoliberal economic system, making his government highly vulnerable to U.S. economic and political influence.

Eleven days after Moreno’s election, CIA Director Mike Pompeo resumed the attack on Assange. He accused WikiLeaks of being a “hostile non-state intelligence service.” That was the first indication that the U.S. national security state intends to seek a conviction of Assange under the authoritarian Espionage Act of 1917, which would require the government to show that WikiLeaks did more than merely publish material.

A week later, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that arresting Julian Assange was a “priority.” The Justice Department was reportedly working on a memo detailing possible charges against WikiLeaks and Assange, including accusations that he had violated the Espionage Act.

On Oct. 20, 2017, Pompeo lumped WikiLeaks together with al-Qaida and Islamic State, arguing that all of them “look and feel like very good intelligence organizations.” Pompeo said, “[W]e are working to take down that threat to the United States.”

Moreno’s Government Under Pressure

During this time, the Ecuadorian foreign ministry was negotiating with Assange on a plan in which he would be granted Ecuadorian citizenship and diplomatic credentials, so that he could be sent to another Ecuadorian embassy in a country friendly to Assange. The Ecuadorian government reached formal agreement with Assange to that effect, and Assange was granted citizenship on Dec. 12, 2017.

But the U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which was responsive to U.S. wishes, refused to recognize Assange’s diplomatic credentials. The foreign office stated that Ecuador “knows that the way to resolve this issue is for Julian Assange to leave the embassy to face justice.” On Dec. 29, 2017, the Ecuadorian government withdrew Assange’s diplomatic credentials.

The Trump administration then took a more aggressive stance toward Assange and the policy of the Moreno government. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Thomas A. Shannon Jr. visited Ecuador in late February 2018, and he was followed in March by the deputy commander of the U.S. Southern Command, Gen. Joseph DiSalvo, whose task was to discuss security cooperation with the Ecuadorian military leadership.

The day after DiSalvo’s visit, the Ecuadorian government took its first major action to curtail Assange’s freedom in the London embassy. Claiming that Assange had violated a written commitment, reached in December 2017, that he not “issue messages that implied interference in relation to other states,” Ecuadorian officials cut off his access to the internet and imposed a ban on virtually all visitors.  The government’s statement alluded to Assange’s meeting with two leaders of the Catalan independence movement and his public statement of support for the movement in November 2017, which had provoked the anger of the Spanish government.

Ecuador’s economic situation offered further opportunity for U.S. leverage at that time. The steep drop in the price of Ecuador’s oil exports had caused the South American nation’s politically sensitive domestic fiscal deficit to increase rapidly.  In mid-June of 2018 an International Monetary Fund delegation made the organization’s first trip to Quito in many years in an effort to review the problem. A report by J.P. Morgan released immediately after the IMF’s mission suggested that it was now likely that the Moreno government would seek a loan from the IMF. The regime had previously sought to avoid such a move, because it would create potential domestic political difficulties. Seeking an IMF loan would make Ecuador more dependent than before on political support from the United States.

On the heels of that IMF visit, Vice President Pence traveled to Ecuador in June and delivered a blunt political message. An unnamed White House official issued a statement confirming that Pence had “raised the issue of Mr. Assange” with Moreno and that the two governments had “agreed to remain in close coordination on potential next steps going forward.”

In late July 2018, Moreno, then in Madrid, confirmed that he was involved in negotiations with the U.K. government on the issue of Assange’s status. The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald reported that a source close to the Ecuadorian foreign ministry and the president’s office had warned privately that the two administrations were close to an agreement that would hand Assange over to the U.K. government. He reported further that it would depend on unidentified assurances from the United States.

The Tale of a Secret Plot Linking Assange With Russia

On Sept. 21, 2018, The Guardian published an article titled “Revealed: Russia’s secret plan to help Julian Assange escape from the UK.” In that story, Guardian reporters Stephanie Kirchgaessner, Dan Collyns and Luke Harding asserted that Russia had devised a plot to “smuggle” Assange out of the embassy in a diplomatic car and then whisk him out of the U.K. The authors also claimed that Moscow had negotiated the alleged plot with a close Ecuadorian confidant of Assange and suggested that the scheme raised “new questions about Assange’s ties to the Kremlin.”

But the story was an obvious fabrication, intended to justify the agreement to deprive Assange of his asylum in the embassy by linking him with the Kremlin. The only alleged evidence it offered was the claim by unidentified sources that the former Ecuadorian consul on London and confidant of Assange, Fidel Narvaez, had “served as a point of contact with Moscow” on the escape plan—a claim that the Narvaez had flatly denied.

A second Guardian piece published five days later implicitly acknowledged the fictitious nature of the first. It failed to even mention the earlier article’s claim that the Russians had concocted a plan to get Assange out of the embassy secretly. Instead the article, by Dan Collyns, cited a “classified document signed by Ecuador’s then-Deputy Foreign Minister Jose Luis Jacome” that showed the foreign ministry had assigned Assange to serve in the embassy in Moscow. But the author acknowledged that he had not seen the document, relying instead on a claim by Ecuadorian opposition politician Paola Vintimilla that she had seen it.

In a Sept. 28, 2018, story for ABC News, reporters James Gordon Meek, Sean Langan and Aicha El Hammar Castano reported that ABC had “reviewed and authenticated” Ecuadorian documents, including a Dec. 19, 2017, directive from the foreign ministry on posting Assange in Moscow. They noted, however, that the documents “did not indicate whether Assange knew of the Ecuadorean directive at the time.”  The ABC story relied on unnamed Ecuadorian officials who, the reporters said, had “confirmed” the authenticity of those documents.

Former U.K. Ambassador Craig Murray, who had been forced out of the British diplomatic corps in 2004 for having having refused to recant his reporting about rampant torture by the Karimov regime in Uzbekistan that was then supplying the United States with military bases, was a close friend of Assange and was helping him during the negotiations on a diplomatic post. “I was asked to undertake negotiations with a number of governments on receiving [Assange], which I did intensively from December to February last year,” Murray recalled in an email. “Julian instructed me which governments to approach and specifically and definitively stated he did not wish to go to Russia.”

Although Murray would not identify the countries with which he had conversations about Assange, his blog and social media postings between December 2017 and March 2018 show that he had traveled to Turkey, Canada, Cuba, Jordan and Qatar.

Murray also said that, to his knowledge, Assange had never been informed of any proposed assignment in Moscow. “Neither the Ecuadorian Embassy, with whom I was working closely, nor Julian ever mentioned to me that Ecuador was organizing a diplomatic appointment to Russia,” Murray said. According to the former ambassador, the Ecuadorian Embassy correspondence with the British Foreign Office, which the embassy shared with him, did not mention a posting to Russia.

Murray believes that there are only two possible explanations for those reported documents. The first is the Ecuadorian government was working on its own plan for Assange to go to Russia without telling him, and “intended to present it as a fait accompli.” But the more likely explanation, Murray said, “is that the documents have been retrospectively faked by the Moreno government to try and discredit Julian and prepare for his expulsion, as part of Moreno’s widespread moves to ingratiate himself with the USA and UK.”

On Oct. 12, the Moreno government took a further step toward stripping Assange of asylum status by issuing a “Special Protocol” that prohibits him from any activities that could be “considered as political or interfering with the internal affairs of other states.” It further required all journalists, lawyers and anyone else who wanted to meet with Assange to disclose social media usernames and the serial number and IMEI codes of their cellphones and tablets. And it stated that that personal information could be shared with “other agencies,” according to the memorandum reported by The Guardian.

In response, Assange’s lawyers initiated a suit against the Ecuadorian foreign minister, Jose Valencia, for “isolating and muzzling him.” But it was yet another sign of the efforts by both the British and Ecuadorian governments to justify a possible move to take away Assange’s protection from extradition to the United States.

When and whether that will happen remains unclear. What is not in doubt, however, is that the Ecuadorian and British governments, working on behalf of the Trump administration, are trying to make it as difficult as possible for Julian Assange to avoid extradition by staying in the Ecuadorian Embassy.

GM to Lay Off Thousands and Close 4 U.S. Plants

DETROIT — General Motors will cut up to 14,000 workers in North America and put five plants up for possible closure as it abandons many of its car models and restructures to focus more on autonomous and electric vehicles, the automaker announced Monday.

The reductions could amount to as much as 8 percent of GM’s global workforce of 180,000 employees.

The restructuring reflects changing North American auto markets as manufacturers continue to shift away from cars toward SUVs and trucks. In October, almost 65 percent of new vehicles sold in the U.S. were trucks or SUVs. That figure was about 50 percent cars just five years ago.

GM is shedding cars largely because it doesn’t make money on them, Citi analyst Itay Michaeli wrote in a note to investors.

“We estimate sedans operate at a significant loss, hence the need for classic restructuring,” he wrote.

Hours after the announcement, President Donald Trump said his administration and lawmakers were exerting “a lot of pressure” on GM. He said he told the company that the U.S. has done a lot for GM and that if its cars aren’t selling, the company needs to produce ones that will.

Trump, who has made bringing back auto jobs a big part of his appeal to Ohio and other Great Lakes states that are crucial to his re-election, also said he was being tough on General Motors CEO Mary Barra.

At a rally near GM’s Lordstown, Ohio, plant last summer, Trump told people not to sell their homes because the jobs are “all coming back.”

The layoffs come amid the backdrop of a trade war between the U.S., China and Europe that likely will lead to higher prices for imported vehicles and those exported from the U.S. Barra said the company faces challenges from tariffs but she did not directly link the layoffs to them.

The planned reduction includes about 8,000 white-collar employees, or 15 percent of GM’s North American white-collar workforce. Some will take buyouts while others will be laid off.

At the factories, around 3,300 blue-collar workers could lose jobs in the U.S. and another 2,600 in Canada, but some U.S. workers could transfer to truck or SUV factories that are increasing production. The cuts mark GM’s first major downsizing since shedding thousands of jobs in the Great Recession.

The company also said it will stop operating two additional factories outside North America by the end of next year, in addition to a previously announced plant closure in Gunsan, South Korea.

General Motors Co.’s pre-emptive strike to get leaner before the next downturn likely will be followed by Ford Motor Co., which has said it is restructuring and will lay off an unspecified number of white-collar workers. Toyota Motor Corp. also has discussed cutting costs, even though it’s building a new assembly plant in Alabama.

GM isn’t the first to abandon much of the car market. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles got out of small and midsize cars two years ago, while Ford announced plans to shed all cars but the Mustang sports car in the U.S. in the coming years.

Barra told reporters that GM doesn’t foresee an economic downturn and is making the cuts “to get in front of it while the company is strong and while the economy is strong.”

Factories that could be closed include assembly plants in Detroit and Oshawa, Ontario, and Lordstown, Ohio, as well as transmission plants in Warren, Michigan, and near Baltimore.

The announcement worried GM workers who could lose their jobs.

“I don’t know how I’m going to feed my family,” Matt Smith, a worker at the Ontario factory, said Monday outside the plant’s south gate, where workers blocked trucks from entering or leaving. “It’s hard. It’s horrible.” Smith’s wife also works at the plant. The couple has an 11-month-old at home.

Workers at the Ontario plant walked off the job Monday but were expected to return Tuesday.

After the morning announcement, Barra was to head for Washington to speak with White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow in what was described as a previously scheduled meeting, according to a White House official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss the meeting publicly.

Most of the factories to be affected by GM’s restructuring build cars that will not be sold in the U.S. after next year. They could close or they could get different vehicles to build. Their futures will be part of contract talks with the United Auto Workers union next year.

The Detroit-based union has already condemned GM’s actions and threatened to fight them “through every legal, contractual and collective bargaining avenue open to our membership.”

Bobbi Marsh, who has worked assembling the Chevrolet Cruze compact car at the Ohio plant since 2008, said she can’t understand why the factory might close given the strong economy.

“I can’t believe our president would allow this to happen,” she said Monday.

She now faces an uncertain future, not knowing whether the plant will close for good or if there’s a chance it could find another use.

“Everything is up in the air,” she said. “I don’t want to give up hope for this facility and these people. I spend more time around them than my own family. It would be like breaking up a family.”

Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown said the move will be disastrous for the region around Youngstown, Ohio, east of Cleveland, where GM is one of the area’s few remaining industrial anchors.

“GM received record tax breaks as a result of the GOP’s tax bill last year, and has eliminated jobs instead of using that tax windfall to invest in American workers,” he said in a statement.

Many of those who will lose jobs are now working on conventional cars with internal combustion engines. Barra said the industry is changing rapidly and moving toward electric propulsion, autonomous vehicles and ride-sharing, and GM must adjust.

She said GM is still hiring people with expertise in software and electric and autonomous vehicles.

GM will stop producing cars and transmissions at the plants through 2019. In all, six car models were scrapped, leaving the company with nine remaining car models.

The automaker said it was ending Chevrolet Volt production because the vehicle was meant to be a bridge to fully electric cars when it was introduced about a decade ago. The Volt has a small battery that can take it about 50 miles, then it switches to a small gasoline engine.

Since it was introduced, battery technology has improved dramatically. Now the full-electric Chevrolet Bolt can go up to 238 miles on a single charge.

GM builds full-size Chevrolet and GMC pickups in Mexico, and it recently announced that a new Chevrolet Blazer SUV will be built there. Also, GM imports the Buick Envision midsize SUV from China.

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Associated Press writers Rob Gillies in Toronto, John Seewer in Toledo, Ohio, and Zeke Miller in Washington contributed to this report.

Mueller: Ex-Trump Campaign Chair Manafort Lied, Broke Plea Agreement

WASHINGTON—Special counsel Robert Mueller is accusing former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort of lying to federal investigators in the Russia probe in breach of his plea agreement, an extraordinary allegation that could expose Manafort to a lengthier prison sentence — and potentially more criminal charges.

The torpedoing of Manafort’s plea deal, disclosed in a court filing Monday, also results in Mueller’s team losing a witness from the top of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign who was present for several key episodes under investigation. That includes a Trump Tower meeting involving Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer he was told had derogatory information on Democrat Hillary Clinton.

In the new filing, Mueller’s team said that after Manafort agreed to truthfully cooperate with the investigation, he “committed federal crimes” by lying about “a variety of subject matters.” Prosecutors said they will detail the “nature of the defendant’s crimes and lies” in writing at a later date to the judge.

Through his attorneys, Manafort denied lying, saying he “believes he provided truthful information” during a series of sessions with Mueller’s investigators. He also disagreed that he breached his plea agreement. Still, both sides now agree they can’t resolve the conflict, and U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson should set a date to sentence him.

Manafort, who remains jailed, had been meeting with the special counsel’s office since he pleaded guilty in September to conspiracy against the United States and conspiracy to obstruct justice. He cut that deal to head off a second trial after being convicted last summer of eight felony counts related to millions of dollars he hid from the IRS in offshore accounts.

Both cases stemmed from his Ukrainian political work and undisclosed lobbying work he admitted to carrying out in the U.S. in violation of federal law.

As part of his plea agreement, Manafort pledged to “cooperate fully, truthfully, completely, and forthrightly” with the government “in any and all matters” prosecutors deemed necessary. He also forfeited many of his rights as well as his ability to withdraw the plea deal if he broke any of the terms. In return, prosecutors agreed to not bring additional charges against him and to ask a judge for a reduction of his sentence if he provided “substantial assistance.”

But with prosecutors saying he breached the agreement, Manafort now faces serious repercussions such as the possibility of prosecution on additional charges, including those prosecutors dropped when he made the deal.

Manafort already faces up to five years in prison on the two charges in his plea agreement. In his separate Virginia case, Manafort’s potential sentencing under federal guidelines has not yet been calculated, but prosecutors have previously said he could face as much as 10 years in prison on those charges.

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Follow Chad Day on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChadSDay

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Read the court filing: http://apne.ws/YN2AwkK

Trump Is Forging His Own Gaza on the Southern Border

When a crowd is exposed to tear gas, an aerosol containing the chemical agent 2-chlorobenzaldene malononitrile (CS), nasal passages begin to run, eyes water uncontrollably and breathing grows short and painful. Those directly exposed can experience vomiting or diarrhea. Effects take hold within 30 seconds, and the symptoms can last up to 10 minutes, even after the air has cleared or the afflicted have managed to scramble to safety.

For these reasons, nearly every nation in the world banned the compound’s use in warfare under the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993. Yet despite ratifying these agreements, the United States continues to utilize tear gas for domestic riot control. Police shot dozens of canisters at protesters over several days in Ferguson, Mo., and now U.S. Border Patrol agents have fired upon Central American migrants and their toddlers in Tijuana, Mexico, seeking asylum in the United States—an act of aggression that almost certainly violates international law.

When President Donald Trump announced that he would be deploying soldiers to the southern border, in numbers that seemed to swell in direct proportion to the fever of his campaign rallies, the media eagerly enabled his hysteria, treating the arrival of a few hundred refugees as an impending alien invasion. And while Nicholas Kristof has since acknowledged that The New York Times allowed itself to be manipulated ahead of a midterm election, few appear willing to confront the darker reality this assault has laid bare: The Trump administration has sought to militarize the region from the start.

In January of 2017, mere days after Trump was sworn into office, Bloomberg published a report detailing Magal Security Systems’ offer to construct the president’s long-promised wall. (Shares in the company soared 50 percent following the 2016 presidential election.) During a conference on border security, the company presented its Fiber Patrol product to officials from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, among others. Previously, Magal Security Systems had constructed Israel’s border wall with Gaza, as well as a fence separating the country from Egypt.

That August, amid a tense meeting with then Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto over who might fund such a construction, Trump made a confession of sorts. “You know, you look at Israel,” a transcript of the conversation reveals him saying. “Israel has a wall and everyone said do not build a wall, walls do not work—99.9 percent of people trying to get across that wall cannot get across anymore. … Bibi Netanyahu told me the wall works.”

While a physical wall will likely go unfunded with Democrats now controlling the House of Representatives, the president has nonetheless achieved its central aim. By separating children from their migrant parents at the border, the Trump administration has exerted its dominance over a vulnerable population, and signaled to its supporters that it will not simply accept white nationalism as a byproduct of American empire but embrace it as a matter of public policy. As of October, administration officials had failed to reunite hundreds of these children with their mothers and fathers, months after a court-imposed deadline to do so.

In recent weeks, the U.S. military has laid down miles of concertina barbed wire along the U.S. border with Mexico as part of Operation Faithful Patriot. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis has since dropped the name of the mission on the grounds that it was too military sounding; when asked if the troops planned to remove the wiring, he replied, “We’ll let you know.”

It seems increasingly unlikely. During a recent stop in Montana, Trump gushed over the work of the U.S. military along the border, the new tracts of fencing in particular. “Mexico is trying, they are trying but we’re different, we have our military on the border,” he said. “And I noticed all that beautiful barbed wire going up today. Barbed wire, used properly, can be a beautiful sight.”

If decades of U.S. foreign policy have shaped the migrant caravan, from President Ronald Reagan’s violent maneuverings in Nicaragua and El Salvador during the waning days of the Cold War to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s assistance in the Honduran coup of 2009, the crisis currently unfolding in Tijuana is almost entirely of the Trump administration’s making. “Trump’s border policy has squeezed asylum seekers at both ends,” observes Vox’s Dara Lind. “Officials stress that migrants ought to present themselves legally at ports of entry, while asylum seekers at ports are forced to wait days or weeks for entry to the US, and President Donald Trump himself says they shouldn’t be coming at all.”

For the president and his enablers, that a refugee’s method of entering the country has no bearing on his or her claims to asylum is ultimately irrelevant. As is so often the case in this administration, the cruelty is the point. Trump has since threatened to shut down the Mexican border “permanently,” an act of dubious legality that, coupled with acts of violent suppression, would only further Gaza-fy the southern border. This was the idea all along.

‘Flawless’: NASA Craft Lands on Mars After Perilous Journey

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.—A NASA spacecraft designed to drill down into Mars’ interior landed on the planet Monday after a perilous, supersonic plunge through its red skies, setting off jubilation among scientists who had waited in white-knuckle suspense for confirmation to arrive across 100 million miles of space.

Flight controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, leapt out of their chairs, screaming, dancing and hugging, upon learning that InSight’s had safely arrived on Mars, the graveyard for a multitude of previous missions.

“Touchdown confirmed!” a flight controller called out, touching off a celebration that was a complete turnaround from the nail-biting anxiety that gripped the control room as the spacecraft made its six-minute descent.

Confirmation came minutes later from a pair of tiny satellites that had been trailing InSight throughout the six-month, 300-million-mile (482-million-kilometer) journey.

The two experimental satellites not only relayed the good news in almost real time, they sent back InSight’s first snapshot of Mars just 4½ minutes after landing. The picture was speckled with debris because the dust cover was still on the lander’s camera, but the terrain looked smooth and sandy with just one sizable rock visible — pretty much what scientists had hoped for. Better photos are expected in the days ahead.

It was NASA’s — indeed, humanity’s — eighth successful landing at Mars since the 1976 Viking probes, and the first in six years. NASA’s Curiosity rover, which arrived in 2012, is still on the move on Mars.

“Flawless,” declared JPL’s chief engineer, Rob Manning. “This is what we really hoped and imagined in our mind’s eye,” he added. “Sometimes things work out in your favor.”

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, presiding over his first Mars landing as the space agency’s boss, said: “What an amazing day for our country.”

He said it was a little strange to realize that by the time word arrived, history had already been made eight minutes earlier because of the lag in communication between Mars and Earth.

Indeed, by the time word of touchdown came from space just after 3 p.m. EST, InSight was already well settled on the western side of Elysium Planitia, the flat-as-a-parking-lot plain that NASA was aiming for.

Many Mars-bound spacecraft launched by the U.S., Russia and other spacefaring countries, have been lost or destroyed over the years, with a success rate of just 40 percent, not counting InSight.

NASA went with its old, straightforward approach this time, using a parachute and braking engines to get InSight’s speed from 12,300 mph (19,800 kph) when it pierced the Martian atmosphere, about 77 miles (114 kilometers) up, to 5 mph (8kph) at touchdown.

Flight controllers were relieved to find out promptly that Insight made it to the surface and didn’t burn up in the atmosphere or bounce off it.

Museums, planetariums and libraries across the U.S. held viewing parties to watch the events unfold at JPL. NASA TV coverage was also shown on the giant screen in New York’s Times Square, where crowds huddled under umbrellas in the rain.

The $1 billion international mission features a German-led mechanical mole that will burrow down 16 feet (5 meters) to measure the planet’s internal heat. Nothing has ever dug deeper into Mars than several inches. The lander also has a French-made seismometer for measuring quakes, if they exist on our smaller, geologically calmer neighbor.

Another experiment will calculate Mars’ wobble to reveal the makeup of the planet’s core.

The 800-pound (360-kilogram) InSight is stationary with three legs and will operate from the same spot for the next two years, the duration of a Martian year. Its first job was to get a fast picture out. The next task was the unfolding of its solar panels. NASA wanted to wait 16 minutes for the dust to settle before attempting that; it was awaiting word Monday night on how that went.

Lead scientist Bruce Banerdt warned it will be a slow-motion mission. The instruments will have to be set up and fine-tuned. He said he doesn’t expect to start getting a stream of solid data until late next spring, and it may take the entire mission to really get the goods.

“It really depends on how benevolent Mars is feeling, how many marsquakes it throws at us,” Banerdt said Sunday. “The more marsquakes, the better. We just love that shaking, and so the more shaking it does, the better we can see the inside.”

Mars’ well-preserved interior provides a snapshot of what Earth may have looked like following its formation 4.5 billion years ago, according to Banerdt. While Earth is active seismically, Mars “decided to rest on its laurels” after it formed, he said.

By examining and mapping the interior of Mars, scientists hope to learn why the rocky planets in our solar system turned out so different and why Earth became a haven for life.

Still, there are no life detectors aboard InSight. That will be part of NASA’s next mission, the Mars 2020 rover, which will prowl for rocks that might contain evidence of ancient life.

The question of whether life ever existed in Mars’ wet, watery past is what keeps driving NASA back to the fourth rock from the sun.