Chris Hedges's Blog, page 458

Many Feared Dead in Indonesian Quake and Tsunami

PALU, Indonesia — The powerful earthquake and tsunami that hit Indonesia’s central Sulawesi has claimed dozens of victims, a disaster official said Saturday, as rescuers raced to reach the region and an AP reporter saw numerous bodies in a hard-hit city.

Disaster agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho told a news conference that four hospitals in the central Sulawesi city of Palu have reported 48 dead and hundreds of injured. He said “many victims” are still to be accounted for.

Dawn revealed a devastated coastline in central Sulawesi where the 3-meter high (10 foot) tsunami triggered by a magnitude 7.5 earthquake Friday smashed into two cities and several settlements.

Palu, the capital of Central Sulawesi province, was strewn with debris from collapsed buildings. Seawater still pooled inland and a mosque heavily damaged by the quake was half submerged. A shopping mall in the paralyzed city of more than 380,000 people had been reduced to a crumpled hulk.

The city is built around a narrow bay that apparently magnified the force of the tsunami waters as they raced into the tight inlet.

An AP reporter saw bodies partially covered by tarpaulins and a man carrying a dead child through the wreckage.

In the nearby city of Donggala a large bridge with yellow arches that spanned a coastal river had collapsed.

Indonesian TV showed a smartphone video of a powerful wave hitting Palu at dusk, with people screaming and running in fear. The water smashed into buildings and a large mosque already damaged by the earthquake.

Communications with the area are difficult because power and telecommunications are cut, hampering search and rescue efforts.

Nugroho has said that essential aircraft can land at Palu airport’s though AirNav, which oversees aircraft navigation, said the runway is cracked and the control tower damaged.

AirNav said one of its air traffic controllers died in the quake after staying in the tower to ensure a flight he’d just cleared for departure got airborne safely. It did.

Indonesia’s president on Friday night said he had instructed the security minister to coordinate the government’s response to a quake and tsunami that hit central Sulawesi.

Joko “Jokowi” Widodo also told reporters in his hometown of Solo that he had called on the country’s military chief help with search and rescue efforts.

U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said U.N. officials were in contact with Indonesian authorities and “stand ready to provide support as required.”

Indonesia is prone to earthquakes because of its location on the “Ring of Fire,” an arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific Basin.

In December 2004, a massive magnitude 9.1 earthquake off Sumatra in western Indonesia triggered a tsunami that killed 230,000 people in a dozen countries.

Israeli Troops Kill Seven Gazans at Border

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Israeli troops killed seven Palestinians, two of them children, and wounded dozens more, Palestinian health officials said, in the deadliest day in recent weeks as Gaza’s Hamas rulers stepped up protests along the border fence.

Thousands of Palestinians gathered Friday at five locations along Gaza Strip’s frontier with Israel in response to calls by Hamas, the militant group that has controlled Gaza since seizing it from the Palestinian Authority in 2007.

Two of the dead were children, aged 12 and 14, the Gaza Health Ministry said, adding that all the dead had gunshot wounds. At least 90 other protesters were wounded by live fire, officials said.

Hamas has led weekly protests since March, but accelerated them in recent weeks to near daily events, pressing in large part for an end to a crippling Israeli-Egyptian blockade imposed after Hamas’s violent takeover of Gaza in 2007. Hamas ousted forces loyal to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in an armed coup.

At the fence, protesters burned dozens of tires, using the thick black smoke as a screen to throw rocks and explosives toward Israeli troops stationed on the opposite side of the fence. The soldiers responded with tear gas and gunfire.

The Israeli military said in a statement that in response to “grenades and explosive devices” hurled at troops during the protests, Israeli aircraft carried out two airstrikes on Hamas militant positions in the Gaza Strip. There were no Israeli casualties reported in Friday’s clashes.

Hamas has led and organized the protests, but turnout has also been driven by growing despair over blockade-linked hardship, including lengthy power cuts and soaring unemployment.

Israeli troops have killed at least 143 Palestinians since protests began in late March, and a Palestinian sniper killed an Israeli soldier in August.

Israel argues it’s defending its border and accuses Hamas of using the protests as a screen for attempts to breach the border fence to attack civilians and soldiers. Human rights groups have accused Israeli troops of excessive and unlawful use of force against unarmed protesters.

Hamas and Israel came to the brink of serious conflict this summer as violence escalated along the border. The two sides attempted to reach an agreement through indirect talks mediated by the United Nations and Egypt to ease tensions in exchange for lifting some restrictions on the economically crippled enclave. But those negotiations have stalled in recent weeks.

Earlier this week, a Hamas official, Sami Abu Zuhri, said the movement would escalate its border protests after the talks failed. He accused Abbas, who governs parts of the West Bank, of disrupting the negotiations.

Hamas vowed to continue the marches until the blockade is lifted. It also promised to accelerate protests after Abbas, speaking at the U.N. on Thursday, threatened more measures to force Hamas into surrendering power.

Abbas slashed funding to Gaza and cut salaries of Palestinian Authority employees there to pressure Hamas, making it increasingly difficult for it to govern. Hamas fears Abbas may further reduce funding to health care and other services for Gazans provided by the Palestinian Authority.

How the Supreme Court Defined Students’ Constitutional Rights

“The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind”
Purchase in the Truthdig Bazaar

“ The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind”

A book by Justin Driver

Reviewed by Eloise Pasachoff

In 1969, as mass protests about the Vietnam War and civil rights roiled America, the Supreme Court issued an opinion upholding the right of students to protest peacefully at school with a memorable and oft-quoted line: “It can hardly be argued that … students … shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” In “The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind,” University of Chicago law professor Justin Driver presents a masterful analysis of the Supreme Court’s role in public school students’ constitutional rights more generally.

Across seven chapters organized thematically around different lines of Supreme Court cases, Driver—a former law clerk to Justices Stephen Breyer and Sandra Day O’Connor—makes the bold claim that “the public school has served as the single most significant site of constitutional interpretation within the nation’s history.” This claim is easy to believe after his encyclopedic discussions of the entire range of Supreme Court cases on student rights under numerous constitutional provisions: the First Amendment’s guarantees of freedom of speech and free exercise of religion, and its proscription against government establishment of religion; the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures; the Fifth Amendment’s protections against self-incrimination; and the 14th Amendment’s guarantees of equal protection and limits on deprivations of liberty or property without due process.

Click here to read long excerpts from “The Schoolhouse Gate” at Google Books.

As Driver demonstrates, it was not obvious 100 years ago that these constitutional protections would extend to students at all or, if they did, how fully they would apply. The book’s portrayals of fierce battles over these rights in public schools—a primary place of “national identity” and “cultural anxieties”—amply justify Driver’s elevation of the public school as an important locus of constitutional interpretation where, time after time, the court “has played an instrumental role in shaping constitutional realities.”

Driver also makes two powerful related arguments. First, the Supreme Court started off in the right direction on school desegregation, student speech rights and school discipline, but in each area has weakened its initial holdings in a way that diminishes “both the nation’s public schools and our constitutional order.” Second, the court has reached acceptable constitutional compromises in a number of important areas, including the role of religion in public education and the meaning of “equal protection” as it applies to single-sex schools.

The book is best when it goes beyond the justices’ opinions to give broader context to each case, including contemporaneous responses by national and local newspapers and the background stories of courageous student plaintiffs and their parents. Though Driver doesn’t make the connection explicit, many of these stories have relevance to current societal debates. For example, today’s football players who kneel during the national anthem draw some of the same heated reactions as did Jehovah’s Witness elementary school students 80 years ago when they refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. (After first approving school expulsions on these grounds in 1940, the Supreme Court reversed course in 1943 and forbid them as a violation of the First Amendment.)

The book also benefits when Driver discusses his personal connection to the material he analyzes. For example, he humorously describes his childhood pastime of watching reruns of “Three’s Company” on TV as “painstaking, exhaustive field research” that helps flesh out his analysis of the “most renowned—if not exactly the most celebrated—speech ever delivered at a high school assembly,” a nomination for student body president that the Supreme Court later deemed “lewd,” “vulgar,” “indecent,” “offensive” and “sexually explicit,” but that the student speaker in question justified as in keeping with student interest in “shows like Three’s Company, with their heavy use of sexual humor.”

More poignantly, Driver recounts his feelings of shame, after he received a three-day suspension in the ninth grade for drinking alcohol with some friends on an overnight field trip, to counter the Supreme Court’s analysis of school suspensions as “a welcome holiday,” reflecting on the expulsion he probably would have faced had his “schoolboy indiscretion” taken place in more recent years under school “zero tolerance” policies that the Supreme Court has largely let stand. Driver also movingly describes his parents’ efforts to take him out of their segregated community across the Anacostia River in Southeast Washington, D.C., to enroll him in Alice Deal Junior High School in Upper Northwest (“where the educational outcomes were much brighter and the student bodies, not incidentally, were much whiter”). This effort required his father to camp out overnight in front of the school to be the first in line to enroll his out-of-boundary son.

Powerful as the book is, however, it feels incomplete on the role of the Supreme Court in public schools in two dimensions. First, arguably the most important part of the Constitution that structures student relationships with their schools is entirely absent from the book: the spending clause, which grants Congress the authority to spend money in pursuit of the “general welfare” in exchange for state and local governments agreeing to accept conditions imposed on the use of that money. Driver’s focus on the rights-granting provisions of the Constitution instead of the provisions designing our government’s structure obscures how the Supreme Court’s interpretations of the scope of the spending clause have dramatic implications for how far Congress may reach into the schoolhouse gate.

Second, a large part of the Supreme Court’s docket involves the interpretation of statutes, not the Constitution. The court has issued many important decisions on the scope of student rights under education statutes. For example, does Title IX’s ban on discrimination by schools on the basis of sex protect students from peer sexual harassment? Does the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act grant students with disabilities the right to attend a private school at public expense if the public school is failing to provide them with a “free, appropriate public education”—and what does a “free, appropriate public education” mean in the first place? Driver acknowledges this gap, saying the court’s role in statutory rights deserves its own book, but it is still hard to come away with a sense that he has fully examined “the intersection of two distinctively American institutions: the public school and the Supreme Court” without it.

Neither of these points undercuts the value of what Driver has written, however. In fact, the number of closely divided cases he both praises and treats as settled law is striking—for example, two decisions from 1982 that required public schools to admit undocumented immigrants and that limited schools’ ability to remove books from their libraries that school board members wished to censor. Precedents like these are up for grabs as the Supreme Court undergoes a personnel shift under Trump, with the arrival of Justice Neil Gorsuch and the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy. Against this background, Driver’s book makes for especially timely and important reading.

Eloise Pasachoff, a former law clerk to Justice Sonia Sotomayor, is a law professor at the Georgetown University Law Center.

©2018 Washington Post Book World

How America Came to Have the World’s Biggest Prison Population

In this week’s “Scheer Intelligence,” elected Public Defender of San Francisco Jeff Adachi, whose parents were confined in an Arkansas internment camp during World War II, recalls how he knew that his parents were “in jail” for being Japanese-American and describes how that understanding affected his life. “That experience—that they didn’t have a trial, that there was never any Japanese-American who was charged with espionage—really ingrained in me the notion that you have to fight for your rights,” he says. “It’s not something that you can take for granted.”

Adachi kicks off the conversation by discussing the new bail law in California, which was purportedly designed to make the existing system more fair. But he and other initial backers decided to drop their support when California Gov. Jerry Brown and judicial advisers made substantive changes to it.

For Adachi, the old system offered a way to “buy your freedom,” which seems to run counter to the vaunted ideal of liberty and justice for all, especially since, as he puts it, “85 percent of the people who are behind bars are there because they cannot post bail.” He opposes the new bill because, he says, it “gives all the power to the judges” to use preventive detention, which precludes the possibility of posting bail and can result in a person sitting in jail indefinitely, even in misdemeanor cases. That strategy is particularly onerous if the person in question is innocent.

Over the course of his career, Adachi has fought for basic constitutional rights and against police and prosecutorial misconduct. “In the immigration court,” he says, “you don’t have the right to a lawyer, even if you’re a child,” so he’s established an immigration unit in the public defender’s office to provide representation to any immigrant who is detained or in custody, including the undocumented and green-card holders.

The discussion takes a lively turn when Adachi suggests that “America at its best is a place where everyone is welcome … [in which] everyone who wants to be part of this great society is able to do that.”

Catch the full episode below:

The Trump Administration Has Resigned Itself to Climate Catastrophe

If the earth’s temperature climbs 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), sea levels are expected to rise 40 centimeters and the availability of fresh water could decrease as much as 9 percent, according to a 2016 study from the scientific journal Earth System Dynamics. An increase of 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) would be catastrophic; whole swaths of Africa, South America and Asia would see dramatic reductions in their crop yields, and 98 percent of the planet’s coral reefs would be at risk.

By the Trump administration’s latest estimations, the planet will warm as much as 4 degrees C (7.2 degrees F) by 2100—this despite the president’s claim that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese government. But not only is it unwilling to address this impending cataclysm, it appears eager to accelerate the earth’s demise.

“The administration did not offer this dire forecast as part of an argument to combat climate change,” The Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin, Brady Dennis and Chris Mooney write of last month’s environmental impact statement. “Just the opposite: The analysis assumes the planet’s fate is already sealed.”

Issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) as a rationalization for the president’s proposal to eliminate fuel efficiency standards for cars and select trucks built after 2020, the statement acknowledges that only radical cuts in carbon emissions can alter our present trajectory. Such cuts, it notes, “would require substantial increases in technology innovation and adoption compared to today’s levels … which is not currently technologically feasible or economically feasible.”

The safety agency’s findings are broadly consistent with recent studies indicating a global climate crisis has increased the frequency of extreme weather events, and that accelerated Arctic warming has prolonged summer weather in North America, potentially leading to “very-extreme extremes.” A report from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in August raised the possibility of a “Hothouse Earth” in which warming oceans and climbing temperatures create a feedback loop that endangers the very future of humanity. Such models remain theoretical, but U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres recently declared that “climate change is moving faster than we are” and that “we face a direct existential threat.”

What ultimately distinguishes the NHTSA’s statement is its nihilism. “The amazing thing they’re saying is human activities are going to lead to this rise of carbon dioxide that is disastrous for the environment and society,” Michael McCracken, a former scientist at the U.S. Global Change Research Program, tells the Post. “And then they’re saying they’re not going to do anything about it.”

In 2017, President Trump withdrew from the Paris Climate Accords, a largely symbolic agreement that nonetheless aims to curb greenhouse gas emissions and keep the planet’s temperature within 1.5 degrees C of pre-industrial levels. It may have been buried in a 500-page document, but the administration’s message is clear: If we as a species are to survive the Anthropocene, the rest of the world cannot put its faith in the United States.

‘Jobs Alliance’ Tries to Block Job-Creating Gas Plants in West Virginia

This article was produced in partnership with the Charleston Gazette-Mail, which is a member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network.

Three years ago, a group of residents in West Virginia’s northern panhandle formed a new group, the Ohio Valley Jobs Alliance, and declared themselves a “voice for local jobs.”

A few months later, however, the group’s first major action was aimed not at creating jobs, but at blocking them.

In November 2015, the alliance, known as the OVJA, filed a legal appeal to challenge a key permit for construction of the Moundsville Power project, a natural gas-fired plant in Marshall County.

The move was puzzling. Backers of Moundsville Power said the project would be a significant boost for the area, providing 500 jobs annually during a three-year construction period and 30 permanent jobs once it was operational. Supporters said the project was a way for residents to capture more economic gains from West Virginia’s booming natural gas industry.

The legal action, it turns out, was funded by Murray Energy Corp., one of the nation’s largest coal producers, one of the group’s leaders testified in a deposition in the case. Murray Energy’s founder and CEO is Robert E. Murray, who is among the nation’s best-known advocates for reviving the coal industry and cutting regulations related to it.

The OVJA also is seeking to stop two other natural gas power plants proposed for West Virginia, and Murray Energy has acknowledged paying “certain legal fees” for the group. Like the Moundsville plant, the facilities proposed for Harrison and Brooke counties would provide hundreds of construction jobs for several years and then about 30 permanent positions. All told, the three plants would cost more than $2 billion to build.

Power plants need several kinds of government permits, and the jobs alliance has focused its legal attacks on air-pollution permits issued by the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection and utility “certificates of need” permits handled by the state Public Service Commission.

Testimony in the power plant cases before both agencies doesn’t reveal details about Murray Energy’s funding for the OVJA lawyers, and current financial records for the alliance aren’t publicly available.

In pursuing their cases, the lawyers paid, at least in part, by Murray Energy have relied on the same kinds of government regulations that Robert Murray has railed against. In the Moundsville plant case, those lawyers challenged a permit partly because it allowed an increase in carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming. Murray has said global warming is a “hoax.”

Construction has not begun on any of the three projects, at least partly, because of litigation-related delays, developers say.

“It’s been very frustrating,” said Drew Dorn, president of Energy Solutions Consortium, the company that was originally behind the Moundsville plant and continues to promote the Harrison and Brooke projects.

OVJA officials and lawyers did not return calls and emails seeking comment. Robert Murray, through a spokesman, declined a request for an interview. The spokesman would not answer questions, pointing to a prepared statement:

“The Ohio Valley Jobs Alliance is a grassroots organization that seeks to preserve coal jobs in the Ohio Valley,” the statement said. “While we certainly support their mission, we have not provided financial support to the organization, other than assisting them with certain legal fees. OVJA members have the welfare of the people in the Ohio Valley as their first priority, as they work to preserve these jobs and family livelihoods. We are pleased to support their efforts.”

The influence of Murray and his company on the coal industry’s future is far-reaching. He is a funder and confidant of President Donald Trump. Trump has pledged to revive the coal industry, and Murray has praised the administration’s efforts. During an August rally in Charleston, the president — typically a supporter of large energy projects — touted coal as superior to natural gas. He played up the risk of terrorist attacks on gas pipelines and extolled the virtues of coal.

“We love clean, beautiful West Virginia coal,” the president told a crowd sprinkled with miners holding “Trump digs coal” signs. “And you know that it’s indestructible stuff in times of war. You can blow up those pipelines.”

But the OVJA’s approach — fighting against an industry competitor of coal — risks stopping developments that could diversify West Virginia’s economy.

The gas plants the OVJA has been fighting would make up for the closure of numerous coal plants across the region that were old, inefficient and unable to comply with modern air pollution limits.

The OVJA is certainly right about one significant point: The gas-fired power plants would employ far fewer workers than a large coal-fired power plant. Appalachian Power’s Mitchell Plant, a coal-fired facility south of Moundsville, has about 270 full-time employees, according to a company spokeswoman, compared to about 30 when the Moundsville plant is operational.

But Anne Blankenship, executive director of the West Virginia Oil and Natural Gas Association, argued in a recent newspaper commentary that comparisons with coal ignore the broader economic benefits of the gas industry. It was an unusually direct response from one local fossil fuel industry to another.

“This argument fails to consider the hundreds of jobs required once that well is drilled, including: Well servicers, compressor station operators, pipeline inspectors, air permit compliance field specialists, environmental compliance inspectors, maintenance personnel, production technicians, division order analysts, accounting staff, reserve engineers and the list goes on and on,” wrote Blankenship, who is not related to former Massey Energy Co. CEO Don Blankenship.

James Van Nostrand, a West Virginia University law professor who has followed the cases, said Murray Energy’s financial support of the jobs alliance’s legal fight is “very unusual” but is unlikely to save coal from gas in the long run — and will just cost the state major gas investments.

“It’s very unfortunate,” Van Nostrand said. “We’re losing all these economic benefits and being able to diversify our fuel supply.”

Blocking the gas plants might delay the closure of some existing coal plants that are on the margins of profitability “in the very short term,” Van Nostrand said. But “it’s only a matter of time” before efficient new gas plants “finish off” more aging and inefficient coal plants, he said.

To be sure, state environmental groups have a variety of concerns about the growth of the state’s natural gas industry, and a Sierra Club leader spoke against the Harrison County plant at a public hearing, citing growing worry about the release of the powerful greenhouse gas methane all along the gas-production process.

But they have not filed formal appeals of the gas plant permits. They have focused their efforts on stopping two new gas transmission pipelines in the state.

Jim Kotcon, a longtime state Sierra Club leader, said there is more significant public opposition to the pipelines, largely because those projects are using eminent domain to take private property, an issue that resonates even with many conservatives in the state.

“As you may suspect, to have a meaningful chance of opposing fossil fuel plants in West Virginia requires a fairly significant public involvement campaign, and unfortunately, we have a few too many of these projects to take on all of them,” Kotcon said.

Committed to Coal

Robert Murray went to work in the mines when he was 16, to help support his family after a mining accident left his father paralyzed. Later, he studied mining engineering at Ohio State University, then spent many years at North American Coal Corp.

In 1988, he and the company parted ways and he mortgaged “everything he owned” to buy his first coal mine, according to Murray Energy’s website.

Since then, Murray Energy has grown to become the largest producer of underground mined coal in the United States.

Along the way, Murray has clashed with regulators, labor unions, environmentalists and journalists.

In 2007, Murray went on national television to blame the deaths of six miners and three would-be rescuers at his company’s Crandall Canyon Mine in Utah on an earthquake, a conclusion investigators had disputed. He’s also sued journalists and media personalities whose coverage or commentary he hasn’t liked, including HBO host John Oliver, The New York Times, and The Charleston Gazette, which later became part of the Gazette-Mail. (That lawsuit was settled when the newspaper agreed to run a commentary written by Murray.)

A Bloomberg News profile of Murray summed up his position as being that of “America’s pro-coal provocateur-in-chief.”

Over the past five years, as coal’s fortunes declined, Murray doubled down on the industry. In 2013, Murray Energy purchased the major coal holdings of Consol Energy Inc., which was largely exiting the coal business in favor of natural gas. Then, in 2015, Murray Energy bought a controlling interest in Foresight Energy, which has major holdings in the coalfields of Southern Illinois.

An early fundraiser for Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign during the 2016 Republican primary, Murray backed Trump when it became clear he was going to be the GOP nominee, and Murray Energy contributed $1 million to a Trump super PAC and donated $300,000 to the inauguration.

“I have personally spent time with Mr. Trump, and I know he will surround himself with the very best people to fix the many problems facing our country,” Murray said the day after the 2016 presidential election. “Indeed, Mr. Trump will finally implement a National Energy Policy whereby all energy sources will compete on a level playing field.”

When the OVJA filed its application for nonprofit status with the Internal Revenue Service, it said the alliance “is a grassroots organization and movement whose mission is to promote and protect the good-paying jobs in the Ohio Valley region.” It estimated that the group’s budget would be $10,000 a year in both 2016 and 2017. The IRS applications didn’t require the source of the money to be disclosed, and the OVJA didn’t do so.

The application did not mention coal, or Murray Energy.

But on May 22, 2015, the same day IRS records show that the OVJA officially formed, Murray Energy did what a lot of coal companies were doing at the time. The company announced plans for anticipated layoffs of hundreds of miners.

Along with “excessive” taxes and “the ongoing destruction” of the coal industry by then-President Barack Obama, a Murray Energy news release blamed “the vastly increased use of natural gas in the Ohio Valley to generate electricity.”

In a news release four days later, announcing the alliance’s formation, Bruce Whipkey, listed as president of the group, cited Murray Energy’s layoff announcement as a reason local residents needed to focus on protecting jobs. Whipkey said the alliance wasn’t against the gas industry, but that it simply opposed tax breaks that local governments were offering to the Moundsville power plant project.

“The Ohio Valley is blessed to have both coal and natural gas reserves,” Whipkey said in the news release. “These two industries can and should work together for the good of everyone in the Ohio Valley.”

Jim Thomas, a retired Wheeling area coal miner and leader of OVJA, has testified that the organization was probably formed before May 2015, but that it wasn’t made “legal” until then.

According to Thomas’ testimony at a 2016 Air Quality Board hearing about the Moundsville plant, Murray Energy’s involvement started sometime after Thomas visited one of the company’s mine offices to arrange for the company to fix a problem with his home’s water supply. Murray Energy had taken over providing Thomas water when it purchased Consol’s mines, which had damaged the original supply, Thomas testified.

“I had a busted water line where they were shipping water up to my house,” he said. “So I went out to talk to [a company official].”

At the time, Thomas was involved in a group called Marshall County Citizens for Better Government, which he and a few of his friends, along with some retired coal miners, started. Its members met at a local diner to talk politics and local affairs, and they made it a habit of attending school board, city council and other government meetings.

“There was probably 10 or 12 of us [who] would go up there and meet and eat breakfast and talk about stuff going on,” Thomas said. The group “discussed different political stuff or what’s wrong with Marshall County, what can we do to make Marshall County better, how can we get people involved in what’s going on?”

Then, Thomas said, he and his friends heard about the proposal for a gas-fired power plant to be built in Moundsville. They had watched one local coal-fired plant close and were concerned that more gas plants would cost the area more high-paying coal jobs, while not providing as many gas industry positions.

“This coal is important to Marshall County,” Thomas said in his testimony. “We’ve got to have it.”

So when Thomas was at the Murray Energy mine office, he met with a company foreman.

“I went in and talked to him and told him what we were trying to do,” Thomas recalled. “I said we’ve got to try to save these jobs. And I gave him my name and phone number.”

Shortly after that, someone from Murray Energy — Thomas doesn’t remember exactly who it was — called him and asked how the company could help the group.

Thomas said that Robert Murray played no role in forming the organization and never attended any of the group’s meetings.

Thomas said he asked his son, Greg, for help with paperwork for the group and with social media.

Greg Thomas is a longtime Republican operative in West Virginia who has been running the U.S. Senate campaign of Don Blankenship. (The state Supreme Court recently ruled that Blankenship could not appear on the ballot as a third-party candidate after he lost in the Republican primary.)

Jim Thomas did not respond to requests for comment for this report.

Greg Thomas said in an email that he has never had an “official role” with the OVJA and has never been paid by the alliance or by Murray Energy.

“My dad taught me to always stand up for what I believe in, and I am proud of him for being so successful with their efforts,” he said.

“Personally, I support any and all West Virginia energy production.”

Lawyers for the OVJA did not respond to requests for comment. The two law firms that represent OVJA also have done work on behalf of Murray Energy in unrelated cases.

Five months after the OVJA was formed, Murray gave a speech in which he encouraged Northern West Virginia business leaders to get involved in the group.

At an economic conference in Wheeling in October 2015, Murray repeated his frequent refrain against the Obama administration, blasting a “regulatory rampage” that he warned was destroying the region’s mining industry. Murray also targeted the natural gas industry and noted that, just a few months earlier, natural gas had — for the first time — surpassed coal in the amount of electricity generated in the United States.

Murray directed his criticism at the gas plant proposed for Moundsville, and he noted that it was only one of several such facilities in the works.

“If this concerns you, or you have a business here, we suggest that you become active in the Ohio Valley Jobs Alliance,” Murray told the crowd of business leaders, according to a copy of his prepared remarks. “We can provide information on it.”

About six weeks later, the OVJA filed its first legal action, an appeal of a state-approved air-pollution permit for the Moundsville gas plant.

OVJA later said it had 400 members. However, the West Virginia Public Service Commission said evidence from a similar case before the Ohio Power Siting Board showed that it had 242 members and that 76 of those were West Virginia residents.

This year, the IRS automatically revoked the the OVJA’s tax-exempt status after the group did not file nonprofit financial forms for three years in a row, according to the IRS website and GuideStar, an organization that monitors nonprofit groups.

“It leaves the IRS and the general public without any basic information about the organization,” said Holly Ivel, GuideStar’s director of data services.

Funding Revealed

In the power plant cases, it hasn’t always been easy to confirm that Murray Energy was funding at least some of the alliance’s legal challenges.

During the Brooke case, a construction union coalition, whose members stand to gain work, wanted records on the challenge filed by the jobs alliance. The Public Service Commission initially refused to force the group to turn over records, saying they weren’t relevant.

But when that case came up for a hearing in October 2017, PSC Chairman Michael Albert asked Jim Thomas where the group’s money came from.

Initially, Thomas responded: “We don’t use much money. I had a couple donations and that was it.”

After another back and forth, Thomas responded: “Murray Energy’s paying for the legal work. But Murray Energy does not give me any money.”

In the utility commission cases, Thomas and his group focused largely on questioning tax breaks being awarded to the developers by local governments. The PSC generally rejected those concerns, saying that the deals still called for the plants to pay more money — in the form of leases for public property and payments in lieu of taxes — than if the plants weren’t built at all.

Thomas and his group also questioned whether the Department of Environmental Protection properly limited air pollution, including, in at least one case, greenhouse emissions — despite Murray having said publicly that the global warming “scare is purely political and not based on any science.”

Despite his stated concerns for the environment, Thomas offered confusing answers when asked about his specific objections to the Moundsville plant’s DEP permit during a deposition taken before the 2016 Air Quality Board appeal hearing.

“One of the issues that’s been raised is concern about greenhouse gases that would come out of the stack of the Moundsville Power project. Do you have a concern about greenhouse gases?” power plant lawyer Dave Yaussy asked.

Thomas responded, “Yes.”

Yaussy followed up, “Are you concerned about global warming?”

Thomas responded, “No.”

Air Quality Board members later wrote in an order that they were “somewhat concerned by the OVJA’s apparent lack of knowledge about the contents of its appeal, lack of cognizable purpose related to the environment, and overall express intent to stop the construction of the plant solely to benefit another industry.”

For the most part, Thomas did not focus on the environmental issues, instead saying his main concern was that natural gas was eating into coal’s market share and that coal provided more jobs — and better-paying jobs — than natural gas ever would.

“West Virginia is coal,” Thomas testified.

The Murray Energy-funded challenges are having some impact on the gas plant proposals. Supporters of the Moundsville plant, for example, say the project is on life support because of litigation-related delays.

Lawyers for the OVJA appealed its air-pollution permit to a state circuit court, where the case was pending for 15 months. Kanawha Circuit Judge Joanna Tabit ruled in November 2017, only after then-state commerce secretary Woody Thrasher — whose agency was not a party — wrote an unusual letter warning that investors were increasingly nervous about delays and asking the judge for an “urgent review” of the case. Tabit, who is now seeking a seat on the state Supreme Court, said she ruled quickly on the case after she was told it was a pressing matter.

Later, legislators passed a bill so that any future cases would bypass county courts and go directly to the West Virginia Supreme Court. The OVJA’s action also prompted legislation to require anyone who appeals such a permit to disclose who is paying their lawyers, but that bill did not pass.

In the most recent case, the jobs alliance’s challenge of the air-pollution permit for the Harrison plant, the state board ruled on Aug. 24 that the group “failed to offer sufficient threshold evidence” to support its objections to emissions limits and air-quality modeling for the project.

The Air Quality Board also ruled, contrary to its findings in the Moundsville plant case, that the OVJA did not have legal standing to bring the appeal.

In its decision, the board noted that Jim Thomas testified that he believed four OVJA members live in Harrison County, but that he could only identify the first name — Steven — of one such member, and that this member had not complained to him about any potential health effects of the plant and was not involved in the appeal.

“The OVJA, as an organization, has no demonstrated interest in protecting the health of the citizenry or the environment of Harrison County,” the board ruled.

And the case about the Brooke County plant is headed for the state Supreme Court, where an oral argument over the alliance’s challenge of the PSC approval is scheduled for early October.

Despite West Virginia’s dramatic growth in natural gas production, the state has only three gas-fired power plants, and they are built to run only when there is high demand. Brooke, Harrison and Moundsville would be larger facilities, meant to run during times of normal electricity demand — the first of their kind for West Virginia.

Just before a hearing in late July on his company’s Harrison plant, Dorn issued a blistering news release characterizing the OVJA cases as “frivolous lawsuits” and alleging that Murray Energy “is trying to kill thousands of jobs on these projects.”

Then, in late August, the Affiliated Construction Trades Foundation, a coalition of construction unions that support the gas plants and whose members would build them, purchased half-page newspaper ads across the state to complain that Murray Energy was supporting a “shadowy front group” that is “holding West Virginia jobs hostage!”

Steve White, director of the ACT Foundation, said his group supports the coal industry but believes that, if the gas plants aren’t built in West Virginia, they likely will go to Ohio or Pennsylvania, instead. For White, the issue comes down to this: Many coal jobs have disappeared, and they seem unlikely to return. So why should West Virginia pass up more jobs related to the gas boom?

“We’re terribly frustrated with the delays on these projects and extremely concerned that we may miss out entirely on these opportunities,” White said. “It’s just a lose-lose situation.”

GOP Agrees to FBI Probe of Kavanaugh, Delaying Senate Vote

WASHINGTON — After a dramatic flurry of last-minute negotiations, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh cleared a key procedural hurdle Friday, but his confirmation prospects were still deeply uncertain as Republicans agreed to ask for a new FBI investigation into sexual assault allegations.

Under pressure from moderate members, Republican leaders said they would allow the new probe for up to one week, slowing their rush to confirm Kavanaugh shortly after the new high court term opens on Monday.

It was unclear whether President Trump backed the new timeline, cobbled together in private negotiations Friday. The talks were forced by Sen. Jeff Flake, a moderate Republican who surprised colleagues by announcing his support for Kavanaugh early Friday only to call for further investigation a few hours later.

Trump, who previously accused the Democrats of obstruction and opposed the FBI probing the allegations against his nominee, said merely that he would “let the Senate handle that.” In fact, it’s the White House that would have to ask the FBI to investigate.

Friday’s developments unfolded a day after Kavanaugh and an accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, testified in an emotional, hours-long hearing that was televised nationwide. Kavanaugh angrily denied the allegation that he assaulted Ford while they were both in high school, but she said she was “100 percent” certain he was her attacker.

Flake, a key moderate Republican, was at the center of Friday’s drama and uncertainty. In the morning, he announced that he would support Kavanaugh’s nomination. Shortly after, he was confronted in an elevator by two women who, through tears, implored him to change his mind. The stunning confrontation was captured by television cameras.

After huddling privately with his colleagues, Flake announced he would vote to advance Kavanaugh’s nomination to the full Senate only if the FBI were to investigate the allegations against the judge. Democrats have been calling for such an probe, though Republicans and the White House have insisted it’s unnecessary.

The committee vote was 11-10 along party lines.

Flake said that after discussing the matter with fellow senators, he felt it “would be proper to delay the floor vote for up to but not more than one week.”

Attention quickly turned to a handful of undecided senators. West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin said he supported Flake’s call to push off a full Senate vote until the FBI investigates Ford’s allegation. He said the probe should happen “so that our country can have confidence in the outcome of this vote.”

It was unclear if Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska would do the same.

With a 51-49 majority, Senate Republicans have little margin for error on a final vote, especially given the fact that several Democrats facing tough re-election prospects this fall announced their opposition to Kavanaugh on Friday. Sens. Bill Nelson of Florida, Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Jon Tester of Montana all said they would vote no.

During Thursday’s hearing, Democrats repeatedly peppered Kavanaugh with questions about whether he would support an FBI investigation. He demurred, saying he would back whatever the committee decided to do.

The FBI conducts background checks for federal nominees, but the agency does not make judgments on the credibility or significance of allegations. It compiles information about the nominee’s past and provides its findings to the White House, which passes them along to the committee. Republicans say reopening the FBI investigation is unnecessary because committee members have had the opportunity to question both Kavanaugh and Ford and other potential witnesses have submitted sworn statements.

If the FBI does reopen the background investigation, agents could interview accusers and witnesses and gather additional evidence or details that could help corroborate or disprove the allegations.

Democrats have been particularly focused on getting more information from Mark Judge, a high school friend of Kavanaugh who Ford said was also in the room during her alleged assault. In her gripping testimony, Ford said Kavanaugh and Judge’s laughter during the incident has stuck with her nearly four decades later.

Judge has said he does not recall any such incident. In a new letter to the Senate panel, he said he would cooperate with any law enforcement agency assigned to investigate “confidentially.”

Flake, a 55-year-old Arizonan, has made himself a central character in the drama. As a retiring Republican, with no public plans to face GOP voters soon, Flake has emerged this year as a vocal and biting Trump critic and an advocate for bipartisan cooperation in Washington, even has he largely votes with his party.

Flake’s post on the committee has given him another platform. In recent weeks, he’s acted as a committee liaison to the Democrats and moderates Republicans urging a slower process. Last weekend, he pushed the committee to give Ford more time to decide whether to testify. Democrats have been eyeing him as a possible “no” vote, leaving many surprised to see him announce Friday morning that he backed the judge. He made clear hours later his vote wasn’t yet secure.

Facebook Says 50 Million User Accounts Affected by Security Breach

NEW YORK—Facebook says it recently discovered a security breach affecting nearly 50 million user accounts.

The hack is the latest setback for Facebook during a year of tumult for the global social media service.

In a blog post, the company says hackers exploited its “View As” feature, which lets people see what their profiles look like to someone else. Facebook says it has taken steps to fix the security problem and alerted law enforcement.

To deal with the issue, Facebook reset some logins, so 90 million people have been logged out and will have to log in again. That includes anyone who has been subject to a “View As” lookup in the past year.

Facebook says it doesn’t know who is behind the attacks or where they’re based.

News broke early this year that a Trump-linked data analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica, had gained access to personal data from millions of user profiles. Then a congressional investigation found that agents from Russia and other countries have been posting fake political ads since at least 2016. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared at a Congressional hearing over Facebook’s privacy policies in April.

In a call with reporters Thursday, Zuckerberg said the company doesn’t know yet if any of the accounts that were hacked were misused.

Facebook has more than 2 billion users worldwide.

Sexual Assault Survivors Confront Jeff Flake Ahead of Kavanaugh Vote

Sexual assault survivors berated Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) on Friday morning after he announced he would vote Brett Kavanaugh out of the Senate Judiciary Committee despite the serious accusations against the Supreme Court nominee and the performance he offered during his testimony Thursday.

“Senator Flake, do you think that Brett Kavanaugh is telling the truth?” asked one assault survivor, according to ThinkProgress. “Do you think that he’s able to hold the pain of these countries and prepare it, that is the work of justice, the way that justice works is you recognize harm. You take responsibility for it and then you begin to repair it. You are allowing someone unwilling to take responsibility for his own actions and willing to hold the harm he has done to one woman, actually three women and not repair it. You are allowing someone who is unwilling to take responsibility for his own actions.”

While Flake had entered an elevator, the women held the door open but the senator repeatedly looked away or down and would not answer their questions or respond to their outrage.

“Look at me when I’m talking to you,” yelled another woman in visible anger. “You’re telling me that my assault doesn’t matter!”

Watch:

“Look at me when I’m talking to you. You’re telling me that my assault doesn’t matter!”: Protesters confront Sen. Jeff Flake moments after he announces he will vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh. https://t.co/Cc5y9kura1 pic.twitter.com/qqvz3jx8JF

— CNN (@CNN) September 28, 2018

Iran Denies Secret Atomic Warehouse, Calls Claims Ridiculous

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Iran on Thursday of keeping a “secret atomic warehouse” just outside its capital, despite the 2015 deal with world powers that was meant to keep it from obtaining nuclear weapons. Hours later, Iran dismissed the allegation.

Holding up a poster-board map of an area near Tehran as he spoke at the U.N. General Assembly, Netanyahu told world leaders that Iranian officials have been keeping up to 300 tons of nuclear equipment and material in a walled, unremarkable-looking property near a rug-cleaning operation.

Netanyahu’s disclosure — which he presented as a big reveal on the international community’s biggest stage — came four months after Israel announced the existence of what it said was a “half-ton” of Iranian nuclear documents obtained by Israeli intelligence in the Shourabad neighborhood near Tehran. Israel said the cache proved that Iranian leaders covered up their nuclear weapons program before signing the nuclear agreement. Iran hasn’t acknowledged the alleged seizure.

“You have to ask yourself a question: Why did Iran keep a secret atomic archive and a secret atomic warehouse?” Netanyahu asked. “What Iran hides, Israel will find.”

Netanyahu didn’t specify what the material and equipment was, and it was not immediately clear whether it proved to be a violation of the nuclear deal. The International Atomic Energy Agency, which has been monitoring Iran’s compliance with the agreement, had no immediate comment.

Netanyahu also said Iranian officials had been clearing some radioactive material out of the site, which sits a short distance from Shourabad, and “spread it around Tehran.” He then even suggested that residents of the capital might want to buy Geiger counters.

In a tweet, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif derided the Israeli presentation as an “arts and craft show” by a country that he said needed to come clean about its own nuclear program.

Israel is widely believed to have a nuclear arsenal but has never publicly acknowledged it.

Zarif said there was nothing to the Israeli allegation, Iranian state-run media reported.

“The only purpose of this is to undercut the reality that Israel is the biggest threat to the region,” he was quoted as saying. He noted that the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, has certified Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal.

The 2015 deal came after years of Western sanctions over Iran’s contested atomic program. The West had feared it could be used to build nuclear bombs. Iran long has denied seeking atomic weapons.

Under terms of the deal, Iran is allowed to keep documents and other research. The deal strictly limits how many centrifuges — important equipment for making enriched uranium that can be used in nuclear power plants or in weapons — Iran can use and how large of a low-enriched uranium stockpile the country can keep.

Netanyahu said the warehouse stored “massive amounts of equipment and materiel,” and he said Israel shared the information with the IAEA. The Vienna-based agency had no immediate comment.

He noted that Israel had long opposed the multinational agreement with Iran. Israel considers Iran its biggest threat, citing Tehran’s calls for Israel’s destruction, its support for hostile militant organizations like the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah group and Iran’s development of long-range missiles.

U.S. President Donald Trump pulled his country out of the nuclear deal in May, and his administration has been re-imposing sanctions on Iran. Israel applauded the move, but many other nations lamented it as jeopardizing what they saw as the best chance to keep Iran from becoming a nuclear-armed power.

“Instead of coddling Iran’s dictators,” other countries should support the sanctions, Netanyahu said to applause. He accused Europe of “appeasement” of Iran, a word that harkens back to criticism of Europe’s approach to Nazi Germany before World War II.

Netanyahu is known for his showmanship at the U.N. In 2012, he famously held up a drawing of a cartoon bomb while discussing Iran’s nuclear program, saying “a red line should be drawn right here” and drawing it with a marker.

At the end of the day’s speeches at the General Assembly, Iran used its “right of reply” to rebut Netanyahu’s accusations.

“His fallacies and his statement confirm his pathological tendency to tell monstrous lies and distort reality,” said a representative of the Iranian delegation. “Exhibiting some photographs of Google Street View, today the Israeli showman claimed that he discovered new nuclear facilities in Iran. This is yet another false story.”

Israel did not ask for a “right of reply” to Iran’s statement.

Netanyahu’s accusation Thursday about Iran came shortly after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas criticized Israel and the U.S. in his own speech, declaring that his people’s rights “are not up for bargaining” and that the U.S. was undermining the long-discussed two-state solution. But Netanyahu devoted less attention to the long-running conflict with the Palestinians.

Abbas halted ties with Trump’s administration in December after the U.S. recognized contested Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and Palestinians have said a pending U.S. peace plan will be dead on arrival because of that and other recent U.S. moves that Palestinians see as favoring Israel.

“Jerusalem is not for sale,” Abbas said to applause as he began his speech. “The Palestinian people’s rights are not up for bargaining.”

He said Palestinians would never reject negotiation, but that “it’s really ironic that the American administration still talks about what they call the ‘deal of the century.’”

“What is left for this administration to give to the Palestinian people?” he asked. “What is left as a political solution?”

Netanyahu, in return, said the Palestinians’ accusations against his country were hypocritical and unwarranted.

“You condemn Israel’s morality?” he asked. “This is not the way to achieve the peace we all want and need and to which Israel remains committed.”

The Islamic militant group Hamas that rules Gaza has led protests for months along the border with Israel, aiming partly to draw attention to the Israeli-Egyptian blockade imposed after Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007.

At least 137 Palestinians, mostly unarmed, have been killed by Israeli fire since the border protests began on March 30. During that time, a Gaza sniper killed an Israeli soldier. Hamas and Israel came close to serious conflict this summer as Gaza militants bombarded southern Israel with mortars and rockets, and Israel struck Hamas targets in Gaza.

Israel says it is defending its border against attempts by Hamas, a militant group sworn to its destruction, to infiltrate and carry out attacks. But Israel has faced heavy international criticism over the large number of unarmed protesters who have been killed or wounded.

While meeting with Netanyahu on Wednesday, Trump told reporters he believes that two states — Israel and one for the Palestinians — “works best.”

Hours before Netanyahu’s scheduled speech, Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman expressed indifference to Trump’s remarks, saying Israel wants “a safe Jewish state.”

Netanyahu had reluctantly accepted the concept of Palestinian statehood but has since backtracked.

Palestinians have been split since Hamas seized Gaza in 2007, ousting forces of Abbas, who now governs just parts of the West Bank. Repeated reconciliation attempts have failed, and Abbas warned that further measures could be taken against Hamas if deadlock persists.

The Israeli and Palestinian speeches fell on the same day that members of a U.N. group of 135 developing countries formalized a decision to give the Palestinians the chairmanship in 2019. That stands to boost their aspirations for official statehood but angers Israel.

Palestinians were infuriated, and many Israelis were thrilled, by a series of decisions Trump has made, starting with his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. The Palestinians also claim the holy city as the capital of an eventual state. Earlier this year, Trump followed up on the recognition by moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

His administration has also slashed aid to the Palestinians by hundreds of millions of dollars and ended U.S. support for the U.N. agency that helps Palestinian refugees.

Trump and his national security team have defended their position, saying decades of attempts to forge peace have failed.

Other leaders who spoke Thursday included Haiti’s President Jovenel Moise, who told leaders he had “spared no effort to ensure that institutions are stable and to make sure we are creating a safe and stable environment conducive to investment and to relaunching growth” in his impoverished Caribbean island country since the U.N. peacekeeping mission there wrapped up in October 2017.