Chris Hedges's Blog, page 50

Illegal Crossings Plunge as U.S. Extends Policy Across Border

YUMA, Ariz. — Adolfo Cardenas smiles faintly at the memory of traveling with his 14-year-old son from Honduras to the U.S.-Mexico border in only nine days, riding buses and paying a smuggler $6,000 to ensure passage through highway checkpoints.

Father and son walked about 10 minutes in Arizona’s stifling June heat before surrendering to border agents. Instead of being released with paperwork to appear in immigration court in Dallas, where Cardenas hopes to live with a cousin, they were bused more than an hour to wait in the Mexican border city of Mexicali.

“It was a surprise. I never imagined this would happen,” Cardenas, 39, said while waiting at a Mexicali migrant shelter for his fifth court appearance in San Diego, on Jan. 24.

Illegal crossings plummeted across the border after the Trump administration made more asylum-seekers wait in Mexico for hearings in U.S. court. The drop has been most striking on the western Arizona border, a pancake-flat desert with a vast canal system from the Colorado River that turns bone-dry soil into fields of melons and wheat and orchards of dates and lemons.

Arrests in the Border Patrol’s Yuma sector nearly hit 14,000 in May, when the policy to make asylum-seekers wait in Mexico took effect there. By October, they fell 94%, to less than 800, and have stayed there since, making Yuma the second-slowest of the agency’s nine sectors on the Mexican border, just ahead of the perennially quiet Big Bend sector in Texas.

Illegal crossings in western Arizona have swung sharply before, and there are several reasons for the recent drop. But Anthony Porvaznik, chief of the Border Patrol’s Yuma sector, said the so-called Migration Protection Protocols have been a huge deterrent, based on agents’ interviews with people arrested.

“Their whole goal was to be released into the United States, and once that was taken off the shelf for them, and they couldn’t be released into the United States anymore, then that really diminished the amount of traffic that came through here,” Porvaznik said.

In the neighboring Tucson sector, arrests rose each month from August to December, bucking a border-wide trend and making it the second-busiest corridor after Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. Porvaznik attributes Tucson’s spike to the absence of the policy there until three months ago.

In late November, the administration began busing asylum-seekers five hours from Tucson to El Paso, Texas, for court and delivering them to Mexican authorities there to wait. This month, officials scrapped the buses by returning migrants to Mexico near Tucson and requiring them to travel on their own to El Paso.

More than 55,000 asylum-seekers were returned to Mexico to wait for hearings through November, 10 months after the policy was introduced in San Diego.

The immigrants were from more than three dozen countries, and nearly 2 out of 3 were Guatemalan or Honduran, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Mexicans are exempt.

Critics say the policy is unfair and exposes asylum-seekers to extreme violence in Mexican border cities, where attorneys are difficult to find.

The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups asked to put the policy on hold during a legal challenge. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments Oct. 1 and has not indicated when it will decide.

On Tuesday, critics scored a partial victory in a separate lawsuit when a federal judge in San Diego said asylum-seekers who are being returned to Mexico from California must have access to hired attorneys before and during key interviews to determine if they can stay in the U.S. while their cases proceed.

Immigration judges hear cases in San Diego and El Paso, while other asylum-seekers report to tent camps in the Texas cities of Laredo and Brownsville, where they are connected to judges by video.

In Yuma, asylum-seekers are held in short-term cells until space opens up to be returned to Mexicali through a neighboring California sector. Those interviewed by The Associated Press waited up to a week in Yuma, though Border Patrol policy says people generally shouldn’t be held more than 72 hours.

Volunteers visit Mexicali shelters to offer bus tickets or a two-hour ride to Tijuana, along with hotel rooms for the night before court appearances in San Diego.

Cardenas, who worked construction in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa, said he feels unsafe in Mexico and that it was impossible to escape gangs in Honduras. “They are in every corner,” he said.

Enma Florian of Guatemala, who crossed the border illegally with her 16- and 13-year-old sons near Yuma in August, doesn’t know if she would stay in Mexico or return to Guatemala if denied asylum in the U.S. The grant rate for Guatemalan asylum-seekers was 14% for the 12-month period that ended Sept. 30, compared with 18% for Salvadorans, 13% for Hondurans and 11% for Mexicans.

“The dream was to reach the United States,” she said, holding out hope that she will settle with relatives in Maryland.

While illegal crossings have nosedived in Yuma, asylum-seekers still sign up on a waiting list to enter the U.S. at an official crossing in San Luis, Arizona. U.S. Customs and Border Protection calls the Mexican shelter that manages the list to say how many asylum claims it will process each day. The shelter estimates the wait at three to four months.

Angel Rodriguez, one of 143 Cubans on the shelter’s waiting list of 1,484 people, has had bright moments in Mexico, including a beautiful Christmas meal. But the 51-year-old rarely goes outside and he dreads the possibility of being forced to wait for hearings in Mexico after his number is called to make an initial asylum claim in the U.S.

“That’s sending me to hell again,” said Rodriguez, who hopes to settle with friends in Dallas or Miami. “If I’m going to seek asylum, I’m going to look to a country that is the safest and respects human rights. That country is the United States of America.”

National Archives ‘Wrong’ to Blur Images of Anti-Trump Signs

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — The National Archives said Saturday it made a mistake when it blurred images of anti-Trump signs used in an exhibit on women’s suffrage.

The independent agency is charged with preserving government and historical records and said it has always been committed to preserving its holdings “without alteration.”

But the archives said in a statement Saturday “we made a mistake.” The archives’ statement came one day after The Washington Post published an online report about the altered images.

The archives said the photo in question is not one of its archival records, but rather was licensed for use as a promotional graphic in the exhibit.

“Nonetheless, we were wrong to alter the image,” the agency said.

The current display has been removed and will be replaced as soon as possible with one that uses the original, unaltered image, the archives said.

The exhibit about the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, blurred some anti-Trump messages on protest signs in a photo of the 2017 Women’s March in Washington.

Signs that referred to women’s private parts, which also were widespread during the march, which was held shortly after Trump took office, also were altered.

The archives said it will immediately begin a “thorough review” of its policies and procedures for exhibits “so that this does not happen again.”

The American Civil Liberties Union called on the archives to issue a more detailed explanation.

“Apologizing is not enough,” Louise Melling, the organization’s deputy legal director, said in a statement. “The National Archives must explain to the public why it took the Orwellian step of trying to rewrite history and erasing women’s bodies from it, as well as who ordered it.”

Archives spokeswoman Miriam Kleiman told the Post for its report that the nonpartisan, nonpolitical federal agency blurred the anti-Trump references “so as not to engage in current political controversy.”

References to female anatomy in the signs were obscured in deference to student groups and young people who visit the archives, Kleiman told the newspaper.

Kleiman did not respond to an emailed request for comment Saturday from The Associated Press. The public affairs office at the archives emailed the statement.

The archives issued the apology as thousands again gathered in Washington and in cities across the country Saturday for Women’s March rallies focused on issues such as climate change, pay equity and reproductive rights.

Doctors Sound the Alarm on Climate Emergency

LONDON — The doctors are worried about the climate emergency. In recent days the UK’s Royal College of Physicians (RCP) has announced it’s halting investments in climate-changing fossil fuel and mining companies.

The RCP, the British doctors’ professional body dedicated to improving the practice of medicine, which has funds in global stock markets amounting to nearly £50 million (US$65m), says it will start divesting immediately from the worst-polluting oil and gas companies, which are mainly in the US.

As part of a phased disinvestment policy the RCP – the oldest medical college in England, with more than 35,000 members – says that within the next three years all investments in fossil fuel companies not aligned with the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change

will be withdrawn.

“The fossil fuel industry is driving the climate crisis and is responsible for a public health emergency”, says Dr Will Stableforth of the RCP.

“As physicians we have a duty to speak out against this industry and hold it accountable for the damage it is doing to human health.”

Gathering impetus

The RCP’s action forms part of a fast-growing worldwide movement involved in withdrawing investment funds from the fossil fuel industry. A growing number of health organisations – both in the UK and elsewhere – has already announced similar divestment moves.

According to the campaign group +350, investment and pension funds managing more than $11 trillion round the globe have committed to divesting from fossil fuel companies.

BlackRock, the world’s largest fund investment management company with nearly $7tn assets under its control, has announced it will withdraw funds from firms sourcing 25% or more of revenues on thermal coal, the most polluting fossil fuel.

Larry Fink, BlackRock’s head, says investors are becoming increasingly aware of climate change in assessing various companies’ long-term prospects.

“Awareness is rapidly changing and I believe we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance”, Fink told fund managers and chief executives this week.

“In the near future – and sooner than most anticipate – there will be a significant reallocation of capital.”

The banking and insurance sectors are also being forced to confront the dangers posed by climate change. The Bank of England recently became the world’s first central bank to introduce a climate change “stress test”,  requiring the UK’s banks and insurance companies to evaluate their exposure to the risks of a warming world.

Despite the moves on divestment and tighter finance controls on climate change-related investments, investors – along with the fossil fuel companies themselves – continue to pump millions into various projects around the world.

BlackRock and other major fund management groups talk of their commitment to sustainability and helping in the fight against climate change, but remain leading fossil fuel investors.

Greenwash continues

Although investments in the coal industry have declined, multi-million dollar investments in new projects are still being made, particularly in Asia.

Carbon Tracker, an independent financial think tank, estimates that between January 2018 and September last year oil and gas companies approved $50bn worth of new projects.

“Gas and mining companies have been furiously trying to “greenwash” their images and promote false solutions to the climate crisis”, says Dr Deidre Duff of the UK-based Medact health charity.

“But in reality, these companies are devastating human and planetary health and exacerbating health inequalities around the world.”

 

Sanders Team Slams Biden for Claiming Social Security Video Was ‘Doctored’

Highlighting a major contrast between the current top two candidates in the Democratic primary field in terms of how they have addressed the issue over their long legislative careers, the Bernie Sanders campaign hit back against a claim made by Joe Biden earlier in the day in which the former vice president said there was “doctored video” being circulated by the Sanders campaign that showed him agreeing with former Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan about the need to cut Social Security.

“It’s simply a lie, that video is a lie,” Biden said at a campaign event in Iowa when asked about his position on Social Security by an attendee.

Biden said the video was attributable to “Bernie’s people,” and that he was looking for the Sanders campaign “to come forward and disown it but they haven’t done it yet.”

According to Reuters:

After Biden’s comments, his campaign said the candidate was referring to recent claims by Sanders that Biden has proposed cutting Social Security in the past. The Sanders campaign has pointed to a speech Biden gave to the Brookings Institution think tank in 2018, when Biden said of Ryan’s plan to reform the tax code: “Paul Ryan was correct when he did the tax code. What’s the first thing he decided we had to after? Social Security and Medicare.”

For its part, the Sanders campaign appeared to relish the opportunity to have the issue discussed in detail. National press secretary Briahna Joy Gray tweeted a video capturing Biden’s comments at the Iowa event and said she hoped “the media covers this as a substantive policy disagreement.”

Hope the media covers this as a substantive policy disagreement.

And I hope they play the video. https://t.co/L1EI6XRgQr

— Briahna Joy Gray (@briebriejoy) January 18, 2020

David Sirota, a speechwriter and frequent message amplifier for the Sanders campaign, sent an email out Saturday evening that stated: “Biden claimed that one video of him pushing Social Security ‘adjustments’ was doctored—but Biden’s absurd assertion has been widely debunked and discredited by reporters and Social Security advocates.”

Journalists who have looked at the issue closely, including The Intercept‘s Washington bureau chief Ryan Grim, agreed it is not accurate to describe the video Biden is referencing as “doctored.”

I hope @PolitiFact at least check this claim from Biden.

There was no doctored video. That’s a fabrication. Interesting to see if Politifact let’s this stand: https://t.co/LSrqyPlzzD

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) January 18, 2020

Grim reported in a piece published Monday that Biden has “advocated cutting social security for 40 years.”

And despite the Biden campaign’s now repeated assertion that the comments about agreeing with Paul Ryan were taken out of context, Grim’s reporting argues that “Biden’s record on Social Security is far worse than one offhand remark.” According to Grim:

Biden’s fixation on cutting Social Security dates back to the Reagan era. One of Ronald Reagan’s first major moves as president was to implement a mammoth tax cut, tilted toward the wealthy, and to increase defense spending. Biden, a Delaware senator at the time, supported both moves. The heightened spending and reduced revenue focused public attention on the debt and deficit, giving fuel to a push for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.

In the midst of that debate, Biden teamed up with Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley to call for a freeze on federal spending, and insisted on including Social Security in that freeze, even as the Reagan administration fought to protect the program from cuts. It was part of the Democratic approach at the time not just to match Republicans, but to get to their right at times as well, as Biden also did on criminal justice policy.

That push by Biden to join forces with Republicans to cut spending on social programs like Medicaid and Social Security in the mid-nineties included numerous speeches and statements Biden made in the Senate, many of them also captured on video and available to watch. Sirota, in particular, has been prolific in sharing them online:

I want you to watch this clip of Biden touting his repeated efforts to cut Social Security, and then I want you to remember that Biden told reporters “I’m not sorry for anything that I have ever done.”https://t.co/TKtv3XxoZB#BidenSocialSecurityCuts pic.twitter.com/MIAx4nO9Qa https://t.co/vKIlVqYQZk

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) January 19, 2020

This video now has almost 450,000 views. Keep retweeting it. Don't let @JoeBiden get away with misleading Iowa voters about his repeated efforts to undermine Democrats and help the GOP try to slash Social Security. Retweet it and spread the word.#BidenSocialSecurityCuts https://t.co/LVo8PXK36a

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) January 19, 2020

In a statement Saturday evening, Sanders’ campaign manager Faiz Shakir also pushed back against the accusation that it has misrepresented in any way some of the positions Biden has taken or remarks he’s made about Social Security.

“Joe Biden should be honest with voters and stop trying to doctor his own public record of consistently and repeatedly trying to cut Social Security,” Shakir said.

“The facts are very clear: Biden not only pushed to cut Social Security—he is on tape proudly bragging about it on multiple occasions,” he continued. “The vice president must stop dodging questions about his record, and start explaining why he has so aggressively pushed to slash one of the most significant and successful social programs in American history, which millions of Americans rely on for survival.”

In a column this week, Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works, said it is no longer possible for Biden to outrun his record on attacking Social Security—a history that Republicans will surely weaponize against him in the general election.

Politicians only use euphemisms like “adjustments” when they really mean “cut.”

There’s no reason to use euphemisms to talk about protecting and expanding Social Security, because that’s incredibly popular: https://t.co/kEFnbs8QJe https://t.co/ONoC5qGtqD

— SocialSecurityWorks (@SSWorks) January 19, 2020

Biden in 2018 on Social Security after his ideal tax plan is implemented: “it still needs adjustments, but it can stay.”

He does not mean adjusted upward, that would make no sense. He is saying, in 2018, it still needs cuts. If you’re a fact checked and don’t see that… pic.twitter.com/6MO9qtET64

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) January 18, 2020

Biden’s record, argued Lawson—who endorsed Sanders officially in December—would be a “a major vulnerability should he become the Democratic nominee. In the 2016 election, Donald Trump continually promised to protect Social Security and Medicare. That was a lie. But lying has never bothered Trump, and he’ll be happy to use the same playbook in 2020.”

 

Louis Adamic’s Life Fighting Fascism

“Death to Fascism: Louis Adamic’s Fight for Democracy”
Purchase in the Truthdig Bazaar

Louis Adamic, a popular nonfiction writer of the 1920s-40s, never escaped—perhaps never wished to escape—his status as an enigma. He was a talented journalist whose work appeared in a variety of magazines, as well as the author of well-received works of fiction and nonfiction. He was also a Slovene immigrant, from that sliver of land once part of Yugoslavia and now an independent state. He poured his finest energies into the vision of a multicultural, multiracial American democracy, something not seen then—or now. Adamic also seemed early on to be an existentialist or grim pessimist, projecting images of fatalism and a propensity for violence as the inescapable reality of his new country. In the end, he threw himself into a crusade against the incoming Cold War, and was assassinated for his trouble. His death removed one more political inconvenience from the latest version of American liberalism.

John P. Enyeart, a professor and chair of the history department at Bucknell University, has written a new biography of Adamic; Enyeart knows his subject intimately and passionately. He gives us a clue in the book’s very title: “Death to Fascism: Louis Adamic’s Fight for Democracy.” Fascism is no longer old news. Nor is well-financed support of fascist or semi-fascist authoritarian leaders, bathed in religious fundamentalism. If American democracy is to be revived, Enyeart shows us through the study of Adamic’s life that it must mean more than tolerance and the rise of minority elites.

Click here to read long excerpts from “Death to Fascism” at Google Books.

Ironically, Adamic’s best-known book, “Dynamite” (1931), was the one destined to be least understood. A nonfiction investigation of the mystery around the bombing of the Los Angeles Times building in 1910, it could hardly convey how political controversy and outright repression, following the explosion, wiped out a vibrant local socialist campaign that seemed likely to win the mayoralty, or that the consequence dealt a decisive blow to the Southern California left for perhaps two decades. Socialists (and later communists) defended the accused bombers, the McNamara brothers, as victims of the class struggle. Adamic insisted that he discovered evidence proving their guilt.

“Dynamite” was widely believed, on publication, to be a vindication of law and order, almost a justification of the anti-Bolshevik, anti-labor (as well as deeply racist) wave that began in wartime and continued into the great Red Scare of 1919-21. But Adamic insisted, against his critics, that he wanted to inspire the American middle class to improve the condition of working people, and that the guilt or innocence of the McNamaras had not been the deeper philosophical theme of his book. Rather, he was addressing the American propensity for violent resolution of social dilemmas.

Enyeart explains that Adamic, a working journalist struggling for a living and a reputation, was inclined to exaggerate his own research and fudge his conclusions. This is useful information when placed alongside his writings on Slovenia and the South Slavs (including Croatians and Serbians). His “Laughing in the Jungle” (1932), in part a recollection of his childhood in Austria-dominated Slovenia, was a surprise hit. The book appealed to Americans to overcome the nativist prejudice against immigrants, especially the “new immigrants” from Southern and Eastern Europe, who by this time dominated the workforce of many industries and populated the urban zones of cities like Cleveland and Chicago.

Adamic also took up the somber task of fighting the fascism that was swooping over his homeland. There, as he explained after an extended visit and the completion of “The Native’s Return” (1934), severe repression had set in—cultural and well as political—with the banning of the Slovenian language in schools.

Unwilling to be pigeonholed as a leftist, Adamic chose not to associate himself directly with the Slovenian socialists in the U.S., then numbering tens of thousands and influential beyond their numbers in the labor movement. His portrayal of the alienation and exploitation of immigrants found readers among assimilated Americans who, in the Depression era, also felt excluded and oppressed.

Befriended by luminaries like novelist Upton Sinclair and Nation magazine editor Carey McWilliams, Adamic gained status as an independent radical, just in time for the high tide of the New Deal and its uncertain partner, the Popular Front. His popular novel, “Grandsons” (1935), urged a nonrevolutionary socialism at the moment when communists themselves took on new roles, especially within the rising industrial union movement soon known as the Congress of Industrial Organizations. For Adamic, the CIO was the very acme of anti-fascism, and with his rhetoric, he placed himself as the spokesman for a wider sentiment.

Enyeart insists that by the later 1930s, Adamic helped redefine the popular understanding of pluralism as the very definition of Americanism. He launched a magazine, Common Ground, to urge fuller democracy at home along with solidarity for the victory of democracy abroad. Most crucially, this also meant racial democracy, a subject broached with extreme caution outside of the left. Anti-fascism, he insisted, meant anti-racism and nothing less. Adamic was surely a godsend for the large, educated middle class of magazine-reading liberals eager to advance the Roosevelt program, and who were outraged at the attempts by conservatives to justify racial barriers and anti-Semitism. He was also extremely popular in ethnic communities. And as Enyeart shows, the logic of anti-fascism carried Adamic toward anti-imperialism.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the German assault upon Europe placed Adamic perfectly to popularize the broader implications of anti-fascism. He visited the White House at Eleanor Roosevelt’s invitation—actually sharing a meal with the first family and Winston Churchill.

His campaign became still more personal as right-wing South Slavs in the United States embraced fascism, usually in the name of defending Christianity. Powerful progressives, including New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, embraced the other side—the Partisans—in Yugoslavia, Adamic’s home territory dominated by avowed communist Josef Broz Tito.

Then the war ended and the tide turned. Adamic was attacked along with his hero, former Vice President Henry Wallace, as subversives, enemies of American democracy, and communists, even if they insisted otherwise. Adamic was not pro-communist but definitely accepted the presence of communists within a wider social movement. Suddenly, his liberal audience faded away or was driven into silence. A large and now-forgotten movement, the American Slav Congress, which looked to Adamic as a visionary, disappeared in the Cold War wave. His last show, so to speak, was heroic support for the Progressive Party campaign of 1948. His 1950 book, “The Eagle and the Roots,” an appeal against the rightward drift, seemed to fall upon deaf ears. No one knows exactly how Adamic died in 1951, but suspicions turn toward fascist agents of anti-Tito forces.

Enyeart writes with special passion about the investigating committees, congressional hearings, “friendly” witnesses, and trumped up charges that opened space for the far right. Adamic himself was accused of being a personal agent of Stalin—just as Tito broke with the Russians, and American communist leaders warned against the rise of “Titoism” within the party. The “fight for democracy” in the book’s subtitle was by that time losing heavily, too often through the unwillingness of liberals to resist, or the flocking of liberals, like former Hollywood progressive Ronald Reagan, to the conservative side. When Adamic’s beloved CIO was hit by the Taft-Hartley Act and the most aggressive unions found themselves expelled, labor’s engine of social progress went into a stall from which it has never quite recovered.

Enyeart turns in his last chapter to Adamic’s legacy and anti-fascism today. If fascism, or something very much like it, is back, then so is a widening sense of democracy as either all-inclusive or so diminished as to be useless in modern times. We cannot be sure what Adamic would have thought of today’s world. But his perception that the United States is a violent nation, and that anti-fascism and the labor movement, linked to anti-racist movements, could turn the tide—well, these are awfully pertinent ideas.

 

Harry, Meghan to Give Up Public Funds, ‘Highness’ Titles Under Deal

LONDON — Goodbye, your royal highnesses. Hello, life as — almost — ordinary civilians.

Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, are quitting as working royals and will no longer use the titles “royal highness” or receive public funds for their work under a deal announced Saturday by Buckingham Palace.

Releasing details of the dramatic split, triggered by the couple’s unhappiness with life under media scrutiny in the royal fishbowl, the palace said Harry and Meghan will cease to be working members of the royal family when the new arrangements take effect within months, in the “spring of 2020.”

The couple will no longer use the prestigious titles His Royal Highness and Her Royal Highness, but they are not being stripped of them.

They will be known as Harry, Duke of Sussex and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. Harry will remain a prince and sixth in line to the British throne.

The agreement also calls for Meghan and Harry to repay 2.4 million pounds ($3.1 million) in taxpayers’ money that was spent renovating a house for them near Windsor Castle, Frogmore Cottage. The use of public funds to ready their home had raised ire in the British press.

The announcement came after days of talks among royal courtiers sparked by Meghan and Harry’s announcement last week that they wanted to step down as senior royals and live part-time somewhere in Canada.

The couple’s departure is a wrench for the royal family, but Queen Elizabeth II had warm words for them in a statement Saturday.

The 93-year-old queen said she was pleased that “together we have found a constructive and supportive way forward for my grandson and his family. Harry, Meghan and Archie will always be much loved members of my family.”

“I recognize the challenges they have experienced as a result of intense scrutiny over the last two years and support their wish for a more independent life,” Elizabeth said.

“It is my whole family’s hope that today’s agreement allows them to start building a happy and peaceful new life,” she added.

Despite the queen’s kind words, the new arrangement will represent an almost complete break from life as working royals, especially for Harry. As a devoted Army veteran and servant to the crown, the prince carried out dozens of royal engagements.

It is not yet clear whether Harry and Meghan will continue to receive financial support from Harry’s father, Prince Charles, who used revenue from the Duchy of Cornwall to help fund his activities and those of his wife and sons.

The duchy, chartered in 1337, produced more than 20 million pounds ($26 million) in revenue last year. It is widely regarded as private money, not public funds, so Charles may opt to keep details of its disbursal private.

While he and Meghan will no longer represent the queen, the palace said they would “continue to uphold the values of Her Majesty” while carrying out their private charitable work.

The withdrawal of Harry from royal engagements will increase the demands on his brother, Prince William, and William’s wife, Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge.

Buckingham Palace did not disclose who will pay for the couple’s security going forward. It currently is taxpayer-funded and carried out primarily by a special unit of the Metropolitan Police, also known as Scotland Yard.

“There are well established independent processes to determine the need for publicly funded security,” it said.

Harry and Meghan have grown increasingly uncomfortable with constant media scrutiny since the birth in May of their son, Archie. They married in 2018 in a ceremony that drew a worldwide TV audience.

Meghan joined the royal family after a successful acting career and spoke enthusiastically about the chance to travel throughout Britain and learn about her new home, but disillusionment set in fairly quickly.

She launched legal action against a newspaper in October for publishing a letter she wrote to her father. Harry has complained bitterly of racist undertones some media coverage of his wife, who is biracial.

There has also been a breach in the longtime close relationship between Harry and William, a future king, over issues that have not been made public.

The couple’s desire to separate from the rest of the family had been the subject of media speculation for months. But they angered senior royals by revealing their plans on Instagram and a new website without advance clearance from the queen or palace officials.

Elizabeth summoned Harry, William and Charles to an unusual crisis meeting at her rural retreat in eastern England in an effort to find common ground.

The result was Saturday’s agreement, which is different from Harry and Meghan’s initial proposal that they planned to combine a new, financially independent life with a reduced set of royal duties.

It is not known where in Canada the couple plan to locate. They are thought to be considering Vancouver Island, where they spent a long Christmas break, or Toronto, where Meghan filmed the TV series “Suits” for many years.

Gun-Rights Activists Gear Up for Show of Force in Virginia

RICHMOND, Va. — Police are scouring the internet for clues about plans for mayhem, workers are putting up chain-link holding pens around Virginia’s picturesque Capitol Square, and one lawmaker even plans to hide in a safe house in advance of what’s expected to be an unprecedented show of force by gun-rights activists.

What is provoking their anger in this once reliably conservative state is the new Democratic majority leadership and its plans to enact a slew of gun restrictions. This clash of old and new has made Virginia — determined to prevent a replay of the Charlottesville violence in 2017 — ground zero in the nation’s raging debate over gun control.

The Virginia Citizens Defense League’s yearly rally at the Capitol typically draws just a few hundred gun enthusiasts. This year, however, thousands of gun activists are expected to turn out. Second Amendment groups have identified the state as a rallying point for the fight against what they see as a national erosion of gun rights.

“We’re not going to be quiet anymore. We’re going to fight them in the courts and on the ground. The illegal laws they’re proposing are just straight up unconstitutional,” said Timothy Forster, of Chesterfield, Virginia, an NRA member who had one handgun strapped to his shoulder and another tucked into his waistband as he stood outside a legislative office building earlier this week.

VCDL president Philip Van Cleave said he’s heard from groups around the country that plan to send members to Virginia, including the Nevada-based, far-right Oath Keepers, which has promised to organize and train armed posses and militia.

Extremist groups have blanketed social media and online forums with ominous messages and hinted at potential violence. The FBI said it arrested three men linked to a violent white supremacist group Thursday who were planning to attend the rally in Richmond, according to a law enforcement official who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to discuss an active investigation.

Democrats have permanently banned guns inside the Capitol, and Gov. Ralph Northam declared a temporary state of emergency Wednesday that bans all weapons, including guns, from Capitol Square, during the rally to prevent “armed militia groups storming our Capitol.” Gun-rights groups asked the Virginia Supreme Court to rule Northam’s declaration unconstitutional, but the court on Friday upheld the ban.

Northam said there were credible threats of violence — like weaponized drones being deployed over Capitol Square. On Friday, the FAA issued a temporary flight restriction, including for drones, over Capitol airspace during the rally.

The governor said some of the rhetoric used by groups planning to attend Monday’s rally is reminiscent of that used ahead of the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville in August 2017. One woman was killed and more than 30 other people were hurt when a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters there.

The Virginia State Police, the Virginia Capitol Police and the Richmond Police are all coordinating the event and have plans for a huge police presence at Monday’s rally that will include both uniformed and plainclothes officers. Police plan to limit access to Capitol Square to only one entrance and have warned rally-goers that they may have to wait hours to get past security screening.

Nonessential state staff were being told to stay away. Del. Lee Carter, a Democratic Socialist, said he’s planning to spend Monday at an undisclosed location because of threats he has received.

“I ain’t interested in martyrdom,” Carter tweeted.

Northam lamented that such precautions were necessary for what’s been a peaceful yearly event, but said pro-gun activists have “unleashed something larger, something they may not be able to control.”

The pushback against proposed new gun restrictions began immediately after Democrats won majorities in both the state Senate and House of Delegates in November. Much of the opposition has focused on a proposed assault weapons ban, which would affect thousands of owners of the popular AR-15-style rifles. One version of the bill, which Democrats later disavowed, would have required current owners of the rifles to turn them in or face felony charges.

That bill was the spark that created the massive pushback, according to Sen. Creigh Deeds, one of the few moderate Democrats left in Virginia who represents rural areas.

“That allowed people who like to inflame passions to say, ‘Look, they’re really coming after your guns, they’re coming after you,’” Deeds said.

Thousands of gun owners from around the state packed municipal meetings to urge local officials to declare their communities “Second Amendment Sanctuaries” opposed to “unconstitutional” gun restrictions like universal background checks. More than 125 cities, towns and counties have approved sanctuary resolutions in Virginia.

Gun-control advocates, meanwhile, have also been flocking to Richmond to show their support for the proposed legislation. More than 200 volunteers with Moms Demand Action held a rally on Jan. 6. Gun control became a leading issue in the 2019 Virginia legislative elections after a city employee in Virginia Beach opened fire on his co-workers in May, killing 12 and injuring four others.

Janet Woody, a retired librarian from Richmond and a Moms volunteer, said she believes the proposed package of legislation can help reduce gun violence.

“I just feel so angry and helpless because of all these massacres,” she said. “You can call your legislator or write, but there comes a point where you just have to get out in the street.”

Riots in Lebanon’s Capital Leave More Than 150 Injured

BEIRUT — Police fired volleys of tear gas and rubber bullets in Lebanon’s capital Saturday to disperse thousands of protesters amid some of the worst rioting since demonstrations against the country’s ruling elite erupted three months ago. More than 150 people were injured.

Thick white smoke covered the downtown Beirut area near Parliament as police and protesters engaged in confrontations that saw groups of young men hurl stones and firecrackers at police who responded with water cannons and tear gas. Some protesters were seen vomiting on the street from inhaling the gas.

The violence began after some protesters started throwing stones at police deployed near the parliament building, while others removed street signs, metal barriers and branches of trees, tossing them at security forces.

The clashes took place with the backdrop of a rapidly worsening financial crisis and an ongoing impasse over the formation of a new government after the Cabinet headed by Prime Minister Saad Hariri resigned in late October.

Lebanon has witnessed three months of protests against the political elite who have ruled the country since the end of the 1975-90 civil war. The protesters blame politicians for widespread corruption and mismanagement in a country that has accumulated one of the largest debt ratios in the world.

The protesters had called for a demonstration Saturday afternoon with the theme “we will not pay the price” in reference to debt that stands at about $87 billion, or more than 150% of GDP.

As rioting took place in central Beirut, thousands of other protesters arrived later from three different parts of the city to join the demonstration. They were later dispersed and chased by police into nearby Martyrs Square that has been a center for protests.

Lebanon’s Internal Security Forces called on all peaceful protesters to “immediately leave the area of riots for their own safety.” It added that some policemen who were taken for treatment at hospitals were attacked by protesters inside the medical centers.

As clashes continued, some two dozen men believed to be parliament guards attacked the protesters’ tents in Martyrs Square, setting them on fire. A gas cylinder inside one of the tents blew up. The fire spread quickly and charred a nearby shop.

The bells of nearby St. George Cathedral began to toll in an apparent call for calm, while loudspeakers at the adjacent blue-domed Muhammad Al-Amin mosque called for night prayers.

Later in the evening, hundreds of protesters chanting “Revolution” chased a contingent of riot police near the entrance of the mosque, forcing them to withdraw. Inside the mosque, several men were treated for gas inhalation and some families were said to be hiding inside.

“We call on the security forces to be merciful with women and children inside the mosque,” a statement blared through the mosque’s loudspeakers.

President Michel Aoun called on security forces to protect peaceful protesters and work on restoring clam in downtown Beirut and to protect public and private property. He asked the ministers of defense and interior and heads of security agencies to act.

“The confrontations, fires and acts of sabotage in central Beirut are crazy, suspicious and rejected. They threaten civil peace and warn of grave consequences,” tweeted Hariri, the caretaker prime minister, who lives nearb y. He called those behind the riots “outlaws” and called on police and armed forces to protect Beirut.

The Lebanese Red Cross said it took 65 people to hospitals and treated 100 others on the spot, calling on people to donate blood. As the clashes continued, more ambulances were seen rushing to the area and evacuating the injured.

Late on Saturday most of the protesters were forced out of the area by police firing tear gas and sometimes rubber bullets. Still, security remained tight as more reinforcements arrived.

Panic and anger have gripped the public as their local currency, pegged to the dollar for more than two decades, plummeted. The Lebanese pound lost more than 60% of its value in recent weeks on the black market. The economy has seen no growth and foreign inflows dried up in the already heavily indebted country that relies on imports for most of its basic goods.

Meanwhile, banks have imposed informal capital controls, limiting withdrawal of dollars and foreign transfers.

Earlier this week, protesters carried out acts of vandalism in a main commercial area in Beirut targeting mostly private banks.

Prime Minister-designate Hassan Diab had been expected to announce an 18-member Cabinet on Friday, but last-minute disputes among political factions scuttled his latest attempt.

___

Associated Press writers Sarah El Deeb, Hussein Malla, Hassan Ammar and Bilal Hussein contributed to this report.

Thousands Gather for Women’s March Rallies Across the U.S.

WASHINGTON — Thousands gathered in cities across the country Saturday as part of the nationwide Women’s March rallies focused on issues such as climate change, pay equity, reproductive rights and immigration.

Hundred showed up in New York City and thousands in Washington, D.C., for the rallies, which aim to harness the political power of women, although crowds were noticeably smaller than in previous years. Marches were scheduled Saturday in more than 180 cities.

The first marches in 2017 drew hundreds of thousands of people to rallies in cities across the country on the day after President Donald Trump was inaugurated. That year’s D.C. march drew close to 1 million people.

In Manhattan on Saturday, hundreds of people who gathered at separate events in Foley Square and Columbus Circle planned to converge at Times Square as part of a “Rise and Roar” rally.

“Today, we will be the change that is needed in this world! Today, we rise into our power!” activist Donna Hill told a cheering crowd in Foley Square.

In Denver, organizers opted to skip the rally after the march and instead invited participants to meet with local organizations to learn more about issues such as reproductive rights, climate change, gun safety and voting.

Several thousand came out for the protest in Washington, far fewer than last year when about 100,000 people held a rally east of the White House. But as in previous years, many of the protesters made the trip to the nation’s capital from cities across the country to express their opposition to Trump and his policies. From their gathering spot on Freedom Plaza, they had a clear view down Pennsylvania Avenue to the U.S. Capitol, where the impeachment trial gets underway in the Senate next week.

In Washington, three key issues seemed to galvanize most of the protesters: climate change, immigration and reproductive rights.

“I teach a lot of immigrant students, and in political times like this I want to make sure I’m using my voice to speak up for them,” said Rochelle McGurn, 30, an elementary school teacher from Burlington, Vermont who was in D.C. to march. “They need to feel like they belong, because they do.”

Peta Madry of New London, Connecticut, was celebrating her 70th birthday in D.C. by attending her fourth Women’s March with her sister, Cynthia Barnard, of San Rafael, California. Both women were wearing handknitted pink hats that date from the first march. With pained expressions, they spoke about Trump’s determination to reverse the policies of his predecessor Barack Obama and his treatment of women.

“Look what he’s doing to Greta Thunberg,” Madry said, referring to the teenage climate activist. “He’s the biggest bully in the world.”

Melissa McCullough of Georgetown, Indiana, said when she recently turned 50 she promised herself that she would get more involved politically. “I’m here to protest Trump, as a woman,” she said.

Her daughter, 19-year-old University of Cincinnati student Elizabeth McCullough, chimed in to say that most women’s issues are human issues, and they talked about the need to protect immigrants.

“You have to push to protect everyone or no one’s safe,” Melissa McCullough said.

The protesters planned to march around the White House, but Trump wasn’t there. He is spending the holiday weekend at his resort in Florida.

Organizers of the Washington march faced criticism from some local African American activists for failing to focus on local issues and damaging the ability of local activists to organize.

“Local D.C. is a domestic colony and the actions of national organizers have to recognize that,” Black Lives Matter D.C. wrote in a letter this week to Women’s March organizers. “Here in D.C., these unstrategic mass mobilizations distract from local organizing, often overlook the black people who actually live here and even result in tougher laws against demonstration being passed locally.”

___

Associated Press reporter Michael Hill in New York City contributed to this report.

White House Seeks to End Michelle Obama Guidelines on School Nutrition

WASHINGTON—The Trump administration on Friday proposed rolling back nutrition guidelines for school meals that had been promoted by Michelle Obama as part of her campaign to combat child obesity.

The impact, child nutrition advocates said, will be less fruit and vegetables and more foods like pizza and fries in the school meals program, which serves 30 million children, most from low-income families.

Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, who announced the rule changes on Obama’s birthday, said they were needed to give schools more flexibility and reduce waste while still providing nutritious and appetizing meals.

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Under the proposal, schools would be allowed to cut the amount of certain types of vegetables served at lunch, and legumes offered as a meat alternative also could be counted as part of the vegetable requirement. Potatoes could be served as a vegetable.

The proposal also would allow schools to reduce the amount of fruit at on-the-go breakfast served outside the cafeteria.

Gay Anderson, president of the School Nutrition Association, said that while the nutrition standards had been a success overall, some requirements led to reduced participation in the program, higher costs and waste.

“USDA’s school meal flexibilities are helping us manage these challenges and prepare nutritious meals that appeal to diverse student tastes,” Anderson said in a statement.

Advocates of the school meals program assailed the changes.

“The Trump administration’s assault on children’s health continues today under the guise of ‘simplifying’ school meals,” Colin Schwartz, the Center for Science in the Public Interest’s deputy director for legislative affairs, said in a statement.

The proposal would give schools greater flexibility in offering entrees for a la carte purchases, which Schwartz said would “create a huge loophole in school nutrition guidelines, paving the way for children to choose pizza, burgers, French fries, and other foods high in calories, saturated fat or sodium in place of balanced school meals every day.”

Geraldine Henchy, director of nutrition policy at the Food Research & Action Center, said the bottom line should be nutrition, but the revisions to the a la carte rule would result in students getting “a lot more fats, a lot more sodium, a lot more calories.”

Specifically, the proposal would reduce the amount of red and orange vegetables that would have to be offered every day at lunch.

For breakfasts taken to go, fruit servings could be reduced from a cup to half a cup.

Rep. Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat and chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor, said the proposal “threatens the progress we’ve made toward improving nutrition in schools.”

“For many children, the food they eat at school is their only access to healthy, nutritious meals,” he said.

As first lady, Obama championed healthier school meals as part of her “Let’s Move” campaign.

The 2010 Health, Hunger-Free Kids Act set nutrition standards for school meals, requiring schools to offer fruits and vegetables and more whole-grain foods and to limit calories, fat and sodium.

The proposed rule is the second move by the Trump administration to scale back the school lunch program’s nutrition standards. Under a 2018 rule, the administration reduced the whole grains that had to be served and allowed low-fat chocolate milk. Before the rule change, only fat-free flavored milk was permitted.

Perdue announced the proposed changes in San Antonio, Texas.

“Schools and school districts continue to tell us that there is still too much food waste and that more common-sense flexibility is needed to provide students nutritious and appetizing meals,” he said.

The agency also proposed changes to the summer meals program, which serves 2.6 million children.