Month: May 2019

News You May Have Missed for May 26, 2019: We’re continuing to draw on the meticulous work of Sarah-Hope and Martha, so that if you want to act on the news you read, you can see how you might do so. In addition, Melissa has discovered more art that offers rsistance and sustenance in the world we find ourselves; see her listings below.

DOMESTIC NEWS

1. Protections eroding for trans, LGBTQ+ people in health care

Health-care providers could discriminate on the basis of sex, sexual orientation and gender identity, if new rules from Health and Human Services go into effect. Discrimination on these grounds had been prohibited by the ACA, though these regulations have been continuously litigated. The new rules have not yet been published for public comment, but you can read HHS’s comprehensive argument here. Look in particular at page 44 and 103, where HHS writes, “It is also the position of the United States government that “Title VII’s prohibition on sex discrimination . . . does not encompass discrimination based on gender identity per se, including transgender status.” 

As the New York Times explained it last year, “The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.”​ For more discussion, see this piece by Charlotte Clymer,  as well as her twitter feed, @cmclymer. 

The Transgender Law Center says you can write to HHS here. If you’d like to see how HHS describes this initiative, you can read their press release. See Martha’s list for a more full discussion of a range of transgender discrimination issues. 

2. More apprehended children dying in custody

On May 20, the Associated Press reported that a fifth Central American child, a sixteen-year-old boy from Guatemala, had died in U.S. custody. But on May 23, CBS News revealed that child was actually the sixth to die in U.S. custody. The administration had not previously announced the death of a ten-year-old Salvadoran girl on September 29, 2018. The girl’s name had not been released as of this writing. In an interview with CBS News, Representative Joaquin Castro, Chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus responded to the girl’s death, “I have not seen any indication that the Trump administration disclosed the death of this young girl to the public or even to Congress, and if that’s the case, they covered up her death for eight months, even though we [the Hispanic Caucus and Congress at large] were actively asking the question about whether any child had died or been seriously injured. We began asking that question last fall.”

Manuel Castillo, Consulate General of El Salvador in Aurora, was also surprised by the report of the September death. He told CBS News his office had no knowledge of the girl’s death and was hoping the CBS News report would help him track down the family. Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez, the boy who died, had been held in custody for six days —twice as long as federal law permits—and had been transferred to a second holding facility, even though it was known he had been diagnosed with influenza. As The New Yorker puts it, in the system of border enforcement, “the quality of mercy is under extreme strain.”

If you want to comment on the deaths of minors in custody, here are some options.

3. More children separated from their parents

Meanwhile, 1,700 additional children–so far–have been identified as possibly having been separated from their parents before the so-called “zero tolerance policy” went into effect, according to NBC News. Under court order, the Trump administration is reviewing 50,000 files on children and families to determine whether the children might have been separated; the Department of Homeland Security will then review the files to confirm whether they were. The ACLU, which brought the case, is trying to locate the families.

4. People arrested for giving food and water to migrants

People protesting the border policy and the treatment of immigrants are being targeted by the Border Patrol, according to documents obtained by Shadowproof. Those involved in peaceful protest–such as at the United States Border Patrol museum–are being hit with felony charges. Border Patrol units are attending seminars with Paul Laney, “a leading architect of the militarized police response to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests on the state’s Great Plains in 2016 and 2017,” according to Shadowproof.  In addition, the Border Patrol has recently admitted that it surveilled journalists, protesters and legal aid workers on the border, according to the Intercept.

People who give food and water to migrants in the desert have been arrested and convicted. And one woman–not an activist but a parent and a city attorney–who stopped to help three ill young people on a Texas highway was arrested but not charged earlier in May, according to the New York Times. The Intercept ran a long, evocative, detailed piece earlier in May on the history of the Arizona sanctuary movement and on Scott Warren, an Arizona community college teacher who helps identify bodies found in the desert so that families can be notified and who has organized humanitarian volunteers to leave food and water for migrants through the organization No More Deaths/No Mas Muertes. Warren goes to trial next week, facing three felonies. His parents have written a plea for people to make phone calls to support him.

To stay tuned to this and other stories, you can follow investigative reporter Will Parrish on Twitter, @willparrishca.

5. Pipeline protest criminalized

In other efforts to criminalize protest, five states–Louisiana, Oklahoma, North Dakota, South Dakota and Iowa–have passed laws “making trespassing on “critical infrastructure” property” a felony, carrying heavy fines and jail time, according to Grist. Other states are poised to do the same. The intent here is to prevent protests under the guise of protecting infrastructure. The laws are close to identical, suggesting the involvement of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) an organization backed by the Koch Brothers which produces “model” conservative legislation. The International Center for Not-For-Profit law has been tracking this legislation.

6. New immigration rules changing the face of the country

Trump’s proposed new immigration rules would vastly reduce the number of people admitted to join family members, give preference to people based on skills and education, and require English fluency for Green Cards. They make no provision for Dreamers, long-term undocumented immigrants, and people with Temporary Protected Status. The language requirement could “definitely change the racial makeup of who’s coming here,” said Peter Isbister, an attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center.​ In addition, he says, “the family-based immigration system is so central to who we are as a country.”​

7. California teachers pay their own subs

If they are sick longer than ten days, California teachers must pay for their own substitutes, up to up to $240 per day​, Buzzfeed reports. Teachers have endured this situation since 1976, but it has not been well-known until a Go-Fund-Me campaign was organized for a San Francisco elementary school teacher who had to go out for the rest of the year for breast cancer treatment. To add inj​ury to injury, teachers nationwide have not recived an increase in real wages since 1996, according to Daily Kos. And to compound the injury, teachers in California and fourteen other states cannot receive Social Security–even if they paid into it through other jobs. Even their spousal Social Security payments have their retirement pensions deducted from them, NPR reported in 2018.

If you want to speak up on behalf of teachers, you might press the state-wide offices of teachers’ unions–National Education Assocation or American Federation of Teachers–to take this up. It’s been over 40 years.

8. Cuts to Job Corps target marginalized youth

The Trump administration is planning to end its involvement in the Civilian Conservation Corps, laying off 1100 federal employees and cancelling a program that provided job training in rural areas for marginalized young people. There is bi-partisan opposition to the cuts, according to the Washington Post, but it is not at all clear that those opposed will prevail.  

To advocate for Job Corps programs, see this link.

9. Russia plans for 2020 and beyond

Russia intends to create racial tension in the US and undermine the electoral process well beyond 2020, new documents obtained by NBC news through the Dossier Center suggest. (The Dossier Center is funded by Russian opposition leader Mikhail Khodorkovsky.) Rep. Val Demings, D-Fla, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee and who saw the documents, commented that “Russia understands how critical the African American vote is to determining the outcome of elections. “And because we have not effectively dealt with racism as a country ourselves, I believe we’ve made ourselves vulnerable to foreign powers like Russia to continue to try to undermine us.”

INTERNATIONAL NEWS

10. Slouching toward war with Iran?

The Trump administration seems to be ambivalently but alarmingly moving toward war with Iran. It pulled out of the Iran nuclear agreement, while other signers have stayed in. National Security Advisor John Bolton, who has long wanted a reason to press for regime change in Iran, said earlier this month that the U.S. has seen “a number of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings” coming from Iran. The US has sent “an aircraft carrier strike group and land-based bombers,” NPR reported, and is proposing to send another 5000 troops along with military equipment, including Patriot missiles. It is not clear what Bolton is referring to; apparently Iran loaded missiles onto small boats and then unloaded them, reported the New York Times.

The build-up of weapons is alarming, according to Colin H. Kahl, who was deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East from 2009 to 2011. His piece in the Washington Post sketches how easily the US and Iran could fall into a war through a tragedy of errors.

Last fall, Conn Hallinan, writing for Foreign Policy in Focus, reviewed a new book by Middle East reporter Reese Erlich, The Iran Agenda Today: The Real Story Inside Iran and What’s Wrong with U.S. Policy. The book, says Hallinan, “certainly provides enough historical context to conclude that an attack on Iran — which would likely also involve Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and possibly Israel — would unleash regional chaos with international repercussions.”

There are key differences between Iran and Iraq that would complicate any invasion, points out professor of history, Juan Cole, among them that “the US would need 2.4 million troops to occupy Iran”; the US has 281,900 active military personnel and 1,860,000 reservists, he says.    (You can follow Juan Cole at @jricole)

If you’re worried about the looming threat of war with Iran, be aware that H.R.2354 and S.1039, both titled the Prevention of Unconstitutional War with Iran Act, would explicitly deny Trump the authority he needs to go to war with Iran. H.R.2354 is with the House Foreign Affairs and Armed Services Committees; S.1039 is with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. 

If you want to urge your representatives to support these bills, you can locate them here.

SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & THE ENVIRONMENT

11. Rogue NSA program cripples Baltimore city government computers

A secret NSA cyberweapon was stolen by hackers back in 2017 and since then has caused havoc around the world, according to the New York Times.. First used by North Korean operatives in the Wannacry virus, which crippled the British healthcare networks and German train systems, the tool has now been leveled at US city governments, which suffer from old outdated software and lax IT standards.

The core of these attacks come from a program made to exploit a flaw found in Microsoft software called EternalBlue, named for the so-called blue screen of death which occurs when the Microsoft operating system crashes. This security flaw was not passed on to Microsoft for five years while the NSA made full use of it until it was appropriated by foreign actors. While Microsoft has now released a patch, many networks used by smaller city governments remain vulnerable. Baltimore is one of the latest victims with its ability to process real estate sales, water bills, health alerts or utilize city email compromised; the system is being held ransom for $100k which Baltimore—at least so far—refuses to pay. 

12. FDA sat on 50,000 “hidden” reports of cardiac device malfunction

The FDA has decided to eliminate an “alternative” reporting system offered as a special exemption to some medical device manufacturers. Ordinarily medical devices are required to report any instances of malfunction or failure to a public database called MAUDE, Manufacturer and User Facility Device Experience, but a number of devices acquired exemptions to this requirement and were permitted to use a private database accessible only to the FDA. This was done ostensibly to streamline reporting but since its inception, over one million reports have accumulated, all out of public view, including 50k reports of an implanted defibrillator in widespread use made by Medtronic. The device itself was recalled by the manufacturer in 2007 but tens of thousands of patients have not had access to information needed to make an informed decision about whether to remove the devices or continue with possible malfunction, Ars Technica reports.

RESOURCES

• See Martha’s whole list for other issues affecting trans people, along with many opportunities to comment on the record, including proposals to loosen restrictions on RoundUp, frack California, tighten asylum rules and make eagle feathers available to non-indigenous people for non-indigenous religious observances.
• If you want challenge locking up asylum-seekers or requiring them to wait in Mexico while their cases are being heard, if you want to advocate for preserving NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System or for keeping the EPA’s system for monitoring the health of children, see Sarah-Hope’s full list.

Arts & Culture

A queer film festival in Tunisia

It is illegal to be queer in Tunisia–but nonetheless for four days in March, the
Mawjoudin Queer Film Festival was a sanctuary for LGBTQ+ people. Mawjoudin, the New York Times reports, means “we exist.”

Black Lives matter–in stained glass windows

Though the show, called Lamentations, has closed, you can still see Kehinde Wiley’s extraordinary stained glass windows representing the beauty and tragedies in Black lives at this site.

Charts and graphs about climate change become art

Alisa Singer, a data visualization artist, is turning scientific data about climate change into art pieces. Her work is part of a show, Environmental Graphiti, which you can see at this site.

Women prisoners healing from PTSD through dance

The “Dance to be Free” program, which uses dance as therapy to assist women prisoners coping with PTSD and which trains women prisoners to serve as teachers, has expanded to eight prisons in five states. You can get a sense of it here.

New Chicago major hangs piece in her office on red-lining

Lori Lightfoot, the new mayor of Chicago, hung an art piece on red-lining, just in time for her inauguration. Produced by the community print studio, Spudnik Press, the piece is one of a series produced by Amanda Williams and Natalie Y. Moore, all based on maps of Chicago.” You can see it here.

In addition to offering opportunities to act or comment on items in the news, News You May Have Missed has added a new section on art projects around topics in the news. Thanks to Melissa for seeing that resistance is sustained by art and for bringing these events to our page.

DOMESTIC NEWS

1. Missing and murdered Indigenous women

According to the National Institute of Justice, four out of five American Indigenous women and men have suffered violence in their lifetimes. Indigenous women also experience intimate partner violence, human trafficking and rape at high rates, and the number of murdered and missing Native American women is also significantly under-reported. A 2008 Department of Justice report examined the issue in considerable detail and the National Institute of Justice report came out in 2016. At last, the bipartisan Not Invisible Act (S. 982), introduced by U.S. Senators Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Jon Tester (D-MT), would address this crisis in the US. As Senator Murkowski’s website says, the bill would establish “an advisory committee of local, tribal and federal stakeholders to make recommendations to the Department of Interior and Department of Justice on best practices to combat the epidemic of disappearances, homicide, violent crime and trafficking of Native Americans and Alaska Natives.” 

If you want to learn about other pending bills on this subject and contact your senators about them, the information is here.

In process since 2016, Canada’s inquiry into murdered and missing Indigenous women has finally been completed; the report is due out in June. Profiles of Indigenous Canadian murdered and missing Indigenous women are in this CBC story

2. Detention in Louisiana

Lowering the state’s high incarceration rate was a commitment Louisiana’s Democratic governor, John Bel Edwards, made when he was elected. However, once the jails empied out, ICE began detaining immigrants in them. There are fewer immigration attorneys in Lousiana so detainees often have to represent themselves. The few attorneys available work extremely long days. And the judges are more punitive; as Mother Jones reported, “One judge, Agnelis Reese, denied every asylum claim she’d heard between 2014 and 2018…her colleague John Duck denies 83 percent of claims.”

3. Children of LGBT parents described as “out of wedlock”

Another threat on the citizenship front involves gay and lesbian couples with children born via surrogate. One gay couple, Roee and Adiel Kiviti are American citizens, with a two-year-old son, born in Canada using an egg donor and a surrogate, who is also an American citizen. When the family was expanded to include the now-two-month-old Kessem, also born in Canada using an egg donor and surrogate, they were told that because Kessem was “born out of wedlock” she is not eligible for birthright U.S. citizenship. This is in accordance with new State Department policy that says a child born via “assistive reproductive technology” to a U.S. citizen father and an anonymous egg donor does not have a right to birthright citizenship, regardless of that father’s marital status. Roee told the Daily Beast, “This is a very clear attack on families, on American families. Denying American married couples their rights to pass their citizenship, that is flat-out discrimination, and everyone should be concerned about this.”

If you want to speak up about this issue, some suggestions are here.

4. Proposed amendments to anti-abortion law

You won’t have missed the news about the draconian anti-abortion laws being passed in Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Ohio, Alabama, and Missouri. Rewire News has a good explainer on the issues. In Alabama, four amendments were proposed before the anti-women-having-control-over-their-own-bodies-and-lives legislation was passed. One was proposed by State Senator Linda Coleman-Madison and would have required free prenatal and medical care for women in the state who are denied an abortion. State Senator Vivian Davis has three proposed amendments. The first would have expanded Medicaid to provide funding for mothers and young children. The second would have required those who voted for the legislation to pay the legal costs of defending it in court. The third would have outlawed vasectomies. Not surprisingly, none of them passed, but they forced those voting in favor of the legislation to embrace the hypocrisy of their “pro-life” stances.

If you want to thank the legislators who made those proposals, their contact information is here. See this link as well for information about demonstrations planned for May 21.

5. Public Utilities at fault

Electrical transmission lines owned by Pacific Gas & Electric Company were responsible for the Camp Fire last year that destroyed the town of Paradise, California, and killed 85 people, according to a report by The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. PG&E, which has filed for bankruptcy protection, faces multiple lawsuits from people whose lives were destroyed, and may be criminally prosecuted as well. Meanwhile, Geisha Williams, who was PG&E’s CEO during the wildfires, received a salary of 9.3 million during 2018.

In addition, the cause of a hundred-day leak of 100,000 metric tons of methane in Southern California in 2015-2016 that led to mass evacuations and countless illnesses was finally attributed to corrosion of the lining of storage tanks. According to the New York Times, “SoCalGas, the company that owns and operates the natural gas well, did not meaningfully investigate or analyze more than 60 previous leaks at the complex.” 36,000 people are suing SoCalGas.

6. Fracking earthquake country

On May 9, Trump released plans to allow fracking across 725,000 acres of federal land on the coast of California and in the Central Valley, according to the Sacramento Bee. An earlier plan would allow fracking on an additional 1.6 million acres. California sued the Trump administration in January to prevent that plan from going forward. The Center for Biological Diversity says that fracking in these areas would lead to “air pollution, drinking water contamination, risk of induced earthquakes, industrial disturbance, habitat fragmentation, and noise and light pollution.” The organization points out that California is already the third-largest oil producing state and that continuing to develop fossil fuels will contribute to climate change.  

If you’re of a mind to speak up about this issue, Martha has located where to comment.

INTERNATIONAL NEWS

7. Canada ends “safe country” policy

Canada has quietly ended its policy of subjecting refugees who come from 43 so-called “safe countries,” including the United States, to abbreviated processes and restrictions on work permits; they were also deprived of the right to appeal. The policy was supposedly designed to reduce the backlog in the immigration system; it did not succeed in doing so, according to CTV. In 2015, 16,000 people applied for asylum in Canada; in 2018 55,000 applied. Most of the applicants were young men.

SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & THE ENVIRONMENT

8. Technique to manipulate single atoms has been developed

Individual atoms can be manipulated into place using the electron beam of scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM), which is controlled using magnetic lenses, according to a paper submitted to the journal “Science Advances.” The paper, by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Vienna, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and others in China, Denmark and Ecuador, opens the door for truly atomic scale engineering. While individual atoms have been painstakingly put into ordered positions before, scientists used a mechanical method involving the minute tip of a scanning tunneling electron microscope to pick up and drop atoms into place. This new method is completely electronic and uses no mechanical moving parts making it potentially much much faster and more accurate than old methods. Instead of a sort of nano-scale claw machine, this process resembles an expert billiards player who can calculate the exact force and angle to predict precisely where his aimed shots will go across a “table” made of a single atom thick layer of graphene.

9. Trump administration unrolls site to report ‘censorship’ by social media companies

Citing “political bias,” the White House has launched an online form to report social media platforms for what they describe as censorship. The Trump administration alleges that social media companies should “advance FREEDOM OF SPEECH” (their caps) and that “too many” Americans have been suspended or banned for violated terms of service that are apparently not well understood. This comes in the wake of a series of high profile bans of alt-right media personalities from platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, all of whom were wildly outside of the terms of service conditions regarding hate speech, Ars Technica reported. The first amendment of the Constitution guarantees freedom of speech in that the federal government is prohibited from curtailing the free speech rights of Americans; however. as most people are well aware private companies also have  rights and are in no way compelled to allow persons free access to their services to promote views they feel are contrary to their economic interests.

ARTS & CULTURE

Artists in Response

In Response is a visual resource of artists, cultural organizers and organizations who engage the arts to investigate and amplify issues related to immigration.  While centered in New York, the site lists organizations and resources from around the country.  Well worth investigating!

Commemorating students killed in school violence

A graduating Ohio student has decorated her mortarboard with QR code that leads to a list of students killed in school shooting, with the heading, “I graduated. These high school students couldn’t.” A CNN article includes a link to a printable version of the QR code, in case you know of any students who might want to do the same

Art and the Environmental Crisis

Christie’s Education is putting on a symposium June 11 in New York, asking such questions as:
• How does contemporary art communicate information about global climate change and its consequences?
• How can art assist in decision making about climate change?
• What methods, materials and processes are among those being utilized by artists?
• How does the context in which we encounter this work impact our response to it?
• How do we gauge its effectiveness?

The cost is $125 – 15% discount using the code: SYMPOSIUM19

RESOURCES

• If you want to speak up about gun violence, pregnancy-related deaths among Black women, the “conscience” rule permitting health care providers to refuse to care for LGBTQ+ patients and others–and much more, see Sarah-Hope’s list.
• The Americans of Conscience list has a list of actions you can take, along with some good news.
• Martha also has good news: The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) reversed the Medicare Part D rule which would have permitted plans to exclude protected classes including people with HIV or cancer. Comments can make a difference! To comment on other issues, among them RoundUp, HUD targeting undocumented residents (see our story last week), exposing miners to diesel exhaust, the ACA, elections and voting systems, municipal sewer run-off, and more, see her list.

At News You May Have Missed, we are continuing our experiment with integrating action items–as we are able to–with news summaries. We appreciate the meticulous work of Martha and Sarah-Hope who identify each week how we can be useful with regard to the topics we care about. In addition, this week Sarah-Hope has joined us as a writer, bringing her remarkable ability to encapsulate complex issues to writing news summaries.

DOMESTIC NEWS

1. Happy Mother’s Day: Consider 55,000 (more) homeless kids

​As many as 55,000 children could become homeless as a result of a new regulation published by Ben Carson’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Until now, families with mixed-status–that is, families who have one or more undocumented members–could live in public housing as long as the family had one member who was eligible for federal subsidies, Mother Jones explains. Under this new regulation, all members would have to be eligible–so families with children who were citizens and one parent who was undocumented would have to leave their homes.  By HUD’s own calculations, this change will affect 76,000 people; about them, HUD wrote,  “HUD expects the fear of the family being separated would lead to a prompt evacuation by most mixed-status families.”  ​If you would like to comment on this, you can do so here; comments are due July 9. 

2. Happy Mother’s Day #2: Kids at Guantánamo

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is proposing to house separated migrant children at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the Independent reported, though as the New York Times pointed out, the image of housing children next to terrorism suspects has kept the plan from moving forward. Still, because ICE is overwhelmed by immigrants–housing some 50,223 at this writing–the Department of Defense is looking at other military bases where they could be housed. The numbers are due in part to Attorney General Barr’s insistence that migrants seeking asylum be detained until their cases can be heard.

3. The entire ACA at risk

​The entire Affordable Care Act could be struck down if the Trump administration prevails in a federal appeals court. The administration argues that the entire ACA is unconstitutional, a change in from its previous position that only part of it needed to be dismantled. If the court agrees with Trump, 21 million people will lose health insurance (see the story on maternal mortality, below). Many millions more will no longer be protected by its provisions–regarding pre-existing conditions, for example, according to the New York Times

4. Redefining poverty

The Office of Budget and Management is proposing a change in the way the national poverty threshold is calculated. The move would tie poverty measures to the “chained” Consumer Price Index, which minimizes increasing inflation by assuming that, rather than buying products whose costs are increasing at new, higher prices, consumers will move to purchasing less expensive items. As a result, the number of families qualifying for income-based services would grow more slowly than the actual growth in consumer prices, Bloomberg reports. The Obama White House tried a similar move with cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security in2014—a proposal that was abandoned after objections by Congressional Democrats.

If you have an opinion about this issue, you can find out where to write here.

5. Marginalizing US Department of Agriculture scientists

Last August, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Purdue announced plans to move the Economic Research Service (ERS) and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA)—both agencies that play a key role in developing policy—outside the nation’s capital. While this proposal may sound inconsequential, fifty-six former United States Department of Agriculture and federal statistical agency officials, along with more than 1,100 scientists and economists have objected to this move. The move is apt to spark retirement or resignation of USDA scientists who do not wish to relocate, creating a loss of expertise that will take years to recover, reports farmprogress.com.

Government officials, policy makers, and scientists frequently consult with the ERS and NIFA. These consultations will be more difficult once the offices are relocated, particularly for out-of-area officials, who could formerly have included visits to the ERS and NIFA offices when conducting other business at the capitol. Susan Offutt, an ERS administrator during the Clinton and Bush (W.) administrations, explained “The USDA’s evidence-lite justification for USDA to so radically uproot its world-class research, economics and statistical agencies is the reason the Economic Research Service should be kept in Washington, DC, and in the USDA research arm. We need its objective and respected analysis to support evidence-based policymaking in our $1 trillion food, agriculture and rural economy.”

If you want to object to this move, here’s how to do so.

6. The plots thicken: Bolton and Cambridge Analytica

​Between 2014 and 2017, John Bolton’s Super PAC received $5 million dollars from John Mercer of Cambridge Analytica, according to the Centre for Public Integrity, which has updated its 2018 story. In turn, Bolton gave back $1.1 million to Cambridge Analytica for data on voters. (Cambridge Analytica was the voter-profiling company whose ability to identify particular details about voters and then target them with fake news to shape their choices was instrumental in the 2016 presidential campaign and in the success of Brexit.) The Centre for Public Integrity’s source was Mark Groombridge, an advisor to Bolton.
The PAC, which Bolton says he disbanded in March but which had continued its operations well after Bolton became National Security Advisor April 9, was intended in part to explore Bolton’s nascent presidential ambitions. All in all, it donated some $6 million to right-wing candidates. Bolton’s PAC was made possible by the Citizens United decision, the Supreme Court decision that allowed corporations and other entities to donate unlimited sums to political campaigns.

7. Foreign governments renting in Trump Tower

​Seven foreign governments–Iraq, Kuwait, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Thailand and the European Union–rented condos at Manhattan’s Trump World Tower, according to a Reuters story, possibly violating the emoluments clause; Congress must approve any gifts or payments from foreign governments. Other governments expressed interest in renting, as a Reuters graphic showing the timeline of these arrangements demonstrates.

INTERNATIONAL NEWS

8. Chinese repression of Uighar Muslims

As trade talks continue (or don’t) between the U.S. and China, one important topic is not on the table: the ongoing Chinese violations of of Uighar Muslims’ human rights. China is currently holding up to one million Uighars in detention camps. The vast Xinjiang region, where the Uighar detentions are occurring has a population of 24 million, almost half of whom are Muslims—and the majority of these are Uighars. The detentions, along with intensive monitoring of Uighars’ daily activities through the use of both cameras and informants are aimed at forcing Uighar abandonment of Islam and of resistance to Chinese rule. The New York Times describes the anti-Uighar programs as “a campaign of breathtaking scale and ferocity that has swept up hundreds of thousands of Chinese Muslims for weeks or months of what critics describe as brainwashing, usually without criminal charges” and noted that this is the country’s most significant internment program since the Mao era. China has called Uighar detention centers “mild corrective institutions” and claims that they provide job training. The Uyghar [sic] Human Rights Policy Act of 2019 (S.178 in the Senate and H.R.649 in the House), which calls for an end to arbitrary, detention, torture, and harassment of Uighar communities remains in committee in both houses of Congress: the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs, Intelligence, and Judiciary Committees.

If you want to speak up about Chinese Muslims, here’s whom to write.

SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & THE ENVIRONMENT

9. Pregnancy-related deaths high among Black and Indigenous Women

​
Pregnancy-related deaths in the U.S. are two and half to three times higher among Black and Indigenous women than among white women, according to the CDC’s weekly morbility and mortality report. Three out of five deaths were preventable; better health care, stable housing and reliable transportation would reduce the number of deaths, according to the CDC. The US has twice the number of deaths in pregnancy and childbirth compared to Canada and a number of other wealthy nations. Severe bleeding, heart disease and strokes caused most of the deaths; the  American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists  recently acknowledged that racial bias plays in role in maternal deaths, in that symptoms among Black and Indigenous women tend to be discounted, according to the New York Times.

10. Extinctions on the horizon

As many as a million plant and animal species are in danger of extinction, putting the survival of ecosystems and people at risk, the New York Times reports. Various ordinary human activities–from farming to poaching–have led to a 20 per cent decrease of plants and animals in major habitats. Climate change has intensified this process, shrinking the areas in which plants and animals can survive, a process that will result in profound loss of biodiversity. As the summary of the United Nations report puts it, “Climate change is a direct driver that is increasingly exacerbating the impact of other drivers on nature and human well-being.”    We have covered this issue before, but are mentioning it again because the full summary is now available–the 1500 page report will be published later this year.

11. Ancient trees discovered in North Carolina

​The bald cypresses of North Carolina were known to be long-lived—however, how long was a mystery until a recent study published in the journal Environmental Research Communications identified trees exceeding 2000 years in age, with one example recorded at over 2600 years. The trees are located along the Black River in a 16,000 acre preserve owned by the Nature Conservancy of North Carolina and these studies would set them around the third oldest trees with confirmed ages in the world. Old growth forests in the United States are exceedingly rare, with less than 1% of old growth cypress trees still in existence, according to BGR.

12. The US military has drones that fire knife-wielding missiles

​The Wall Street Journal reports that the United States Department of Defense, in collaboration with the Central Intelligence Agency, has created a new version of the Hellfire missile that uses kinetic energy and blades to kill. Developed in response to a mandate by the Obama administration to reduce collateral casualties in drone strikes, the missile instead uses precision guidance, 100 pounds of metal and spring-loaded blades in an attempt to eliminate single targets. The missile, designated R9X, has been used about six times according to the WSJ, with two confirmed strikes against targets in vehicles in which the vehicles did not explode. In the strike against Al Qaeda leader Ahmad Ahasan Abu Kahyr al-Masri in February of 2017 the damage to his Kia was limited to a hole in the roof and a crack in the windshield, according to Ars Technica.

RESOURCES

• Do you have something to say about fracking in California? The destruction of grey wolves? The requirement that asylum seekers pay fees to apply?  If so, Martha can tell you how to weigh in. Here is her list.
• Sarah-Hope has identified even more action items than we have listed above, from ways to speak up about the dismantling of safeguards around off-shore drilling to subsidies of fossil fuels to Anita Hill’s call for federal protections against sexual harassment. See her list here.

News You May Have Missed is integrating some action items into our news summaries. Martha and Sarah-Hope (see the Resources below) do thorough, comprehensive investigations into how people can respond to the many issues in the news–we think it makes sense not only to call your attention to undercovered stories but to give you ways to intervene in them. Feel free to comment on our Facebook page if you have thoughts about this.

DOMESTIC NEWS

1. More attacks on freedom of the press

We’ve reported before on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) keeping a database of journalists and influencers. In further news, Bloomberg Government reports on a DHS FedBizOpps.gov posting (Statement of Work) which describes monitoring the public activities of media professionals and influencers.

The Committee to Protect Journalists has just posted a different kind of database–a heartbreaking list of 1340 journalists killed worldwide since 1992. If you want to work with the database, you can search by gender, country, year, and so forth.

2. Unreliable list of unreliable news sites

The Poytner Institute, ordinarily a very responsible organization which conducts journalism education and analysis, pulled its list of 515 unreliable news sites after a barrage of critique. The list was compiled from “fake news” databases developed by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at University of Southern California, Merrimack University, PolitiFact, Snopes and data designer Chris Herbert, according to the Hill.

In a letter on its website, the editor said that they had decided to pull the site because of “weaknesses” in the methodology. She wrote, “we regret that we failed to ensure that the data was rigorous before publication, and apologize for the  confusion and agitation caused by its publication.”

3. Heath care for LGBTQ+ patients compromised

Health care providers may now refuse to care for LGBTQ patients for reasons of conscience, according to new rules published by Health and Human Services last week. According to PBS, which provides a detailed analysis, the new rule broadens the grounds on which health care workers can opt-out of providing care. They may refuse to see transgender patients, for example, or to address concerns regarding HIV/AIDS.

In addition, health care providers no longer have to refer patients to other practitioners if patients need care to which they object, a measure that will have a particularly serious impact on rural women. The regulations go beyond the provision of services in that they permit workers to opt out for religious reasons from health care research and insurance processing, according to Rewire News. On Thursday, San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera sued the Trump administration, saying that “people’s health should not be a political football. The intent of this new rule is clear: it’s to prioritize religious beliefs over patient care, thereby undermining access to contraception, abortion, HIV treatment and a host of other medical service.”

Are you inclined to speak up about this policy? Write the head of Health and Human Services.

4. More severe hardships imposed on asylum seekers

In April, Attorney General William Barr declared that asylum seekers had no right to bail. Now, the ACLU, the American Immigration Council, and the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project have sued the Trump administration, insisting that asylum seekers have a right to due process, according to the Associated Press. Judy Rabinovitz of the ACLU described the issue this way: “We are talking about people who are fleeing for their lives, seeking safety. And our response is just lock them up.”

In other measures designed to deter asylum-seekers, the Trump administration ordered that they be charged fees for applying for asylum, that anyone crossing the border illegally be denied work permits, and that courts adjudicate asylum requests within 180 days, the Washington Post reported.

If you want to speak up about the treatment of asylum-seekers, some options are here.

5. Child who died in US custody had tumor, authorities claim

On April, 30, Juan De Leon Guiterrez, 16, died in U.S. Government custody at Driscoll Children’s Hospital in Corpus Christi, Texas. He was taken to a shelter on April 20, when, according to a statement released by Administration for Children and Families spokesperson Evelyn Stauffer, no health problems were observed. The following morning, Guiterrez became visibly ill, with fever and chills, and was taken to a local emergency department for treatment; when his condition did not improve the following day, he was returned to the hospital by ambulance and later transferred to Driscoll, where he spent several days in intensive care, according to USA Today. Authorities claim the teen had a Pott’s tumor, which is a rare complication of sinusitis, according to Applied Radiology. Guiterrez is the third child to die in U.S. custody.

If you want to recommend that the health of asylum-seekers, especially children, be more closely monitored, here are some people to write.

6. Hondurans drown in the Rio Grande

On Thursday, May 2, U.S. border agents recovered the body of a 10-month-old boy, and continued to look for the remains of three other Honduran migrants who are missing, presumed dead after their boat overturned as they tried to cross the Rio Grande late on the evening of Wednesday, May 1. 

7. Indigeous rights to eagle feathers threatened

The Department of the Interior is proposing to permit non-Indigenous people to have access to eagle feathers for religious purposes, according to the Turtletalk blog on Indigenous legal affairs. Under current Fish & Wildlife regulations, designed to preserve eagles, no one may possess eagle feathers except Indigenous people, to whom they are sacred. Indigenous people may receive eagle feathers from the  National Eagle Repository, inherit them, or receive them as gifts.

You can submit a formal comment on this issue here and here.

8. Disaster unrelieved

In March, we noted that the Inspector General of HUD was investigating whether the Trump Administration had blocked disaster relief funding for Puerto Rico. A recent Government Accounting Office report revealed that block grants for several locations hit by hurricanes–Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands–had not been released. Meanwhile, children and adults in these areas are suffering mental health crises, as NPR and The Guardian report.

If you want to recommend that these funds be released, you can find whom to write here.

INTERNATIONAL NEWS

9. Climate emergency declared in the U.K.

A climate emergency has been declared by Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister of Scotland; she said she was moved to act by meeting with young climate change protestors. Sturgeon’s government has already banned fracking, according to the BBC, and has committed Scotland to being carbon-neutral by 2050.

Wales, too, has declared a climate emergency following protests; cyclists disrupted traffic by riding slowly through Cardiff. Lesley Griffiths, Minister of Energy, Planning, and Rural Affairs, told the BBC, that “climate change threatens Wales’ health, economy, infrastructure and natural environment.” She added that the Welsh government was committed to establishing a “carbon neutral public sector by 2030.”

In response to pressure from these governments and the action group Extinction Rebellion, the UK government also declared a climate emergency. Though it is not binding on the government, Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn said, “We pledge to work as closely as possible with countries that are serious about ending the climate catastrophe and make clear to US President Donald Trump that he cannot ignore international agreements and action on the climate crisis.”

10. Trump vetoes resolution to stop U.S. aid to Saudi war against Yemen.

By the end of this year, a quarter of a million people will have died in the US-assisted Saudi war on Yemen, according to the U.N. Development Report, just released. Conditions there are dire, especially for children, who are dying of famine and lack of water, caught in bombing raids and forced to serve as child soldiers.

In response to the on-going conflict, the U.S. Congress for the first time invoked the War Powers Act, passed in 1973 to prevent presidents from waging war without Congressional approval. The resolution to stop aiding Saudia Arabia passed both houses but was vetoed last week by Trump, Al Jazeera reported. In a 53 to 45 vote, the Senate failed to over-ride the veto, falling short of the two-thirds majority needed. In a statement, Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders, one of the sponsors of the measure, said “The bad news today: we were unable today to override Trump’s veto regarding U.S. intervention in this horrific war in Yemen. The good news: for the first time in 45 years, Congress used the War Powers Act to reassert its constitutional responsibility over the use of armed forces.”

11. Coup in Venezuela fails–for now

In Venezuela, a US-backed coup against the government of  President Nicolás Maduro, a coup led by opposition leader Juan Guaidó has apparently failed. Calling it  “Operation Liberty,” Guaidó admitted on Saturday that the opposition had overestimated support from the military and said that he would take any offer of military support from the US to the national assembly, reported the Washington Post.

The Nation ran an insightful on-the-ground piece demonstrating the ways in which the mainstream media got the story wrong and the very high cost of potential US intervention.

Meanwhile, US sanctions have killed an estimated 40,000 people since 2017,  according to a report economist Jeffrey Sachs has co-authored with Mark Weisbrot, Democracy Now points out. The report, published by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, refers to these deaths–due to lack of food and medicine–as collective punishment.U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden criticized Maduro’s government for “concocting false and outlandish conspiracy theories” about the United States, according to Politico.

Do you want to speak up about Yemen or Venezuela? Find your Senators and Representatives here.

SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & THE ENVIRONMENT

12. Second largest emperor penguin colony all but wiped out

Researchers from the British Antarctic Survey have revealed that the second largest colony of emperor penguins in the world in Antarctica has totally collapsed, as The Hill reports.. Using satellite imagery the colony located at Halley Bay has been observed to be shrinking for several years now, with the last three breeding seasons yielding almost no chicks. The sea ice on which the colony depends during brooding season broke up far earlier than the historic norm, with climate change the likely cause. The small glimmer of hope is that a nearby colony has been seen to be increasing, taking in refugees; however, emperor penguin numbers overall are predicted to crash between 50-70% by the end of the century.

13. Department of Justice to investigate taxpayer-funded carbon capture facility

The Department of Justice has issued a notice to Southern Company that it intends to investigate the Kemper County energy facility in Mississippi regarding the decision to abandon its project to sequester carbon at the power plant. Tax-funded grants of 387 million dollars had been provided to help fund the facility that was intended to use cutting-edge coal gassification and carbon sequestration technology. Instead the company scrapped the project and simply converted the plant to run on cheap natural gas, apparently pocketing the grant money. This failure represents a blow both to any prospect of a resurgence of coal as a viable energy source and industrial CO2 sequestration as a byproduct, according to Ars Technica.

RESOURCES

• Lawfare has a page with just the executive summaries of the Mueller report.
• Martha has a particularly comprehensive list this week, addressing threats to the ACA, a massive fracking plan in California, changes to groundwater contamination, and much more. She tells you where to submit a federal comment on these and other issues.
• Sarah-Hope’s full list suggests other issues you may want to address–the House climate change bill, the Trump administration’s resistance to considering rape a weapon of war, gun control, and more.
• Jen Hofmann’s Americans of Conscience checklist also offers clear, managable actions to take.