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https://www.csmonitor.com/Daily/2022/20220329/Kyiv-Odesa-and-what-s-in-a-name
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Odessa or Odesa? The Donbass or the Donbas?
Newsrooms have been busy debating the spelling of Ukrainian place names. Many of us in the media have long used Russian transliterations for some places, such as Odessa, while using Ukrainian ones for others, like Kyiv.
Starting this week, the Monitor has shifted entirely to using the renderings established by Ukraine’s government. The principle underlying this is respect for what a sovereign country has chosen. As we wrote in a 2009 article as we switched to Kyiv from Kiev, “we like to call people what they want to be called.” Not doing so can send an unintended message: The Monitor’s Scott Peterson, who reported recently from Odesa, shared some sources’ shocked reactions when they saw a dateline of “Odessa.”
Getting people to adjust to changes in familiar names, even by a letter, is hard. Ukraine launched the global #KyivnotKiev campaign in 2018 to push the point, despite having required Kyiv since 1995. The U.S. State Department and the United Nations use Ukrainian transliterations. Still, other organizations, like the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, long allowed Kiev as an alternative. That stopped in 2019.
Like us, numerous media have shifted recently, including The Associated Press, whose style we largely observe. Our staff took the issue seriously; one editor noted the 58 comments in a newsroomwide message thread about it. In the end, we established our rule based on consistency and, most important, respect.
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Three weeks ago, Ali Willis got a phone call, and knew she had to go. Russian-speaking friends had gone to a Polish border town to help humanitarian workers with refugees, and more help was needed. Ukrainians, who generally know Russian but not Polish, were pouring in. Soon Ms. Willis, a communications professional in London who speaks Russian, was at the border.
That’s where she spotted a woman and her toddler son – Alina Serbinenko and Emmanuel – and immediately took them under her wing. Ms. Willis had already seen how young women and children in such circumstances can “fall into the wrong hands,” as she says. Ms. Serbinenko and Emmanuel, both weak from illness, seemed especially vulnerable.
Ms. Willis managed to connect mother and child with a host family in Germany via ukrainetakeshelter.com, and three days later was on a plane with them to Munich. She marvels at the leaps of faith required in the massive undertaking of finding temporary homes for Ukrainian refugees.
“Who were we to those we met?” Ms. Willis writes on Facebook. “How did Alina’s parents near Kyiv know their daughter and grandson would be safe with me? How did I know Alina would be safe with the German family found on a website? We all just had to put our faith in our fellow man.”
Ms. Serbinenko’s mother and teenage brother have now joined them in Germany, and soon the Ukrainians will move into their own temporary housing. Ms. Willis has left, but remains in touch with her new friends.
To me, none of this story is surprising. I’ve known Ms. Willis and her wonderful family since she was a little girl, when her father, David Willis, was the Monitor’s correspondent in Moscow. I was there as a student.
Ms. Willis went on to study Russian at university, and has used her linguistic skill over the years in her work. And sometimes, she has shown, knowing a foreign language can be a lifeline for a family in peril.
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Two ways to read the story
On the second day of the war, Andrey Kurkov, one of Ukraine’s most celebrated authors, left Kyiv. It took 22 hours to drive 260 miles to Lviv. He was safely ensconced in western Ukraine, but couldn’t keep writing the novel he had been working on. Instead, he’s taken it upon himself to talk with the outside world about the situation unfolding in his country.
“I write only articles and essays about what is happening in Ukraine,” he tells the Monitor in a Q&A. But conflict has been affecting Mr. Kurkov’s life – and Ukrainian literature – for nearly a decade now, since pro-Russian separatists took up arms in the country’s east in 2014.
Why We Wrote This
Resistance to oppression can take many forms. For one author trapped in Ukraine, it’s describing the effects of war through the eyes of ordinary people, and corresponding with the outside world.
“In Kyiv I met many refugees from Donbas,” he says of the inspiration behind his 2018 book about the conflict, “Grey Bees.” “I realized that there are thousands of people who are in the same situation in the gray zone between the positions of the Ukrainian Army and those of pro-Russian separatists. That was the reason to write the novel. By that time there were already more than 200 books about soldiers, but none about ordinary civilians caught up in the war.”
The war has since spread. More civilians have gotten caught up in it. Mr. Kurkov hopes the world is paying attention to them.
Andrey Kurkov is one of the most acclaimed Ukrainian writers of the post-Soviet era. The author of 19 novels, as well as television scripts and books for children, he is also a frequent commentator on Ukraine for European and American media. His 2018 novel, “Grey Bees,” has just been published in the United States. Mr. Kurkov and his family left their home in Kyiv the day after Russia invaded Ukraine. He exchanged email messages with the Monitor recently from western Ukraine, where the family is sheltering.
What is life like for you now?
We left Kyiv at the beginning of the war, on the second day, and moved to our village house 60 miles to the west. From there we moved to Lviv. It took 22 hours to drive 260 miles. Then we stayed in a small tourist hotel in the Carpathian mountains. Now we are in the Transcarpathian region.
Why We Wrote This
Resistance to oppression can take many forms. For one author trapped in Ukraine, it’s describing the effects of war through the eyes of ordinary people, and corresponding with the outside world.
Are you doing any writing?
I was working on a novel but stopped after the Russian invasion. Now I write only articles and essays about what is happening in Ukraine. I am in touch with many of my friends in different cities and regions. Some of my friends and colleagues are in the occupied territories and there is no more connection with them. Russians take away computers and mobile phones from those they suspect to be an activist or intellectual.
You wrote “Grey Bees” in 2018, before the current crisis. The novel is set during the war in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine in 2014. What was the impetus for writing it?
In Kyiv I met many refugees from Donbas. One of them told me that he is driving once a month back to Donbas, to a village on the frontline, to bring seven families that remained there medicines and whatever they need, because they have no shops, no pharmacies, no infrastructure at all. Then I realized that there are thousands of people who are in the same situation in the gray zone between the positions of the Ukrainian Army and those of pro-Russian separatists. That was the reason to write the novel. By that time there were already more than 200 books about soldiers, but none about ordinary civilians caught up in the war.
The two main characters in “Grey Bees,” a beekeeper and his neighbor, live in a war zone, but go about their daily lives. Have they simply adapted to war?
People in Donbas are adapted to the war and try sometimes to ignore distant explosions. They can understand when the danger is approaching and only then react. They can differentiate many military sounds and different kinds of explosions.
Since the Russian invasion, have you seen a similar attitude in Ukraine?
It takes months to adapt to living in the dangerous situation of war. It happens when you become indifferent to your own fate and to everything else and you stop making plans for the future and stop dreaming.
What do you hope readers of “Grey Bees” learn about Ukraine today?
They can see the war through the eyes of ordinary people of Donbas. They can understand the situation in Crimea after annexation. They can understand the mindsets of ordinary people for whom the war came as a great and horrible surprise.
How has war, particularly since 2014, affected the literature produced in Ukraine?
Before 2014, Ukrainian literature was about sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, but then it became very militant, very politically engaged. Now there are hundreds of books about the war, dozens of historical novels.
It has been said that Ukrainian literature is one means of defiance in the face of imperial domination. Do you agree?
Yes, I agree, Ukrainian literature was, from 1991 [when the Soviet Union collapsed], independent from both the influence of Soviet literature and from Ukrainian politics. It developed sporadically and quickly became European. Russian literature remained in the Russian/Soviet tradition under the patronage of [President Vladimir] Putin’s administration.
Why do you write your novels in Russian and not Ukrainian?
Literature in Ukraine is written in several languages: Ukrainian, Russian, Crimean Tatar, Gagauz, and Hungarian. My mother tongue is Russian. I am ethnically Russian, was born in Russia and grew up in Russian-speaking Kyiv. In Ukraine, my books are published in Russian and then translated into Ukrainian. My books are not published in Russia and were banned twice. Since 2014, it has been illegal to bring my books in Russian to sell in Russia. So I am one of many Ukrainian writers who writes in Russian.
What message would you most like to convey to the world about Ukraine and the current conflict?
Ukrainians and Russians are very different. For Ukrainians, freedom is more important than stability. For Russians, it is the opposite. Ukrainians change their presidents at each election, Russians keep their czars until the czar is dead. Ukrainians and Russians are not the same people, as Putin claims.
“Death and the Penguin,” one of your best known novels, features a penguin as a main character. Most of your novels have animals as characters. Why?
Animals are excellent natural protagonists. They help me to convey what I want to say about society, about the situation, about people. And they are very symbolic. Penguins live in groups, not pairs, so they need to be part of something bigger. They are like the Soviet people, who lost themselves after the U.S.S.R. collapsed.
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One characteristic of countries with high voter confidence in the integrity of elections is public trust in the people who run elections. When that trust breaks down, as it has in much of the United States, restoring it can lead to hard questions – about the technology for ballot counting, as an example, or the role of private money in government-run elections – but also a flurry of attempts at reform.
Since the 2020 presidential election, at least 19 states have enacted nearly three dozen laws to regulate access to the ballot box and expand public monitoring at polling stations. Those measures are designed to renew public confidence either by making it easier to vote or by eliminating opportunities for fraud. Court cases and the House probe of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, meanwhile, aim to restore democracy through accountability.
But in communities across the country, local election officials are weaving a perhaps more consequential tapestry of trust. Instead of focusing on what has gone wrong with American democracy, they are engaging more vigorously in what makes it right. “One of the things that I always try to do is make sure that I’m not using triggering language, that I’m not using the language that automatically puts us on one or the other side of the aisle,” said Tammy Patrick, a senior adviser to the Democracy Fund and former county election official from Arizona, in an interview with the website Governing.
The public remains deeply divided over the results of the 2020 election. The most recent Monmouth University Poll, from last November, found that a third of Americans – including 75% of Republicans – still believe Joe Biden did not win the presidency fairly. That skepticism has helped fuel a troubling rise in threats against local election officials. In Pennsylvania, according to the Pew Research Center, a third of local election officials have left their jobs in fear for their safety. Lawmakers in at least 10 states are debating new criminal penalties to curb those threats.
But doubt about the last election also appears to be stirring a new era of civic participation. More people – including more minorities – are either running for local offices or learning how to be volunteers at polling stations. Town clerks and county election officials are banding together to produce public education videos about how elections are held and votes are counted. Some have started podcasts. Others are holding town hall meetings and hosting webinars and public tours in their offices. For some, threats of violence have deepened their resolve.
“Am I scared? Yes, I’m not going to lie. I am scared,” Linh Nguyen, a town clerk candidate in DeKalb County, Illinois, told the Iowa Capital Dispatch. “But as a minority woman, to be honest, in a room of raised hands, mine will never be picked, and I learned to look for opportunities where other people see obstacles.”
That courage underscores what makes democracy more solid and enduring than it sometimes seems. “Almost one-third of citizens vote at town halls staffed with election workers volunteering their time to help fulfill the promise of democracy,” said Mike Koles, executive director of Wisconsin Towns Association. “They are the same people we see in church, we rely on to respond to emergencies, and that cheer on the local team on Friday night. Nobody can be trusted more than these local public servants.”
As the U.S. moves toward its next elections, the renewed spirit of civic service among election managers may be the best way to restore trust in the outcomes of ballot counting.
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https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2022/0331/Quest-for-nuclear-fusion-is-advancing-powered-by-scientific-grit
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For decades, scientists have aspired to create nuclear fusion – a carbon-free, potentially limitless power source. The path has been long, winding, and full of frustration.
But with an eye on the vital role that energy plays in humanity’s future, researchers are continuing to come together to try to make it happen – with an important milestone reached just last month.
Why We Wrote This
Science often advances one slow step at a time. The goal of energy from nuclear fusion is an example. Hope is rising, but researchers need discipline, perseverance, and trust that painstaking effort can pay off.
For now, fusion power remains a dream. No fusion experiment has been able to fuel itself. Instead, researchers must use energy to make energy. They inject heat, like how steam heats milk in a cappuccino machine, to help hydrogen isotopes react and fuse. As the plasma gets hotter, it releases energy.
In February, the Joint European Torus lab in the United Kingdom generated more than twice as much heat as its last record in 1997. Scientists say that, while today’s experiments create energy for just a few seconds at a time, they are steppingstones toward the goal of sustained energy production.
Deirdre Boilson, a division head at a larger fusion feasibility project in southern France, describes the hope that’s driving researchers forward. The scientific theory combined with their research experience, she says, “allows us to have confidence in the machine we are building, and the physics behind it.”
Science is slow: It’s doing the same difficult thing over and over, observing, changing, doing it again. It’s setting up a thousand little things while waiting for the big thing to finally happen.
The quest for nuclear fusion – a carbon-free, potentially limitless power source – is exactly that. Aspirations have endured for decades. The path has been long, winding, and full of frustration.
But with an eye on the vital role that energy plays in humanity’s future, researchers are continuing to come together to try to make it happen. In the fight against climate change, they have been making headway, including with an important milestone reached just last month.
Why We Wrote This
Science often advances one slow step at a time. The goal of energy from nuclear fusion is an example. Hope is rising, but researchers need discipline, perseverance, and trust that painstaking effort can pay off.
“Climate change is endangering our world’s future,” says Deirdre Boilson, a division head at ITER, a massive fusion feasibility project in southern France. “The most important thing we must do to halt climate change is move from fossil fuels to carbon-free energy alternatives.”
Still, the estimated launch of the world’s first fully operational fusion power plant is at least three decades away. Yet after decades of dismissal as a fringe pipe dream, fusion power is starting to look like it just might happen.
A win for Earth’s climate?
Like renewables such as wind, solar, and geothermal power, fusion has the potential to be abundant and virtually inexhaustible. And backers say it wouldn’t depend on whether the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. In theory, one kilogram of fuel from a potential fusion plant could provide as much power as 10 million kilograms of fossil fuel.
One more thing: Where traditional nuclear power (in fission reactors) has resulted in tragic plant meltdowns, a fusion power plant would be fundamentally safer. Fusion brings atoms together, while fission forces them apart. Unlike fission, fusion is a self-limiting process, not a chain reaction: Without fuel, it quickly comes to a stop. And though a fusion power plant would generate radioactive waste, it would be classified as either “very low” or “low” activity waste and “cannot pose any serious danger,” the International Atomic Energy Agency says. Skeptics, however, counter that fusion is far from perfect: It’s expensive, to start.
For now, fusion power remains a dream. No fusion experiment has been able to fuel itself. Instead, researchers must use energy to make energy. They inject heat to help the system react and fuse, like how steam heats milk in a cappuccino machine. As the plasma gets hotter, it releases energy using hydrogen. But once it runs out of hydrogen, it can’t keep itself going. It fizzles out.
The lab that has come closest to this break-even point – make energy versus take energy – is JET, the Joint European Torus in the United Kingdom, which generated 16 megawatts of fusion power, versus 24 megawatts of power that was used to heat the plasma (a so-called Q ratio of 0.67).
In February, JET announced that its reactor experiment achieved a new milestone: It generated more than twice as much heat as its last record (59 megajoules in 2022, versus 21.7 megajoules in 1997). JET’s reactor is a tenth of the volume of the still-unfinished ITER, where Dr. Boilson works. So it loses heat faster.
“One must be open to continuous learning and growth,” she says, and try to maintain a steady “resilience in facing issues.”
Scientists say that if today’s experiments are modest in scale, creating energy for just a few seconds at a time, they are steppingstones toward the goal of sustained energy production.
“Every day brings new challenges,” says Akko Maas, a division head at ITER who like Dr. Boilson was interviewed by email. “This requires both discipline and resilience from us all.”
Collaborative, cooperative, global
Like fusion, the construction underway at ITER is an effort that brings things together, rather than pushing them apart. It’s a highly structured international blend of labor and resources.
“Working at ITER, knowing that your day job helps to address one of the biggest challenges our world is facing – climate change – is in itself an inspiration, and a good reason to get up in the morning motivated to give your best to this project,” Dr. Boilson says.
Climate change is a global issue, and therefore “needs a global response,” she adds.
The United States is working alongside six other members: China, India, Japan, Korea, Russia, and the European Union. (The war in Ukraine’s impact on ITER is at this point unclear, but the project was built in the spirit of international collaboration, so the scientific community is hoping for peace.)
“The international aspect ... is one of the major challenges,” Dr. Maas says. “At the same time it provides opportunities through the cooperation. ... We are trying all together to make our contribution for a better world.”
Wrangling plasma, creating energy
The project is essentially cobbled together, as the members must work collaboratively. Components are constructed across the globe and shipped to France. The machine itself is built and assembled on-site, and integrating these components can take time and perseverance.
Construction is currently 75% complete toward “first plasma,” which is when experiments can begin. That milestone is slated for 2025.
“ITER is a very complex machine with more than a million components,” Dr. Maas says. “To make sure that everything will fit together requires a lot of discipline.”
He adds: “As I always say to my children, I am proud to work on something that might (and I believe it will) provide a solution to the energy problems that we have today.”
A fusion experiment is powered by the same nuclear reaction that fuels the sun. ITER runs on two isotopes of hydrogen: deuterium and tritium. A doughnut-shaped structure, known as a tokamak machine, turns gaseous hydrogen into a superhot, charged plasma that brings hydrogen atoms together to form a heavier element (helium), releasing energy (neutrons) using strategically placed magnetic coils. It’s essentially an artificial star: It runs on continuous fusion reactions fueled by plasma, a super high-energy, charged gas.
“The magnets basically keep this superhot plasma away from the walls of the vessel and therefore don’t damage it,” Dr. Boilson says. “It’s like creating a suspended sun inside a cage.”
Heat is an essential ingredient. It’s part of the recipe. So scientists find themselves acting like Goldilocks: The temperature of the plasma must be “just right” – not too hot, not too cold. That “just right” plasma temperature at ITER will reach 150 million degrees Celsius – a very, very hot “porridge.”
Discipline, faith, hope
Sometimes, the discipline of doing science can feel like hope: It’s all about working toward something, waiting for it to be revealed. There’s hope in that. There may even be faith in that.
This is not rolling a rock up a hill for eternity. The goal at ITER is to demonstrate that the machine can make more energy than the energy it takes to keep it running. Although setbacks have accompanied the progress, and years of persistence lie ahead, these researchers see the goal as achievable.
“As a scientist, it is easy to have ‘faith’ when the science is understood,” Dr. Boilson says. “The understanding of the physics of fusion is already there,” she adds. “The combination of different devices and collaborative scientific endeavors brings experience, which allows us to have confidence in the machine we are building, and the physics behind it.”
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Astronomers have discovered the farthest star yet, a super-hot, super-bright giant that formed nearly 13 billion years ago at the dawn of the cosmos.
But this luminous blue star is long gone, so massive that it almost certainly exploded into bits just a few million years after emerging. Its swift demise makes it all the more incredible that an international team spotted it with observations by the Hubble Space Telescope. It takes eons for light emitted from distant stars to reach us.
“We’re seeing the star as it was about 12.8 billion years ago, which puts it about 900 million years after the Big Bang,” said astronomer Brian Welch, a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins University and lead author of the study appearing in Wednesday’s journal Nature.
“We definitely just got lucky.”
Mr. Welch nicknamed it Earendel, an Old English name which means morning star or rising light – “a fitting name for a star that we have observed in a time often referred to as `Cosmic Dawn.′ ”
The previous record-holder, Icarus, also a blue supergiant star spotted by Hubble, formed 9.4 billion years ago. That’s more than 4 billion years after the Big Bang.
In both instances, astronomers used a technique known as gravitational lensing to magnify the minuscule starlight. Gravity from clusters of galaxies closer to us – in the foreground – serve as a lens to magnify smaller objects in the background. If not for that, Icarus and Earendel would not have been discernible given their vast distances.
While Hubble has spied galaxies as far away as 300 million to 400 million years of the universe-forming Big Bang, their individual stars are impossible to pick out.
“Usually they’re all smooshed together. ... But here, nature has given us this one star – highly, highly magnified, magnified by factors of thousands – so that we can study it,” said NASA astrophysicist Jane Rigby, who took part in the study. “It’s such a gift really from the universe.”
Vinicius Placco of the National Science Foundation’s NOIRlab in Tucson, Arizona, described the findings as “amazing work.” He was not involved in the study.
Dr. Placco said based on the Hubble data, Earendel may well have been among the first generation of stars born after the Big Bang. Future observations by the newly launched James Webb Space Telescope should provide more details, he said, and “provide us with another piece of this cosmic puzzle that is the evolution of our universe.”
Current data indicate Earendel was more than 50 times the size of our sun and an estimated 1 million times brighter, outsizing Icarus. Earendel’s small, yet-to-mature home galaxy looked nothing like the pretty spiral galaxies photographed elsewhere by Hubble, according to Mr. Welch, but rather “kind of an awkward-looking, clumpy object.” Unlike Earendel, he said, this galaxy probably has survived, although in a different form after merging with other galaxies.
“It's like a little snapshot in amber of the past,” Dr. Rigby said.
Earendel may have been the prominent star in a two-star, or binary, system, or even a triple- or quadruple-star system, Mr. Welch said. There’s a slight chance it could be a black hole, although the observations gathered in 2016 and 2019 suggest otherwise, he noted.
Regardless of its company, the star lasted barely a few million years before exploding as a supernova that went unobserved as most do, Mr. Welch said. The most distant supernova seen by astronomers to date goes back 12 billion years.
The Webb telescope – 100 times more powerful than Hubble – should help clarify how massive and hot the star really is, and reveal more about its parent galaxy.
By studying stars, Dr. Rigby said: “We are literally understanding where we came from because we’re made up of some of that stardust.”
This story was reported by The Associated Press. The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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Richard Linklater is a nostalgist in the best sense, and never more so than in his terrific new film, “Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood.” As a writer-director, he draws on his memories of the past in order to enhance his apprehension of the present. Best of all, he does so without the usual sentimentalizing that often accompanies semi-autobiographical coming-of-age yarns.
Like Linklater’s earlier “A Scanner Darkly” and, especially, “Waking Life,” “Apollo 10½” is a first-rate example of rotoscope animation, in which live-action footage is digitally painted over to create a fanciful, hyper-realistic effect. The technique perfectly suits Linklater’s subject. He wants to show what it was like for a NASA-obsessed 10-year-old suburban Houston boy to grow up in the dawn of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon launch.
The film’s narrative is bifurcated. In the beginning, we appear to be watching a tall tale featuring the young Stan (voiced by Milo Coy), who claims he was chosen by NASA for a top secret pre-Apollo 11 moon mission because he fit into the too-small capsule the engineers mistakenly designed for the adult astronauts. After a bunch of backstory involving his fifth grade antics and his large, unruly family – he’s the youngest of six kids – his rambling account abruptly halts soon after he blasts off.
Why We Wrote This
Besides offering an entertaining trip back to 1969 – the year of the first moon landing – the animated film “Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood” prompts viewers to ponder how memories form and shape us.
For much of the rest of the film, except for occasional cutaways to young Stan’s imaginings, the adult Stan (voiced by Jack Black) narrates what really happened. These scenes are fanciful in their own way: They point up how seemingly mundane events, filtered through the haze of time, can appear equally magical.
What gives the movie its considerable homegrown charm is Linklater’s affection for this late ’60s era and how it formed Stan. Although Linklater has said the film doesn’t duplicate his own Houston childhood – his father, for example, unlike Stan’s, didn’t work for NASA – what comes through seems highly personal anyway. The specificity of detail and incident in this film is lovingly rendered. The soundtrack is a melange of ‘60s pop tunes, and Linklater employs them not simply as an oldies soundtrack but also to convey how Stan and his siblings experienced them as the soundtrack to their lives.
Because of Linklater’s fond presentation, everything concerning Stan is resonant: The cheesy sci-fi films and shows like “Dark Shadows” that he watches on the family’s black-and-white, rabbit-eared television set; the overchlorinated public swimming pools; the meals of tuna casserole with potato chips; the trips with his grandmother to see “The Sound of Music”; the way he hated watching the Disney TV show on Sunday nights because it always meant he had to go to school the next day. He describes the “special comfort of falling asleep in the car” after a family outing.
Stan’s thrill ride at the AstroWorld amusement park, the morning before that evening’s Apollo 11 moon landing, represents his own flight into the unknown. (Elsewhere in the film, in a fantasy cutaway, he imagines himself in his Apollo capsule reading Mad Magazine.) When it actually comes time to watch Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon, an exhausted Stan has already fallen asleep. His mother carries him off to bed with words that could easily serve as the film’s summary: “He’ll think he saw it all. You know how memory works.”
Linklater certainly does. That’s why, even though he doesn’t downplay the Vietnam War that periodically breaks into the TV news, he recognizes that, for Stan, that conflict is background noise. “Apollo 10½” is a portrait of innocence untainted by any agenda other than the need to convey as honestly as possible what it felt like to be that particular boy at that particular moment in history. It’s a movie about how we conjure and commemorate our pasts.
Peter Rainer is the Monitor’s film critic. “Apollo 10½” is rated PG-13 for some suggestive material, injury images, and smoking. It is available on Netflix starting April 1.
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For union organizers at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, the second time could be a charm – or not.
After a crushing defeat last year, when a majority of workers voted against forming a union, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) is hoping for a different outcome in a do-over election. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on Monday began counting mail-in ballots that were sent to 6,100 workers in early February. Results could come as early as Thursday.
If the vote goes in favor of the union, it would be Amazon’s first one ever in the United States.
Like last time, the RWDSU is driving the union campaign in Bessemer. Vaccines have made it easier for organizers to do face-to-face meetings during the pandemic as opposed to the texts, emails, and phone calls they relied on the first time around.
“It’s been easier to spread the message this time, and we’ve had more support inside the building,” said Dale Wyatt, an Amazon worker at the Bessemer facility who’s assisting in the union push. “For example, more people are wearing T-shirts and pins and apparel, and more people are willing to come up and talk to us this time.”
Amazon has had a chance to regroup as well after the NLRB determined that the company unfairly influenced last year’s election. The country’s second-largest private employer continues to hammer the message that it invests in both pay and benefits for its workers.
Regular full-time employees in Bessemer earn at least $15.80 an hour, higher than the estimated $14.55 per hour on average in the city based on an analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau. They also get health care as well as a 401(k) with company match.
Amazon has also made some changes too but still kept a controversial U.S. Postal Service mailbox that was key in the NLRB’s decision to invalidate last year’s vote.
Labor activists say the company is still relying on consultants and managers to hold mandatory staff meetings to talk about why unions are a bad idea. Such meetings stopped right before the ballots were sent, in accordance with labor laws.
An Amazon spokesperson said the meetings give employees the opportunity to ask questions and learn what a union “could mean for them and their day-to-day life working at Amazon.”
Prior to the Bessemer union drive, Amazon hadn’t faced a major union election in the U.S. since 2014 when the majority of the 30 workers at a warehouse in Delaware voted against organizing. In many European countries like France, Italy, Spain, and Germany, where union membership is higher and there are fewer obstacles for labor groups, Amazon workers have long been unionized.
Amazon also faces two union elections in the more labor-friendly New York City, though they’re being spearheaded by a nascent independent labor group.
Amazon’s sprawling fulfillment center in Bessemer opened in 2020 just off an interstate exit where 18-wheelers painted with the Amazon logo come and go past small manufacturers, transportation companies, and the city’s high school.
Bessemer itself is located about 20 miles southwest of Birmingham. The once-vibrant manufacturing town of 26,000 people fell on hard times after the area’s steel industry began slipping in the late 1900s. Today the city is more than 70% Black, with about a quarter of its residents living in poverty.
Workers at the warehouse reflect Bessemer’s racial demographic – roughly 85% of them are Black, according to RWDSU. They drive to their jobs from as far away as metro Montgomery, nearly 100 miles to the south.
RWDSU has been working with community organizations who have helped to frame the union push in Alabama in the context of the Civil Rights movement, focusing on the dignity and treatment of Amazon workers and linking their rights with human rights.
“The community support has been essential, and it’s always been a part of the civil rights struggles in the South and other struggles in the South,” said Marc Bayard, the director of the Institute for Policy Studies’ Black Worker Initiative.
Erica Iheme, deputy director of Jobs to Move America, said her organization honed its message from last year, going beyond pay. It visited barber shops, beauty shops, and other places where Black residents frequented and distributed 6,000 flyers.
“For this election, what we have to get people to understand is it goes beyond bread and butter issues,” Ms. Iheme said. “Sometimes, your body has physical limitations. Sometimes you are tired. Sometimes you have children and you need to step away without losing your job. It’s about humanity of our community.”
While unions are historically a tough sell in the South, Dale Wyatt comes from a labor family. He began working at Amazon in August, taking items off incoming trucks and placing them into pods before they shipped to customers.
“We need better working conditions, better hours, better pay,” Mr. Wyatt said. “We need longer breaks and more attention from management and a better HR system.”
RWDSU’s first union campaign came in a year of widespread labor unrest at many corporations that has only reinvigorated the group’s cause. Workers at more than 140 Starbucks locations around the country, for instance, have requested union elections and several of them have already been successful.
The pandemic spotlighted the plight of hourly workers who felt employers didn’t do enough to protect them from the virus. But labor shortages have only given workers more power to push for higher wages and better working conditions.
Still, organizers are up against strong federal labor laws that favor corporations. Alabama itself is a right-to-work state, which means that companies and unions are prohibited from signing contracts that require workers to pay dues to the union that represents them.
Labor activists also battle high turnover at the Bessemer facility. RWDSU estimates that roughly half of the 6,100 workers eligible to vote are new, making it difficult to organize.
“It’s an uphill fight,” said Stuart Appelbaum, president of the RWDSU. “No matter what happens, we are not walking away. The first campaign initiated a global debate on the way Amazon operates. It has inspired workers all over the country and all over the world to stand up to their employers.”
This story was reported by The Associated Press. Anna D’Innocenzio and Haleluya Hadero reported from New York and Jay Reeves reported from Bessemer, Alabama.
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Republican governors in Oklahoma and Arizona both signed bills into law on Wednesday that prevent transgender girls and women from competing on female sports teams, joining more than a dozen other states with similar laws.
Flanked by more than two dozen young female athletes, including his 14-year-old daughter Piper, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed the measure, dubbed the “Save Women’s Sports Act.”
“This bill, the Save Women’s Sports Act, to us in Oklahoma is just common sense,” said Mr. Stitt, a first-term Republican who is running for reelection. “When it comes to sports and athletics, girls should compete against girls. Boys should compete against boys. And let’s be very clear: That’s all this bill says.”
Until two years ago, no state had passed a law regulating gender-designated youth sports. But the issue has become front and center in Republican-led statehouses since Idaho lawmakers passed the nation’s first sports participation law in 2020. That law is now blocked in court, along with another in West Virginia.
The Oklahoma bill, which took effect immediately with the governor’s signature, applies to female sports teams in both high school and college.
The new law was quickly panned by civil rights groups as unnecessarily targeting a group of people who already are marginalized.
“Transgender people belong everywhere, but with the swipe of a pen and a public display, Governor Stitt has sent a clear message to Oklahoma’s vulnerable transgender youth that they are not welcome or accepted in our state,” Tamya Cox-Toure, the executive director of the Oklahoma chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. “Ultimately, SB2 violates the United States Constitution and federal civil rights law, puts Oklahoma at risk of losing federal funding, and harms transgender youth, all to solve a problem that does not exist.”
Oklahoma’s governing body for high school sports, the Oklahoma Secondary Schools Activity Association, has had a policy in place since 2015 addressing transgender athletes’ participation in sports, but OSSAA spokesman Van Shea Iven said no school has ever requested enforcement of the policy for a male student transitioning to female.
There are also few transgender athletes in Arizona schools. Since 2017, about 16 trans athletes have received waivers to play on teams that align with their gender identities out of about 170,000 high school athletes in the state, according to the Arizona Interscholastic Association.
Outside the room where Mr. Stitt signed the bill, 26-year-old Cara Kleber, who is transgender, held a sign that read: “How does it feel bullying kids needing support?”
“They’re not going to keep trans kids from playing sports, having fun, or living their lives,” Mx. Kleber said. “What they are going to do with this bill is tell them they’re not invited in spaces and amongst everyone else, that they’re not equal, that they’re not loved, that they’re not cared for.”
In Oklahoma, several supporters of the measure said they were convinced to vote for it after University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, a trans woman, won a title earlier this month at the national NCAA Women’s Division I championship.
Some opponents had raised concerns about the NCAA pulling sports tournaments from Oklahoma, including the Women’s College World Series held each year in Oklahoma City, but Mr. Stitt said he wasn’t concerned.
“We’re not worried about it, because we know Oklahomans are with us and the majority of Americans are with us as well,” he said.
This story was reported by The Associated Press. AP writers Bob Christie and Jonathan J. Cooper in Phoenix contributed to this report.
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Maine Sen. Susan Collins said Wednesday she will vote to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, giving Democrats at least one Republican vote and all but ensuring that Judge Jackson will become the first Black woman on the Supreme Court.
Senator Collins met with Judge Jackson a second time this week after four days of hearings last week and said Wednesday that “she possesses the experience, qualifications, and integrity to serve as an associate justice on the Supreme Court.”
“I will, therefore, vote to confirm her to this position,” Senator Collins said.
Senator Collins’ support gives Democrats at least a one-vote cushion in the 50-50 Senate and likely saves them from having to use Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote to confirm President Joe Biden’s pick. Senate Democratic leaders are pushing toward a Senate Judiciary Committee vote on the nomination Monday and a final Senate vote to confirm Judge Jackson late next week.
President Biden called Senator Collins on Wednesday to thank her after her announcement, according to the senator’s office. The president had called her at least three times before the hearings, part of a larger push to win a bipartisan vote for his historic pick.
Judge Jackson, who would replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, would be the third Black justice, after Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas, and the sixth woman. She would also be the first former public defender on the court.
It is expected that all 50 Democrats will support her, though one notable moderate Democrat, Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, hasn’t yet said how she will vote.
Senator Collins was the most likely Republican to support Judge Jackson, and she has a history of voting for Supreme Court nominees picked by presidents of both parties, as well as other judicial nominations.
The only Supreme Court nominee she’s voted against since her election in the mid-1990s is Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who was nominated by then-President Donald Trump after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the weeks before Mr. Trump’s election defeat to Mr. Biden in 2020. Senator Collins, who was up for reelection that year, said she voted against Justice Barrett because of the accelerated six-week timeline. “It’s not a comment on her,” Senator Collins said of Justice Barrett at the time.
In her statement supporting Judge Jackson, the Maine senator said she doesn’t expect that she will always agree with Judge Jackson’s decisions.
“That alone, however, is not disqualifying,” Senator Collins said. “Indeed, that statement applies to all six justices, nominated by both Republican and Democratic presidents, whom I have voted to confirm.”
Senator Collins said she believes the process is “broken” as it has become increasingly divided along party lines. When Senator Collins first came to the Senate, Supreme Court confirmations were much more bipartisan. Justice Breyer, who will step down this summer, was confirmed on an 87-9 vote in 1994.
“In my view, the role the Constitution clearly assigns to the Senate is to examine the experience, qualifications, and integrity of the nominee,” Senator Collins said. “It is not to assess whether a nominee reflects the ideology of an individual senator or would rule exactly as an individual senator would want.”
In Judge Jackson’s hearings, several Republican senators interrogated her on sentencing decisions in her nine years as a federal judge and in child pornography cases in particular. The senators, several of whom are eyeing a run for president, asked the same questions repeatedly in an effort to paint her as too lenient on sex criminals.
Judge Jackson told the committee that “nothing could be further from the truth” and explained her sentencing decisions in detail. She said some of the cases have given her nightmares and were “among the worst that I have seen.”
Senator Collins told reporters after her announcement that they discussed many of the cases that were brought up at the hearings in an hourlong meeting on Tuesday and “I had no doubt that she applies a very careful approach to the facts of the case when she is judging.”
It is unclear if any other GOP senators will vote for Judge Jackson. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell set the tone for the party last week when he said he “cannot and will not” support her, citing the GOP concerns raised in the hearing about her sentencing record and her support from liberal advocacy groups.
Judge Jackson is still making the rounds in the Senate ahead of next week’s votes, doing customary meetings with Democratic and Republican senators. On Tuesday she met with Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, who said afterward that he was undecided about supporting her.
Senator Romney said he had an “excellent meeting” and found Judge Jackson to be intelligent, capable, and charming. He said he probably won’t decide whether to vote for her until the day of the vote.
Senator Romney voted against Judge Jackson last year, when she was confirmed by the Senate as a federal appeals court judge. Senator Collins, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham were the only three Republicans to support her at the time.
Senator Murkowski and Senator Graham have each indicated they might not vote for her a second time. Senator Murkowski said in a statement before the hearings that “I’ve been clear that previously voting to confirm an individual to a lower court does not signal how I will vote for a Supreme Court justice.”
Senator Graham was one of several Republicans on the Judiciary panel who pressed Judge Jackson on the child pornography cases, and he has been vocal in his frustrations that President Biden chose Judge Jackson over his preferred candidate, a federal judge from South Carolina.
He also aired past grievances in the hearing, asking Judge Jackson about her religion and how often she goes to church, in heated comments that he said were fair game after unfair criticism of Justice Barrett’s Catholicism.
Also Wednesday, Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said he will not support Judge Jackson, further indication that the Judiciary panel will likely deadlock 11-11 at its Monday vote on whether to recommend her confirmation to the full Senate.
A deadlocked vote means Democrats will have to spend additional hours on the Senate floor next week to do a “discharge” from committee.
Still, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said this week that the Senate is “on track” to confirm her by the end of next week and before a two-week Spring recess.
This story was reported by The Associated Press. AP writers Alan Fram, Lisa Mascaro, and Darlene Superville and video journalist Rick Gentilo in Washington and David Sharp in Portland, Maine, contributed to this report.
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If Democrats manage to hang on to their narrow majority in the U.S. House of Representatives after this fall’s midterm elections, it will be because of places like Glens Falls, New York.
For years it has been a small spot of blue in a mostly red Adirondack district. But it may become part of a Democratic-tilting district under a new map passed last month by the New York legislature – a map that could take the state’s eight Republican House members down to as few as four.
Why We Wrote This
Political map-drawing is a powerful tool. While Democrats have decried Republican gerrymandering in recent years, those in some blue states say it’s unilateral disarmament if they don’t respond in kind.
Critics are calling the New York congressional map a blatant gerrymander. On Thursday evening, a Republican state court judge in Western New York agreed. The judge tossed the map, writing that it showed clear political bias.
But New York isn’t the only blue state with warped lines. After years of decrying partisan gerrymandering, Democrats in states from Illinois to Oregon have passed congressional maps that attempt to shore up their own incumbents and eliminate GOP seats.
Republicans have produced equally gerrymandered maps elsewhere. Add the work of independent commissions or courts, and the result is a national playing field that, on paper at least, increasingly looks something like a draw. In practice, polls currently suggest Republicans have a strong advantage heading into this fall’s midterm elections.
If Democrats manage to hang on to their narrow majority in the U.S. House of Representatives after this fall’s midterm elections, it will be because of places like Glens Falls, New York.
Dubbed “hometown, U.S.A.” by Look magazine in 1944, Glens Falls has for years been a small spot of blue in a mostly red Adirondack district. But under a new map passed last month by New York Democrats, it will become part of a newly redrawn Democratic-tilting district based in Albany, which now snakes an arm up Interstate 87 to grab the quaint town of 14,000.
Critics are calling the New York congressional map, which has been signed into law by the governor, one of the most blatant gerrymanders in the country. It could potentially take the state’s eight Republican House members down to as few as four.
Why We Wrote This
Political map-drawing is a powerful tool. While Democrats have decried Republican gerrymandering in recent years, those in some blue states say it’s unilateral disarmament if they don’t respond in kind.
On Thursday evening, a Republican state court judge in Western New York agreed. The judge tossed the map, writing that it showed clear political bias, adding: “in a democracy it is rare if ever that one party has all the right answers.”
But experts say the Democrats’ New York map may well be preserved on appeal, at least for the current cycle. And New York isn’t the only blue state with warped lines. After years of decrying partisan gerrymandering and pushing for legislation to outlaw the practice, Democrats in states from Illinois to Maryland to Oregon have passed congressional maps that attempt to shore up their own incumbents and eliminate GOP seats. Having had little say in the last redistricting cycle a decade ago, thanks to the shellacking it took in the 2010 elections, the party has taken advantage of more recent electoral gains to go on offense, aggressively redrawing district lines in certain states in its own favor.
Republicans have produced equally gerrymandered maps elsewhere, in states from Texas to Florida. At the same time, a growing number of states have turned to independent commissions or courts to produce their maps. The result is a national playing field that, on paper at least, increasingly looks something like a draw. Although a few states’ maps are still being debated and court challenges are ongoing, the overall House map now appears almost evenly balanced between Democrat- and Republican-leaning districts for the first time in decades.
Some analysts say Democrats had little choice but to be aggressive where they could – unless they wanted to unilaterally disarm, since Republicans have steadfastly opposed redistricting reform proposals at the federal level.
“Do [Democrats] impose redistricting rules on themselves? Or do they try to do what Republicans are doing in some states?” asks Seth Masket, a University of Denver political scientist.
Still, Republicans are raising cries of hypocrisy.
“Anytime you accuse your opponents of doing something, and then turn around and do the exact same thing, you’re a hypocrite,” says John Feehery, a Republican strategist based in Washington.
The battle for seats
At the outset of this year’s reapportionment, Republicans had appeared poised to gain as many as 10 seats nationwide from the process. But several GOP maps, such as in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, have been overthrown by courts.
Democratic maps are also facing legal challenges – which could potentially restore Republicans’ edge. Days before New York’s map was tossed, Maryland’s map was rejected by a state court as well. Only one seat likely hangs in the balance for Democrats in Maryland; New York is a far bigger prize. But not everyone is convinced the Empire State’s map is doomed.
Courts in New York have historically been loath to intervene in political fights – and all the justices on the state’s highest court were appointed by Democratic governors, noted Shawn Donahue, a University of Buffalo redistricting expert, before the New York ruling came out. He’s skeptical Republicans can win the appeals that are sure to follow the ruling.
Many Democrats see this year’s efforts as a necessary corrective, after the last round of redistricting gave Republicans a significant structural edge. In 2012, Republican gerrymanders helped the GOP maintain control of the House by a 33-seat margin, despite receiving 1.4 million fewer votes for the House overall.
Of course, rejiggering lines can only accomplish so much. Most polls indicate Republicans will have a strong advantage heading into this fall’s midterm elections, given concerns about inflation and President Joe Biden’s weak poll numbers, which could tip swing districts as well as weaker Democratic ones to the GOP.
And some Democrats reject the idea that their party is relying on gerrymandering to try to offset the political head winds.
“Democrats are drawing maps that reflect the census and the population growth,” says John Bisognano, executive director of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which was formed after the last round of redistricting by former Attorney General Eric Holder to guide the Democrats’ efforts nationwide. In a statement to the Monitor, Mr. Bisognano points to states that lost congressional seats because of population declines in rural, Republican areas. New maps ought to reflect that shift, he says.
Others seem more conflicted, however. When a Nashville Scene reporter asked retiring Tennessee Rep. Jim Cooper, a moderate Democrat, about the New York map, he responded, “Are you asking me to be proud of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’?”
Of course, many feel the GOP is taking eyes and teeth of its own – including eliminating Mr. Cooper’s Democratic Nashville district, splitting it up between three rural Republican ones.
New York’s mapmaking was originally supposed to be handled by a bipartisan commission, approved by voters in 2014. But as in several other states, the commission deadlocked, sending the process to the state Legislature, where Democrats have gained a supermajority in recent years.
The resulting map cuts the number of congressional districts where former President Donald Trump would have won from seven out of 27 to four out of 26 – in a state where 37% of voters overall pulled the lever for the former president. That has raised eyebrows even outside the ranks of Republicans. The Princeton Gerrymandering Project, a nonpartisan research center, gave the New York map an F grade.
“It’s an outrageous, blatant, partisan gerrymander that is clearly contrary to our state constitution,” says former GOP Rep. John Faso, who is leading a lawsuit against the map in state court. An amendment passed by New York voters in 2014 prohibits districts drawn “to discourage competition” or to favor “particular candidates or political parties.” The state judge relied, in part, on that amendment in striking down the map on Thursday.
A coffee shop debate
Critics argue the New York map also fails a “compactness” test, prioritizing partisanship over geography – and ignoring the ways in which local concerns often unite communities more than national politics.
Sitting in SPoT Coffee, next to the old First National Bank building in Glens Falls, Michael Borgos – chairman of the Republican Party committee in Glens Falls – argues that grouping his small town with Albany will just make it “a little fish in a big pond.”
Current GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik’s district office is just a short walk away, he notes. To local townsfolk – whether they love or loathe her – she’s just “Elise.” A Democrat representing a safe, Albany-based district, Mr. Borgos predicts, won’t give Glens Falls the same kind of attention.
Moreover, the town has been historically and culturally tied to parts north, as the gateway to the Adirondacks, he says. “So to separate us, from a political standpoint, doesn’t make any sense.”
“I disagree,” Lynne Boecher cuts in from across the table. The chair of the Warren County Democratic Party, Ms. Boecher contends Glens Falls faces many of the same challenges that the state capital does, like poverty and housing affordability. The town, which voted for Mr. Biden by 23 points in 2020, has far more in common politically with Albany than with the heavily Republican Adirondacks, she says.
Ms. Boecher and Mr. Borgos, often at odds on issues, know each other well. Mr. Borgos is a high school friend of Ms. Boecher’s son.
While they disagree about the new map, there’s one thing they do agree on – they’d likely be able to hash out better lines than the powers that be in Albany.
“Michael and I could probably sit down and draw the 21st and the 20th [districts],” Ms. Boecher quips.
“There you go,” Mr. Borgos chimes in. “Call Albany, tell them we’ll figure it out.”
Editor’s Note: This story was updated to reflect the ruling by a New York state court judge on Thursday evening throwing out the state’s new map.
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The war in Ukraine, more than any conflict before, is on the record. With 70% of the country online, anyone connected can watch the war through civilian smartphones. Anyone, including war crime investigators.
A coalition of international investigators has come to document alleged war crimes in Ukraine. And the near-ubiquitous open-source information available online, from satellite images of cluster-bomb hits to TikTok videos of Russian troop buildups, may bring a rarity for these investigations: prosecution of specific perpetrators.
Why We Wrote This
War crimes investigators – mobilized on the ground in Ukraine and at desks and laboratories around the world to gather and process evidence – inspire hope for justice, and possibly deterrence of further crimes as the war drags on.
“It’s impossible today to conduct any small-scale, let alone large-scale, military operation or to violate human rights in any way of sufficient size ... without outing yourself and who you are,” says Scott Edwards, senior adviser for crisis response at Amnesty International.
Belkis Wille, a Human Rights Watch investigator in Lviv, met a family who’d watched the bombardment of Kharkiv. The youngest, barely 2 years old, was so devastated he no longer wanted to see, and for 24 hours since the family fled had barely opened his eyes.
Ms. Wille appreciates the swift international willingness to “see” this war: “That’s given me a lot of hopefulness in the work that we were able to do, and that we’re going to continue to be doing.”
Belkis Wille met a boy who wouldn’t open his eyes at a shelter in Lviv, Ukraine. There, she was recording potential war crimes for Human Rights Watch and had started interviewing the boy’s mother, a beauty salon owner whose face wore new lines of stress and exhaustion.
The day before, the boy, his mother, and his grandmother had fled Kharkiv amid shelling. His father and grandfather stayed in case they needed to fight. Leaving on the train, all three generations of this family watched their home city being bombarded, as their own apartment had been. The youngest, barely 2 years old, had decided he no longer wanted to see.
“Look at my son,” his mother told Ms. Wille. “He hasn’t opened his eyes since we left Kharkiv.”
Why We Wrote This
War crimes investigators – mobilized on the ground in Ukraine and at desks and laboratories around the world to gather and process evidence – inspire hope for justice, and possibly deterrence of further crimes as the war drags on.
Ms. Wille listened and asked for more details, talking next to 20 or so other Ukrainians who had just reached Lviv and needed a place to rest. When they finished, she had three more pages in her notebook to archive on her laptop that night at the long kitchen table in her apartment, where she and her team worked into the late hours.
Ms. Wille, speaking to the Monitor by phone, is a senior conflict researcher for Human Rights Watch. Those pages were just three out of the hundreds her team – conducting more than 150 interviews over three weeks – compiled in Ukraine in March. From those interviews, they wrote reports on human rights abuses and war crimes that Ms. Wille hopes will help hold the Russian military accountable.
More than any conflict before, the war in Ukraine is on the record. Around 70% of the country has internet access, which means almost anyone with a smartphone can watch. And prosecutors are.
In the past five weeks nongovernmental organizations, governments, intelligence units, and international investigators have all started documenting alleged war crimes in Ukraine. Each group has a different mandate, and their work isn’t all coordinated. But the number of people investigating, combined with near-limitless open-source information – from videos of Russian strikes to satellite images of troop movements – makes it more likely that specific charges are filed, a rarity in these investigations.
“It’s impossible today to conduct any small-scale, let alone large-scale, military operation or to violate human rights ... without outing yourself and who you are,” says Scott Edwards, senior adviser for crisis response at Amnesty International.
A nationwide crime scene
Russia outed itself when it invaded Ukraine this February. Now, its soldiers, officers, and leaders have become suspects in a nationwide crime scene. Millions of civilians experiencing attacks are witnesses. Everything from missile containers to military communications is evidence.
The detectives are dozens of investigators rushing to preserve that evidence while they still can.
“There’s a lot of work to be done, and it will not be easy to do that work in circumstances where there’s shooting and shelling all over the place,” says Chile Eboe-Osuji, president of the International Criminal Court from 2018 to 2021.
That work starts with documenting the “crime base,” or the actual offense. Through witness testimony and open-source information available online, investigators build a detailed record of the war crime – or, more often in an actual case, a series of crimes.
In effect, Ms. Wille and her fellow investigators were in Lviv to do just that. Each day, she woke up around 7 a.m. and visited the train station to find witnesses fleeing Kharkiv who could confirm reports of civilian shelling and cluster-bomb attacks. Inside the station was too chaotic – too many people, moving too quickly, making too much noise. So she stood near the street out front, facing the station's columns, statues, and giant gray dome, and watched thousands of Ukrainians with pets, bags, and other personal possessions stream in and out.
She approached people who’d stopped for a break and, asking through an interpreter if they could speak and where they were from, explained the investigation. Each witness was different. Some had spent the previous week sheltering in a basement; others had taken videos of the attacks or even watched. Some had started processing the destruction; others were still in shock.
“These interviews are very difficult because you’re talking to people who are quite traumatized and obviously you don’t want to do harm when doing the interviews,” says Ms. Wille. “But getting those crucial details is really important.”
She asked what the attacks sounded like, distinguishing the rumble of cluster munitions from the singular boom of other shells. Often, she pulled up a map on her phone and confirmed precise locations.
Then she asked sources for photos and videos – shared over cables, AirDrop, or email to maintain the metadata, or digital fingerprint – which would help verify their testimony before the team used it in a report. All this she filed into a digital archive each night, so Human Rights Watch analysts could review and supplement her work.
Mr. Edwards leads a similar team of analysts at Amnesty. On Feb. 24, soon after the war began, Amnesty researchers spoke with local sources to document a hospital strike in the southeastern town of Vuhledar. They sent their notes, along with photos and videos, to Amnesty’s weapons investigator, who identified the kind of missile used and noted that it was too inaccurate a weapon to responsibly fire near civilians.
These are the components of a crime base. Once investigators establish one, they can start building their case.
A clue as tiny as a rifle serial number
That’s the easy part, says Bill Wiley, executive director of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, who’s investigated war crimes for decades in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. In all, he says, establishing a crime base should take up around 10% of an investigation. The other 90% is connecting the crime base to specific perpetrators through “linkage evidence.”
“The challenge from an investigation’s perspective is it’s not enough to just show that the crimes have happened,” says Rebecca Hamilton, a professor at American University’s Washington College of Law and a former lawyer for the International Criminal Court. “You need to figure out who can you hold criminally responsible.”
More than 10 years ago, on one of his first cases, Mr. Edwards received evidence of a clear war crime: a five-minute video of a mass execution during Nigeria’s fight against the terrorist group Boko Haram.
The killers wore Nigerian military fatigues, but Mr. Edwards knew the Nigerian leaders could claim they weren’t government soldiers. He needed, somehow, to confirm their identity. Watching the video carefully, he caught just a few frames in which a serial number on a soldier’s rifle became visible. Through Nigeria’s Ministry of Defense, he confirmed that the rifle hadn’t been reported stolen and belonged to a specific unit.
“If we hadn’t noticed just in the two or three seconds that the serial number presented itself, that information would have been lost forever,” he says.
The war in Ukraine won’t offer such smoking guns, says Dr. Wiley. Unlike prosecuting an individual incident, cases built around the way a war is being fought – called a “conduct of hostilities” case – require piecing together evidence like an amorphous puzzle.
The key is looking for the right information and the right sources, says Dr. Wiley.
“You have to take a cold, practical approach to this stuff, rooted in the requirements of the law,” he says. Witnesses may have powerful stories about an attack and its effects. But they can rarely help link it to specific perpetrators. In most cases, the law demands proof of knowledge or intent. If Russians bomb a theater, investigators need to show a specific leader ordered it, that it wasn’t near a military target, and that it didn’t house military assets. Without that, they would need to show a leader was aware such abuses were occurring but didn’t stop them.
In the past, evidence like that has almost only come from the enemy, making it difficult to collect and difficult to preserve, says Dr. Wiley. He suggests Ukrainian soldiers should fleece prisoners and casualties for “pocket debris,” like notes, cellphones, encryption keys, and laptops. They should also monitor Russian military cellphone and radio communication, which so far has often been unencrypted and easy to hack.
Connecting dots from bomb back to launch
The advent of open-source investigations helps solve the linkage evidence problem. Researchers like Eliot Higgins, founder of the open-source investigative group Bellingcat, can now compensate for distance from the conflict with the volume of information available online.
Early in March, Mr. Higgins played connect-the-dots with remnants of cluster munitions dropped on Kharkiv.
These weapons hit the ground in three stages, and each piece points back toward the other. From abroad on a computer, Mr. Higgins marked the three points, drew a straight line through them, and repeated the process with nearby impacts. Altogether, he could trace the attacks to a single artillery site – geolocated on a map Bellingcat helped develop – with the right number of launchers, in the right range, pointing in the right direction.
“If we can complete that kind of chain of responsibility, it means it’s a lot easier for accountability processes to actually accuse specific units, governments, and commanders, which is often what’s missing,” he says.
Bellingcat started monitoring Russia’s military buildup this February through satellite images and later through TikTok videos of troop movements, tracking and indexing specific attacks. “We’ll dig for every single possible scrap of information that we can find,” says Mr. Higgins.
Those scraps may link all the way up Russian leadership, which is perhaps already accountable for not stopping existing attacks, says Dr. Eboe-Osuji, the former International Criminal Court president. “What everybody’s seeing on television ... I’m sure Mr. [Vladimir] Putin is seeing,” he says. “That is, Russian fire directed at apparently civilian facilities.”
Justice isn’t always enforceable
That doesn’t mean he will face consequences. Russia is already ignoring a “provisional measure” from the International Court of Justice to stop fighting. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin once quipped, “‘How many divisions has the Pope?’” says Stephen Rapp, the U.S. State Department’s ambassador-at-large for the Office of Global Criminal Justice.
In other words, justice isn’t always enforceable.
But Ambassador Rapp, who prosecuted former Liberian President Charles Taylor for war crimes in neighboring Sierra Leone, has seen it enforced. Former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milošević too would likely have been convicted for war crimes in Kosovo had he not died in custody.
Mr. Putin may not reach trial, but the war he began will be recorded.
After speaking for an hour with the family in Lviv, Ms. Wille could see they needed to stop. The son had started crying. His mother and grandmother looked drained. She thanked them for their time, asked if they could speak again if necessary, and left.
But the moment stuck with her. The boy was too young to understand what was happening or why he had to leave his father and home. He couldn’t understand an investigation, war crimes, or accountability. He could only feel the trauma, and show what it felt like – forcing his eyes shut in snow pants and a thick jacket on his mom’s lap.
Maybe, that feeling would help other people see.
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Two ways to read the story
In the second month of the “special military operation” in Ukraine, Russia’s social and political atmosphere – never very receptive to dissenting opinions – is rapidly chilling. For many Russians trying to feel their way through frightening political restrictions, the dangers remain the source of deep uncertainty.
The tone has been set by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who recently seemed to refer to Russians with a pro-Western point of view as “scum and traitors” that the Russian people “will simply spit ... out like an insect in their mouth.”
Why We Wrote This
The atmosphere inside Russia has turned cold to anyone critical of the country’s “special military operation” in Ukraine. But some, especially youth, are still standing up for their values.
Timur, a student in St. Petersburg, was briefly detained by police for alleged illegal protesting and let go. But he has been expelled from his university. The vice rector called Timur into his office and told him that “you are the kind of person who would stab us in the back and spit on the graves of our soldiers. ... You are not wanted here.”
“We are faced with new rules. We just don’t know where the boundaries are, or what it’s going to be like tomorrow,” says Nikita, a liberal political activist. “I am just not sure what I can say. Will I be punished or not?”
Anna Afanasyeva, a fifth-year nursing student at St. Petersburg’s Pediatric University, admits she was feeling vague anti-war emotions as she went about her business in the city center March 2. But she says she had no intention of participating in any protests.
Nevertheless, she suddenly found herself grabbed by police near the Gostiny Dvor metro station in downtown St. Petersburg, where no rally even seemed to be happening, and thrown into a police van along with several other people.
Editor’s note: This article was edited in order to conform with Russian legislation criminalizing references to Russia’s current action in Ukraine as anything other than a “special military operation.”
Why We Wrote This
The atmosphere inside Russia has turned cold to anyone critical of the country’s “special military operation” in Ukraine. But some, especially youth, are still standing up for their values.
She spent two nights in police detention before being taken to court. A sympathetic judge considered the charge of participating in an illegal assembly, noted that Ms. Afanasyeva had no previous record, and let her off with a light fine. That was just the beginning of her troubles.
“Without even waiting for the court decision, my university summarily expelled me,” she says. “There was no due process according to the rules for expelling a student. I was just told to leave. I am trying to solve this, hopefully without suing the university. If I go that way I can lose a year or more of studies. ... I am just so upset about all this. I’ve heard that there is a blanket order to expel all students who participate in anti-war activities, and I just fell victim to it.”
Welcome to Russia in the second month of the “special military operation” in Ukraine, where the social and political atmosphere – never very receptive to dissenting opinions – is rapidly chilling. Military conflict can have harsh effects on any society, proscribing criticism and tarring anti-war sentiments as treason. But for many Russians trying to find their feet and feel their way through frightening political restrictions not seen in the lifetimes of most, the dangers remain the source of deep uncertainty.
Timur, another St. Petersburg student, was briefly detained by police for alleged illegal protesting and let go. But he has been expelled from his university. The vice rector called Timur into his office and told him that “you are the kind of person who would stab us in the back and spit on the graves of our soldiers. ... You are not wanted here.” Timur has retained a lawyer to appeal the expulsion, and faces military conscription if he can’t get the decision reversed. “I really want to finish my studies,” he says.
According to the Latvia-based online news service Zerkalo, a dozen members of Russia’s National Guard from the southern region of Krasnodar refused to deploy to Ukraine in late February on the grounds that their duties were confined to Russian territory, and were immediately fired. They appealed to lawyers and sued for reinstatement.
One of the lawyers, Mikhail Banyash, says that of the original 12 guardsmen, most have quit and only 3 are still pressing the case.
“The pressure they have been subjected to testifies that their case is sound,” says Mr. Banyash. “But it’s a complicated case, and I can’t predict how it might turn out.”
“True patriots” vs. “scum and traitors”
The tone has been set by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who recently adopted rhetoric that hasn’t been heard in Russia for a very long time. Apparently referring to Russians with a pro-Western point of view as internal enemies, he said: “The collective West is trying to divide our society using, to its own advantage, combat losses and the socioeconomic consequences of the sanctions, and to provoke civil unrest in Russia and use its fifth column in an attempt to achieve this goal. ... But any nation, and even more so the Russian people, will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and will simply spit them out like an insect in their mouth, spit them onto the pavement.”
So far the police crackdown on people who allegedly express opposition to the ongoing military operation has been relatively mild by Russian standards. According to the protest-monitoring group OVD-Info, about 15,000 people have been detained by police since the operation began, the majority of them receiving administrative fines rather than prison sentences.
The main impact to date of the crisis has been the shock and emotional dislocation that has been disproportionately suffered by more youthful, educated, and professional Russians, with many thousands quitting their jobs or even leaving the country. Critical media voices, both independent and mainstream, have been effectively silenced, with Novaya Gazeta being the last independent outlet to close its doors.
Ironically, the same segment of society has also been affected most immediately and deeply by the intensifying Western-imposed sanctions regime, as a result of being cut off from family, property, work, and travel to the West.
Polls suggest popular support is actually consolidating behind Russian authorities as the conflict intensifies, though Lev Gudkov, director of the independent pollster Levada Center, says that under-30s tend to be far more skeptical of official claims than their elders.
“Russian youth are far more negative toward the military operation, those between 15 and 30,” who make up about 15% of the population, he says. “They are scared of the consequences of war, particularly young men who face the prospect of military service. ... Perhaps half of the youth are opposed to the operation, but many are also indifferent, who don’t want to notice events. But on the whole, there seems little appetite for public protest.”
“I don’t believe that I should hide”
For the moment, at least, many politically active young people seem to think that they can adapt to the situation and navigate around the increasingly draconian laws against “fake news” concerning the special military operation.
Nikita, a liberal political activist, publishes carefully calculated criticism on social media, but says he would rather his full name not appear in a U.S. newspaper “under these circumstances.” Still, he’s happy to discuss the dangerous ambiguities that regulate any sort of political speech in Russia today.
“We are faced with new rules. We just don’t know where the boundaries are, or what it’s going to be like tomorrow,” he says. “I am just not sure what I can say. Will I be punished or not? On the first day [of the operation] I posted a note on one of my social media pages that I believe in diplomacy, but not the diplomacy of the tank. It doesn’t seem to have been noticed, but who knows? ... I think we just have to wait, survive, until this operation ends. Then we will see what Russia has changed into, what is the new Russia? Then we’ll have a better idea about how to go forward.”
Egor Kotkin is a left-wing activist who has no problem with speaking plainly. He has long lived an openly gay lifestyle in Moscow, and says he finds Russians to be generally much more tolerant and open-minded than their leaders.
A promotional writer for IT companies, Mr. Kotkin says he never watches TV, has generally opposition-minded co-workers, and mainly encounters pro-Kremlin views through his partner’s family and his relationship with his mother. She is a big fan of Mr. Putin, he says.
“My mother has formed a relationship, through the media, with Putin and the regime. She sees them as part of her life; she trusts them on a personal level. I try not to touch that, because it would spoil my relations with my mom. I guess a lot of families are like that,” he says.
“I don’t believe that I should hide. But we seem to be living under something like martial law. So, anything can change.”
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A federal jury’s $14 million award to Denver protesters hit with pepper balls and a bag filled with lead during 2020 demonstrations over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis could resonate nationwide as courts weigh more than two dozen similar lawsuits.
The jury found police used excessive force against protesters, violating their constitutional rights, and ordered the city of Denver to pay 12 who sued.
Nationwide, there are at least 29 pending lawsuits challenging law enforcement use of force during the 2020 protests, according to a search of the University of Michigan’s Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse.
The verdict in Denver could give cities an incentive to settle similar cases rather than risk going to trial and losing, said Michael J. Steinberg, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and director of the Civil Rights Litigation Initiative. It could also prompt more protesters to sue over their treatment at the hands of police.
“There’s no doubt that the large jury verdict in Denver will influence the outcome of pending police misconduct cases brought by Black Lives Matter protesters across the country,” said Dr. Steinberg, whose law students have been working on a similar lawsuit brought by protesters in Detroit.
Lawyers for the claimants argued that police used indiscriminate force against the nonviolent protesters, including some who were filming the demonstrations, because officers did not like their message critical of law enforcement.
“To the protest of police violence they responded with brutality,” one of their attorneys, Timothy Macdonald, told jurors.
People who took part in the protests have already made similar allegations in lawsuits filed across the country.
In Washington, D.C., activists and civil liberties groups sued over the forcible removal of protesters before then-President Donald Trump walked to a church near the White House for a photo op. The claims against federal officials were dismissed last year but a judge allowed the case against local police to continue.
Several lawsuits alleging protesters were wrongfully arrested or that police used excessive force have been filed against New York City and its police department, including one brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James that claims police used excessive force and wrongfully arrested protesters. In Rochester, New York, people who protested the death of Daniel Prude, a Black man who lost consciousness after being pinned to the street by officers during a mental health call in 2020, claim police used extreme force against them in a lawsuit that also alleges city officials have allowed a culture of police brutality against racial minorities to fester.
One of their attorneys, Donald Thompson, said he plans to raise the Denver award in settlement talks with the city and note that unlike most of the Denver protesters, some of his clients suffered lasting injuries including the loss of an eye and scarring from being hit in the face with a tear gas canister. Mr. Thompson also thinks the Denver verdict shows that the public, in the age of cellphone and body camera videos, is not as willing to give police the benefit of the doubt anymore.
“Now people see how this policing really works. You can’t be naïve,” he said.
A spokesperson for Rochester did not return a call and an email seeking comment. When the case was filed, the city said it had already revised the way police respond to protests.
Over the last two months, the city of Austin, Texas, has agreed to pay a total of $13 million to four people who were hit in the head with bean bag rounds fired by police.
Even before the Denver ruling last week, the police department made some changes in response to criticism that arose from the protests, including eliminating the use of 40mm foam rounds for crowd control and changing the way officers are permitted to use pepper balls.
Denver’s Department of Public Safety, which includes the police department, said in a statement that the city was not prepared for the level of sustained violence and destruction. During the trial, lawyers and witnesses said over 80 officers were injured as some in the crowds hurled rocks, water bottles, and canned food at them.
The department said it continues to evaluate its policies to “better protect peaceful protestors while addressing those who are only there to engage in violence.”
Still, the large award is not expected to lead to an overhaul of how officers respond to what experts say are inherently chaotic situations that are difficult to prepare for.
Ed Obayashi, a use-of-force consultant to law enforcement agencies and a deputy sheriff and legal adviser in Plumas County, California, said society may have to bear the cost of such settlements because innocent people can be injured during protests as outnumbered police try to react on the fly, including to people intent on violence.
“It really goes south in an instant because there are individuals out there who want to cause chaos,” he said.
Mr. Obayashi said there is not much police training for protests, which have been relatively rare. He said it would be prohibitively expensive to have officers practice deploying equipment such as tear gas canisters. Because projectiles used in crowds and considered “less lethal” by police, such as rubber bullets and pepper balls, have less velocity and less power to hurt people, it is harder to ensure they hit their intended target, he said.
Lawyers representing people who have also alleged police misconduct and violation of their constitutional right to protest can now use the Denver damage award as part of their own settlement negotiations, said Mark Silverstein, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented some of the winning Denver protesters.
The decision came nearly two years after thousands of people angry about Mr. Floyd’s death took to the streets nationwide, a relatively quick result for the legal system and soon enough for others who allege misconduct by police to file a claim. In Colorado and many other states, there is a two-year statute of limitations for such lawsuits Mr. Silverstein said, leaving only a few months for others to sue.
The city attorney’s office said it has not decided whether to appeal the verdict, but appeals in such big cases are common, said Gloria Browne-Marshall, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Outside lawyers will also scrutinize the case to try to determine if there are unique circumstances that may have led to a “lightning in a bottle” verdict that is less likely to be repeated.
However, Dr. Browne-Marshall thinks the verdict sends a significant message that regular people respect the right of protest and demand change from the government, which she believes police and prosecutors have been undermining.
“It should send a message to both, but whether or not they listen is a different issue,” Dr. Browne-Marshall said.
This story was reported by The Associated Press.
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Washington Gov. Jay Inslee on Thursday signed into law a bill that creates a first-in-the-nation statewide alert system for missing Indigenous people, to help address a silent crisis that has plagued Indian Country in the state and nationwide.
The law sets up a system similar to Amber Alerts and so-called silver alerts, which are used respectively for missing children and vulnerable adults in many states. It was spearheaded by Democratic Rep. Debra Lekanoff, the only Native American lawmaker currently serving in the Washington state Legislature, and championed by Indigenous leaders statewide.
“I am proud to say that the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women’s and People’s Alert System came from the voices of our Native American leaders,” said Ms. Lekanoff, a member of the Tlingit tribe and the bill’s chief sponsor. “It’s not just an Indian issue, it’s not just an Indian responsibility. Our sisters, our aunties, our grandmothers are going missing every day ... and it’s been going on for far too long.”
Tribal leaders, many of them women, wore traditional hats woven from cedar as they gathered around Governor Inslee for the signing on the Tulalip Reservation, north of Seattle. Afterward they gifted him with a handmade traditional ribbon shirt and several multicolored woven blankets.
The law attempts to address a crisis of missing Indigenous people – particularly women – in Washington and across the United States.
While the law includes missing men, women, and children, a summary of public testimony on the legislation notes that “the crisis began as a women’s issue, and it remains primarily a women’s issue.”
Besides notifying law enforcement when there’s a report of a missing Indigenous person, the new alert system will place messages on highway reader boards and on the radio and social media, and provide information to the news media.
The legislation was paired with another bill Governor Inslee signed Thursday that requires county coroners or medical examiners to take steps to identify and notify family members of murdered Indigenous people and return their remains. That new law also establishes two grant funds for Indigenous survivors of human trafficking.
This piece of the crisis is important because, in many cases, murdered Indigenous women are mistakenly recorded as white or Hispanic by coroners’ offices, never identified, or their remains never repatriated.
A 2021 report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found the true number of missing and murdered Indigenous women in the United States is unknown due to reporting problems, distrust of law enforcement, and jurisdictional conflicts. But Native American women face murder rates almost three times those of white women overall – and up to 10 times the national average in certain locations, according to a 2021 summary of the existing research by the National Congress of American Indians. More than 80% have experienced violence.
In Washington, more than four times as many Indigenous women go missing than white women, according to research conducted by the Urban Indian Health Institute in Seattle, but many such cases receive little or no media attention.
The bill signing began with a traditional welcome song passed down by Harriette Shelton Dover, a cherished cultural leader and storyteller. Ms. Dover recovered and shared many traditions and songs from tribes along Washington’s northern Pacific Coast and worked with linguists before her death in 1991 to preserve her language, Lushootseed, from extinction. Women performed an honor song after the event.
Tulalip Tribes of Washington Chairwoman Teri Gobin said Washington and Montana are the two states with the most missing Indigenous people in the U.S. Nearly four dozen Native people are currently missing in Seattle alone, she said.
“What’s the most important thing is bringing them home, whether they’ve been trafficked, whether they’ve been stolen, or murdered,” she said. “It’s a wound that stays open, and it’s something that we pray with [for] each person, we can bring them home.”
Investigations into missing Indigenous people, particularly women, have been plagued by many issues for decades.
When a person goes missing on a reservation, often there are jurisdictional conflicts between tribal police and local and state law enforcement. A lack of staff and police resources, and the rural nature of many reservations, compound those problems. And many times, families of tribal members distrust non-Native law enforcement or don’t know where to report news of a missing loved one.
An alert system will help mitigate some of those problems by allowing better communication and coordination between tribal and non-tribal law enforcement and creating a way for law enforcement to flag such cases for other agencies. The law expands the definition of “missing endangered person” to include Indigenous people, as well as children and vulnerable adults with disabilities or memory or cognitive issues.
The law takes effect June 9 and some details are still being worked out. For example, it’s unclear what criteria law enforcement will use to positively identify a missing person as Native American and how the information will be disseminated in rural areas, including on some reservations, where highways lack electronic reader boards – or where there aren’t highways at all.
The measure is the latest step Washington has taken to address the issue. The Washington State Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and People Task Force is working to coordinate a statewide response and had its first meeting in December. Its first report is expected in August.
Many states from Arizona to Oregon to Wisconsin have taken recent action to address the crisis of murdered and missing Indigenous women. Efforts range from funding for better resources for tribal police to the creation of new databases specifically targeting missing tribal members. Tribal police agencies that use Amber Alerts for missing Indigenous children include the Hopi and Las Vegas Paiute.
In California, the Yurok Tribe and the Sovereign Bodies Institute, an Indigenous-run research and advocacy group, uncovered 18 cases of missing or slain Native American women in roughly the past year – a number they consider a vast undercount.
An estimated 62% of those cases are not listed in state or federal databases for missing persons.
The law is already drawing attention from other states, whose attorneys general have called to ask how to enact similar legislation, said state Attorney General Bob Ferguson, who called the law “truly groundbreaking.”
“Any time you’re doing something for the first time in this country, that’s an extra heavy lift,” he said. “This most certainly will not be our last reform to make sure that we bring everybody back home. ... There is so much more work that needs to be done and must be done.”
This story was reported by The Associated Press. Gillian Flaccus reported from Portland, Oregon.
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Early one Saturday morning, the vendor hung a pair of bluejeans on his stall in a Johannesburg township. They were a pair of secondhand Levi’s 550s made in Lesotho.
Rorisang Kamoli works in the factories that produce for Levi Strauss & Co. in Lesotho. Years of quality control work has left her thumbnails split open and her fingers calloused. In 2021, a colleague was fatally shot by police as employees protested for their wages to be increased to about $160 a month.
Why We Wrote This
More than 1.25 billion pairs of bluejeans are sold worldwide every year. The round-the-world journey of a single pair of Levi’s made in a factory in Lesotho shines a light on the cost of America’s voracious appetite for fast fashion.
Due to a trade deal, nearly all of Lesotho’s Levi’s end up in the United States, so that pair of jeans had almost certainly traveled to America, where families buy nearly a new closet’s worth of items annually. The jeans were one of those purchases, selling for $70 or so.
But then came the pandemic, with people staying home, elastic waistbands gaining popularity, and clothing donations to secondhand stores spiking by more than 50% in 2020. Donated, but not purchased, the jeans headed back to Africa, where 70% of donated clothes wind up, making it difficult for the continent’s independent garment producers to compete with the influx of used clothing.
After two trips across the ocean, the secondhand jeans sold in South Africa for $10.
Early one Saturday morning, the vendor hung The Jeans on his stall on a dusty street corner in a Johannesburg township. They were a pair of secondhand Levi’s 550s. Straight leg. Relaxed fit. Waist 36, inseam 34. One hundred percent cotton, in a soft, brushed blue. The hems on the left pocket were frayed, and there was a small tear above one belt loop, but otherwise The Jeans could have been new.
People who buy secondhand clothes here see Levi’s as a luxury brand, the vendor knew. A message stamped onto the inside of one of The Jeans’ pockets explained that Levi’s are “an American tradition, symbolizing the vitality of the West to people all over the world.” He could probably sell them for $10.
But however symbolic they are of the American West, The Jeans were also global citizens. A glossy tag stitched inside the right hip read “Made in Lesotho.” Encircled entirely by South Africa, the tiny, mountainous country is about 250 miles away from the market where The Jeans now hung. But instead of a simple overland journey of five hours, these jeans had likely lapped the globe before ending up for resale back in southern Africa.
Why We Wrote This
More than 1.25 billion pairs of bluejeans are sold worldwide every year. The round-the-world journey of a single pair of Levi’s made in a factory in Lesotho shines a light on the cost of America’s voracious appetite for fast fashion.
Across the course of their life, The Jeans probably had their cotton grown in one country, spun and woven into fabric in another, were cut and sewn in a third, and were worn and donated to charity in a fourth, all before ending up here in South Africa, country number five.
That journey from one neighboring African country to another, via an 18,000 mile detour to the United States, is a parable of Africa’s role in the fast-fashion industry, and Americans’ implication in it. The clothing industry, one of the world’s most environmentally destructive, is responsible for 10% of global emissions, more than air travel and maritime shipping combined. Meanwhile the people who make the world’s clothing – mostly women in the Global South – rarely earn above their country’s minimum wage, which is less than $200 a month in many African countries. Yet the continent is increasingly shouldering the burden of both creating America’s clothes, and disposing of them after they finish with them.
Threadbare benefits for workers
Bluejeans are perhaps the modern world’s most popular garment spun from cotton, a plant fiber that has helped shape much of today’s world as we know it.
“Without cotton cloth, we would have no global economy, no staggering social inequality between the Global North and South, no work for women outside the home, and no industrialization, which was all powered by slavery on expropriated and overtaxed land,” argues Maxine Bedat, the author of “Unraveled: The Life and Death of a Garment,” a book about the denim supply chain.
Born in a Nevada tailor’s workshop in the 1870s, denim was popularized by Levi Strauss & Co. as workwear for lumberjacks, cowboys, and railroad workers. By the mid-20th century, jeans had become a leisure item too. Today, an American woman, on average, owns seven pairs of jeans. A whopping 1.25 billion pairs are sold worldwide every year.
Sometime in the last few years, The Jeans were among them.
First, though, they had to be sewn. Based on their “Made in” tag, this particular pair could have been stitched together in only one place, a scruffy industrial district of aluminum factory shells in Maseru, the capital of Lesotho.
Although the southern African country is a minuscule player in the global garment industry, jeans are big business for the country of 2 million. The vast majority of those who work in clothing factories here, like nearly everywhere in the world, are women. So it was almost certainly women in Lesotho who made The Jeans. About 100 of them, because that’s how many people’s hands a pair of jeans passes through, from the moment the roll of denim is unspooled on the factory floor until it’s packed in a shipping container.
What would The Jeans’ first moments of existence have looked like?
They would have been loud. The cavernous interior of a bluejeans factory buzzes like a swarm of flies. Irons hiss. Washing machines clack and clatter. The only thing that’s more or less silent are the workers, hunched over their machines assembling a single item – a belt loop, a pocket, a leg seam – with laser focus, trying to keep pace with targets that run into the hundreds or thousands of pairs daily.
Rorisang Kamoli has worked in the factories that produce for Levi Strauss in Lesotho for more than a decade. She’s slight, in her early 30s, with thick-rimmed Buddy Holly glasses and long braids. If The Jeans passed through her hands, here’s what she would have done. She would have run her fingers over the rivets, those tiny patented bronze buttons sutured to the front pockets of every pair of Levi’s, and the button on the fly. She would have twisted each one, to make sure it was secure, and felt for rough, sharp edges that would make The Jeans dangerous to wear.
Years of this quality control work has left her thumbnails split open and her fingers calloused. Her mind, too, is equally weary, thinking about the people in America who buy these jeans for $69.50 – about half her monthly wage.
“[Americans] just want to wear these products – they don’t care how we are living to make them,” she says.
Among the things she suspects Americans don’t consider: her cracked thumbnail. Whether anyone can raise two children on $150 a month. What it feels like to have a colleague killed in a protest while trying to convince the companies to raise that wage to about $160 a month. The terror of watching half the world swap jeans for sweatpants during a global pandemic, when your life depends on bluejeans.
When Ms. Kamoli was growing up, Lesotho had a different export – its men went to work in the gold, diamond, and platinum mines of neighboring South Africa. But beginning in the 1990s, the mines began to close. The men returned, and, as new garment factories opened, the women went to work.
But the new opportunities made for a bitter independence. “Sometimes I feel angry with jeans. I hate them. Why should I have to work so hard, for a wage that’s not enough, to make a thing like this?” Ms. Kamoli says.
Secondhand imports flood Africa
Lesotho’s garment industry exists in large part thanks to an American trade deal called the African Growth and Opportunities Act, which, since 2001, has allowed Lesotho and three dozen other African countries to import certain goods, including clothes, to the U.S. duty-free.
It also means that nearly all of Lesotho’s Levi’s are America-bound. So it’s fairly safe to say that’s where The Jeans went next. Americans buy clothing voraciously, purchasing dozens of clothing items per year – an average of 68, according to the clothing rental service Rent the Runway.
In the 1950s, American families were spending 10% of their income on clothing, and purchasing just a few items a year. Now that figure is 2%, but thanks to the rise of so-called fast fashion, that amount buys nearly a new closet’s worth of items annually.
For someone, somewhere, The Jeans were one of those many purchases.
Then, along came the pandemic. Around that time, The Jeans and their owner parted ways. Who needed jeans anymore, when pants with an elastic waist existed and you were never leaving your house? Clothing donations spiked by more than 50% in 2020, according to the online secondhand retailer ThredUp.
Because The Jeans were in near-perfect nick, their owner could have been forgiven for thinking they would be a great item to donate to a local Goodwill or Salvation Army. Someone would snatch them right up at a local thrift store, they might have reasoned, and the charity would earn some much-needed cash for its programs.
Except that’s not what happens to most of the clothes Americans donate to charity, and it’s not what happened to The Jeans either.
On average, American charity stores sell just 10% to 20% of the donations they receive. The rest end up in the hands of textile recyclers – companies whose entire reason for being is to make old clothes disappear. They buy charity shop donations by weight, then sort them. About 45% is considered “salable,” that is, high enough quality that it can be worn again, according to the Secondary Materials and Recycled Textiles Association. Another 50% can be made into either rags or insulation, and the worst quality stuff is simply thrown away.
“Watching the process of sorting and grading feels a little like a visit to the slaughterhouse,” wrote George Packer of visiting a textile recycler in Brooklyn.
The Jeans, it’s clear, made the cut for resale. So they were pressed, with hundreds of other pairs, into a cube about the size of a dishwasher, and loaded on another shipping container.
Globally, 70% of donated clothes end up in Africa. But it’s not, as many assume, because Africans are desperate for the rest of the world’s castoffs. In the decades after independence, many African countries had major textile industries of their own. After Western governments and global lenders began putting pressure on those countries to liberalize their economies in the 1980s, trade restrictions fell, and clothing imports from the rest of the world flooded in.
In recent years, some African countries have attempted to fight back. But when a bloc of East African countries banned the import of secondhand clothes in 2016, American textile exporters reacted predictably. They pressured lawmakers, and soon the U.S. was threatening to withdraw the African Growth and Opportunities Act, the trade deal that gives African countries duty-free access to American markets for many goods. In the end, only the central African nation of Rwanda stood its ground.
And so The Jeans probably landed in South Africa’s coastal neighbor Mozambique. Technically, it’s illegal to import any secondhand clothing into South Africa – a move to protect its own clothing factories – but the rule is flagrantly ignored. Truckloads rumble unhindered across its border every day, much of it bound for a single market in downtown Johannesburg.
There, on a four-block stretch of De Villiers Street, wedged between a minibus taxi stand and the city’s main train station, dozens of hawkers sell secondhand clothes from bed-sized bins: heaps of gauzy blouses, T-shirts from American 5K races, vintage dresses, and yes, jeans. “AmaSkinnyJean! AmaSkinnyJean!” they shout, using the Zulu prefix to pluralize words. “Cheap cheap cheap!”
The market also sells to wholesalers like the one who bought The Jeans. He then brought them 20 miles north, to a neighborhood whose name means “Olive Wood Forest” in Afrikaans, although it is a patch of prairie dotted with small houses and tin shacks, with no trees in sight. Like many South African townships – the mostly working class bedroom communities that huddle on the edge of all its cities – Olievenhoutbosch has a clothing market, where every weekend a couple dozen vendors set up shop on a corner near a dusty police station.
One weekend last November, The Jeans were among the clothes on offer.
“How much?” asked a customer.
R150, the vendor answered. $10.
She pulled the bills out of her wallet, Nelson Mandela’s face beaming up from the blue and red notes.
And just like that, The Jeans, and all the stories they carried, belonged to me.
Reporting for this story was supported by The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
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Hungary’s right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is facing his toughest election yet on April 3, against a united opposition led by a Christian conservative. But the war in Ukraine has pushed traditional hot-button issues into the background – and looks likely to boost Europe’s self-styled “illiberal” strongman’s chances at the ballot box.
The war changed the dynamic of the parliamentary campaign, as the opposition seized on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to present Mr. Orbán as Vladimir Putin’s lackey in Europe. It highlighted that Hungary blocked Ukraine’s accession to NATO, and that Mr. Orbán stood alongside Mr. Putin weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine.
Why We Wrote This
For some Hungarians, Viktor Orbán’s close ties to Russia aren’t cause to vote for his opponent. They’re a reason the prime minister is best suited to keep Hungary safe from the war in Ukraine.
But the latest polls suggest Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party could win by a narrow margin. The public’s logic seems to be that Mr. Orbán puts the economic well-being of Hungarian families first and national interests above geopolitical considerations.
“Orbán gave a very smart answer, saying in wartimes the most important thing for Hungarians is not who is responsible for the war and not moral issues,” says Ágoston Mráz, a conservative think tank director. “The question is who can guarantee the freedom and peace of Hungary and through that, the prosperity of Hungary?”
For many right-wing European leaders who have wooed Russian President Vladimir Putin, the war in Ukraine has been a blow to their popularity.
Not so for Viktor Orbán.
The Hungarian prime minister is facing his toughest election yet on April 3, against a united opposition led by a Christian conservative. Before the invasion, the public fretted about COVID-19, high inflation, migration, the defense of traditional family values versus greater LGBTQ rights, and how Budapest’s conflicts with Brussels over rule of law, corruption, and media freedoms might play out. It seemed like a formula for Mr. Orbán’s ouster.
Why We Wrote This
For some Hungarians, Viktor Orbán’s close ties to Russia aren’t cause to vote for his opponent. They’re a reason the prime minister is best suited to keep Hungary safe from the war in Ukraine.
But the conflict in Ukraine has pushed traditional hot-button issues into the background – and looks likely, experts say, to boost Europe’s self-styled “illiberal” strongman’s chances at the ballot box.
The latest polls suggest Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party could win by a narrow margin. The public’s logic seems to be that Mr. Orbán puts the economic well-being of Hungarian families first and national interests above geopolitical considerations.
“We really trust in Viktor Orbán,” says Gyöngyi Bors, a redheaded hairdresser who came with her grandchildren to hear the Hungarian leader speak in Budapest. “As long as he is in power, this country is safe and the people of Hungary are safe. He is reliable. He is authentic. And whenever we go outside Budapest, we see that Hungary is developing in a great way. Everything is getting more and more beautiful. Things are built.”
While Fidesz is expected to win, it is also expected to lose the supermajority it secured in 2018 – which made constitutional changes possible.
“There is room for surprises,” says Stefano Bottoni, a teacher of Eastern European history at the University of Florence and author of a book on Mr. Orbán. “The war totally changed the situation.”
From freedom fighter to Putin’s ally
Mr. Orbán knows how to pivot and nail down messages that resonate with the majority of Hungarians, analysts say. He shot to political fame as an anti-communist freedom fighter who stood in Budapest’s Heroes’ Square in 1989 demanding that Russian troops exit Hungary. It was Mr. Orbán who oversaw Hungary’s accession to NATO in 1999. And for years, he insisted that Hungary should diversify its energy sources and lessen its dependence on Russia.
“We don’t want to be the happiest barracks of Gazprom,” Mr. Orbán declared in 2007 when his Fidesz party was in the opposition.
That fiery antagonism toward Russia ended in 2010, when Mr. Orbán traveled to Moscow and reset relations with Mr. Putin. In the summer of 2014, he declared Russia – along with China and Turkey – as political models to follow, proudly launching Hungary on the path to “illiberal democracy.” Mr. Orbán’s authoritarian tendencies and sweeping reforms are today major points of concern for the European Union.
On the economic front, Mr. Orbán signed a contract with Russia’s Rosatom to expand the Paks Nuclear Power Plant. More recently, he invited the controversial Russian-led International Investment Bank to set up its headquarters in Budapest, reportedly providing diplomatic immunity to its staff even if critics see it as a front for Russian spying. These projects are perceived to be dear to the Hungarian leader’s heart, fruits of a carefully crafted, pragmatic relationship with Mr. Putin.
They are also why he is widely perceived as Mr. Putin’s last ally in Europe.
“That’s not a viable position,” says Dr. Bottoni. “He seemed quite unsure for a couple of days [after the invasion of Ukraine began]. Then he assumed this new position of peace fighter. He has a pass for victory now because he has a new narrative as commander in chief for peace and many Hungarians want to hear this. The war scares people, and Hungary is a border country [with Ukraine].”
“There is moral risk”
The war changed the dynamic of the parliamentary campaign, as the opposition seized on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to present Mr. Orbán as Mr. Putin’s lackey in Europe. It highlighted that Hungary blocked Ukraine’s accession to NATO, and that Mr. Orbán stood alongside Mr. Putin weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine, celebrating their 12th meeting since 2010.
It’s a matter of “East versus West” and democracy versus greater authoritarianism, opposition leaders say.
“Choose Europe, freedom, and growth instead of East, slavery, and deprivation,” urged Péter Márki-Zay, the joint opposition candidate for prime minister at a rally last month. As a small-town mayor and churchgoing father of seven, he embodies the conservative values that resonate with the right-wing Fidesz voter base but also has the support of liberal parties. Many believe he is the country’s best hope to unseat Mr. Orbán.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has also criticized Mr. Orbán in recent days, blaming him for holding back on some sanctions, blocking weapons transfers to Ukraine via Hungary, and importing Russian oil and gas. “There can be no Russian branches in Europe that divide the EU from within, that are trying to help Russia make as much money as possible even now,” Mr. Zelenskyy said Tuesday. “Europe must stop listening to the excuses of Budapest.”
Hungary has come out looking soft relative to the other central European nations. When the prime ministers of the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovenia – which, along with Hungary, form the so-called the Visegrád Group – went to Kyiv to show support for Ukraine earlier this month, Mr. Orbán stayed home. Hungary’s weaker line toward Russia also led the rest of the Visegrád Group to snub a planning meeting of defense ministers in Budapest this week.
Still, Hungary did fall into line with the EU and impose sanctions on Russia. And for all the cozying up to Mr. Putin in recent years, Mr. Orbán has never called into question Hungary’s membership in NATO or the EU per se, analysts note. “We were trying to expand our range of motion,” says Dr. Bottoni. “Until now, it didn’t seem so risky. It seemed even a smart move, playing a bit with the Russians, with the Chinese, imagining a global role for Hungary.”
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine dramatically changed the equation. “It’s not only risky; there is moral risk,” Dr. Bottoni adds. “You are aligning with bloody dictatorships; you are aligning with isolated regimes. You are perceived as a kind of last ally [to Mr. Putin]. And Hungary has a very bad tradition, unfortunately, in the 20th century of standing on the wrong side.”
Remembering the Soviets
The majority of Hungarians are wary of being dragged into the Ukrainian conflict. Hungary was stripped of two-thirds of its territory in the aftermath of World War I. Hungary sided with Nazi Germany in World War II largely because Adolf Hitler offered to return the land. Large swaths of the population still dream of restoring Greater Hungary, a sentiment Mr. Orbán plays on.
“Hungary had to pay a high price for these wars,” says Ágoston Mráz, director of the conservative think tank Nézőpont Intézet. “That is why the sentiment to stay neutral is so strong in society.”
The stakes of a conflict with Russia are clear for the average Hungarian, even if ties between Budapest and Moscow have been at their best under Mr. Orbán, and even if Fidesz media repeats Russian tropes about the Ukrainian conflict. Hungary lived under communist rule until 1989.
“We know what it is like to fight with the Russians,” says Endre Pokasz, a press officer tasked with showing the aircraft museum, upgraded churches, and cultural venues set up under Mr. Orbán in the town of Szolnok. “If anyone thinks the Russians can be beaten easily, they are wrong. Hungary must keep the peace. What if Russia takes revenge on us? We are too small for this. If they close the gas, we will have no heating. Companies will have to stop working. Nothing will work.”
Russia supplies 80% of Hungary’s gas. Mr. Orbán signed a 15-year deal with Gazprom last year. That makes energy prices in Hungary cheaper compared with the rest of Europe. “It is a powerful weapon for Orbán,” says Dr. Bottoni. “We have to do what is good for us. You are paying less for gas and oil. Do you want to pay more? Please vote for the opposition, break down the agreements with the Russians. ... If not, we have to accept that the Russians are our partners. Whatever they do.”
“Orbán gave a very smart answer saying in wartimes, the most important thing for Hungarians is not who is responsible for the war and not moral issues. But the question is who can guarantee the freedom and peace of Hungary, and through that the prosperity of Hungary?” concurs Mr. Mráz.
Victory for the opposition would mean a complete re-orientation of Hungary’s foreign policy toward the West. That is the fervent wish of lawyer Gabor Matlak, in Budapest. Lingering by the banks of the Danube River with his family after the opposition rally, he clung to the flag of Europe.
“We are afraid we will not be part of the EU anymore if Orbán wins again,” he explains. “It is our last chance for Hungary to stay in the European Union and NATO. I think Europe will not tolerate Orbán anymore if we are not strong enough to kick him out.”
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Four times in 40 days, Fahad Shah was close to coming home. The Monitor contributor was arrested as India has clamped down on dissent in Kashmir. But each time he made bail, he was rearrested on a new charge. Now, the government has jailed him under the designation of “preventive detention,” which can last up to two years without formal charges.
Fahad’s story is a personal one – of a principled determination to continue responsible journalism even amid a crackdown. It is also a story of Kashmir – a window into a Muslim-majority state now essentially put under martial law by the Hindu nationalist government. But it is a story for the wider world, too. On the day that Fahad was returned to jail, there was only pride in the work he and his colleagues have done through their publication, The Kashmir Walla, to give people a voice and stand for rule of law.
In a globalized world where every atrocity and threat to freedom is brought to our phones with a ping and devastating clarity, the overwhelming feeling can be impotence. Though I cannot ask him, I do not think Fahad would agree. The good we do is bound only by our conviction to do it.
Fahad’s professional lifework, The Kashmir Walla, is under tremendous strain. The website, including a donation page, can be found at thekashmirwalla.com, and the entire operation can be sustainably funded for a few thousand dollars a month.
But more deeply, the need is for the free world to awake. The post-World War II era saw an unprecedented expansion of freedom. But it was dearly bought. When divisions usurp our determination to expand freedom, when they eclipse our love for our neighbor, they replace progress with the cold calculations of personal will. Fahad’s story exhorts us all to remember that freedom never lives long in ungenerous hearts.
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Arthur C. Brooks has spent years studying happiness. He teaches a class on happiness and leadership at Harvard Business School, worked closely with the Dalai Lama, and walked the Camino de Santiago – a 100-mile Roman Catholic meditation trail.
He has also turned a trove of personal journals into his new book, “From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life.”
Why We Wrote This
A formula for happiness may seem too good to be true, but a new book takes the idea of happiness beyond self-help, offering simple ideas we can all explore for deeper meaning.
The New York Times bestseller suggests readers focus on the happiness that already exists in their life, and points to small daily steps people can take to cultivate happiness in the present.
“Satisfaction is not a function of what you have,” says Mr. Brooks. “It’s a function of what you have divided by what you want. ... So your satisfaction can go up, paradoxically, by wanting less. Now how do you want less? You have to make a positive affirmative decision to do that, and you absolutely can.”
His formula for happiness focuses on love. “You can boil down all of the studies of happiness to five words,” he says. “Those words are: Happiness is love. Full stop.”
Arthur C. Brooks has spent decades studying happiness. But in recent years the social scientist’s research turned into what he calls “me search.”
He found that those who are unhappiest later in life are often the strivers on a continual quest for money, power, pleasure, and prestige. Mr. Brooks turned his introspection into a bestseller, “From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life.”
Formerly the president of the American Enterprise Institute, Mr. Brooks is now a columnist for The Atlantic. He also teaches a class on happiness and leadership at Harvard Business School. The Monitor recently spoke with him about his book. The discussion has been edited for length and clarity.
Why We Wrote This
A formula for happiness may seem too good to be true, but a new book takes the idea of happiness beyond self-help, offering simple ideas we can all explore for deeper meaning.
How did you embark on your quest to understand happiness – and what most surprised you about what you discovered?
My wife read it – these are just my notebooks – and she said, “You’ve got to publish this as a book.” I said, “I don’t know if anybody’s going to read it.” And it opened [shortly after its debut in February] at No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list.
The most important skill that I talk about in this book is to really think about the happiness that’s occurring in your life. Why do I have these feelings that I have? What are the feelings that I wished I [had instead]? And when you do that, you can actually make some very affirmative and positive decisions in your life.
Like many people, you struggle with spending a lot of time thinking about the future. Why is that problematic?
My mentor Martin Seligman, at the University of Pennsylvania, believes that we shouldn’t be called Homo sapiens. He believes we should be called Homo prospectus. And the reason is because we’re the only species that can spend any significant cognitive energy on the future.
The average person spends, according to Seligman, between 30% and 50% of his or her time thinking about the future. To be thinking about the future, ironically, is basically to take the current present and waste it because you’re treating the current moment like drudgery so you can live in a better future. In a very real way, you’re missing your own life.
You went for a long walk in Spain to learn not to constantly chase that state of happiness on the horizon. Tell me about it.
One of the ways that you can fix that is by getting into a rhythmic activity in which your only goal is to be present. I did it on the Camino de Santiago, which is this ancient Roman Catholic walking meditation. One hundred miles. You walk all day and your job is to be fully present and pray a lot. When I notice my mind focusing on scenarios of the future, I’ll take it back to the dust on my boots. Flowers on the side of the road. The feel of the rain on my bald head. At first there’s screaming inside your head. Then after about 24 hours the screaming starts to get softer and then pretty soon you’re just in rhythm. I wouldn’t say it’s a permanent game changer because you have to keep doing it.
You write about the importance of cultivating a spiritual practice. Why?
The four habits that are most associated with the happiest people are faith, family, friendship, and work that serves others. That’s the happiness portfolio. The first of those is faith. By that I don’t mean a particular faith. One of the greatest sources of misery in our lives is that we’re obsessed with the most boring thing in the world, repetitively thinking about my job, my car, my clothes, my house, my relationships. It’s like the same TV show over and over and over again.
I’ve worked very closely with the Dalai Lama for the last 10 years. He says, “Always remember you are one in 7 billion.” Which does not mean I’m an ant or insignificant. It means I need to zoom out to find the majesty of life, to find the adventure in life.
Every year, on your birthday, you compile what you term “a reverse bucket list.” Explain that concept.
Satisfaction is not a function of what you have. It’s a function of what you have divided by what you want. Most people try to have this kind of fruitless “haves” management strategy. Which puts them on what we call the hedonic treadmill. ... You go from have, to have, to have, to have. You can defeat that by modeling it in a different way by having a “wants” management strategy. The wants are the denominator of the satisfaction equation. And when you decrease the denominator, the whole number increases. So your satisfaction can go up, paradoxically, by wanting less. Now how do you want less? You have to make a positive affirmative decision to do that, and you absolutely can.
You write that love is the epicenter of happiness. Tell me more.
The world gives you a bogus formula for happiness. No. 1: Use people. No. 2: Love things. No. 3: Worship yourself. And it actually seems right because it’s so close to the truth. It just mixes up the nouns and the verbs. The right formula, based on all of the best neuroscience, clinical, [and] social scientific research, is simply: Use things, love people, and worship the divine. You can boil down all of the studies of happiness to five words. Those words are: Happiness is love. Full stop.
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President Joe Biden on Thursday ordered the release of 1 million barrels of oil per day from the nation’s strategic petroleum reserve for six months, a bid to control energy prices that have spiked after the United States and allies imposed steep sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.
The president said it was not known how much gasoline prices could decline as a result of his move, but he suggested it might be “anything from 10 cents to 35 cents a gallon.” Gas is averaging about $4.23 a gallon, compared with $2.87 a year ago, according to AAA.
“The bottom line is if we want lower gas prices we need to have more oil supply right now,” Mr. Biden said. “This is a moment of consequence and peril for the world, and pain at the pump for American families.”
The president also wants Congress to impose financial penalties on oil and gas companies that lease public lands but are not producing. He said he will invoke the Defense Production Act to encourage the mining of critical minerals for batteries in electric vehicles, part of a broader push to shift toward cleaner energy sources and reduce the use of fossil fuels.
The actions show that oil remains a vulnerability for the United States. Higher prices have hurt Mr. Biden’s approval domestically and added billions of oil-export dollars to the Russian government as it wages war on Ukraine.
Tapping the stockpile would create pressures that could reduce oil prices, though Mr. Biden has twice ordered releases from the reserves without causing a meaningful shift in oil markets. Mr. Biden said Thursday he expects gasoline prices could drop “fairly significantly.”
Part of Mr. Biden’s concern is that high prices have not so far coaxed a meaningful jump in oil production. The planned release is a way to increase supplies as a bridge until oil companies ramp up their own production, with administration officials estimating that domestic production will grow by 1 million barrels daily this year and an additional 700,000 barrels daily in 2023.
The markets reacted quickly with crude oil prices dropping about 6% in Thursday trading to roughly $101 a barrel. Still, oil is up from roughly $60 a year ago, with supplies failing to keep up with demand as the world economy has begun to rebound from the coronavirus pandemic. That inflationary problem was compounded by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which created new uncertainties about oil and natural gas supplies and led to retaliatory sanctions from the U.S. and its allies.
Stewart Glickman, an oil analyst for CFRA Research, said the release would bring short-term relief on prices, but that markets would ultimately look to see whether, after the releases stop, the underlying problems that led to Mr. Biden’s decisions remain.
“The root cause of the headache is probably still going to be there,” Mr. Glickman said.
Mr. Biden has been in talks with allies and partners to join in additional releases of oil, such that the world market will get more than the 180 million barrels total being pledged by the U.S.
Americans on average use about 21 million barrels of oil daily, with about 40% of that devoted to gasoline, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That total accounts for about one-fifth of total global consumption of oil.
Domestic oil production is equal to more than half of U.S. usage, but high prices have not led companies to return to their pre-pandemic levels of output. The U.S. is producing on average 11.7 million barrels daily, down from 13 million barrels in early 2020.
Republican lawmakers have said the problem results from the administration being hostile to oil permits and the construction of new pipelines such as the Keystone XL. Democrats say the country needs to move to renewable energy such as wind and solar that could reduce the dependence on fossil fuels and Mr. Putin’s leverage.
Republican Sen. Steve Daines from Montana blasted Mr. Biden’s action to tap the reserve without first taking steps to increase American energy production, calling it “a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.″
Senator Daines called Mr. Biden’s actions “desperate moves″ that avoid what he called the real solution: “investing in American energy production,″ and getting “oil and gas leases going again.”
The administration says increasing oil output is a gradual process and the release would provide time to ramp up production. It also wants to incentivize greater production by putting fees on unused leases on government lands, something that would require congressional approval.
Oil producers have been more focused on meeting the needs of investors than consumers, according to a survey released last week by the Dallas Federal Reserve. About 59% of the executives surveyed said investor pressure to preserve “capital discipline” amid high prices was the reason they weren’t pumping more, while fewer than 10% blamed government regulation.
In his remarks Thursday, Mr. Biden tried to shame oil companies that he said are focused on profits instead of putting out more barrels, saying that adding to the oil supply was a patriotic obligation.
“This is not the time to sit on record profits: It’s time to step up for the good of your country,” the president said.
The steady release from the reserves would be a meaningful sum and come near to closing the domestic production gap relative to February 2020, before the coronavirus caused a steep decline in oil output.
Still, the politics of oil are complicated with industry advocates and environmentalists both criticizing the planned release. Groups such as the American Petroleum Institute want to make drilling easier, while environmental organizations say energy companies should be forced to pay a special tax on windfall profits instead.
The administration in November announced the release of 50 million barrels from the strategic reserve in coordination with other countries. And after the Russia-Ukraine war began, the U.S. and 30 other countries agreed to an additional release of 60 million barrels from reserves, with half of the total coming from the U.S.
According to the Department of Energy, which manages it, more than 568 million barrels of oil were held in the reserve as of March 25. After the release, the government would begin to replenish the reserve once prices have sufficiently fallen.
News of the administration’s planning was first reported by Bloomberg.
This story was reported by The Associated Press.
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In one of the world’s most unstable regions, the global drift toward authoritarianism has hit a wall, one draped in the red and black of judicial robes. Kenya’s Supreme Court ruled this week against President Uhuru Kenyatta, who had proposed constitutional changes that might have enabled him to remain influential in a new office.
The decision, on what was essentially a procedural question of executive power, illustrates how young societies – particularly those emerging from colonial pasts – develop the rule of law: not by inheriting systems of government, but through a deepening conviction in the moral foundations of equal liberty protected by an independent and impartial judiciary.
The decision will not only resonate in Africa, where rulers find it easy to manipulate the law to stay in power, but perhaps around the world. In its latest survey, Freedom House found that 60 countries saw a decline on key aspects of democracy. The trend has left only 20% of the global population living in what the survey calls “free” countries. In Africa, notes Leiden University law professor Nick Huls, even though all 54 countries have a written constitution, “a culture of constitutionalism is often missing.” Earlier gains in judicial independence on the continent have lately been in retreat.
During Kenya’s first 40 years of independence, as Chief Justice Martha Koome noted, the first two presidents pushed through 30 constitutional amendments to concentrate and perpetuate their power. That remains a common tactic in Africa. It is how Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni extended his 36-year grip on power last year.
Kenya has shed that tendency gradually as its citizens have demanded better governance. A three-year process culminating in the new 2010 constitution was widely inclusive. The new document rebalanced power among the branches of government and entrenched the rights of women and marginalized communities. By 2020, 88% of Kenyans agreed that government must always follow the law and 74% said presidents must respect court decisions, according to the polling group Afrobarometer.
The court’s decision on March 31 related to a presidential push for a constitutional amendment to create a new office of prime minister side by side with the presidency. Critics saw this as an attempt by Mr. Kenyatta, who cannot seek a third term later this year, to retain power and weaken political opposition. The Supreme Court ruling upheld two lower court decisions that found he had introduced the amendment unconstitutionally. The decision marked the second time the court has flexed its independence under the new constitution. In 2017 it annulled the presidential election, citing widespread discrepancies, and ordered that it be held again.
Justice Njoki Ndung’u, who dissented in the court’s interpretation of how the constitution allows for amendments, nonetheless observed, “Kenyans wanted to have a head of state who would not whimsically amend the constitution.”
Significantly, Mr. Kenyatta did not oppose the ruling in 2017. Nor has he now. At a turbulent moment globally, Kenya has reaffirmed judicial independence. More than a check on the actions of a president, it sends a timely message about democratic rule of law that restrains personal power and ensures self-governance.
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In mid-March, a New York City-size mass called the Conger ice shelf collapsed completely – the first time in recorded history that this had happened in East Antarctica. This came at the tail end of a stunning heat wave in the region with temperatures that, while still cold, reached nearly 70 degrees Fahrenheit above normal.
One key reason for these anomalies seems clear. A warming climate has created changes in Earth’s systems, such as rising ocean temperatures and shifts in the way atmospheric currents carry heat and moisture.
Why We Wrote This
Antarctica holds mysteries with big implications for Earth’s environment. Recent news of a massive ice breakup may, to borrow an apt metaphor, be just the tip of the iceberg.
But it’s also far more complicated than that – with other elements of Earth’s natural systems involved, and direct causal correlations of any event not always clear.
“It’s still an unknown place,” says Catherine Walker, an assistant scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “For the most part, it’s unexplored. You do your best [to understand it] with the measurements you can get. But events like this last week – we were all surprised.”
Scientists believe Antarctica serves as a global air conditioner. And they know it’s changing.
Says oceanographer Matt Long: “That’s something crucial for the scientific community to engage in and for the international community to address.”
In early March, analysts at the U.S. National Ice Center began to notice changes along the eastern coast of Antarctica.
First, a large piece of ice, some 13 nautical miles in length, broke off the remnants of an area known as the Glenzer ice shelf. Ice shelves are sections of glacial ice that extend off land and rest on the ocean, and occasionally “calve,” or break apart, to produce icebergs.
Although it’s less common for such an event to take place on the eastern side of Antarctica – the western side is far more dynamic and tends to be the focus of scientists who study glaciers – it is by no means unprecedented, says Christopher Readinger, the Ice Center’s lead Antarctic ice analyst.
Why We Wrote This
Antarctica holds mysteries with big implications for Earth’s environment. Recent news of a massive ice breakup may, to borrow an apt metaphor, be just the tip of the iceberg.
He quickly put out a memo, informing sailors and scientists that a newly named iceberg, C-37, was now floating in what is already considered one of Earth’s most harrowing maritime environments.
But then, a week later, something else happened.
The ice shelf adjacent to Glenzer, a New York City-size mass called the Conger ice shelf, collapsed completely – the first time this had happened in East Antarctica since scientists began using satellites to record such events.
The collapse came around the same time as a stunning heat wave in the region, which had included temperatures reaching nearly 70 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. (This pushed the temperature to a relatively balmy 11 degrees F, compared with the typical 56 below zero.) Some scientists have described it as Earth’s most extreme heat wave ever recorded.
Mr. Readinger sent out another report and named a new iceberg, C-38, made from the ice that had been the Conger ice shelf. And scientists around the world began to scramble to understand what, exactly, was going on in Antarctica – a part of the world known to be a crucial regulator of global climate, but one still filled with mystery.
“It’s a gut check for the glaciology community” says Peter Neff, a glaciologist with the University of Minnesota. “We have record low sea ice [around East Antarctica]. We have a much stronger heat wave than we ever thought was possible. And an ice shelf collapsing in a place where we didn’t expect it to collapse. ... It causes concern for us that we’re not fully appreciating the vulnerability of East Antarctica.”
That vulnerability matters – not only for the ecosystems of this remote, southern continent, but for climate and sea levels worldwide. It is a reminder of how much scientists still don’t know about Antarctica, its ecosystems, and the Southern Ocean that surrounds it. And it shows the importance of the scientific and geopolitical collaboration that takes place on this continent, even as researchers struggle to understand it.
“It’s still an unknown place,” says Catherine Walker, an assistant scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “For the most part, it’s unexplored. You do your best [to understand it] with the measurements you can get. But events like this last week – we were all surprised.”
A continent’s complexities
On the one hand, the reason for the Conger ice shelf collapse and the preceding heat wave seems clear. A warming climate has created changes in Earth’s systems, such as rising ocean temperatures and shifts in the way atmospheric currents carry heat and moisture, that in turn lead to events like city-size ice blocks dropping off a continent.
But it’s also far more complicated than that.
Scientists are generally loath to say that any one event, such as an ice shelf collapse, is the clear result of climate change. These are natural systems, after all, and direct correlation is not always clear. Dr. Neff, for instance, collects ice cores to try to understand historical climate markers – and to see, for instance, whether East Antarctica has experienced this sort of heat wave before.
(To show just how complicated this is, the weather event scientists say led to the recent Antarctic heat – a band of warm, moisture-filled air called an “atmospheric river” – also brings with it a huge amount of snow. And that snow builds glaciers. Which means it’s not even clear whether a heat wave results in net melting. As Dr. Neff says, “Add tens of gigatons of snow over a couple of days to your glacier, and it can put a wrinkle in your model.”)
Meanwhile, when it comes to polar regions, Antarctica seems – at first glance, at least – to have been less affected by global warming than the north so far.
“If you look at a map of warming over the last 50 years, Antarctica still looks pretty blue, or cold, and the North Pole is red, or warming,” says Dr. Walker. “We hear more about Greenland and shrinking sea ice in the north.”
Indeed, scientists believe that Antarctica serves as a global air conditioner. While ocean waters around the world absorb a quarter of all the carbon humans put into the atmosphere, the Southern Ocean does the most work, absorbing about half of those molecules. And the same churning that makes it so treacherous to sail – or do research – on the Southern Ocean also pushes that heat and carbon into deeper water.
In other words, without the Southern Ocean, the world would be a whole lot hotter, many scientists say. (Again, it’s not quite so simple – the churning also brings up natural carbon from organisms decaying at the ocean floor. But the dominant theory about the Southern Ocean is that it is a carbon sink.)
But researchers also know Antarctica is changing.
“We have indications of really important changes,” says Matt Long, an oceanographer with the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “There are direct observations of warming. Of freshening. Of increased freshwater input. We don’t fully understand the implication of those changes for Antarctic marine ecosystems. That’s something crucial for the scientific community to engage in and for the international community to address.”
One impact of all the heat absorbed by the Southern Ocean seems to be that ice is thinning from below. Antarctica holds 90% of the world’s ice, and 70% of Earth’s freshwater volume, according to the National Science Foundation. This means that even partial melting could have a catastrophic impact on coastal communities around the world.
An international collaboration of scientists studying the Florida-size Thwaites Glacier on the western side of Antarctica, for instance, has warned of new cracks and melting in that ice.
Should that glacier fully collapse, it could raise global sea levels by feet – but again, by how much, and how fast, is up for debate.
The recent Conger collapse probably won’t have a big impact on sea levels, scientists say. Still, says Dr. Walker, they are monitoring it.
“The thing we’re all sort of interested in is the process,” she says. “What happens, what’s next. That can help us learn what to expect from the bigger ones.”
All nations have a stake
If this isolated continent is the site of mysterious – and perhaps unnerving – changes, it might also be the location of big global answers, both scientific and geopolitical.
Not owned by any one country, Antarctica is governed internationally. The first Antarctic treaty, signed in 1959, demilitarized the continent and explicitly made it a region where countries would collaborate on scientific research. Since then, other agreements have banned mining, oil and gas exploration, and required any fishing industry activity meet conservation goals.
“Internationally, people often look at this treaty system as being very enlightened,” says Claire Christian, executive director of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition. But there is still a need to monitor activity around the continent to ensure the goals of “peace and science” are being maintained.
Different constituents, she and others say, have conflicting opinions about the best way to do this. For some, economic benefits, such as krill fishing, outweigh conservation efforts, such as setting aside waters as protected areas. To others, scientific exploration is worth disrupting ecosystems.
How Antarctica handles these conflicting goals, in the face of global change, can be illustrative.
“It’s a bit of a microcosm for the issue overall,” says Dr. Long. “You have this global commons issue that characterizes the climate change problem. And then you have Antarctica, where various countries have different perspectives.”
And overall, Ms. Christian says, the world needs to care about what happens here – and adjust its climate policies accordingly.
“Antarctica belongs to everyone,” she says. “And everybody in the world has a stake in keeping Antarctica frozen.”
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A federal jury’s $14 million award to Denver protesters hit with pepper balls and a bag filled with lead during 2020 demonstrations over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis could resonate nationwide as courts weigh more than two dozen similar lawsuits.
The jury found police used excessive force against protesters, violating their constitutional rights, and ordered the city of Denver to pay 12 who sued.
Nationwide, there are at least 29 pending lawsuits challenging law enforcement use of force during the 2020 protests, according to a search of the University of Michigan’s Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse.
The verdict in Denver could give cities an incentive to settle similar cases rather than risk going to trial and losing, said Michael J. Steinberg, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and director of the Civil Rights Litigation Initiative. It could also prompt more protesters to sue over their treatment at the hands of police.
“There’s no doubt that the large jury verdict in Denver will influence the outcome of pending police misconduct cases brought by Black Lives Matter protesters across the country,” said Dr. Steinberg, whose law students have been working on a similar lawsuit brought by protesters in Detroit.
Lawyers for the claimants argued that police used indiscriminate force against the nonviolent protesters, including some who were filming the demonstrations, because officers did not like their message critical of law enforcement.
“To the protest of police violence they responded with brutality,” one of their attorneys, Timothy Macdonald, told jurors.
People who took part in the protests have already made similar allegations in lawsuits filed across the country.
In Washington, D.C., activists and civil liberties groups sued over the forcible removal of protesters before then-President Donald Trump walked to a church near the White House for a photo op. The claims against federal officials were dismissed last year but a judge allowed the case against local police to continue.
Several lawsuits alleging protesters were wrongfully arrested or that police used excessive force have been filed against New York City and its police department, including one brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James that claims police used excessive force and wrongfully arrested protesters. In Rochester, New York, people who protested the death of Daniel Prude, a Black man who lost consciousness after being pinned to the street by officers during a mental health call in 2020, claim police used extreme force against them in a lawsuit that also alleges city officials have allowed a culture of police brutality against racial minorities to fester.
One of their attorneys, Donald Thompson, said he plans to raise the Denver award in settlement talks with the city and note that unlike most of the Denver protesters, some of his clients suffered lasting injuries including the loss of an eye and scarring from being hit in the face with a tear gas canister. Mr. Thompson also thinks the Denver verdict shows that the public, in the age of cellphone and body camera videos, is not as willing to give police the benefit of the doubt anymore.
“Now people see how this policing really works. You can’t be naïve,” he said.
A spokesperson for Rochester did not return a call and an email seeking comment. When the case was filed, the city said it had already revised the way police respond to protests.
Over the last two months, the city of Austin, Texas, has agreed to pay a total of $13 million to four people who were hit in the head with bean bag rounds fired by police.
Even before the Denver ruling last week, the police department made some changes in response to criticism that arose from the protests, including eliminating the use of 40mm foam rounds for crowd control and changing the way officers are permitted to use pepper balls.
Denver’s Department of Public Safety, which includes the police department, said in a statement that the city was not prepared for the level of sustained violence and destruction. During the trial, lawyers and witnesses said over 80 officers were injured as some in the crowds hurled rocks, water bottles, and canned food at them.
The department said it continues to evaluate its policies to “better protect peaceful protestors while addressing those who are only there to engage in violence.”
Still, the large award is not expected to lead to an overhaul of how officers respond to what experts say are inherently chaotic situations that are difficult to prepare for.
Ed Obayashi, a use-of-force consultant to law enforcement agencies and a deputy sheriff and legal adviser in Plumas County, California, said society may have to bear the cost of such settlements because innocent people can be injured during protests as outnumbered police try to react on the fly, including to people intent on violence.
“It really goes south in an instant because there are individuals out there who want to cause chaos,” he said.
Mr. Obayashi said there is not much police training for protests, which have been relatively rare. He said it would be prohibitively expensive to have officers practice deploying equipment such as tear gas canisters. Because projectiles used in crowds and considered “less lethal” by police, such as rubber bullets and pepper balls, have less velocity and less power to hurt people, it is harder to ensure they hit their intended target, he said.
Lawyers representing people who have also alleged police misconduct and violation of their constitutional right to protest can now use the Denver damage award as part of their own settlement negotiations, said Mark Silverstein, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented some of the winning Denver protesters.
The decision came nearly two years after thousands of people angry about Mr. Floyd’s death took to the streets nationwide, a relatively quick result for the legal system and soon enough for others who allege misconduct by police to file a claim. In Colorado and many other states, there is a two-year statute of limitations for such lawsuits Mr. Silverstein said, leaving only a few months for others to sue.
The city attorney’s office said it has not decided whether to appeal the verdict, but appeals in such big cases are common, said Gloria Browne-Marshall, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Outside lawyers will also scrutinize the case to try to determine if there are unique circumstances that may have led to a “lightning in a bottle” verdict that is less likely to be repeated.
However, Dr. Browne-Marshall thinks the verdict sends a significant message that regular people respect the right of protest and demand change from the government, which she believes police and prosecutors have been undermining.
“It should send a message to both, but whether or not they listen is a different issue,” Dr. Browne-Marshall said.
This story was reported by The Associated Press.
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Washington Gov. Jay Inslee on Thursday signed into law a bill that creates a first-in-the-nation statewide alert system for missing Indigenous people, to help address a silent crisis that has plagued Indian Country in the state and nationwide.
The law sets up a system similar to Amber Alerts and so-called silver alerts, which are used respectively for missing children and vulnerable adults in many states. It was spearheaded by Democratic Rep. Debra Lekanoff, the only Native American lawmaker currently serving in the Washington state Legislature, and championed by Indigenous leaders statewide.
“I am proud to say that the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women’s and People’s Alert System came from the voices of our Native American leaders,” said Ms. Lekanoff, a member of the Tlingit tribe and the bill’s chief sponsor. “It’s not just an Indian issue, it’s not just an Indian responsibility. Our sisters, our aunties, our grandmothers are going missing every day ... and it’s been going on for far too long.”
Tribal leaders, many of them women, wore traditional hats woven from cedar as they gathered around Governor Inslee for the signing on the Tulalip Reservation, north of Seattle. Afterward they gifted him with a handmade traditional ribbon shirt and several multicolored woven blankets.
The law attempts to address a crisis of missing Indigenous people – particularly women – in Washington and across the United States.
While the law includes missing men, women, and children, a summary of public testimony on the legislation notes that “the crisis began as a women’s issue, and it remains primarily a women’s issue.”
Besides notifying law enforcement when there’s a report of a missing Indigenous person, the new alert system will place messages on highway reader boards and on the radio and social media, and provide information to the news media.
The legislation was paired with another bill Governor Inslee signed Thursday that requires county coroners or medical examiners to take steps to identify and notify family members of murdered Indigenous people and return their remains. That new law also establishes two grant funds for Indigenous survivors of human trafficking.
This piece of the crisis is important because, in many cases, murdered Indigenous women are mistakenly recorded as white or Hispanic by coroners’ offices, never identified, or their remains never repatriated.
A 2021 report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found the true number of missing and murdered Indigenous women in the United States is unknown due to reporting problems, distrust of law enforcement, and jurisdictional conflicts. But Native American women face murder rates almost three times those of white women overall – and up to 10 times the national average in certain locations, according to a 2021 summary of the existing research by the National Congress of American Indians. More than 80% have experienced violence.
In Washington, more than four times as many Indigenous women go missing than white women, according to research conducted by the Urban Indian Health Institute in Seattle, but many such cases receive little or no media attention.
The bill signing began with a traditional welcome song passed down by Harriette Shelton Dover, a cherished cultural leader and storyteller. Ms. Dover recovered and shared many traditions and songs from tribes along Washington’s northern Pacific Coast and worked with linguists before her death in 1991 to preserve her language, Lushootseed, from extinction. Women performed an honor song after the event.
Tulalip Tribes of Washington Chairwoman Teri Gobin said Washington and Montana are the two states with the most missing Indigenous people in the U.S. Nearly four dozen Native people are currently missing in Seattle alone, she said.
“What’s the most important thing is bringing them home, whether they’ve been trafficked, whether they’ve been stolen, or murdered,” she said. “It’s a wound that stays open, and it’s something that we pray with [for] each person, we can bring them home.”
Investigations into missing Indigenous people, particularly women, have been plagued by many issues for decades.
When a person goes missing on a reservation, often there are jurisdictional conflicts between tribal police and local and state law enforcement. A lack of staff and police resources, and the rural nature of many reservations, compound those problems. And many times, families of tribal members distrust non-Native law enforcement or don’t know where to report news of a missing loved one.
An alert system will help mitigate some of those problems by allowing better communication and coordination between tribal and non-tribal law enforcement and creating a way for law enforcement to flag such cases for other agencies. The law expands the definition of “missing endangered person” to include Indigenous people, as well as children and vulnerable adults with disabilities or memory or cognitive issues.
The law takes effect June 9 and some details are still being worked out. For example, it’s unclear what criteria law enforcement will use to positively identify a missing person as Native American and how the information will be disseminated in rural areas, including on some reservations, where highways lack electronic reader boards – or where there aren’t highways at all.
The measure is the latest step Washington has taken to address the issue. The Washington State Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and People Task Force is working to coordinate a statewide response and had its first meeting in December. Its first report is expected in August.
Many states from Arizona to Oregon to Wisconsin have taken recent action to address the crisis of murdered and missing Indigenous women. Efforts range from funding for better resources for tribal police to the creation of new databases specifically targeting missing tribal members. Tribal police agencies that use Amber Alerts for missing Indigenous children include the Hopi and Las Vegas Paiute.
In California, the Yurok Tribe and the Sovereign Bodies Institute, an Indigenous-run research and advocacy group, uncovered 18 cases of missing or slain Native American women in roughly the past year – a number they consider a vast undercount.
An estimated 62% of those cases are not listed in state or federal databases for missing persons.
The law is already drawing attention from other states, whose attorneys general have called to ask how to enact similar legislation, said state Attorney General Bob Ferguson, who called the law “truly groundbreaking.”
“Any time you’re doing something for the first time in this country, that’s an extra heavy lift,” he said. “This most certainly will not be our last reform to make sure that we bring everybody back home. ... There is so much more work that needs to be done and must be done.”
This story was reported by The Associated Press. Gillian Flaccus reported from Portland, Oregon.
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Two ways to read the story
Early one Saturday morning, the vendor hung a pair of bluejeans on his stall in a Johannesburg township. They were a pair of secondhand Levi’s 550s made in Lesotho.
Rorisang Kamoli works in the factories that produce for Levi Strauss & Co. in Lesotho. Years of quality control work has left her thumbnails split open and her fingers calloused. In 2021, a colleague was fatally shot by police as employees protested for their wages to be increased to about $160 a month.
Why We Wrote This
More than 1.25 billion pairs of bluejeans are sold worldwide every year. The round-the-world journey of a single pair of Levi’s made in a factory in Lesotho shines a light on the cost of America’s voracious appetite for fast fashion.
Due to a trade deal, nearly all of Lesotho’s Levi’s end up in the United States, so that pair of jeans had almost certainly traveled to America, where families buy nearly a new closet’s worth of items annually. The jeans were one of those purchases, selling for $70 or so.
But then came the pandemic, with people staying home, elastic waistbands gaining popularity, and clothing donations to secondhand stores spiking by more than 50% in 2020. Donated, but not purchased, the jeans headed back to Africa, where 70% of donated clothes wind up, making it difficult for the continent’s independent garment producers to compete with the influx of used clothing.
After two trips across the ocean, the secondhand jeans sold in South Africa for $10.
Early one Saturday morning, the vendor hung The Jeans on his stall on a dusty street corner in a Johannesburg township. They were a pair of secondhand Levi’s 550s. Straight leg. Relaxed fit. Waist 36, inseam 34. One hundred percent cotton, in a soft, brushed blue. The hems on the left pocket were frayed, and there was a small tear above one belt loop, but otherwise The Jeans could have been new.
People who buy secondhand clothes here see Levi’s as a luxury brand, the vendor knew. A message stamped onto the inside of one of The Jeans’ pockets explained that Levi’s are “an American tradition, symbolizing the vitality of the West to people all over the world.” He could probably sell them for $10.
But however symbolic they are of the American West, The Jeans were also global citizens. A glossy tag stitched inside the right hip read “Made in Lesotho.” Encircled entirely by South Africa, the tiny, mountainous country is about 250 miles away from the market where The Jeans now hung. But instead of a simple overland journey of five hours, these jeans had likely lapped the globe before ending up for resale back in southern Africa.
Why We Wrote This
More than 1.25 billion pairs of bluejeans are sold worldwide every year. The round-the-world journey of a single pair of Levi’s made in a factory in Lesotho shines a light on the cost of America’s voracious appetite for fast fashion.
Across the course of their life, The Jeans probably had their cotton grown in one country, spun and woven into fabric in another, were cut and sewn in a third, and were worn and donated to charity in a fourth, all before ending up here in South Africa, country number five.
That journey from one neighboring African country to another, via an 18,000 mile detour to the United States, is a parable of Africa’s role in the fast-fashion industry, and Americans’ implication in it. The clothing industry, one of the world’s most environmentally destructive, is responsible for 10% of global emissions, more than air travel and maritime shipping combined. Meanwhile the people who make the world’s clothing – mostly women in the Global South – rarely earn above their country’s minimum wage, which is less than $200 a month in many African countries. Yet the continent is increasingly shouldering the burden of both creating America’s clothes, and disposing of them after they finish with them.
Threadbare benefits for workers
Bluejeans are perhaps the modern world’s most popular garment spun from cotton, a plant fiber that has helped shape much of today’s world as we know it.
“Without cotton cloth, we would have no global economy, no staggering social inequality between the Global North and South, no work for women outside the home, and no industrialization, which was all powered by slavery on expropriated and overtaxed land,” argues Maxine Bedat, the author of “Unraveled: The Life and Death of a Garment,” a book about the denim supply chain.
Born in a Nevada tailor’s workshop in the 1870s, denim was popularized by Levi Strauss & Co. as workwear for lumberjacks, cowboys, and railroad workers. By the mid-20th century, jeans had become a leisure item too. Today, an American woman, on average, owns seven pairs of jeans. A whopping 1.25 billion pairs are sold worldwide every year.
Sometime in the last few years, The Jeans were among them.
First, though, they had to be sewn. Based on their “Made in” tag, this particular pair could have been stitched together in only one place, a scruffy industrial district of aluminum factory shells in Maseru, the capital of Lesotho.
Although the southern African country is a minuscule player in the global garment industry, jeans are big business for the country of 2 million. The vast majority of those who work in clothing factories here, like nearly everywhere in the world, are women. So it was almost certainly women in Lesotho who made The Jeans. About 100 of them, because that’s how many people’s hands a pair of jeans passes through, from the moment the roll of denim is unspooled on the factory floor until it’s packed in a shipping container.
What would The Jeans’ first moments of existence have looked like?
They would have been loud. The cavernous interior of a bluejeans factory buzzes like a swarm of flies. Irons hiss. Washing machines clack and clatter. The only thing that’s more or less silent are the workers, hunched over their machines assembling a single item – a belt loop, a pocket, a leg seam – with laser focus, trying to keep pace with targets that run into the hundreds or thousands of pairs daily.
Rorisang Kamoli has worked in the factories that produce for Levi Strauss in Lesotho for more than a decade. She’s slight, in her early 30s, with thick-rimmed Buddy Holly glasses and long braids. If The Jeans passed through her hands, here’s what she would have done. She would have run her fingers over the rivets, those tiny patented bronze buttons sutured to the front pockets of every pair of Levi’s, and the button on the fly. She would have twisted each one, to make sure it was secure, and felt for rough, sharp edges that would make The Jeans dangerous to wear.
Years of this quality control work has left her thumbnails split open and her fingers calloused. Her mind, too, is equally weary, thinking about the people in America who buy these jeans for $69.50 – about half her monthly wage.
“[Americans] just want to wear these products – they don’t care how we are living to make them,” she says.
Among the things she suspects Americans don’t consider: her cracked thumbnail. Whether anyone can raise two children on $150 a month. What it feels like to have a colleague killed in a protest while trying to convince the companies to raise that wage to about $160 a month. The terror of watching half the world swap jeans for sweatpants during a global pandemic, when your life depends on bluejeans.
When Ms. Kamoli was growing up, Lesotho had a different export – its men went to work in the gold, diamond, and platinum mines of neighboring South Africa. But beginning in the 1990s, the mines began to close. The men returned, and, as new garment factories opened, the women went to work.
But the new opportunities made for a bitter independence. “Sometimes I feel angry with jeans. I hate them. Why should I have to work so hard, for a wage that’s not enough, to make a thing like this?” Ms. Kamoli says.
Secondhand imports flood Africa
Lesotho’s garment industry exists in large part thanks to an American trade deal called the African Growth and Opportunities Act, which, since 2001, has allowed Lesotho and three dozen other African countries to import certain goods, including clothes, to the U.S. duty-free.
It also means that nearly all of Lesotho’s Levi’s are America-bound. So it’s fairly safe to say that’s where The Jeans went next. Americans buy clothing voraciously, purchasing dozens of clothing items per year – an average of 68, according to the clothing rental service Rent the Runway.
In the 1950s, American families were spending 10% of their income on clothing, and purchasing just a few items a year. Now that figure is 2%, but thanks to the rise of so-called fast fashion, that amount buys nearly a new closet’s worth of items annually.
For someone, somewhere, The Jeans were one of those many purchases.
Then, along came the pandemic. Around that time, The Jeans and their owner parted ways. Who needed jeans anymore, when pants with an elastic waist existed and you were never leaving your house? Clothing donations spiked by more than 50% in 2020, according to the online secondhand retailer ThredUp.
Because The Jeans were in near-perfect nick, their owner could have been forgiven for thinking they would be a great item to donate to a local Goodwill or Salvation Army. Someone would snatch them right up at a local thrift store, they might have reasoned, and the charity would earn some much-needed cash for its programs.
Except that’s not what happens to most of the clothes Americans donate to charity, and it’s not what happened to The Jeans either.
On average, American charity stores sell just 10% to 20% of the donations they receive. The rest end up in the hands of textile recyclers – companies whose entire reason for being is to make old clothes disappear. They buy charity shop donations by weight, then sort them. About 45% is considered “salable,” that is, high enough quality that it can be worn again, according to the Secondary Materials and Recycled Textiles Association. Another 50% can be made into either rags or insulation, and the worst quality stuff is simply thrown away.
“Watching the process of sorting and grading feels a little like a visit to the slaughterhouse,” wrote George Packer of visiting a textile recycler in Brooklyn.
The Jeans, it’s clear, made the cut for resale. So they were pressed, with hundreds of other pairs, into a cube about the size of a dishwasher, and loaded on another shipping container.
Globally, 70% of donated clothes end up in Africa. But it’s not, as many assume, because Africans are desperate for the rest of the world’s castoffs. In the decades after independence, many African countries had major textile industries of their own. After Western governments and global lenders began putting pressure on those countries to liberalize their economies in the 1980s, trade restrictions fell, and clothing imports from the rest of the world flooded in.
In recent years, some African countries have attempted to fight back. But when a bloc of East African countries banned the import of secondhand clothes in 2016, American textile exporters reacted predictably. They pressured lawmakers, and soon the U.S. was threatening to withdraw the African Growth and Opportunities Act, the trade deal that gives African countries duty-free access to American markets for many goods. In the end, only the central African nation of Rwanda stood its ground.
And so The Jeans probably landed in South Africa’s coastal neighbor Mozambique. Technically, it’s illegal to import any secondhand clothing into South Africa – a move to protect its own clothing factories – but the rule is flagrantly ignored. Truckloads rumble unhindered across its border every day, much of it bound for a single market in downtown Johannesburg.
There, on a four-block stretch of De Villiers Street, wedged between a minibus taxi stand and the city’s main train station, dozens of hawkers sell secondhand clothes from bed-sized bins: heaps of gauzy blouses, T-shirts from American 5K races, vintage dresses, and yes, jeans. “AmaSkinnyJean! AmaSkinnyJean!” they shout, using the Zulu prefix to pluralize words. “Cheap cheap cheap!”
The market also sells to wholesalers like the one who bought The Jeans. He then brought them 20 miles north, to a neighborhood whose name means “Olive Wood Forest” in Afrikaans, although it is a patch of prairie dotted with small houses and tin shacks, with no trees in sight. Like many South African townships – the mostly working class bedroom communities that huddle on the edge of all its cities – Olievenhoutbosch has a clothing market, where every weekend a couple dozen vendors set up shop on a corner near a dusty police station.
One weekend last November, The Jeans were among the clothes on offer.
“How much?” asked a customer.
R150, the vendor answered. $10.
She pulled the bills out of her wallet, Nelson Mandela’s face beaming up from the blue and red notes.
And just like that, The Jeans, and all the stories they carried, belonged to me.
Reporting for this story was supported by The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
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Hungary’s right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is facing his toughest election yet on April 3, against a united opposition led by a Christian conservative. But the war in Ukraine has pushed traditional hot-button issues into the background – and looks likely to boost Europe’s self-styled “illiberal” strongman’s chances at the ballot box.
The war changed the dynamic of the parliamentary campaign, as the opposition seized on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to present Mr. Orbán as Vladimir Putin’s lackey in Europe. It highlighted that Hungary blocked Ukraine’s accession to NATO, and that Mr. Orbán stood alongside Mr. Putin weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine.
Why We Wrote This
For some Hungarians, Viktor Orbán’s close ties to Russia aren’t cause to vote for his opponent. They’re a reason the prime minister is best suited to keep Hungary safe from the war in Ukraine.
But the latest polls suggest Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party could win by a narrow margin. The public’s logic seems to be that Mr. Orbán puts the economic well-being of Hungarian families first and national interests above geopolitical considerations.
“Orbán gave a very smart answer, saying in wartimes the most important thing for Hungarians is not who is responsible for the war and not moral issues,” says Ágoston Mráz, a conservative think tank director. “The question is who can guarantee the freedom and peace of Hungary and through that, the prosperity of Hungary?”
For many right-wing European leaders who have wooed Russian President Vladimir Putin, the war in Ukraine has been a blow to their popularity.
Not so for Viktor Orbán.
The Hungarian prime minister is facing his toughest election yet on April 3, against a united opposition led by a Christian conservative. Before the invasion, the public fretted about COVID-19, high inflation, migration, the defense of traditional family values versus greater LGBTQ rights, and how Budapest’s conflicts with Brussels over rule of law, corruption, and media freedoms might play out. It seemed like a formula for Mr. Orbán’s ouster.
Why We Wrote This
For some Hungarians, Viktor Orbán’s close ties to Russia aren’t cause to vote for his opponent. They’re a reason the prime minister is best suited to keep Hungary safe from the war in Ukraine.
But the conflict in Ukraine has pushed traditional hot-button issues into the background – and looks likely, experts say, to boost Europe’s self-styled “illiberal” strongman’s chances at the ballot box.
The latest polls suggest Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party could win by a narrow margin. The public’s logic seems to be that Mr. Orbán puts the economic well-being of Hungarian families first and national interests above geopolitical considerations.
“We really trust in Viktor Orbán,” says Gyöngyi Bors, a redheaded hairdresser who came with her grandchildren to hear the Hungarian leader speak in Budapest. “As long as he is in power, this country is safe and the people of Hungary are safe. He is reliable. He is authentic. And whenever we go outside Budapest, we see that Hungary is developing in a great way. Everything is getting more and more beautiful. Things are built.”
While Fidesz is expected to win, it is also expected to lose the supermajority it secured in 2018 – which made constitutional changes possible.
“There is room for surprises,” says Stefano Bottoni, a teacher of Eastern European history at the University of Florence and author of a book on Mr. Orbán. “The war totally changed the situation.”
From freedom fighter to Putin’s ally
Mr. Orbán knows how to pivot and nail down messages that resonate with the majority of Hungarians, analysts say. He shot to political fame as an anti-communist freedom fighter who stood in Budapest’s Heroes’ Square in 1989 demanding that Russian troops exit Hungary. It was Mr. Orbán who oversaw Hungary’s accession to NATO in 1999. And for years, he insisted that Hungary should diversify its energy sources and lessen its dependence on Russia.
“We don’t want to be the happiest barracks of Gazprom,” Mr. Orbán declared in 2007 when his Fidesz party was in the opposition.
That fiery antagonism toward Russia ended in 2010, when Mr. Orbán traveled to Moscow and reset relations with Mr. Putin. In the summer of 2014, he declared Russia – along with China and Turkey – as political models to follow, proudly launching Hungary on the path to “illiberal democracy.” Mr. Orbán’s authoritarian tendencies and sweeping reforms are today major points of concern for the European Union.
On the economic front, Mr. Orbán signed a contract with Russia’s Rosatom to expand the Paks Nuclear Power Plant. More recently, he invited the controversial Russian-led International Investment Bank to set up its headquarters in Budapest, reportedly providing diplomatic immunity to its staff even if critics see it as a front for Russian spying. These projects are perceived to be dear to the Hungarian leader’s heart, fruits of a carefully crafted, pragmatic relationship with Mr. Putin.
They are also why he is widely perceived as Mr. Putin’s last ally in Europe.
“That’s not a viable position,” says Dr. Bottoni. “He seemed quite unsure for a couple of days [after the invasion of Ukraine began]. Then he assumed this new position of peace fighter. He has a pass for victory now because he has a new narrative as commander in chief for peace and many Hungarians want to hear this. The war scares people, and Hungary is a border country [with Ukraine].”
“There is moral risk”
The war changed the dynamic of the parliamentary campaign, as the opposition seized on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to present Mr. Orbán as Mr. Putin’s lackey in Europe. It highlighted that Hungary blocked Ukraine’s accession to NATO, and that Mr. Orbán stood alongside Mr. Putin weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine, celebrating their 12th meeting since 2010.
It’s a matter of “East versus West” and democracy versus greater authoritarianism, opposition leaders say.
“Choose Europe, freedom, and growth instead of East, slavery, and deprivation,” urged Péter Márki-Zay, the joint opposition candidate for prime minister at a rally last month. As a small-town mayor and churchgoing father of seven, he embodies the conservative values that resonate with the right-wing Fidesz voter base but also has the support of liberal parties. Many believe he is the country’s best hope to unseat Mr. Orbán.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has also criticized Mr. Orbán in recent days, blaming him for holding back on some sanctions, blocking weapons transfers to Ukraine via Hungary, and importing Russian oil and gas. “There can be no Russian branches in Europe that divide the EU from within, that are trying to help Russia make as much money as possible even now,” Mr. Zelenskyy said Tuesday. “Europe must stop listening to the excuses of Budapest.”
Hungary has come out looking soft relative to the other central European nations. When the prime ministers of the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovenia – which, along with Hungary, form the so-called the Visegrád Group – went to Kyiv to show support for Ukraine earlier this month, Mr. Orbán stayed home. Hungary’s weaker line toward Russia also led the rest of the Visegrád Group to snub a planning meeting of defense ministers in Budapest this week.
Still, Hungary did fall into line with the EU and impose sanctions on Russia. And for all the cozying up to Mr. Putin in recent years, Mr. Orbán has never called into question Hungary’s membership in NATO or the EU per se, analysts note. “We were trying to expand our range of motion,” says Dr. Bottoni. “Until now, it didn’t seem so risky. It seemed even a smart move, playing a bit with the Russians, with the Chinese, imagining a global role for Hungary.”
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine dramatically changed the equation. “It’s not only risky; there is moral risk,” Dr. Bottoni adds. “You are aligning with bloody dictatorships; you are aligning with isolated regimes. You are perceived as a kind of last ally [to Mr. Putin]. And Hungary has a very bad tradition, unfortunately, in the 20th century of standing on the wrong side.”
Remembering the Soviets
The majority of Hungarians are wary of being dragged into the Ukrainian conflict. Hungary was stripped of two-thirds of its territory in the aftermath of World War I. Hungary sided with Nazi Germany in World War II largely because Adolf Hitler offered to return the land. Large swaths of the population still dream of restoring Greater Hungary, a sentiment Mr. Orbán plays on.
“Hungary had to pay a high price for these wars,” says Ágoston Mráz, director of the conservative think tank Nézőpont Intézet. “That is why the sentiment to stay neutral is so strong in society.”
The stakes of a conflict with Russia are clear for the average Hungarian, even if ties between Budapest and Moscow have been at their best under Mr. Orbán, and even if Fidesz media repeats Russian tropes about the Ukrainian conflict. Hungary lived under communist rule until 1989.
“We know what it is like to fight with the Russians,” says Endre Pokasz, a press officer tasked with showing the aircraft museum, upgraded churches, and cultural venues set up under Mr. Orbán in the town of Szolnok. “If anyone thinks the Russians can be beaten easily, they are wrong. Hungary must keep the peace. What if Russia takes revenge on us? We are too small for this. If they close the gas, we will have no heating. Companies will have to stop working. Nothing will work.”
Russia supplies 80% of Hungary’s gas. Mr. Orbán signed a 15-year deal with Gazprom last year. That makes energy prices in Hungary cheaper compared with the rest of Europe. “It is a powerful weapon for Orbán,” says Dr. Bottoni. “We have to do what is good for us. You are paying less for gas and oil. Do you want to pay more? Please vote for the opposition, break down the agreements with the Russians. ... If not, we have to accept that the Russians are our partners. Whatever they do.”
“Orbán gave a very smart answer saying in wartimes, the most important thing for Hungarians is not who is responsible for the war and not moral issues. But the question is who can guarantee the freedom and peace of Hungary, and through that the prosperity of Hungary?” concurs Mr. Mráz.
Victory for the opposition would mean a complete re-orientation of Hungary’s foreign policy toward the West. That is the fervent wish of lawyer Gabor Matlak, in Budapest. Lingering by the banks of the Danube River with his family after the opposition rally, he clung to the flag of Europe.
“We are afraid we will not be part of the EU anymore if Orbán wins again,” he explains. “It is our last chance for Hungary to stay in the European Union and NATO. I think Europe will not tolerate Orbán anymore if we are not strong enough to kick him out.”
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