Lindsey

The legislation includes significant Ukraine aid and a reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act.

Both the House and Senate have finally passed full-year appropriations bills, unlocking billions in aid to Ukraine, infrastructure money, and millions in earmarks.

The $1.5 trillion appropriations package now heads to President Joe Biden’s desk, where he’s expected to sign it. The massive, 12-bill omnibus is the product of months of negotiating between the two parties, as well as a last-minute scramble to remove Covid-19 relief due to concerns some Democrats had about how it would be paid for.

It will provide $13.6 billion in military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, and greenlight new levels of social spending and defense spending after they’ve been locked at Trump-era levels for over a year.

Lawmakers also still have to deal with keeping the government open: Both the House and Senate voted to extend a March 11 funding deadline until next Tuesday, giving themselves more time to navigate procedural hurdles.

What’s in the appropriations bills

The $1.5 trillion appropriations bill contains a 6.7 percent increase in non-defense spending over the previous fiscal year to $730 billion, and a 5.6 percent increase in defense spending to $782 billion. Below are some of the programs that it will fund:

• Ukraine aid: The bill allocates $13.6. billion in humanitarian relief and military support to Ukraine, including funding for refugees, medical supplies, food, and weapons transfers. Such aid is separate from bipartisan trade legislation the House has also passed, which support President Joe Biden’s efforts to curb energy imports from Russia and require a review of Russia’s membership in the World Trade Organization.
• Reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act: The legislation contains $575 million to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, which funds programs that combat domestic abuse and sexual assault. Lawmakers have struggled to renew the bill since it expired in 2019 due to disagreements about gun control provisions, but they’ve since arrived at a compromise that stripped those out.
• Financial aid for college: The bill includes $24.6 billion for federal student aid programs, including funding that increases the maximum Pell grant by $400 to $6,895 per year. That’s the biggest expansion to these grants — which are awarded annually to undergraduate students based on financial need — in 10 years, according to the legislation.
• Food aid programs: The legislation contains $26.9 billion for child nutrition programs, which includes a $1.8 billion boost over the previous year for school lunches and a summer SNAP program. It does not include, however, funding for waivers that would enable schools to offer universal free lunches as they have been able to do during the pandemic.
• Infrastructure money: As Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) noted last month, much of the spending allocated in the infrastructure bill has been held up because it has to be formally approved by Congress first via these appropriations bills. Once the bills are passed, millions in funding for roads and bridges, and other transportation programs, can be funneled out.
• Defense spending: Roughly half the bill is dedicated to funding for the military and national security — including $32.5 billion more than the prior year. This includes money for weapons and transportation systems, veterans’ health care and a 2.7 percent salary increase for service members.
• Earmarks: Beyond the larger expenditures that it contains, the appropriations package also brings the return of earmarks, or the ability for lawmakers to set aside funds for specific projects in their state or district.

In the Senate, these earmarks are now called “congressionally directed spending” and included requests for community centers, fire stations, and airport terminals. In the House, they are called “community project funding,” and included requests for regional water projects, local school programs, and workforce training. There are more than 4,000 earmarks in the omnibus package, The Hill reports.

What comes next

Democrats have announced that they plan to hold a standalone vote on Covid-19 funding next week, but it’s unclear how much Republican support it will be able to garner as a separate bill.

Democrats had decided to drop Covid-19 funding from the omnibus package because their own members disagreed with how it would be paid for. Since Republicans wanted new Covid-19 funds to be offset, lawmakers had agreed to do so by using $8 billion in unspent funding from the American Rescue Plan, which had yet to be sent to different states. Democratic lawmakers from those states, however, fiercely opposed this arrangement — leading it to be removed from the final omnibus.

The decision to strip this funding carries risk. If it’s not ultimately approved, it could severely impede the United States’s response to a new variant, its ability to seek out additional treatments, and its resources for distributing vaccines internationally.

“It is heartbreaking to remove the COVID funding, and we must continue to fight for urgently needed COVID assistance, but unfortunately that will not be included in this bill,” Pelosi wrote in a letter on Wednesday.

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Republican judges appear unwilling to acknowledge that they do not command the United States military.

The United States Navy requires nearly all of its uniformed personnel to be vaccinated against Covid-19. Well over 99 percent of active-duty US sailors have complied with this requirement, leaving only a handful who refuse to obey a direct order.

Yet, rather than facing the consequences that typically face a service member who defies a lawful order from a superior, several Navy personnel who didn’t want the vaccine found Republican judges willing to exempt them from the Navy’s policy. The result is a pitched legal fight over just who is in command of the military: President Joe Biden and the array of civilian officials and military officers who answer to him as commander-in-chief, or a judiciary dominated by Republicans.

Last January, Judge Reed O’Connor, a former GOP Capitol Hill staffer known for his failed attempts to repeal Obamacare and to undermine marriage rights for same-sex couples, ruled in favor of 35 Naval special warfare personnel, 26 of whom are SEALs, who sought a religious exemption from the vaccination policy. Then, in late February, an especially right-wing panel of the conservative United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit refused to stay O’Connor’s decision. This first case is called U.S. Navy SEALs 1-26 v. Biden.

In mid-February, meanwhile, Judge Steven Merryday, a George H.W. Bush appointee, granted similar relief to two officers who claim that their religion requires them to defy the order to get vaccinated. That case is called Navy SEAL 1 v. Austin.

These decisions are egregiously wrong under current law. As the Supreme Court held in Goldman v. Weinberger (1986), “the essence of military service ‘is the subordination of the desires and interests of the individual to the needs of the service.’” Accordingly, the Court has consistently called upon judges to defer to military commanders, and ultimately to elected officials charged with overseeing the military, in cases impacting military readiness.

And, lest there be any doubt, O’Connor’s and Merryday’s decisions are already undermining US national security. None of the Navy personnel in the suits have been vaccinated while waiting for their cases to play out. And Merryday issued an excessively broad order forbidding the Navy from taking “any adverse or retaliatory action ... in conjunction with” the plaintiffs’ requests for religious exemptions.

As Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern reports, one of these two plaintiffs is the commander of a $1.8 billion warship. The Navy wants to remove this officer from his command due to a pattern of insubordination, disregard for the safety of men and women under his command, and dishonesty toward his superiors, including meeting in person with dozens of other Navy personnel while he was infected with Covid-19.

That has led to a standoff between military commanders, who refuse to deploy this officer’s ship until he is removed from command, and Judge Merryday, who insists that nothing can be done to its insubordinate commander. For the time being, that means that a 10,000-ton destroyer and the 320 Naval personnel who work on that vessel are, in the administration’s words, “indefinitely sideline[d].”

The Biden administration formally asked the Court to issue a partial stay of O’Connor’s decision on Monday, asking the justices to block O’Connor’s order to the extent that it “usurps the Navy’s authority to decide which service members should be deployed” on which missions. And it is likely that the Supreme Court will eventually step in and reverse O’Connor and Merryday.

The Court recently upheld a federal rule requiring most health care workers to get vaccinated, and health care workers, unlike members of the military, do not literally sign away their right to refuse a direct order. The Court has also fairly consistently turned away health care workers seeking religious exemptions from vaccine mandates.

But until someone provides adult supervision to O’Connor and Merryday, these two Republican judges will continue to behave as if they, and not President Biden, sit at the apex of the military’s chain of command.

O’Connor’s and Merryday’s orders undermine national security

In the past, the Supreme Court has been crystal clear that judges are not supposed to interfere with the military’s judgments about which service members should be deployed on which missions. As the Court held in Gilligan v. Morgan (1973), “it is difficult to conceive of an area of governmental activity in which the courts have less competence” than “the complex, subtle, and professional decisions as to the composition, training, equipping, and control of a military force.”

The Navy’s senior commanders, moreover, have been equally clear that O’Connor’s and Merryday’s orders undermine national security.

Consider, for example, a statement from Capt. Frank Brandon, the direct superior of the insubordinate destroyer commander (the destroyer commander is not identified by name in court filings). According to Capt. Brandon, this commander reported to work for two days while he was experiencing Covid-19 symptoms, and even spoke at a briefing attended by 50-60 other Navy personnel. Yet he didn’t even get tested for Covid-19 until Brandon ordered him to do so. Then the commander tested positive.

Similarly, Brandon says that this commander “intentionally deceived me” regarding where he would travel when he took leave from his ship.

Capt. Brandon’s statement is supplemented by another from Vice Admiral Daniel Dwyer, commander of the Navy’s Second Fleet, who says that “under no circumstances would the Navy typically deploy a commander in an operational capacity with whom his or her superior officers have such reservations.” But, thanks to Judge Merryday’s order, neither Brandon nor Dwyer can remove this insubordinate officer from command.

Or consider the words of Adm. William Lescher, the Navy’s second-highest uniformed officer in the Navy, regarding why O’Connor’s order is particularly harmful to military readiness.

Among other things, Lescher explains that many Navy vessels have only limited medical personnel and health care facilities. So, if a member of the ship’s crew becomes seriously ill, that “would require a return to port or an emergency medical evacuation by helicopter” — potentially forcing the entire ship to accommodate one unvaccinated service member.

Special forces personnel, moreover, often deploy in very small units, so one member becoming sick can be a big blow to the team. And, the Navy argued, special operations “are often conducted in hostile, austere or diplomatically sensitive environments” where a severely ill service member might not be able to obtain local medical care and may need to be evacuated by the Navy — an operation that is itself dangerous and that could force the sick service member’s fellow sailors to risk their lives on his or her behalf.

For these reasons, the Navy typically disqualifies personnel with fairly minor health risks from special warfare duties altogether. As the Justice Department explains in its brief, “the long list of disqualifying conditions includes, for example, certain forms of sleep apnea, severe allergies, dental issues requiring frequent care, and any condition requiring frequent medication.”

And yet, O’Connor’s order forces the Navy to deploy special operations personnel that the military has determined are medically unsuitable for such work. According to the Justice Department, O’Connor’s order forced the Navy to send one of the plaintiffs “to Hawaii for duty on a submarine against its military judgment.”

O’Connor’s and Merryday’s orders are egregiously wrong

Ordinarily, when someone claims that the federal government has burdened their religious beliefs, they may sue the government under a statute known as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which provides that the federal government may not “substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion” unless it does so “in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest” and uses the “least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.”

The Biden administration persuasively argues in its brief that preventing the spread of Covid-19 and ensuring military readiness are both compelling interests, and that a vaccine mandate is the least restrictive way of achieving these goals. But it really shouldn’t even need to make this argument, because the Court has repeatedly held that judges should be exceedingly reluctant to question the military’s decisions regarding its personnel.

The Court has held that judges should defer to the military even when such deference limits the constitutional rights of potential service members. Ordinarily, for example, the Court has held that “a party seeking to uphold government action based on sex must establish an ‘exceedingly persuasive justification’ for the classification.” In Rostker v. Goldberg (1981), however, the Court permitted the Selective Service System to discriminate against men by requiring them, and not women, to register for the draft.

In fact, the Court has specifically held that judges should defer to the military when a service member claims that their religious liberties are burdened by an order from a superior. That was the holding of Goldman, which held that a Jewish officer was not exempt from an Air Force regulation prohibiting him from wearing a yarmulke, the traditional Jewish skullcap, while he was indoors.

“Our review of military regulations challenged on First Amendment grounds is far more deferential than constitutional review of similar laws or regulations designed for civilian society,” the Court explained in Goldman, adding that granting an exemption would undermine service members’ “habit of immediate compliance with military procedures and orders” — a habit that “must be virtually reflex with no time for debate or reflection.”

In fairness, Goldman was decided nearly four decades ago, and the Court’s current majority is far more sympathetic to the concerns of religious objectors than the justices who sat in the 1980s. And generally, the Court’s deference to the executive branch on national security might merit some reevaluation. But the Court concluded as recently as 2018 that judges should defer to the president on matters of national security, even when religious liberty is at stake.

That was the holding of Trump v. Hawaii (2018), which upheld former President Donald Trump’s policy preventing people from several predominantly Muslim nations from entering the United States. “‘Any rule of constitutional law that would inhibit the flexibility’ of the President ‘to respond to changing world conditions,’” the Court explained in Hawaii, “‘should be adopted only with the greatest caution,’ and our inquiry into matters of entry and national security is highly constrained.”

All of which is a long way of saying that O’Connor’s and Merryday’s decisions have no basis in law.

Something needs to be done to prevent rogue judges from issuing lawless orders that bind the entire country

It is likely, for a variety of reasons, that the Supreme Court will not tolerate O’Connor’s and Merryday’s orders. Though the Court 6-3 Republican majority struck down a Biden administration rule requiring most workers to get vaccinated, it has otherwise shown a degree of moderation in vaccination cases. Among other things, the Court has consistently rejected requests from religious objectors claiming that their faith entitles them to remain unvaccinated, despite a state or federal policy requiring vaccination.

Similarly, while the Court’s current majority appears eager to rewrite many longstanding legal doctrines, they’ve given few outward signs that they will overrule the many previous Court decisions warning judges not to micromanage the military.

But O’Connor’s and Merryday’s orders highlight a pervasive problem within the judiciary. It is too easy for litigants to shop around for sympathetic judges who are willing to issue orders that most judges would conclude are lawless. And it takes far too long for the Biden administration to secure an order from a higher court overturning these rogue judges’ decisions.

Moreover, while the Supreme Court may step in to halt truly egregious decisions by conservative judges like O’Connor and Merryday, the fact that the Court is dominated by movement conservatives creates a partisan imbalance. When Republican judges issue dubious orders blocking Democratic policies, the Court often lets those orders remain in effect for months — if not forever. When lower court judges block Republican policies, by contrast, the Roberts Court frequently intervenes with great alacrity.

Oddly enough, archconservative Justice Neil Gorsuch offered one of the most persuasive arguments against allowing a single federal judge to block a federal policy on a nationwide basis in 2020.

“There are currently more than 1,000 active and senior district court judges, sitting across 94 judicial districts, and subject to review in 12 regional courts of appeal,” Gorsuch wrote. If every one of these judges can halt any federal policy, he added, then “the government’s hope of implementing any new policy could face the long odds of a straight sweep, parlaying a 94-to-0 win in the district courts into a 12-to-0 victory in the courts of appeal.”

Hundreds of judges could potentially uphold a policy, but if the government is handed “a single loss,” then “the policy goes on ice.”

It’s unclear whether Gorsuch is still bothered by these kinds of single-judge, nationwide injunctions now that a Democrat is in the White House. But if Gorsuch and others like him want to prevent judges like O’Connor and Merryday from declaring themselves commander-in-chief, there’s a fairly straightforward policy solution.

As law professor Steven Vladeck writes, Congress or the Court could require all lawsuits seeking to block a federal policy to be heard by a three-judge panel, rather than by a single judge. And the government could also gain the power to transfer these cases to a federal court in DC — thus preventing plaintiffs from shopping around for sympathetic judges.

Such a policy could be implemented by Congress, but it could also potentially be implemented by the justices themselves. Federal law provides that “the Supreme Court shall have the power to prescribe general rules of practice and procedure” for federal courts.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The ice cream machines used by a majority of McDonald’s franchise owners are notoriously flaky. Produced by Taylor Restaurant Equipment, the machines are so unreliable even the McDonald’s corporate Twitter account has made jokes about them.

This unreliability has created a (very small) cottage industry of solutions. One solution is web-based: it simply tells you which ice cream machines are down, allowing customers to avoid wasting a trip to their local franchise in search of a product that can’t be acquired at the moment.

Another solution was created by Melissa Nelson and Jeremy O’Sullivan. It’s called “Kytch.” It’s a phone-sized gadget that unscrambles the purposely inscrutable error codes generated by Taylor Restaurant Equipment ice cream machines, allowing franchisees to troubleshoot issues without having to call in a Taylor service tech at their own expense. It also allows franchisees to track problem over time to head off future problems and/or address recurring problems.

Taylor doesn’t like this. It has a lucrative contract with McDonald’s that pretty much ensures franchisees are locked into both the machines and their service contracts. The worse the machines perform, the more money Taylor makes. McDonald’s ensures Taylor’s profitability by only allowing certain equipment to be purchased and used by franchise owners. If owners decide to use unapproved equipment, McDonald’s has the power to terminate contracts and eject franchisees. In most cases, McDonald’s owns the land under the restaurant, which gives it considerable leverage when it comes to enforcing contracts.

Kytch had the potential to change the game for franchise owners by saving money on unneeded service calls and generating more revenue with increased up time. Taylor didn’t care for this at all. It managed to secure a device from Kytch through some (alleged) subterfuge and set about making its own (presumably much more expensive) version to sell to franchise owners. It also secured a lawsuit from Kytch over its anti-competitive behavior and (again, alleged) deliberate deception. And that lawsuit has resulted in a temporary restraining order against Taylor — something that followed the Federal Trade Commission opening up a preliminary investigation of McDonald’s and Taylor’s inability to produce soft-serve ice cream on a regular basis.

Now, it’s time for McDonald’s to get sued. Kytch’s co-founders have filed a lawsuit against the company, again alleging anti-competitive behavior and other shady dealings by the most recognizable fast food franchise in the world. This news comes via Andy Greenberg, writing for Wired.

Late Tuesday night, Kytch filed a long-expected legal complaint against McDonald’s, accusing the company of false advertising and tortious interference in its contracts with customers. Kytch’s cofounders, Melissa Nelson and Jeremy O’Sullivan, are asking for no less than $900 million in damages.

$900 million is a big ask, no matter what the claims are. But Kytch had a potential market of nearly 20,000 franchises in North America alone. And that market has been completely destroyed by Taylor Restaurant Machines and its primary enabler, McDonald’s. Rather than allow a third-party to address a problem Taylor obviously feels is more profitable to ignore, McDonald’s and its soft-serve machinery provider of choice colluded to lock Kytch out of the market.

Apparently, McDonald’s and Taylor believe this is an acceptable failure rate. (Screenshot taken at 11:00 am CST, March 6, 2022.)

Nearly 13% of the machines in the nation are down. And that percentage is likely on the low side. The rate is much higher in major cities where a higher number of customers means more accurate reporting of machine downtime. Unbelievably, this 13% is likely an undercount, what with less-populated areas having yet to discover the machine is down and/or report it. And it’s unlikely many people is time zones further west are seeking ice cream at 9 or 10 in the morning.

The first lawsuit filed by Kytch, which targeted alleged Taylor wrongdoing, has given the company access to a large number of internal communications between McDonald’s and the soft-serve machine maker. And those communications have indicated McDonald’s is at least just as culpable in Kytch’s ejection from the market as Taylor is. In fact, it’s beginning to look like McDonald’s did more to lock Kytch out than Taylor did.

Kytch’s cofounders have hinted that they intended to use the discovery process in their lawsuit against Taylor to dig up evidence for a suit against McDonald’s too. In fact, the 800 pages of internal Taylor emails and presentations that Kytch has so far obtained in discovery show that it was McDonald’s, not Taylor, that at many points led the effort to study and develop a response to Kytch in 2020. In February of that year, Taylor president Jeremy Dobrowolski wrote in an email that “McDonald’s is all hot and heavy about this,” referring to Kytch’s growing adoption. A McDonald’s executive later asked for a conference call with Taylor in June of that year to discuss Kytch. When McDonald’s shared with Taylor a draft of the Kytch-killing email it planned to send franchisees, a Taylor executive commented to a colleague that “I am a bit in shock they are willing to take such a strong position.”

This is how the lawsuit [PDF] details just a small portion of the allegations against McDonald’s:

Kytch was the only product on the market that was positioned to fix the soft-serve machines at McDonald’s. Kytch soon gained market dominance after the largest organization of independent McDonald’s operators—the National Owners Association (“NOA”)—endorsed Kytch at its national conference.

McDonald’s took note and met with Taylor after the endorsement. According to Taylor’s internal emails, “McDonald’s [was] putting all of their eggs in this basket to fight Kytch” because “[t]hey have nothing else ready from their own IT Team.”

In the days that followed, McDonald’s Director of Equipment, Mike Zagorski, directed that “[t]hings need to go much faster” with Taylor’s Open Kitchen development, which was moving at a “turtle[’]s pace.” McDonald’s also warned Taylor that independent restaurant operators were demanding that McDonald’s integrate Kytch into the McDonald’s system. This threatened to undermine Taylor’s longstanding service and repair racket that the new Open Kitchen device was being designed to protect. McDonald’s and Taylor needed to buy more time to get Open Kitchen to the market.

To that end, McDonald’s and Taylor worked together to create a stall tactic. Together they fabricated bogus “safety” claims to mislead Kytch’s customers into believing that safety testing determined that the Kytch Solution would cause “serious human injury” to users—claims that are, and that McDonald’s and Taylor both knew at the time to be, demonstrably false.

Emails sent franchisees from McDonald’s corporate offices stated two things: Taylor was coming up with its own version of Kytch (a “strategic connectivity solution” that would “allow operators to receive text notifications” when their machines went down and “provide data on products dispensed”) and that franchise owners using Kytch would “completely void any existing OEM equipment warranty.”

The email also claimed — literally unbelievably — that Kytch devices allowed devices to keep running even when opened for cleaning and repair, which could lead to employees being injured. Kytch calls bullshit on this claim, which its refers to as disparagement and defamation of the upstart company.

[F]ar from being comparatively more dangerous than Taylor’s competing device, the Kytch Solution integrates (and is constrained by) the softserve machines’ safety mechanisms. For example, when the freezer door is removed exposing interior parts of the machine that might create a safety risk, a magnetic interlock system disables motor function to protect the operator from injury, and Kytch cannot operate the machine remotely. Thus, while Kytch does have the ability to remotely control the machine, it is limited by Taylor’s existing control mechanisms—including this magnetic interlock system—to ensure safety.

The lawsuit alleged McDonald’s deliberately misled franchisees to ensure Taylor’s market dominance. How locking itself into a single provider directly benefits McDonald’s isn’t entirely clear. But it clearly benefits Taylor. According to the lawsuit, service contracts account for 25% of Taylor’s annual revenue. Whatever the reasons for McDonald’s actions, its desire to eliminate Kytch prompted it to make seemingly false claims about the safety of the device. Worse, its actions have forced franchisees to throw money away on service contracts with a company whose machines are so unreliable they’ve become the source of McDonald’s corporate punchlines. And that makes this lock-in look more like extortion than a mutually beneficial relationship between franchisees and the corporation overseeing them.

The Smithsonian plans to drop its requirement that visitors wear masks while visiting its museums and the National Zoo. The mandate will end on Friday, March 11, the institution announced Monday. Following a Omicron-inspired reduction in open hours, Smithsonian museums are ramping up their availability; the National Museum of Natural History and the National Zoo […]

Non-Ukrainian refugees are trapped between racism and Cold War geopolitics.

An estimated 1 million people have already fled Russia’s war on Ukraine, and many European Union nations are welcoming Ukrainians with open arms. But non-Ukrainian citizens face an uncertain immediate future: Some have had difficulty trying to flee, and those who’ve managed to cross the border may not be able to find refuge in the European Union, at least for the long term.

That has put foreigners who adopted Ukraine as their home in a difficult situation, one aggravated by longstanding political and social factors, including the continuing embrace of Cold War policy, the inherent limits of the European Union’s will to welcome non-Europeans, and pervasive (though not necessarily overt) racism.

The EU and United Nations have been adamant that anyone who wants to leave Ukraine should be allowed to do so. But on the ground, a number of non-Ukrainians of color, including Africans, Afghans, and Yemenis, have reported facing discrimination while waiting in line at the border and while trying to access critical resources. While official statistics on the number of non-Ukrainian refugees facing such issues haven’t yet been compiled, the sheer volume of troubling reports has led to rebukes from United Nations diplomats and refugee officials.

The EU recently issued a framework for member countries to process non-Ukrainian refugees. All member states agreed on Thursday to allow some non-Ukrainians to automatically obtain asylum through the same pathway as Ukrainian citizens. But it’s not clear just how many non-Ukrainians will have access to the program, and which will need to return to their countries of origin. For some, that uncertainty — as well as the prospect of having to go back to their home countries — is daunting.

“I thought my whole life would be in Ukraine. My family doesn’t know who I am anymore,“ one medical student from Morocco, whose name is being withheld to protect their safety, told Vox. “Morocco isn’t as safe as everyone thinks, especially when it comes to expressing political opinions.”

It’s not yet clear whether Morocco will be deemed risky enough for that student to gain access to the newly announced asylum program. And that lack of clarity is a reminder that the EU’s current open-arms approach to Ukrainian refugees is an exception to the continent’s refugee policy, not an indication of a paradigm shift. After a record 1.3 million people sought asylum in Europe in 2015 alone, Europe became more hostile to people seeking refuge at its doorstep, including Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis, and sub-Saharan Africans. Having lived for a time in Ukraine isn’t likely to shield anyone from that reality.

Race is certainly a factor in Europe’s stance toward Ukrainian refugees. Countries have been much more willing to accept refugees who are perceived as white than those who are not. But it’s not the only factor. Unlike other refugee crises in the recent past, Russia’s assault on Ukraine involves geopolitics that go beyond the immediate conflict.

Not all fleeing the war get the same treatment leaving Ukraine

While everyone fleeing Ukraine has encountered long lines at the borders, often without adequate access to basic necessities and services, some non-Ukrainians have faced particularly poor treatment. Reports include African refugees being pushed to the back of the lines at the border by Ukrainian soldiers or by others trying to flee. Some were even reportedly turned away at hotels in cities close to the Polish border.

Poland has suggested that these reports are inaccurate. Polish Ambassador to the UN Krzysztof Szczerski has said that his country allows anyone who arrives at the border to cross, even without a valid visa or passport, and that arriving refugees have represented nearly 125 nationalities. “The nationals of all countries who suffered from Russian aggression or whose life is at risk can seek shelter in my country,” he said at a UN General Assembly meeting on Monday.

But those on the ground have told a different story. Many refugees of color who’ve succeeded in crossing the border say they did so only after multiple attempts, and after being deprioritized in favor of white Ukrainians.

“It was just a blanket bias against foreigners to favor Ukrainians and allow them to cross the border and access help first,” Asya, a Kenyan national who was studying medicine in Ukraine, told Vox.

Ethan Swope/Bloomberg via Getty Images

And it’s not just an issue faced by Black refugees. There have been reports of Afghans being turned away, and advocates have shared narratives of Yemeni students facing extreme violence.

Diplomats and world leaders have spoken out against these incidents and cited global commitments the European Union must follow during times of crisis.

“We strongly condemn this racism and believe that it is damaging to the spirit of solidarity that is so urgently needed today,” Kenyan Ambassador to the UN Martin Kimani said Monday at the security council meeting.

But for many migration advocates and people trying to flee Ukraine, these difficulties reflect broader issues with how Europe treats migrants.

Race and geopolitics are playing a role in the scale of Europe’s response

It’s clear that race and identity have affected Europe’s response to this refugee crisis. At least one European political leader has stressed that they feel Ukrainians’ perceived whiteness, tendency toward Christianity, and “Europeanness” makes them more palatable than past refugee populations.

“These people are Europeans,” Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov said last week. “These people are intelligent. They are educated people. ... This is not the refugee wave we have been used to, people we were not sure about their identity, people with unclear pasts, who could have been even terrorists.”

Rhetoric like Petkov’s hasn’t arisen in a vacuum. It is very much a consequence of the 2015 arrival of Syrians — who, similar to Ukrainians, were fleeing an authoritarian leader destroying their country.

Between 2014 and 2016, millions of Syrians, North Africans, and others arrived in Europe. Some countries, though not all, initially welcomed them. Then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel arguably staked her political career on her decision to open her country’s doors; 1.7 million people applied for asylum in Germany in the five years after. But the influx of people — and the public debates over how to handle those Syrians — helped fuel the rise of populist, anti-immigration, euroskeptic, and far-right parties across Europe.

Andreas Gebert/picture alliance via Getty Images

The rise of those parties not only led to Europe embracing a more nativist stance on migration but also struck fear in politicians who might have previously been more welcoming. Governing parties such as French President Emmanuel Macron’s La République en Marche have become hawkish on migration in recent years, and in 2020, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen praised Greece as Europe’s “shield” against asylum seekers and migrants.

To this day, migration remains politically fraught in Europe. It’s recently manifested in Poland deciding to deploy troops and construct a $400 million wall to repel predominantly Muslim asylum seekers at its border with Belarus. To complicate the situation, Belarus was accused of transporting those asylum seekers to the Polish border with false promises of easy passage as a means of antagonizing the EU over sanctions imposed in 2020. And Hungary has passed laws criminalizing support for asylum seekers and limiting the right to asylum; it’s also allowed police to automatically expel any unauthorized migrants — all measures predominantly affecting Muslims.

History and foreign policy are two other elements driving the disparate treatment of Ukrainians and non-Ukrainians. The so-called Refugee Convention, signed in 1951 by 145 nations, was initially meant to protect people who had been displaced as a result of World War II in Europe. But it became a weapon Europe used to fight the Cold War, as countries began to use it as a legal framework to absorb people who wanted to leave Soviet bloc countries.

“It became a way, from a political and moral kind of narrative, to project this idea of the West being better than the East,” said Nando Sigona, chair of international migration and forced displacement at the University of Birmingham.

The EU’s decision to absorb Ukrainians is a continuation of that idea. It allows Europe to position itself as a safe bastion for peaceful, democracy-loving people fleeing for their lives from a dangerous and authoritarian Russia.

But when it comes to refugees from other parts of the globe, Europe has become less interested in investing in resettlement. That’s because those refugees don’t do much to advance the continent’s geopolitical interests, Sigona said. Certainly, Europe wants to be seen as a benevolent power and leader on humanitarian issues. But accepting refugees from sub-Saharan Africa or Yemen doesn’t serve its objective of advancing the supremacy of Western-style democracies over the Russian political system.

“What we’re seeing with Ukraine now is very much a return to the Cold War kind of logic,” Sigona said.

Beyond the political considerations, there are also practical issues driving the European response to the refugee crisis. Neighboring European countries are the closest landing spot for Ukrainians who are fleeing, and those Ukrainians currently don’t have a country to go back to. Non-Ukrainians (in some but not all cases, given crises in countries like Yemen or Ethiopia) arguably do.

“We don’t really have another choice to respond to this crisis because these people are going to come to Europe,” said Camille Le Coz, a senior policy analyst for the Migration Policy Institute Europe.

What’s next for non-Ukrainians fleeing the war?

All 27 EU member states have agreed to adopt a directive that instantly grants temporary protection to Ukrainian citizens and some others fleeing Russia’s invasion. It would give them the right to live and work in the European Union for up to three years without going through the EU’s long asylum process that has historically left thousands of refugees in limbo, as well as access to social welfare assistance, medical assistance, and childhood education.

The fate of non-Ukrainians is less clear, however.

Beata Zawrzel/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

The EU is not offering automatic protection to most of them. That’s partly because Poland, among several other member countries, does not want to host non-Ukrainians long term.

People who had long-term residency permits in Ukraine would be eligible for that automatic protection. But to otherwise qualify for protection, non-Ukrainians, including stateless individuals, must prove that they were legally residing in Ukraine and are unable to return to their home countries due to the lack of “safe and durable conditions.” It’s not clear how EU countries will determine what constitutes those kinds of conditions.

They could also apply for asylum through lengthy, traditional pathways, but there’s no guarantee that they will get it. And without legal status in the EU, they could potentially be forcibly returned to their home countries.

“For example, if you’re a Moroccan student, the idea is you go back home. If you’re an Indian student, you go back home,” said Le Coz. “But if you’re an Afghan refugee — because there were some Afghans who had sought refuge in Ukraine or have been evacuated there — it means you can seek asylum in Poland.”

The policy has left many non-Ukrainians unsure how to regain the opportunities they’d hoped Ukraine would provide. Ali Sadaka, a dentistry student from Lebanon who was studying in Kharkiv, was reluctant to halt his studies and return home.

“We didn’t want to stop. Most Lebanese students don’t have any other opportunities, mainly because our government won’t help us to continue here. There’s an economic crisis,” he told Vox.

And for nationals of countries currently involved in conflict, there’s been uncertainty as well. Though Yemenis should receive protection under the EU’s plan, the Yemeni Embassy in Poland posted a statement on February 26 implying that resettlement in the EU would be difficult. There’s been no further information since.

Ultimately, though, non-Ukrainian refugees “now have to figure out what they are going to do with their lives,” as Azal Al-Salafi, a researcher at Yemen Policy Center, told Vox. And they have limited time to do so.

Read 20 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The CIA’s worst-kept secret will remain a “state secret.”

There’s no reasonable doubt that Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, a Palestinian man who is often referred to as “Abu Zubaydah,” was held by the Central Intelligence Agency at a black site in Poland. Nor is there reasonable doubt that he was tortured at this black site.

Nevertheless, the Supreme Court held on Thursday, in United States v. Husayn a.k.a. Zubaydah, that these widely reported facts are “state secrets,” and that the US government may refuse to confirm or deny them.

The upshot of the Zubaydah decision is that the Court prioritized somewhat vague concerns about national security — that foreign governments might lose faith in the United States if the US government reveals “secret” programs that aren’t really secret — over getting to the bottom of a gross human rights violation.

The facts of the Zubaydah case are horrific. Zubaydah was captured in Pakistan in 2002, and American officials incorrectly believed him to be a top al-Qaeda leader. In a vain effort to extract information that he did not possess, Zubaydah was taken to a black site in Thailand and then another in Poland, where he was repeatedly waterboarded, locked in a coffin-sized box for hundreds of hours, deprived of sleep, and forced to remain in “stress positions,” among other similar tactics.

Eventually, in 2006, the CIA concluded that it had made a mistake. Zubaydah, according to the intelligence agency, “was not a member of al Qaeda.” Nevertheless, he remains a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Zubaydah case itself arises out of a Polish investigation into Zubaydah’s treatment. In 2010, Zubaydah’s lawyers and several human rights organizations filed a criminal complaint in Poland, asking for an investigation into Polish officials who may have contributed to Zubaydah’s mistreatment. Though Zubaydah’s complaint initially achieved little, Polish prosecutors reopened the investigation after the European Court of Human Rights determined that “the treatment to which [he] was subjected by the CIA during his detention in Poland ... amount[ed] to torture.”

To aid Poland’s investigation, Zubaydah’s lawyers asked a US court to compel two psychologists and former CIA contractors, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, to testify regarding how Zubaydah was treated in Poland. Mitchell and Jessen helped develop the torture techniques used by the CIA — indeed, their company was paid $81 million to devise these techniques and to oversee their use. Zubaydah’s lawyers also sought documents from Mitchell and Jessen related to Zubaydah’s torture.

A federal appeals court pointed to the overwhelming public evidence — including a 712-page unclassified version of the landmark Senate torture report, a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights examining the Polish torture site, and declassified CIA communications — confirming that Zubaydah was, in fact, tortured by the CIA in Poland. The appeals court concluded that at least some of the information sought by the man’s lawyers should be turned over. Although the federal government may sometimes conceal military and other national security secrets under a doctrine known as the “state secrets” privilege, Judge Richard Paez wrote that “in order to be a ‘state secret,’ a fact must first be a ‘secret.’”

Thursday’s Supreme Court decision reverses Paez, concluding that “sometimes information that has entered the public domain may nonetheless fall within the scope of the state secrets privilege.”

The crux of the Supreme Court’s decision: Foreign governments need to be able to trust US promises

The Zubaydah case produced a maze of concurring opinions, partial dissents, and full dissents. And the justices divided on fairly unfamiliar lines. Justice Stephen Breyer, a left-leaning Clinton appointee, wrote the Court’s main opinion. Justice Neil Gorsuch, an archconservative Trump appointee, dissented — in an opinion joined by liberal Obama appointee Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

In any event, Gorsuch spends several pages of his dissent laying out the overwhelming weight of evidence confirming that Zubaydah was tortured by the CIA in Poland. Here’s a small excerpt:

As far back as 2007, the Council of Europe issued a lengthy report finding that the CIA held Zubaydah at a black site in Poland after his capture. In 2012, Aleksander Kwasniewski, the President of Poland from 1995 to 2005, told reporters that the CIA site was established “with [his] knowledge.” In 2014, the European Court of Human Rights found “beyond reasonable doubt” that Zubaydah was detained in Poland from December 2002 until September 2003. In support of its conclusion, the ECHR cited evidence spanning over 100 pages, including declassified flight records, Polish governmental records, and eyewitness testimony.

Additionally, a 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report detailed the CIA’s use of torture. Though the full report is classified, Zubaydah’s name appears 1,343 times in an unclassified executive summary of that report and its accompanying documents.

Despite the weight of all this evidence, the Supreme Court concluded that the federal government can refuse to “confirm or deny whether Poland had cooperated with the CIA.”

To justify this decision, Breyer points to a declaration by former CIA director Michael Pompeo arguing that America’s “‘sensitive’ relationships with other nations are ‘based on mutual trust that the classified existence and nature of the relationship will not be disclosed.’” If the US government confirmed that Zubaydah was tortured in Poland, that would “breach” this trust and threaten the United States’ ability to convince foreign governments to cooperate in the future.

Or, as Justice Elena Kagan argued in a separate opinion concurring with most, but not all, of Breyer’s approach, “official confirmation would conflict with commitments the Government has made to foreign intelligence services to never disclose clandestine relationships,” and foreign governments need to be able to trust the United States’ promises.

The Court — or, at least, its Republican majority — isn’t always so concerned about ensuring the United States keeps its promises to foreign governments. Just last August, the Court effectively forced the Biden administration to resume a controversial program requiring many Central American asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while they pursue their asylum claims in the United States. The Court did so, moreover, despite the fact that the Biden administration told the Mexican government that it would end this program.

Nevertheless, the Zubaydah case concludes with a bloodless, pragmatic assessment of national security interests, even when that assessment requires the Court to turn a blind eye to an atrocity.

It’s unclear just how much this decision will prevent anyone from understanding what happened to Zubaydah in Poland. As Breyer notes, “Zubaydah’s need” for more evidence that he was tortured in Poland “is not great.” His lawyer conceded that “we know where Abu Zubaydah was. We want to establish how he was treated there.” Still, many of the details of his treatment can be found in the Senate Intelligence Committee report and elsewhere.

But the result of Thursday’s opinion is that the Supreme Court — and the US government more broadly — is one of the few entities on the planet that refuses to acknowledge what happened to Zubaydah.

Read 21 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Back in December, we wrote about how the major book publishers had teamed up to sue the state of Maryland over a fairly tame law concerning ebooks and libraries. As we’ve been detailing, over the last few years, the big book publishers have been working overtime to abuse copyright law to destroy libraries. Whereas, historically, a library could just buy a book like anyone else, and then lend it out, with ebooks, the publishers demand ridiculous prices for libraries and then put nonsensical restrictions on how libraries can lend out those ebooks. This is because publishers hate libraries — and, while they want to insist to you that copying a digital file is “theft,” they will also deny that those same digital files get the kind of first sale rights of physical books.

The Maryland law was very simple. It basically tried to make the digital world for libraries and ebooks similar to the analog world of libraries and paper books. It said that if a publisher offers an ebook to the public then it has to offer libraries an ebook license at a “reasonable” price. Leaving aside the debates about what constitutes “reasonable,” the publishers argued that this law violated federal copyright law, which preempts states from creating their own copyright laws. Maryland argued back that this wasn’t a copyright law, but just about licensing — pointing to an Ohio case about a law that regulated movie licenses that was found not to be preempted by the Copyright Act.

The court, though, has come down initially on the side of the publishers, issuing an injunction to stop the law from going into effect, and suggesting that it looks like the law is preempted by federal copyright law.

The Act’s mandate that publishers offer to license their electronic literary products to libraries interferes with copyright owners’ exclusive right to distribute by dictating whether, when, and to whom they must distribute their copyrighted works. Accordingly, the Court finds that the Maryland Act likely stands as an obstacle to the accomplishment of the objectives of the Copyright Act and that it is likely preempted under the Supremacy Clause.

Which… I get. But then couldn’t you just as easily argue that the First Sale doctrine does the same thing? Or various copyright exceptions?

But, in the end, the Court more or less says that if publishers need to license ebooks on reasonable terms to libraries, it’s for Congress, not the states to decide.

Libraries serve many critical functions in our democracy. They serve as a repository of knowledge–both old and new–and ensure access to that knowledge does not depend on wealth or ability. They also play a special role in documenting society’s evolution. Congress has underscored the significance of libraries and has accorded them a privileged status on at least one occasion, legislating an exception to the Copyright Act’s regime of exclusive rights that permits libraries to reproduce copyrighted material so it may be preserved in the public record across generations. See 17 U.S.C. § 108. Libraries face unique challenges as they sit at the intersection of public service and the private marketplace in an evolving society that is increasingly reliant on digital media. Striking the balance between the critical functions of libraries and the importance of preserving the exclusive rights of copyright holders, however, is squarely in the province of Congress and not this Court or a state legislature.

So, hey, Congress, maybe here’s a copyright reform that the public would actually get behind?

Many scientists worry that flashy efforts to clean plastic from the ocean do more harm than good.

Last month, a group of marine biologists noticed something fishy in a video posted on Twitter by a nonprofit called The Ocean Cleanup. “This is likely a staged video,” Clark Richards, a scientist at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography, wrote. “I call bullshit.”

In the 25-second clip, a large net appears to dump 8,400 pounds of plastic waste, including crates, buckets, and fishing gear, onto the deck of a ship. The Ocean Cleanup, which has raised more than $100 million on the promise to rid plastic from the seas, said the trash in the video was just pulled from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — an infamous region in international waters, between California and Hawaii, that’s polluted with plastic waste.

Richards and several other marine biologists quickly challenged the group’s claim. On Twitter and in media reports, they said that the plastic looked too clean to have been floating for a while in the ocean. There should have been a more visible build-up of marine organisms like algae and barnacles. In response to those allegations, The Ocean Cleanup explained that water in the garbage patch lacks nutrients that marine life needs to grow and shared other reasons why the plastic looked so clean (which some biologists again rebuffed).

The Ocean Cleanup

On its face, The Ocean Cleanup’s approach to solving one of the hardest environmental problems appears to be a worthy one. But the whole squabble raises a bigger question about cleaning up plastic in the open ocean: Is it even a good idea to begin with?

Everyone can agree that plastic waste is a scourge. Between 2000 and 2019, plastic production worldwide doubled, reaching 460 million metric tons — and only a small fraction of that gets recycled. The rest is burned, buried, or ends up in the environment, including the sea. Some estimates suggest that by 2050, there could be more plastic in the oceans, by weight, than fish.

But some scientists think that cleaning up the open ocean is a futile, and perhaps even harmful, endeavor. Several marine biologists told Vox that existing methods, including The Ocean Cleanup’s strategy, are inefficient and often produce pollution themselves. Plus, this approach can kill sea creatures — the very animals these efforts are ultimately trying to protect.

Ocean cleanups also do little to address the core of the issue: our dependence on plastic and the steady stream of waste it produces. “It’s like mopping up the spill when the spigot is still on,” Katie Matthews, chief scientist at the nonprofit advocacy group Oceana, told Vox. “We can’t clean up our way out of plastic pollution.”

With a challenge so large, and at a time when climate change and commercial fishing are also threatening marine life, it might seem unwise to shoot down any ideas that could help. But marine scientists told Vox that there are plenty of other solutions that are far more effective — or at least, less controversial — than open ocean cleanups.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch isn’t actually a patch

The problem with cleaning up the open ocean starts with a pervasive misconception — that there are enormous blobs of trash floating out at sea just waiting to be scooped up. News stories in the 2000s popularized this idea by referring to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as an “island” of trash. Even today, a Google search of the “patch” reveals images of large expanses of floating waste.

The Ocean Cleanup

The so-called patch isn’t so much an island as it is a soup, however, in which broken-down bits of plastic are like pepper flakes. Much of the waste is pea-sized or smaller and floats below the surface. That explains why, when you’re there, “it just looks like ocean,” said Melanie Bergmann, a marine biologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, who last visited the region in 2019. The same is true for a handful of other marine garbage patches, which form around gyres — systems of rotating currents.

This is one reason why ambitious ocean cleanup efforts are often inefficient, said Richards, the marine scientist at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography; the large pieces of plastic are spread out and much of the rest is impossible to retrieve. Plus, only about 1 percent of the plastic we dump into our oceans ends up in these kinds of patches (it’s still somewhat of a mystery where the rest goes). So even if ocean cleanups were more efficient, they wouldn’t make a significant dent in the overall waste problem.

Some scientists are also concerned that ocean cleanups could even make certain environmental problems worse.

Ocean cleanup operations can harm marine life

The Dutch inventor Boyan Slat founded The Ocean Cleanup in 2013, when he was 18. Since then, the organization — which counts Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and tech billionaire Peter Thiel as funders — has tested a few different devices to retrieve waste from the garbage patch. Most of them didn’t live up to the hype.

Today, the organization collects plastic by dragging a shallow net between two large ships. According to Matthews and Richards, the method is not unlike trawl fishing, and so it faces the same problem of bycatch — marine life caught by accident.

It’s hard to collect free-floating plastics without ensnaring fish, turtles, and other animals, said Bergmann, who did her PhD dissertation on bycatch. These creatures often die, even if they’re thrown back into the water, she added. Some scientists also worry that open ocean cleanups harm the organisms that make up an ecosystem right below the ocean’s surface.

Getty Images

Matthias Egger, a scientist at The Ocean Cleanup who has a PhD in marine biogeochemistry, told Vox that the group’s approach is “the complete opposite of fishing.” The net is shallow and moves slowly, so that fish can pass underneath it, and there are escape hatches if they get caught, he said. “The main reason why we do what we do is to help marine life,” he added.

The Ocean Cleanup has consulted fishers to make a system that doesn’t catch sea life, he said, noting that it’s still in the research and development phase. However, the group said it has caught a small amount of marine life in its nets before, including sea turtles (which may have been dead before entering the net).

Some marine scientists also point out that using large ships that run on fossil fuels to drag nets through the water pollutes the air and the climate. Two vessels operated by The Ocean Cleanup, for example, release 600 metric tons of carbon dioxide for a month of cleanup, according to the nonprofit — equivalent to about 130 cars on the road for a year. Egger said The Ocean Cleanup aims to develop a system that doesn’t need to be towed by large vessels. Until then, the group says it will offset its carbon emissions and work with its shipping partner, Maersk, to develop more sustainable fuels.

Ridding the sea of plastic with an approach that burns fossil fuels — which are, themselves, used to make plastic — raises additional questions about efficiency, Matthews said. Why not put that investment into something like beach cleanups? “People walking up and down a beach has no carbon footprint,” she said. “The return on investment is much higher.”

Egger agrees that beach cleanups are valuable, but says that conservation isn’t a zero-sum game. Funding The Ocean Cleanup doesn’t necessarily siphon away money away from other projects, he said. Plus, he added, there’s more value in removing plastic in the ocean, where it’s already harming sea life, than picking it up on the beach.

The real way to clear the ocean of plastic pollution

Ultimately, solving the problem of plastic waste requires that companies produce and use less plastic, experts said. Single-use plastics like bags and takeout containers — which have boomed during the pandemic — should be the first to go, Matthews said. “We have decided to use something that lasts forever for something we only need for five minutes,” she said.

Governments around the world have been making progress. Many US cities, including New York and Chicago, ban or tax plastic bags. The European Union went as far as banning single-use plastics outright last summer. And just this week, delegates of the United Nations began working on a global treaty to eliminate plastic waste. “We have seen tremendous progress on negotiations toward an internationally legally binding instrument to end plastic pollution,” the executive director of the UN environment program, Inger Andersen, said in a February 28 statement.

Even if successful, the most ambitious efforts to limit plastic production won’t happen overnight, so there’s still a place for cleanups. “I don’t think that anyone would tell you that you should never pick up trash,” Richards said.

Most researchers agree that coastal cleanups are effective. In 2020, volunteers removed 5.2 million pounds of plastic from beaches around the world in a single day. Perhaps the most beloved solution, however, is Mr. Trash Wheel. Floating in the mouth of the Jones Falls river in Maryland, it’s a simple machine that intercepts waste heading for Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. (Mr. Trash Wheel is something of a celebrity in the DC-Baltimore area and part of a “family” of similar trash wheels in the region.)

Courtesy of Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore

“There are lots of low-tech tools that get plastic before it reaches the ocean,” said Miriam Goldstein, director of ocean policy at the Center for American Progress, who studied the garbage patch as a graduate student (and has previously criticized The Ocean Cleanup). “Those are highly effective and efficient and cheap.”

Nicholas Mallos, senior director of the Ocean Conservancy’s Trash Free Seas program, agreed. While there’s “absolutely a role for technology,” he said, the science is increasingly showing that removing plastic from rivers and coastal areas is the best and most efficient approach to reducing plastic waste.

The Ocean Cleanup deploys similar river trash collection systems, but the group still sees a place for cleaning up the open ocean. Even if we rid beaches and rivers of plastic, Egger said, there will still be waste floating out at sea and harming marine life. “We should work together on solving this rather than having these arguments,” he said.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

DC Health announced yesterday that it is shifting the way it handles Covid metrics, now that the District’s community rate is classified as “low,” meaning most people are at low risk and few precautions are needed. Instead of releasing daily case numbers, reports will be issued every Wednesday. Those will include weekly case rates, rates […]

Much of the world is, correctly, standing up against Russia following its despicable invasion of Ukraine as part of Vladimir Putin’s power-mad fever dream. And in response there are lots of questions about how different companies are looking to punish, sanction, or limit Russian access to goods and services. Some of the ideas make sense. Some of them don’t. And some of them are incredibly dangerous. In the extremely dangerous territory is Ukrainian officials reaching out to ICANN on Monday and asking it to disconnect Russia from the internet, revoking domains issued in Russia and shutting down DNS servers in Russia.

Moreover, it’s becoming clear that this aggression could spread much further around the globe as the Russian Federation puts the nuclear deterrent on “special alert” and threatens both Sweden and Finland with “military and political consequences” if these states join NATO. Such developments are unacceptable in the civilized, peaceful world, in the XXI century.

Therefore, I’m strongly asking you to introduce the following list of sanctions targeting Russian Federation’s access to the Internet:

Revoke, permanently or temporarily, the domains “.ru”, “.рф” and “.su”. This list is not exhaustive and may also include other domains issued in the Russian Federation.

Contribute to the revoking for SSL certificates for the abovementioned domains.

Shut down DNS root servers situated in the Russian Federation, namely:

Saint Petersburg, RU (IPv4 199.7.83.42)

Moscow, RU (IPv4 199.7.83.42, 3 instances)

Apart from these measures, I will be sending a separate request to RIPE NCC asking to withdraw the right to use all IPv4 and IPv6 addresses by all Russian members of RIPE NCC (LIRs – Local Internet Registries), and to block the DNS root servers that it is operating.

All of these measures will help users seek for reliable information in alternative domain zones, preventing propaganda and disinformation. Leaders, governments and organizations all over the world are in favor of introducing sanctions towards the Russian Federation since they aim at putting the aggression towards Ukraine and other countries to an end. I ask you kindly to seriously consider such measures and implement them as quickly as possible. Help to save the lives of people in our country.

It is difficult to describe just how bad an idea this is. First of all, this is kind of what Russia already wants. It’s already looking to cut itself off from the wider internet in order to keep its own citizenry misinformed. Second, this punishes the Russian people, many of whom are against the war. Third, the internet remains the best way for activists on the ground in Russia to organize and to evade crackdowns by the Russian government. Fourth, the internet remains one of the most important ways that people outside of Russia are getting information on what is happening in the country.

Thankfully, it appears that almost everyone realizes exactly why this is a terrible, terrible idea.

“This is a huge request from Ukraine,” says Justin Sherman, a fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative. “It’s very likely ICANN will just say no. The Kremlin is spreading tons of propaganda and disinformation about Ukraine, but this is not the way to go about addressing it.”

The RIPE Network Coordination Centre, which (as noted above) received its own such request has similarly rejected it and explained the many reasons why cutting off Russia from the internet is a dreadfully bad idea.

It is crucial that the RIPE NCC remains neutral and does not take positions with regard to domestic political disputes, international conflicts or war.

This guarantees equal treatment for all those responsible for providing Internet services. This is a fundamental reason why the RIPE NCC has been able to maintain its operations in the way it has for the past three decades. It also means that the information and data provided by the RIPE NCC can be trusted as authoritative and free from bias or political influence. Failure to adhere to this approach would jeopardise the very model that has been key to the development of the Internet in our service region.

Separately, the Internet Society has put out a statement explaining why undermining the internet at this moment is a dangerous idea.

These proposals miss something fundamental about the Internet: it was never designed to respect country borders. The idea of unplugging a country is as wrong when people want to do it to another country as it is when governments want to do it to their own.

Internet connectivity means anyone with access can use the Internet to communicate. This means aggressors and opponents alike. Unlike most historical communication methods, the Internet is astonishingly resilient when conditions for connection are bad. It’s not magic. It won’t end wars or invasions. But it is a great tool for humans to use against their oppressors.

The Internet allows people who otherwise would be silenced to speak, so it should be no surprise that there are people the world over trying to undermine the Internet.

Russia has been trying for over a decade, with limited evidence of success (whatever the Kremlin has said), to be able to unplug from the Internet. Some governments impose Internet shutdowns that harm the interests of their citizens and impede economic development, all in the interests of social control. These efforts are not “the Internet with local characteristics,” or any other catchphrase. They’re opposition to the Internet. The Internet puts decisions about connections into the hands of people who want to connect. It’s a frightening idea to those who want to control the messages. But it’s what has made the Internet a resource to enrich people’s lives.

Furthermore, it notes just how dangerous a precedent this would set:

Once large network operators start demonstrating an ability to make routing decisions on political grounds, other governments will notice. This will attract regulatory requirements to shape network interconnection in real time along political lines. If we travel that path, in short order the network of networks will not exist. In its place we would have a different network design built around national gateways, broken up on geopolitical lines, and just as dynamic and robust as other multilateral, regulation-based systems. The Internet has done a lot to erode those systems because it is more efficient and effective. We’d give that up.

Without the Internet, the rest of the world would not know of atrocities happening in other places. And without the Internet, ordinary citizens of many countries wouldn’t know what was being carried out in their name. Our best hope, however dim, is that those supporting an aggressive regime will change their support. More information can help, even as disinformation circulates. We need a better understanding of what is and is not disinformation. Cutting a whole population off the Internet will stop disinformation coming from that population—but it also stops the flow of truth.

We must not ease the path for those who hate the Internet and its ability to empower people. We must fight the suppression of the Internet. This means making sure connectivity does not stop for anyone. It means ensuring that strong encryption, which protects ordinary communications, but also allows political discourse in the face of censorship, is always available. It means making sure the critical properties of the Internet are not undermined by legislation, no matter how well-meaning. It means making interconnections cheap and easy and ubiquitous, so that all networks are reliable and robust systems that can be made from unreliable parts. It means dedicating ourselves to ensuring that the Internet is for everyone.

I can kind of understand the thinking behind the original request, but it’s important to recognize how such an idea would (1) dangerously backfire in the short-term, and (2) set an extraordinarily bad precedent for the future that would then be widely abused. There are plenty of reasonable actions to take against Russia. Cutting them off from the internet is not one and would play into Putin’s hands.

Amazon closing all bookstores, including 2 in DC area | WTOP News

Amazon closing all bookstores, including 2 in DC area | WTOP News

by Caroline Chen

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

As the United States relaxes pandemic restrictions, advising some 70% of Americans they no longer need to wear a mask, many parents of young children are desperate to know when they can expect a vaccine to be authorized for kids under 5.

But opaque communication from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and drugmakers, on top of whiplash over the shifting timeline and unexpected delays, has led to confusion and angst. Some parents are obsessively tracking every press release, investor report and social media announcement to glean information, and a few have even lied about their kids’ ages to get their children vaccinated. Many feel they are on their own.

“I just feel like we are being left on Pandemic Island,” said Jen Wendeln, mother to a 3-year-old boy in Cincinnati. “They’ve sent rescue boats several times and then told us: ‘Never mind, none for your children. Don’t worry, we’ll come back, just keep waiting.’”

Parents have been told that vaccines for little ones are coming “soon” over and over. In September, Pfizer’s CEO Albert Bourla said that two-shot data for 2- to 4-year-olds would be available “before the end of the year,” with submission to the FDA soon after. That data turned out to contain mixed news, and timelines got pushed out as Pfizer added a third shot. Parents grew hopeful when Dr. Anthony Fauci suggested authorization could happen sometime in February, and momentum seemed to be gathering as the FDA scheduled a meeting of outside experts to review Pfizer’s data on Feb. 15 to consider authorizing two doses first while waiting for data on the third. In the latest twist, however, the FDA then delayed that meeting, saying that new information had led it to decide it was better to wait for more data.

All of this happened as first the delta variant, then omicron, sent an increasing number of children to the hospital, filling up pediatric wards. Some parents, hearing experts urge the public to get vaccinated as soon as possible to prevent catching the highly infectious variant, were frustrated not to have that option for their children. “I put my kids in car seats. I laid them on their back when they were babies so they wouldn’t suffocate,” said Dr. Amy Cho, an emergency room physician in Minnetonka, Minnesota. Knowing that vaccines are preventing deaths in kids over 5, it pains her that one isn’t available yet for her 3-year-old. “I couldn’t live with myself knowing I didn’t do everything I could to prevent that outcome,” she said.

Thousands of parents have turned to Facebook groups to share information and seek answers to their questions: Why the delay? When would the data become public? What is going on with the trials? Conspiracy theories have blossomed and rumors are rampant.

To bring some clarity to the conversation, I dug into FDA policy and asked officials at the agency, Moderna and Pfizer as well as pediatric vaccine experts the questions parents most want answered. What I learned dispels a widespread myth, adds context to the factors officials are deliberating and provides an update on timing.

Why Do Parents Want a Vaccine?

While children under 5 are much less vulnerable to the coronavirus than adults, they are not invulnerable to serious consequences. In the United States, more than 460 children under 5 have died of COVID-19, according to the CDC. They’ve been hospitalized and have died at a higher rate than kids ages 5 to 11, according to the agency. “It’s very frustrating for us, writing off kids who have died — what’s the acceptable number of child deaths for people?” asked Dr. Scott Krugman, vice chair of pediatrics at the Herman & Walter Samuelson Children's Hospital at Sinai. “If it’s preventable, it should be zero.”

A source of anxiety for many parents is that it’s hard to predict which kids may have bad outcomes. While children with asthma or other lung conditions are more likely to suffer from pneumonia if they are infected, researchers still don’t know what puts a child at higher risk of suffering from multisystem inflammatory syndrome, or MIS-C. The condition, in which many different organs including the heart, lungs, kidneys and brains become inflamed, can be serious and even deadly. Children with no preexisting conditions are often the ones who experience MIS-C, Krugman said: “They’re perfectly healthy 4- or 5 year-olds who randomly show up with cardiac enzymes through the roof and who need close monitoring and support.” Some other children also experience symptoms that last for months.

Experts have been telling parents that they can keep their little ones safe by surrounding them with people who are vaccinated, boosted and masked. But many parents point out that restrictions are easing and people are becoming more active, so the risk is actually increasing for their children. As schools drop mask mandates as well, some parents are also worried that their vaccinated older kids could bring the virus home to their unvaccinated younger siblings.

“Things are getting less safe for those of us who cannot vaccinate our family members — knowing there are even fewer people wearing masks makes everything that much more dangerous for us,” said Chris Nammour, father of a 2-year-old in Puyallup, Washington. So far, he’s chosen not to send his daughter to day care. “Our world is very small.”

What Exactly Does the FDA Consider Before Approving the Vaccine?

Many parents who want a vaccine say they don’t expect perfection: They don’t expect it to prevent infection, but want to lower the risk of the worst outcomes for their children, like hospitalizations or Long COVID. Emily Whittington is one of them. Her 4-year-old son, Jeremy, was born with a rare gene mutation that causes brain malformations and is particularly at risk of experiencing a seizure if he gets sick. Whittington lives in rural West Virginia and said that the low vaccination rate in her area has made her have to keep Jeremy out of pre-K to avoid exposure. “Can any of those doctors or advisory boards look me in the eye and say, ‘Your son is better off getting COVID without the vaccine than with some protection?’”

But the agency isn’t considering Whittington’s situation in isolation; it has a far more complicated calculus to make. “In addition to those people who are really excited about getting their kids vaccinated, there are also a lot of people out there that are like ... I really want to know that, if the FDA tells me I’m going to have to give this to my kid or I should give this to my kid, I want to know that it really works,” an FDA official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told me. Only 1 in 4 children ages 5 to11 was fully vaccinated as of March 1, and polling has shown that about a third of parents want to “wait and see,” while another third do not plan to get their child the shot.

“The challenge we have is, if we take something forward where there’s tremendous controversy because the data are not really clear, there can be a lot of confusion in the public, and ultimately, it can be counterproductive for getting the population vaccinated,” the official said.

The FDA also considers what’s going on in real time. When cases of omicron were surging and more and more kids were being hospitalized, the agency made an unprecedented move by saying it would consider authorizing two shots of the Pfizer vaccine for kids under 5 while waiting for the rest of the efficacy data on a third shot. The thinking was that those kids could get a head start on the vaccine series before the third shot was authorized. But the plan also hung on the presumption that the third dose would do the trick. What if Pfizer’s three doses still weren’t enough? Some experts worried that it was a risky move for the agency to take.

“If it didn’t work out, the price they could pay could be a lack of confidence not just in the COVID-19 vaccinations but a spillover into other childhood vaccinations,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, a pediatrician and dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. And what if a fourth or a fifth dose was ultimately needed? asked Dr. C. Buddy Creech, professor of pediatrics and director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Research Program. “Do side-effect profiles go up when we do that? Does it change over time if you keep hammering the immune system with the same antigen over and over again?”

Pfizer, which was gathering data in real time, reportedly found that its shots were less effective against the omicron variant. With this new information in hand, the FDA decided to delay and wait for data from all three shots to come in before considering authorization. One factor in the decision was that risk for children overall has dropped as omicron cases have fallen. “In the midst of a huge surge, the benefit/risk [calculation] could be different than when you’re now coming towards the tail of a surge,” the FDA official said. “It doesn't change our essential considerations, which are that the vaccine has to show the safety that we need ... but it is true that the efficacy that we would expect, that could be a little bit different depending on the amount of disease that was circulating at a given time, the amount of hospitalizations, etc.”

The agency has a challenging job of balancing the need for thoroughness with speed, said Dr. Paul Spearman, director of the division of infectious diseases at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Children are not just little adults — their immune systems are different — so you can’t just scale down the existing vaccine proportionally and presume it’ll be both safe and effective. It’s not unusual for children’s vaccine trials to take longer than adults’ because of additional steps needed to find the correct dosage for different age groups, Spearman said. “There’s more care taken about safety and finding a precise dose, and more scrutiny, because it's a vulnerable population.”

Ian Stone, parent of a 4-year-old in San Diego, said he’s willing to wait for a vaccine. “I want it to be safe. I want it to be effective. I don’t want it to be pushed forward because we have to have something,” he said. But Stone, who works in public relations, said he thinks the unexpected delay “may cause more harm than good. It’ll make people question and scrutinize it that much more. If it wasn’t ready, I wish they hadn’t gotten hopes up because you’ve drawn unwanted attention.”

Is “Age De-escalation” a Real FDA Vaccine Policy?

Misinformation has further confused parents, causing unnecessary concern that vaccines will be further delayed.

In December, Pfizer said that two shots were found to be safe for all kids under 5, but while children under 2 generated antibody levels similar to what has been seen in 16- to 25-year-olds, the 2- to 4-year-olds did not hit the same bar for effectiveness. In response to the results, the drugmaker said it would start testing a three-shot regimen to see if that could increase the level of protection.

For parents of children under 2, the obvious question was: Why not authorize the shot for the babies first?

It was surprisingly hard to get a clear answer to this question. A myth sprung up and circulated around the internet, printed in traditional media and repeated by doctors, that the FDA had a policy that prohibited it from authorizing vaccines for age groups out of order. It was referred to as an “age de-escalation policy.”

Age de-escalation describes how some clinical trials are run, including the COVID-19 vaccine trials. Adults are enrolled first, and once the vaccines are proven safe and effective, then the trial extends to younger and younger age groups. This is important for a number of reasons including safety — adults and teens are better able to articulate side effects they may be experiencing, so if a side effect is identified as related to the vaccine, researchers can look out for that symptom in younger kids who may not be as articulate; a fussing baby, as every parent knows, can be difficult to interpret.

But when it comes to authorizing vaccines, that doesn’t apply. “There’s no such policy, and we would have been happy to skip an age group,” the FDA official told me.

I also asked Pfizer why, then, it hadn’t sought authorization for kids under 2 first. The oblique answer I got from a spokeswoman was: “We’re continuing to study a third dose in this population.” I asked for more information and was told, “If successful, we will pursue a three-dose series based on the ongoing late stage study.”

So Pfizer is pursuing a three-dose series for all kids under 5. But why do that, if two doses had worked for the younger age group?

The FDA is tightly limited by regulation and cannot publicly discuss trial data before approval outside of specific circumstances, such as an advisory committee. That has accounted for much of the agency’s reticence. The official could only tell me, enigmatically, that “eventually it will become clear that there was not a way to skip an age group here.” Perhaps something in Pfizer’s data in infants made the drugmaker or FDA determine it wasn’t sufficient for authorization, but until data becomes public, it is impossible to know.

As for Moderna, authorization of its vaccine for 12- to 17-year-olds has been held up in the U.S. because of concerns that it could cause myocarditis, inflammation of the heart muscle. Moderna is now testing a smaller dose for adolescents and 6- to 11-year-olds, but in the meantime, the company has said that it expects data from its trial of kids under 5 in March.

Parents, again confused by the supposed age de-escalation policy, have speculated that Moderna could not ask the FDA for authorization for the youngest kids before the teens had access to the vaccine.

Not so, a Moderna spokesperson told me: “Once the data are available in this age group, Moderna will review the data and decide whether to file for Emergency Use Authorization independent of whether other EUA submissions currently under review have already been approved.”

What’s Next for Vaccines for Small Children?

Here’s the good news: Two companies could have data on vaccines in kids under 5 in a matter of weeks. Pfizer has said it’ll have data on three doses “in spring” and Moderna has said it’ll have data by the end of March. If the data looks good, there’s nothing to stop the FDA from authorizing a vaccine for kids of a certain age group, even if an older cohort misses the mark or hasn’t yet gotten the green light. Creech, who is also a principal investigator for Moderna’s pediatric vaccine trials, and Spearman both told me they expect authorization by April or, in a worst-case scenario, May.

The bad news is that this far into the pandemic, communication is still floundering in the face of a public that is increasingly distrustful of scientists and federal health agencies.

It’s true that the FDA is legally limited in discussing data particulars and manufacturers are traditionally secretive about ongoing trials. But nobody has acknowledged that the legal and conventional restrictions mean that answers to basic questions like, “Why was this review delayed?” tend to result in impenetrable answers like, “We realize now in data that came in very rapidly because of the large number of cases of omicron that at this time it makes sense for us to wait until we have the data from the evaluation of a third dose.” None of this helps the public understand the scientific process.

What is apparent is that while many parents would like to see more data, what they want even more is to be reassured that their kids’ health is a priority.

“They’ve never spoken to parents of underage kids to say: ‘We’re sorry this is so hard. It grieves us too that it’s been so complicated,’” said Jennifer Martin, a parent of three in Seattle. “There’s a lack of urgency,” said Samirah Swaleh, parent to a 9-month-old boy in the Los Angeles area. “They just don’t seem to care about babies and toddlers?!” wrote Wendeln, the mother in Cincinnati. Cho, the emergency room physician, longs for a clearer timeline. “If you’re running a marathon and you know there’s an end, people can do amazing things. But it’s really, really hard when you don’t know if there’s an end in sight.”

I brought these sentiments to the FDA official I spoke to. The response hit many of the notes the parents said they wanted. I wish it could have come earlier, more often and been on the record, but I hope it provides some parents a bit of reassurance that they’ve been heard.

“We are going to work as expeditiously as possible,” the official said. “What does that mean? In general — though I can’t promise anything — you’ve seen that after an EUA [application] in this area, we generally are trying to take action in two to four weeks.”

The official emphasized: “We’re not going to be sitting on anything here.”

“I would want parents to know that we understand their concerns. We’re parents too,” the official added. “We are going to move as fast as we can once we have the data in our hands.”

Why Carl Icahn launched an animal welfare-focused proxy fight against the fast food giant.

Carl Icahn, the billionaire activist investor, is known for spearheading hostile takeovers of underperforming companies on Wall Street, so it seemed odd when he bought a small stake in McDonald’s and last month nominated two new directors to its board, since the company has outperformed its fast food competitors in recent years.

But Icahn’s rancor wasn’t directed at the company’s financial performance. Rather, it was directed at how pigs in the company’s supply chain are treated.

The fight has made headlines in the business press in recent weeks, but its origins go back a decade. In 2012, after pressure from Icahn and the Humane Society of the US, McDonald’s pledged that it would end the use of gestation crates for pregnant pigs — which confine the animals so tightly they are unable to turn around for months at a time — throughout its supply chain by the end of 2022.

Now that 2022 has arrived, Icahn argues the company is far from following through on its commitment, and he’s ready to take action. (Disclosure: I briefly worked with Icahn’s daughter at the Humane Society of the US in 2012 and 2013.)

“Animals are one of the things I feel really emotional about,” Icahn told the Wall Street Journal, noting that he and his wife have three dogs and that he has a particular soft spot for pigs.

In the US pork industry, a majority of the 6 million female breeding pigs, or sows, are confined in 7-by-2-foot gestation crates for the duration of their four-month pregnancies, which take a physical and mental toll on the animals. “It’s not life,” animal welfare scientist Temple Grandin told a reporter in 2012. “The way I look at [gestation crates] is: How would you like to live in an airline seat?” Notably, Grandin is a longtime adviser to McDonald’s on animal welfare.

Harold Hoch/MediaNews Group via Getty Images

The industry’s better alternative for sows is “group housing” — placing a couple dozen sows together in a large pen. Even in group housing systems, though, sows still spend a few weeks after each birth in a “farrowing crate” — a confined space slightly larger than a gestation crate — as they nurse their piglets.

In response to Icahn’s campaign, McDonald’s told the Wall Street Journal that over 60 percent of its US pork is from “confirmed pregnant sows” not housed in gestation crates, and that by the end of the year, it’ll be at 85 to 90 percent.

That makes it sound as though McDonald’s is falling just a little short of its goal and that Icahn is being petty. But according to Josh Balk of the Humane Society, McDonald’s neglects to make clear that this statement’s wording allows its suppliers to confine sows for the first four to six weeks of their 16-week pregnancies, at which point they’re confirmed pregnant.

The practice is pervasive in what the industry calls “group housing” pork production, meaning that even sows supposedly raised in group environments are still individually confined in gestation crates for a little over three months of the year, since they average a little over two pregnancy cycles per year.

In other words, most “crate-free” pork is in reality only partially crate-free. Icahn and the Humane Society want McDonald’s to go all the way by not allowing its suppliers to use gestation crates at all, which they argue was the company’s stated goal in 2012.

“McDonald’s [policy] has gone from pigs ‘never being in a gestation crate,’” says Balk, “to now allowing explicitly more than three months every year, unable to turn around.”

When reached for comment, McDonald’s referred me to its February 20 press release in response to Ichan’s campaign. The release states that McDonald’s is “sourcing U.S. pork from confirmed pregnant sows not housed in gestation crates.”

In the pork industry, “confirmed pregnant” means the sows were kept in gestation crates for the first four-six weeks of their pregnancy.

McDonald’s also reiterated to me that its policy was guided by the pork industry and the American Association of Swine Veterinarians, whose definition of group housing uses the “confirmed” language as well. The association’s definition doesn’t specify the number of weeks for pregnancy confirmation, though a spokesperson with the association told me, “Confirmation of pregnancy can typically occur between 35 and 45 days of gestation.”

It’s an issue throughout the pork industry. Most “group housing” producers still confine sows in gestation crates for the first four-six weeks of their pregnancies because some studies have found that mixing newly pregnant sows together in large pens can increase rates of aggression, injury, and stress. However, researchers say findings are inconsistent, and have also found that these challenges could potentially be minimized through changes in flooring, environment, diet, and management.

And these concerns about mixing newly pregnant sows together in their first few weeks have to be weighed against the immense suffering imposed by confining them in gestation crates instead: sores, foot and leg injuries from lying on concrete all day, reduced bone strength, and distress, boredom, and frustration, evidenced by the bite marks on the bars of their crates and the pigs swaying their heads side to side.

Icahn’s objections relating to weeks and percentages might seem like splitting hairs, but what McDonald’s does next could have ripple effects for the entire food system, for as go the Golden Arches, so goes the fast food industry. Some in the animal welfare community credit McDonald’s with accelerating the broader shift toward cage-free eggs after it pledged in 2015 to source exclusively cage-free eggs by 2025 (the company is almost two-thirds of the way toward achieving its goal). If McDonald’s can eliminate gestation crates from its supply chain, its competitors might be forced to catch up, creating a domino effect in much the same way it did with cage-free eggs.

But if the company stands firm against Icahn and his proxy fight, it could further entrench one of the cruelest devices in today’s food system — one that confines pigs in a way that would be criminal if done to a dog or cat.

The complex crate-free bacon supply chain, explained

When Icahn called on McDonald’s to eliminate gestation crates from its supply chain by the end of the year, the company defended itself by saying “the current pork supply in the U.S. would make this type of commitment impossible.”

That could be true. A new California law bans the sale of pork from crated sows, but according to a March 2021 report by agribusiness financier Rabobank, less than 4 percent of the US pork supply at the time met California’s crate-free requirements, far from enough to meet the state’s demand, let alone McDonald’s too. However, the supply is now likely much higher than 4 percent, as some of the country’s biggest pork producers have stated in recent months that they’ll supply California with compliant pork.

But McDonald’s statement also belies the leverage it has over its suppliers. I spoke with a former high-level decision-maker at Burger King’s purchasing cooperative, RSI, who spoke on condition of anonymity, about McDonald’s response to Icahn. In his opinion, “‘Impossible’ is a strong word. It’s difficult. It’s not easy for them to get this resolved.” Despite that, in his opinion, “[McDonald’s hasn’t] made the effort necessary” to reach its commitment.

The company has used its leverage to force changes among its meat suppliers in the past, and according to Balk, it could’ve spent the last two decades using that leverage — it buys 1 percent of all US pork — to push its suppliers to meet its 100 percent crate-free goal. (The company listed “explore sow gestation housing alternatives” as a goal as early as 2002.)

The “impossible” comment also contradicts what some of the nation’s largest pork producers say about the matter: Hormel, Clemens Food Group, Seaboard, and Tyson Foods have all publicly stated that they can supply California with crate-free pork, which requires even more space per sow than what is standard in the industry, though at least for the time being, McDonald’s would have to compete with California grocery stores for it.

McDonald’s is far from alone in falling behind on its gestation crate pledge. Dozens of fast food chains, grocers, and food manufacturers have made similar promises too, winning praise from media and animal welfare groups when announced, only to have mixed success on follow-through. The exceptions are Chipotle, which achieved a gestation crate-free supply in 2020, and Whole Foods, which has prohibited gestation crates since 2003.

But McDonald’s is doubling down on its insistence that its anti-gestation-crate policy doesn’t allow its suppliers to still use them when it sounds like it does, and even though some other big food companies, such as Burger King, have acknowledged this problem in their supply chain and at least say they’ll work to change it. Panera Bread has been more specific, noting that as of 2019, 41 percent of its pork came from farms that never use crates.

“It would be one thing if McDonald’s said, ‘We pledge to get rid of gestation crates, we aren’t there yet but we’re going to keep going and here’s our plan to get there,’” Balk of the Humane Society says. “But that’s not what McDonald’s is doing. Instead, they’ve failed to meet their very public promise to get rid of gestation crates, and now they’re actively allowing gestation crates. That’s the real issue.”

The animal rights movement changed how big business buys meat and eggs

Ending the extreme confinement of farmed animals — sows in gestation crates, egg-laying hens in cages, calves in veal crates — became a flagship campaign for the animal protection movement in the early 2000s, which has seen significant success despite resistance by agribusiness. Fourteen states have passed laws to ban or restrict the use of cages and crates, some of which have forced animal agriculture to overhaul operations.

Combined with the hundreds of food companies that have been pressured to phase out cages and crates from their supply chains, factory farming today looks a little less grim than it did 15 years ago. Today, nearly one-third of eggs are cage-free, a number that is expected to climb as state laws go into effect and the egg industry constructs new cage-free operations.

The suffering in America’s animal agriculture system is still immense; extreme confinement is just the most viscerally disturbing practice on a long list of horrors one would find when they step inside any of America’s thousands of factory farms — cage- and crate-free farms included — where nearly all meat, milk, and eggs are produced.

But progress is progress. If the effort to eliminate the worst cruelties prevalent in industrialized animal farming succeeds, it’ll likely take decades and a pluralistic approach, everything from grassroots activism to lobbying politicians and, yes, even proxy fights on Wall Street.

Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

by Ilya Marritz

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Though Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is just days old, Russia has been working for years to influence and undermine the independence of its smaller neighbor. As it happens, some Americans have played a role in that effort.

One was former President Donald Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Another was Trump’s then-lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

It’s all detailed in a wide array of public documents, particularly a bipartisan 2020 Senate report on Trump and Russia. I was one of the journalists who dug into all the connections, as part of the Trump, Inc. podcast with ProPublica and WNYC. (I was in Kyiv, retracing Manafort’s steps, when Trump’s infamous call with Ukraine’s president was revealed in September 2019.)

Given recent events, I thought it’d be helpful to put all the tidbits together, showing what happened step by step.

Americans Making Money Abroad. What’s the Problem?

Paul Manafort was a longtime Republican consultant and lobbyist who’d developed a speciality working with unsavory, undemocratic clients. In 2004, he was hired by oligarchs supporting a pro-Russian party in Ukraine. It was a tough assignment: The Party of Regions needed an image makeover. A recent election had been marred by allegations that fraud had been committed in favor of the party’s candidate, prompting a popular revolt that became known as the Orange Revolution.

In a memo for Ukraine’s reportedly richest man, Rinat Akhmetov, Manafort summed up the polling: Many respondents said they associated the Party of Regions with corruption and considered it the “party of oligarchs.”

Manafort set to work rebranding the party with poll-tested messaging and improved stagecraft. Before long, the Party of Regions was in power in Kyiv. One of his key aides in Ukraine was, allegedly, a Russian spy. The Senate Intelligence Committee report on Trump and Russia said Konstantin Kilimnik was both “a Russian intelligence officer” and “an integral part of Manafort’s operations in Ukraine and Russia.”

Kilimnik has denied he is a Russian spy. He was indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for obstruction of justice for allegedly trying to get witnesses to lie in testimony to prosecutors in the Manafort case. Kilimnik, who reportedly lives in Moscow, has not been arrested. In an email to The Washington Post, Kilimnik distanced himself from Manafort’s legal woes and wrote, “I am still confused as to why I was pulled into this mess.”

Manafort did quite well during his time in Ukraine. He was paid tens of millions of dollars by pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych and other clients, stashing much of the money in undeclared bank accounts in Cyprus and the Caribbean. He used the hidden income to enjoy some of the finer things in life, such as a $15,000 ostrich jacket. Manafort was convicted in 2018 of wide-ranging financial crimes.

“We Are Going to Have So Much Fun, and Change the World in the Process”

In 2014, Manafort’s plum assignment in Ukraine came to an abrupt end. In February of that year, Yanukovych was deposed in Ukraine’s second uprising in a decade, known as the Maidan Revolution, in which more than a hundred protesters were killed in Kyiv. He fled to Russia, leaving behind a vast, opulent estate (now a museum) with gold-plated bathroom fixtures, a galleon on a lake and a 100-car garage.

With big bills and no more big checks coming in, Manafort soon found himself deep in debt, including to a Russian oligarch. He eventually pitched himself for a new gig in American politics as a convention manager, wrangling delegates for an iconoclastic reality-TV star and real estate developer.

“I am not looking for a paid job,” he wrote to the Trump campaign in early 2016. Manafort was hired that spring, working for free.

According to the Senate report, in mid-May 2016 he emailed top Trump fundraiser Tom Barrack, “We are going to have so much fun, and change the world in the process.” (Barrack was charged last year with failing to register as a foreign agent, involving his work for the United Arab Emirates. He has pleaded not guilty. The case has not yet gone to trial.)

A few months later, the Trump campaign put the kibosh on proposed language in the Republican Party platform that expressed support for arming Ukraine with defensive weapons.

One Trump campaign aide told Mueller that Trump’s view was that “the Europeans should take primary responsibility for any assistance to Ukraine, that there should be improved U.S.-Russia relations, and that he did not want to start World War III over that region.”

According to the Senate report, Manafort met Kilimnik twice in person while working on the Trump campaign, messaged with him electronically and shared “sensitive campaign polling data” with him.

Senate investigators wrote in their report that they suspected Kilimnik served as “a channel for coordination” on the Russian military intelligence operation to hack into Democratic emails and leak them.

The Senate intel report notes that in about a dozen interviews with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Manafort “lied consistently” about “one issue in particular: his interactions with Kilimnik.”

Manafort’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Manafort didn’t make it to Election Day on the Trump campaign. In August 2016, The New York Times revealed that handwritten ledgers recovered from Yanukovych’s estate showed nearly $13 million in previously undisclosed payments to Manafort from Yanukovych and his pro-Russian party. Manafort was pushed out of his job as Trump’s campaign chairman less than a week later.

After Trump won the election, the Senate report says, Manafort and Kilimnik worked together on a proposed “plan” for Ukraine that would create an Autonomous Republic of Donbas in separatist-run southeast Ukraine, on the Russian border. Manafort went so far as to work with a pollster on a survey on public attitudes to Yanukovych, the deposed president. The plan only would need a “wink” from the new U.S. president, Kilimnik wrote to Manafort in an email.

Manafort continued to work on the “plan” even after he had been indicted on charges of bank fraud and conspiracy, according to the Senate report. It’s not clear what became of the effort, if anything.

“Do Us a Favor”

With Manafort’s conviction in 2018, Rudy Giuliani came to the fore as the most Ukraine-connected person close to President Trump. Giuliani had long jetted around Eastern Europe. He’d hung out in Kyiv, supporting former professional boxer Vitali Klitschko’s run for mayor. One of Giuliani’s clients for his law firm happened to be Russia’s state oil producer, Rosneft.

By 2018, Giuliani had joined Trump’s legal team, leading the public effort to discredit Robert Mueller’s investigation. Giuliani saw that Ukraine could be a key to that effort.

Giuliani ended up working with a pair of émigré business partners, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, to make contacts in Ukraine with corrupt and questionable prosecutors, in an effort to turn up “dirt” on Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, who had served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. Giuliani also worked to sow doubt about the ledger that had revealed the secret payments to Manafort, meeting with his buddies in a literally smoke-filled room.

Parnas and Fruman told the president at a donor dinner in 2018 that the U.S. ambassador in Kyiv was a liability to his administration.

((<a href="https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-parnas-yovanovitch-recording-transcript-trump-discusses-firing-yovanovitch-at-donor-dinner">Transcript</a> courtesy of rev.com))

Trump recalled Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, who had been a vocal opponent of corruption in Ukraine, from Kyiv in May 2019.

Two months later, Trump had his infamous call with Ukraine’s new President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Zelenskyy asked Trump for anti-tank Javelin missiles. You know what happened next. Trump said he needed Zelenskyy to first “do us a favor” and initiate investigations that would be damaging to Joe Biden. He also pressed Zelenskyy to meet with Giuliani, according to the official readout of the call:

These events became publicly known in September 2019, when a whistleblower complaint was leaked.

“In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election,” the whistleblower wrote.

In December 2019, as an impeachment inquiry was at full tilt, Giuliani flew to Ukraine and met with a member of Ukraine’s parliament, Andrii Derkach, in an apparent effort to discredit the investigation of Trump’s actions. Derkach, a former member of the Party of Regions, went on to release a trove of dubious audio “recordings” that seemed to be aimed at showing Biden’s actions in Ukraine, when he was vice president, in a negative light.

Within months, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Derkach, describing him as “an active Russian agent for over a decade” who tried to undermine U.S. elections. Derkach has called that idea “nonsense.”

In a statement, Giuliani said, “there is nothing I saw that said he was a Russian agent. There is nothing he gave me that seemed to come from Russia at all.” Giuliani has consistently maintained that his actions in Ukraine were proper and lawful. His lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Where They Are Now...

Many of Trump’s allies have been charged or investigated for their work in and around Ukraine:

Paul Manafort: convicted of financial fraud — then pardoned by Trump

Rick Gates: a Manafort aide who pleaded guilty to conspiracy and lying to the FBI

Sam Patten: another Manafort associate convicted for acting as a straw donor to the Trump inaugural committee on behalf of a Ukrainian oligarch

Rudy Giuliani: reportedly under criminal investigation over his dealings in Ukraine; his lawyer called an FBI search of his home and seizure of electronic devices “legal thuggery”

Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman: convicted for funneling foreign money into U.S. elections; Parnas’ attorney said he would appeal

Key Documents

• US Senate Intelligence Committee Russia Investigation Volume 5: Counterintelligence Threats and Vulnerabilities
• Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Report
• Many of the exhibits from Paul Manafort’s 2018 trial are available for free with a CourtListener account

A rally on the Washington Monument grounds Tuesday to support trucker convoys has drawn a minuscule crowd so far. About 20 people are in attendance, Washingtonian photographer Evy Mages reports from the scene, as well as a similar number of people who are there to cover the event. The rally was organized by Kyle Sefcik, […]

Get your cameras ready: Peak bloom for the cherry blossoms at Washington, DC’s Tidal Basin will take place from March 22-25, 2022. The National Park Service announced its annual prediction at a National Cherry Blossom Festival press conference Tuesday. Peak bloom is the best time within the two-week-ish blooming period to go check out the […]