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Israel’s Genocide Day 440: New reports of mass killings in Gaza surface
A new report documents the mass killing of Palestinians in northern Gaza. Meanwhile, Hamas and Israel have discussed the details of a prisoner exchange that could serve as the centerpiece of a 60-day ceasefire.
By Qassam Muaddi, December 19, 2024
Casualties
· 45,129 + killed* and at least 107,338 wounded in the Gaza Strip, 59% of whom are women, children, and elderly.
· 822+ Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. This includes at least 146 children.**
· 3,962 Lebanese killed and more than 16,520 wounded by Israeli forces since October 8, 2023***
· Israel revised its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,189.
· Israel recognizes the death of 890 Israeli soldiers, policemen and intelligence officers and the injury of at least 5,065 others since October 7.****
* Gaza’s branch of the Palestinian Ministry of Health confirmed this figure in its daily report, published through its WhatsApp channel on December 19, 2024. Rights groups and public health experts estimate the death toll to be much higher.
** The death toll in the West Bank and Jerusalem is not updated regularly. This is the latest figure according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health as of December 19, 2024.
*** This figure was released by the Lebanese Health Ministry, updated on December 9, 2024. The counting is based on the Lebanese official date for the beginning of “the Israeli aggression on Lebanon,” when Israel began airstrikes on Lebanese territory after the beginning of Hezbollah’s “support front” for Gaza.
**** These figures are released by the Israeli military, showing the soldiers whose names “were allowed to be published.” Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot reported on August 4, 2024, that some 10,000 Israeli soldiers and officers have been either killed or wounded since October 7. The head of the Israeli army’s wounded association told Israel’s Channel 12 that the number of wounded Israeli soldiers exceeds 20,000, including at least 8,000 who have been permanently handicapped as of June 1. Israel’s Channel 7 reported that according to the Israeli war ministry’s rehabilitation service numbers, 8,663 new wounded joined the army’s handicap rehabilitation system since October 7 and as of June 18.
Source: mondoweiss.net
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It’s Movement Time
It’s movement time.
As the Trump presidency take shape, there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. Disbelief meshes with despair, and some are quite frankly desolate.
Dry your tears, blow your noses, and join movements of resistance to this madness. Blacks in America have never known a time when resistance wasn’t necessary, including life under a Black president.
For centuries for generations, people have had to struggle for freedom, for respect, for justice. Why should this time be any different?
The ancestors, like the revered Frederick Douglass, lambasted Abraham Lincoln as a fool or coward who wouldn’t fight the civil war with thousands of willing Black troops. Said Douglass, “if there is no struggle, there is no progress.” Said Douglass, “Power concedes nothing without demand.”
So let us struggle. Let us build movements that lift our hearts. Let us remake our history with the brick and mortar of struggle.
—Prison Radio, November 21, 2016
https://www.prisonradio.org/commentary/it-is-movement-time/
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
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We need a united, independent, democratically organized mass movement for peace, justice and equality in solidarity with similar movements worldwide if we are to survive the death agony of capitalism and its inevitable descent into fascism and barbarism before it destroys the world altogether!
—Bonnie Weinstein
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On this Wrongful Conviction Day, Leonard Peltier, the longest-serving Indigenous political prisoner, is incarcerated in lockdown-modified operations conditions at USP Coleman I, operated by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP).
Yet, in this moment of silence, Leonard speaks.
To honor his birthday and all those who are unjustly convicted and incarcerated, the Leonard Peltier Official Ad Hoc Committee has released a video of Leonard Peltier that is going viral. Narrated by renowned scholar Ward Churchill and set to a video created by award-winning filmmaker Suzie Baer, the film most importantly centers Leonard’s personal reflection on his 80th year.
Jenipher Jones, Mr. Peltier's lead counsel, commented, "This powerfully moving film captures the essence of who I know Leonard to be. I am grateful to Professor Churchill and Suzie Baer for their work and longstanding advocacy of Leonard. As the recent execution of Marcellus Williams-Imam Khaliifah Williams shows us, we as a society bear a responsibility to uplift the cases of all those who are wrongfully convicted and also hold the government accountable to do that for which it professes to exist. We must challenge our impulses of blind blood-thirst for guilt and the use of our legal systems to carry out this malignant pathology. There is absolutely no lawful justification for Leonard's incarceration."
“Leonard Peltier is Native elder whose wrongful incarceration is shameful. His continued imprisonment exemplifies the historical cruelty of the US Government toward Native people. The US BOP's treatment of Leonard Peltier is unlawful, and he deserves his freedom.” —Suzie Baer
Leonard's Statement: Peltier 80th Statement.pdf:
https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=%21ABHSRNdyB8SKn0I&id=DFF2DD874157D44A%21118178&cid=DFF2DD874157D44A&parId=root&parQt=sharedby&o=OneUp
To view the film, please visit:
https://tinyurl.com/Peltier80thPresentation
We hope to have additional updates on Leonard soon. In the meantime, please engage our calls to action or donate to his defense efforts.
Miigwech.
Donate/ActNow:
Write to:
Leonard Peltier 89637-132
USP Coleman 1
P.O. Box 1033
Coleman, FL 33521
Note: Letters, address and return address must be in writing—no stickers—and on plain white paper.
Sign our petition urging President Biden to grant clemency to Leonard Peltier:
https://www.freeleonardpeltier.com/petition
Email: contact@whoisleonardpeltier.info
Address: 116 W. Osborne Ave. Tampa, Florida 33603
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Beneath The Mountain: An Anti-Prison Reader (City Lights, 2024) is a collection of revolutionary essays, written by those who have been detained inside prison walls. Composed by the most structurally dispossessed people on earth, the prisoner class, these words illuminate the steps towards freedom.
Beneath the Mountain documents the struggle — beginning with slavery, genocide, and colonization up to our present day — and imagines a collective, anti-carceral future. These essays were handwritten first on scraps of paper, magazine covers, envelopes, toilet paper, or pages of bibles, scratched down with contraband pencils or the stubby cartridge of a ball-point pen; kites, careworn, copied and shared across tiers and now preserved in this collection for this and future generations. If they were dropped in the prison-controlled mail they were cloaked in prayers, navigating censorship and dustbins. They were very often smuggled out. These words mark resistance, fierce clarity, and speak to the hope of building the world we all deserve to live in.
"Beneath the Mountain reminds us that ancestors and rebels have resisted conquest and enslavement, building marronage against colonialism and genocide."
—Joy James, author of New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency
Who stands beneath the mountain but prisoners of war? Mumia Abu-Jamal and Jennifer Black have assembled a book of fire, each voice a flame in captivity...Whether writing from a place of fugivity, the prison camp, the city jail, the modern gulag or death row, these are our revolutionary thinkers, our critics and dreamers, our people. The people who move mountains. —Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
Filled with insight and energy, this extraordinary book gifts us the opportunity to encounter people’s understanding of the fight for freedom from the inside out. —Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag and Abolition Geography
These are the words each writer dreamed as they sought freedom and they need to be studied by people inside and read in every control unit/hole in every prison in America. We can send this book for you to anyone who you know who is currently living, struggling, and fighting
Who better to tell these stories than those who have lived them? Don’t be surprised with what you find within these pages: hope, solidarity, full faith towards the future, and most importantly, love.
Excerpt from the book:
"Revolutionary love speaks to the ways we protect, respect, and empower each other while standing up to state terror. Its presence is affirmed through these texts as a necessary component to help chase away fear and to encourage the solidarity and unity essential for organizing in dangerous times and places. Its absence portends tragedy. Revolutionary love does not stop the state from wanting to kill us, nor is it effective without strategy and tactics, but it is the might that fuels us to stand shoulder to shoulder with others regardless. Perhaps it can move mountains." —Jennifer Black & Mumia Abu-Jamal from the introduction to Beneath The Mountain: An Anti Prison Reader
Get the book at:
https://www.prisonradiostore.com/shop-2/beneath-the-mountain-an-anti-prison-reader-edited-by-mumia-abu-jamal-jennifer-black-city-lights-2024
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Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky
In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries.
Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin:
“To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?”
Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine.
A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism.
To sign the online petition at freeboris.info
—Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024
https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine.
Petition in Support of Boris Kagarlitsky
We, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison.
Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles.
The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested.
On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release.
The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison.
The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences.
There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering.
Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course.
We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally.
We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest.
Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitsky
https://freeboris.info
The petition is also available on Change.org
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) Giant Companies Took Secret Payments to Allow Free Flow of Opioids
Drugmakers including Purdue Pharma paid pharmacy benefit managers not to restrict painkiller prescriptions, a New York Times investigation found.
By Chris Hamby, Dec. 17, 2024
This is the third article in a series about how pharmacy benefit managers distort the health care system at the expense of patients, employers and taxpayers.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/17/business/pharmacy-benefit-managers-opioids.html
In 2017, the drug industry middleman Express Scripts announced that it was taking decisive steps to curb abuse of the prescription painkillers that had fueled America’s overdose crisis. The company said it was “putting the brakes on the opioid epidemic” by making it harder to get potentially dangerous amounts of the drugs.
The announcement, which came after pressure from federal health regulators, was followed by similar declarations from the other two companies that control access to prescription drugs for most Americans.
The self-congratulatory statements, however, didn’t address an important question: Why hadn’t the middlemen, known as pharmacy benefit managers, acted sooner to address a crisis that had been building for decades?
One reason, a New York Times investigation found: Drugmakers had been paying them not to.
For years, the benefit managers, or P.B.M.s, took payments from opioid manufacturers, including Purdue Pharma, in return for not restricting the flow of pills. As tens of thousands of Americans overdosed and died from prescription painkillers, the middlemen collected billions of dollars in payments.
The details of these backroom deals — laid out in hundreds of documents, some previously confidential, reviewed by The Times — expose a mostly untold chapter of the opioid epidemic and provide a rare look at the modus operandi of the companies at the heart of the prescription drug supply chain.
The P.B.M.s exert extraordinary control over what drugs people can receive and at what price. The three dominant companies — Express Scripts, CVS Caremark and Optum Rx — oversee prescriptions for more than 200 million people and are part of health care conglomerates that sit near the top of the Fortune 500 list.
The P.B.M.s are hired by insurers and employers to control their drug costs by negotiating discounts with pharmaceutical manufacturers. But a Times investigation this year found that they often pursue their own financial interests in ways that increase costs for patients, employers and government programs, while driving independent pharmacies out of business. Regulators have accused the largest P.B.M.s of anticompetitive practices.
The middlemen’s dealings with opioid makers reveal a lesser-known consequence of this pay-to-play system: Seemingly everything — including measures meant to protect patients and curtail abuse — can be up for negotiation.
The P.B.M.s’ power lies in their role as gatekeepers. They largely control the lists of drugs that insurance plans will cover, and drugmakers compete for position on those lists by offering rebates. The middlemen typically pass along most of these rebates to their clients, but they also keep a portion for themselves.
The drug lists, known as formularies, frequently include restrictions meant to save money by steering patients to cheaper drugs. But for some drugs, such as opioids, restrictions can serve a medical purpose — minimizing the risk of overdose and addiction and limiting the number of pills that could be diverted to the illicit market.
Yet time and again, documents show, the P.B.M.s bargained away safeguards in exchange for rebates.
Purdue’s strategy to ensure broad access to its blockbuster painkiller OxyContin was explicit: “Offer rebates to remove payer restriction,” according to an internal presentation. The company didn’t want doctors to have to provide additional justification for prescribing a powerful narcotic, and it didn’t want strict limits on the number of pills that could be dispensed.
The approach worked. Purdue repeatedly boasted in internal reports that prescribers and patients faced few or no restrictions on access to the drug.
What could have been a backstop against overprescribing instead became a sales tool, records show. After striking deals with P.B.M.s, drugmakers touted the favorable coverage — no second-guessing or paperwork requirements from insurers — as part of an effort to get doctors to write more prescriptions.
Even as the epidemic worsened, the P.B.M.s collected ever-growing sums. The largest of the middlemen bought competitors and used their increasing leverage not to insist on safeguards but to extract more rebates and fees. From 2003 to 2012, for example, the amount Purdue was paying P.B.M.s in rebates roughly doubled to about $400 million a year, almost all of it for OxyContin.
The documents reviewed by The Times — including contracts, invoices, emails, memos and financial data — span more than two decades, beginning with the debut of OxyContin in 1996. Many came from a public repository of records unearthed during court cases and investigations. The Times also obtained more than 200 previously confidential documents from plaintiffs in litigation against drugmakers, P.B.M.s and others.
In the public assignment of blame for the opioid epidemic, the P.B.M.s have largely escaped notice. Drugmakers, distributors, pharmacies and doctors have paid billions of dollars to resolve lawsuits and investigations. But more recently, the largest P.B.M.s have been in the legal cross hairs.
In statements, the P.B.M.s said they had long worked to prevent opioid abuse, while also ensuring that people in serious pain had access to the drugs. They said that for years they had offered their clients — employers, insurers and state and federal programs like Medicaid — the option to impose restrictions on opioids.
Justine Sessions, a spokeswoman for Express Scripts, said most clients had instituted some sort of safeguards for opioids. “Ultimately, our clients control their formularies and all aspects of their drug benefits,” she said.
But this often presented the clients with a fraught choice: If they added restrictions, they could lose the rebates that helped make coverage affordable.
In addition, documents show that P.B.M.s sometimes collaborated with opioid manufacturers to persuade insurers not to restrict access to their drugs.
“Our work behind the scenes is paying off!” one Purdue executive emailed a colleague in 2003, recounting how she had worked with P.B.M.s that later became part of CVS Caremark and Express Scripts to persuade insurers to lift restrictions on OxyContin.
The opioid manufacturer Mallinckrodt similarly credited its collaboration with P.B.M.s with preventing two large insurance companies from imposing restrictions in 2015. “This is a best practice of how to reverse a negative decision,” a Mallinckrodt executive emailed colleagues.
Spokeswomen for Purdue and Mallinckrodt declined to comment.
Employees at Express Scripts and Optum Rx at times raised concerns that rebates were trumping safety considerations, internal emails show.
In 2017, for example, an Optum Rx executive proposed immediately restricting access to the painkiller Opana ER because it was going to be pulled from the market for safety reasons. It was important to prevent new patients from beginning to use the drug in the months before the withdrawal took effect, he wrote.
But another executive objected. “We currently get rebates,” he wrote, “and that would put our rebates at risk.”
The years following the 1996 rollout of OxyContin proved to be a critical period in the nascent opioid epidemic.
In response to rising costs and news coverage about addiction and abuse, some insurers began restricting access to the drug, requiring doctors to seek authorization before they could write some prescriptions or limiting the number of pills that could be prescribed to a patient each month.
For Purdue, this posed a serious threat. The restrictions, the company noted in an internal planning document, will “create barriers to OxyContin being able to achieve significant growth.”
To knock down these barriers, Purdue needed to win over the middlemen, which held sway over insurers and other clients that counted on the rebates that the P.B.M.s shared with them.
Purdue forged what executives described internally as a “partnership” with Express Scripts and a “special arrangement” with Merck-Medco, one of the nation’s largest P.B.M.s at the time. Together, the drugmaker and the middlemen disseminated purportedly independent guidance on pain management, including a mailing to doctors from Express Scripts that was meant to, in Purdue’s words, “squelch the anti-OxyContin pushback.”
In 1999, when Purdue struck a similar deal with AdvancePCS, the third of the big P.B.M.s at the time, a Purdue sales executive, James Lang, celebrated: “We want to make OxyContin a billion-dollar drug in two years. This will help.”
“This is amazing,” Purdue’s president, Richard Sackler, replied.
Rebates formed the cornerstone of the relationships. In 2001, as OxyContin abuse made national headlines and regulators began trying to crack down, Purdue paid rebates of more than $31 million to Merck-Medco and $25 million to Express Scripts. By 2003, Purdue’s total rebates to P.B.M.s reached almost $200 million. (Merck-Medco later became part of Express Scripts, and AdvancePCS became part of CVS Caremark.)
Because the P.B.M.s often shared a portion of the rebates with the insurers and employers that hired them, these clients had a financial incentive not to impose restrictions. Purdue and the P.B.M.s sometimes reminded clients of this when they considered limiting access.
In a 2003 email, a Purdue executive, Bernadette Katsur, listed insurers that had abandoned planned restrictions on OxyContin — “proof of our success in working behind the scenes,” she wrote.
By teaming up with AdvancePCS, she wrote in another email, “we have eliminated many attempts” to restrict access to the painkiller. Another Purdue manager relayed a Merck-Medco executive’s account of the power of rebates: “The reason they have been able to keep various clients from placing” restrictions on OxyContin “has been the value of the rebates to them.”
An important test came in 2003. At a meeting with Purdue, an executive for the insurer UnitedHealthcare raised concerns about abuse of OxyContin, noting that some patients were being prescribed as many as 1,000 pills a month. The insurance company planned to limit prescriptions to 60 pills; doctors would need to call to get authorization for higher amounts.
For help, Purdue turned to Merck-Medco, the P.B.M. that UnitedHealthcare had hired to handle prescription drug benefits for its customers. The effort culminated in a meeting at UnitedHealth Group’s offices. A Merck-Medco official delivered a presentation on the “potential loss of rebates” to the insurer if it went forward with the limit, an executive for the P.B.M. reported to Purdue. “That information convinced the UHG team to change,” he wrote.
The insurer imposed a limit of 124 pills, more than double what it had previously planned.
Other drug companies adopted similar tactics — a playbook that would prove effective even as the opioid epidemic spread.
A manager at the drugmaker Mallinckrodt succinctly explained the access game to colleagues in 2012, after a group of large insurers imposed restrictions on one of the company’s painkillers. “We need to remove the barrier to growth, and that will require us to ‘pay to play,’” the manager wrote.
Express Scripts, the P.B.M. for the insurance plans, helped arrange a “rebate enhancement,” and the insurers loosened the restrictions.
Purdue and other leading drugmakers focused on avoiding two types of restrictions. The first was the requirement that doctors provide additional evidence to insurance companies or P.B.M.s that powerful painkillers were warranted.
In 2014, a large Blue Cross Blue Shield plan in New Jersey imposed such a requirement on Mallinckrodt’s drug Xartemis XR because of “safety, policy and chronic use concerns,” the drugmaker noted in an internal presentation. But after “assertive action” by Mallinckrodt and a P.B.M. called Prime Therapeutics, the Blue Cross Blue Shield plan “quickly reversed the decision.”
A second priority for opioid manufacturers was to ease limits on the number of pills that could be dispensed. As some insurers tried to slow the flood of pills fueling the epidemic, manufacturers pushed for limits that were often well above the Food and Drug Administration-approved dosing guidelines.
Purdue argued that P.B.M.s should allow patients to get at least 320 milligrams of OxyContin per day. That was four times the level that some states recommended and more than double the limit that P.B.M.s, under federal pressure, would later impose. A 2015 study found that patients who received even half that amount were far more likely to die than those prescribed lower doses.
The 320-milligram threshold was nonetheless enshrined in numerous rebate contracts between Purdue and the P.B.M.s. CVS Caremark negotiated an option that allowed clients to set a lower limit, but if they did, the rebate that they received from Purdue would be cut roughly in half.
David Whitrap, a CVS Caremark spokesman, characterized that as a “significant concession,” enabling clients to restrict the number of OxyContin pills while preserving some rebates from Purdue.
When opioid manufacturers struck a deal with a major P.B.M., they often urged their sales forces to capitalize.
After Mallinckrodt signed a contract with Express Scripts in 2014, for example, a sales manager relayed the good news to his team: “Make sure you let all your physicians know” that “they are free to write” prescriptions without insurance obstacles.
Long before the big P.B.M.s rolled out their opioid safety programs in 2017 and 2018, there was ample evidence that they had the power to help curb the opioid epidemic.
In the early 2000s, at the behest of Georgia’s Medicaid program, Express Scripts started requiring prior authorization for some prescriptions and placing limits on the number of pills that could be prescribed. A subsequent study by the P.B.M. found that the measures reduced the number of potentially inappropriate prescriptions.
“Any P.B.M. should be doing these things,” an Express Scripts researcher said when he presented the results at an industry conference in 2003.
Some private insurers, including Blue Cross Blue Shield plans in Tennessee and Massachusetts, took action even though it meant losing rebates.
“This was a patient safety and public health imperative,” said Andrew Dreyfus, the chief executive of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts when it restricted opioid access in 2012. While the insurer saw its rebates decline significantly, it credited the changes with reducing the overprescribing of opioids. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also found that opioid prescriptions decreased after the insurer’s changes.
But despite the growing body of evidence, the largest P.B.M.s continued to use their leverage to wring larger rebates out of opioid manufacturers.
Optum Rx, for example, largely controlled access to patients with a Medicare drug plan run by the insurer UnitedHealthcare — a population that generated roughly $200 million in annual sales for Purdue. (UnitedHealth Group owns both the insurer and Optum Rx.) To keep OxyContin on the list of approved drugs, Purdue was already shelling out about 23 percent of every sale in the form of rebates, totaling nearly $50 million in 2012, documents show.
But the P.B.M. wanted much more: about 60 percent. Purdue executives resented the demand, but they also feared the downside. If the middleman cut off access to OxyContin, sales could plunge, and other P.B.M.s and insurers might follow suit, the drugmaker worried.
“This is a ‘no-win/tough’ decision,” a Purdue executive wrote to colleagues.
Purdue agreed to the deal.
Mallinckrodt, too, agreed to pay ever-growing sums to keep its drugs available without restrictions. For some Medicare plans, the drugmaker by 2015 was paying Optum Rx about 70 percent of every sale.
The P.B.M.s’ longstanding arrangements with opioid manufacturers began to crumble in 2016. That March, the C.D.C. issued guidelines cautioning against excessive opioid prescriptions, especially those for high doses and large numbers of pills.
The middlemen also faced growing pressure from Medicare regulators to reduce opioid overuse, and more states were enacting their own restrictions.
By then, most opioid prescriptions were for generic versions of painkillers, on which drugmakers usually didn’t offer rebates. Even so, some P.B.M. executives fretted about potentially losing rebates on the remaining brand-name prescriptions.
In 2017, Express Scripts executives calculated how much money the company would lose by imposing restrictions and decided to charge clients for putting the safeguards into effect. The new fees should “make up for the rebate hit,” one executive said in an email. (Ms. Sessions, the Express Scripts spokeswoman, said the company charged for the program “to ensure that we have the staffing and resources necessary.”)
At Optum Rx, some executives pushed to delay new restrictions. They reminded colleagues that adding prior-authorization requirements and dose limits could violate the company’s contract with Purdue. Under that deal, the P.B.M. received rebates only if it allowed a daily dose of OxyContin that was far above the amount that the C.D.C. said was associated with increased risk of overdose.
But the idea of postponing the restrictions frustrated some Optum Rx executives, including David Calabrese, a senior vice president. In emails in 2017, he stressed the severity of the opioid epidemic and “the immediacy of the need for intervention.”
His concerns prompted a colleague to snap, “Stop with the attitude, and help us make sure we are compliant with our contracts.”
“My attitude,” Mr. Calabrese fired back, “is toward the gross overprescribing and overpromotion of these medications to our country’s citizens, the countless deaths and my commitment to doing whatever is within my power to put an end to it.”
The concerns about forfeiting rebates contributed to Optum Rx’s decision to delay at least some restrictions until 2018, emails show.
In the meantime, the P.B.M. renegotiated its deal with Purdue to continue receiving rebates despite the addition of restrictions. According to an internal Purdue memo, the drugmaker agreed to keep paying because it feared that it would be booted from the middleman’s drug lists altogether “if we do not keep them whole in terms of rebates.”
Purdue made similar concessions to other P.B.M.s, documents show.
Within a couple of years of the publication of the C.D.C. guidelines, the benefit managers had added authorization requirements for potent, long-acting drugs like OxyContin and redirected some patients to alternatives that posed less risk for addiction and abuse. The P.B.M.s also limited the number of pills and doses that could be dispensed.
The middlemen publicly touted the results of their programs, citing decreases in potentially inappropriate prescriptions.
Amid the positive publicity, an Optum Rx manager, Brian Sabin, floated the idea of going even further: What about removing OxyContin entirely from the company’s lists of covered drugs?
“Purdue has looked awful in the news since basically 2008,” Mr. Sabin wrote in a 2019 email to his colleague Venkat Vadlamudi. “They basically caused the opioid epidemic, and we’re essentially rewarding their bad behavior. From a purely P.R. perspective, I think it would look good on us.”
“Valid point,” Mr. Vadlamudi replied. “We as a company looked into this, but the amount of utilization on OxyContin and the rebates we collect prevented us from doing it.”
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2) ‘No Place to Hide’: Trapped on the Border, Immigrants Fear Deportation
Undocumented immigrants whose children or spouses are U.S. citizens are feeling particularly vulnerable to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s threats to push them out.
By Edgar Sandoval, Reporting from the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, Dec. 17, 2024
Maria, an undocumented immigrant, has lived nearly half her life in the United States. She has two American-born daughters who are teenagers. Credit...Gabriel V. Cárdenas for The New York Times
For the last quarter of a century, Maria’s version of the American dream has been confined to a small corner of South Texas, tucked between the border with Mexico and a fortified Border Patrol checkpoint 77 miles north.
Maria, the mother of two U.S.-born teenagers who crossed illegally from Mexico in 1998, is one of thousands of unauthorized immigrants who have long lived in a netherworld along the Texas border, tied to family members who are citizens but trapped in an unusual part of the country where, without legal immigration documents, it is all but impossible for them to stray far from their adopted hometowns.
Now, with President-elect Donald J. Trump’s vow to begin mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, many of those living with American family members along the border fear that they will be easy targets.
Border Patrol agents are legally able to make arrests within 100 miles of the border, but in the past they have generally not targeted families like Maria’s — a situation that could swiftly change. Adding to the families’ concerns, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas has offered the use of the Texas National Guard and state law enforcement officers to aid any immigration roundups. His land commissioner, Dawn Buckingham, has also offered land along the Texas border, only a few miles from where Maria lives, to serve as a staging site.
“Before Trump got elected, we always felt scared but knew we could do things to avoid being noticed,” said Maria, who did not want her last name published for fear of drawing the authorities’ attention. “Now we feel that once he takes office, dangers are everywhere. There is no place to hide.”
For generations, members of these mixed-status families — where at least one parent is undocumented and caring for children who are legal U.S. residents or citizens — have blended into the Latino-majority communities in this part of Texas. American border towns have long held strong ties to the Mexican side, and immigrants with legal documents cross the international border with the same ease that a person from Manhattan travels to Brooklyn.
About 75,000 children in the Rio Grande Valley live in such blended families, according to a 2018 report by two immigrant activist groups, La Unión del Pueblo Entero and Human Impact Partners.
Maria left her native San Luis PotosÃ, Mexico, in the late 1990s, married a fellow undocumented immigrant and gave birth to two daughters. In the months leading up to the November election, she began to worry. She taught her oldest daughter, now 15, to drive and told both of them to be prepared to move in with legal relatives in the area in case one day she didn’t come home.
“We know from the moment that we crossed illegally, that there is always a chance we could be sent back,” Maria said in an interview at her home.
Her elder daughter, also named Maria, said she planned to study immigration law to bring her mother back in case she was deported. “I want her here for when I graduate, get married, to be here for all the events of my life,” the daughter said.
Another Rio Grande Valley resident in a similar predicament, Laura, 35, said she had been living along the Texas border since she was a child.
She remembers vividly the morning many years ago when her mother told them she wanted to offer them a better life than the one they had in Matamoros, Mexico. She pulled Laura and her two siblings on top of her on a large tire and floated with them across the Rio Grande, Laura recalled.
Laura, who now works as a clerk at a medical clinic, eventually married a U.S. citizen and gave birth to two children in the country, ages 3 and 10. She has limited legal status, via the Obama-era program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which is intended to protect young people who were brought to the United States as children.
But her authorization expires in two months, and she is not confident that Mr. Trump will keep the program in place. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit is considering a challenge that could end DACA, as the program is known.
“I don’t even want to think about leaving my children behind if I have to return to a land I no longer recognize,” she said.
In Texas border communities, there has been growing impatience with unauthorized immigration. Mr. Trump won 12 of the South Texas region’s 14 counties, up from five in 2016.
“I think that people who are U.S. citizens, and I’m talking about, you know, most of our population, I think they believe that immigration laws should be enforced,” said Toni Treviño, who leads the Republican Party in Starr County, along the border. “And if you marry somebody who you know is not a U.S. citizen, that is a choice you are making. And at that point there could be consequences. Because oftentimes consequences of actions are very serious.”
She said immigrants were welcome as long as they chose a legal pathway. In a case such as Maria’s, Ms. Treviño said, her children could petition for her to return legally if she were to be deported.
Fears that some blended families could be separated became palpable during a recent meeting organized by activists from La Unión del Pueblo Entero in the border town of San Juan, Texas.
“Many kids are terrified that they are going to come home from school and find an empty house, because their parents have been deported,” said Elizabeth Rodriguez, an activist who works with immigrant farmworkers.
A nervous crowd watched quietly as meeting organizers staged a series of sketches meant to educate them about their rights as undocumented immigrants. One person played the role of a police officer and another that of an immigrant caught in a traffic stop.
JoaquÃn GarcÃa, a director of community organizing for the group, who was playing the officer, began by warning the audience that unauthorized immigrants would need to be extra cautious come Jan. 20, when Mr. Trump returned to the White House. They should do everything in their power, he added, to avoid an interaction with local and state police and the ubiquitous green-and-white Border Patrol trucks that can be seen at almost every turn in Texas border cities.
In one scenario, Mr. GarcÃa coaxed a woman playing the role of an immigrant into admitting that she lacked identification and a car registration, prompting the pretend officer to call Border Patrol for backup. In that scenario, he said, deportation would be almost guaranteed.
Mr. GarcÃa reassured the crowd that they had a right to remain silent, the right to call an immigration lawyer and the right to ask for a hearing before an immigration judge. He also warned them not to sign a voluntary order of deportation, even if they were pressured to do so.
Mr. GarcÃa also instructed people to have a plan in place in case they found themselves in an immigration jail, including securing power of attorney to give custody of their children to a legal resident so that their children would not end up in foster care.
“Have a plan. Be ready. Because remember, they also have a plan,” Mr. GarcÃa said. “Their plan is to get you out of the country.”
One man raised his hand and wondered if it would be better for people in danger of deportation to pack their bags and return to their native country to avoid being held behind bars. “Why wait to get deported? Because they are going to deport you anyway,” he asked.
Brittany, 22, who has attended several such meetings, said she was a U.S. citizen but feared for her husband, a Mexican immigrant who was fighting an order of deportation. She said she had been calling her immigration lawyer almost every day demanding updates. She had been told that her husband might have a path to legal residency because he was married to her and they had two American-born children.
But she fears that when Mr. Trump returns to office, those protections may simply evaporate.
“I’m just trying to get his documents settled before January,” she said. “At this point, we are praying for a miracle to keep our family together.”
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3) I Was a Health Insurance Executive. What I Saw Made Me Quit.
By Wendell Potter, Dec. 18, 2024
Mr. Potter is the former vice president for corporate communications at Cigna.
Damon Winter/The New York Times
I left my job as a health insurance executive at Cigna after a crisis of conscience. It began in 2005, during a meeting convened by the chief executive to brief department heads on the company’s latest strategy: “consumerism.”
Marketing consultants created the term to persuade employers and policymakers to shift hundreds, and in many cases thousands, of dollars in health-care costs onto consumers before insurance coverage kicks in. At the time, most Americans had relatively modest cost-sharing obligations — a $300 deductible, a $10 co-payment. “Consumerism” proponents contended that if patients had more “skin in the game” they would be more prudent consumers of health care, and providers would lower their prices.
Leading the presentation was a newly hired executive. Onstage, he was bombarded with questions about how plans with high deductibles could help the millions of Americans with chronic conditions and other serious illnesses. It was abundantly clear that insurance companies would pay far fewer claims but many enrollees’ health care costs would skyrocket. After about 30 minutes of nonstop questions, I realized I’d have to drink the Kool-Aid and embrace this approach.
And I did, for a while. As head of corporate communications at Cigna from 1999 until 2008, I was responsible for developing a public relations and lobbying campaign to persuade reporters and politicians that consumerism would be the long-awaited solution to ever-rising insurance premiums. But through my own research and common sense, I knew plans requiring significant cost sharing would be great for the well-heeled and healthy — and insurers’ shareholders — but potentially disastrous for others. And they have been. Of the estimated 100 million Americans with medical debt, the great majority have health insurance. Their plans are simply inadequate for their medical needs, despite the continuing rise in premiums year after year.
I grew uneasy after the company retreat. But it took an impromptu visit to a free medical clinic, held near where I grew up in the mountains of East Tennessee, to come face to face with the true consequences of our consumerism strategy.
At a county fairground in Wise, Va., I witnessed people standing in lines that stretched out of view, waiting to see physicians who were stationed in animal stalls. The event’s organizers, from a nonprofit called Remote Area Medical, told me that of the thousands of people who came to this three-day clinic every year, some had health insurance but did not have enough money in the bank to cover their out-of-pocket obligations.
That shook me to my core. I was forced to come to terms with the fact that I was playing a leading role in a system that made desperate people wait months or longer to get care in animal stalls, or go deep into medical debt.
The tragic assassination of the UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson has reinvigorated a conversation that my former colleagues have long worked to suppress about an industry that puts profits above patients. Over 20 years working in health insurance, I saw the unrelenting pressure investors put on insurers to spend less paying out claims. The average amount insurers spent on medical care dropped from 95 cents per premium dollar in 1993, the year I joined Cigna, to approximately 85 cents per dollar in 2011, after the Affordable Care Act restricted how much insurers can profit from premiums. Since then, big insurers have bought physician practices, clinics and pharmacy middlemen, largely to increase their bottom line.
Meanwhile, the barriers to medical care have gotten higher and higher. Families can be on the hook for up to $18,900 before their coverage kicks in. Insurers require prior authorization more aggressively than when I was an industry spokesman, which forces patients and their doctors through a maze of approvals before getting a procedure, sometimes denying them necessary treatment. Sure, the insurance industry isn’t to blame for all the problems with our health system, but it shoulders much of them. (In response to a request for comment, Cigna told The Times that Mr. Potter’s views don’t reflect the company’s and that Cigna is constantly working to improve its support for patients.)
At Cigna, my P.R. team and I handled dozens of calls from reporters wanting to know why the company refused to pay for a patient’s care. We kept many of those stories out of the press, often by telling reporters that federal privacy laws prohibited us from even acknowledging the patient in question and adding that insurers do not pay for experimental or medically unnecessary care, implying that the treatment wasn’t warranted.
One story that we couldn’t keep out of the press, and that contributed most to my decision to walk away from my career in 2008, involved Nataline Sarkisyan, a 17-year-old leukemia patient in California whose scheduled liver transplant was postponed at the last minute when Cigna told her surgeons it wouldn’t pay. Cigna’s medical director, located 2,500 miles away from Nataline, said she was too sick for the procedure. Nataline’s family stirred up so much media attention that Cigna relented, but it was too late. Nataline died a few hours after Cigna’s change of heart.
Nataline’s death affected me personally and deeply. As a father, I couldn’t imagine the depth of despair her parents were facing. I turned in my notice a few weeks later. I could not in good conscience continue being a spokesman for an industry that was making it increasingly difficult for Americans to get often lifesaving care.
One of my last acts before resigning was helping to plan a meeting for investors and Wall Street financial analysts — similar to the one that UnitedHealthcare canceled after Mr. Thompson’s horrific killing. These “annual investor days,” like the consumerism idea I helped spread, reveal an uncomfortable truth about our health insurance system: that shareholders, not patient outcomes, tend to drive decisions at for-profit health insurance companies.
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4) Insurers Are Deserting Homeowners as Climate Shocks Worsen
Without insurance, it’s impossible to get a mortgage; without a mortgage, most Americans can’t buy a home.
Christopher Flavelle reported from Silver City, N.M. Data analysis and graphics by Mira Rojanasakul. Photography and video by Paul Ratje for The New York Times. Dec. 18, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/12/18/climate/insurance-non-renewal-climate-crisis.html
The insurance crisis spreading across the United States arrived at Richard D. Zimmel’s door last week in the form of a letter.
Mr. Zimmel, who lives in the increasingly fire-prone hills outside Silver City, N.M., had done everything right. He trimmed the trees away from his house, and covered his yard in gravel to stop flames rushing in from the forest near his property. In case that buffer zone failed, he sheathed his house in fire-resistant stucco, and topped it with a noncombustible steel roof.
None of it mattered. His insurance company, Homesite Insurance, dumped him. “Property is located in a brushfire or wildfire area that no longer meets Homesite’s minimum standard for wildfire risk,” the letter read. (Homesite did not respond to a request for comment.)
Mr. Zimmel has company. Since 2018, more than 1.9 million home insurance contracts nationwide have been dropped — “nonrenewed,” in the parlance of the industry. In more than 200 counties, the nonrenewal rate has tripled or more, according to the findings of a congressional investigation released Wednesday.
As a warming planet delivers more wildfires, hurricanes and other threats, America’s once reliably boring home insurance market has become the place where climate shocks collide with everyday life.
The consequences could be profound. Without insurance, you can’t get a mortgage; without a mortgage, most Americans can’t buy a home. Communities that are deemed too dangerous to insure face the risk of falling property values, which means less tax revenue for schools, police and other basic services. As insurers pull back, they can destabilize the communities left behind, making their decisions a predictor of the disruption to come.
Now, for the first time, the scale of that pullback is becoming public. Last fall, the Senate Budget Committee demanded the country’s largest insurance companies provide the number of nonrenewals by county and year. The result is a map that tracks the climate crisis in a new way.
The American Property Casualty Insurance Association, a trade group, said information about nonrenewals was “unsuitable for providing meaningful information about climate change impacts,” because the data doesn’t show why individual insurers made decisions. The group added that efforts to gather data from insurers “could have an anticompetitive effect on the market.”
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island and the committee’s chairman, said the new information was crucial. In an interview, he called the new data as good an indicator as any “for predicting the likelihood and timing of a significant, systemic economic crash,” as disruption in the insurance market spreads to property values.
The map of dropped policies shows how the crisis in the American home insurance market has spread beyond well-known problems in Florida and California. The jump in nonrenewals now extends along the Gulf Coast, through Alabama and Mississippi; up the Atlantic seaboard, through the Carolinas, Virginia and into southern New England; inland, to parts of the plains and Intermountain West; and even as far as Hawaii.
Silver City shows how the insurance crisis is a result of several factors over decades — and how hard it is to solve.
Founded as a mining town in the 1870s, the city of 10,000 nestles up against the foothills of the Gila National Forest, 3.3 million acres of alligator juniper, ponderosa pine and Gambel oak draped across softly sloping mountains.
That forest has also become a firetrap.
Since its designation as a national forest in 1924, the U.S. government sought to protect the land by stopping forest fires. That policy failed to take into account that fires clear out vegetation, according to Adam Mendonca, the U.S. Forest Service’s Washington deputy director of fire and aviation, who lives in Silver City. The result was the buildup of decades of additional trees and brush, which means wildfires, when they do happen, now burn larger and hotter.
That threat has been exacerbated by climate change, which has brought higher temperatures and drier conditions. Wildfires are now more likely to break out any time of year.
“We used to take our wildland gear home, put it into storage about September, and then bring it back to the station in February,” said Milo Lambert, Silver City’s fire chief. “Now it doesn’t leave the trucks.”
Even as the threat of wildfires has grown, home construction has pushed further into the forest. On a recent afternoon, Eric Casler, an assistant professor of natural sciences at Western New Mexico University, surveyed the neighborhoods that have grown up north of the city limits.
“See all these scattered houses out here?” Mr. Casler said. If a wildfire started to burn through the area, “it’s going to be really hard for them to stop it.”
It’s not just where people build homes that puts them at risk, experts said, but how those homes are constructed. Outside city limits, Grant County has no zoning or wildfire building restrictions, according to Roger Groves, the fire chief for the county, which includes Silver City.
Taken together, those challenges have caused insurers to pull back, according to Susan Sumrall, an insurance agent in Silver City.
Across Grant County, 51 home insurance contracts were not renewed in 2018, based on the data provided to the committee. That’s about one in 100 policies. By last year, that number had doubled to 100 nonrenewals, even as the county’s total population shrank.
One of Ms. Sumrall’s clients who has lost her insurance is Charlene Rosati. Ms. Rosati and her husband had to spend months in Houston, where he was being treated for cancer. Her insurance company, State Farm, sent an inspector to check if the home was being properly maintained, Ms. Rosati said, and concluded it was not.
Ms. Rosati’s husband died in September last year. Soon after, State Farm told her it wouldn’t renew her coverage. The company did not respond to a request for comment.
Many homes in and around Silver City are mobile or manufactured homes, which can offer less protection against fires than traditional site-built houses. Lorri Williams lives in a manufactured home in a valley just outside of Silver City. She, too, got a letter from her insurer, Standard Casualty Company, based in Texas.
“Reason — unsatisfactory risk,” the company wrote in block letters. “Your home is either located inside of or in close proximity of an area that is identified as having a high risk of wildfire.”
Standard Casualty Company did not respond to a request for comment.
People who lose insurance often don’t have great options. Ms. Williams’s broker, Chelsea Hotchkiss, tried getting her another insurer, with no luck. Ms. Hotchkiss suggested the state-run high-risk insurance program, which offers coverage to homeowners who can’t find it on the private market. But that program is more expensive and provides less coverage.
After Mr. Zimmel got his nonrenewal letter last week, he called State Farm, which declined to cover him. His insurance agent struck out with three more carriers, including Travelers. (State Farm and Travelers did not respond to requests for comment.) Finally, a smaller company agreed to insure his house, but his premiums jumped by one-third.
Mr. Zimmel’s bigger worry, he said, is how the struggle over insurance could affect his home’s value, which his real estate agent estimates at about $725,000.
“I just don’t know what’s going to happen to the town if this keeps happening,” said Mr. Zimmel’s agent, Shelley Scarborough.
Officials are trying to reduce wildfire risk. The county is looking at setting building standards to cut fire exposure, Mr. Groves said. State officials are also considering ways to get more homeowners to clear the vegetation from their property, possibly through a pilot project in nearby Lincoln County that would make those steps necessary to qualify for the state high-risk insurance pool.
And the U.S. Forest Service is trying to clear out decades’ worth of thick brush and other excess vegetation — what experts call “treating” the forest. That process is anything but simple.
In the parts of the forest nearest the city, workers have cut down smaller trees, low-hanging branches and scrub oak, then stacked them into piles to dry out. After a year or so, the piles are set on fire — ideally during the winter, to reduce the risk of the fire spreading.
After those two steps, the Forest Service can perform a prescribed burn: deliberately setting fire to a patch of the forest to further clear out the vegetation. To maintain that work, the process should typically be repeated every five to 10 years.
The Forest Service has been treating between 25,000 and 30,000 of the 3.3 million acres in the Gila Forest each year, according to Mr. Mendonca. “It’s a constant struggle for the agency to try to address,” he said, citing a shortage of staffing, money and time.
The underlying challenges that are driving insurers from Silver City can be found across the country.
In parts of Wyoming, the growing risk of wildfire is similarly pushing insurers to drop customers. Teton County, which includes Jackson Hole, saw nonrenewal rates increase 1,394 percent since 2018. Jeff Rude, the state insurance commissioner, said the state was focused on educating homeowners about how to reduce the risk on their land, because tougher building standards are unpopular in Wyoming.
In California, which has some of the country’s most stringent building codes to address wildfire risk, insurers have nonetheless been fleeing. In some counties, nonrenewal rates have increased more than 500 percent since 2018. Officials announced last week that they would make it easier for insurers to raise rates, but in exchange, those insurers must agree to keep doing business in fire-prone areas.
In Hawaii, the nonrenewal rate tripled between 2018 and 2023, one of the highest increases in the country. The growing risk from wildfires and other threats has led to what Gov. Josh Green, a Democrat, has called a “condo insurance crisis.” In August, he signed an emergency proclamation, setting up a task force to search for solutions.
In coastal South Carolina, which now has some of the highest nonrenewal rates in the country, insurers have been going out of business, reducing their exposure or just leaving the area, said Jay Taylor, an insurance agent in Beaufort County, which includes Hilton Head, an area particularly exposed to sea-level rise, hurricanes and other climate threats.
Homeowners complain about the difficulty and cost of getting insurance, he said. But the desire to live by the ocean, despite the danger, remains the stronger force.
“They may cuss us out,” Mr. Taylor said. “But they never stop building.”
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5) U.S. Agrees to Pay $116 Million to Settle Sexual Abuse Claims at California Prison
Lawyers for the victims said it was the largest deal of its kind reached with the federal Bureau of Prisons.
By Orlando MayorquÃn, Dec. 18, 2024
The now-closed Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, Calif., in April. Credit...Terry Chea/Associated Press
The federal government agreed on Tuesday to pay about $116 million to settle lawsuits by 103 women who said they had been sexually abused while in custody at a now-shuttered women’s prison in Northern California where such claims were rampant.
Lawyers for the women said the deal was the largest of its kind reached with the federal Bureau of Prisons, and a landmark victory that they hoped would offer abuse victims at prisons across the country hope that justice was possible.
The Bureau of Prisons confirmed the settlement in a statement on Tuesday and said that it “strongly condemns all forms of sexually abusive behavior and takes seriously its duty to protect the individuals in our custody as well as maintain the safety of our employees and community.”
The Federal Correction Institution in Dublin, Calif., a low-security facility about 30 miles east of San Francisco, had at one point housed 600 inmates and had stood out as a particularly egregious example of abuse in women’s prisons. At least seven correctional officers have pleaded guilty or been convicted on charges of sexual abuse at the prison. The case against an eighth officer is still pending.
Last year, a former prison warden, Ray Garcia, was sentenced to 70 months in prison and 15 years of supervised release for sexually abusing three female inmates and lying to federal investigators.
Abuse had been so rampant at the prison that it became known among to many as the “rape club,” said Jessica Pride, whose law firm represented some of the victims.
“What happened at Dublin was not just a failure of oversight,” Ms. Pride said in a statement. “It was a cultural rot, where sexual abuse became entrenched as part of the prison’s operations.”
Tuesday’s settlement agreement resolved claims that had been made in the last three to five years against more than 25 correctional officers and medical personnel, according to another law firm that represented 24 of the women. But the settlement represents only a fraction of the abuse at the facility because of a two-year statute of limitations on tort claims, said Adam Slater, a lawyer at the firm Slater Slater Schulman L.L.P.
“So the abuse dates way back,” Mr. Slater said. “We have been contacted by tons of women that have no legal recourse.”
In its statement, the Bureau of Prisons said that the settlement addressed sexual abuse and retaliation claims made by current and former prisoners and that the bureau was “dedicated to appropriately addressing the consequences of sexually abusive behavior at F.C.I. Dublin.”
Earlier this month, the agency announced that it was permanently shutting down the Dublin prison because of low staffing levels, crumbling infrastructure and the high cost of living in the Bay Area. The agency also said at the time that it was disbanding six other facilities across the country, citing maintenance struggles and “a very difficult budget situation.”
Mr. Slater said that women incarcerated in Dublin had faced retaliation, including being placed in solitary confinement, if they reported being abused. His colleague, James Lewis, said such abuse was systemic and not limited to the Dublin facility.
“I think this settlement sheds a light on that a little bit and hopefully will bring attention to all prisons and rampant sexual abuse that goes on in virtually in every prison across the country,” Mr. Lewis said.
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6) On Avignon’s Ancient Ramparts, Modern Messages Denounce ‘Rape Culture’
A feminist collective, the Amazons of Avignon, has been plastering the walls of the city with testimony from the trial of the 51 men who were convicted in the Gisèle Pelicot rape case.
By Catherine Porter and Ségolène Le Stradic, Dec. 20, 2024
The reporters spent the past four months returning regularly to Avignon, France, to cover the trial.
Ms. Pelicot in Avignon in October. She pushed for the trial to be opened to the public to force France to look and see the prevalence of rape. Credit...Christophe Simon/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The buttery yellow ramparts encircling the center of Avignon stretch 2.6 miles and are notched with arrow slits and gaps for dumping boiling water or cooking oil on attackers below.
Over the centuries, the walls have protected popes and warded off sieges. They have been rebuilt by the 19th-century architect who refurbished Notre-Dame, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, and have been decorated by the notices for plays since the summer theater festival began in the city soon after World War II.
And for the last four months, they have borne witness to the mass rape trial occurring in the modern courthouse just across the road and to its central victim, Gisèle Pelicot.
The night before the trial began in early September, a group of local feminists traveled around the city and pasted pieces of paper with letters on them to walls, in large collages. They contained messages for the accused men who would arrive to court the next day.
“Rapist, we see you,” read one along the lip of an arched gate through the wall.
“Victims, we believe you,” read another.
The feminists belong to a group called the Amazons of Avignon. Like other feminist collectives in France, they had been gluing up messages about violence against women around the city for years. But they picked up their pace after Ms. Pelicot pushed for the trial to be opened to the public.
Her husband of 50 years, Dominique, was convicted on Thursday of having drugged her for almost a decade to rape her, and then inviting men he met online to rape her. With the help of a library of videos and photographs he took of the assaults, the police tracked down 50 other men — and charged all but one with raping, attempting to rape or sexually assaulting Ms. Pelicot.
They were all convicted on Thursday and given sentences ranging from three to 15 years in prison. Mr. Pelicot was sentenced to the maximum of 20 years.
A retired manager and grandmother, Ms. Pelicot felt her life and self-identity crash into a “field of ruins,” she explained. She decided to point a huge magnifying glass over her intimate horror, to force the country to look and see the prevalence of rape.
After that decision, different messages began to decorate Avignon’s walls, celebrating her.
“Gisèle, courageous and dignified,” read one. “Gisèle standing, braving the storm. Women admire you,” read another. And this one, simple and poetic: “Wonder Gisèle.”
The Amazons, like many local residents, attended the trial, where they attentively watched the proceedings and took notes. At the end of each day’s session, they joined the honor line to cheer Ms. Pelicot as she left court. Then, at night, they ventured out and pasted unadulterated words from her testimony to the walls of their city.
“Since I arrived in this courtroom, I have felt humiliated,” read one such citation. “I have the impression that the guilty one is me and that behind me are 50 victims,” read another.
They painted a huge banner with her response to one of the defense lawyers who had maladroitly explained the difference between the legal definition of rape and the street one. Then, they climbed up ladders and hung it from the ramparts right across from the front door of the courthouse.
“A rape,” it read, “is a rape.”
“We are in total admiration of what she is doing,” said Fanny Fourès, 48, a French teacher who was out with the Amazons one night in October, helping the group to paste up the message: “Gisèle, we are all with you.”
“We feel in our guts, we have to be there, to watch her back,” Ms. Fourès added.
Avignon, an ancient city of about 90,000 people about 430 miles south of Paris, gained considerable importance in the 14th century, when Pope Clement V moved there from Rome and built his palace and the walls. Eight more popes — some of them disputed — stayed there.
Like Paris, Avignon is divided between the more upscale ancient center — “intra-muros,” which means “within the walls” in Latin — and its poorer suburbs, known as “extra-muros.” The dividing line is formed by the rampart walls.
Since the trial began, the Amazons have ventured out about three times a week to paste messages on both sides of the ramparts, but mostly concentrating on the intra-muros area near the courthouse.
Some people who live and work inside the walls say the last few months have felt particularly heavy. They’ve seen Ms. Pelicot walking to and from the courthouse each day, sometimes stopping to tell her “bravo.” They’ve also brushed shoulders with the more than 40 lawyers on the case and the many accused who were found guilty on Thursday.
“Shame must change sides,” said Damien Sentilhes, 63, an artist who works in a gallery near the courthouse, echoing words from Ms. Pelicot that were also painted on a banner and hung from the ramparts. “It’s really obvious that shame is on the side of men.”
Both Ms. Pelicot and some of the accused have shopped at Eddy Hiolet’s small grocery store a block from the courthouse.
“It’s a weird feeling. We feel uneasy, sometimes we’d rather not serve these people because what they’ve done is huge,” Mr. Hiolet, 58, said. But as uncomfortable as it has been, he’s glad for the trial: “If it can shake things up a bit, it’s for the best.”
In November, the Amazons began pasting up the words they heard some of the accused use in court, again word for word.
“People need to know what they are saying,” explained the group’s founder, Blandine Deverlanges, 56. “Rape culture is that too — it’s the explanations we hear that are so backwards and so trivialized. Just by repeating them, it should provoke a reaction.”
One such statement from a defendant read: “I committed a rape, it’s my body not my brain.” Black letters on a yellow wall spelled out: “It wasn’t me. It was my doppelgänger.” On a large wall a few paces from the courthouse was pasted: “It is an involuntary rape.”
At the bottom of that last one was written in small type the name of the man who had uttered that line.
That had not been part of the original collage, Ms. Deverlanges explained. Someone outside their team added it later. The Amazons also noticed that people began to write notes directly to Ms. Pelicot in the white spaces around the letters of their signs: “Thank you Gisèle.” “Nous t’aimons.” “Vielen Dank Gisèle.”
“Our collages, once they are in the world, they don’t belong to us anymore,” Ms. Deverlanges said. “Women have appropriated them and used them as a platform for their own words. It’s wonderful.”
One tangible impact of the trial, the Amazons believe, is a newfound sense of their role and place in the city, along with their occupation of public space.
Adèle Bossard, a local radio journalist, said: “The feminist movement here has grown. Now there are many women who are active — I think that will likely change the city.”
Not everyone agrees. Some say the trial’s impact on Avignon has been minimal, and ephemeral.
“I’m not sure these messages shock everyone,” said Paul Payan, a lecturer in medieval history at the local university. “It’s bizarre to see them detached from their judicial context.”
Others believe Avignon is simply a microcosm of France, which is already changing because of the trial.
“I think women will talk more and more now,” said Camille Leroy, 21, a law student from Avignon who attended the trial. “No one has survived something worse than Gisèle. If she could do it, we all can do it, too.”
The Amazons believe they have played their small part, echoing the messages in the courtroom out through the city and from there, throughout the country and the world.
On the night before the verdict, they were joined by more than a dozen journalists, clambering for the best angle of their emerging messages, pasted up on walls already crowded by other snippets of testimony and poetry.
“51, tous capables, tous coupables,” the women pasted up in one spot: “51, all capable, all guilty.”
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7) How Drug Overdose Deaths Have Plagued One Generation of Black Men for Decades
In dozens of cities, the recent rise of fentanyl has put older Black men in particular jeopardy.
By Josh Katz, Margot Sanger-Katz and Nick Thieme, Dec. 20, 2024
Ricky Austin, 52, first struggled with opioid addiction in his teens. Credit...Jessica Griffin/The Philadelphia Inquirer
Young Black men in cities across America died of drug overdoses at high rates in the 1980s and 1990s. During the recent fentanyl crisis, older Black men in many cities have been dying at unusually high rates.
They’re all from the same generation.
An investigation of millions of death records — in a partnership between The New York Times, The Baltimore Banner, Big Local News and nine other newsrooms across the country — reveals the extent to which drug overdose deaths have affected one group of Black men in dozens of cities across America at nearly every stage of their adult lives.
Some causes of death strike people of many ages all at once — like the Covid-19 pandemic.
Others strike at a certain age: Prostate cancer almost always kills men later in their lives.
Gun homicides are more concentrated among younger men.
But, across many American cities, drug deaths in Black men have followed a different pattern.
In Chicago, for example, higher overdose death rates have followed a generation of Black men as they age.
Death rates in this group are higher now than ever, as the drug supply has gotten even more dangerous.
There’s no similar pattern among white men.
In recent years, the opioid epidemic has brought dangerous drugs to every corner of the country, and overdoses have risen among younger, whiter and more rural populations.
That huge tide now appears to be ebbing — but not for this group of Black men. In the 10 cities examined in this partnership, including Baltimore, Chicago, San Francisco, Newark, Washington, Milwaukee and Philadelphia, Black men ages 54 to 73 have been dying from overdoses at more than four times the rate of men of other races.
“They were resilient enough to live through a bunch of other epidemics — H.I.V., crack, Covid, multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis — only to be killed by fentanyl,” said Tracie M. Gardner, the executive director of the National Black Harm Reduction Network and a former New York State health official.
In all, the analysis identified dozens of cities, mostly in the Northeast and Midwest, where a generation of Black men were at higher risk of overdose deaths throughout their lives. In many of those places, cities have done little to distribute resources to this population.
The details vary from city to city.
In Chicago, there is no focused effort in nearly $1.3 billion of state opioid settlement money to help older Black men, despite a heavy death toll for this group, The Chicago Sun-Times found.
In Pittsburgh, Black men in jail with opioid use disorders have been less likely to receive medications to combat their addictions than white men, a PublicSource investigation has found, though local officials are working to close the gap.
In San Francisco, many of the men vulnerable to overdoses use both opioids and cocaine, a combination that may make treating their addictions more complex, according to an analysis of mortality data by The San Francisco Standard.
In Newark, NJ.com/The Star-Ledger also found that overdose victims were using both opioids and cocaine.
In Baltimore, hundreds of men have been dying in senior housing, The Baltimore Banner found.
In Philadelphia, older Black men were actually less likely to die than their white peers — until recently. By 2018, their death rate had shot up, according to a Philadelphia Inquirer analysis.
In Washington, local regulations and insurers have prevented doctors from giving longtime opioid users effective doses of drugs meant to curb their cravings, reporters for The 51st found.
‘Dying for decades’
Black men of this generation, born from 1951 to 1970, came of age at a time of wide economic disparities between Black and white people in their cities. Some of them served in Vietnam, where they were first exposed to heroin. In cities where heroin was available, others started using the drug closer to home in the 1970s and ’80s, and became addicted.
Many have continued to use drugs on and off for decades. Though some managed their addictions safely, the risk of overdose was always there.
Mark Robinson, 66, grew up in Washington and now runs a syringe exchange program in the city. He estimates he knows 50 people who have died over the years from overdoses, including one of his best friends.
“Black men didn’t just start dying,” he said. “We’ve been dying for decades as a direct result of opioid use disorder.”
The cities with this pattern of drug deaths tend to be places with large Black populations, intense residential segregation and heroin markets that were active in the 1970s, when the oldest of these men were young and first became exposed to illicit drugs, according to Dr. Dan Ciccarone, a professor of family and community medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
“Heroin has become an endemic problem,” he said. “It never went away.”
In addition to the risk of overdose, men of this generation lived through convulsions in public health and criminal justice. In the 1980s, some became exposed to H.I.V. through drug injections. In the 1990s, more aggressive sentences for drug crimes meant many of them spent time in jails or prisons.
Several public health researchers said widespread incarceration may have reduced these men’s chances of staying clean. “You’re basically disarming them from having a good life,” said Ricky Bluthenthal, a professor of public health at the University of Southern California, who has studied injection drug users for decades. “They lose girlfriends, they lose houses, they lose connections to their children.”
They have lived through the social upheavals of Covid, a period of isolation that coincided with an increase in the overdose rate for nearly all groups.
They also stand to benefit from the recent embrace of more medical approaches to drug addiction. Drugs that can reverse an overdose are widely distributed in many cities now. And more doctors are willing to prescribe medications that can curb drug cravings for people who want to quit.
But in many of the cities where older Black men are dying at high rates, those innovations may not be reaching this group.
Decades of drug use, criminal risk and stigma have made some reluctant to discuss their addictions. The Philadelphia council member Kendra Brooks said she recently learned about nine overdoses among older Black residents in her neighborhood. The overdoses had happened quietly, in private homes.
“In this generation, you don’t get high in public,” Ms. Brooks said. “It’s something very private and personal. Amongst folks that I know, it’s like a secret disease.”
Older Black drug users have been less likely than white ones to receive prescription medicines that are now the gold standard for addiction treatment.
Medicare, the public program that insures older Americans, tends to cover fewer addiction services than insurance for younger people.
And, more generally, many outreach programs are aimed at younger populations.
“If you go to a harm reduction program, it’s not typically set up with older folks in mind,” said Brendan Saloner, a professor of health policy at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, who studies access to health care among people who use drugs. “They’re not in any way unwelcome, but they’re not generally the target.”
In Chicago, Fanya Burford-Berry, who directs the West Side Heroin and Opioid Task Force, pleaded with state officials to devote more resources to the city’s older Black drug users at a recent meeting.
“It seems like there’s a blind spot when it comes to prioritizing Black men, older Black men and drug usage,” she said.
‘Not any real heroin’
This generation’s experience also highlights how much more dangerous the drug supply has become. Despite better treatment and more resources to combat addiction, the overdose death rate among older Black men in these cities has risen in recent years, as heroin has been replaced by the more potent fentanyl.
“There is not any real heroin being sold in the streets, period,” said Joe Henery, 77. Mr. Henery, who lives in Washington, used heroin for 30 years before getting clean. He said his friends who are still alive were “fortunate enough to survive the epidemics of all sorts,” but he worries about the risk of overdose for those who are still using. What was once heroin in Washington is now almost all either replaced by or mixed with fentanyl.
Fentanyl is easier for cartels to manufacture in labs and smuggle into the country. But the high doesn’t last as long as heroin’s, which often means drug users take more doses a day to avoid withdrawal symptoms. And its variable strength makes it more likely for even experienced users to take a fatal dose accidentally.
Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health, said the pattern of deaths in Baltimore reported by The Times and The Banner has caused her to seek new research on why these men are dying and how to prevent it.
Dr. Volkow acknowledged that their drug addiction has long placed them at risk, but she said that fentanyl has greatly intensified that risk.
“If you were, in the past, using heroin, your chances of dying were much, much lower than your chances of dying now,” she said. “The key element now is the dangerousness of the drugs.”
Reporting was contributed by Cheryl Phillips, Eric Sagara, Sarah Cohen and Justin Mayo of Big Local News; Frank Main, Elvia Malagón and Erica Thompson of The Chicago Sun-Times; Aubrey Whelan and Joe Yerardi of The Philadelphia Inquirer; Venuri Siriwardane and Jamie Wiggan of PublicSource; Abigail Higgins and Colleen Grablick of The 51st; Ryan Little of The Baltimore Banner; David Sjostedt, Noah Baustin and George Kelly of The San Francisco Standard; and Steve Strunsky and Riley Yates of NJ.com/The Star-Ledger.
About this project
The data and methodology behind this project can be downloaded from the Stanford Digital Repository. This article was published in partnership with The Baltimore Banner, Stanford’s Big Local News and other local news outlets: The Chicago Sun-Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, PublicSource, The 51st, The San Francisco Standard and NJ.com/The Star-Ledger. Others with pending work in this project are The Boston Globe, Free Press Indiana/Mirror Indy and Wisconsin Watch.
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8) Starbucks Workers Begin a Strike in 3 Cities on Friday
The walkout in Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle comes after talks between the company and the workers’ union failed to produce an agreement on raises.
By Noam Scheiber, Published Dec. 19, 2024, Updated Dec. 20, 2024
Noam Scheiber has covered the union campaign at Starbucks since it began in 2021.
The strike is expected to begin in about 15 Starbucks stores and could spread to hundreds by Christmas Eve. Credit...Graham Dickie/The New York Times
A union representing Starbucks workers said that baristas in Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle walked off the job Friday morning and that the strikes would spread to hundreds of stores by Christmas Eve unless the company improved its wage offer in contract negotiations.
The union, which represents baristas at more than 500 company-owned stores in the United States — about 5 percent of the U.S. total — said it called the strike after a bargaining session with the company this week failed to produce better wage gains.
The strike will begin in about 15 stores across the three metropolitan areas, according to a union member familiar with the situation who was not authorized to speak publicly.
“Starbucks proposed an economic package with no new wage increases for union baristas now and a guarantee of only 1.5 percent in future years,” the union, Workers United, said in a statement.
The guarantee would entitle unionized Starbucks workers to receive a wage increase of 1.5 percent even if the company raises wages nationwide by less than that amount in future years. If the company raised wages by more than that — as it did this year, with a recently announced increase of 2 percent — unionized workers would get the higher amount.
Andrew Trull, a Starbucks spokesman, said union delegates “prematurely ended” this week’s negotiations. “It is disappointing they didn’t return to the table given the progress we’ve made to date,” he added.
The two sides have been bargaining a national contract framework during monthly sessions since April. They have reached more than two dozen tentative agreements on a variety of issues, including health and safety, attendance policies and ensuring that workers can be fired only for just cause.
The union workers will also receive an expansion of paid parental leave that Starbucks recently announced for all workers; union members say the announcement appeared to be a response to a demand the union made during bargaining.
While Starbucks workers have waged one- and two-day strikes since they began to unionize in the fall of 2021, the latest action could see workers at dozens or even hundreds of stores walk off the job for longer periods. The union said the strike would end within five days.
The company had largely resisted the union’s organizing efforts for more than two years until February, when it sought a peace deal of sorts that would establish a process for workers to unionize without opposition from the company, and another process for bargaining contracts at hundreds of stores. The two sides also agreed to try to resolve litigation that had been filed during the fight.
The decision to engage with the union was made by the company’s former chief executive, Laxman Narasimhan, who faced pressure from a union-backed campaign to elect three new candidates to the company’s board, as well as from boycotts and protests tied to the war between Israel and Palestinians.
Mr. Narasimhan said on an earnings call in January that the protests were having a “negative impact” on the company financially despite being “driven by misperceptions” that the company was hostile to Palestinians and their supporters.
Starbucks ousted Mr. Narasimhan in August and replaced him with Brian Niccol, the former chief executive of Chipotle. Mr. Niccol wrote a letter to the union in September saying he was “committed to making sure we engage constructively and in good faith.” But union members involved in the bargaining say the momentum slowed somewhat during the fall.
“Our C.E.O. Brian doesn’t know what it’s like to preside over the company while it’s fighting with us,” said a Starbucks barista and bargaining delegate, Silvia Baldwin, on a call open to supporters and the media on Thursday night.
“It was pretty clear very quickly that we were going to have to remind him or teach him what that looks like.”
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9) More People Are Now Dying From the Cold
A new study finds that deaths related to cold weather in the United States have risen in the past two decades.
By Emily Schmall, Dec. 20, 2024
Getty Images
Deaths related to cold weather have risen steadily nationwide in recent decades, new research shows, underscoring the continued risks of cold exposure even as average temperatures continue to climb.
The study, which examined data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that the rate of deaths in which cold was an underlying or contributing cause more than doubled between 1999 and 2022, with the highest mortality rates recorded in the Midwest. In 2022, 3,571 people died of causes linked to cold weather, the study’s authors said.
“Even though we are in this warming world, cold-related deaths are still a public health issue in the U.S.,” said Michael Liu, a student at Harvard Medical School and the lead author of the study.
Winters in much of America are now, on average, 4 degrees warmer than they were a half-century ago, according to Climate Central, an independent research group. But climate change has also led to more bursts of extremely cold winter weather, including polar vortexes, which occur when Arctic air blows into the United States.
This “winter whiplash,” as Victor Gensini, a professor of meteorology at Northern Illinois University, describes it, can make people more vulnerable to cold snaps.
“We are less accustomed to experiencing those cold temperatures,” he said, “so that when they do occur, it is much more of a shock to the system.”
Most Vulnerable to Cold
The cold weather can lead to serious health effects, including frostbite and hypothermia, a condition in which the body’s core temperature drops below 95 degrees. Prolonged hypothermia can affect the cardiac and respiratory systems and is sometimes fatal.
The study found that the death rate was highest among people 75 or older. The body’s ability to regulate temperatures declines with age, making people more susceptible to sudden spikes or drops in body temperature. Older people are also more likely to have chronic conditions like diabetes or thyroid problems that, if not properly treated, can make it harder to stay warm.
The authors said other factors could also be at play, including social isolation, substance abuse and an increase in homelessness. Dr. Neha Raukar, an emergency room doctor at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., said that in recent years she had seen more patients with cold-related injuries who were intoxicated. People who are drinking alcohol may not realize how cold it is outside, she added.
The rise in cold-related deaths was most pronounced from 2017 through 2022, a period when more people experienced homelessness, according to federal data. The study also found that the cold-related death rates were highest among American Indian, Alaska Native and Black people, groups that federal data shows are also disproportionately affected by homelessness.
Dr. James Miner, an emergency physician at Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis, said that he had seen this firsthand in recent years. On cold nights, he said, more people without shelter now crowd into the hospital’s waiting room in search of warmth.
How to Prevent and Treat Injuries From the Cold
Dr. Raukar said preventing cold-related injuries started with dressing right. She recommended piling on several layers of loosefitting, lightweight clothing to trap the heat. She also advised always wearing a hat, gloves and scarf, and not lingering in wet socks.
She also said that it was important to stay hydrated — she recommended drinking warm fluids — and to avoid alcohol in extreme cold. This type of weather can be dehydrating: We lose fluids in winter simply by breathing in cold, dry air that the body must warm and moisten before it reaches the lungs, Dr. Raukar explained. Physical activity like shoveling snow causes heavier, deeper breathing, which takes more fluid.
A mild injury from cold exposure is frost nip, when toes or fingers turn painful and purple. Mild hypothermia can cause uncontrollable shivering. People with these symptoms can warm themselves up at home, using lukewarm water and blankets to restore feeling and heat.
But if any part of the body looks bruised or blistered, experts said, people may need to see a doctor to be treated for frostbite. If patients have hypothermia and can’t quickly warm up, they could become confused or exhibit strange behavior, Dr. Miner said. People often stop shivering and may even take off their clothes, convinced that they are too warm. Some patients go into cardiac arrest.
In the hospital, doctors treat severe hypothermia by covering a patient in blankets and blasting the person with warm air. If the patient doesn’t improve, doctors may insert catheters or even use a bypass machine to warm up the blood. Dr. Raukar said, “We see a lot of frostbite and hypothermia in people who don’t realize that they’re getting really cold, that they’ve been outside too long, and just how dangerous it is.”
Experts said that the best way to take care of a homeless person on a cold night was to help the person find a shelter, a library, a subway or anywhere else insulated from the cold.
“A blanket wouldn’t hurt,” Dr. Miner said, “but what we really need is to get people inside.”
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10) ‘Living or Dead, We Want Our Sons Back’
In Syria, women begin picking up the pieces of a broken nation.
Photographs and text by Lynsey Addario, December 21, 2024
More than 600,000 Syrians died during 13 years of civil war. At least 100,000 more went missing.
They were mostly men, taken to prisons and torture centers around the country. Some were simply piled into anonymous mass graves.
Many of those left behind were their mothers, wives and children.
Now, even as joy sweeps a nation emerging from darkness, these women are working to understand what was lost …
… and rebuild what they can from what remains.
After the fall of the Assad regime in early December, Syrians rushed to learn the fate of those who disappeared during the war. At morgues, prisons and hospitals, the number of women searching for answers was notable.
Hilala el-Hassan lost four sons. None of them were among the bodies she found at a morgue. But she did find the corpse of one of their friends.
Her grief stood in stark contrast to the joyful gatherings nearby.
Thousands poured into the streets of Damascus to celebrate the end of a regime that held the nation in a brutal autocratic grip for decades.
It was a moment — perhaps a brief one — in the light.
At a morgue in Damascus, Amira al-Homsi cried, “I have found my son!”
Her husband, Yahyiha Abu Shaqra, helped identify their child, Muhammad Fayez Abu Shaqra. He was arrested just a month before the war ended.
His face was mutilated from torture, but his mother recognized the tattoos on his chest.
His parents buried him the next day at a cemetery in the al-Midan neighborhood in Damascus.
Some of the women searching the prisons and morgues could only hope for this kind of closure.
One of the greatest challenges in recent weeks has been identifying the dead.
There were so many bodies that there could be confusion about their identities.
Doctors have used DNA testing in many cases, but the results take time.
Wahida Muhammad Sobhe thought she had found her child, missing for a decade, at a morgue.
“This is my son,” she cried. “This is my son! Oh, God! He has a mark on his eye!”
A day later, officials determined that it was not his body.
At the Sednaya prison, Ayoush Moussa el-Hassan searched for some sign of her son’s fate. She hasn’t heard from him since he was arrested 13 years ago.
“Living or dead,” she says, “we want our sons back. We want their bones.”
The detritus of those who didn’t make it out littered the prison.
At a detention center inside this abandoned military-intelligence compound, another story took place.
Falak was arrested in 2014 for her support of the Free Syrian Army and was held here for a while.
She was tortured and was made to watch as others had their teeth pulled out with pliers or were hanged upside down from a ladder and beaten for hours.
Falak’s family was able to pay a heavy fine, and she left prison after four years.
Now she wanted to face the horror of what happened.
“I have chills inside me,” she said, looking at the way the light entered the room.
“We never used to see that light. This light didn’t exist. There was only darkness.”
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11) Amazon Warehouse Workers in New York City Join Protest
The workers’ union hopes that adding employees at the Staten Island warehouse to a protest started by delivery drivers will increase pressure on Amazon.
By Noam Scheiber and Santul Nerkar, Dec. 21, 2024
Workers at Amazon’s fulfillment center in Staten Island picketing after walking off the job after midnight on Saturday morning. Credit...Dakota Santiago for The New York Times
Signaling an escalation in a labor campaign that began at seven Amazon delivery hubs on Thursday, workers at the company’s largest Staten Island warehouse began a protest there at midnight Saturday morning. They were joined by New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, later in the morning.
The Staten Island warehouse, known as JFK8, has more than 5,000 workers, by far the largest group at Amazon who have sought to be represented by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. That makes it the union’s greatest potential source of leverage as the Teamsters tries to pressure Amazon to bargain with drivers and other workers who have organized.
“Amazon is jeopardizing the holidays for consumers so they can try to make an extra buck,” Connor Spence, president of the local chapter representing workers at JFK8, said in a statement. “Amazon workers are standing up to demand this corporation finally treat them with respect.”
Unlike the drivers the Teamsters have attempted to unionize at delivery hubs, the Staten Island workers are employed by Amazon directly rather than through contractors. That gives them a somewhat stronger legal foothold for challenging the company.
But union leaders at JFK8 have struggled to sustain the support of workers in the warehouse since they voted to unionize in 2022, and only several dozen workers were participating in the action late Saturday morning. Some said they had been scheduled to work that day and did not clock in, while others said they had not been scheduled to work.
That raises questions about how much of an impact they will have on Amazon’s operations during the critical holiday season. Similar questions have accompanied the Teamsters-led walkouts at delivery hubs in New York, Georgia, Illinois and California that began Thursday.
Kelly Nantel, a spokeswoman for Amazon, said the protest had not impacted the Staten Island warehouse.
The JFK8 workers joined a union called the Amazon Labor Union when they voted to unionize in 2022. The A.L.U. was initially independent, but it struggled to secure gains from Amazon, which challenged the election outcome and has refused to recognize or bargain with the union. (The National Labor Relations Board certified the election, but a federal court paused further action on the case while the company challenged the constitutionality of the board.)
In June, the A.L.U. affiliated with the Teamsters under an agreement that gave the new A.L.U. local the exclusive right within the Teamsters to organize Amazon warehouses in New York City. The agreement also promised that the international union would help the local with organizing, research, communications and legal matters.
At the time, A.L.U. leaders said that the Teamsters told them that the international union had allocated $8 million for organizing efforts at Amazon, and that the Teamsters were also prepared to tap a strike fund of more than $300 million to support the effort.
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12) The New Climate Gold Rush: Scrubbing Carbon From the Sky
By David Gelles and Christopher Flavelle, Dec. 22, 2024
This summer, Bill Gates huddled in London with representatives of some of the world’s wealthiest people, including the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, the SoftBank founder, Masayoshi Son, and Prince al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia.
They were evaluating their joint investments in companies that could help the world combat climate change. Among the businesses in their portfolio, four stood out as having a particularly audacious goal: They were working to strip carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, for a profit.
As countries around the world continue to pump planet-warming pollution into the skies, driving global temperatures to record levels, the financial world is racing to fund the emerging field of carbon dioxide removal, seeking both an environmental miracle and a financial windfall.
The technology, which did not exist until a few years ago, is still unproven at scale. Yet, it has a uniquely alluring appeal. Stripping away some of the carbon dioxide that is heating up the world makes intuitive sense. And with a small but growing number of companies willing to pay for it, investors are jockeying to be first movers in what they believe will inevitably be a big industry that is necessary to help fight global warming.
Companies working on ways to pull carbon dioxide from the air have raised more than $5 billion since 2018, according to the investment bank Jefferies. Before that, there were almost no such investments.
“It’s the single greatest opportunity I’ve seen in 20 years of doing venture capital,” said Damien Steel, the chief executive of Canada-based Deep Sky, which has raised more than $50 million to develop carbon dioxide removal projects. “The tailwinds behind the industry are greater than most industries I’ve ever looked at.”
The group assembled by Mr. Gates, known as Breakthrough Energy Ventures, is among the biggest backer of the more than 800 carbon removal companies that have been started in recent years. Others investors include Silicon Valley venture capitalists, private equity firms from Wall Street and major corporations like United Airlines.
Investors believe the market is poised for explosive growth.
More than 1,000 big companies have pledged to eliminate their carbon emissions over the next few decades. As part of those efforts, more corporations are starting to pay for carbon dioxide removal. This year, Microsoft, Google, and British Airways were among the companies that committed a total of $1.6 billion to purchase removal credits.
That figure was up from less than $1 million in 2019, according to CDR.fyi, a website that tracks the carbon dioxide removal industry. Next year, industry executives believe companies could spend up to $10 billion on such purchases. In a recent report, McKinsey estimated the market could be worth as much as $1.2 trillion by 2050.
While huge sums of money are being dedicated to the nascent field, these projects will not have a meaningful effect on global temperatures anytime soon.
There are a few dozen facilities operational today, including ones in Iceland and California. But the biggest of these capture only a sliver of the greenhouse gases humans produce in one day. Even if hundreds more such plants were built, they would not come close to counteracting even 1 percent of annual carbon dioxide emissions.
“Let’s not pretend that it’s going to become available within the time frame we need to reduce emissions,” said former Vice President Al Gore, a co-founder of Climate Trace, which maps global greenhouse gas emissions.
Last year a United Nations panel cast significant doubt on the industry’s ability to make a difference. “Engineering-based removal activities are technologically and economically unproven, especially at scale, and pose unknown environmental and social risks,” it said.
Instead, many scientists and activists say the most effective way to combat global warming is to rapidly phase out oil, gas and coal, the burning of which is heating the planet.
“We need to obey the first law of holes,” Mr. Gore said. “When you’re in one, stop digging.”
Carbon dioxide removal is the most developed form of what is known as geoengineering, a broad set of speculative technologies designed to manipulate natural systems in order to cool the planet. In the past several years, as climate change has worsened, such ideas have moved from the stuff of science fiction into the mainstream.
Other proposed plans include changing the chemistry of the world’s rivers and oceans to absorb more carbon dioxide, genetically altering bacteria to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, and reflecting sunlight away from Earth by brightening clouds or spraying sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere.
But it is carbon dioxide removal that is attracting the big money.
Investors believe that, while the impact on temperatures may be negligible in the short term, the industry will start to make a difference as global emissions fall and the technology becomes more powerful.
And decades from now, even if the world is able to completely eliminate all new greenhouse gas emissions, many experts, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a scientific body convened by the United Nations, believe it will still be necessary to remove some carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to reduce global temperatures.
Critics argue that carbon dioxide removal is a dangerous distraction that will perpetuate the behavior that is causing the climate crisis.
“Carbon capture will increase fossil fuel production, there’s no doubt about it,” said Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University. “It does not help climate one bit.”
But for now, neither investors nor customers are shying away.
A group of companies including Stripe, H&M, J.P. Morgan and Meta have banded together to make more than $1 billion in purchase commitments for carbon dioxide removal. Other companies including Airbus, Equinor and Boeing have pledged to pay for the service, too.
Some companies are trying to offset their emissions. Some see value in helping to develop a new industry they might one day profit from. And some say they are simply trying to do the right thing.
“This isn’t intrinsically tied to our day-to-day business,” said Nan Ransohoff, the head of climate at Stripe, an online payments company that is coordinating the group purchasing. “But we care a lot about progress and trying to help the world move in the right direction.”
The U.S. government is supporting the industry. The Inflation Reduction Act more than tripled the tax credit for capturing and storing carbon removed directly from the atmosphere, to $180 per ton. The bipartisan infrastructure law signed by President Biden in 2021 included $3.5 billion for the creation of four demonstration projects.
Executives don’t believe that the carbon dioxide removal industry will be knocked off course by President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has called climate policies a “scam” and has said he wants to roll back many of Biden’s climate initiatives.
Support for the new technology “has been very bipartisan,” said Noah Deich, who until recently was the deputy assistant secretary of carbon management at the Energy Department.
Last month, Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, and Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat of Colorado, introduced legislation that would create additional tax incentives for the carbon dioxide removal industry.
And the demonstration projects being funded by the infrastructure law have been championed by some Republicans. “This will help ensure our economy is built for the future,” Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana posted on X when his state was selected as one of the sites. “It is great for our state!”
Yet even as enthusiasm for the technology grows, there is not nearly enough supply to meet the demand. Only 4 percent of all purchases have been fulfilled, according to CDR.fyi.
Pulling greenhouse gases out of the air is also expensive. Today, it can cost as much as $1,000 per ton to capture and sequester carbon dioxide. Many analysts say the price would need to drop to around $100 a ton for the industry to take off.
“This isn’t a market,” Mr. Steel said. “A market means liquidity, repeatability, standards. We have none of that here.”
But at least for now, investors are still eagerly funding new companies in the field, hoping that some of their bets pay off.
Svante, one of many Canadian companies in the industry, has received more than $570 million from small venture firms as well as big energy companies like Chevron.
And Climeworks, a Swiss company that has already built the largest operational direct air capture facility in the world, in Iceland, has raised more than $800 million from investors including Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund and individuals like the venture capitalist John Doerr.
Mr. Doerr is also a partner in Breakthrough Energy Ventures and was with Mr. Gates in London this summer.
“We’re going to need carbon removal,” Mr. Doerr said, adding that the need to quickly scale the companies was a “code red” situation.
As with any industry, many start-ups are likely to fail for every one that hits it big. But to investors, that is a risk worth taking.
“There will be some big winners in this space,” said Clay Dumas, co-founder of Lowercarbon Capital, a venture firm that has backed several of the companies. “You could be wrong 95 percent of the time and still look like a genius when you send a bunch of money back to your investors.”
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13) University of California Resolves Civil Rights Complaints Over Gaza Protests
Five schools agreed to changes after reports that they failed to protect students from antisemitism and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim discrimination.
By Orlando MayorquÃn, Dec. 21, 2024
The University of California has resolved federal civil rights complaints from students who cited antisemitism and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim discrimination at U.C.L.A. and four other campuses following protests over the Israel-Hamas war, the Education Department announced Friday.
The announcement follows similar agreements that the Education Department’s office of civil rights has made in recent months with other schools and institutions including Brown University, Temple University, the University of Cincinnati and the School District of Philadelphia.
Since the University of California and other universities receive federal funds, they are required to comply with federal regulations that prohibit discrimination on the basis of race and other protected identities. The regulations were designed to prevent intolerant environments that hinder learning. Dozens of schools have faced inquiries from the Education Department since 2023 over complaints of such violations, with many still pending.
After the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent invasion of Gaza by Israeli forces, many students at U.C.L.A. said they heard antisemitic chants at pro-Palestinian events, including “no peace until they’re dead,” according to a report by the Education Department after an investigation. The department also said that pro-Palestinian students complained that they had been harassed by other students and members of the public.
In April, at a pro-Palestinian encampment on the U.C.L.A. campus, some Jewish students said they were denied access to occupied areas and campus buildings by pro-Palestinian protesters unless they renounced Zionism, and many Palestinian, Arab and pro-Palestinian students said they were attacked by counterprotesters, the department said.
Similar environments hostile to Jewish, Arab and Muslim students were reported at University of California campuses at Davis, San Diego, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz, the department said. At UC Santa Barbara, the department said the school had been notified of antisemitic vandalism at a dorm room and signs at a student center targeting some Jewish students.
To resolve the complaints, the University of California agreed to measures that include more thoroughly investigating the reports of discrimination and harassment to determine if additional action is needed; providing more training to university authorities about their responsibilities to comply with federal law prohibiting discrimination; and obtaining approval from the department for any revisions to university policies regarding discrimination involving race, color or nationality.
In a statement after the Education Department’s announcement, the University of California said it “unequivocally rejects antisemitism, Islamophobia, and all forms of harassment and discrimination.” It added that it had taken more steps to support students and others, including creating a systemwide office of civil rights.
The wave of protests at college campuses following Oct. 7 resulted in a litany of legal action against universities and the ouster of some of their leaders, who were accused of failing to protect students from discrimination.
Some institutions, such as New York University, agreed to make payments in addition to reviewing policies to settle legal claims.
U.C.L.A. was among the most active protest sites in the country. In April, U.C.L.A. administrators initially took a relatively tolerant approach to a pro-Palestinian encampment at the school. But after several days, the university’s chancellor, Gene Block, declared the encampment illegal and told demonstrators to leave. On April 30, agitators who were said to identify as Zionist attacked the encampment.
A university report found that the pro-Palestinian students inside the encampment were attacked with “bear mace and other chemical irritants, hammers, knives, stink bombs, high-grade fireworks, baseball bats, metal and wooden rods.”
One counterprotester reportedly had a gun, and protesters said they had pleaded with campus security to intervene. They said the attackers had been allowed to leave without being apprehended when law enforcement stepped in hours later, according to university reports.
On May 2, police officers raided and cleared the encampment, arresting more than 200 protesters.
Last month, an independent investigation report on the events was released and is under review by the university. Its recommendations are largely focused on developing concrete response plans to campus unrest.
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14) We’ve Misunderstood Human Nature for 100 Years
By Kurt Gray, Dec. 22, 2024
Dr. Gray is a social psychologist and the author of the forthcoming book “Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground,” from which this essay is adapted.
Christian Philip Scott
One day in the summer of 1924, an anthropologist named Raymond Dart made an incredible discovery — and drew a conclusion from it about human nature that would mislead us for a century.
Dart was examining a set of fossils that had been unearthed by miners near the town of Taung in South Africa when he found the skull of a “missing link” between ancient apes and humans. It belonged to a juvenile member of the species Australopithecus africanus who was later nicknamed the Taung Child.
The skull conclusively demonstrated that Africa was the birthplace of humankind. It also seemed to reveal something sinister about human nature: There was a series of grooves etched in the bone, which Dart believed could be produced only by human-made tools. These marks convinced him that this young hominid had been butchered and eaten by another member of its tribe (perhaps a hungry uncle).
Our ancestors, Dart concluded, were cannibalistic killers. He argued that Australopithecus africanus represented a “predatory transition” in which our ancestors evolved from eating plants and fruits to devouring meat — and one another.
Dart’s thesis quickly became scientific consensus, and other anthropologists found facts to support the theory that humans evolved as ruthless hunters. For instance, we can run long distances (presumably to exhaust prey), throw objects with accuracy (to kill prey with spears) and work well together (to coordinate killing prey).
The idea that humans are natural-born predators was not just a scientific claim; it also found expression in the broader culture. In the 1954 novel “Lord of the Flies,” a group of school-age boys stranded on an island descend into savage violence, revealing their true nature. The 1968 movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” begins with a tribe of prehistoric apes — our ancestors — discovering how to use a leg bone as a weapon to assault one another. Today, self-help gurus argue that we should reconnect with our “ancestral lifestyle” of eating raw meat and organs.
The assumption that our nature is predatory colors our everyday life. We might generally believe that other people mean well, but as soon as someone causes us harm — like cutting us off in traffic — we assume that they intended it (it’s why we get so angry). The predatory assumption also shapes our perceptions of politics: The “other side” often seems ruthless, callous and happy to inflict harm.
In a 2022 study led by the moral psychologist Daniela Goya-Tocchetto, researchers found that Democrats and Republicans perceived their opponents’ policies — on issues such as taxation, gun control and environmental regulation — as driven by malicious intent. While people acknowledged the unintended, regrettable trade-offs in their own side’s policies, they believed the other side’s policies were deliberately harmful. When it came to debates about curtailing industry to protect the environment, Democrats saw Republicans as intentionally damaging the environment, while Republicans believed Democrats were actively trying to destroy blue-collar jobs.
There is a glaring problem, however, with the widespread assumption that humans are predators by nature: It’s wrong.
Start with Dart’s finding. In the 1990s, the archaeologist Lee Berger and other researchers re-examined the fossils studied by Dart. The Taung Child bones had been found in a pile with butchered animal bones, suggesting the den of a human predator. But Berger also found eagle-like eggshells in this den. Why, he wondered, would humans go through the trouble to collect and eat eagle eggs, risking lethal falls for a tiny snack?
It seemed that Dart had discovered evidence not of human predation but rather of an ancient eagle nest, complete with discarded eggshells from hatchlings. A closer look at the “butchery” marks on the Taung Child corroborated this new theory: The pattern was consistent with the scraping of an eagle’s beak. Modern-day harpy eagles can carry off small goats, and prehistoric eagles were certainly big enough to pick up a hominid child. That child had been prey.
Similar discoveries, such as hominid skulls punctured by the fangs of saber-toothed cats, support the claim that our ancestors (and not just their children) were more prey than predators. Our weak bodies also betray our original status as prey. Unlike true predators, we have teeth that are more suited for chewing plants and fruits, and our claws are laughable. Sure, we can throw things, but the sharpened sticks of early humans would barely annoy a large predator. And our ability to run far? Science shows that exhaustion hunting is historically rare.
Finding that hominids were hunted also implies that humans evolved with a prey mind-set, living in fear and constantly seeking protection. Anthropologists now believe that early humans spent many days worrying about predators — and most nights, too. Big cats, like leopards, hunt primates at night. Their eyes can see in darkness, while our eyes, evolved for detecting ripe fruit in daylight, cannot.
This picture of fearfulness is consistent with our understanding of human psychology. We’re hard-wired to detect threats quickly and to stay fixated on places where threats once appeared, even after they have vanished. We fear that “child predators” will abduct our kids even when they are safer than ever.
Modern humans, ensconced in towns and cities, are now mostly safe from animal predators, but we are still easily frightened. Whether we’re scrolling social media or voting for a presidential candidate, we all still carry the legacy of our ancestors, who worried about big cats lurking in the darkness.
Bearing in mind that our species is by nature more prey than predator is a good rule of thumb when interacting with people — and it could help soothe today’s intense political animosity by increasing our sympathy for the other side. Just as you vote to protect yourself and your family, so do those who vote differently. The next time you feel angry at your political opponents, pause to think about how they might feel threatened. When people want to close the southern border, for example, it’s usually not because they want to harm migrants, but because they want to protect against the perceived threat of crime and job loss.
Unless they see you as naïve, your political opponents probably view you as a predator. To help them understand your true motivation, consider explaining how your beliefs relate to your fears and your desire to protect yourself, your family, your community. You might start a political conversation by asking, “What worries you most about the future?” or “What makes you feel threatened?”
The answer is probably not “an eagle snatching my child” — but it might as well be.
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15) Organized Looting Throws Gaza Deeper Into Chaos
Gangs are filling a power vacuum left by Israel in some parts of southern Gaza, hijacking desperately needed aid for Palestinian residents.
By Adam Rasgon and Aaron Boxerman, Dec. 23, 2024
Reporting from Jerusalem. This article is based on more than 20 interviews with officials, aid workers, businessmen and Gaza residents.
"International aid workers have accused Israel of ignoring the problem and allowing looters to act with impunity. The United Nations does not allow Israeli soldiers to protect aid convoys, fearing that would compromise its neutrality, and its officials have called on Israel to allow the Gaza police, which are under Hamas’s authority, to secure their convoys. ...As looters have run rampant in areas nominally controlled by the Israeli military, truck drivers and aid workers have suggested the Israeli military mostly turns a blind eye."
Trucks carrying humanitarian aid entering Gaza via the Rafah crossing have become easy prey for organized gangs. Credit...Said Khatib/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Hazem Isleem, a Palestinian truck driver, was passing through the ruins of southern Gaza last month with a truckload of aid when armed looters ambushed his convoy.
One of the gunmen broke into his truck, forcing him to drive to a nearby field and unload thousands of pounds of flour intended for hungry Palestinians, he said by phone from Gaza. By the next morning, the gang had stripped virtually all of the supplies from the convoy of about 100 trucks of United Nations aid, enough to feed tens of thousands of people, in what the United Nations described as one of the worst such episodes of the war.
“It was terrifying,” said Mr. Isleem, 47, whom the looters held for 13 hours while they pillaged the flour. “But the worst part was we weren’t able to deliver the food to the people.”
Israel’s bombardment and invasion of Gaza in response to the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack last year has unleashed a humanitarian crisis in the enclave, with more than 45,000 people dead, according to local health officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Hunger is widespread, and Israel has placed restrictions on the entry of aid into Gaza and blocked movement of aid trucks between the north and south.
Though Hamas has been routed in much of the territory, Israel has not put an alternative government in place. In parts of southern Gaza, armed gangs have filled the resulting power vacuum, leaving aid groups unwilling to risk delivering supplies.
The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said this month that it would no longer deliver aid through Kerem Shalom, the main border crossing between Israel and southern Gaza, because of the breakdown in law and order.
Hundreds of truckloads of relief are piling up at the crossing in part because aid groups fear they will be looted.
What began as smaller-scale attempts to seize aid early in the year — often by hungry Gazans — has now become “systematic, tactical, armed, crime-syndicate looting” by organized groups, said Georgios Petropoulos, a senior U.N. official based in the southern city of Rafah. “This is just larceny writ large,” he said.
This article is based on more than 20 interviews with Israeli and U.N. officials, aid workers, Gaza residents and Palestinian businessmen. The New York Times also reviewed internal U.N. memos in which officials discussed the looting and its consequences.
The situation in Gaza deteriorated after the Israeli military invaded Rafah in May, seeking to oust Hamas from one of its final strongholds. Hamas’s security forces fled, and organized gangs — with no one stopping them — began intercepting aid trucks as they headed from the main border crossing into southern Gaza. They are stealing flour, oil and other commodities and selling them at astronomical prices, aid groups and residents say.
In southern Gaza, the price of a 55-pound sack of flour has risen to as much as $220. In northern Gaza, where there are fewer aid disruptions, the same sack can cost as little as $10.
International aid workers have accused Israel of ignoring the problem and allowing looters to act with impunity. The United Nations does not allow Israeli soldiers to protect aid convoys, fearing that would compromise its neutrality, and its officials have called on Israel to allow the Gaza police, which are under Hamas’s authority, to secure their convoys.
Israel, which seeks to uproot Hamas, accuses the group of stealing international aid and says that the police are just another arm of the militant group. They have repeatedly targeted Hamas’s police force, severely weakening it, and police officers are rarely seen in much of Gaza, residents say.
Over the past two weeks, Israel has allowed some aid trucks to travel along Gaza’s border with Egypt, a new route fully controlled by the Israeli military. U.N. agencies have been able to avoid looters and deliver some relief.
But that has not done enough to address the shortfall in aid, aid groups and residents say. The high prices of goods sold by looters have contributed to desperate scenes among ordinary Gazans fighting for what little affordable food is available.
In late November, crowds had already gathered at Zadna bakery in the central city of Deir al Balah hours before it opened, hoping to buy a 20-piece bag of bread for the U.N.-subsidized price of $1. Suddenly, mayhem broke loose as ordinary people in the crowd — some brandishing knives — pushed to reach the front of the line, said Abdelhalim Awad, the bakery’s owner.
During the commotion, gunshots rang out. Two women were killed and others were injured, he said, and a third later died of her wounds.
With unrest rising, all of the U.N.-backed bakeries in southern and central Gaza have closed their doors for now.
“Today, the ordinary Gazan’s dream, his aspiration, is to obtain a piece of bread,” Mr. Awad said. “I can’t say anything sadder than that.”
Gazan transportation company owners, truck drivers and aid groups say multiple gangs have participated in looting recently. But many people involved in aid delivery named Yasser Abu Shabab, 35, as the man who runs the most sophisticated operation.
They say Mr. Abu Shabab’s gang dominates much of the Nasr neighborhood in eastern Rafah, which the war has transformed into a wasteland. Mr. Petropoulos, the U.N. official, called him “the self-styled power broker of east Rafah.”
Mr. Isleem, the truck driver who was ambushed in Rafah, said the looters who captured him told him that Mr. Abu Shabab was their boss. Awad Abid, a displaced Gazan who said he had tried to buy flour from Mr. Abu Shabab’s gang in Rafah, said he had seen gunmen guarding warehouses containing stolen cartons of U.N.-marked aid.
“I asked one of them for a sack of flour to feed my children,” Mr. Abid said, “and he raised a pistol at me.”
Mr. Abu Shabab denied looting aid trucks on a large scale, although he conceded that his men — armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles — had raided half a dozen or so since the start of the war.
“We are taking trucks so we can eat, not so we can sell,” he said in a phone interview, claiming he was feeding his family and neighbors. “Every hungry person is taking aid.” He accused Hamas of being primarily responsible for stealing the aid, a claim that Hamas has denied.
The looters’ chokehold on supplies and soaring prices are undermining Hamas in the areas that it still controls. On Nov. 25, Hamas’s security forces raided Mr. Abu Shabab’s neighborhood, killing more than 20 people, including his brother, Mr. Abu Shabab said.
Official Hamas media reported at the time that its forces had killed 20 members of “gangs of thieves who were stealing aid.”
As looters have run rampant in areas nominally controlled by the Israeli military, truck drivers and aid workers have suggested the Israeli military mostly turns a blind eye.
“There is continued tolerance by the Israel Defense Forces of unacceptable amounts of looting of areas that are ostensibly and de facto under their military control,” Mr. Petropoulos said.
At times, Israeli tanks have deployed along main roads where aid trucks travel. And Israeli ministers have said they debated authorizing private security contractors to protect international aid convoys inside Gaza.
Until recently, Israeli forces largely did not target the looters unless they were affiliated with Hamas or other militant groups, according to U.N. officials. But that appears to have changed in recent weeks.
In Israeli military drone footage viewed by The Times, looters can be seen confiscating white sacks of aid from cars in southern Gaza in November. Minutes later, an Israeli airstrike killed them, the footage appears to show.
Shani Sasson, a spokeswoman for the Israeli military agency that regulates aid to Gaza, said Israeli forces were targeting armed looters who attacked convoys, not just those affiliated with Hamas. She denied that Israel was providing any immunity to criminal gangs stealing aid.
In late November, Israeli forces opened fire on looters waiting to waylay trucks in Rafah, forcing them to retreat, according to an internal U.N. memo. With the path cleared, U.N. aid trucks rushed toward central Gaza.
But the gangs were far from deterred.
The looters soon regrouped and hijacked them on the road, the U.N. memo said. The trucks were stripped bare.
Abu Bakr Bashir and Bilal Shbair contributed reporting from Deir al Balah, Gaza.
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