❧ Shell is finally being put on trial in London for allegedly causing hundreds of oil spills in Nigeria. Over a decade ago, the Niger Delta’s Bille and Ogale communities brought a lawsuit claiming that Shell oil spills had destroyed their water sources, robbing thousands of people of clean drinking water and killing fish and vegetation. Shell successfully delayed the suit for years. But the case was eventually heard by the UK’s High Court.
According to Amnesty International, the Niger Delta is “one of the most polluted places on Earth.” And though oil companies rarely face accountability, there is precedent for them being forced to make huge payouts to victims of pollution: In 2021, Shell agreed to pay $111 million for its pollution of Nigeria over the past half-century. But many areas still remain uninhabitable. The plaintiffs are hoping the next trial could result in the company being required to come and clean up the damage. (Common Dreams)
Eric Dooh, a Nigerian farmer and one of the plaintiffs in the Shell case shows his
hand covered in crude oil after dipping it into a creek near Goi, Ogoniland, Nigeria.
❧ In the U.K., Prime Minister Keir Starmer has reportedly told Labour MPs they’re no longer allowed to criticize his policies publicly. This latest controversy for the troubled Starmer government comes after ten members of Labour voted against the Prime Minister’s decision to refuse any compensation to WASPI—the Women Against State Pension Inequality, a group of retirees who feel they got the short end of the stick when the pension age was raised from 60 to 65 in 1995. Rather than adjust his position to be good instead of bad, Starmer has simply issued a letter to the rebel MPs, telling them that “you are not entitled to criticise the government in public.” Surely that’ll go well, and isn’t the sign of a politician who’s desperately flailing. (Morning Star)
❧ Believe it or not, Donald Trump had a good idea about foreign policy. We know, we’re shocked too. But it’s true: in a statement on Wednesday, Trump said he wanted an international agreement with Russia and China in which all three countries would reduce their military spending by half:
We're going to have them spend a lot less money. We're going to spend a lot less money. And I know they're going to do it. They agreed to it [...] There's no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons. We already have so many [...] You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over. And here we are building new nuclear weapons, and they're building nuclear weapons.
We have no idea why Trump suddenly started sounding like Noam Chomsky, or whether it’s actually true that Russia and China “agreed to” this idea. It seems kind of unlikely, and knowing Trump, he’ll soon forget he ever said this. But he’s right about the threat of nuclear devastation, something American politicians rarely treat with the seriousness it deserves. Not to mention, if the U.S. really did cut its $825 billion military budget in half, we could take the savings and put them toward free college education or Medicare for All—you know, stuff that helps people instead of killing them. (Axios)
❧ A prominent advocate for the rights of Libyan refugees had his phone targeted in a spyware attack. David Yambio, a former child soldier who has lived in several refugee camps throughout Africa, fled from Libya in 2016. At just 27, he now works as an advocate for other refugees against human rights violations as the president of the group Refugees in Libya. He now resides in Italy and has been a vocal critic of the Meloni government’s cruel policies towards Libyan refugees, including funding the Libyan coast guard to trap desperate people in the country, preventing them from reaching the Mediterranean—a policy Yambio has called a “death sentence.” Most recently, Yambio took the government to task for its decision to release a notorious Libyan warlord, Ossama Anjiem, on a technicality after he’d been indicted by the International Criminal Court. He oversaw a network of brutal detention centers infamous for murder, torture, and rape—Yambio himself was one of the victims held in these camps. “The fragile hope for justice that we were all holding on to has been crushed,” Yambio said after the decision.
Now, it's been revealed that Yambio was the victim of a mysterious spyware attack in November. He received an email from Apple warning him that someone was attempting to “remotely compromise the iPhone associated with your Apple account” and that the person doing it “is likely targeting you specifically because of who you are or what you do.” The message was similar in nature to one received by dozens of other prominent activists and journalists last month through WhatsApp, including an Italian journalist and two activists who’d been critical of the Meloni government. It’s not yet known whether the WhatsApp attack is connected to the one against Yambio. But WhatsApp has identified an Israeli company called Paragon Solutions as responsible for the attack. This is notable because Paragon had contracted with the Italian government but halted the contract after news of the WhatsApp attack became public. The Meloni government has vociferously denied any involvement with the attack. (The Guardian)
❧ [CONTENT WARNING: Very sad story about deceased children.]Two homeless children have frozen to death in Detroit. The Williams family—mother Tateona Williams and her five kids—had been unhoused since November, living in a 2002 Chrysler minivan. Williams had reportedly called the Detroit city government’s homelessness hotline at least three times, along with local shelters, but was unable to get any help; as Mayor Mike Duggan now puts it, “For whatever reason, this wasn't deemed an emergency.” And this past Sunday, when the van ran out of gas and temperatures dropped overnight, two of the kids didn’t make it. They were two and nine years old, respectively.
It’s an unspeakable tragedy, and the mayor is now looking to “overhaul the city's homeless services department”—but it should never have gotten to this point. This is what happens when the richest country in the world doesn’t treat housing as a human right, and it’s why fundamental change has to come. (Detroit Free Press)
❧ Meanwhile,Fremont, California just made it illegal to “aid or abet” homeless people. It’s the latest escalation in American politicians’ war on their unhoused citizens, which kicked off with the Grants Pass ruling that allowed local governments to arrest people simply for sleeping outside. Fremont has taken things a step further, and criminalized anyone who “aids or abets” a homeless encampment that’s been deemed illegal, with penalties of up to six months in jail.
It’s an incredibly vague law, and one that could constitute a First Amendment violation. In the past, federal courts have ruled that feeding the homeless is protected under both speech and religious rights, since it’s “expressive conduct,” and since many faiths command believers to help the poor whenever possible. So the Fremont law is very possibly unconstitutional. In any case, it’s just pointlessly cruel, and needs to be overturned. (San Francisco Standard)
❧ The U.S. Department of Agriculture is trying to dismiss a major animal-welfare lawsuit. The case was filed last year by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), which is suing the USDA over a practice called “puppy laundering.” That’s when a “puppy mill”—a cruel, inhumane facility that breeds dogs as much as possible to churn out more puppies for sale—“launders” its ill-gotten pups through a second seller so it’s not clear where they came from.
The ASPCA alleges that the USDA is enabling this practice by automatically renewing the licenses of dog breeders, even when they’ve been accused of “laundering” and violating the Animal Welfare Act. But instead of addressing the substance of the complaint, the USDA is arguing that the ASPCA doesn’t have standing to sue in the first place, since it’s “not in the dog-dealing industry” and therefore couldn’t plausibly be harmed. Seems like an evasion of the real issue, doesn’t it? (Iowa Capital Dispatch)
Not this kind of puppy laundering. The other kind.
❧ In one of the least vaccinated counties in Texas, measles has broken out. Health officials have identified 24 cases of measles in West Texas’ Gaines County. Twenty-two of the patients are children, and nine of them have been hospitalized. The state’s health department reports that not a single one of the people who have come down with measles received the vaccination for measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR), a problem that is especially pronounced in Gaines County. They have one of the highest rates of vaccine rejection in the state, with 14 percent of children not receiving at least one of the recommended doses.
Before vaccines, measles used to kill hundreds of people each year in the U.S. and hospitalized tens of thousands more. We basically eradicated the illness by 2000 using vaccines. But now, as anti-vaccine sentiment has been mainstreamed by unscrupulous and ignorant public figures—more on that later in this briefing—progress appears to be reversing. (Washington Post)
❧ This makes it one hell of a time for Louisiana’s surgeon general, Ralph Abraham, to send a directive telling the state’s health department to stop promoting “mass vaccination,” which he did this week. The order emphasized that instead of the state government’s “promotion of specific pharmaceutical products” through public messaging campaigns, the decision of whether to get vaccinated should come down to a patient’s individual consultation with their physician. Of course, many people in Louisiana do not have a primary care physician at all, meaning they may have no source for reliable information about vaccines.
This is part of a broader campaign of bringing public health down to the level of the individual: Abraham says that we should not rely on a “miracle pill for the major population health problems we face,” instead saying that in order to improve public health we need to do the “usual hard work of improving diet, increasing exercise, and making better lifestyle choices.” While he’s not wrong that changes in lifestyle are important for health, vaccines are about as close to a “miracle pill” as have ever been created in medical history! They have virtually eliminated illnesses that were once commonplace, like polio, smallpox, cholera, and diphtheria, and it was only through mass public health efforts that this was achieved. (NOLA.com)
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (Or, “What are our politicians and oligarchs up to?”)
❧ Saikat Chakrabarti is running against Nancy Pelosi for the House of Representatives. Chakrabarti is only 39, which is young for a prospective member of Congress, but his record is already impressive: he’s a co-founder of Justice Democrats, a former chief of staff for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and one of the creators of the original Green New Deal bill.
In a long tweet announcing his run this Wednesday, Chakrabarti pointed out that Pelosi is now running for her 21st term in office (!) and came onto the political scene at a time when “you could buy a home on a single income” and “A summer job could pay for college,” which makes her out of touch with the economic issues people face today. It’s early yet, and past challengers to Pelosi have come up short—but even if Saikat himself doesn’t win, it’s clear that more progressive leadership is desperately needed among the Democrats. (Politico)
Beating Pelosi is a challenge, but he’s going to try.
❧ In bad news for anyone who enjoys breathing, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been confirmed to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. In the end, Kennedy’s nomination was approved by a 52 to 48 vote, with only Mitch McConnell voting no from the Republican bench. Special boos and jeers go to Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a former medical doctor who should have known better, but voted for Kennedy anyway. We’ve written pretty extensively before on why RFK Jr. is a terrible choice, from his anti-vaccine beliefs to his promotion of crackpot “alternative” cures, so we won’t belabor the point. There might be a few small silver linings, like his promise to ban high fructose corn syrup—if he actually does it—but with bird flu, norovirus, and the aforementioned measles on the rise, having Kennedy at the helm is an unmitigated disaster. (New York Times)
❧ As Americans express outrage over ICE rounding up their friends and neighbors for deportation, the immigration agency is seeking out private contractors to monitor “negative” social media discussion. The agency cited an increase in “threats” to ICE agents and calls for contractors to drill down into the social media profiles of suspicious users. But as the Interceptreports, “People who simply criticize ICE online could [be] pulled into the dragnet”:
As part of its mission to protect ICE with “proactive threat monitoring,” the winning contractor will not simply flag threatening remarks but “Provide monitoring and analysis of behavioral and social media sentiment (i.e. positive, neutral, and negative).” This includes regular updates on the “total number of negative references to ICE found in social media” from week to week.
Such sentiment analysis — typically accomplished via machine-learning techniques — could place under law enforcement scrutiny speech that is constitutionally protected. Simply stated, a post that is critical or even hostile to ICE isn’t against the law.
This person may want to put their accounts on private.
❧ It’s not just the government keeping a watchful eye on the internet: UnitedHealth has also hired a defamation law firm to scour social media for criticism of its practices. The company has been in the news a lot lately, ever since someone—who hasn’t actually been proven to be Luigi Mangione, by the way—killed their CEO. It seems all the attention has them a little flustered, because UnitedHealth has now hired the law firm Clare Locke to go after social media posts it disapproves of. That’s the same law firm that represented Dominion Voting Systems during the disputes over the 2020 election results, and they’ve already contacted a surgeon to demand she retract statements about UnitedHealth denying care to one of her patients. But if we say that UnitedHealth is a loathsome profiteering racket that should be nationalized out of existence, there’s nothing they can do about that, because that’s an opinion. (Fortune)
❧ The State Department just suspended a plan to spend more than $400 million on “armored Teslas.” On Wednesday, the New York Timesfound the expenditure on a list of purchases the Department planned to make in 2025. Though it was not exactly clear what model of Tesla would have been used (the Times assumes it would have been Tesla’s hulking pentagonal Cybertruck, which is the only model fit to be “armored”), it would have been extraordinarily lucrative to Tesla CEO Elon Musk. That very same Elon Musk has been illegally gutting federal agencies under the guise of cutting “waste” and “fraud” and has been grilled in recent days for his obvious conflicts of interest as one of America’s largest federal contractors.
The news that the State Department would be dropping hundreds of millions on Musk’s cars put in even starker relief how credible those fears were. And the Trump administration rushed to suspend the contract. Strangely, this payment was actually put on the State Department’s ledger in December, when the Biden administration was still in power, reportedly as part of an effort to invest more in electric vehicles. Trump and Musk, meanwhile, will surely attempt to spin their suspension of the payment as evidence of their transparency and lack of self-dealing. But remember, this payment had been in the works for months—they only suspended it once they got caught. (New York Times)
Even without the conflict of interest, the idea that the government would shell out so much money for such an unsightly, defective hunk of junk is outrageous.
❧ Donald Trump is waging a quixotic war on names and dates, and corporate America is giving in without a fight. As you probably know by now, the president has unilaterally decided to change the name of Denali to “Mt. McKinley” and the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.” This is both silly and a bit racist, and there’s no particular reason anyone should respect the changes—but big corporations and media organizations are already bending over backwards to do so. The Associated Press has split the difference, saying that it will use “Mt. McKinley” but mention both names when referring to the Gulf. Even that lukewarm resistance prompted a tantrum from Trump, who has indefinitely banned the AP from White House events.
Meanwhile, Google has capitulated completely, putting “Gulf of America” on Google Maps. They’ve even done things Trump didn’task for, like removing Pride Month and Black History Month from Google Calendars. Only the good old Encyclopedia Britannica is standing firm, and will retain “Gulf of Mexico.” This is all a little goofy, but it’s also frightening, because it shows that Trump and his MAGA allies believe they can just make reality become whatever they want it to be—a worrying quality in any political leader. (Washington Post)
See, we can arbitrarily rename stuff too.
WHALE FACT OF THE WEEK
Contrary to what you may have read in the Book of Jonah or Moby Dick, whales can’t actually swallow people.
In the latest skirmish in the seemingly endless battle between whales and seafaring vessels, a humpback whale briefly held a kayaker in its mouth off the coast of Chile last weekend before promptly spitting him out. The whole thing was captured on video by his father, who happened to have a camera rolling:
Thankfully, the man, 23-year-old Adrián Simancas, was fine and lived to tell the tale. The big reason he survived seems to be that whales don’t have very big throats. According to one Brazilian scientist who spoke to the BBC, humpback whale throats are “about the size of a household pipe” and are meant for swallowing small fish and shrimp. “They physically cannot swallow large objects like kayaks, tires, or even big fish like tuna,” he said.
Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. Header graphic by Cali Traina Blume. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.
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