WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is on his way to the Northern Mariana Islands—a United States territory—where he is expected to make a plea deal with the U.S. government that will result in his freedom. According to the Justice Department, he will plead guilty to a single violation of the Espionage Act, which will result in a sentence of time served. After more than 13 years in exile, including 1901 days—more than five years—in England’s maximum-security Belmarsh Prison, he’ll finally be able to return home to Australia.
Assange prepares to board a flight at London’s Stansted airport. (Image: WikiLeaks)
Of course, from a purely justice-based point of view, this compromise is still unsatisfying. Assange should never have served any time behind bars, because his only “crime” was to expose the crimes of others, particularly the United States military. It’s worth remembering that none of the people responsible for the murder of Reuters journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh, revealed to the world by Wikileaks’ 2007 “Collateral Murder” video, have ever been put on trial. Only Assange and fellow whistleblower Chelsea Manning were punished, in an obvious act of political retaliation. Worse, as Trevor Timm writes for the Guardianthis morning, the guilty plea sets a dangerous legal precedent that the American public are parties “not entitled to receive” information about their government’s secrets under the terms of the Espionage Act.
Still, this is good news. For a moment, it looked likely that Assange would be extradited to the United States, where he could have faced life in prison or even capital punishment. His freedom comes as the result of years of campaigning by activists around the world, who refused to let his story be ignored or drop from the headlines. It’s a reminder that when enough people put pressure on their leaders, and keep it up for long enough, they can get results. Now, if the journalistic profession actually cares about freedom and transparency the way they claim to, they should really think about getting Assange his long-overdue Pulitzer.
FIGHTING BACK
Extinction Rebellion crashes a golf tournament
On a golf course in Cromwell, Connecticut, the athletes competing in the Travelers Championship—part of the annual PGA Tour—recently got some unexpected guests. As professional golfer Scottie Scheffler lined up his shot on the 18th green, several climate protestors burst onto the course, wearing T-shirts with the hourglass logo of Extinction Rebellion and spraying clouds of bright red and yellow powder. They were quickly tackled to the ground by police, but not before the crowd got a chance to read the slogan on their shirt fronts: NO GOLF ON A DEAD PLANET.
The message is an important one, especially since golf has an outsized environmental impact. According to data released by the U.S. Golf Association, golf courses use an estimated 2.08 billion gallons of water per day for irrigation—and that’s just in the United States. The courses also make extensive use of pesticides, including ones that have been banned for use on food crops, which can easily seep into the groundwater nearby communities use. And increasingly, golf events like the PGA Tour are being used to “sportswash” the ruling regime of Saudi Arabia, which invests heavily in them to distract from both its environmental and human rights crimes.
Interrupting a game of golf might seem dramatic, but the environmental situation today is serious enough to warrant this protest, and more besides. Unless serious action is taken, everyone’s life will soon be threatened by climate change and the disasters it causes. People are dying of heat exhaustionalready. The protestors have done a valuable service, reminding us that we can no longer afford to golf while the planet burns.
It’s worth remembering that some Boomers are cool. (Image: FOX 61 via YouTube)
In other news...
In a victory for climate activists, the U.K. Supreme Court has ruled that the future environmental impact of burning oil—not just the impact of constructing an oil well—must be considered before a project is allowed to move forward. (BBC)
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (Or, “What’s going on with our politicians and oligarchs?”)
❧ The Supreme Court has agreed to rule on Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for teenagers. The case could have massive implications for whether states are allowed to outlaw transgender healthcare nationwide.
As of May 2024, 25 U.S. states now have bans on gender transition care, following years of fearmongering about trans people by conservative politicians and pundits. While these laws vary somewhat in severity depending on the state, this usually means that trans teenagers cannot access common treatments like puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy—which are widely considered beneficial to those struggling with gender dysphoria. According to the Human Rights Campaign, 117,600 trans youth, 39 percent of them, live in states that ban gender-affirming care. The case now before the Supreme Court, will likely not be decided until the fall of next year, but could have ramifications for their well-being across the country.
Oh, great. This place is getting involved in people's healthcare again. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)
Tennessee’s law has gone through a chaotic legal back-and-forth since it was passed in 2022. It was blocked by a federal trial court, but reinstated by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. Up to that point, it had been close to a consensus among federal courts that these sorts of bans on trans medical care were unconstitutional forms of sex discrimination. But as Ian Millhiser explains for Vox, Sixth Circuit Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton found ways of being tricky with language:
“Sutton […] attempts to paint Tennessee’s law as nondiscriminatory by reframing how it operates. If that law is understood as a ban on estrogen treatments for people assigned one sex at birth, and as a ban on testosterone treatments for people assigned the other, then […] Tennessee’s law must be struck down. But, if the law is reframed as a general ban on all gender transition care, then Sutton argues that it is sex-neutral because members of both sexes are forbidden from transitioning.”
(As Millhiser points out, this is not a new trick. When trying to come up with reasons why gay marriage bans were not discriminatory, conservatives argued that technically gay people weren’t banned from getting married, they just couldn’t marry members of the same sex.)
The Supreme Court decided to rule on the law, which had already been challenged by the ACLU, after the Biden administration petitioned it to consider issuing one. Given its recent stances on bodily autonomy, it’s hard to have tons of optimism about how the Court will approach trans rights, which it has not made many consequential rulings on. There is perhaps some glimmer of hope given that as recently as 2020, the Court ruled that trans people were protected under anti-discrimination law and in 2023 they ruled that a transgender girl was allowed to compete on the girls’ cross-country team. But as Millhiser writes, there isn’t much sense in trying to suss out what precedents the Court sets:
The only question that really matters is whether there are five justices on this Supreme Court who want transgender health care bans to survive. As this Court has shown time and time again in its recent terms, the six Republican appointees who dominate the Supreme Court are more than willing to overrule, or simply ignore, longstanding law if doing so is necessary to achieve one of their policy goals. Which brings us back to why LGBTQ rights litigators should be at least a little worried that Sutton will persuade a majority of the justices to agree with him.
PAST AFFAIRS
Check out editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson’s 2021 deep dive into the “wave of pseudoscholarship and pseudojournalism” that has fueled the moral panic about transgender kids.
As a result of his ongoing bankruptcy proceedings, Alex Jones’ notorious InfoWars media empire will be shut down and liquidated, with the money going to the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims who sued Jones for defamation in 2018. (Associated Press)
Art by C.M. Duffy from Current Affairs Magazine, Issue 18, March/April 2019
Newly released text messages implicate Ohio Governor Mike DeWine in the growing corruption scandal around H.B. 6, a piece of legislation that gave the FirstEnergy corporation a $1 billion bailout in exchange for extensive donations and bribes to state officials. (Ohio Capital Journal)
Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor for the Clinton administration, says he’s “scared shitless” for Thursday's presidential debate. (Substack)
BAD TAKE OF THE WEEK
Washington Post columnist and former Mike Bloomberg speechwriter Francis S. Barry has some… interesting… advice for President Biden as he enters the debate about how to avoid alienating the right:
It should be noted that, in this analogy, the Sensible Moderate Liberals are the ones defending the institution of slavery, while the Left are the ones that are actually correct. As we say, interesting.
The Supreme Court keeps taking up cases based on false and hypothetical situations. (The Guardian)
Bernie Sanders is hauling the CEO of Novo Nordisk — the Danish manufacturer of diabetes drugs Ozempic and Wegovy — to ask him why they charge Americans 10 to 15 times as much as they charge Europeans for the same drugs. (Common Dreams)
Colorado Democrats have spent $500,000 to support Republican congressional candidate Ron Hanks, a 2020 election denier they believe will be an easy opponent in the general. This seems like a questionable strategy at best. (CBS)
Water has gone WOKE! But fear not! You can now buy “anti-woke” water from a company called “Freedom2o.” Its CEO—a fourth-string MAGA talking-head named Alex Clark—advertised her new product this weekend at the Turning Point USA Convention saying, “It’s not just refreshing, it’s rebellious.” Rebellion, of course, doesn’t come cheap: a 12-pack of “Freedom Water” costs $21… But freedom isn’t free. (Mediaite)
Nowadays, the rainbow flag is a familiar sight. It can be found billowing from thousands of porches, flagpoles, cars, and other surfaces, during Pride month and all year round. But when was the first one flown?
Well, it was today! On June 25, 1978, to be exact, in the Gay and Lesbian Freedom Parade in San Francisco.
The artist behind the flag was Gilbert Baker—charmingly nicknamed “The Gay Betsy Ross” by one documentary—and he created the flag at the urging of Harvey Milk, one of the first openly gay politicians in the United States. Originally, the flag had eight stripes (not the six that are popular today), each with its own meaning:
Pink - Sex
Red - Life
Orange - Healing
Yellow - Sunlight
Green - Nature
Turquoise - Art
Indigo - Harmony
Purple - Spirit
But over time, the pink stripe was left off—“we ran out of pink dye,” Baker told one interviewer—and the turquoise and indigo stripes got combined into a single blue one in 1979, mostly so there would be an even number. Today, the very first flag can be seen in the GLBT Historical Society Museum in San Francisco, after a fragment of it was found in Baker’s effects when he died in 2017.
⚜ LONG READ: For Defector, Dave McKenna looks at how the doctrine of “qualified immunity” gives American police the freedom to kill people with near total impunity:
During a May 10 hearing before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Va., Maryland Assistant Attorney General Phillip Pickus argued that case law allowed police officers to use deadly force against anybody they say they’re afraid of. Even little kids.
Pickus, who was before the appeals court as the lawyer defending Maryland State Police trooper Joseph Azzari in a civil case filed by the mother of Peyton Ham, a teen the officer shot and killed in 2021, repeatedly cited the legal concept of “qualified immunity” in his arguments. He asserted that the Supreme Court has frequently told judges and plaintiffs not to "second guess" members of law enforcement, even after killings. Judge Roger Gregory, a member of the panel, seemed put off by Pickus’s cocksure counseling, and at one point in the hearing tried to get the Maryland attorney to admit there are limits to what officers can get away with. He asked Pickus if he was saying it’d be legally kosher for a cop to shoot a “5-year-old” who scared him.
Pickus affirmed. “It’s theoretically possible,” he said.
Icky, for sure. But for non-cops, the scariest part of Pickus’s pro-police-involved-shooting pose is: He’s probably right. As people opposed to qualified immunity point out and as Pickus’s courtroom decorum indicates, in practice the concept damn near allows anybody with a badge to shoot whomever they’re afraid of while on the job.
“The truth is, many court opinions back that up,” Lauren Bonds, executive director of the National Police Accountability Project, told Defector. Last week the organization, a non-profit that advocates on behalf of victims of police violence, held a conference for attorneys and law students in Baltimore. “Police officers have pretty broad discretion about [use of deadly force], and tack on qualified immunity, and it’s difficult to get any sort of justice for victims.”
In other news...
The Internet Archive, the world’s largest free online library, revealed that it has been forced to remove 500,000 titles from its website after it was sued by four multi-billion dollar publishing houses for “copyright infringement.” As tech blogger Mike Masnick writes, “This lawsuit is 100% about killing the very concept of libraries.” (TechDirt)
PAST AFFAIRS
Last year, Stephen Prager wrote about why the Internet Archive is such a uniquely valuable online resource and how the lawsuit against it represents a larger corporate war against free access to information:
Aside from the act of converting purchased books into a new format, the Archive uses lending practices that are functionally identical to those that tens of thousands of libraries use every day. If we believe in principle that libraries should be legal, it’s hard to buy any argument that the Archive’s activities should be prohibited under copyright law. They do not profit from the work of others, nor do they create more copies of works without compensating the authors and publishers… Their only crime—unless you want to question the right of all free libraries to exist—is that their services are too universal and convenient.
Ron DeSantis just vetoed all government grants for arts and culture in Florida, leaving organizations like the Tampa Museum of Art and the Sarasota Opera unsure how they’ll pay their staff. (New York Times)
At Columbia University, a task force will tell all incoming students and professors that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. (The Intercept)
The A.I. music generation apps Suno and Udio are being sued by the Recording Industry Association of America—which represents several large record labels—for using millions of unlicensed songs by major artists to train its algorithms. Ethically speaking, these A.I. companies totally deserve to lose the case, as they blatantly steal the hard work of artists. But we must admit that we’d miss making catchy calypso songs about the GDP. (Rolling Stone)
South Carolina is about to implement the most censorious K-12 book ban seen yet in the U.S. After a push by (you guessed it!) Moms for Liberty, the law deems any book containing sexual content to be “developmentally or age inappropriate,” which could include everything from Ulysses to the Canterbury Tales to the Bible. (Popular Information)
Travel sites are being inundated with AI-generated phishing scams. According to the top safety official at Booking.com, they’ve seen “anywhere from a 500 to a 900 percent increase" in fraudulent posts in the last 18 months and they’re far more convincing than human-generated ones. (BBC)
It’s a big week for beavers in Oregon. The Fish and Wildlife Commission has declassified them as predators, meaning landowners can no longer kill them simply for being a nuisance or out of fear that the furry intruders will eat their crops. Congratulations, beavers! (Oregon Capital Chronicle)
It's kind of unclear how beavers could be considered "predators" to begin with, since they mostly eat tree bark. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)
REMINDER: DO NOT TRUST ADVERTISING!
Advertising can look friendly, full of amusing mascots and slogans. But just consider its past, and beware:
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ In addition to the thousands of children who have been killed during the war in Gaza, Save the Children—a UK-based humanitarian group—estimates that as many as 21,000 may be missing. A report published Monday by the group says:
It is nearly impossible to collect and verify information under the current conditions in Gaza, but at least 17,000 children are believed to be unaccompanied and separatedand approximately 4,000 children are likely missing under the rubble, with an unknown number also in mass graves. Others have been forcibly disappeared, including an unknown number detained and forcibly transferred out of Gaza, their whereabouts unknown to their families amidst reports of ill-treatment and torture.
There are 1.1 million children in the Gaza Strip, and they are currently being subjected to some of the most inhuman treatment possible. In addition to the thousands currently trapped beneath rubble or wandering through a war zone alone, Save the Children has other horrifying statistics:
Nearly all children in Gaza are at imminent risk of famine.
There is a total absence of education in Gaza, leaving 625,000 children out of school.
Over 1 million children in Gaza are in need of mental health support.
5,500 babies, or 180 per day, are due to be born in the next 30 days.
This doesn’t even mention some of the other things children have been subjected to throughout this war. In March, UNICEF estimated that more than 1,000 children had become amputees and that it was the “biggest cohort of pediatric amputees in history.” And even for those children who have not sustained physical injuries, they are no doubt being subject to unthinkable emotional trauma as they are forced to flee for their lives and watch friends and family die. As this war continues towards its ninth month, with Israeli officials continuing to openly discuss annihilating the population, it’s important to remember who they are talking about. More than half of the people in Gaza are children.
In other news...
The Supreme Court of Iran has overturned a death sentence for Toomaj Salehi, the rapper and political dissident who was condemned for the dubious charge of spreading “corruption on earth” back in April. It’s a victory for human rights, but Iran still accounts for 74 percent of all executions on Earth, so there’s a long way to go. (CNN)
There’s also an election coming up in Iran, in which Masoud Pezeshkian—a moderate reformer who has criticized the country’s hijab policy—is expected to have a chance of becoming president in a runoff. (Al-Monitor)
Assimi Goïta, the president of Mali’s transitional government, has accused France of counterfeiting the CFA Franc—the main currency used in Mali—to sabotage his administration. (Business Insider Africa)
Things are getting scarily tense between the Philippines and China after a confrontation near the disputed Second Thomas Shoal. (Associated Press)
Labour is on track to demolish the Tories in the UK’s upcoming elections with major support from young voters. But they shouldn’t take youth support for granted. Under the surface, Gen Z is uninspired by party leader Sir Keith... uh, Keir Starmer over his abandonment of housing and green energy commitments and support for the war in Gaza. “If he fails to deliver the change he has only gestured at, young people will come to revolt against their paltry political inheritance,” writes Nicholas Harris. (The New Statesman)
Another coup may be on the horizon in Burkina Faso. Amid widespread violence and political chaos, military leader Captain Ibrahim Traore extended the nation’s “transition” to democracy by another five years last month. (Al Jazeera)
Australia has become the first country in the world to ban the sale of vapes outside of pharmacies. The law is set to go into effect next week. And wouldn’t you know it: vape users are turning to the black market, which is controlled by organized crime. (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
HORSE FACT OF THE WEEK
Przewalski's Horses have returned to Kazakhstan!
It’s always nice to see an animal that was recently on the verge of extinction make a comeback. But it’s even better when the animal in question is a goofy little horse. That’s exactly what’s happened in the Golden Steppe of Kazakhstan this month, with Equus ferus przewalskii—better known as Przewalski’s horse.
As the name suggests, Przewalski’s horses were named by the Russian geographer Nikolay Przhevalsky, who also named Przewalski's gazelle. (Apparently he didn’t suffer from false modesty.) They’re stocky little horses who split off from the Equus evolutionary tree about 36,000 years ago, and look closer to donkeys than your average Clydesdale. At one point, they roamed all over the grasslands of central Asia—but thanks to a combination of harsh winters, competition with other animal species, and hunting by humans, they were declared extinct in the wild in the late 1960s.
Like with many animals, diligent conservation efforts at zoos and wildlife sanctuaries—including Chernobyl, where 30 horses were released in 1998—have kept the species alive. And earlier this month, zoologists from the Prague Zoo released seven Przewalski horses in Kazakhstan, where they haven’t been seen for more than 200 years. The zoo has plans to bring 40 more in the next five years, with the goal of establishing a sustainable breeding population—and ultimately, reversing extinction itself.
With any luck, these horses could replace Borat as the public face of Kazakhstan.
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. Fact-checking by Justin Ward. 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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