Injustice Anywhere is a Threat to Justice Everywhere, MLK jr – Page 175

Switzerland has a stunningly high rate of gun ownership — here’s why it doesn’t have mass shootings

Insider

Switzerland has a stunningly high rate of gun ownership — here’s why it doesn’t have mass shootings

Hilary Brueck – May 25, 2022

Switzerland hasn’t had a mass shooting in 21 years.
In the US, there is almost one every day.
The Swiss have strict rules for who can get a gun, and take firearm training very seriously.
Visit Insider’s homepage for more stories.

Switzerland hasn’t had a mass shooting since 2001, when a man stormed the local parliament in Zug, killing 14 people and then himself.

The country has about 2 million privately owned guns in a nation of 8.3 million people. In 2016, the country had 47 attempted homicides with firearms. The country’s overall murder rate is near zero.

The National Rifle Association often points to Switzerland to argue that more rules on gun ownership aren’t necessary. In 2016, the NRA said on its blog that the European country had one of the lowest murder rates in the world while still having millions of privately owned guns and a few hunting weapons that don’t even require a permit.

Video: Inside a factory that makes untraceable ‘ghost guns’

Untraceable ‘ghost guns’ are easier than ever to 3D-print — we went inside a company that helps people do it

“Ghost guns” don’t require background checks or serial numbers, meaning they can’t be traced. Some companies are taking advantage of the legal loophole that has allowed this industry to go unregulated.

But the Swiss have some specific rules and regulations for gun use.

Insider took a look at the country’s past with guns to see why it has lower rates of gun violence than the US, where gun death rates are now at their highest in more than 20 years, and the leading cause of death for children and adolescents.

Knabenschiessen swiss guns — Wikimedia Creative Commons

Having an armed citizenry helped keep the Swiss neutral for more than 200 years.

swiss herders — Alpine herdsmen in Toggenburg, Switzerland.Keystone/Getty Images

The Swiss stance is one of “armed neutrality.”

Switzerland hasn’t taken part in any international armed conflict since 1815, but some Swiss soldiers help with peacekeeping missions around the world.

Many Swiss see gun ownership as part of a patriotic duty to protect their homeland.

Most Swiss men are required to learn how to use a gun.

Swiss President Ueli Maurer shooting guns switzerland — Swiss President Ueli Maurer pauses during a shooting-skills exercise — a several-hundred-year-old tradition — with the Foreign Diplomatic Corps in Switzerland on May 31, 2013.REUTERS/Denis Balibouse

Unlike the US, Switzerland has mandatory military service for men.

All men between the ages of 18 and 34 deemed “fit for service” are given a pistol or a rifle and trained.

After they’ve finished their service, the men can typically buy and keep their service weapons, but they have to get a permit for them.

In recent years, the Swiss government has voted to reduce the size of the country’s armed forces.

Switzerland is a bit like a well-designed fort.

Switzerland’s borders are basically designed to blow up on command, with at least 3,000 demolition points on bridges, roads, rails, and tunnels around the landlocked European country.

John McPhee put it this way in his book “La Place de la Concorde Suisse”:

“Near the German border of Switzerland, every railroad and highway tunnel has been prepared to pinch shut explosively. Nearby mountains have been made so porous that whole divisions can fit inside them.”

Roughly a quarter of the gun-toting Swiss use their weapons for military or police duty.

In 2000, more than 25% of Swiss gun owners said they kept their weapon for military or police duty, while less than 5% of Americans said the same.

In addition to the militia’s arms, the country has about 2 million privately owned guns — a figure that has been plummeting over the past decade.

The Swiss government has estimated that about half of the privately owned guns in the country are former service rifles. But there are signs the Swiss gun-to-human ratio is dwindling.

In 2007, the Small Arms Survey found that Switzerland had the third-highest ratio of civilian firearms per 100 residents (46), outdone by only the US (89) and Yemen (55).

But it seems that figure has dropped over the past decade. It’s now estimated that there’s about one civilian gun for every three Swiss people.

Gun sellers follow strict licensing procedures.

swiss gun shop — Daniel Wyss, the president of the Swiss weapons-dealers association, in a gun shop.REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann

Swiss authorities decide on a local level whether to give people gun permits. They also keep a log of everyone who owns a gun in their region, known as a canton, though hunting rifles and some semiautomatic long arms are exempt from the permit requirement.

But cantonal police don’t take their duty dolling out gun licenses lightly. They might consult a psychiatrist or talk with authorities in other cantons where a prospective gun buyer has lived before to vet the person.

Swiss laws are designed to prevent anyone who’s violent or incompetent from owning a gun.

swiss nina christen rifle — Nina Christen of Switzerland at the Olympic Games in Rio in August 2016.Sam Greenwood/Getty Images

People who’ve been convicted of a crime or have an alcohol or drug addiction aren’t allowed to buy guns in Switzerland.

The law also states that anyone who “expresses a violent or dangerous attitude” won’t be permitted to own a gun.

Gun owners who want to carry their weapon for “defensive purposes” also have to prove they can properly load, unload, and shoot their weapon and must pass a test to get a license.

Switzerland is also one of the richest, healthiest, and, by some measures, happiest countries in the world.

Swiss Switzerland flag fan trumpet — Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images

Switzerland was ranked sixth in the UN’s 2019 World Happiness Report.

The Swiss have been consistently near the top of this list. In 2017, when Switzerland was ranked fourth overall among nations, the report authors noted that the country tends to do well on “all the main factors found to support happiness: caring, freedom, generosity, honesty, health, income and good governance.”

Meanwhile, according to the report, happiness has taken a dive over the past decade in the US.

The report authors cite “declining social support and increased corruption,” as well as addiction and depression for the fall.

But the Swiss aren’t perfect when it comes to guns.

Swiss flag Switzerland — Harold Cunningham/Getty Images

Switzerland still has one of the highest rates of gun violence in Europe, and most gun deaths in the country are suicides.

Around the world, stronger gun laws have been linked to fewer gun deaths. That has been the case in Switzerland too.

Geneva Swiss Switzerland Police Officer — A police officer at Geneva’s airport.REUTERS/Denis Balibouse

After hundreds of years of letting local cantons determine gun rules, Switzerland passed its first federal regulations on guns in 1999, after the country’s crime rate increased during the 1990s.

Since then, more provisions have been added to keep the country on par with EU gun laws, and gun deaths, including suicides, have continued to drop.

As of 2015, the Swiss estimated that only about 11% of citizens kept their military-issued gun at home.

Most people aren’t allowed to carry their guns around in Switzerland.

swiss hunters — Hunters at a market in central Switzerland offer their fox furs.REUTERS

Concealed-carry permits are tough to get in Switzerland, and most people who aren’t security workers or police officers don’t have one.

“We have guns at home, but they are kept for peaceful purposes,” Martin Killias, a professor of criminology at Zurich University, told the BBC in 2013. “There is no point taking the gun out of your home in Switzerland because it is illegal to carry a gun in the street.”

That’s mostly true. Hunters and sports shooters are allowed to transport their guns only from their home to the firing range — they can’t just stop off for coffee with their rifle.

And guns cannot be loaded during transport to prevent them from accidentally firing in a place like Starbucks — something that has happened in the US at least twice.

My Great-Grandpa Killed My Great-Grandma Giving Her An Abortion On Their Kitchen Table

HuffPost – Personal

My Great-Grandpa Killed My Great-Grandma Giving Her An Abortion On Their Kitchen Table

“Come say goodbye to your mother,” he told my grandmother as he brought her and her siblings into the kitchen, where their mother lay dying.

By Linda Black – May 6, 2022

"The room, table, and her mother’s lower half were awash with her blood. This is the only memory my grandmother had of her mother." — “The room, table, and her mother’s lower half were awash with her blood. This is the only memory my grandmother had of her mother.”

In 1919, my 7-year-old grandmother was startled awake in the early hours by her father. “Come say goodbye to your mother,” he told her. He brought her and her siblings into the kitchen, where their mother lay dying on the kitchen table. The room, table, and her mother’s lower half were awash with her blood. This is the only memory my grandmother had of her mother. Any positive memories were shocked from her system in that moment.

My grandmother’s father killed her mother performing an illegal abortion. He was never charged with a crime. After the death of his wife, he kept his younger daughter and his young boys with him. He sent my grandmother to work as a farmhand for a relative. To him, the abortion was a necessary risk. They already had too many kids.

In 1919, it was illegal in many states to provide information about birth control or abortion. My great-grandmother had no choice when it came to having sex with her husband; it was considered marital duty. That gave her no say in being pregnant. Her lack of choice killed her.

By her own account, my grandmother never felt loved after the death of her mother. The relatives who raised her treated her like the help. My grandmother married the first man to take an interest in her (my grandfather was a lovely man). She was 16. He was older and living with his parents. Until the death of her husband’s mother, my grandmother was treated as a servant in his house.

Her siblings fared little better. The younger brothers were regularly beaten by their father, and my great-aunt (the younger sister) was molested by their father. My great-aunt eventually married a man like her father. He abused her from the time of their marriage until the day of her death. The brothers disappeared. For decades my grandmother had no idea what had happened to her brothers. She didn’t find them until they were in their 60s.

My great-grandmother has a host of great-granddaughters and great-great-granddaughters. At least two of us have had legal abortions. I was barely 18, just starting college. The abortion was not harrowing; being pregnant was. I could not wait to be relieved of that burden. On the drive home after, I kept sighing with relief and saying, “Thank God that’s over.” Since that day, I have used two forms of birth control without fail (yes, even during marriage).

My adult child has never had sex without contraceptives. Currently, my child is wild with fear after the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion indicating a plan to overturn Roe. Their health and life is too complicated to successfully manage a pregnancy or a child. This gentle soul is in a state of panic on behalf of all fertile people with uteruses. In speaking with my offspring, I had to promise that if Roe is overturned, I would form a pipeline to help people make their way to a country where abortion is legal. My kid can’t sleep for worrying about those who will fall through the cracks — those who will die due to unsafe abortions. My child knows the story of my great-grandmother.

I have never rested easy knowing a group of elderly and middle-aged men could make decisions stripping me of my rights. At the state and federal level, governmental representatives are mostly white, mostly male, and most have some financial privilege. They are mostly people who will never need an abortion. Some number of these men, when it was prudent to their futures, have paid women to get abortions on the quiet. They have paid for their daughters’ abortions. Men with power have been doing this in the United States almost since its inception. Still, they work to see Roe overturned.

“In speaking with my offspring, I had to promise that if Roe is overturned, I would form a pipeline to help people make their way to a country where abortion is legal. My kid can’t sleep for worrying about those who will fall through the cracks — those who will die due to unsafe abortions. My child knows the story of my great-grandmother.”

It is abundantly clear that the anti-abortion folks do not care about babies or people with uteruses. If they did, people with uteruses would have access to excellent health care and birth control. Our government would ensure that every member of every family was well fed and healthy. Children in foster care would be given well-vetted places to live. The system would provide the help parents need to appropriately support and love their children, thus returning kids safely to their parents when possible. Foster parents would be given enough money to raise these children. Foster kids would be aided into adulthood with significant job training or college. It would be less expensive to adopt foster children into loving homes. Childcare would be available as a matter of course. All people with uteruses would have access to paid maternity leave. Sick leave would not be limited in any job.

The top-level corporate executives (usually male) would not make 1,000 times more money than their employees. (In 2018, Walmart’s chief executive officer made over $23 million; his average full-time employee, often a woman, earned just under $22,000.) The lives of people with uteruses and children pale when compared to this alternate reality.

In the early 20th century, women and children were legally the property of men. So, we might understand why they had so few rights. What confuses me is this: Why do women and people with uteruses have little support and tenuous control over their own bodies today?

Turning back time will not give anti-abortion folks comfort. It will ruin lives, families, and result in shocking deaths of women and those with uteruses. In 2022, no one should die on a table covered in their own blood from a botched illegal abortion like my great-grandmother did.

As a teen, Linda Black was the fourth runner-up in a Miss Teen-Kentucky beauty pageant. Her first job was at Wendy’s. As an adult, Linda earned a B.A. and a Ph.D., working for over 30 years as a college professor. She now works in the administrative side of higher education. Her current favorite film is “Gaslight.” Her current favorite book is “Skeleton Woman Buys the Ticket.” She is bossed around by an adult child, a delightful dog, and a slightly sinister cat.

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Michigan state senator hits back at GOP colleague accusing her of ‘grooming’ kids

Yahoo! News

Michigan state senator hits back at GOP colleague accusing her of ‘grooming’ kids

Christopher Wilson, Senior Writer – April 20, 2022

Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow pushed back in a viral speech against the growing trend of Republicans labeling their Democratic opponents as groomers and pedophiles.

McMorrow responded Tuesday morning to accusations made in a fundraising email by Republican state Sen. Lana Theis that her Democratic colleague wanted to “groom and sexualize kindergarteners.”

“I didn’t expect to wake up yesterday to the news that the senator from the 22nd District had, overnight, accused me by name of grooming and sexualizing children in an email fundraising for herself,” McMorrow said at the beginning of her remarks. “So I sat on it for a while wondering: Why me? And then I realized: Because I am the biggest threat to your hollow, hateful scheme. Because you can’t claim that you are targeting marginalized kids in the name of ‘parental rights’ if another parent is standing up to say no.”

Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow. (Senate TV via Twitter)

Republicans have attempted to position themselves as the party of parental rights, with state legislatures across the country introducing a series of bills targeting the LGBTQ community, with those opposing the legislation being labeled as “groomers.” They’ve also targeted books that discuss race and gender while attempting to make it illegal for parents to seek gender-affirming care for transgender children. Prominent right-wing media figures have focused on anti-LGBTQ attacks in recent weeks.

“So then what?” continued McMorrow. “Then you dehumanize and marginalize me. You say that I’m one of them. You say she’s a groomer, she supports pedophilia, she wants children to believe that they were responsible for slavery and to feel bad about themselves because they’re white.”

McMorrow’s speech has been viewed over 9 million times in the less than 24 hours since she posted it to her Twitter account. During her comments, she talked about growing up being active in the church, working with her mother at a soup kitchen and the civil rights work of Father Ted Hesburgh, the former president of her alma mater, Notre Dame.

“I learned that service was far more important than performative nonsense like being seen in the same pew every Sunday or writing ‘Christian’ in your Twitter bio and using that as a shield to target and marginalize already marginalized people,” McMorrow said, emphasizing that she is a white, straight, Christian, suburban mom and that those promoting the attacks were using it to deflect from the fact that they weren’t working on the real issues.

“I know that hate will only win if people like me stand by and let it happen,” concluded McMorrow, who was first elected in 2018 and is on the ballot again this November. “So I want to be very clear right now: Call me whatever you want. I hope you brought in a few dollars. I hope it made you sleep good last night. I know who I am. I know what faith and service means and what it calls for in this moment. We will not let hate win.”

Theis’s rhetoric against McMorrow in the fundraising email sent out on Monday read, “These are the people we are up against. Progressive social media trolls like Senator Malloy McMorrow (D-Snowflake) who are outraged they can’t teach can’t groom and sexualize kindergarteners or that 8-year-olds are responsible for slavery.” She added that “enlightened elites” believe parents “must surrender to the wisdom of teacher unions, trans-activists, and the education bureaucracy.”

Theis targeted McMorrow and other Democrats in the Senate after they walked out of a session last Wednesday due to the content of Theis’s invocation, which the legislators took as a precursor to action against LGBTQ educators.

“Dear Lord, across the country we’re seeing in the news that our children are under attack. That there are forces that desire things for them other than what their parents would have them see and hear and know. Dear Lord, I pray for your guidance in this chamber to protect the most vulnerable among us,” said Theis, who is chair of the Senate Education and Career Readiness Committee.

Michigan state Sen. Lana Theis. — Michigan state Sen. Lana Theis in 2019. (David Eggert/AP)

“The ‘forces’ are, of course, public school teachers, and the ‘things’ are the LGBTQ community,” tweeted Democratic state Sen. Dayna Polehanki. “To pervert the Senate Invocation in this way is beyond the pale.”

“Without sharing or repeating closed-minded harmful words from a sitting Senator under the guise of a ‘prayer,’ to every child in Michigan — you are perfect and welcome and loved for being exactly who you are,” added McMorrow on Twitter.

A number of GOP senators used the confirmation hearings of new Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to label her as soft on child pornography offenders, despite repeated analyses showing that Jackson’s rulings were within the mainstream of her fellow judges. When three Republican senators said they would vote to confirm Jackson, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., called them “pro-pedophile.” The following day, she referred to Democrats as the “party of pedophiles.”

Greene’s comments and the general trend toward accusations of pedophilia echo the QAnon conspiracy theory, supported by Greene in the past, which alleges that former President Donald Trump was working to take down a powerful cabal of child traffickers typically portrayed as the Democratic elite. Believers in the debunked theory frequently allege that their political opponents support pedophiles. Those pushing the accusations have a large audience, as a recent survey from the Public Religion Research Institute found that 16% of Americans believed that “the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex-trafficking operation.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. — Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., addresses Trump supporters in Commerce, Ga., on March 26. (Megan Varner/Getty Images)

McMorrow’s direct response is a contrast to what the national Democratic strategy has been to the increase of Republicans claiming they are a party of “pedophiles” and “groomers.” Vice News spoke to a number of prominent House Democrats last week about Greene’s comments.

“I don’t even really pay attention to anything she says because she has nothing rational to say. It seems to me to be a ridiculous allegation,” said Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., a member of House Democratic leadership. “We’re focused right now on getting things done for everyday Americans: lowering costs, addressing gas prices and inflation. They can continue to peddle lies and conspiracy theories.”

“I see polling that shows that that outrageous characterization is landing with some folks,” Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., told the outlet. “But you also don’t really want to give oxygen to the land of misfit toys, which is where this is coming [from].”

Putin’s approval rating soars since he sent troops into Ukraine- state pollster

Reuters

Putin’s approval rating soars since he sent troops into Ukraine- state pollster

Peter Hobson – April 8, 2022

FILE PHOTO: Russian President Putin chairs a meeting on agricultural and fish industries outside Moscow

LONDON (Reuters) – The proportion of Russians who trust President Vladimir Putin has risen to 81.6% from 67.2% before he ordered troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, according to a survey by the state-run pollster VTsIOM published on Friday.

The conflict has displaced more than 10 million Ukrainians from their homes, killed or injured thousands, turned cities into rubble and led to sweeping Western sanctions that will push down Russian living standards.

VTsIOM said 78.9% of respondents in its latest survey said they approved of Putin’s actions, compared to 64.3% in the last poll before the start of what Russia calls its “special military operation”. The proportion who disapproved of his actions fell to 12.9% from 24.4%.

Ukraine and Western leaders have condemned Russia’s military campaign as unprovoked aggression. The Kremlin says it had to demilitarise and “denazify” Ukraine to protect Russian-speakers and pre-empt a threat from the Western NATO alliance.

VTsIOM’s numbers were similar to those in a survey published on March 30 by the independent Levada Center, in which the proportion of Russians saying they approved of Putin’s actions rose to 83% from 71% in February.

Levada recorded a comparable surge in Putin’s approval rating in 2014, when Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine and annexed it and Russian-speaking separatists took control of part of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine with Moscow’s support.

Ordinary Russians have little access to independent reporting on their country as almost all significant media outlets that diverge from government policy have been closed down in the last few years.

Since Feb. 24, Moscow has further restricted access to foreign media and social media, and made it a criminal offence to publish reports about the armed forces that deviate from official statements.

VTsIOM said it surveys 1,600 people across Russia each day and its weekly polls are an average of responses from the previous seven days.

The poll published on Friday was gathered between March 28 and April 4, it said.

(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Kevin Liffey/Mark Heinrich)

U.N. Envoy Angelina Jolie Outlines What Constitutes ‘War Crimes’ amid International Conflicts

People

U.N. Envoy Angelina Jolie Outlines What Constitutes ‘War Crimes’ amid International Conflicts

Dan Heching – April 8, 2022

European Parliament / Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Angelina Jolie continues to speak out about civilian rights during wartime as the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues with mounting civilian casualties in places like Bucha and Mariupol. She has also been very vocal about the ongoing Yemeni Civil War.

The humanitarian and Special Envoy to the United Nations, 46, posted a series of excerpts from the Geneva Conventions to her Instagram on Friday, highlighting language focusing on civilian populations caught in the middle of war.

The Geneva Conventions, agreed upon in 1949, are a series of treaties and international agreements establishing standards of humanitarian treatment during wartime of the sick and wounded, as well as civilians and non-combatants.

In the caption to her post, Jolie identified the Conventions as “an attempt to limit the damage done by war, and reduce suffering.”

She also included a basic summary of the rules of warfare under the Conventions, writing, “Civilians can never be targeted” and “medics and aid workers should be protected.” “The things civilians need for survival — like food and water — should not be denied or destroyed,” Jolie’s post noted.

Angelina Jolie

Over the past 60 years, civilians have been the main victims of war. Thousands of civilians have been killed. Others don’t have food, water, heat or shelter. Millions have been forced to flee their homes.

Both soldiers and civilians are protected under the Geneva Conventions. An attempt to limit the damage done by war, and reduce suffering.

The 4 Geneva Conventions:

• Protects the sick, wounded, medical and religious personnel during conflict
• Care for the wounded, sick and shipwrecked during war at sea
• Treat prisoners of war with humanity
• Protect all civilians, including those in occupied territory

From these conventions come the rule of war. They are universal. All sides in conflicts have to follow them.

The basic rules:

• Civilians can never be targeted
• The sick and wounded have a right to be cared for – no matter whose side they are on
• Medics and aid workers should be protected
• The things civilians need for survival – like food and water – should not be denied or destroyed
• Prisoners deserve fair treatment. They must not be tortured or abused
• Weapons which cause excessive or untargeted damage should be limited
• Rape and other forms of sexual violence are expressly forbidden

BREAKING THESE RULES IS A WAR CRIME

The Oscar winner also specified that “Rape and other forms of sexual violence are expressly forbidden.” “Breaking these rules is a war crime,” Jolie concluded.

As a special envoy to the U.N., Jolie serves the High Commissioner for Refugees, and has brought attention to humanitarian crises around the world, including in Myanmar and Yemen.

She has also directly addressed the unfolding atrocities in Ukraine, specifically focusing on how children are going to “pay the highest price.”

Last month, the Maleficent star posted a set of gripping photos to her Instagram amid the ongoing war. The carousel of images began with a photo of a man and woman holding children as they wait to cross a river after escaping Irpin, Ukraine.

RELATED VIDEO: Maks Chmerkovskiy Returns to Poland to Help Refugees Escaping Ukraine: ‘It Is Getting Worse’

The second picture was of a teenage boy lying in a hospital bed with his mother nearby as he was treated for his injuries following a Russian attack. The third image showed a young cancer patient hugging a man in the basement of a treatment facility that is serving as a bomb shelter.

“As well as the millions who’ve fled over Ukraine’s borders, nearly 2 million people are displaced inside their country, many trapped by fighting, denied access to aid, and in direct physical danger,” Jolie captioned the post. “Without an end to the war children will pay the highest price — in trauma, lost childhoods and shattered lives.”

She ended with a note for her followers to “learn more” about the UN High Commissioner for Refugees by sharing the official Instagram page.

Russia’s attack on Ukraine continues after their forces launched a large-scale invasion on Feb. 24 — the first major land conflict in Europe in decades. Details of the devastation change by the day, but hundreds of civilians have already been reported dead or wounded, including children. Millions of Ukrainians have also fled, the United Nations says.

What are Russian ‘filtration camps’?

Yahoo! News

What are Russian ‘filtration camps’?

Marquise Francis, National Reporter & Producer – April 7, 2022

As President Biden announced a new wave of severe financial sanctions against Russia this week for alleged war crimes against Ukraine, new details have emerged of how Russian soldiers have forcibly removed tens of thousands of Ukrainians from occupied areas and sent them to “filtration camps” for intense interrogation before shipping them off to various cities around Russia, according to multiple reports.

The filtration camps, described as large plots of military tents with rows of men in uniforms, are where deported Ukrainians are photographed, fingerprinted, forced to turn over their cellphones, passwords and identity documents, and then questioned by officers for hours before being sent to Russia. A satellite image captured by the U.S.-based Maxar Technologies last week offered the first glimpse of one camp in the Russian-controlled village of Bezimenne, giving a peek into how Russians are processing Ukrainians and attempting to strip them of their identities. Ukrainian officials say more than 40,000 people have been forced into Russia against their will since last month.

Ukrainians share ‘degrading’ experiences in the camps

Many Ukrainians have shared with the Guardian harrowing accounts of being taken from their homes and dropped off in a foreign Russian community.

“On March 15, Russian troops stormed into our bomb shelter and ordered all the women and children to get out. It was not a choice,” one woman, who requested anonymity for fear of her safety, told the British-based paper. “People need to know the truth, that Ukrainians are being moved to Russia, the country that is occupying us.

“They went through my phone; they asked if I knew anything about the Ukrainian army, if I had friends in the military,” she added. “They also asked me what I thought about Ukraine, about [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and about the conflict. It was very degrading.”

Evacuees sort out their belongings in a local sports school arrayed with dozens of temporary beds. — A temporary accommodation center for evacuees in a school in Taganrog, in Russia’s Rostov region, on March 17. (Maxim Romanov/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

This claim backs up a recent Telegram post from the Mariupol City Council stating that Russian soldiers have kidnapped Ukrainian residents from the besieged port city of Mariupol, according to the English translation of the post.

Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, has denied these accusations, calling the reports “lies.” He claimed that an excess of 420,000 Ukrainians have voluntarily evacuated into Russia from dangerous conditions in Ukraine.

Ukrainians who have been forced from their homes, however, contradict this assertion. They say Russian forces have transported Ukrainians through Russian-controlled eastern Ukraine in groups of 200 to 300.

U.S. response to filtration camps

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, suggested on Tuesday at a U.N. Security Council briefing that there are similarities between present-day Russian filtration camps and Nazi Germany concentration camps nearly a century prior.

“Reports indicate that Russian Federal Security agents are confiscating passports and IDs, taking away cellphones, and separating families from one another,” she said. “I do not need to spell out what these so-called filtration camps are reminiscent of. It’s chilling, and we cannot look away.”

A military bus without one set of wheels and its previous designation painted out. — A damaged military bus, formerly marked National Guard of Ukraine, in the courtyard of a hospital in Mariupol on April 4. (Leon Klein/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

The scale and force of Russia’s deportations and widespread assaults on civilians remain unclear — but their impact has reverberated around the world.

“We have all seen the gruesome photos,” Thomas-Greenfield said. “Lifeless bodies lying in the streets, apparently summarily executed, their hands tied behind their backs.” She called the reports of the abduction of children, mayors, doctors, religious leaders and journalists deeply troubling.

History of filtration camps

This is not the first time Russia has been accused of using filtration camps.

The term originated in Europe after the end of World War II, in the mid- to late 1940s, according to Nick Baron, a professor of history at the University of Nottingham in the U.K. After millions of Soviet citizens gained their freedom from Nazi control, many who were living outside the Soviet Union sought to return but were subjected to holding stations and camps for screening before readmission.

A Chechen refugee, with an anguished expression, is seen sitting on a truck. — In 1999, in a truck at a Chechen-Ingush border checkpoint, a Chechen refugee sits on her belongings. (Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images)

Fifty years later, during the first Chechen war in the mid-1990s and the second Chechen war in the early 2000s, as the small European nation vied for its independence, Russian forces once again used these camps for mass internment, according to NPR.

The Guardian reported at the time several accounts of escapees detailing the horror inside these filtration camps. One Chechen man recalled men and women being raped by Russian guards, inmates being beaten daily with iron bars and others forced to use their close quarters as an open toilet.

Another Chechen survivor said Russian forces were using the filtration camps for “extermination,” citing various accounts describing suffocation, electric shocks to genitalia, faked executions and exposure to frigid temperatures. Russians sought ransom from Chechens, and those who could not pay were tortured, most of them allegedly dying during the ordeal.

Human Rights Watch, an international human rights organization, detailed the brutal abuse and violence in these camps in a February 2020 report.

A young child sits on a bed, facing the camera, with a backdrop of refugees. — A child at a refugee camp in the Ingush Republic of the Russian Federation in 2002. (Alexander Sorin/Getty Images)

Thomas de Waal, a reporter who covered the war in the 1990s, told NPR last month that he sees similarities between the reports surfacing today and Russia’s actions then.

“There are some pretty disturbing parallels,” de Waal told the public radio network. “The use of heavy artillery, the indiscriminate attacking of an urban center. They bring back some pretty terrible memories for those of us who covered the Chechnya war of the 1990s.”

Two decades ago, Russia won a victory against Chechnya after those two wars.

Global impact of filtration camps

Offering some hope, according to the United Nations, the unlawful deportation, transfer or confinement of others constitutes a war crime. But the scope of any potential punishment remains unclear.

The international human rights group Amnesty International listed details in its latest press release of “extrajudicial executions and other unlawful killings,” as an attempt to record alleged Russian war crimes demonstrating the brutality of Russian forces.

“Testimonies show that unarmed civilians in Ukraine are being killed in their homes and streets in acts of unspeakable cruelty and shocking brutality,” Agnès Callamard, the group’s secretary-general, said in the release.

“The intentional killing of civilians is a human rights violation and a war crime. These deaths must be thoroughly investigated, and those responsible must be prosecuted, including up the chain of command.”

Two men pass a burned-out building amid debris-filled streets in the city of Mariupol. — Civilians walk past a burned building in Mariupol on April 4. (Leon Klein/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Laura Mills, a researcher with the organization, hopes the stories it has personally verified help lead to justice for those involved.

“These are apparent war crimes,” Mills told Yahoo News. “They should be investigated and prosecuted as such.”

Ukrainian officials are hoping resources and increased Russian penalties will help them outlast their larger foe. Biden’s most recent sanctions include banning new investment in Russia, imposing the most severe financial sanctions on Russia’s largest bank and government officials and their family members, who include two of Putin’s daughters.

“We’re going to stifle Russia’s ability to grow for years to come,” Biden said Wednesday.

The U.K. and other European countries have also tightened financial sanctions on Russia. Though they have not thwarted the assault on Ukraine as of yet, the resilience of the much smaller Ukrainian defense shows vulnerability in Russia’s future.

Meanwhile, the appearance of mobile cremation machines has been reported alongside killings of Ukrainian civilians still being carried out by Putin-led troops. According to NBC News, reports of sightings of the machines are “credible” but there is no evidence they have been used. The mayor of Mariupol estimated on Wednesday that more than 5,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed in that city alone since late February and that the death toll continues to climb.

Demonstrators in Italy hold posters saying Bestiality in Italian, and Putinizm Genocide. — In Milan, a woman holds up a poster at a rally on Wednesday against President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. (Pier Marco Tacca/Getty Images)

According to NATO, an estimated 7,000 to 15,000 Russian troops have been killed since Russia invaded Ukraine six weeks ago, on Feb. 24. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has said that at least 1,300 Ukrainian troops have been killed since then, according to the New York Times.

As of Thursday, more than 4.2 million Ukrainians had fled the country, with the majority — upwards of 2.4 million — finding refuge in Poland, according to the U.N. refugee agency.

“We want policymakers in all countries to take this seriously,” Mills said. “[We want them] to take war crimes seriously.”

Could Vladimir Putin be prosecuted for war crimes?

The Guardian

Explainer: could Vladimir Putin be prosecuted for war crimes?

David Smith in Washington – April 4, 2022

<span>Photograph: Sputnik/Reuters</span> — Photograph: Sputnik/Reuters

Joe Biden has called for the prosecution of Vladimir Putin for war crimes after the discovery in Bucha, Ukraine, of mass graves and bodies of bound civilians shot at close range. But bringing the Russian president to trial would be far from simple.

What are war crimes?

The international criminal court (ICC), the world’s first permanent war crimes tribunal, defines them as “grave breaches” of the Geneva Conventions, a set of humanitarian laws to be observed in war.

Jonathan Hafetz, an international criminal law and national security scholar at Seton Hall University School of Law, told the Reuters news agency that the execution of civilians as alleged in Bucha was a “quintessential war crime”.

Russia continues to deny culpability. Its defence ministry insisted on Sunday that “not a single civilian has faced any violent action by the Russian military”.

How can a case pointing to war crimes be built?

Jake Sullivan, the US national security adviser, told reporters on Monday that there were four main sources of evidence: information gathered by the US and its allies including from intelligence sources; Ukraine’s own efforts on the ground to develop the case and document forensics from the killings; material from international organisations including the UN and NGOs; and findings by global independent media with photos, interviews and documentation.

Can Putin be held personally responsible for his troops’ actions?

The prosecution could argue that Putin and his inner circle committed a war crime by directly ordering an illegal attack or knew crimes were being committed and failed to prevent them. This case may be hard to prove in isolation but if it fits a wider pattern across Ukraine, it becomes more compelling. The US had accused Russia of war crimes even before Bucha.

Philippe Sands, a professor at University College London, told the Associated Press: “You’ve got to prove that they knew or they could have known or should have known. There’s a real risk you end up with trials of mid-level people in three years and the main people responsible for this horror – Putin, Lavrov, the minister of defence, the intelligence folks, the military folks and the financiers who are supporting it – will get off the hook.”

Who would run such a trial?

The ICC opened 20 years ago to prosecute the perpetrators of genocide and crimes against humanity. But the US, China, Russia and Ukraine are not members of the court, which has been criticised for focusing too heavily on Africa and applying “selective justice”.

The ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, said in February he had opened a war crimes investigation in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Although it is not a signatory, Ukraine previously approved an investigation dating back to 2013, which includes Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

The ICC will issue arrest warrants if prosecutors can show “reasonable grounds” to believe war crimes were committed. But there is little chance that Russia would comply and the ICC cannot try someone in absentia. The US’s unwillingness to join the court is also diplomatically awkward and likely to prompt cries of western hypocrisy.

Donald Trump once told the UN general assembly: “As far as America is concerned, the ICC has no jurisdiction, no legitimacy, and no authority.” His administration announced that the US would impose visa bans on ICC officials involved in the court’s potential investigation of Americans for alleged crimes in Afghanistan.

But Sullivan said on Monday: “The US has in the past been able to collaborate with the international criminal court in other contexts despite not being a signatory. But there’s a variety of reasons one might consider alternative venues as well.”

What are these “alternative venues”?

The UN seems an obvious starting point. But one problem with going through the UN security council is that Russia is a permanent member. “It would be difficult to imagine that they would not attempt to exercise their veto to block something,” Sullivan observed.

Another option might be a special tribunal organised by a group of countries. The Nuremberg tribunal was established by the US, Britain, France and the Soviet Union to hold Nazi leaders to account after the second world war.

Potential models for Ukraine could include the tribunals set up to prosecute war crimes committed during the Balkan wars in the early 1990s and the 1994 Rwanda genocide. Another example was the UN-backed special court for Sierra Leone, established in 2002 to bring to justice those responsible for atrocities perpetrated during the country’s country’s civil war in 1996.

What about a different charge?

It would be easier to prosecute Putin for the crime of aggression after he waged an unprovoked war against another sovereign country. The ICC does not have jurisdiction over Russia for the crime of aggression because Russia is not a signatory.

Last month dozens of prominent lawyers and politicians, including the Ukrainian foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, and the former British prime minister Gordon Brown, launched a campaign to create a special tribunal to try Russia for the crime of aggression in Ukraine.

How long would a prosecution take?

Probably many years. The international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia indicted its first head of state, the then Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milošević, in 1999 and took him into custody in 2001. His trial began in 2002 and was under way when he died at the Hague in 2006.

Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, was found guilty of aiding and abetting war crimes and crimes against humanity for supporting rebels who carried out atrocities after four years of hearings at the special court for Sierra Leone in the Hague.

Flurry of New Laws Move Blue and Red States Further Apart

The New York Times

Flurry of New Laws Move Blue and Red States Further Apart

Shawn Hubler and Jill Cowan – April 4, 2022

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — After the governor of Texas ordered state agencies to investigate parents for child abuse if they provide certain medical treatments to their transgender children, California lawmakers proposed a law making the state a refuge for transgender youths and their families.

When Idaho proposed a ban on abortions that empowers relatives to sue anyone who helps terminate a pregnancy after six weeks, nearby Oregon approved $15 million to help cover the abortion expenses of patients from out of state.

As Republican activists aggressively pursue conservative social policies in state legislatures across the country, liberal states are taking defensive actions. Spurred by a U.S. Supreme Court that is expected to soon upend an array of long-standing rights, including the constitutional right to abortion, left-leaning lawmakers from Washington to Vermont have begun to expand access to abortion, bolster voting rights and denounce laws in conservative states targeting LGBTQ minors.

The flurry of action, particularly in the West, is intensifying already marked differences between life in liberal- and conservative-led parts of the country. And it’s a sign of the consequences when state governments are controlled increasingly by single parties. Control of legislative chambers is split between parties now in only two states — Minnesota and Virginia — compared with 15 states 30 years ago.

“We’re further and further polarizing and fragmenting, so that blue states and red states are becoming not only a little different but radically different,” said Jon Michaels, a law professor who studies government at UCLA.

Americans have been sorting into opposing partisan camps for at least a generation, choosing more and more to live among like-minded neighbors, while legislatures, through gerrymandering, are reinforcing their states’ political identities by solidifying one-party rule.

“As states become more red or blue, it’s politically easier for them to pass legislation,” said Ryan D. Enos, a Harvard political scientist who studies partisan segregation. “Does that create a feedback loop where more sorting happens? That’s the part we don’t know yet.”

With some 30 legislatures in Republican hands, conservative lawmakers, working in many cases with shared legislative language, have begun to enact a tsunami of restrictions that for years were blocked by Democrats and moderate Republicans at the federal level. A recent wave of anti-abortion bills, for instance, has been the largest since the landmark 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade.

Similar moves have recently been aimed at LGBTQ protections and voting rights. In Florida and Texas, teams of “election police” have been created to crack down on the rare crime of voter fraud, fallout from former President Donald Trump’s specious claims after he lost the 2020 presidential election.

Carrying concealed guns without a permit is now legal in nearly half of the country. “Bounty” laws — enforced not by governments, which can be sued in federal court, but by rewards to private citizens for filing lawsuits — have proliferated on issues from classroom speech to vaccination since the U.S. Supreme Court declined to strike down the legal tactic in Texas.

The moves, in an election year, have raised questions about the extent to which they are performative, as opposed to substantial. Some Republican bills are bold at first glance but vaguely worded. Some appear designed largely to energize base voters.

Many, however, send a strong cultural message. And divisions will widen further, said Peverill Squire, an expert on state legislatures at the University of Missouri, if the Supreme Court hands more power over to the states on issues like abortion and voting, as it did when it said in 2019 that partisan gerrymandering was beyond federal jurisdiction.

Some legal analysts also say the anticipated rollback of abortion rights could throw a host of other privacy rights into state-level turmoil, from contraception to health care. Meanwhile, entrenched partisanship, which has already hobbled federal decision-making, could block attempts to impose strong national standards in Congress.

“We’re potentially entering a new era of state-centered policymaking,” said Karthick Ramakrishnan, a professor of public policy and political science at the University of California, Riverside. “We may be heading into a future where you could have conservative states and progressive states deciding they are better off pushing their own visions of what government should be.”

In recent weeks, several states including Colorado and Vermont have moved to codify a right to abortion. More — Maryland and Washington, for example — have expanded access or legal protection in anticipation of out-of-state patients.

But no state has been as aggressive as California in shoring up alternatives to the Republican legislation.

One package of pending California bills would expand access to California abortions and protect abortion providers from out-of-state legal action. Another proposal would thwart enforcement of out-of-state court judgments removing children from the custody of parents who get them gender-affirming health services.

Yet another would enforce a ban on ghost guns and assault weapons with a California version of Texas’ recent six-week ban on abortion, featuring $10,000 bounties to encourage lawsuits from private citizens against anyone who sells, distributes or manufactures those types of firearms.

In a “State of the State” address last month, Gov. Gavin Newsom took more than a half-dozen swipes at Florida and Texas, comparing California’s expanded sick leave, family leave and Medicaid coverage during the pandemic with the higher COVID-19 death rates in the two Republican-led states, and alluding to states “where they’re banning books” and “where you can sue your history teacher for teaching history.”

After Disney World employees protested the corporation’s initial reluctance to condemn the Florida bill that opponents call “Don’t Say Gay,” Newsom suggested Disney cancel the relocation of some 2,000 West Coast positions to a new Florida campus, saying on Twitter that “the door is open to bring those jobs back to California — the state that actually represents the values of your workers.”

Dan Schnur, a former Republican strategist who teaches political science now at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Berkeley, said that without strong Republican opposition, Newsom has been using the governors of Texas and Florida as straw men.

“It’s an effective way of strengthening himself at home and elevating his name in Democratic presidential conversations,” Schnur said.

Conservatives in and outside California have criticized the governor for stoking division.

A spokesperson for Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is a Republican presidential contender, noted in an email that Disneyland was closed three times longer than Disney World during the pandemic, and that hundreds of thousands of Americans moved to Florida between April 2020 and July 2021 while hundreds of thousands left California. Newsom, she wrote, “is doing a better job as a U-Haul salesman.”

“Politicians in California do not have veto power over legislation passed in Florida,” the spokesperson, Christina Pushaw, added. “Gov. Newsom should focus on solving the problems in his own state.”

The office of Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas — who, in 2018, ran on the slogan “Don’t California My Texas” — did not respond to emails and calls requesting comment.

Newsom noted that California has been grappling for decades with the cultural and demographic changes that are only now hitting other parts of the country, including early battles over such issues as gay rights and immigration. “I’m very concerned broadly about what’s happening and whether or not it’s fully understood by the majority, not just of the American people but people within my own party,” he said.

“We are not going to sit back and neutrally watch the progress of the 20th century get erased,” he added, decrying the “zest for demonization” and an “anti-democratic” tilt in recent policies to restrict voting and LGBTQ protections.

“If you say nothing, you’re complicit,” Newsom said. “You have to take these guys on and push back.”

California’s stance has broad implications. Although U.S. census figures showed stalled growth in the state in 2020, its population of nearly 40 million is the nation’s largest, encompassing 1 in 9 U.S. residents.

“In a world in which the federal government has abdicated some of its core responsibility, states like California have to figure out what their responsibilities are,” said Michaels, the UCLA professor. “The hard question is: Where does it end?”

For example, he noted, the fallout could mean that federal rights that generations have taken for granted could become available only to those who can afford to uproot their lives and move to the states that guarantee them.

“It’s easy for Gov. Newsom to tell struggling Alabamians, ‘I feel your pain,’ but then what? ‘Come rent a studio apartment in San Francisco for $4,000 a month?’ ”

Violet Augustine, 37, an artist, art teacher and single parent in Dallas, worries about the limits of interstate refuge. For months, she said, she considered moving away from Texas with her transgender daughter, a kindergartner, to a state where she doesn’t constantly fear for their safety. When Abbott and Texas’ attorney general directed the state to investigate parents with transgender children for possible child abuse, her plan solidified.

An appeal on GoFundMe has raised some $23,000, and she recently made a visit to Los Angeles, staying at a hotel in the heart of the city’s Koreatown and meeting with leaders of a community group that describes itself as “radically inclusive” of LGBTQ families.

“The city itself just felt like a safe haven,” Augustine said. But, she added, her $60,000 salary, which allows her to rent a house in Texas, would scarcely cover a California apartment: “We’re going to have to downsize.”

Republican-controlled states have higher murder rates than Democratic ones: study

Yahoo! News

Republican-controlled states have higher murder rates than Democratic ones: study

Ben Adler, Senior Editor – April 4, 2022

Republican politicians routinely claim that cities run by Democrats have been experiencing crime waves caused by failed governance, but a new study shows murder rates are actually higher in states and cities controlled by Republicans.

“We’re seeing murders in our cities, all Democrat-run,” former President Donald Trump asserted at a March 26 rally in Georgia. “People are afraid to go out.”

In February, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., blamed Democrats for a 2018 law that reduced some federal prison sentences — even though it was signed by Trump after passing a GOP-controlled Congress. “It’s your party who voted in lockstep for the First Step Act that let thousands of violent felons on the street who have now committed innumerable violent crimes,” Cotton said during a speech in the Senate.

Last December, Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, told Fox News viewers, “America’s most beautiful cities are indeed being ruined by liberal policies: There’s a direct line between death and decay and liberal policies.”

Former President Donald Trump at a rally at a rally on March 26 in Commerce, Georgia, in front of a sign reading — Former President Donald Trump speaks at a rally at a rally on March 26 in Commerce, Ga. (Megan Varner/Getty Images)

But a comparison of violent crime rates in jurisdictions controlled by Democrats and Republicans tells a very different story. In fact, a new study from the center-left think tank Third Way shows that states won by Trump in the 2020 election have higher murder rates than those carried by Joe Biden. The highest murder rates, the study found, are often in conservative, rural states.

The study found that murder rates in the 25 states Trump carried in 2020 are 40% higher overall than in the states Biden won. (The report used 2020 data because 2021 data is not yet fully available.) The five states with the highest per capita murder rate — Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama and Missouri — all lean Republican and voted for Trump.

There are some examples of states Biden won in 2020 that also have high per capita murder rates, including New Mexico and Georgia, which have the seventh- and eighth-highest murder rates, respectively. And there are Trump-supporting states with low murder rates, such as Idaho and Utah. Broadly speaking, the South, and to a lesser extent the Midwest, has more murders per capita than the Northeast, interior West and West Coast, the study found.

Those findings are consistent with a pattern that has existed for decades, in which the South has had higher rates of violent crime than the nation as a whole.

Demonstrators march in Atlanta in 2021 to protest the shooting death of Daunte Wright. — Demonstrators march in Atlanta on April 14, 2021, to protest the shooting death of Daunte Wright three days earlier. (Megan Varner/Getty Images)

“We as criminologists have known this for quite some time,” Jennifer Ortiz, a professor of criminology at Indiana University Southeast, told Yahoo News. “States like Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama have historically had high crime rates.”

Criminologists say research shows higher rates of violent crime are found in areas that have low average education levels, high rates of poverty and relatively modest access to government assistance. Those conditions characterize some portions of the American South.

“They are among the poorest states in our union,” Ortiz said of the Deep South. “They have among the highest rates of child poverty. They are among the least-educated states. They are among the states with the highest levels of substance abuse. All of those factors contribute to people engaging in criminal behavior.”

“I thought that was a very good study,” Richard Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and former president of the American Society of Criminology, told Yahoo News about the Third Way report. “In Republican states, states with Republican governors, crime rates tend to be higher. I’m not certain that’s related to the fact that the governor is a Republican, but it’s a fact nonetheless.”

Police and emergency personnel work on a crime scene in November 21 in Waukesha, Wisconsin. — Police and emergency personnel work on a crime scene in Waukesha, Wis., in November 2021. (Jim Vondruska/Getty Images)

(While the Third Way study divided states by presidential vote in 2020, using gubernatorial party affiliation leads to similar results because most states have recently chosen the same party for governor and for president. Based on presidential vote, eight of the 10 states with the highest murder rates lean Republican, versus seven of the top 10 if one uses the governor’s party.)

Although murder rates tend to be highest in the South, the biggest increases in 2020 were found in the Great Plains and Midwest, according to Third Way. The largest jumps were in Wyoming (91.7% higher than in 2019), South Dakota (69%), Wisconsin (63.2%), Nebraska (59.1%) and Minnesota (58.1%). Wyoming, South Dakota and Nebraska all voted for Trump and have Republican governors. Wisconsin and Minnesota voted for Biden and are led by Democrats.

Few large cities are governed by Republicans — only 26 of the 100 largest U.S. cities have Republican mayors — making apples-to-apples comparisons difficult. But cities that do have Republican mayors do not have lower murder rates than similarly sized Democratic-led cities, the study found.

Some experts warn against the impulse to use crime data to score quick political points.

“Being a Republican or Democratic state or city is correlated with many other issues,” David Weisburd, a professor of criminology and executive director of the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy at George Mason University, wrote in an email to Yahoo News. “That means that the murder rate may be due to the state being Republican, or it may be due to the fact that Republican states have many other risk factors related to crime or murder rates. Even with a very comprehensive modeling of all of these factors, it is very difficult to get a valid causal result for explaining crime rates.”

Police tape blocks a street where a person was shot in a drug-related incident in Philadelphia in 2021. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

That argument cuts both ways, however. Weisburd also thinks the claims of Trump and other Republicans who say Democrats have caused a crime wave in the cities and states they govern are unfounded. “I don’t think this argument can be supported no matter which way you go,” Weisburd said.

Murder rates in the U.S. rose dramatically in 2020 from record lows, and the increases are similar across states — regardless of partisan preference. For homicides in 2020, Third Way found a 32.2% uptick in Trump-backing states versus a 30.8% rise in those that voted for Biden. Some states with large cities, such as New York and Pennsylvania, saw larger-than-average increases: New York went up 47% and Pennsylvania is up 39%. But the largest increases were in rural, Republican-led states, including Montana (+84%) and South Dakota (+81%).

The higher national murder rate is naturally causing public concern, although violent crime does remain far below its early 1990s high point. “Using the FBI data, the violent crime rate fell 49% between 1993 and 2019,” from 757 incidents per 100,000 people to 379 per 100,000, the Pew Research Center noted last November. Between 2019 and 2020, the murder rate jumped from 6 homicides per 100,000 people to 7.8 homicides per 100,000, but that was still 22% below the rate in 1991 of 10 homicides per 100,000.

Call Logs Underscore Trump’s Efforts to Sway Lawmakers on Jan. 6

The New York Times

Call Logs Underscore Trump’s Efforts to Sway Lawmakers on Jan. 6

Luke Broadwater and Maggie Haberman – March 30, 2022

Peter Navarro, former trade advisor to the White House, speaks to reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington, on Oct. 30, 2020. (Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times).

WASHINGTON — As part of his frenzied attempt to cling to power, President Donald Trump reached out repeatedly to members of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, both before and during the siege of the Capitol, according to White House call logs and evidence gathered by the House committee investigating the attack.

The logs, reported earlier by The Washington Post and CBS and authenticated by The New York Times, indicated that Trump had called Republican members of Congress, including Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, as he sought to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to reject electoral votes from several states.

But the logs also have a large gap with no record of calls by Trump from critical hours when investigators know that he was making them. The call logs were among documents turned over by the National Archives to the House committee examining the attack last year on the Capitol.

The New York Times reported last month that the committee had discovered gaps in official White House telephone logs from the day of the riot. The Washington Post and CBS reported Tuesday that a gap in the phone logs amounted to 7 hours and 37 minutes, including the period when the building was being assaulted.

Investigators have not uncovered evidence that any of the call logs were tampered with or deleted. It is well known that Trump routinely used his personal cellphone, and those of his aides, to talk with other aides, congressional allies and outside confidants, bypassing the normal channels of presidential communication and possibly explaining why the calls were not logged.

The logs appear to have captured calls that were routed through the White House switchboard. Three former officials who worked under Trump said that he mostly used the switchboard operator for outgoing calls when he was in the residence. He would occasionally use it from the Oval Office, the former officials said, but more often he would make calls through the assistants sitting outside the office, as well as from his cellphone or an aide’s cellphone. The assistants were supposed to keep records of the calls, but officials said the record keeping was not thorough.

People trying to reach Trump sometimes called the cellphone of Dan Scavino, former deputy chief of staff and omnipresent aide, one of the former officials said. (The House committee investigating the attack recommended Monday evening that Scavino be charged with criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with a subpoena from the panel.)

But the call logs nevertheless show how personally involved Trump was in his last-ditch attempt to stay in office.

One of the calls made by Trump on Jan. 6, 2021 — at 9:16 a.m. — was to McConnell, the Senate’s top Republican, who refused to go along with Trump’s pressure campaign. Trump checked with the White House switchboard operator at 10:40 a.m. to make sure a message had been left for McConnell.

McConnell declined to return the president’s calls, he told reporters Tuesday.

“The last time I spoke to the president was the day after the Electoral College declared President Biden the winner,” McConnell said. “I publicly congratulated President Biden on his victory and received a phone call after that from President Trump and that’s the last time we’ve spoke.”

The logs also show Trump reached out on the morning of Jan. 6 to Jordan, who had been among members of Congress organizing objections to Joe Biden’s election on the House floor.

The logs show Trump and Jordan spoke from 9:24 a.m. to 9:34 a.m. Jordan has acknowledged speaking with Trump on Jan. 6, although he has said he cannot remember how many times they spoke that day or when the calls occurred.

Trump called Hawley at 9:39 a.m., and Hawley returned his phone call. A spokesperson for Hawley said Tuesday that the two men did not connect and did not speak until March. Hawley had been the first senator to announce he would object to Biden’s victory, and continued his objections even after rioters stormed the building and other senators backed off the plan.

The logs also show that Trump spoke from 11:04 a.m. to 11:06 a.m. with former Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., who had recently lost his reelection campaign to Sen. Jon Ossoff.

A spokesperson for Sen. Bill Hagerty, R- Tenn., confirmed he had called Trump on Jan. 6 but said they did not connect. Hagerty declined to comment.

Despite the lack of call records from the White House, the committee has learned that Trump spoke on the phone with other Republican lawmakers on the morning of Jan. 6.

For instance, Trump mistakenly called the phone of Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, thinking it was the number of Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala. Lee then passed the phone to Tuberville, who said he had spoken to Trump for less than 10 minutes as rioters were breaking into the building.

The president also fielded a call from Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, the top House Republican, who told Trump that people were breaking into his office on Capitol Hill.

During that call, Trump was said to have sided with the rioters, telling the top House Republicans that members of the mob who had stormed the Capitol were “more upset about the election than you are.”

Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, was also calling lawmakers that day and continued to do so even after rioters laid siege to the building. In an evening phone call, he made clear that the effort to fight the result of the election was still alive even after the riot.

“Sen. Tuberville, or I should say Coach Tuberville, this is Rudy Giuliani, the president’s lawyer,” Giuliani said in a voicemail message intended for Tuberville, but mistakenly left on Lee’s phone. “I’m calling you because I want to discuss with you how they’re trying to rush this hearing and how we need you, our Republican friends, to try to just slow it down.”

The news of the call logs came the same day that the White House said Biden would not extend executive privilege to cover any testimony to the committee by Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, who worked as his advisers.

“The president has spoken to the fact that Jan. 6 was one of the darkest days in our country’s history, and that we must have a full accounting of what happened to ensure that it never occurs again,” said White House spokesperson Kate Bedingfield. “And he’s been quite clear that they posed a unique threat to our democracy and that the constitutional protections of executive privilege should not be used to shield, from Congress or the public, information about an attack on the Constitution itself.”

Kushner is scheduled to testify before the committee this week, while Ivanka Trump has been negotiating the terms of her potential cooperation.