If GOP doesn’t listen to Nancy Mace on abortion, the party can count on losing big in 2024
Ingrid Jacques, USA TODAY – April 22, 2023
South Carolina U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace seems to understand some things that many others in her Republican Party are missing.
On issues such as abortion and guns, compromise is going to be necessary – or the GOP will lose the support of all but its most devout proponents. And that is not a recipe for winning elections.
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, Mace has advocated a “middle ground” approach to abortion rights, warning that extreme anti-abortion views allowing for few if any exceptions aren’t compassionate toward women and will alienate moderate conservatives and independent voters. The majority of Americans now support legal abortion in most cases, according to polls.
“The middle, the independent voters, right of center, left of center, they cannot support us,” Mace said on a Sunday TV show.
Court battle renews focus on abortion
The midterm elections made it clear that voters were motivated on the issue of abortion, and many Republicans weren’t ready with a message that resonated – if they had one at all.
And now the legal battle over access to frequently used abortion pill mifepristone has brought fresh attention to the matter. After a federal judge in Texas halted Food and Drug Administration approval of the drug this month, the case has moved quickly through the courts.
The debate over this pill is a big deal, because more than half of abortions in the United States are medication abortions. Mifepristone is used in conjunction with misoprostol, which can also be used on its own. The two drugs are also used to treat miscarriages.
The judge’s decision sparked outrage from Democrats, including New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who said the Biden administration should simply ignore the ruling. Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon echoed the sentiment.
As I wrote previously about Ocasio-Cortez and Wyden, Mace took things too far by making the argument that the executive branch can simply ignore the judicial branch when it doesn’t like a court decision. The ruling needs to play out in the courts, and it is.
Her broader point is worthy of consideration, however.
“This is an issue that Republicans have been largely on the wrong side of,” Mace told CNN after the Texas judge’s decision. “We have, over the last nine months, not shown compassion toward women, and this is one of those issues that I’ve tried to lead on as someone who’s pro-life and just have some common sense.”
Political decisions on issues as impactful as abortion shouldn’t be based solely on polls. Yet conservatives have to realize that imposing too much change at once on citizens will backfire on them.
USA TODAY columnist Ingrid Jacques
Politicians and groups opposed to abortion should listen to voices like Mace and fine-tune a strategy going into 2024 that is reasonable and won’t create a backlash that could hurt the GOP for years to come.
Japan has almost completely eliminated gun deaths — here’s how
Chris Weller, Erin Snodgrass, Katie Anthony, Azmi Haroun, Lloyd Lee – April 20, 2023
japan gun shotgun
AP
Japan is a country of more than 127 million people, but it rarely sees more than 10 gun deaths a year.
Culture is one reason for the low rate, but gun control is a major one, too.
Japan has a long list of tests that applicants must pass before gaining access to a small pool of guns.
A recent spate of mass shootings has prompted intensified discussions around gun control in the US.
On Saturday, four people were killed and 32 were injured in a shooting in Dadeville, Alabama, during a 16th birthday party. Last month, a 28-year-old woman opened fire at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, killing three elementary school students and three adult staff members, according to police.
One of the biggest questions being asked: How does the US prevent this from happening over and over again?
Although the US has no exact counterpart elsewhere in the world, some countries have taken steps that can provide a window into what successful gun control looks like. Japan, a country of 127 million people and yearly gun deaths rarely totaling more than 10, is one such country.
“Ever since guns entered the country, Japan has always had strict gun laws,” Iain Overton, executive director of Action on Armed Violence, a British advocacy group, told the BBC. “They are the first nation to impose gun laws in the whole world, and I think it laid down a bedrock saying that guns really don’t play a part in civilian society.”
Japan is a country with regulations upon regulations
Japan’s success in curbing gun deaths is intimately linked with its history. Following World War II, pacifism emerged as one of the dominant philosophies in the country. Police only started carrying firearms after American troops made them, in 1946, for the sake of security. It’s also written into Japanese law, as of 1958, that “no person shall possess a firearm or firearms or a sword or swords.”
The government has since loosened the law, but the fact Japan enacted gun control from the stance of prohibition is important. (It’s also one of the main factors separating Japan from the US, where the Second Amendment broadly permits people to own guns.)
If Japanese people want to own a gun, they must attend an all-day class, pass a written test, and achieve at least 95% accuracy during a shooting-range test. Then they have to pass a mental-health evaluation, which takes place at a hospital, and pass a background check, in which the government digs into their criminal record and interviews friends and family. They can only buy shotguns and air rifles — no handguns — and every three years they must retake the class and initial exam.
Even Japanese riot police infrequently turn to guns, instead preferring long batons.Toru Hanai/Reuters
Japan has also embraced the idea that fewer guns in circulation will result in fewer deaths. Each prefecture — which ranges in size from half a million people to 12 million, in Tokyo — can operate a maximum of three gun shops; new magazines can only be purchased by trading in empty ones; and when gun owners die, their relatives must surrender the deceased member’s firearms.
The role of trust can’t be overstated
The result is a situation where citizens and police seldom wield or use guns.
Off-duty police aren’t allowed to carry firearms, and most encounters with suspects involve some combination of martial arts or striking weapons. When Japanese attacks do turn deadly, they generally involve fatal stabbings. In July of 2016, an assailant killed 19 people in an assisted living facility. Japan rarely sees so many fatalities from guns in an entire year.
Yet even Japan is not immune to gun violence. The assassination of former the county’s former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on July 8, 2022, shocked the nation. Abe was shot and killed by a shooting suspect wielding what appeared to be a homemade firearm constructed of metal barrels attached to wood with black tape.
Nancy Snow, Japan director of the International Security Industrial Council, told Insider that Japan will be “forever changed” by Abe’s death.
“When I talk about Japan changing forever — the Japanese people, it’s hard to even have a conversation with them about the gun culture in the United States, without people getting viscerally upset thinking about it because they say, we’re not that country,” Snow said.
Gun control in Japan, combined with the prevailing respect for authority, has led to a more harmonious relationship between civilians and the police than in the US. It’s something of a chicken-egg problem: The police, in choosing to use sub-lethal force on people, generate less widespread fear among the public that they’ll be shot. In turn, people feel less of a need to arm themselves.
The US, meanwhile, has a more militarized police force that uses automatic weapons and armored cars. There is also less widespread trust between people (and between people and institutions). The factors combine to produce a much fearful culture that can seem to be always on-edge.
Japan’s approach would be a tough sell in the face of American gun culture, but it can provide a starting point for reining in the senseless violence that has become a hallmark of life in the US.
As Fears of Banking Crisis Surged, Members of Congress Sold Bank Shares
Kate Kelly – April 20, 2023
An account belonging to Representative Jared Moskowitz’s children sold shares of Seacoast Banking Corporation as fears of a banking crisis rattled investors. (AP)
WASHINGTON — On March 10, as fears were swirling over the health of the nation’s banks, an investment account belonging to the children of Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., sold shares of Seacoast Banking Corp. worth $65,000 to $150,000.
Two days later, with the government working to control the crisis, Moskowitz said in a television interview that he had attended a bipartisan congressional briefing on the tumult. And on March 13, as investors fretted over the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and two other, smaller banks, Seacoast Banking shares fell nearly 20%.
A spokesperson for Moskowitz said in an email that the Seacoast share sales had been suggested by the congressman’s financial adviser as a means to diversify his young children’s holdings. Moskowitz said the congressional briefing on the bank crisis had taken place just before the television interview and after the shares were sold.
But the transaction was just one example of how members of Congress continue to buy and sell stocks and other financial assets in industries that intersect with their official duties.
At least eight members of Congress or their close relatives sold shares of bank stocks in March, according to an analysis by Capitol Trades, a project of the data firm 2iQ — a number that could rise in the coming days, as lawmakers make additional disclosures of trades made last month.
Although broadly legal, stock trading by members of Congress has become a flashpoint because lawmakers are sometimes privy to closely held information about the companies and industries they oversee.
A New York Times investigation last year showed that during a three-year period, nearly one-fifth of federal lawmakers or their immediate family members had bought or sold stocks or other securities that could have been affected by their legislative work.
Efforts to pass legislation to place limits on trading by members of Congress or to ban it have stalled in recent years. On Capitol Hill on Tuesday, Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., and Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, announced a new bill intended to eliminate the practice that has 19 co-sponsors in the Senate.
A House version of the bill is co-sponsored by Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas, and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill.
“As the Silicon Valley Bank was closed, even during that period, there were reports that members of Congress were trading bank stocks,” Brown said. “I mean, imagine that — that members of Congress, we have more inside information,” he said, adding, “members of Congress are able, because of our jobs, to know more about the economy.”
Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., sold shares of First Republic Bank, the large depositor that was rapidly losing both cash and clients, on March 15, the day before it received an industry bailout of $30 million.
The wife and children of Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., sold First Republic shares that same day. Rep. John Curtis, R-Utah, sold shares in First Republic from a joint account with his spouse on March 16, the day the industry bailout occurred.
By that time, First Republic shares had already fallen nearly 80% from a February peak. The timing of the sales by those three lawmakers or their relatives meant that the sellers averted an additional price swoon that was still to come. First Republic stock is down nearly 90% since the beginning of this year.
A spokesperson for Goldman has said that his portfolio is managed by a third party without his knowledge and that he is setting up a blind trust to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest. Khanna has said that his filings relate to trades made by a diversified trust belonging to his wife and young children and that he has no involvement in it. Spokespersons for Curtis did not respond to requests for comment.
Some members were also buying bank shares during the volatility. On March 17, Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., bought shares of New York Community Bancorp after private discussions with New York state bank regulators. Her transaction was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Two days later, New York Community Bancorp bought assets belonging to the failed Signature Bank — a deal that prompted its biggest share rally ever. Around that same time, other lawmakers, including Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., and family members of Khanna, bought shares in larger U.S. banks, like Truist Financial. Goldman, among other transactions, made a series of purchases of shares in foreign banks, like Lloyds Banking Group and Mizuho Financial Group.
A spokesperson for Malliotakis said that her financial adviser had recommended the purchase and that it amounted to less than $5,000 in value. A spokesperson for Peters did not respond to questions about the transaction.
Will the West Turn Ukraine into a Nuclear Battlefield?
By Joshua Frank, originally published by Tom Dispatch
April 20, 2023
Why Depleted Uranium Should Have No Place There
It’s sure to be a blood-soaked spring in Ukraine. Russia’s winter offensive fell far short of Vladimir Putin’s objectives, leaving little doubt that the West’s conveyor belt of weaponry has aided Ukraine’s defenses. Cease-fire negotiations have never truly begun, while NATO has only strengthened its forces thanks to Finland’s new membership (with Sweden soon likely to follow). Still, tens of thousands of people have perished; whole villages, even cities, have been reduced to rubble; millions of Ukrainians have poured into Poland and elsewhere; while Russia’s brutish invasion rages on with no end in sight.
The hope, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is that the Western allies will continue to furnish money, tanks, missiles, and everything else his battered country needs to fend off Putin’s forces. The war will be won, according to Zelensky, not through backroom compromises but on the battlefield with guns and ammo.
“I appeal to you and the world with these most simple and yet important words,” he said to a joint session of Great Britain’s parliament in February. “Combat aircraft for Ukraine, wings for freedom.”
The United Kingdom, which has committed well over $2 billion in assistance to Ukraine, has so far refused to ship fighter jets there but has promised to supply more weaponry, including tank shells made with depleted uranium (DU), also known as “radioactive bullets.” A by-product of uranium enrichment, DU is a very dense and radioactive metal that, when housed in small torpedo-like munitions, can pierce thickly armored tanks and other vehicles.
Reacting to the British announcement, Putin ominously said he would “respond accordingly” if the Ukrainians begin blasting off rounds of DU.
While the UK’s decision to send depleted-uranium shells to Ukraine is unlikely to prove a turning point in the war’s outcome, it will have a lasting, potentially devastating, impact on soldiers, civilians, and the environment. The controversial deployment of DU doesn’t pose faintly the same risks as the actual nuclear weapons Putin and his associates have hinted they might use someday in Ukraine or as would a potential meltdown at the embattled Zaporizhzhia nuclear facility in that country. Still, its use will certainly help create an even more lethal, all too literally radioactive theater of war — and Ukraine will end up paying a price for it.
The Radioactive Lions of Babylon
Stuart Dyson survived his deployment in the first Gulf War of 1991, where he served as a lance corporal with Britain’s Royal Pioneer Corps. His task in Kuwait was simple enough: he was to help clean up “dirty” tanks after they had seen battle. Many of the machines he spent hours scrubbing down had carried and fired depleted uranium shells used to penetrate and disable Iraq’s T-72 tanks, better known as the Lions of Babylon.
Dyson spent five months in that war zone, ensuring American and British tanks were cleaned, armed, and ready for battle. When the war ended, he returned home, hoping to put his time in the Gulf War behind him. He found a decent job, married, and had children. Yet his health deteriorated rapidly and he came to believe that his military service was to blame. Like so many others who had served in that conflict, Dyson suffered from a mysterious and debilitating illness that came to be known as Gulf War Syndrome.
After Dyson suffered years of peculiar ailments, ranging from headaches to dizziness and muscle tremors, doctors discovered that he had a severe case of colon cancer, which rapidly spread to his spleen and liver. The prognosis was bleak and, after a short battle, his body finally gave up. Stuart Dyson died in 2008 at the age of 39.
His saga is unique, not because he was the only veteran of the first Gulf War to die of such a cancer at a young age, but because his cancer was later recognized in a court of law as having been caused by exposure to depleted uranium. In a landmark 2009 ruling, jurors at the Smethwick Council House in the UK found that Dyson’s cancer had resulted from DU accumulating in his body, and in particular his internal organs.
“My feeling about Mr. Dyson’s colon cancer is that it was produced because he ingested some radioactive material and it became trapped in his intestine,” Professor Christopher Busby, an expert on the effects of uranium on health, said in his court testimony. “To my mind, there seems to be a causal arrow from his exposure to his final illness. It’s certainly much more probable than not that Mr. Dyson’s cancer was caused by exposure to depleted uranium.”
The U.S. Department of Defense estimated that American forces fired more than 860,000 rounds of DU shells during that 1991 war to push Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein’s military out of Kuwait. The result: a poisoned battlefield laced with radioactive debris, as well as toxic nerve agents and other chemical agents.
In neighboring southern Iraq, background radiation following that war rose to 30 times normal. Tanks tested after being shelled with DU rounds had readings 50 times higher than average.
“It’s hot forever,” explains Doug Rokke, a former major in the U.S. Army Reserve’s Medical Service Corps who helped decontaminate dozens of vehicles hit by DU shells during the first Gulf War. “It doesn’t go away. It only disperses and blows around in the wind,” he adds. And of course, it wasn’t just soldiers who suffered from DU exposure. In Iraq, evidence has been buildingthat DU, an intense carcinogenic agent, has led to increases in cancer rates for civilians, too.
“When we were moving forward and got north of a minefield, there were a bunch of blown-out tanks that were near where we would set up a command post,” says Jason Peterson, a former American Marine who served in the first Gulf War. “Marines used to climb inside and ‘play’ in them … We barely knew where Kuwait was, let alone the kind of ammunition that was used to blow shit up on that level.”
While it’s difficult to discern exactly what caused the Gulf War Syndrome from which Dyson and so many other soldiers suffered (and continue to suffer), experts like Rokke are convinced that exposure to depleted uranium played a central role in the illness. That’s an assertion Western governments have consistently downplayed. In fact, the Pentagon has repeatedly denied any link between the two.
“I’m a warrior, and warriors want to fulfill their mission,” Rokke, who also suffers from Gulf War Syndrome, toldVanity Fair in 2007. “I went into this wanting to make it work, to work out how to use DU safely, and to show other soldiers how to do so and how to clean it up. This was not science out of a book, but science done by blowing the shit out of tanks and seeing what happens. And as we did this work, slowly it dawned on me that we were screwed. You can’t do this safely in combat conditions. You can’t decontaminate the environment or your own troops.”
Death to Uranium
Depleted uranium can’t produce a nuclear explosion, but it’s still directly linked to the development of atomic weaponry. It’s a by-product of the uranium enrichment process used in nuclear weapons and fuel. DU is alluring to weapons makers because it’s heavier than lead, which means that, if fired at a high velocity, it can rip through the thickest of metals.
That it’s radioactive isn’t what makes it so useful on the battlefield, at least according to its proponents. “It’s so dense and it’s got so much momentum that it just keeps going through the armor — and it heats it up so much that it catches on fire,” says RAND nuclear expert and policy researcher Edward Geist.
The manufacturing of DU dates back to the 1970s in the United States. Today, the American military employs DU rounds in its M1A2 Abrams tanks. Russia has also used DU in its tank-busting shells since at least 1982 and there are plenty ofaccusations, though as yet no hard evidence, that Russia has already deployed such shells in Ukraine. Over the years, for its part, the U.S. has fired such rounds not just in Kuwait, but also in Bosnia, Iraq, Kosovo, Syria, and Serbia as well.
Both Russia and the U.S. have reasons for using DU, since each has piles of the stuff sitting around with nowhere to put it. Decades of manufacturing nuclear weapons have created a mountain of radioactive waste. In the U.S., more than500,000 tons of depleted-uranium waste has built up since the Manhattan Project first created atomic weaponry, much of it in Hanford, Washington, the country’s main plutonium production site. As I investigated in my book Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America, Hanford is now a cesspool of radioactive and chemical waste, representing the most expensive environmental clean-up project in history with an estimated price tag of $677 billion.
Uranium, of course, is what makes the whole enterprise viable: you can’t create atomic bombs or nuclear power without it. The trouble is that uranium itself is radioactive, as it emits alpha particles and gamma rays. That makes mining uranium one of the most dangerous operations on the planet.
Keep It in the Ground
In New Mexico, where uranium mines were primarily worked by Diné (Navajo People), the toll on their health proved gruesome indeed. According to a2000 study in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, rates of lung cancer in Navajo men who mined uranium were 28 times higher than in those who never mined uranium. The “Navajo experience with uranium mining,” it added, “is a unique example of exposure in a single occupation accounting for the majority of lung cancers in an entire population.”
Scores of studies have shown a direct correlation between exposure to uranium and kidney disease, birth defects in infants (when mothers were exposed), increased rates of thyroid disease, and several autoimmune diseases. The list is both extensive and horrifying.
“My family had a lot of cancer,” says anti-nuclear activist and Indigenous community organizer Leona Morgan. “My grandmother died of lung cancer and she never smoked. It had to be the uranium.”
One of the largest radioactive accidents, and certainly the least reported, occurred in 1979 on Diné land when a dam broke, flooding the Puerco River near Church Rock, New Mexico, with 94 million gallons of radioactive waste. The incident received virtually no attention at the time. “The water, filled with acids from the milling process, twisted a metal culvert in the Puerco and burned the feet of a little boy who went wading. Sheep keeled over and died, while crops curdled along the banks. The surge of radiation was detected as far away as Sanders, Arizona, fifty miles downstream,” writes Judy Pasternak in her book Yellow Dirt: A Poisoned Land and the Betrayal of the Navajo.
Of course, we’ve known about the dangers of uranium for decades, which makes it all the more mind-boggling to see a renewed push for increased mining of that radioactive ore to generate nuclear power. The only way to ensure that uranium doesn’t poison or kill anyone is to leave it right where it’s always been: in the ground. Sadly, even if you were to do so now, there would still be tons of depleted uranium with nowhere to go. A 2016 estimate put the world’s mountain of DU waste at more than one million tons (each equal to 2,000 pounds).
So why isn’t depleted uranium banned? That’s a question antinuclear activists have been asking for years. It’s often met with government claims that DU isn’t anywhere near as bad as its peacenik critics allege. In fact, the U.S. government has had a tough time even acknowledging that Gulf War Syndrome exists. A Government Accountability Office report released in 2017 found that the Veterans Affairs Department had denied more than 80% of all Gulf War illness claims by veterans. Downplaying DU’s role, in other words, comes with the terrain.
“The use of DU in weapons should be prohibited,” maintains Ray Acheson, an organizer for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and author of Banning the Bomb, Smashing the Patriarchy. “While some governments argue there is no definitive proof its use in weapons causes harm, it is clear from numerous investigations that its use in munitions in Iraq and other places has caused impacts on the health of civilians as well as military personnel exposed to it, and that it has caused long-term environmental damage, including groundwater contamination. Its use in weapons is arguably in violation of international law, human rights, and environmental protection and should be banned in order to ensure it is not used again.”
If the grisly legacy of the American use of depleted uranium tells us anything, it’s that those DU shells the British are supplying to Ukraine (and the ones the Russians may also be using there) will have a radioactive impact that will linger in that country for years to come, with debilitating, potentially fatal, consequences. It will, in a sense, be part of a global atomic war that shows no sign of ending.
The Dominion Settlement Is Just the Beginning of Fox and Rupert Murdoch’s Nightmare
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld – April 19, 2023
Celebrity Sightings In Los Angeles – November 12, 2019
Rupert Murdoch is seen on November 12, 2019 in Los Angeles, California. Credit – PG-Bauer-Griffin/GC Images
Forget the repetitive media chatter debating the political and societal wins and losses over the historic record $787.5 million settlement between Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems, after the voting machine maker alleged defamation by the cable network for promoting false news stories that Dominion rigged the 2020 presidential election against Donald Trump. Fox settled out of court at the last minute, seemingly panicked over the prospect of a dazed 92-year-old Rupert Murdoch, CEO of Fox News parent company Fox Corporation, having to take the stand to explain how he lost control of his prized creation—his “Foxenstein” monster. But while it’s a historic and record-setting amount to pay to avoid an embarrassing public trial over the airing of an admitted lie, the settlement doesn’t mark the end of Fox’s or Murdoch’s nightmare.
The horror story that is just beginning to unfold and that will continue to haunt the company and its patriarch is the corporate governance catastrophe this case leaves in its wake and the punctured business bravado of the scorching public record of admitted fraud and negligent management oversight. Fox’s celebrity anchors already soiled themselves in emailed evidence revealing they did not believe what they were reporting as truth. Their testimony and emails are in the public record for future litigants. Meanwhile, the judge’s special master, investigating fraudulent representations by Fox and its lawyers in discovery, continue undaunted by this settlement. The rest of Murdoch’s life and the rest of the careers of his board will likely be defined by ongoing fallout.
The Big Winner
There is no disputing that this is a grand slam for Dominion and nothing short of a transformative business success. Dominion is a tiny young company not even 1% the size of Fox, and it was sold to private equity investors Staple Street Capital for just about $40 million in 2018. This week’s settlement is gigantic—more than eight times their company revenues last year of $98 million, which assuming a 20% profit margin means that the settlement results in a whopping 5000% boost in the company’s earnings.
Such a whopping settlement may not have been awarded by a jury in court and very well could have been tossed on appeal. This small a company would have had a tough time proving concrete economic damage and lost revenues equivalent to $787.5 million let alone the $1.6 billion in damages they were seeking had it gone to trial. There are two types of damages—compensatory and punitive—and the idea that a company that may have been valued by its own investors, according to Fox’s lawyers, at no more than $80 million could get anything close to 10 times that as compensatory damages is blatantly ludicrous, while punitive damages are becoming increasingly pegged to the value of compensatory damages.
Even if an appellate court concurred with a possible jury verdict that an actual malice standard was met, the financial damages Dominion asked for were excessive. Plus, unlike the Alex Jones award of $1 billion, which is facing years of byzantine appeals and stalling, Dominion gets this money now—without any more hassle, delay, or expense and without having to deal with anxious insurers and litigation finance hedge funds breathing down their neck.
News Corporation headquarters, home to Fox News, on April 18, 2023 in New York City. Moments before opening arguments were set to begin, Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems said that they had reached a settlement of $787 million in the voting machine company’s defamation lawsuit against Fox.Spencer Platt-Getty Images
The Even Bigger Loser
On the other hand, for Fox Corp., the parent company of Fox News, this is a major strikeout. Incredibly, even though $787.5 million, more than half of the company’s total profit last fiscal year, is four times larger than the prior record for a defamation settlement—in 2017, Disney/ABC News paid out $177 million over misleading reporting on pink slime—Fox’s woes are just beginning.
Sure, some Dominion fans or Fox News haters might be upset that the cable channel did not have to publicly accept responsibility or apologize, rather just releasing a statement of meaningless legalese: “We acknowledge the Court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.” But such disappointment ignores the massive business and financial ramifications that Fox will have to live with for years. We are still only in the early innings of Fox’s struggles.
What now stands as a statement of legal fact for future litigants is the judge’s condemning conclusions.
The judge wrote, “the evidence does not support that FNN conducted good-faith, disinterested reporting.”
In another finding, the judge wrote that the “evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that is CRYSTAL clear that none of the statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true.”
Other companies, such as Smartmatic, will surely be emboldened in their own defamation suits against Fox, which share basically the same fact patterns as Dominion’s. Furthermore, the condemning depositions of Fox anchors and executives, admitting that they knew their stories were false and sources were ludicrous, opens Fox’s board to serious claims of negligence and breaches of fiduciary duty—violations of a board’s duty of care and duty of loyalty under Delaware corporate law.
Plaintiffs’ attorneys are rushing to file derivative shareholder class action lawsuits on behalf of the 60% of Fox shares not held by the Murdoch family. Fox has a sophisticated board with accomplished individuals, such as former House Speaker Paul Ryan, Managing Partner of Quinn Emanuel William Burck, former Ford CEO Jacques Nasser, and Formula One CEO Chase Carey, all of whom have a lot to lose—whether by way of reputation or liability—by more embarrassing disclosures coming out of depositions and trials.
Already two of many law firms queuing up filed suit in Delaware Chancery Court, charging: “Fox knew—from the Board on down—that Fox News was reporting false and dangerous misinformation about the 2020 Presidential election, but Fox was more concerned about short-term ratings and market share than the long-term damages of its failure to tell the truth.”
While some media commentators have suggested that insurance might cover a large portion of Fox’s Dominion settlement, the company’s breaches of fiduciary duty could absolve insurers from having to cover the payout on top of permitting them to charge the company permanently higher insurance premiums. Even worse for Fox, unless the company reforms its coverage and corporate governance processes, insurers might recoil from underwriting the insurance of Fox’s board directors and officers, much the way Elon Musk was once forced to personally underwrite the insurance of Tesla’s board directors and officers after every insurance company refused to stomach the risk.
Admissions by Murdoch, Ryan, Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott, and Fox Corp. Chief Legal Officer Viet Dinh demonstrate a failure to act on what they knew to be false—or a failure of their duties of care and duty of loyalty to the shareholders. Their duties were not to protect management or even to please viewers, but to protect the enterprise and shareholder value. Yet, when asked in a January deposition if he could have intervened when falsehoods were being spread on his cable network, Murdoch succinctly replied on the record, “I could have. But I didn’t.”
Alt-right media such as One America News Network and Newsmax are likely facing even greater financial peril as they are facing similar legal challenges as Fox.
Despite his self-proclaimed willingness to testify in court, Murdoch’s rambling, brutally candid, and self-incriminating answers in deposition raise questions over his judgment. Fox cannot retract Murdoch’s sworn testimony, and when they unsuccessfully tried to hide his actual Fox News executive oversight duties, they had to apologize for such deception. Presumably Murdoch will be forced to continue to shed light on how much he knew, when he knew it, and what he did or didn’t do in response, as the drumbeat of investigations rolls on.
For its part, Fox News is already modifying its approach and seeming to take some of these lessons to heart before they become total Faux News. Nobody would mistake Fox today for MSNBC, but the cable network has severely limited former President Trump’s airtime recently, rarely ever showcasing full Trump campaign rallies and speeches as it used to do, while anchors almost always now resort to pre-taped edited clips of Trump rather than offering the unchecked freewheeling surprise live dial-in privileges Trump used to enjoy. Like Samuel Johnson quipped, nothing so focuses the mind like the prospect of an imminent hanging. Still, as Murdoch tries to restrain his out-of-control creation, he has his work cut out for him.
Switzerland has a stunningly high rate of gun ownership — here’s why it doesn’t have mass shootings
Hilary Brueck and Azmi Haroun – April 19, 2023
Switzerland has a stunningly high rate of gun ownership — here’s why it doesn’t have mass shootingsMembers of the Swiss federal army’s honor guard in October 2012.REUTERS/Thomas Hodel
Switzerland hasn’t had a mass shooting in 21 years.
The Swiss have strict rules for who can get a gun, and take firearm training very seriously.
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.
But the Swiss have some specific rules and regulations for gun use.
Though the word roughly translates to “boys shooting” and the competition used to be only boys, teenage girls have been allowed in since 1991.
Kids in the country flock to the competition every September to compete in target shooting using Swiss army-service rifles. They’re proud to show off how well they can shoot.
The competition values accuracy above all else, and officials crown a Schutzenkonig — a king or queen of marksmen — based on results.
Having an armed citizenry helped keep the Swiss neutral for more than 200 years.
Alpine herdsmen in Toggenburg, Switzerland.Keystone/Getty Images
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 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
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.
Arnd Wiegmann/Reuters
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.
AP/Keyston, Lukas Lehmann
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.
Members of an honor guard of the Swiss army.REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann
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. The University of Sydney now estimates that there’s about one civilian gun for every three Swiss people.
Gun sellers follow strict licensing procedures.
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.
Cantonal police don’t take their duty doling out gun licenses lightly. They might consult a psychiatrist or talk with authorities in other cantons where a prospective gun buyer has lived to vet the person.
Swiss laws are designed to prevent anyone who’s violent or incompetent from owning a gun.
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.
The Swiss have been consistently near the top of this list. In 2017, when the UN ranked Switzerland fourth overall among the world’s 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.
Around the world, stronger gun laws have been linked to fewer gun deaths. That has been the case in Switzerland, too.
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.
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.
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 for coffee with their rifle.
Guns also 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.
Germany’s foreign minister: Parts of China trip ‘more than shocking’
Alexander Ratz – April 19, 2023
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock visits ChinaGerman Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock visits China
BERLIN (Reuters) – German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock on Wednesday described parts of her recent trip to China as “more than shocking” and said Beijing was increasingly becoming a systemic rival more than a trade partner and competitor.
The blunt remarks followed Baerbock’s visit to Beijing last week where she warned that any attempt by China to control Taiwan would be unacceptable.
Beijing claims democratically governed Taiwan as a Chinese province and has never ruled out the use of force to bring the island under its control.
Baerbock had also said China wanted to follow its own rules at the expense of the international rules-based order. Beijing in turn asked Germany to support Taiwan’s “reunification” and said China and Germany were not adversaries but partners.
Speaking to the German Bundestag (lower house of parliament) on Wednesday about her China trip, Baerbock said “some of it was really more than shocking”.
She did not elaborate on specifics, although her remark came after she said China was becoming more repressive internally as well as aggressive externally.
For Germany, she said, China is a partner, competitor and systemic rival, but her impression is now “that the systemic rivals aspect is increasing more and more”.
China is Germany’s largest trading partner, said Baerbock, but this did not mean Beijing was also Germany’s most important trading partner.
The German government wants to work with China but does not want to repeat past mistakes, for example the notion of “change through trade”, she said, that the West can achieve political shifts in authoritarian regimes through commerce.
Baerbock also said China had a responsibility to work towards peace in the world, in particular using its influence over Russia in the war in Ukraine.
She welcomed Beijing’s promise not to supply weapons to Russia, including dual use items, though added that Berlin would see how such a promise worked in practice.
In a departure from the policies of former chancellor Angela Merkel, Olaf Scholz’s government is developing a new China strategy to reduce dependence on Asia’s economic superpower, a vital export market for German goods.
(Writing by Matthias Williams; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
Vladimir Kara-Murza is a pro-democracy opposition leader in Russia — and my friend. He was arrested in April of last year for “discrediting the armed forces” of Russia. His arrest was apparently triggered by a visit he made to Arizona the previous month during which he simply told the truth.
“The entire world sees what [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s regime is doing to Ukraine,” Kara-Murza told members of Arizona’s state legislature. “It bombs civilian areas, hospitals and schools.”
In the months that followed his arrest, the Kremlin piled on. He was also charged with using the funds of an “undesirable organization” — the Washington, D.C. -based NGO “Free Russia Foundation” — to convene a conference in support of Russian political prisoners in Moscow in October 2021. Simultaneously, he was accused of “high treason” because he testified before the Helsinki Commission and the NATO Parliamentary assembly, and for allegedly “consulting foreign special services” for $30,000 a month.
This punishment is much harsher than the ones to which the regime’s vengeance has lately subjected members of the opposition. The two other leading opponents of the Kremlin, Alexei Navalny and Ilya Yashin, were sentenced to nine years and eight-and-a-half years respectively.
Heightened repression is always a sign of fear. Could Kara-Murza’s punishment have had something to do with the fact that Navalny was sentenced a year ago and Yashin last December, when the war in Ukraine may not have looked to the Kremlin as much of an endless bloody slog as it appears today? And also when its prosecution of the war, while dealing with harsh Western sanctions, was not as much fraught with the possibility of popular discontent over gradual impoverishment and casualties in the hundreds of thousands? It seems that the reason the sentence is so harsh is to scare civil society and preclude any chance of organized resistance.
Even in the post-Stalin Soviet Union, the authorities generally avoided charging dissidents with crimes like “high treason,” most often espionage. (The 1977 case of the Jewish refusenik Anatoly Sharansky was an exception.) As Kara-Murza, whom the Kremlin almost certainly tried to poison twice before, pointed out to the kangaroo court this week, his sentence harkens back not just to Soviet times but to the 1930s Stalinist purges of “enemies of the people.”
Kara-Murza is a Cambridge-trained historian, and he was right. Putin’s regime is descending into Stalinism. Sustained by indiscriminate ruthlessness, such regimes do not “evolve”— witness North Korea or Cuba. They can only be destroyed either by an invasion, like Pol Pot’s Cambodia or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, or exploded from within by a miraculous leader like Mikhail Gorbachev.
Neither outcome is likely in Russia so long as Putin lives. And so the struggle is very personal now between the two Vladimirs, Putin and Kara-Murza, even biological: Only Putin’s death can free my friend Vladimir. Putin is 70, Kara-Murza is 41. But the effective age gap will narrow steadily as Kara-Murza’s jailers will undoubtedly begin grinding him down from day one.
Yet Kara-Murza was defiant and hopeful even as his sentence came down. “I know that the day will come when the darkness over our country will be gone,” he said in his final statement before the court. “When the war will be called a war, and the usurper [in the Kremlin] will be called a usurper; when those who have ignited this war will be called criminals instead of those who tried to stop it… And then our people will open their eyes and shudder at the sight of the horrific crimes committed in their names.”
And that is how Russia’s road back to the community of civilized states will commence, Kara-Murza told the court. Even as he sat in the steel cage in the courtroom, he said he believed that Russia would travel this road.
“Because,” he concluded, despite everything, “I love my country and I have trust in our people.”
‘Time doesn’t heal’: Ukraine’s war widows count the cost
Jonathan Brown and Elizabeth Striy, in Warsaw – April 17, 2023
Olga Slyshyk began to fear the worst in January this year when her husband, Mykhailo, a military engineer serving on the front line in eastern Ukraine, didn’t contact her on her birthday.
It wasn’t unusual for the 40-year-old trained lawyer to be offline for days at a time, but Slyshyk knew he would reach out — one way or another — on January 14 if he was alive and well.
“I was sure he would call or find some way to congratulate me. But I had had a very bad dream and I already knew something was wrong,” she told AFP in Kyiv wearing black and holding her two-year-old son Viktor.
“On January 15, I found out he had died.”
More than one year after Moscow invaded, Slyshyk is among a growing number of women widowed by Russian forces and left to count the cost of Ukraine’s determination to hold out and push Moscow’s invasion back.
Neither side has disclosed the exact figures of troops killed, though recently leaked US intelligence documents suggest as many as 17,500 Ukrainian servicemen have been lost.
Slyshyk said a social media group for war widows she joined had more than 300 members after her husband was killed defending Soledar in the eastern Donetsk region, but it had doubled in size since.
– ‘You learn to live with it’ –
President Volodymyr Zelensky last August hosted widows and their children at an honours ceremony to reassure next of kin their loved ones’ sacrifice had not been in vain.
“They will remain forever at battle. But they live on in the memory of their relatives,” he said, greeting mourning women and their children one by one.
Thirty-year-old Slyshyk, who was born in Mariupol — a port city besieged and captured by Russian forces last spring — said she often evokes the memory of her killed husband.
“All the time. Both in my head and aloud. I’ll be unable to open a tin can, weeping from frustration, and I cry out: ‘Misha, I’m not even able to do this’ and then suddenly, it opens.”
Daria Mazur, 41, said she learned of her husband’s death in 2014 from graphic pictures of his bloodied corpse published on Russian media after fierce fighting with Kremlin-backed separatists.
He was killed while withdrawing from Ilovaisk, an infamous and costly chapter of the conflict for Ukraine that saw hundreds killed that August as Kyiv troops pulled back in the face of advancing pro-Russian forces.
“Time does not heal. You just get used to it. You accept it. You learn to live with it. And that pain just becomes a part of you,” she told AFP in her kitchen in Kyiv, next to pictures showing her husband smiling with their child in his arms.
They met on a beach in2006, fell in love and married in 2010 in the southern region of Kherson, where Mazur fled from when Russia invaded last February. Her home town is currently occupied by Russian forces.
She said her final conversations with her husband, Pavlo, who was 30 when he was killed, betrayed a sense of foreboding. He knew the situation was precarious.
“He told me: ‘please promise me that no matter what happens to me, you will be happy,'” she recounted to AFP.
– ‘I need you by my side’ –
“These guys are giving their lives so we can live on,” she added, referring to Ukrainian servicemen fighting now.
It was precisely this need to go on that pushed Oksana Borkun, who also lost her husband to the Russian invasion, to create “We Have to Live,” an organisation that supports widows — the same group that Slyshyk joined.
Borkun said that while the government offers financial and psychological support, she wanted to go a step further.
“The girls face a huge amount of pain. You can say it’s possible to go crazy from it. Life is going on around you, and you want to talk to those who understand.”
The organisation gathers money for widows, offers logistical and moral support, too, but chiefly it provides a platform — mainly online — for already nearly one thousand widows country-wide to share.
For Slyshyk, her husband’s family has proven a stronger pillar of support than her own.
Her mother, who is also a widow of two years, lives in Donetsk, a pro-Russian stronghold city captured by separatists in 2014 and does not support Ukraine in the war.
The fact they have both lost their husbands has not brought them together, she said.
Months after Mykhailo’s death, Slyshyk is torn when weighing whether his sacrifice was worth it.
“He said he was going there for me and Viktor,” she recounted, explaining her husband believed Ukraine had no choice but to fight back and win.
“But if you want me to be safe, to be ok, I need you by my side, not somewhere else,” she added, swallowing back tears.
Ex-Navy Officer Reportedly Probed for Amplifying Pentagon Leak to Russian Channels
Josh Fiallo – April 17, 2023
Dado Ruvic/Illustration/Reuters
The feds are reportedly probing a former U.S. Navy non-commissioned officer who’s accused of overseeing a prominent Russian propaganda account that made leaked documents from the Pentagon go viral this month.
Sarah Bils, 37, was unmasked this weekend as being behind the online persona “Donbass Devushka”—which roughly translates to “Donbass Girl”—despite her being a New Jersey native who lives in Washington state.
Two U.S. defense officials told United States Naval Institute News that Bils is now being probed for potentially sharing four classified docs—allegedly leaked initially by Massachusetts Air Guardsman Jack Teixeira, who was arrested last week—to Donbass Devushka’s 65,000-plus followers on Telegram.
Exact details on the probe—and potential charges for Bils—have not been released.
A Navy biography for Bils says she was an aviation electronics technician who worked out of Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in Washington state until November 2022. Speaking from her home, she admitted to The Wall Street Journal that she’s partially behind the Donbass Devushka network, which describes itself on its social media pages—including Twitter, Telegram and YouTube—as engaging in “Russian–style information warfare.”
But Bils told the paper she’s just one of 15 people “all over the world” with access to the propaganda accounts, maintaining that she wasn’t the administrator who posted the classified U.S. intel. Instead, she claims she was the admin who eventually deleted the posts.
The leaked docs quickly went viral in Russia after they were posted by Donbass Devushka on April 5, the Journal reported, with “several large Russian social-media accounts” picking up the documents and reposting. The channel’s posts with the classified documents remained online for days.
“Some very interesting potential intel,” the Telegram channel for Donbass Devushka posted with screenshots of the documents. “The authenticity cannot be confirmed but looks to be very damning nato information.”
It was the virality of this post that alerted U.S. authorities that classified intel was compromised. Previously, Teixeira, 21, had been posting other classified documents to a private Discord channel for months but the docs never went public, group members told The Washington Post.
Bils said she never used her position in the Navy to leak classified intel and that she didn’t work with Teixeira, telling the Journal, “I obviously know the gravity of top-secret classified materials. We didn’t leak them.”
The military and Justice Department have not made a public statement about Bils and her alleged role in amplifying the leak. Gen. Pat Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, told the Journal that the military has ordered a review of intelligence access, accountability, and control procedures to nix future leakers.
Teixeira has been charged with unauthorized detention and transmission of national defense information and unauthorized removal of classified information and defense materials. The feds allege that he shared classified information on social media starting in December.
Members of Teixeira’s Discord channel told the Post that he shared screenshots of battlefield conditions in Ukraine, highly classified satellite images of the aftermath of Russian missile strikes, and vivid details on troop movements within Ukraine.
The Donbass Devushka network has basked in the aftermath of this month’s leaks—gaining thousands of new followers. Those new to its multiple social media pages were met with posts advertising pro-Russia merchandise and a promise that proceeds would go to the mercenary Wagner Group and the Russian military.
The Journal reported that Bils was honorably discharged from the military in November after a “significant demotion.” Bils told reporters that she’d left the Navy because she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, and that she has “some” Russian heritage.
On a podcast that shares the same name as her popular Telegram channel, Bils spoke with a “slight Russian accent,” the Journal reported—an accent other outlets have described as being “phony.” She also posed as being a woman from the Donbas region of Ukraine, one of the bloodiest areas of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict.
Bils told the Journal her old gig gave her clearance to view top-secret information but that she no longer has that access.
“I don’t even know the authenticity of the documents or what they say,” she told the Journal about the leaked intel shared on her page. “I am not very well versed in reading documents like that.”
