Nearly 850,000 people signed a petition demanding that Justice Clarence Thomas should be booted from the Supreme Court following Roe v. Wade ruling
Taylor Ardrey – July 2, 2022
Justice Clarence Thomas in his dissenting opinion to Supreme Court decision on Thursday repeated a misleading claim about COVID-19 vaccines.Erin Schaff/Associated Press
Thousands of people have signed a petition to impeach Justice Clarence Thomas.
About 841,016 people have signed the Move On petition as of Saturday.
The calls to remove Thomas were heightened after SCOTUS overturned Roe v. Wade.
Hundreds of thousands of people have signed a petition demanding the removal of Justice Clarence Thomas from the Supreme Court following the reversal of Roe v. Wade, The Hill reported.
“The right-wing rigged Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last week, effectively taking away the right to privacy and bodily autonomy that’s been considered legal precedent for the past 50 years,” the petition said.
“Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—who sided with the majority on overturning Roe—made it clear what’s next: to overturn high court rulings that establish gay rights and contraception rights.”
Following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Thomas said that the court should also “reconsider” rulings that protect contraception access, same-sex relationships, and same-sex marriage, Insider previously reported. Democrats, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have also advocated for Thomas to be booted from his seat.
“Thomas’ failure to recuse himself warrants immediate investigation and heightened alarm. And it’s only the latest in a long history of conflicts of interest in the service of a right-wing agenda and mixing his powerful role with his conservative political activism,” the petition continued. “He has shown he cannot be an impartial justice and is more concerned with covering up his wife’s coup attempts than the health of the Supreme Court.”
Vladimir Putin seeks to convey an indomitable will. Here is a man who has set his course and will stick to it, whatever the obstacles in his way and the costs of overcoming them. It is an image that serves him well. It is now widely assumed in the West that he will not back down in the war with Ukraine and, if things go badly, he will lash out.
Such a man must not be provoked. Yet the image is starting to fray at the edges. Behind all the braggadocio his power is slowly eroding. The symptoms of this are to be found not in a readiness to compromise on the war, which remains absent, but instead in policy paralysis, pressing on with his established strategy because he can think of nothing better to do.
Putin’s St Petersburg Speech
A good place to start is with the 70-minute speech he delivered at the annual St Petersburg International Economic Forum.
This is intended as an alternative Davos. Putin’s audience was not as substantial as in previous years, with representatives of the Taliban helping make up the numbers.
The theme of his address was that, despite facing an American-led ‘economic blitzkrieg’, Russia would emerge even stronger as the rest of the world suffers from inflation and recession.
He described in great detail the measures being taken to protect the economy against this onslaught which would ensure self-sufficiency. ‘We are strong people, he insisted, ‘and can cope with any challenge. Like our ancestors, we will solve any problem, the entire thousand-year history of our country speaks of this.’
He presented the current conflict as being essentially about Russia standing up to American arrogance – they ‘think of themselves as exceptional. And if they think they’re exceptional, that means everyone else is second class. This is a theme that provides common ground with China. President Xi sent his own video message along similar lines.
Putin’s assertions of invincible Russian strength were undermined by his speech being delayed for an hour by a disruptive cyberattack, demonstrating that this supposedly favored Russian instrument of modern conflict can be used against it in an embarrassing way.
Although he boasted about how well the economy will weather the storm, even official forecasts see the economy contracting this year by some 8 percent and unofficial estimates go as high as 15 percent. One reason why Russia’s economic position is not worse is because of the boost to revenues resulting from the huge rise in oil and gas prices, yet Putin is currently seeking to add to the pressure on the West by cutting gas supplies to EU countries.
He will fight the economic war by demonstrating to Europeans that siding with the US will mean that they are committing ‘economic suicide’. At the moment, if there is a punitive option available he is anxious to take it.
With regards to the huge issue of the effects on world food supplies of the blockade of the Black Sea, and the real prospect of famine in many countries, Putin again deflected the blame on US and EU sanctions against Russian fertilizer and grain exports, and the obstacles put in the way of Russian efforts to send exports to those in direst need.
Another perspective was provided in one of the more telling interventions in the forum. Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the state-controlled RT media organization, who specializes in blood-curdling threats and in making Russians feel cheerful about their prospects by warning how bad it is going to be for everybody else, presented famine as a Russian weapon in the economic war: ‘The famine will start now and they will lift the sanctions and be friends with us, because they will realize that it’s impossible not to be friends with us.’
On the war itself, Putin promised that Russia would meet its goals fully: ‘freedom for the Donbas’.
As if ignorant of the cruel realities of the war, and the devastation being inflicted on Ukrainian towns and cities, he urged that: ‘ We must not turn those cities and towns that we liberate into a semblance of Stalingrad. This is a natural thing that our military thinks about when organizing hostilities.’ Those who urge a peace deal got little comfort from Putin.
The Kremlin line is now firmly that Ukraine will have to live with new borders: those areas under Russian occupation are being prepared for annexation.
The only possible concession came when Putin stated that he had no objection to Ukraine joining the EU because the EU ‘isn’t a military organization.’
This admission is one of those moments equivalent to an alternative ending to Hamlet when the old King returns from an overseas trip to reveal that the tragedy that has just unfolded was based on an unfortunate misunderstanding.
This whole sorry business began in the summer of 2013 when Putin put the Russophile President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, under intense economic pressure, including cutbacks in energy supplies, to prevent him from signing an association agreement with the EU.
This pressure succeeded and the agreement was not signed, but the effect was to trigger the Euromaidan movement which eventually led to Yanukovych fleeing the country, Putin annexing Crimea, and encouraging the separatist movement in the Donbas.
The admission shows that Putin realizes that he must pick his fights carefully. He can’t do much for now about the EU opening negotiations with Ukraine so best not to try.
For a similar reason, the Kremlin dismissed the moves by Finland and Sweden to join NATO as being irrelevant, despite previous lurid warnings of the terrible fate awaiting those countries should they take such a step (and the assumption by some Western geopoliticians that NATO enlargement is all Putin really cares about). This is another development he can’t do much about and so is inclined to let pass.
Which may be just as well because the challenges keep on coming. One of the most intriguing moments at the forum came when Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, the only head of state to join Putin onstage, made it clear that his country would not recognize the ‘quasi-governments’ in the Donbas, as well as those in South Ossetia or Abkhazia (in Georgia) or for that matter Taiwan. ‘If the right to self-determination is to be realized everywhere on the planet, then instead of 193 governments on Earth, there will be 500 or 600 …. Of course, it will be chaos.’ This was not what the audience – or Putin – expected to hear.
This led to the normal warnings that because Kazakhstan has a large Russian-speaking population Russia was bound to take an interest, and if it started to be unfriendly Russia could get very interested indeed.
Simonyan’s husband and fellow propagandist, Tigran Keosayan, had, even before the forum, complained about Kazakhstan’s ‘ingratitude’, after it canceled a Victory Day parade on 9 May, and suggested that Tokayev ‘look carefully at what is happening in Ukraine.’ (The reference to ingratitude was to the brief Russian-led intervention last January to help put down civil unrest).
Elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, Moldova and Georgia are exploring their own links with the EU (with Georgia’s population apparently more enthusiastic than its government), while Belarus, which is now stuck in an unequal alliance with Russia, has avoided committing forces to the war.
As Tom McTague noted in an essay reflecting on his recent travels in Kyrgyzstan, it is only in Russia that there is any nostalgia for the old Soviet Union, and Putin has not found a way to develop a positive appeal. ‘The question for Russia’, he asked, ‘is, right now, what does it have to attract its former colonies beyond history?
It is not rich enough, advanced enough, or ideologically compelling enough. Nor does it show the kind of love that suggests it would preside over a happy family.’ Who looks at Belarus or Crimea let alone the Donbas and thinks there is something there to emulate? Hence the Kremlin’s dependence upon coercion and control. Putin only knows the way of the bully. When an individual, or a state, or any other entity, starts on a path that he doesn’t like all he can do is threaten and if his threats lack credibility then he has to let it pass.
Lithuania and Kaliningrad
This can be seen with the latest flash point in Russia’s conflict with the West. The Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, home to some 430,000 people, is sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland. This was formerly the German Konigsberg, captured by Soviet forces right at the end of World War Two and valued by Moscow for its Baltic port. Because it is home to Russia’s Baltic Fleet it is a territory of strategic importance.
Its position became exposed when Poland and Lithuania joined NATO. This vulnerability has now been underlined as the Lithuanian government has blocked deliveries of coal, metals, construction materials, and advanced technology through its territory by means of both rail and road. This move is in line with, and does not go beyond, EU sanctions, does not stop the movement of passengers and unsanctioned goods and does not preclude Russia from supplying Kaliningrad by sea.
Dmitry Peskov – the Kremlin spokesman who has spent a lot of his recent career warning other states about one thing or another – has reported that Russia is preparing ‘retaliatory measures’. Putin’s close buddy and Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev has vowed that these measures, yet to be determined, ‘will have a serious negative impact on the Lithuanian population.’ It’s not clear what options are available.
Not a lot of Lithuanian goods travel through Russia these days while the option to cut off gas supplies is negated by the fact that Lithuania stopped taking Russian gas in April, having had the foresight after 2015, when nearly all of its gas supplies were imported from Russia, to have built an off-shore LNG import terminal in the port city of Klaipeda.
So Moscow is short of available economic forms of coercion. The move has been described on Russian TV as tantamount to a declaration of war, but retaliatory military action against a NATO country would be a bold and dangerous step to take simply because of the implementation of sanctions which Moscow insists in general are really no big deal.
He is unwilling to take the even greater risks required to secure a military victory (assuming that these could succeed) yet unable to accept anything that would look like a defeat. Because no one amongst the elite has a clue how to escape this conundrum or, even if they did, has the political courage and opportunity to move against Putin, the odds of him being overthrown in a coup are low.
Instead, there is paralysis as internal divisions grow along with the consequential problems caused by the war. Putin, she notes, ‘has created a situation for which he was not prepared and which he doesn’t know how to deal with, while the Russian power system that he himself built is constructed in such a way as to prevent effective decisions from being made collectively and in a balanced way.’
This paralysis is reflected in the conduct of the war. Russian tactics and strategies remain inflexible and predictable.
Having identified Severodonetsk as a vital objective, just as Mariupol was before, failure cannot be contemplated, and so all available firepower and manpower has been hurled at it to break the Ukrainian resistance and then prevent the defenders from retreating.
This has come at a heavy cost for Ukraine and questions have been asked in Kyiv about the wisdom of committing so much of its own military capability to the defense of a city that has acquired strategic relevance only because it seems to matter so much to Moscow. Yet, the Ukrainian military insists, the effort has been worthwhile: Russian forces have suffered the greater attrition; this defense has delayed advances elsewhere, as Ukraine waits for – and now starts to receive – much-needed Western weaponry; and it has diverted Russian capabilities from places where Ukraine is now able to start moving on to the offensive. Evidence of this offensive is seen in Ukrainian advances in the Kherson area.
A Test of Endurance
From the start of this crisis, Russia has acted to demonstrate its strength and show why it deserves to be treated at all times like a great power. But its power is limited and Russia is now facing the possibility that it really has bitten off more than it can chew.
None of this means an early end to the war. Nor does it mean that things will get easier for Ukraine. Putin’s default strategy is always to inflict pain even if he can achieve little else. The risk of more reckless action cannot be precluded. Nonetheless, we should not assume that Russia is inexhaustible or, just because we cannot pick a winner in the battle at the moment, that the war is destined for a prolonged stalemate.
The political paralysis affects Russia’s military strategy. Putin is unwilling to accept defeat and see what he can extract by way of concessions for an offer to withdraw. Nor does he want to mobilize all of Russian society for the war effort, so the limits on troop numbers will remain, and will affect operations more as those that are lost cannot be replaced and Russian advantages in firepower begin to be eroded.
He can propose a cease-fire to allow him to hold the territory already taken but he knows that will be rejected by President Zelensky unless it is accompanied by a promise of withdrawal.
His best hope, in pressing on with his current strategy, is that at some point, preferably quite soon, Ukraine’s Western supporters will tire of the war and its economic costs and urge Kyiv to accept some territorial compromise.
Here his problem is that there is also paralysis of a different sort on the Western side. The economic costs are high, but they have already been incurred. The commitment to Ukraine, and to ensuring that Russia does not win its war of conquest, has been made.
So long as Ukraine continues to fight, and suffer the costs, then even leaders who think a compromise might at some point be necessary are holding their tongues. The West is settling in for the long haul, looking for ways to keep Ukraine supplied with the weapons and ammunition it needs, while adjusting foreign policies to be able to concentrate on the war.
The fight can be presented as a conflict between democracy and autocracy. But at its core it is also now about the future of the European security order, and if that means improving relations with autocracies, whether in urging the Saudis to pump more oil or keeping relations with China calm, then so be it.
This means that the most salient test of endurance is still on the field of battle. When Russia began to suffer setbacks, after the initial offensive in February, the Ministry of Defense moved smartly to recast the operation as being solely about the Donbas.
The problems the Russian military has faced over the last couple of months have not so much resulted from Ukrainian counter-offensives as the meager territorial gains they have achieved for such an enormous effort.
If it is the case that the Ukrainian armed forces are beginning to increase the tempo of their offensive operations then Russian commanders will face a new set of challenges. It may be that their troops will be as tenacious in defense as their Ukrainian counterparts, even as they take heavy blows, but it is as likely that they will not do so with the same conviction.
Problems of morale and disaffection may begin to tell. From the start of this war, its most important feature has been the asymmetry of motivation. In the end, the Ukrainians are fighting because they have no other choice. Russians have the option of going home.
Can Phoenix, the hottest city in America, survive climate change?
David Knowles, Senior Editor – July 2, 2022
PHOENIX — On the downtown streets in America’s hottest city the temperature has hit 109 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s 1 o’clock in the afternoon in late June and the sidewalks are mostly empty, but an elderly woman carrying an umbrella passes by walking her terrier, the dog’s tiny feet fitted with leather moccasins to protect them from the scorching concrete.
Inside an air-conditioned conference room on the 11th floor of the building that houses city hall, Mayor Kate Gallego is recounting the story of her parents abandoning Chicago for the Southwest following the blizzard of 1979. “Cars buried in snow. Trying to navigate the city was a real challenge,” she told Yahoo News.
A Democrat who was appointed to her first mayoral term in 2019 at the age of 37 after her predecessor was elected to Congress, Gallego was raised in Albuquerque. Like many in her generation, she suffers from asthma, a condition made worse by the air pollution causing climate change, and which she credits for her early interest in the environment. As she grew up, temperatures across the Southwest grew noticeably hotter during her childhood, she said, until global warming was all but impossible to ignore.
Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego at City Hall on June 23. (Caitlin O’Hara for Yahoo News)
“There was a radio station whose number was 97.3, and they would give away money every time we hit 97 degrees,” she said. “It did feel like when they started the promotion it was unlikely to happen, and then it became more and more frequent.”
In Phoenix, where summer can feel a bit like living through a science experiment or a dystopian dare, the average summertime temperature has risen by 3.8 degrees since 1970, according to data compiled by Climate Central, a nonprofit composed of scientists and journalists. The city now averages 111 annual days of triple-digit heat, and experiences 12 more days above 110 degrees Fahrenheit each year than it did in 1970.
Nighttime temperatures have risen even faster, climbing 5.7 degrees since 1970. The average summertime low now stands at 84 degrees Fahrenheit, depriving those without adequate air-conditioning the chance for the body to cool down before the mercury begins rising each morning with the sun.
Downtown Phoenix in 2019. (Caitlin O’Hara)
“In about a decade, we have seen a sea change in the attitudes” among residents formerly skeptical that humans are causing climate change, said Gallego, who earned an undergraduate degree in environmental studies from Harvard University before getting a master’s degree in business administration from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Now, she adds, they “would like elected officials to do something.”
Because of the undeniable rise in temperatures, it has become a cliché to say that Phoenix’s climate change future is already here. That way of looking at the problem, however, risks downplaying what’s still to come. By the year 2100, climate models predict, summer highs are expected to rise on average by as much as 10 degrees in the city, which means daily temperature readings of 114 degrees Fahrenheit, which will almost certainly lead to more heat-related deaths.
A sign at the Pima Canyon Trailhead in Phoenix warns hikers to bring sufficient water and beware of extreme heat. (Caitlin O’Hara for Yahoo News)
Since 2014, deaths attributed to heat in Maricopa County — which includes Phoenix and adjacent cities like Mesa, Scottsdale and Tempe — have spiked by 454%, KPNX News reported. For the past two years, the county has set new heat death records, with 323 people killed in 2020 and 331 in 2021, the bulk of those occurring in Phoenix.
Yet people continue to flock to the so-called Valley of the Sun. Between 2010 and 2020, Phoenix grew faster than any other big American city, according to Census Bureau data, adding 163,000 residents.
“Across the United States we are seeing a migration toward sun,” Gallego said. “People are moving toward Sunbelt states. That means having a conversation about how we allocate resources.”
To help lead that conversation, Gallego hired Arizona State University professor David Hondula to head up the city’s newly created Office of Heat Response and Mitigation, the first of its kind in the U.S.
David Hondula, director of Phoenix’s Office of Heat Response and Mitigation. (Caitlin O’Hara for Yahoo News)
In his first eight months on the job, Hondula, who at37 bears a passing resemblance to former Phoenix Suns point guard Steve Nash, has put forth a “heat response” strategy. It focuses on reducing heat-related death and illness through measures such as opening air-conditioned cooling centers across the city where people can escape the oven-like summer conditions, launching a hotline residents can call to arrange transportation to get them to one, and sending out volunteers to pass out reusable water bottles.
It’s intuitive that climate change disproportionately impacts those who don’t have the resources to afford rent, let alone air-conditioning or private means of transportation. In his new role, Hondula has spent a lot of time confirming that fact, meeting with poor and unsheltered residents and seeing firsthand how direct intervention can help save lives.
“I might have had more education in the past eight months about the heat problem than I’ve had for eight years working on the problem from an academic standpoint,” he said. “There are folks for whom heat is an inconvenience. Folks for whom heat is a manageable problem, and folks for whom heat is a catastrophe.”
Life and death in ‘the zone’
Tents line a street in one of Phoenix’s biggest encampments for unsheltered people, known as “the zone,” where the pavement can reach 160 degrees Fahrenheit. (Caitlin O’Hara for Yahoo News)
In Phoenix, catastrophe is a fixture of daily life in “the zone,” a grim homeless encampment near downtown that spans several treeless blocks. With a by-now-familiar mixture of desperation, drug and alcohol abuse, violence and mental illness, the zone resembles similar tent outposts that have popped up in cities across the West, but the Phoenix heat adds another layer of misery. Roughly two-thirds of heat-related deaths in the city over the last two years were among the homeless, and Hondula is keenly aware that if the city continues to break heat-death records, his job may be in jeopardy.
“We better be doing something that moves those numbers in the other direction as soon as possible,” he said.
That may prove easier said than done given that Phoenix has one of the highest eviction rates in the country, apartment and home rental prices continue to soar, and homelessness has risen by 35% in Maricopa County over the last two years. Hondula is realistic about the challenges but remains optimistic that the city can address the problem, noting that heat-related calls to the Phoenix fire department are running 5% lower than the volume experienced at this time last year.
Community advocate Stacey Champion asks a worker to let an unsheltered person in to a cooling center in June. (Caitlin O’Hara for Yahoo News)
“When we showed up at Cortez Park the other day,” Hondula recounted about a recent outing, “and within a minute of pulling in the parking lot, we’re getting our water bottles set up, the homelessness case manager noticed a bunch of folks crowded around this old Suburban — a family of 10 living out of their car. By the time we had finished our outreach shift, they were on their way to a shelter that night. So, any question about if this is a good use of our time evaporates right there.”
Just a block from the zone, self-described “feisty” activist Stacey Champion stands in the shade of a tree outside Carnegie Library. Bordered by a fenced-in, football-field-size manicured lawn dotted with trees that is off limits to the public, the former library, which opened in 1898, now serves as an administrative space for the Arizona State Library, but the grounds are always vacant.
“I think this is the ultimate picture of inequity. This is public space that has the potential to save people’s lives,” said Champion, a public relations consultant who advocates on behalf of Phoenix’s unsheltered community. “We had temp guns out here, and in the zone one day it was 168 degrees. Then we came over and measured the grass, which was like 90. Just being on the grass could potentially save people’s lives.”
Shady and with lush grass, the Carnegie Library, now a City of Phoenix archives building, is locked to the public but is located just across the street from one of the city’s biggest encampments for unsheltered people. (Caitlin O’Hara for Yahoo News)
Champion has been pressuring Hondula, city council members, elected officials, state lawmakers and anyone else who will listen, to open the park to the homeless from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m., but so far, no one is budging.
“I’ve known David for years. I think David is very smart. I think David really cares,” she said of Hondula. “I think that David’s hands are going to be tied with politics and with a lot of bureaucratic red tape.”
While she has praised the heat response portions of Hondula’s plans, she also believes that the city isn’t acting quickly enough to implement them.
“Having tracked the heat deaths for all these years — these are preventable deaths,” she said. “I’m fairly certain we’re going to break the record this year.”
Champion walks into the Justa Center, a day shelter for older adults, on June 24. (Caitlin O’Hara for Yahoo News)
While saving lives is Hondula’s immediate focus this summer, his overall plan also includes “heat mitigation actions,” long-term strategies to cool the city over the coming years to make it more livable as climate change tightens its grip. The plan includes planting tree canopies to create shade corridors for pedestrians, expanding a new light-rail system, and painting roadways white so as to reduce surface temperatures and diminish the “heat island effect” that makes cities hotter than their rural surroundings.
In some ways, heat mitigation can be seen as a footrace between climate change and the many steps required to retrofit a place so that it is still worth living there in the coming decades. The decision to spend money insulating communities for the climate change future is still a relatively new phenomenon in the United States, perhaps because so many lawmakers refuse to admit what more than 99.9 percent of scientific research proves:That mankind’s burning of fossil fuels and adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere is what is causing temperatures to rise.
People’s tents line a street in the area known as the zone. (Caitlin O’Hara for Yahoo News)
But in the West, where researchers have linked the ongoing extreme drought to climate change, dwindling water from the Colorado River will soon be rationed for the 44 million people who depend on it, wildfires worsened by rising temperatures have become an all-too-common fixture of life and extreme heat waves blur into one another, inaction isn’t a viable option.
In May, the Phoenix city council voted to allocate $13 million of the $90 million it received from the American Rescue Act toward heat-related programs that Hondula’s office will help administer.
One of the local nonprofits pressing the city on how and where to spend that money is Chispa AZ, a League of Conservation Voters offshoot that seeks to mobilize Hispanic voters and politicians on environmental issues.
“We’ve been working with the city on a climate action plan,” Dulce Juarez, Chispa’s state co-director, told Yahoo News. “It’s a start. It’s not the perfect plan, but they are talking about investments in cool corridors and cooling the streets. It’s in the small ways that the city is hoping to create an impact.”
Dulce Juarez, co-director at Latinx environmental justice organization Chispa AZ. (Caitlin O’Hara for Yahoo News)
Juarez says she and her staff have impressed upon Hondula that while richer neighborhoods in Phoenix are mostly tree-lined, offering a respite from the blaring sun, poorer ones remain barren and continue to bake.
“Our team members have met with him to try and talk about what we do about trees. That’s a big issue for us,” she said. “We also have to keep in mind maintenance and water, making sure that we have long-term care for these trees.”
Like Champion, Juarez sees the state as lagging when it comes to addressing its heat problem.
“Unfortunately here in the state of Arizona, we don’t have a very progressive Legislature,” she said. “I think a lot of people don’t even believe in climate change, which is why we have a lot of the problems we do. We’re kind of behind on this issue of climate change and climate action.”
Chispa AZ planning and brainstorming notes fill a whiteboard. (Caitlin O’Hara for Yahoo News)
With the rate of climate change speeding up in recent decades as the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continues unabated, and mitigation measures slow to take shape, Juarez, like many local residents, wonders how long living in Phoenix will make sense. That question, she said, hit home in 2020 when the city recorded 53 consecutive days of 110-degree temperatures or higher.
“I love it here. The desert is a very magical and beautiful place, but when you stop and think about it, you wonder ‘Is it really the best option to live in the middle of the desert if our utility companies or our grid goes out? How are we going to survive in this heat without electricity?’” she said.
Without a trace
Located on the northeast border of Phoenix’s Sky Harbor International Airport, the unassuming Pueblo Grande Museum is set on the archeological ruins left behind by a Native American civilization known as the Hohokam. At around A.D. 300, the Hohokam became the first people to settle on the banks of the Salt and Gila rivers and lay claim to the Valley of the Sun.
A diagram of waterways used by Indigenous groups, including the Hohokam. (Caitlin O’Hara for Yahoo News)
The grounds to the three-room museum are home to a platform mound believed to have housed tribal leaders, ball courts similar to those found farther south in Mesoamerica and the remnants of an elaborate series of irrigation canals that allowed the Hohokam to thrive in the Sonoran Desert.
The precursor to the irrigation system still used today on the lower Colorado River, the network of canals and irrigation grew to become the most advanced in all of America’s precolonial history, and helped the Hohokam grow 12 different crop species in an otherwise inhospitable environment. Over the next millennium, the population swelled to a few thousand people, who made ornate pottery and erected adobe dwellings. And then, suddenly, the Hohokam civilization nose-dived.
“From 1350 to 1450 the population plunges and traces of the Hohokam disappear from the archaeological record,” the museum’s website states.
The predominant theory explaining the society’s collapse is that a Southwestern drought led to widespread crop failure, forcing the population to relocate.
A modern canal near the Pueblo Grande Museum in Phoenix. (Caitlin O’Hara for Yahoo News)
While other Native American tribes would later settle in the region, the modern city of Phoenix wasn’t founded here until 1881. By that time, the industrial revolution was underway, burning fossil fuels at an unprecedented rate.
From the ashes
When it comes to heat death, Hondula is clear-eyed that the problem may get worse before his proposed solutions can make it better.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if we are in worse shape from a heat-associated-death standpoint than we were last year because there are so many more unsheltered folks that are at 200-300 times the risk of heat-associated death,” he said.
With its negative impacts on infrastructure, weather patterns, migration and death, climate change has a knack for taking existing problems and making them worse. While scientists are tasked with demonstrating such a dynamic using data points, politicians must decide what to do about it.
Park steward Ron Cordova, pictured near the Pima Canyon Trailhead on June 25, has brought back children and adult hikers on horseback who were experiencing heat exhaustion or other injuries. (Caitlin O’Hara for Yahoo News)
Gallego may be the first U.S. mayor to hire a taxpayer-funded position to deal with the effects of heat made worse by climate change, but, like all elected officials, she must offer a hopeful spin on how her administration will make life better for residents.
“We get our name from the mythical bird that rose from ashes. Hopefully we take heat and make something that makes the world a better place,” she said. “I hope we also take challenges around climate change and are at the forefront of the solution. The people of Phoenix have a lot at stake addressing climate change and heat, so we’re motivated to find those solutions.”
After leaving city hall, a dust storm alert from the National Weather Service lands on cellphones all over Phoenix. “Infants, the elderly and those with respiratory issues urged to take precautions,” it reads, and right on cue the sky quickly turns a brownish orange, reducing visibility to a hundred yards or so.
What few residents who had ventured out into the afternoon heat head back inside. And while the dust dissipates after about an hour, it once more reveals an unforgiving sun.
The Supreme Court Isn’t Done Carrying Water for Right-Wing Activists
The conservative court just finished issuing a string of devastating decisions made with little regard for precedent. It’s just getting started
By David S. Cohen – July 1, 2022
Law is supposed to be an objective discipline. We praise the “rule of law” as an immutable hallmark of the American legal system, and take solace in the ideal that justice should be dispensed fairly and evenly regardless of who is dispensing it. Our judges wear black robes because they are meant to be indistinguishable. It theoretically shouldn’t matter which one hears a case because the law, not the individual, determines the outcome.
But here’s the spoiler: This is all hogwash. At least when it comes to the Supreme Court, who the judge is matters immensely, while what the law is matters very little. In fact, as the cases decided in the past few weeks make clear, the current justices are going to take almost every chance they get to issue the most politically conservative decision possible.
Let’s review what the court has done just in the past week or so. First, last Thursday, it gutted one of the key protections from the Miranda rights everyone knows (“You have the right to remain silent…”). Now, when police don’t give the required warning, defendants can still have their statements suppressed in court, and they can’t sue the police for the violation. Overturning Miranda v. Arizona has been one of the conservative legal movement’s goals ever since the case was decided in 1966. Its whittling last Thursday happened not because the Constitution changed, but solely because the court’s personnel changed. When Miranda was decided over 50 years ago, the court was at its most liberal. A more conservative court reconsidered the case in 2000, but refused to overturn it. In 2022, however, with the court now packed with conservative justices, the case has been partially rebuked, and the groundwork laid for a more complete rejection later.
Something similar happened with guns. In 2008, a conservative Supreme Court reversed decades of precedent to rule in District of Columbia v. Heller that an individual has the right to own a handgun. It was signal enough that court decisions are all about personnel, but what happened Thursday drove the point home. Ever since that 2008 decision, gun rights advocates have pushed the court to expand the ruling to get rid of even more gun laws. But the court never had enough votes to do it, refusing to hear subsequent gun cases as its most conservative members complained that liberal justices were avoiding important issues. That was until former President Trump appointed three new conservative justices to the court, which subsequently took up New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, ruling last week that there is a constitutional right to concealed carry. There’s now little doubt this motivated group of conservative jurists will soon expand gun rights even further.
The same personnel change animated Friday’s abortion ruling. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health involved a ban on abortion at 15 weeks pregnancy, starting its journey before the court with the state of Mississippi asking only that the court approve this particular ban, not that it also overturn Roe v. Wade. But when Mississippi fully briefed the case, it asked the court not only to uphold the Mississippi law but also to strike down the landmark 1977 case guaranteeing a constitutional right to abortion access. What changed? Ruth Bader Ginsburg was replaced by Amy Coney Barrett. Because of that personnel change alone, Mississippi changed what it asked of the court. It got its wish on Friday, with the court’s conservative majority overturning Roe. Without Barrett and with Ginsburg, this would not have happened. That it did is a reflection not of law but of the people wearing the robes.
Then came Monday’s decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton. In that case, the court ruled that a public school football coach can pray after a game on the 50-yard line and not be disciplined for doing so, with the court’s conservative majority saying the coach has a free speech and freedom of religion right to pray right after games. In ruling this way, the court put the nail in the coffin of a 50-year-old precedent that determined what constitutes crossing the line separating church and state. In fact, the court’s ruling this week almost reads that protection out of the First Amendment entirely, which, again, has been a long-standing project of legal conservatives.
Unfortunately, the decisions the court handed down this term are just the beginning. The new right-wing majority on the court is showing everyone that it is not shy about flexing its conservative muscle. The justices are not doing anything piecemeal and are using every opportunity to rule in the most expansive way possible on some of the country’s most divisive political issues. There’s more in the pipeline for next year, such as matters related to affirmative action, religious exemptions to anti-discrimination law, and the ability of state legislatures to control elections. It’s a conservative activist’s wish list of issues for the court to tackle, and these justices are complying.
In dissent in the abortion case last week, liberal Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan wrote: “The American public … should never conclude that its constitutional protections hung by a thread — that a new majority, adhering to a new ‘doctrinal school, could by dint of numbers’ alone expunge their rights. It is hard — no, it is impossible — to conclude that anything else has happened here.
They are right. The group of justices committed to enshrining the conservative legal agenda into law means the outcomes of almost all coming cases are very unlikely to surprise. Ask what the conservative policy position is, and that’s how these politicians in robes will rule.
World War II-Era Boat Exposed at Lake Mead as Water Levels Decline
Stephanie Wenger – July 1, 2022
LAKE MEAD NATIONAL RECREATION AREA, NEVADA – JULY 01: A sunken World War II-Era Higgins landing craft that used to be nearly 200 feet underwater is being revealed near the Lake Mead Marina as the waterline continues to lower on July 01, 2022 in the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Nevada. The water level at Lake Mead is at its lowest since being filled in 1937 after the construction of the Hoover Dam as a result of a climate change-fueled megadrought coupled with increased water demands in the Southwestern United States. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
A World War II-era boat was spotted more than halfway out of the water at Nevada’s Lake Mead this week as the lake’s water levels continue to decline.
The Higgins landing craft — which was previously 185 feet below the lake’s surface — is located less than a mile from Lake Mead Marina and Hemenway Harbor, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Associated Press and KLAS.
The boat was a popular diving destination for years before it emerged, KLAS reported.
The vessel was previously used to survey the Colorado River, then was purchased by a marina, and finally sunk to become anchor, D.J. Jenner of Las Vegas Scuba told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Las Vegas Scuba did not immediately return PEOPLE’s request for comment.
Earlier this week, the boat was featured on the YouTube channel The Other Me.
LAKE MEAD NATIONAL RECREATION AREA, NEVADA – JULY 01: A sunken World War II-Era Higgins landing craft that used to be nearly 200 feet underwater is being revealed near the Lake Mead Marina as the waterline continues to lower on July 01, 2022 in the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Nevada. The water level at Lake Mead is at its lowest since being filled in 1937 after the construction of the Hoover Dam as a result of a climate change-fueled megadrought coupled with increased water demands in the Southwestern United States. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
New Orleans-based Higgins Industries — which was owned by entrepreneur Andrew J. Higgins —built several thousand land crafts from 1942 to 1945, Las Vegas Review-Journal reported. The company created two versions of the boat — one was a personal landing craft and the other larger style was designed for tanks.
Higgins Industries made the landing craft that was used during the D-Day invasion in 1944, according to KLAS.
Climate change and drought have caused the lake’s water levels to drop to their lowest levels, according to the AP.
New recycling method could eliminate the climate impact of plastic
Gianna Melillo – July 1, 2022
Story at a glance
Plastic pollution is one of the more pressing issues for conservationists and environmentalists alike.
Researchers in Sweden harvested a byproduct of plastic disposal and used it to create a new sustainable plastic.
By incentivizing collection of this byproduct, experts hope to scale the process and create a more sustainable plastic recycling process.
Declining plastic recycling rates coupled with increased plastic pollution on the Earth’s surface and within its oceans spell concern for the planet’s health.
In an effort to combat these trends, researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden developed a recycling method that replaces all fossil raw materials used in new plastic production with carbon atoms from mixed waste. The technique has the potential to eliminate the climate impact of plastic and may rid the air of carbon dioxide.
“While fossil fuel use is the main cause of anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and a transition away from the use of such fuels is essential to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 [degrees celsius], the production and use of materials such as plastics, cement and steel entail significant GHG emissions,” researchers explained in the Journal of Cleaner Production.
They hypothesized carbon atoms in plastic waste serve as an important untapped resource. These existing resources are currently incinerated or find their way to landfills. Thermochemical technologies can target this wasted carbon and use it as a raw material to produce plastics of similar quality to those created with fossil fuels.
According to investigators, enough of these atoms already exist to meet the needs of all global plastic production. The atoms can be harvested from waste with or without food residue.
“If the process is powered by renewable energy, we also get plastic products with more than 95 percent lower climate impact than those produced today, which effectively means negative emissions for the entire system,” said co-author Henrik Thunman in a press release.
To complete the process, the carbon atoms would need to be heated to 600 to 800 degrees celsius, converting the material to gas. Adding hydrogen to this gas can replace the building blocks of plastics and researchers are working to ensure the gas can be used and converted in the same factories currently used to manufacture plastic.
This process can also be powered by renewable sources like solar, wind or hydro power, making them more energy efficient than current systems in use. Experts would also be able to harvest excess heat produced in the process to offset heat production from waste incineration, thereby eliminating carbon dioxide emissions resulting from energy recovery, they explained.
Creating an economic structure to collect and use these carbon atoms can help incentivize this new form of recycling.
The process has already proven successful in one Swedish plant in collaboration with Borealis, a plastic manufacturer.
“Global application of advanced thermochemical recycling technologies has great potential: less energy than used in today’s material system may likely be required, and carbon emissions can be reduced using different energy sources, leading to near-zero carbon emissions with renewable energy,” authors concluded.
More research is needed to better understand best deployment strategies and determine their economic and energy implications.
Court Decision Leaves Biden With Few Tools to Combat Climate Change
Coral Davenport – July 1, 2022
U.S. President Joe Biden holds up a wind turbine size comparison chart while attending a meeting with governors, labor leaders, and private companies launching the Federal-State Offshore Wind Implementation Partnership, at the White House in Washington, U.S., June 23, 2022. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque (Kevin Lamarque / reuters)
WASHINGTON — One by one, the tools available to President Joe Biden to fight climate change are being stripped away.
After a Supreme Court decision Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency will have less authority to limit carbon dioxide from power plants, a major source in this country of the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.
It is one in a series of setbacks for Biden, who came into office with the most ambitious climate agenda of any president, pledging to the rest of the world that the United States, the world’s largest historic emitter of greenhouse gases, would cut that pollution in half by the end of the decade.
In a statement, Biden called the ruling “another devastating decision that aims to take our country backwards” and said the conservative majority on the court was siding “with special interests that have waged a long-term campaign to strip away our right to breathe clean air.”
“The science confirms what we all see with our own eyes — the wildfires, droughts, extreme heat, and intense storms are endangering our lives and livelihoods,” Biden said. “I will take action. My administration will continue using lawful executive authority, including the EPA’s legally upheld authorities, to keep our air clean, protect public health and tackle the climate crisis.”
Some experts say that after the Supreme Court’s decision in the case, West Virginia v. EPA., it will soon be mathematically impossible for Biden to meet his goals.
“At this point, I don’t see any way to hit the kind of targets they laid out,” said David G. Victor, an expert in climate policy at the University of California, San Diego.
The consequences could be severe. Scientists say the United States must hit Biden’s target if it is to do its part to limit average global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, compared with temperatures before the Industrial Revolution. That is the threshold beyond which the likelihood significantly increases of catastrophic impacts such as deadly heat waves, drought, wildfire and storms. The planet has already warmed an average of about 1.1 degrees Celsius.
Biden has faced obstacle after obstacle in his push for climate action, ranging from conflicts within his own party to a worldwide energy crunch triggered by the war in Ukraine to well-funded legal challenges from Republicans and the fossil fuel industry.
Patrick Morrisey, the Republican attorney general of West Virginia and the lead plaintiff in the case, called the decision a “great win for West Virginia and her residents,” adding, “We are pleased this case returned the power to decide one of the major environmental issues of the day to the right place to decide it: the U.S. Congress, comprised of those elected by the people to serve the people.”
The problem for Biden is that Congress has so far failed to act on climate change. The centerpiece of the president’s climate plan, legislation to replace coal and gas-fired power plants with wind, solar and nuclear energy, was deleted from a major domestic policy bill last fall after objections from Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. Manchin, who has personal financial ties to the coal industry, has been able to single-handedly set the limits of Biden’s legislative ambitions as the key swing vote in an evenly divided Senate.
The domestic policy bill in limbo on Capitol Hill still includes what would be a historic increase in tax credits to spur the wind and solar industries. But it is unclear if Manchin will support the plan and the legislation could die if Republicans, who have shown little interest in climate action, retake one or both chambers in the midterm elections.
Biden has focused on the nation’s top source of greenhouse gas pollution — transportation — by directing the EPA to craft tough new limits on tailpipe emissions to speed up adoption of electric vehicles. But those rules are already under legal assault in lower courts by many of the same plaintiffs who were victorious in this week’s Supreme Court case.
As a candidate, Biden promised to end drilling on public lands — oil, gas and coal extraction from federal land and waters generates 25% of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions. But when he tried to pause new drilling, it was overturned by a legal challenge from Republican attorneys general from states that produce fossil fuels. The administration held its first onshore drilling lease sale this week in seven Western states.
“The judicial branch and the legislative branch are seriously hindering Joe Biden’s ability to get the job done on climate,” said Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard, who served on Biden’s EPA transition team. “A lot of the optimism that everyone had a year ago is being replaced by pessimism. They’re running out of options right now.”
The Biden administration contends that it remains possible for the United States to meet its climate targets, by cobbling together a mix of executive actions.
“Ambitious climate action presents a singular opportunity to ensure U.S. global competitiveness, create jobs, lower costs for families, and protect people’s health and well-being, especially those who’ve long suffered the burden of inaction,” Michael S. Regan, the EPA administrator, said in a statement. “EPA will move forward with lawfully setting and implementing environmental standards that meet our obligation to protect all people and all communities from environmental harm.”
The Supreme Court ruling left intact the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions but blocked any attempt by the agency to write regulations so broad that they force the closure of coal-fired plants, which generate the most carbon dioxide, or compel utilities to switch from fossil fuels to wind, solar and other clean sources.
The EPA still plans to issue tougher regulations to control methane, a potent greenhouse gas that leaks from oil and gas wells. And it plans stricter limits on other types of pollution generated by power plants, such as mercury, smog and soot. The idea is that cracking down on those pollutants could force electric utilities to clean up or shut down the dirtiest facilities, such as coal-burning power plants, which produce more carbon dioxide than gas-fired plants.
“Those air pollution rules will have co-benefits — as they are being enforced, they will squeeze out some CO2 pollution,” said Leah Stokes, a professor of environmental policy at the University of Santa Barbara, California, who has advised congressional Democrats on climate legislation. “It wouldn’t be the same amount. Every time we take a tool off the table we’re in a worse position.”
Meanwhile, the private sector has already been shifting away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy sources.
Electric vehicle sales have doubled over the past year, making up about 5% of new vehicle sales in the United States in the first quarter of 2022, compared with about 2.5% in the first quarter of 2021. General Motors has pledged to stop producing gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035, with other carmakers setting similar goals. Ford Motor is producing an electric version of the F-150 pickup truck, the country’s best-selling vehicle, and has taken customer reservations for more than 200,000 of them.
With the cost of solar and wind energy dropping below the price of coal and natural gas in many parts of the United States, renewable sources of electricity now make up 20% of the nation’s energy mix, up from 15% a decade ago.
But the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, combined with the war in Ukraine and the related ban on Russian oil have scrambled global energy supplies, and prompted Biden to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserves and urge producers to pump more oil, at least in the short term. Clean energy producers in the United States also face significant obstacles from an outdated electricity transmission system.
And the private sector is not moving quickly enough to cut emissions to the level that scientists say is needed to avert climate catastrophe. Biden wants half of new cars sold in the United States to be electric by 2030, and all electricity to come from wind, solar and other zero-carbon sources by 2035.
“We do see a powerful trend emerging in the private sector both driven by consumers who are demanding cleaner options, that is driving a shift in our energy mix, and toward electric vehicles, but that pace of change is really not sufficient to meet the long-term targets,” said Sasha Mackler, an energy analyst at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington research organization. “For that, you still need policy. The administration doesn’t have the right tools to get us all there. Success in the time that we need it, according to the scientific community — that requires Congress.”
Congress in the coming weeks could still pass a scaled-back version of the spending bill that has been stalled on Capitol Hill for months. A version of the bill that passed the House last year includes $300 billion in clean energy tax incentives for producers and purchasers of clean electricity and electric vehicles.
But its current status is uncertain: Manchin blocked the larger spending bill that includes the tax credits last December, although he has recently restarted talks with the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., about the prospects for a less ambitious version. Under Senate rules, that bill must be passed by Sept. 30. The Senate is in recess through the second week of July, and will break again for the month of August, leaving Democrats limited time to reach agreement on a package that has eluded consensus for the past year.
Democrats say the Supreme Court decision lends urgency to the push to pass that bill. Schumer said the decision will “put American lives at risk, making it all the more imperative that Democrats soon pass meaningful legislation to address the climate crisis.”
Stalled action on the federal level puts a spotlight on dozens of states that are moving ahead with their own climate plans. “If the state actions are put on steroids as the federal government realizes its impotence, the effects of that will be significant,” Victor said.
Just under half the states have already enacted significant climate policies. Their leader is California, which in the coming weeks is expected to finalize a first-in-the-nation regulation requiring that all new cars sold in the state must be electric or zero-emission by 2035. Seventeen other states are in line to adopt the same rule when it passes in Sacramento.
California also requires that 100% of its electricity be generated from zero-carbon sources by 2045. Twenty-one other states have some version of that clean electricity standard, and several are advancing legislation for even more stringent versions.
“Today’s ruling makes it even more imperative that California and other states succeed in our efforts to combat the climate crisis,” said Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California. “While the court has once again turned back the clock, California refuses to go backward — we’re just getting started.”
But those state-level tools are also in the sights of many of the same Republican attorneys general who brought the power plant case to the Supreme Court. They have already filed a suit in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit — considered the second-most powerful court in the country — seeking to block state authority to mandate a transition to all- electric vehicle sales. Oral arguments have yet to be scheduled.
“It’s a knife fight,” said Stokes. “We have to fight with every single tool we have on every level and it’s going to get harder.”
In that last instance, Thomas didn’t write the majority opinion but he did pen an inflammatory concurrence inviting challenges to the rights to same-sex marriage and contraception, but notably not interracial marriage, something that’s obviously very dear to his heart.
Then Thomas hit us all with a “hold my beer”, squeezing a reference to the debunked conspiracy theory that Covid-19 vaccines are made of cells from aborted fetuses into his dissent in the Court’s decision to decline a challenge to New York’s vaccine mandate for medical workers.
A group of healthcare workers sued to challenge the mandate, arguing they should be allowed to continue working, unvaccinated, in medical settings, during a pandemic, under a religious exception. Lower courts kicked their challenge to the curb but they appealed to the Supreme Court, where a 6-3 majority, including three Conservative justices, agreed that the case wouldn’t be heard.
Thomas, joined by fellow conservatives Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh, went in his bag, writing that the Court should have taken the opportunity to sort out whether or not a religious exemption should have been granted. He noted that there was a “broad exception” to the mandate—that exception being that you didn’t need a vaccine if it might endanger your life—but noted that the plaintiffs’ argued there was no such consideration for their religious beliefs.
What, exactly, were those beliefs that should make them exempt from vaccination? “They object on religious grounds to all available COVID–19 vaccines because they were developed using cell lines derived from aborted children.”
Pfizer and Moderna used fetal cell lines early in their Covid vaccine development to test the efficacy of their formulas, as other vaccines have in the past. The fetal tissue used in these processes came from elective abortions that happened decades ago. But the cells have since replicated many times, so none of the original tissue is involved in the making of modern vaccines.
So it is not true that Covid vaccines are manufactured using fetal cell lines, nor do they contain any aborted cells.
The good thing is the Supreme Court’s term ended yesterday and given his history of sitting on the bench for years without saying anything, it’ll probably be awhile before we hear from Clarence Thomas again.
Russian missiles kill 20 in strikes on Odesa apartments, recreation center, Ukraine says
Niamh Cavanagh, Producer – July 1, 2022
LONDON — Russian missiles struck an apartment building near the Ukrainian city of Odesa early on Friday, leaving at least 20 people — including a child — dead, officials said.
The overnight attack targeted the small town of Serhiivka, located about 30 miles southwest of the major Black Sea port city. Authorities said 16 civilians were killed in an apartment block, while four were found dead in a recreational center.
Rescuers evacuate a body from a destroyed building that was hit by a missile strike in the Ukrainian town of Serhiivka on Friday. (Oleksandr Giminov/AFP via Getty Images)
Kyrylo Tymoshenko, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, wrote on Telegram that at least 38 others were injured, including six children and a pregnant woman. All 38 civilians have been hospitalized, the official added.
Video footage posted online appears to show the charred remains of the recreational building while emergency workers search for survivors among the debris.
Speaking outside the ruins of the apartment block, Ukrainian First Deputy Interior Minister Yevhenii Yenin said rescue operations were continuing but that officials “don’t expect to find anyone alive.” He added that there were no military targets located near the areas that were attacked.
A damaged residential building in Odesa early Friday, following Russian missile attacks. (Ukrainian Emergency Service via AP)
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied that Russia had targeted civilians. “I would like to remind you of the president’s words that the Russian armed forces do not work with civilian targets,” Peskov said.
The attack followed a missile strike on a shopping mall in the central Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk on Monday that killed more than 20 people.
Zelensky released CCTV footage on Tuesday apparently showing a Russian missile striking the mall with an estimated 1,000 people inside.
The clip, shown during Zelensky’s nightly address to the nation, appears to show a missile hitting a large building site before it bursts into flames. Zelensky accused Russia of wanting to “kill as many people as possible” and called the strike “one of the most defiant terrorist attacks in European history.”
Blasts rock Ukraine’s Mykolaiv after missiles kill 21 near Odesa
Iryna Nazarchuk – July 1, 2022
Damaged residential building is seen at the site of the missile strike in MykolaivAftermath of a missile strike in MykolaivRescuers evacuate a dog from a damaged residential building in Mykolaiv
SERHIIVKA, Ukraine (Reuters) – Powerful explosions rocked the Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv early on Saturday, the mayor said, a day after authorities said at least 21 people were killed when Russian missiles struck an apartment building near the Black Sea port of Odesa.
Air raid sirens sounded across the Mykolaiv region, which borders the vital exporting port of Odesa, before the blasts.
“There are powerful explosions in the city! Stay in shelters!” Mykolaiv mayor Oleksandr Senkevich wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
It was not immediately known what caused the explosions. Reuters could not independently verify the report.
Explosions flattened part of an apartment building while residents slept on Friday, the latest in a series of what Ukraine says are Russian missile attacks aimed at civilians.
In his nightly video address on Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy denounced the strikes as “conscious, deliberately targeted Russian terror and not some sort of error or a coincidental missile strike.”
Kyiv says Moscow has intensified its long-range missile attacks, hitting civilian targets far from the frontline. Russia says it has been aiming at military sites. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov cited President Vladimir Putin’s statements “that the Russian Armed Forces do not work with civilian targets”.
SIFTING THROUGH RUBBLE
A Russian missile earlier this week struck a crowded shopping mall in central Ukraine, killing at least 19 people.
Thousands of civilians have been killed since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24 in what Moscow calls a “special operation” to root out nationalists. Ukraine and its Western allies say it is an unprovoked war of aggression.
Residents in the resort village of Serhiivka helped workers pick through the rubble of the nine-storey apartment block, a section of which had been destroyed in Friday’s early-morning strike.
Walls and windows of a neighbouring 14-storey apartment block were damaged by the blast wave. Nearby holiday camps were also hit.
“We came here to the site, assessed the situation together with emergency workers and locals, and together helped those who survived. And those who unfortunately died. We helped to carry them away,” said Oleksandr Abramov, who lives nearby and had rushed to the scene when he heard the blast.
Serhiy Bratchuk, spokesman for the Odesa regional administration, said 21 people had been confirmed killed, including a 12-year-old boy. Among the fatalities was an employee of the Children’s Rehabilitation Center set up by Ukraine’s neighbour Moldova in the resort.
The strike on Serhiivka took place shortly after Russia pulled its troops off Snake Island, a strategically important outcrop about 140 km (85 miles) southeast of Odesa that it seized on the war’s first day.
The chief of Ukraine’s General Staff, Valeriy Zaluzhny, accused Russia of failing to abide by its assertions that it had left Snake Island as a “gesture of good will”. On his Telegram channel, Zaluzhny said two Russian warplanes had taken off from a base in Crimea and bombed targets on the island on Friday evening.
He posted a video of what he said was the attack. Reuters could not confirm the authenticity of the video or the Russian action depicted. There was no immediate Russian comment.
Russian forces had used Snake Island to control the northwestern Black Sea and impose a blockade on Ukraine, one of the world’s biggest grain exporters.
Moscow denies it is to blame for a food crisis, which it says is caused by Western sanctions hurting its own exports.
Putin met the president of Indonesia on Thursday and spoke by phone on Friday to the prime minister of India, promising both major food importers that Russia would remain a big supplier of grain.
Ukraine has accused Russia of stealing grain from the territories that Russian forces have seized since its invasion.
The Kremlin has denied stealing grain and did not reply to requests for comment on Friday.
NO GAS,ELECTRICITY, WATER
Russia’s stepped up campaign of missile attacks on Ukrainian cities coincides with its forces grinding out success on the battlefield in the east, with the aim of forcing Ukraine to cede Luhansk and Donetsk provinces.
Moscow has been on the verge of capturing Luhansk since taking the city of Sievierodonetsk last week after some of the heaviest fighting of the war.
Ukraine’s last bastion in Luhansk is Sievierodonetsk’s sister city, Lysychansk, across the Siverskyi Donets river, which is close to being encircled under Russian artillery barrages.
In Russian-occupied Sievierodonetsk, residents emerged from basements to sift through the rubble of their city.
“Almost all the city infrastructure is destroyed. We are living without gas, electricity and water since May,” Sergei Oleinik, 65, told Reuters.
More weapons were needed in eastern and southern Ukraine, Zelenskiy said, as the Pentagon announced the United States was sending two NASAMS surface-to-air missile systems, four additional counter-artillery radars and ammunition as part of its latest arms package.
(Reporting by Reuters bureaux; Writing by Lincoln Feast; Editing by William Mallard)
