Sandy Hook families settle with Remington marking 1st time gun maker is held liable for mass shooting
AAron Katersky – February 15, 2022
Remington Arms agreed Tuesday to settle liability claims from the families of five adults and four children killed in the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, according to a new court filing, marking the first time a gun manufacturer has been held liable for a mass shooting in the U.S.
The settlement comes nearly eight years after the families sued the maker of the Bushmaster XM15-E2S semiautomatic rifle that was used in the 2012 mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.
More details will be announced at a news conference from the families.
On Dec. 14, 2012, Adam Lanza, 20, forced his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School, and in the course of 264 seconds, fatally shot 20 first-graders and six staff members.
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The rifle Lanza used was Remington’s version of the AR-15 assault rifle, which is substantially similar to the standard issue M16 military service rifle used by the U.S. Army and other nations’ armed forces, but fires only in semiautomatic mode.
The families argued Remington negligently entrusted to civilian consumers an assault-style rifle that is suitable for use only by military and law enforcement personnel and violated the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act through the sale or wrongful marketing of the rifle.
Remington, which filed for bankruptcy protection in July 2020, had argued all of the plaintiffs’ legal theories were barred under Connecticut law and by a federal statute — the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act — which, with limited exceptions, immunizes firearms manufacturers, distributors and dealers from civil liability for crimes committed by third parties using their weapons.
The settlement with the maker of the rifle used in the 2012 elementary school massacre marks the first time a gun manufacturer has been held liable in a U.S. mass shooting.
NBC News
Sandy Hook families reach historic $73M settlement with gunmaker Remington
Elizabeth Chuck – February 15, 2022
Relatives of nine victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting have reached a $73 million settlement with Remington, the maker of the rifle used in the massacre, marking the first time a gun manufacturer has been held liable for a mass shooting in the United States.
“Today marks an inflection point,” Veronique de la Rosa, the mother of six-year-old victim Noah Pozner, said at a press conference Tuesday. “Today is a day of accountability for an industry that has thus far enjoyed operating with immunity and impunity, and for this I am grateful.”
The landmark victory comes after a protracted legal battle over how Remington marketed its Bushmaster AR-15-style rifle, which was used in the December 2012 killings of the 20 first graders and six educators in Newtown, Connecticut. The gunman fatally shot his mother before the elementary school rampage, then killed himself.
In their lawsuit against Remington, which has since filed for bankruptcy, families of the victims argued that the gun maker irresponsibly marketed the weapon to at-risk young men such as the Sandy Hook shooter through product placement in violent video games.
Remington, based in Madison, North Carolina, has denied the allegations. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment from NBC News on Tuesday.
Attorney for the families, Joshua Koskoff, began Tuesday’s press conference by displaying photos of the victims and described details about the final days of their lives: the Hanukkah candles that Noah proudly lit for the first time; the favorite diner breakfast that fellow first-grader Jesse Lewis loved to eat; the Christmas music that teacher Victoria Soto would listen to on her drive into work.
Last July, attorneys for Remington offered nearly $33 million to the families to settle the suit. At the time, Koskoff praised Remington’s insurers for their offer, even though the families did not accept at the time.
“These families would pay everything, give it all back, just for one minute” more with their loved ones, Koskoff said Tuesday.
The path to a settlement was complicated, with the lawsuit making its way through the state Supreme Courtafter Remington argued it should be shielded under a federal law designed to prevent gun manufacturers from being held liable for crimes in which their guns were used. In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court said it would allow the suit to go forward.
In September, a couple months after presenting its settlement offer, Remington subpoenaed school records of children and educators killed in the massacre.
Attorneys for the families immediately moved to seal the records.
“We have no explanation for why Remington subpoenaed the Newtown Public School District to obtain the kindergarten and first-grade academic, attendance and disciplinary records of these five schoolchildren,” Koskoff said, The Connecticut Post reported. “The records cannot possibly excuse Remington’s egregious marketing conduct, or be of any assistance in estimating the catastrophic damages in this case. The only relevant part of their attendance records is that they were at their desks on December 14, 2012.”
NY girl missing for 2 years found alive, stashed inside ‘small, cold and wet’ staircase
Matt Spillane, Poughkeepsie Journal – February 15, 2022
SAUGERTIES, New York — More than two years after she disappeared, a 6-year-old girl was found stashed under the staircase of a home in eastern New York.
The case broke Monday night when a detective pried open the staircase and found Paislee Shultis in a “small, cold, and wet” secret room, where she was hiding with her biological, “non-custodial” mother in a Fawn Road home, according to Town of Saugerties police.
Police arrested Paislee’s biological parents, who did not have custody of her and had been suspected of abducting her.
Paislee Shultis, who was reported missing in 2019, was found in Saugerties on Feb. 14, 2022.
Saugerties police initially said Paislee disappeared in Cayuga Heights in Tompkins County, but Cayuga Heights police said Tuesday that was untrue. Saugerties police said in a Facebook post in 2020 that Paislee went missing in Spencer, a village in Tioga County. Saugerties police could not be reached for clarification Tuesday.
She had last been seen with Kimberly Cooper and Kirk Shultis Jr., police said at the time. Multiple police agencies had investigated numerous leads about Paislee’s disappearance, including several that led police to that Saugerties house. But each time police checked it out the residents denied any knowledge of the girl’s whereabouts.
It was not immediately clear with whom the girl was living when she disappeared.
Cooper and Shultis Jr. were arrested Monday, along with Kirk Shultis Sr., who owns the house on Fawn Road with his wife.
Police said the investigation is ongoing and more arrests are pending.
Paislee was taken to the police station, where she was met by paramedics. She was in good health and released to her legal guardian, police said.
The Ulster County District Attorney’s Office could not immediately be reached for more information.
Paislee Shultis, 6, was found under this staircase on Fawn Road in Saugerties on Feb. 14, 2022.
‘Something out of place’
Police said Shultis Jr., the girl’s biological father, “resurfaced shortly after Paislee’s disappearance” and denied knowledge of his daughter’s whereabouts, and told police that he had not seen her since 2019, when he reported Cooper fled to Pennsylvania with his daughter.
During some follow-ups at the Fawn Road home, police said Shultis Jr. and his father allowed officers “limited access” to look around the home, “knowing the child and her abductor were hidden within the house and would not be found.”
Paislee Shultis, 6, was found under this staircase in a home on Fawn Road in Saugerties on Feb. 14, 2022.
The mystery of Paislee’s whereabouts was solved Monday, though, when police went to the Shultis’ home on a tip that Paislee was being held there. At 8:06 p.m. Saugerties police and state police took a search warrant to the house.
Shultis Sr. allegedly told police he did not know where Paislee was and he had not seen her since she was reported missing in 2019.
Police had been searching the house for more than an hour when Detective Erik Thiele noticed something odd about the way the steps were built on the staircase leading from the back of the home to the basement, where “something was out of place,” police said.
Det. Erik Thiele, an instructor for the Saugerties Police Department bike patrol, talks about training officers at the Saugerties Police Department in Saugerties, NY on Tuesday, June 8, 2021.
Thiele shined a flashlight through a crack between the wooden steps and saw what he thought was a blanket. The staircase seemed solid, police said, but they grabbed a tool and removed several of the wooden steps.
Detectives then “saw a pair of tiny feet,” police said, and after removing several more steps, they found Paislee and Cooper.
Cooper, 33, was charged with second-degree custodial interference and endangering the welfare of a child, both misdemeanors. She was also wanted on an arrest warrant issued through Ulster County Family Court, police said.
Cooper was arraigned in Saugerties Town Court and taken to the Ulster County Jail on the warrant.
Shultis Jr., 32, and Shultis Sr., 57, were both charged with first-degree custodial interference, a felony, and endangering the welfare of a child. They were both arraigned in Saugerties Town Court and released. They could not be reached for comment.
Cooper, Shultis Jr. and Shultis Sr. all had orders of protection issued against them to stay away from Paislee. They are due back in court Wednesday.
IRS Chief: We’re facing enormous challenges this tax filing season
Charles P. Rettig – February 15, 2022
As the IRS begins this tax season, it continues to face enormous challenges. Our dedicated workforce has done everything it can to prepare for filing day on April 18. Our immediate focus is simplifying the taxpayer’s filing experience by streamlining the process, answering as many questions as possible and reducing our historic inventories.
Today, millions of people are still waiting for prior years’ returns to be processed, and refund checks to arrive in the mail, while preparing for their upcoming tax filing. While we can’t immediately solve these significant issues, our employees are doing everything they can, and I am committed to returning to normal inventory levels before next year.
The IRS is operating without stable, multi-year funding in place, which creates additional impediments to our efforts to deal with our current situation. However, we have taken extraordinary measures to work through unprocessed returns and correspondence, including mandatory overtime by IRS employees, creating and redirecting surge teams to address the inventories, temporarily suspending certain automated compliance notices and, where possible, modernizing operating systems to accelerate the manual processing of inventories.
COVID hit us all. While facing consequential resource challenges as a result of chronic underfunding, the IRS worked as hard as possible, while taking on a significant increase in responsibilities while also facing unprecedented challenges from the pandemic. It has been my privilege to lead the IRS since 2018 as we have worked through the successful delivery of more than $1.5 trillion in refunds, stimulus payments, and advance payments of the Child Tax Credits – all during an excruciating pandemic. Through our work, we touch more Americans than any other private or public sector organization—and we are deeply proud to serve our country.
IRS federal building in Washington, DC. (Photo: Getty Creative)
For the current tax season, the IRS workforce has already delivered more than 4 million refunds worth nearly $10 billion just through Feb. 4. And yet millions are waiting for their returns to be processed, and many won’t be able to reach us when they call with questions this filing season. This is frustrating for taxpayers and for us.
We want to do more, but we face major challenges. Over the past decade, the IRS budget has been cut by nearly 20%. The agency today has as few employees as it did in the 1970s, despite a 60% increase in the United States population during that time and an unprecedented increase in responsibilities. While more than 90% of the over 160 million individual returns are filed electronically, the remaining people who file on paper lead to millions of time-intensive, manually processed paper returns.
As we have seen across our economy, technological improvements can do wonders to increase the efficiency of workforces and organizations. Without long-term, predictable funding, the IRS will continue to face severe limitations, unable to provide the service taxpayers deserve and need.
There are tangible consequences to American taxpayers who aren’t able to receive the level of service they deserve, as well as the IRS’s ability to enforce tax laws for ultra-wealthy tax cheats. Last year, the IRS received 120 million calls on certain phone lines during filing season (at times, calls came in at the rate of about 1,500 per second), but our limited workforce was able to answer fewer than 20% of them. Over the last several years, staffing for taxpayer assistance centers decreased so dramatically that less than a third as many taxpayers are able to receive face-to-face assistance from the IRS than they were in 2016.
There are several ways people can ensure a smoother filing process this year. Filing electronically with direct deposit can avoid processing delays, refund delays and later IRS notices. Taxpayers should pay extra attention if they received Economic Impact Payments or an advance Child Tax Credit in 2021. The IRS has sent out more than 150 million information letters this year. This will help assure information is reported accurately.
The reality at the IRS is that we know we need to do better, we’re committed to doing better, and we are trending in a positive direction. Our employees are doing everything they can. But we need help. As many IRS leaders have stated for most of the past decade, without long-term, predictable funding, the IRS will continue to be hamstrung, failing to provide the experience that taxpayers deserve.
Chuck Rettig currently serves as the 49th Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service.
It’s not just home prices. Rents rise sharply across the U.S.
Chris Arnold – February 14, 2022
A for rent sign in Palo Alto, California. Across the country rents are on the rise, in part due to a historic shortage of homes either to rent or buy.PAUL SAKUMA/AP
Last year, Laura Kraft landed a job in Orlando, Florida. She’d just gotten her PhD in entomology, meaning she studies bugs, and she’d be working on a big nature exhibit at a theme park. All that sounded great until she started looking for an apartment.
“I started looking at rent and was like, not sure if I was going to take the job,” she says. “The rent was so high in Orlando… it really blew me away.”
At first she looked for a place of her own. But anything in her price range had a waiting list at least 6 months long. So she found a Facebook group for theme park employees looking for roommates in order to afford a place to live.
Laura Kraft in her apartment in the Orlando area. She moved across the country for a new job and couldn’t believe how much it cost to rent a place.Courtesy of Laura Kraft
“My roommate and I together are paying $2,200,” Kraft says. “A lot of people that I know have like three, four, sometimes five roommates in a house.”
The cost of renting a place in Orlando rose nearly 30% just last year alone, according to a survey by the real estate firm Redfin. Cities in Florida, New York, and New Jersey are seeing particularly steep jumps in rent. As is Austin, Texas, with the biggest one year gain of 40%.
The survey, it should be noted, tracks new listings for apartments.
“That doesn’t literally mean that every person in Austin is going to see their rent go up 40 percent,” says Redfin’s Chief Economist Daryl Fairweather. “But it means that if you are on the market right now looking for an apartment or home to rent, the prices will be 40 percent higher than they were the year before.”
Some of the forces driving rents higher differ from city to city. Fairweather says a lot of technology workers have been moving to Austin and the migration of more people there is pushing up both rents and home prices. In New York City, rents are rebounding after falling earlier in the pandemic.
But she says rents are rising more than usual just about everywhere.
“The root cause of the problem is a lack of supply,” Fairweather says. “We have not built enough homes to meet demand.”
There a bunch of reasons for that. One of the biggest, she says, is restrictive zoning. Especially in higher-cost parts of the country, zoning rules make it hard to build cheaper smaller houses or apartments that are tightly packed together.
Meanwhile, Fairweather says more millennials in their late 20s and early 30s feel like they’re done with roommates or their parents’ basement.
“Millennials are the biggest generation,” she says. “We’re forming households, and we want a place of our own and that is causing an increase in demand.”
Redfin’s survey looks at the 50 largest U.S. cities. On average, it found the rents landlords were seeking for available homes and apartments rose 3% in 2020, which is about normal for recent years. But then last year, they rose 14%.
Government data show that the rent Americans are actually paying — not just the change in price for new listings — rose 3.8% over the past year. But, while less dramatic, that consumer price index also shows rents have been rising more than usual the past few months.
Allison Best-VanLiew is feeling the bite of those rising rents up in Buffalo, New York. “It’s been a little wild, to be honest,” she says.
By no stretch is Buffalo a hot housing market historically. Best-VanLiew and her husband have been renting on a busy street for a few years and they pay $900 a month.
“We do not have a dishwasher, which is normally fine.” But she says now they are thinking of having a baby. “The bottles alone, like you kind of need that.
And as they’ve been looking around for a better place, she says everything seems more expensive than it was a few years ago. “Between $1,200 and $1,400 for a place relatively close to this size with just a dishwasher,” she says.
Like a lot of young couples, she and her husband would rather buy a house. But with home prices hitting new records she says they’re having trouble saving enough for a down payment. And with so many would-be first time homebuyers priced out of the market, that boosts demand for rentals and helps push rents even higher.
Pollution causing more deaths than COVID, action needed, says U.N. expert
By Emma Farge – February 15, 2022
GENEVA (Reuters) – Pollution by states and companies is contributing to more deaths globally than COVID-19, a U.N. environmental report published on Tuesday said, calling for “immediate and ambitious action” to ban some toxic chemicals.
The report said pollution from pesticides, plastics and electronic waste is causing widespread human rights violations and at least 9 million premature deaths a year, and that the issue is largely being overlooked.
The coronavirus pandemic has caused close to 5.9 million deaths, according to data aggregator Worldometer.
“Current approaches to managing the risks posed by pollution and toxic substances are clearly failing, resulting in widespread violations of the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment,” the report’s author, U.N. Special Rapporteur David Boyd, concluded.
“I think we have an ethical and now a legal obligation to do better by these people,” he told Reuters later in an interview.
Due to be presented next month to the U.N. Human Rights Council, which has declared a clean environment a human right, the document was posted on the Council’s website on Tuesday.
It urges a ban on polyfluoroalkyl and perfluoroalkyl, man-made substances used in household products such as non-stick cookware that have been linked to cancer and dubbed “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down easily.
It also seeks the clean-up of polluted sites and, in extreme cases, the possible relocations of affected communities – many of them poor, marginalized and indigenous – from so-called “sacrifice zones”.
That term, originally used to describe nuclear test zones, was expanded in the report to include any heavily contaminated site or place rendered uninhabitable by climate change.
“What I hope to do by telling these stories of sacrifice zones is to really put a human face on these otherwise inexplicable, incomprehensible statistics (of pollution death tolls),” Boyd said.
Boyd considers the report, his latest in a series, to be his most hard-hitting yet and told Reuters he expects “push back” when he presents it to the Council in Geneva.
U.N. rights chief Michelle Bachelet has called environmental threats the biggest global rights challenge, and a growing number of climate and environmental justice cases are invoking human rights with success.
Chemical waste is set to be part of negotiations at a U.N. environment conference in Nairobi, Kenya, starting on Feb. 28, including a proposal to establish a devoted panel, similar to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
(Reporting by Emma Farge; editing by John Stonestreet and Grant McCool)
Accounting Firm Drops Trump Organization Over Dubious Financial Docs
Jose Pagliery – February 14, 2022
Mario Tama
The Trump Organization’s trusted outside accounting firm has taken the unprecedented step of ditching its client, explaining that the former president’s family company has a decade of financial statements that can’t be trusted.
The bombshell move by Mazars USA—the accounting firm that has long worked with former President Donald Trump’s family and friends—was revealed in court filings in New York on Monday.
The decision to drop Trump follows last month’s aggressive move by New York Attorney General Letitia James to publicly file documents detailing accounts of what it called “significant evidence” of financial fraud.
The AG’s office is in the midst of two similar investigations of the Trump empire: A civil lawsuit exploring potential bank fraud by the company, and a joint criminal probe with the Manhattan District Attorney into alleged tax dodging and financial fraud.
While the criminal case is proceeding quietly before a grand jury in New York City, Monday’s revelations stem from the AG’s civil lawsuit, which seeks to force Trump and two of his adult children to testify about business dealings.
In a letter to the Trump Organization on Feb. 9, the U.S. branch of the global accounting firm Mazars told the company that “the statements of financial condition for Donald J. Trump” ranging between 2011 and 2020 “should no longer be relied upon and you should inform any recipients thereof… that those documents should not be relied upon.” The firm explained that the decision was made in light of the AG’s revelations as well as “our own investigation.”
The letter goes on to sever all future business ties. “We have also reached the point such that there is a non-waivable conflict of interest with the Trump Organization,” Mazars wrote. “As a result, we are not able to provide any new work product to the Trump Organization.”
The AG’s office, which got a hold of the letter, filed it in court to bolster its case that Trump, Ivanka Trump, and Don Jr. should be forced to testify about how so many family real estate development projects and properties had wildly fluctuating values that seemed high whenever they needed loans but low whenever it came time to pay taxes.
The Trump Organization did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The letter also alluded to another matter that criminal investigators reviewed with the Manhattan DA’s office: A Trump building apartment in New York City that was provided to Matt Calamari Jr.—a family insider who is now the corporate director of security.
Junior, the son of Trump Organization COO Matthew Calamari Sr., received immunity from a criminal prosecution when he testified before the grand jury investigating company benefits—such as corporate apartments—that may have run afoul of taxing laws, according to a source with direct knowledge of his testimony.
In the firm’s Feb. 9 letter, Mazars general counsel William J. Kelly described how accountants had not yet been able to finish preparing the tax paperwork for the former president and first lady, Melania, because they hadn’t answered questions about Calamari Jr.’s fringe benefits.
“We believe the only information left to complete those returns is the information regarding the Matt Calimari Jr. apartment. As you know, Donald Bender has been asking for this information for several months but has not received it,” Kelly wrote.
Donald Bender, a partner at Mazars, has served as the trusted accountant for Trump and his lieutenants for years, a role that has since drawn scrutiny from law enforcement, according to sources with firsthand knowledge of the transactions and current investigations.
Mazars has found itself in the spotlight since at least 2016, when Trump successfully ran for president but broke with tradition and refused to disclose his tax returns. The firm successfully protected Trump’s tax returns from seeing the light of day, receiving widespread rebuke in the process. And the precedent-establishing Supreme Court fight that ultimately handed those tax documents to the Manhattan DA—but not Congress—bears the firm’s name.
West megadrought worsens to driest in at least 1,200 years
Seth Borenstein – February 14, 2022
Water drips from a faucet near boat docks sitting on dry land at the Browns Ravine Cove area of drought-stricken Folsom Lake in Folsom, Calif., on May 22, 2022. The American West’s megadrought deepened so much last year that it is now the driest it has been in at least 1200 years and a worst-case scenario playing out live, a new study finds. (AP Photo/Josh Edelson, File)ASSOCIATED PRESS
The American West’s megadrought deepened so much last year that it is now the driest in at least 1,200 years and is a worst-case climate change scenario playing out live, a new study finds.
A dramatic drying in 2021 — about as dry as 2002 and one of the driest years ever recorded for the region — pushed the 22-year drought past the previous record-holder for megadroughts in the late 1500s and shows no signs of easing in the near future, according to a study Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change.
The study calculated that 42% of this megadrought can be attributed to human-caused climate change.
“Climate change is changing the baseline conditions toward a drier, gradually drier state in the West and that means the worst-case scenario keeps getting worse,” said study lead author Park Williams, a climate hydrologist at UCLA. “This is right in line with what people were thinking of in the 1900s as a worst-case scenario. But today I think we need to be even preparing for conditions in the future that are far worse than this.”
Williams studied soil moisture levels in the West — a box that includes California, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, most of Oregon and Idaho, much of New Mexico, western Colorado, northern Mexico, and the southwest corners of Montana and Texas — using modern measurements and tree rings for estimates that go back to the year 800. That’s about as far back as estimates can reliably go with tree rings.
A few years ago, Williams studied the current drought and said it qualified as a lengthy and deep “megadrought” and that the only worse one was in the 1500s. He figured the current drought wouldn’t surpass that one because megadroughts tended to peter out after 20 years. And, he said, 2019 was a wet year so it looked like the western drought might be coming to an end.
But the region dried up in late 2020 and 2021.
All of California was considered in official drought from mid-May until the end of 2021, and at least three-quarters of the state was at the highest two drought levels from June through Christmas, according to the U.S. drought monitor.
“For this drought to have just cranked up back to maximum drought intensity in late 2020 through 2021 is a quite emphatic statement by this 2000s drought saying that we’re nowhere close to the end,” Williams said. This drought is now 5% drier than the old record from the 1500s, he said.
The drought monitor says 55% of the U.S. West is in drought with 13% experiencing the two highest drought levels.
This megadrought really kicked off in 2002 — one of the driest years ever, based on humidity and tree rings, Williams said.
“I was wondering if we’d ever see a year like 2002 again in my life and in fact, we saw it 20 years later, within the same drought,” Williams said. The drought levels in 2002 and 2021 were a statistical tie, though still behind 1580 for the worst single year.
Climate change from the burning of fossil fuels is bringing hotter temperatures and increasing evaporation in the air, scientists say.
Williams used 29 models to create a hypothetical world with no human-caused warming then compared it to what happened in real life — the scientifically accepted way to check if an extreme weather event is due to climate change. He found that 42% of the drought conditions are directly from human-caused warming. Without climate change, he said, the megadrought would have ended early on because 2005 and 2006 would have been wet enough to break it.
The study “is an important wake-up call,” said Jonathan Overpeck, dean of environment at the University of Michigan, who wasn’t part of the study. “Climate change is literally baking the water supply and forests of the Southwest, and it could get a whole lot worse if we don’t halt climate change soon.”
Williams said there is a direct link between drought and heat and the increased wildfires that have been devastating the West for years. Fires need dry fuel that drought and heat promote.
Eventually, this megadrought will end by sheer luck of a few good rainy years, Williams said. But then another one will start.
Daniel Swain, a UCLA climate scientist who wasn’t involved in the study, said climate change is likely to make megadrought “a permanent feature of the climate of the Colorado River watershed during the 21st century.”
‘Mad’ Mike Hughes’ Last Ride: Inside a Flat-Earther’s Doomed Mission
Kelly Weill – February 15, 2022
Mad Rocket Scientist – Credit: Matt Hartman/AP
In 2018, while reporting from the Flat Earth International Conference in Colorado, I met a man who’d towed a rocket ship into a hotel conference room. He was Mike Hughes, an amateur rocket stuntman and vocal champion of Flat Earth theory. He hoped to launch himself into space to take a photograph that would prove once and for all whether Earth was a globe, or a flat disc.
Though the answer might seem obvious to the vast majority of globe-dwellers, a small but committed movement of conspiracy theorists believes Earth is not a sphere but a great, celestial Frisbee contained within a dome. I spent years within this movement while reporting my bookOff The Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything. At first I believed the theory to be weird, even occasionally funny. Then in February 2020, it turned deadly serious. That month, Mike Hughes died while trying to ride his homemade rocket thousands of feet into the atmosphere. He was among a collective of conspiracy theorists pushing their inquiries to life-threatening extremes.
The rocket took off like a punctured balloon, wobbly and erratic. A jagged trail of steam traced the ship’s path across the sky, up thousands of feet above the California desert. For a moment, the rocket seemed to hover, oblivious to gravity.
Then the inevitable descent. To onlookers on the ground, the ship and the man inside it were a blur of black.
“Come on, parachute,” one watcher murmured anxiously.
“Pull it, Mike,” another man shouted. But the parachutes that had bloomed above Mike Hughes on his previous death-defying rocket launches were nowhere to be seen. “Pull it! Pull it! Oh God.”
Hughes’s rocket crashed into the dust with absolute finality. There was no need to call an ambulance.
Until that moment, Hughes had been one of the most famous living Flat Earthers. He had earned his fame by taking the theory to its logical conclusion. He was going to build a rocket ship, blast into Earth’s upper reaches, and see for his own eyes whether the horizon was flat or curved. “This space launch is to prove or disprove the Flat Earth,” he told me in spring 2019.
I thought it was a terrible idea. I suggested, much too gently, that it was a terrible idea. I thought it was such a terrible idea that I wrote a chapter about Hughes and the cadre of conspiracy theorists attempting dangerous stunts to prove their beliefs. I titled the chapter “Someone Is Going to Die for No Reason.” Then I dropped the matter and never raised it to him again. Hughes was 64 at the time and didn’t need my advice, I reasoned. Besides, I doubted he’d really attempt the launch. For the past year, he’d notified me of various complications: parachute malfunctions and unforeseen weather that delayed his project. I began to suspect he was searching for excuses, avoiding a dangerous stunt that would force him to confront the curved horizon. I was wrong about his convictions. On Feb. 22, 2020, in a gray stretch of desert, Hughes joined the growing ranks of conspiracy-theory casualties, and I’ve had to live with that scrapped chapter title on my conscience ever since.
In the mid-1840s, when Samuel Rowbotham popularized Flat Earth as a “zetetic” science, he preached that zetetics should believe only what they could personally observe. Rowbotham was a fraud, routinely borrowing and often even misrepresenting real scientists’ work when it suited him. But Hughes, with his insistence on seeing the world for himself, was one of the truest zetetics I’ve ever known.
Hughes had an advantage that most other would-be zetetic Flat Earthers lacked: he knew how to build a rocket and had no fear of dangerous stunts. Born to a race-car hobbyist in 1956, Hughes spent much of his youth traveling the county-fair circuit, where his father competed in dirt-track races. Oklahoma City was home, but Hughes and his family spent so much time traveling from state to state, speedway to speedway, that life began to feel like a long racing circuit of its own. “It’s just consuming. It consumes your life,” Hughes wrote of his father’s hobby in his self-published autobiography. “You got no time for anything else and it just eats at relationships like termites to wood.”
When his pit-crew gigs dried up like his racing career, Hughes started driving a limousine, and chasing thrills as a freelance stuntman on the side. While trying to outdo a famous stunt by daredevil Evel Knievel, Hughes began tinkering with homemade rockets, which could propel him on long horizontal jumps off ramps. One stunt led to the next. If he could launch across a river, he thought, then perhaps he could break the record for vertical height in a homemade rocket. He toppled that record, then broke his own record on a subsequent launch, inching upward each time until his dreams became a list of altitudes.
“I don’t believe in science,” he told reporters in November 2017. “I know about aerodynamics and fluid dynamics and how things move through the air, about the certain size of rocket nozzles and thrust. But that’s not science, that’s just a formula. There’s no difference between science and science fiction.”
But there is a difference. A science fiction author can save a character from certain death with a few twists of plot. Hughes was working with the indifferent mathematical fact of gravity. And as early as a March 2018 launch — Hughes’s first after coming out as a Flat Earther— that difference very nearly killed him.
Hughes had intended the launch to take him only eighteen hundred feet in the air, much too low to observe the planet’s curvature. Still, he managed to fundraise more than $7,000 online from Flat Earthers — and from people who thought his project was a big joke. They almost funded a tragedy. Short on cash, Hughes built the rocket in his garage and converted an old mobile home into a launch ramp. Then he hauled the whole thing to Amboy, a windswept California ghost town with a history of bad karma: stories of hauntings and occult rituals and bloody motel rooms. Other towns with legitimate governments had turned Hughes away, unwilling to deal with the headache of a potential rocket catastrophe. But Amboy, a popular filming location for horror movies, was virtually a theme park for destruction, and its owner welcomed Hughes for what was nearly another nightmare.
As he approached his rocket (emblazoned with research flat earth), Hughes noticed a hissing noise, like an air mattress deflating. The noise was a vapor leak, but after the trip to Amboy and the makeshift launch-ramp assembly, no one knew how long the rocket had been compromised, which would determine how dangerous it would be. “We don’t know if it’s been going for five minutes or five hours,” Hughes told me. A friend who had helped with his rocket construction urged him to wait, telling him they could fix the problem, if Hughes was willing to postpone.
“I said ‘You know what, I’m not waiting any longer. I got in, and I did it,” Hughes told me. His secondhand parachutes were 23 and 21 years old. “I didn’t even know if they were going to work. They were all I could afford.”
One of the chutes failed on the way down, and Hughes slammed into the earth, barely clinging to consciousness. “It was pretty ugly,” he said. “I could have died.” When he recovered from the hard landing, Hughes announced his new plans to prove Flat Earth by flying to outer space in a “rockoon,” a homemade rocket attached to weather balloons that would carry it upward after the rocket fuel burned out. He would build the rockoon in his garage, ride it 68 miles above Earth’s surface, and, before gravity reclaimed him and his parachutes deployed, take a photograph of the world. It was a breathtakingly dangerous stunt, but everyone who knew Hughes said there was no talking him out of it. “He had an IQ of 136. He’s very smart,” Waldo Stakes, Hughes’s close friend who had helped him build his rockets, told me, “but he’s very hardheaded . . . Once he’s made his mind up about something, he’ll just continue no matter what. He’ll just do it.”
Just do it, death be damned, is a popular sentiment among Flat Earth’s most extreme zetetics. At the 2019 Flat Earth International Conference, I found myself seated behind a man named Bobby Hartley, who wore a T-shirt advertising a 2025 trip to fabled lands beyond Antarctica.
The frozen continent often conjures an air of foreboding among Flat Earthers. Like most popular Flat Earth models, including Rowbotham’s, argue that Antarctica extends like an icy ring around the pancake planet, keeping all its oceans in check. Common variations on this claim include a theory that Antarctica’s most distant edge touches the base of a dome that encloses Earth and that the international treaties against colonizing Antarctica are actually part of a nefarious scheme to prevent people from seeing the dome. This subset of believers claims that Antarctica is highly militarized and that unauthorized explorers will eventually hit a kind of polar Area 51, defended by armies of the New World Order.
There are dissenters within the Flat Earth world, of course. A group called the Infinite Plane Society suggests that Antarctica extends out to eternity, a universe of ice to cradle our little blue oasis. Hartley told me he thought another world existed beyond the ice wall, and that other people likely already lived in this distant land. “I just got into Flat Earth about a year ago, but I’m obsessed with this land beyond Antarctica. I want to go there so bad,” Hartley told me. He seemed like a pleasant guy, and our conversation felt almost normal, until he divulged, laughingly, that the trip was something of a suicide mission. “Of course, we all might die. I’m not married. I have no kids.”
It was a startling comment from someone I’d just met 30 seconds earlier, and I asked him whether he was serious. Apparently so.
“There is about a five percent chance of me making it. Out of that five percent chance of making it, I would say a one percent chance of ever coming back. It would almost be a one-way trip.” Those odds would be worth it, even to spend 24 hours in the land beyond the ice, he said. I made some polite noises, with what I hoped was a neutral expression.
I’ll probably never be any good talking death wishes with strangers, but a couple years in this scene had made me better at it. This was the second time that year, for example, that I’d spoken with a Flat Earther who had pitched me on a likely deadly trip to the lands beyond Antarctica. Months earlier, I’d spoken with Michael Marshalek, a friend of Mike Hughes, who was planning his own trip across the ice.
Digitally manipulated image of moon casting shadow on flat earth. – Credit: Ikon Images/AP
Ikon Images/AP
“Mad Mike is going up, and I’ll be headed south,” Marshalek told me. He was out to prove Flat Earth by trekking as far as Antarctica would take him. For Marshalek, all specicies of Earth’s shape were under consideration until he reached its edge. “I think it’s infinite until proven otherwise,” he said. “If there’s a dome, which many Flat Earthers believe in, I myself want to go out there and see that, take a chunk of the dome.”
Like Hughes, Marshalek was making steady, even worrying progress toward setting off on his mission. A tech worker for a major New York City bank, he already had most of the funds saved for his planned expedition by the time we spoke in May 2019. He intended to reach the South Pole (or whatever’s out there) by snowkiting, a technique that involves riding skis while clinging to a large kite or sail that captures the wind. The plan had obvious challenges. Snowkiting is an extreme sport, one that leaves a rider at the mercy of sudden winds and rocky terrains — two conditions Antarctica has in frightening abundance. Snowkiting also prioritizes speed over distance. The world’s longest and most challenging snowkite race is the Ragnarok, a scrupulously supervised 100-kilometer race in Norway each year. Antarctica, meanwhile, is merciless and more than 2,381 miles (or 3,831 kilometers) across. Famed polar explorer Børge Ousland has used a kite and skis to cross parts of the continent, but he also offset them with grueling hikes in parts of the expedition where snowkiting would be, in his own words, “certain death.”
And Ousland knew where he was going. He knew how much food to pack, how many days he could survive in the frozen wild before sending out an SOS. Marshalek, with his philosophy of “infinite until proven otherwise,” would not be setting out with the same luxuries. If he planned to survive a journey that could be infinite, I asked him, wouldn’t he eventually need to turn around and come home? How would he know when that was necessary? Marshalek promised to reveal his full itinerary in due time. When he did, he expected it would strike a blow against “edge-ophobes,” his term for Flat Earthers who don’t seek the planet’s outer limits. He accused edge-ophobes of being afraid to explore, caught in a gridlock of excuses about why they can’t simply traverse Antarctica. “They’re stuck in debates all the time,” he said. “They say, ‘You can’t burn fuel, there’s treaties, it’s too cold.’ They’re all excuses.”
Here’s another excuse, for any Flat Earthers reading: anyone trying to sell you a ticket for a Flat Earth–oriented Antarctic expedition is probably trying to scam you. I’ve stumbled upon two of these grifts without really trying.
In March 2017, someone who called himself John Bramha began registering social media accounts and buddying up with Flat Earthers online. Bramha claimed to be part of the elite group that enforced Antarctica’s boundaries, protecting it from intruders. He and a handful of others from this secret police force had turned rogue aftr discovering the wonders that lay at the earth’s edge, and now he was leading expeditions to the end of the world to share the truth of what lay beyond. For his trouble, of course, he needed funding. Specifically $1 million in hard-to-track Bitcoin payments. “You might think that’s a lot of money, but it’s just the cost of 10 Tesla Model S cars,” he told viewers in a YouTube clip. “People spend, collectively, way more than this on personal luxuries.” He planned to earn his million by selling 10 seats on his expedition for $100,000 each. He never showed his face in his videos, and the avatar he used on Facebook and Twitter had been stolen from a stock-image website.
By the way, Bramha said, the $100,000 trip would cure his customers of cancer. The dome surrounding Flat Earth was actually a wall of pure energy that “cures you instantly of anything you might be suffering from, medically,” he claimed on YouTube. He shared a supposed picture of said energy wall, which looked like a pretty standard glacier.
For a group that doesn’t believe in gravity or the moon, Flat Earthers were remarkably quick to support Bramha. At least one popular Flat Earth YouTube channel made a video vouching for the shadowy Antarctican, without ever meeting him. Flat Earthers tweeted that they’d filled out applications for Bramha’s $100,000 excursion, and by summer 2017 Bramha claimed (albeit dubiously) that he’d sold six tickets. Of those alleged customers, two were counting on the trip to save their lives. “We have two persons on board who are suffering from Cancer and this expedition will heal them,” Bramha wrote on Facebook.
The expedition was scheduled for November 2017, at which point (of course) Bramha vanished from the internet, taking with him whatever money he’d swindled from the desperate. The popular Flat Earth YouTube channel that had vouched for him uploaded a new video, this time claiming Bramha’s scam was evidence of a conspiracy to make Flat Earthers look bad. As it turned out, the new video noted, Bramha’s picture of the “pure energy” glacier had been taken by a professional photojournalist focused on the environment and climate change. The photojournalist had won grants from scientific institutions, including NASA. The connection to NASA, that great Flat Earth bogeyman, was enough for Flat Earthers to accuse Bramha of being a “big science” saboteur. To them, Flat Earth theory was still vindicated, in its way: someone wanted to suppress its believers.
Remarkably, the following year, someone else tried a similar stunt. A company called Over the Poles offered a onetime flight over part of Antarctica starting at $11,900. The trip is technically possible, although rarely attempted, due to the danger involved. One notorious 1979 Antarctic sightseeing flight left all 257 passengers and crew dead after it crashed into a mountain in whiteout conditions. Over the Poles said it was going much farther inland than that deadly crash site and, while it did not market exclusively to Flat Earthers, it acknowledged the conspiracy movement on its website. (John Bramha and Over the Poles did not return requests for comment.)
Michael Marshaek told me he bought a ticket in the brief months that Over the Poles operated its website. Then, like Bramha’s venture before it, the company and all its affliates vanished from the internet, leaving people holding expensive tickets to nowhere. Yet as vicious as the Antarctica scams were to their victims, the situation could have been worse: the ice wall–curious crowd could have taken an ill-planned trip to the South Pole and died. They would all have joined the growing ranks of conspiracy theorists committing real-world harm in an effort to prove their beliefs.
Callifornia’s Shasta Lake depleted by drought. NNehring / E+ / Getty Images
The Southwestern U.S. is currently experiencing its worst megadrought in 1,200 years, a new study has found.
The research, published in Nature Climate Change Monday, found that the period from 2000 to 2021 was the region’s driest since at least 800 A.D.
“Anyone who has been paying attention knows that the west has been dry for most of the last couple decades,” study lead author and University of California, Los Angeles climate scientist Park Williams told The Guardian. “We now know from these studies that is dry not only from the context of recent memory but in the context of the last millennium.”
A megadrought is a dry spell that lasts for more than 20 years. These extended dry spells are naturally occurring in the region. However, the climate crisis has made the current drought 42 percent more extreme.
“The results are really concerning, because it’s showing that the drought conditions we are facing now are substantially worse because of climate change,” Williams told the Los Angeles Times. “But that also there is quite a bit of room for drought conditions to get worse.”
The researchers based their findings on evidence of past droughts recorded in tree rings from around 1,600 sites in the North American West, from Montana to Northern Mexico. They focused on droughts that lasted for 23 to 30 years.
The new study builds on previous research which found that the period from 2000 to 2018 was the driest since a megadrought in the 1500s. The extremely dry summer of 2021 “really pushed it over the top,” Williams told The New York Times, making the current 22 year period the driest since 800 A.D., which is the point at which the researchers’ data set begins. The study authors calculated that around 19 percent of the severity of 2021’s drought could be attributed to climate change.
The megadrought is already having major impacts across the region, the Los Angeles Times pointed out. It has depleted California’s reservoirs, shrunken Utah’s Great Salt Lake to record low levels and fueled extreme wildfires. And the bad news is that there isn’t necessarily an end in sight.
“This drought at 22 years is still in full swing,” Williams told The New York Times., “and it is very, very likely that this drought will survive to last 23 years.”
In fact, researchers believe it is likely to last as long as 30 years. Further, if it weren’t for the climate crisis, the drought would likely have ended in 2005 or 2006 when rainfall would have been enough to relieve it, The AP reported.
Julie Cole, a University of Michigan climate scientist who was not involved in the research, told The New York Times that the study shows how temperature can make more of a difference than precipitation when it comes to prologing a drought.
“[T]he air is basically more capable of pulling the water out of the soil, out of vegetation, out of crops, out of forests,” Cole said. “And it makes for drought conditions to be much more extreme.”
Average temperatures in the Southwestern U.S. have been 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit higher since 2000 when compared to the previous 50 years, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Jonathan Overpeck, the dean of environment at the University of Michigan who wasn’t part of the study, told The AP that it was an “important wake-up call.”
“Climate change is literally baking the water supply and forests of the Southwest, and it could get a whole lot worse if we don’t halt climate change soon,” he said.
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