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For the First Time, California Is Enforcing Water Restrictions

by LanoraKitamura Posted on April 1, 2015

Mother Jones

Today, California Governor Jerry Brown announced mandatory water restrictions for the first time in the state’s history. The announcement follows a drought of more than three years, which has officials worrying that Californians may have only one year of drinking water left.

The regulations require California cities to decrease water use by 25 percent, though, crucially, only requires agricultural users to report their water use and submit drought management plans. Agriculture accounts for about 80 percent of California’s water usage. (For more drought background, check out our past coverage on agricultural water use—almonds are the biggest suck—and municipal water use.)

From the press release:

The following is a summary of the executive order issued by the Governor today.

Save Water

For the first time in state history, the Governor has directed the State Water Resources Control Board to implement mandatory water reductions in cities and towns across California to reduce water usage by 25 percent. This savings amounts to approximately 1.5 million acre-feet of water over the next nine months, or nearly as much as is currently in Lake Oroville.

To save more water now, the order will also:

Replace 50 million square feet of lawns throughout the state with drought tolerant landscaping in partnership with local governments;
Direct the creation of a temporary, statewide consumer rebate program to replace old appliances with more water and energy efficient models; Require campuses, golf courses, cemeteries and other large landscapes to make significant cuts in water use; and
Prohibit new homes and developments from irrigating with potable water unless water-efficient drip irrigation systems are used, and ban watering of ornamental grass on public street medians.

Increase Enforcement

The Governor’s order calls on local water agencies to adjust their rate structures to implement conservation pricing, recognized as an effective way to realize water reductions and discourage water waste.

Agricultural water users – which have borne much of the brunt of the drought to date, with hundreds of thousands of fallowed acres, significantly reduced water allocations and thousands of farmworkers laid off – will be required to report more water use information to state regulators, increasing the state’s ability to enforce against illegal diversions and waste and unreasonable use of water under today’s order. Additionally, the Governor’s action strengthens standards for Agricultural Water Management Plans submitted by large agriculture water districts and requires small agriculture water districts to develop similar plans. These plans will help ensure that agricultural communities are prepared in case the drought extends into 2016.

Additional actions required by the order include:

Taking action against water agencies in depleted groundwater basins that have not shared data on their groundwater supplies with the state;
Updating standards for toilets and faucets and outdoor landscaping in residential communities and taking action against communities that ignore these standards; and
Making permanent monthly reporting of water usage, conservation and enforcement actions by local water suppliers.

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For the First Time, California Is Enforcing Water Restrictions

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White Men Are Overdosing on Heroin at a Record Rate

by Juliane84J Posted on March 9, 2015

Mother Jones

A decades-long surge in heroin use has left behind a trail of overdose victims. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released this week found that the number of heroin overdoses quadrupled from 1,842 in 2000 to 8,257 in 2013—with a significant boost among people between the ages of 18 and 44, particularly white men.

Dr. Len Paulozzi, a medical epidemiologist who studies drug overdoses at the CDC’s Injury Center, says that both the growing availability of heroin nationwide and the shift among prescription drug users to heroin use may have contributed to the dramatic rise in deaths. “Thirty years ago, people snorting heroin never used OxyContin or Vicodin before” using heroin, says Paulozzi, who did not contribute to the CDC report. But now the drug’s abusers start with prescription drugs, he says, turning these meds into gateway drugs. A National Survey on Drug Use and Health study found that heroin abuse was 19 times higher among people who had previously abused pain relievers.

The increase in overdoses follows a federal crackdown on prescription painkillers, beginning toward the end of the Clinton era and lasting through the Bush administration, that resulted in a rash of arrests for illegal use during the mid-2000s. While the rate of deaths involving prescription painkillers like OxyContin appears to have leveled off, heroin overdoses have risen 348 percent. Most of the deaths occurred after 2010. That year, a new tamper-resistant form of Oxy hit the market, making it less potent and harder to abuse.

The rate of heroin deaths accelerated among people between the ages of 18 and 24, from 0.8 deaths per 100,000 people in 2000 to 3.9 deaths per 100,000 in 2013. For people between 25 and 44 years old, the rate jumped from 1.3 deaths per 100,000 people in 2000 to 5.4 per 100,000 in 2013. Among young and middle-aged white people, that death rate reached 7.0 per 100,000 by 2013.

The CDC report also highlighted the stark gender and regional disparities among those who overdose. Deaths among men from heroin overdoses were four times higher than those among women between 2000 and 2013. While heroin overdoses increased throughout the country, the greatest number occurred in the Northeast and Midwest. In those regions, particularly near cities, the Justice Department observed the illicit drug as a rising threat—especially given the reported spike in the use of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid some 30 times more potent than heroin.

According to the Washington Post, the Justice Department predicted the emerging trend in 2002: “As initiatives taken to curb the abuse of OxyContin are successfully implemented, abusers of OxyContin…also may begin to use heroin, especially if it is readily available, pure, and relatively inexpensive.” A flood of heroin from Mexico, the world’s third-largest opium producer, also factored into the drug’s availability in the United States. In 2013, the Drug Enforcement Administration seized 2,196 kilograms of powder and black tar at the US-Mexico border, a nearly 160 percent bump from 2009.

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White Men Are Overdosing on Heroin at a Record Rate

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EPA to Obama: You gotta reject Keystone

by MAQReginavpus Posted on February 3, 2015

EPA to Obama: You gotta reject Keystone

By on 3 Feb 2015commentsShare

Extracting tar-sands oil from Canada would lead to “a significant increase in greenhouse gas emissions,” says the U.S. EPA.

Since the Keystone XL pipeline would facilitate tar-sands extraction, and President Obama said he would only approve the proposed pipeline if it “does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution,” the EPA is in effect saying to the president, “Reject it!”

Right now the pipeline project is being reviewed by the State Department, which will make a recommendation to Obama on whether to give it an OK or a KO. State asked eight other federal agencies, including EPA, to offer their views on the project by yesterday. EPA did so, arguing as it has before that the pipeline would have major environmental and climate impacts. The EPA’s use of the word “significant” is, well, significant, as that’s the same word Obama used in laying out his criteria for making a decision.

Says climate activist (and Grist board member) Bill McKibben, “In a city where bureaucrats rarely say things right out loud, the EPA has come pretty close. Its knife-sharp comments make clear that despite the State Department’s relentless spin, Keystone is a climate disaster by any realistic assessment.”

The EPA has been unenthusiastic about Keystone for years, but it’s even more skeptical now that oil prices are so low. Fuel Fix explains:

In a letter to the State Department released Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency said plummeting crude prices could make the proposed pipeline vital to Canadian oil sands developers who face higher costs to ship their crude by rail.

An earlier State Department analysis of the project found that Alberta, Canada’s oil sands likely would be developed with or without Keystone XL. But the EPA noted that “this conclusion was based in large part on projections of the global price of oil.”

With domestic West Texas Intermediate crude hovering around $50, it’s important to revisit that analysis, said EPA Assistant Administrator for Enforcement Cynthia Giles.

Says the Natural Resources Defense Council, “There should be no more doubt that President Obama must reject the proposed pipeline once and for all.”

Now we just have to wait to see if Obama agrees.

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Is the Gates Foundation Still Investing in Private Prisons?

by KentMolloy Posted on December 8, 2014

Mother Jones

One year after Mother Jones reported on multi-million-dollar investments made on behalf of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that appeared to contradict the foundation’s mission, the philanthropy’s trust will not say if one of its most controversial holdings is still on its books.

In its 2012 tax filing, the Gates Foundation Trust, which manages the foundation’s endowment, reported a $2.2 million investment in the GEO Group, a Florida-based prison company. In its most recent tax forms, the Gates Foundation Trust listed an investment in the GEO Group worth more than $2 million.

In recent years, the GEO Group has faced accusations of detainee abuse and substandard care in multiple states. In 2012, Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Office of Detention Oversight reported that GEO Group’s Adelanto facility near Los Angeles had committed “several egregious errors” in administering medical care to detainees. (GEO Group has repeatedly dismissed allegations of mistreatment.) More recently, a group of former immigrant detainees in Colorado sued the company for making them work around the prison for minimal pay, sometimes under the threat of solitary confinement. (The GEO Group said detainees were working under a “volunteer work program” and that its $1-per-day wages met federal standards.) The Gates Foundation Trust did not respond to requests for comment directed through a foundation spokesperson.

According to the Gates Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates—the only members of the trust’s board—have defined areas that the trust will not invest in, “such as companies whose profit model is centrally tied to corporate activity that Bill and Melinda Gates find egregious.” Tobacco companies fall into that category.

The trust’s last reported investment in the GEO Group took the form of a $2,148,790 bank loan. (The Gates Foundation Trust did not issue the loan itself. The term “bank loan” refers to a type of corporate debt that companies with low credit ratings occasionally sell through a conventional bank to get extra cash.) The asset was reported in a tax form filed with the Internal Revenue Service this October, but is accurate only through October 2013.

Bank loans can yield higher returns for investors than stocks or bonds, but their ownership is harder to trace independently.

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In April, after demanding Gates divest from the GEO Group, supporters of a coalition of immigrant, Native American, and Latino rights groups rallied outside the foundation’s Seattle headquarters. The foundation eventually accepted more than 10,000 petitions from the activists and promised to submit their grievances to the trust.

“Bill Gates needs to be transparent about whether they’re still investing in GEO Group,” says Mariana Ruiz Firmat, managing director for Presente, which organized that protest. “It’s really problematic for the foundation, which claims to invest in communities of color. By investing in GEO Group now or in the past, that goes against communities of color.”

Christopher Petrella, a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, who published a study this year demonstrating that private prisons are disproportionately filled with people of color, sees a similar contradiction between the trust’s investment in GEO Group and its declared mission of “improving the quality of life for individuals around the world.”

“In my estimation, such a contradiction is difficult to justify,” he said in an email.

In an interview with the Seattle Stranger at the time of the April protest, foundation spokesman Jonah Goldman said the staff were sympathetic to the outcry since “everybody at the foundation is deeply committed to social justice and human rights.” Yet, in an instance of what reporter Ansel Herz called “philanthro-splaining,” Goldman rationalized the foundation’s private-prison investments. “The foundation invests in life-saving technologies, in US schools, in making sure people living with AIDS in Africa are less likely to die,” Goldman said. “The trust invests in a lot of things to make sure we have the most money we can have to do that job.”

Last June, after our story ran, the trust pulled its investments in G4S, a United Kingdom-based private security group which operates a number of youth detention centers in the United States, and which had come under fire for maintaining Israeli detention facilities. At the time, a spokesman for the Gates family gave a vague explanation for why the trust had ended its investment: “Like other large foundations, the foundation trust evaluates its holdings regularly, both for performance and fit. As a result of this, the foundation trust no longer holds an investment in G4S.”

The foundation’s investments in the prison industry have been waning. In 2003, three years after the Gates Foundation was formed, tax returns show its trust held more than $23 million in bonds from Corrections Corporation of America and a $7 million bond from Wackenhut Corrections Corporation, GEO’s predecessor. By 2012, the trust had reduced its investment in the GEO Group by 70 percent and no longer retained any investments in CCA.

According to its tax forms, the Gates Foundation’s total assets were worth more than $40 billion in 2013, up from $36 billion at the beginning of the fiscal year. Most of this increase came from investment income.

The Gates Foundation first caught flack over its financial holdings in 2007, when the Los Angeles Times published a major investigation showing that the trust’s investments were actually undermining public health gains it was promoting. A Nigerian boy featured in the story had received Gates-funded polio and measles vaccinations yet suffered from a cough made worse by pollution from an oil refinery owned by the Italian company Eni. The Gates Foundation was one of the company’s investors.

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Is the Gates Foundation Still Investing in Private Prisons?

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3 Ways Obama’s Immigration Executive Action Changes Everything (and One Way It Doesn’t)

by eltonwagner4653 Posted on November 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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The details of President Barack Obama’s much-rumored, much-debated executive action on immigration have been leaked to the press, and the broad outline, according to Fox News and the New York Times, includes deportation relief for upwards of 5 million people.

Republicans are already lining up to block the White House’s plans, and Obama’s successor could go ahead and reverse course in 2017, anyway. Still, here are three reported provisions that could have a dramatic impact on the lives of the United States’ 11 million undocumented immigrants:

1. Expansion of DACA, the program for DREAMers: Back in 2012, a Department of Homeland Security directive known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) extended deportation relief to those young immigrants who came to the United States before their 16th birthday and went on to graduate from high school or serve in the US military. As Vox‘s Dara Lind has reported, the program has been a success for the roughly 600,000 immigrants who received deferred action by June 2014, although just as many are eligible but haven’t yet applied. According to the Fox News report, Obama’s executive action would move the cutoff arrival date from June 2007 to January 1, 2010, and remove the age limit (31 as of June ’12); a Migration Policy Institute (MPI) report from September detailed how changes to the initial plan could make hundreds of thousands of immigrants DACA-eligible:

“Executive Action for Unauthorized Immigrants,” Migration Policy Institute, 2014

2. Relief for the undocumented parents of US citizen children: According to the Times, a key part of the executive action “will allow many parents of children who are American citizens or legal residents to obtain legal work documents and no longer worry about being discovered, separated from their families and sent away,” a move that would legalize anywhere from 2.5-3.3 million people. The Huffington Post reported in June that more than 72,000 parents of US-born children were deported in fiscal year 2013 alone; of those, nearly 11,000 had no criminal convictions. (One 2013 report estimated that 4.5 million US-born kids have at least one undocumented parent.)

3. Elimination of mandatory fingerprinting program: Under Secure Communities, or S-Comm, immigrants booked into local jails have their fingerprints run through a Homeland Security database to check their legal status. (If they’re unauthorized, they can be held by local authorities until the feds come pick them up.) The program, which began under President George W. Bush and was greatly expanded under Obama, has long come under fire for quickly pushing people toward detention and potential deportation, as well as for contributing to racial profiling and even the detention of thousands of US citizens. According to one 2013 report, S-Comm led to the deportation of more than 300,000 immigrants from fiscal years 2009 to 2013.

There are other parts to Obama’s plan, including hundreds of thousands of new tech visas and even pay raises for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. Still, given this year’s border crisis, it’s notable that the president’s plan seems to make little to no mention of the folks who provoked it: the unaccompanied children and so-called “family units” (often mothers traveling with small kids) who came in huge numbers from Central America and claimed, in many cases, to be fleeing violence of some sort.

The administration has been particularly adamant about fast-tracking the deportation of those family unit apprehensions, whose numbers jumped from 14,855 in fiscal 2013 to 68,445 in fiscal 2014, a 361 percent increase. Meanwhile, ICE has renewed the controversial practice of family detention (a complaint has already been filed regarding sexual abuse in the new Karnes City, Texas, facility) and will soon open the largest immigration detention facility in the country, a 2,400-bed family center in Dilley, Texas—just as Obama starts rolling out what many immigration hardliners will no doubt attack as an unconstitutional amnesty.

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3 Ways Obama’s Immigration Executive Action Changes Everything (and One Way It Doesn’t)

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"Extremely Troubling" Documents Show How Obama Administration Embraced Foreign Detention of Terror Suspects

by KendraDrury Posted on June 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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What happens when an FBI agent steps into a foreign prison to interrogate a US citizen? For several years, even as the FBI has cooperated with foreign governments to question Americans locked up in countries such as Kuwait, South Sudan, and Yemen, the Obama administration has been tight-lipped about the rules that govern such interrogations. FBI officials have told Congress that the same rules apply when FBI agents interview suspects at home and overseas. But an internal bureau interrogation manual suggests that the truth is more complicated—and new information from the FBI shows that key edits were made to the manual as the Obama administration shifted away from the Bush-era practice of questioning terrorism suspects at Pentagon- or CIA-run facilities, and toward outsourcing detentions to foreign regimes.

The FBI acknowledges that information it shares with foreign countries sometimes leads to the arrest of people the FBI is interested in, including Americans, and that its agents sometimes interview these suspects. This controversial practice, often called proxy detention, has been denounced by human rights advocates who say it circumvents suspects’ constitutional rights. But it took a lawsuit from the ACLU to force the Obama administration to disclose a manual that offers advice to FBI agents conducting these interviews.

When the manual, titled “Cross-Cultural, Rapport-Based Interrogation” was released in 2012, the sections that dealt with proxy detention were heavily redacted. The FBI’s page-and-a-half of “recommended practices” for conducting interviews of suspects in foreign custody was entirely redacted:

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Another section, titled “Conducting Custodial Law Enforcement Interviews Overseas,” was also heavily censored:

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Then, in December, I broke the story of a bizarre FBI mistake: In 2010, a top agent at the bureau, thinking (incorrectly) that he could copyright the manual, deposited an unredacted version at the Library of Congress, where anyone could read it. But the tale gets even stranger.

More MoJo reporting on proxy detention


Locked Up Abroadâ&#128;&#148;for the FBI


Obama Administration Interrogating Terror Suspects Locked Up Abroad (Again)


Document Shows US Government Knew About American Locked Up in Yemen


American Muslim Alleges FBI Had a Hand in His Torture (Updated with Video)


US Charges Yonas Fikre, American Who Claimed Torture, With Conspiracy


READ: Letter to Justice Department About Alleged Proxy Detainee Yonas Fikre


Obama Administration Sued Over “Proxy Detention”

The interrogation manual deposited at the Library of Congress was labeled “Version 3” and dated August 18, 2008, just a few months before President George W. Bush left office. A side-by-side comparison showed that the section dealing with proxy detentions had changed dramatically between this Bush-era version and the 2011 one released to the ACLU.

The Bush-era section focused on interviews in Defense Department facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan—not suspects held by foreign governments. It was titled “Conducting Custodial Law Enforcement Interviews in Combat Zones,”—minus the word “Overseas,” with its broader meaning. And the page-and-a-half on “recommended practices” that was entirely redacted in the 2011 version wasn’t in this version of the manual at all.

So when were the changes made? Recently, an FBI spokesman got me an answer. He said the tweaks came “around late 2010,”—well into the Obama administration—and “were mainly based on additional experiences gained overseas along with additional research on the subject matter.”

Michael German, a former FBI agent who is now a fellow at the Brennan Center for Law and Justice at New York University, says it is “extremely troubling” that it took the ACLU to uncover the manual, and that “these rules seem to expand without notice or public discussion. It is clear evidence there are insufficient internal or external controls on the FBI.”

In recent years, the Obama administration has continued to shift away from unilateral measures such as drone strikes, and toward working with foreign allies through means like proxy detention. Publicly disclosed funding to train and equip foreign militaries to fight terrorism has increased from $218.6 million in 2012 to a requested $290.2 million in 2014, and defense officials recently told The Hill that the government’s secret counterterrorism budget now has less money going to Afghanistan and more going to North Africa and the Middle East. Data collected by Long War Journal show that drone strikes in Pakistan peaked in 2010 and have declined every year since; similar data for Yemen show a peak in 2012 and a decline in the years since.

For more on what the FBI’s work with American citizens overseas can look like in practice, check out my recent investigation in the May/June issue of Mother Jones.

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"Extremely Troubling" Documents Show How Obama Administration Embraced Foreign Detention of Terror Suspects

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Law Enforcement vs. the Hippies

by CarriNDQ Posted on May 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Paul Waldman writes today about how lefty protest groups get treated differently from right-wing protest groups:

The latest, from the New York Times, describes how law enforcement officials around the country went on high alert when the Occupy protests began in 2011, passing information between agencies with an urgency suggesting that at least some people thought that people gathering to oppose Wall Street were about to try to overthrow the U.S. government. And we remember how many of those protests ended, with police moving in with force.

….If you can’t recall any Tea Party protests in 2009 and 2010 being broken up by baton-wielding, pepper-spraying cops in riot gear, that’s because it didn’t happen. Just like the anti-war protesters of the Bush years, the Tea Partiers were unhappy with the government, and saying so loudly. But for some reason, law enforcement didn’t view them as a threat.

Maybe this is because lefties don’t complain enough. You may remember the hissy fit thrown by Fox News when the Department of Homeland Security issued a report suggesting that the election of a black president might spur recruitment among right-wing extremist groups and “even result in confrontations between such groups and government authorities similar to those in the past.” As it turns out, that was a good call. But the specter of jack-booted Obama thugs smashing down the doors of earnest, heartland Republicans dominated the news cycle long enough for DHS to repudiate the report under pressure and eventually dissolve the team that had produced it.

And the similar report about left-wing extremism that DHS had produced a few months earlier? You don’t remember that? I don’t suppose you would. That’s because it was barely noticed, let alone an object of complaint. And even if lefties had complained, I doubt that anyone would have taken it seriously. There’s just no equivalent of Fox News on the left when it comes to turning partisan grievances into mainstream news.

There’s probably more to it, though. Mainstream lefties just don’t identify with the far left as a key part of their tribe. They’ll get a certain amount of support, sure, but they’ll also get plenty of mockery and derision, as the Occupy protesters did. On the right, though, extremists are all members of the tribe in good standing as long as they stop short of, say, murdering people. They only have to stop barely short, though. Waving guns around and threatening to kill people is A-OK, as Cliven Bundy and his merry band of armed tax resistors showed.

So when DHS produces a report suggesting that right-wing extremism might turn out to be a growth industry in the Obama era, the ranks of the conservative movement close. An attack on one is an attack on all, and Fox News stands ready and willing to turn the outrage meter to 11. Rinse and repeat.

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Law Enforcement vs. the Hippies

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In the Future, Home Appliances Will Be as Smart as Your Phone

by KianBittner Posted on March 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Estimates vary, but by 2020 there could be over 30 billion devices connected to the Internet. Once dumb, they will have smartened up thanks to sensors and other technologies embedded in them and, thanks to your machines, your life will quite literally have gone online.

The implications are revolutionary. Your smart refrigerator will keep an inventory of food items, noting when they go bad. Your smart thermostat will learn your habits and adjust the temperature to your liking. Smart lights will illuminate dangerous parking garages, even as they keep an “eye” out for suspicious activity.

Techno-evangelists have a nice catchphrase for this future utopia of machines and the never-ending stream of information, known as Big Data, it produces: the Internet of Things. So abstract. So inoffensive. Ultimately, so meaningless.

A future Internet of Things does have the potential to offer real benefits, but the dark side of that seemingly shiny coin is this: companies will increasingly know all there is to know about you. Most people are already aware that virtually everything a typical person does on the Internet is tracked. In the not-too-distant future, however, real space will be increasingly like cyberspace, thanks to our headlong rush toward that Internet of Things. With the rise of the networked device, what people do in their homes, in their cars, in stores, and within their communities will be monitored and analyzed in ever more intrusive ways by corporations and, by extension, the government.

And one more thing: in cyberspace it is at least theoretically possible to log off. In your own well-wired home, there will be no “opt out.”

You can almost hear the ominous narrator’s voice from an old “Twilight Zone” episode saying, “Soon the net will close around all of us. There will be no escape.”

Except it’s no longer science fiction. It’s our barely distant present.

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In the Future, Home Appliances Will Be as Smart as Your Phone

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How the US Militarized the Haiti-Dominican Republic Border

by al36olu Posted on November 19, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

It isn’t exactly the towering 20-foot wall that runs like a scar through significant parts of the US-Mexican borderlands. Imagine instead the sort of metal police barricades you see at protests. These are unevenly lined up like so many crooked teeth on the Dominican Republic’s side of the river that acts as its border with Haiti. Like dazed versions of US Border Patrol agents, the armed Dominican border guards sit at their assigned posts, staring at the opposite shore. There, on Haitian territory, children splash in the water and women wash clothes on rocks.

One of those CESFRONT (Specialized Border Security Corps) guards, carrying an assault rifle, is walking six young Haitian men back to the main base in Dajabon, which is painted desert camouflage as if it were in a Middle Eastern war zone.

If the scene looks like a five-and-dime version of what happens on the US southern border, that’s because it is. The enforcement model the Dominican Republic uses to police its boundary with Haiti is an import from the United States.

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How the US Militarized the Haiti-Dominican Republic Border

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International cops are on the pirate fishing case

by AshleaMelina844 Posted on February 21, 2013

International cops are on the pirate fishing case

By Susie Cagle

Shutterstock

Pirate fishing is an entertainingly named but actually terrible scourge of the oceans.

“It leaves communities without much needed food and income and the marine environment smashed and empty,” according to Greenpeace, which has estimated that there are upwards of 1,000 illegal industrial-scale fishing ships at sea. “Pirate fishing compounds the global environmental damage from other destructive fisheries. Because they operate, quite literally, off the radar of any enforcement, the fishing techniques they use are destroying ocean life.” The practice is rampant in Central America and parts of Europe and Africa.

But now the super-intimidating international policing ubergroup INTERPOL is convening for the first time ever to talk about policing these pirates at next week’s International Fisheries Enforcement Conference in Lyon, France. “High-level Chiefs in the field of fisheries law enforcement are invited to join together with the aim of sharing expertise and strategies to prevent and combat fisheries crime,” says INTERPOL.

More from Mission Blue:

This high level gathering will address questions like “What are the challenges of transnational organized fisheries crime and how can we fight it?” Fisheries managers from all over the world will collaborate and share strategies and information to build a future where reprehensible illegal fishing must answer to the law. INTERPOL will outline a program of National Environmental Security Security Task Forces that have real teeth to identify, apprehend and prosecute criminal activity on our high seas.

Great news for the oceans! And for the Discovery Network, because you know it’s like T minus a year or two until it finds extra-charismatic INTERPOL ocean cops to star in a high-stakes documentary series.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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