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One state just banned reusable shopping bags to fight coronavirus

New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu announced last week that reusable bags will be temporarily banned during the COVID-19 outbreak, and that all retail stores will be required to use single-use paper or plastic bags.

The move is a dramatic reversal of the recent trend of states and municipalities banning single-use plastic bags. Over the past few years, Hawaii, California, and more recently Oregon and New York have prohibited the use of plastic bags. The bans are an effort to reduce plastic pollution, which is driven by single-use plastics like shopping bags and has taken a terrible toll on ocean ecosystems.

“Our grocery store workers are on the front lines of COVID-19, working around the clock to keep New Hampshire families fed,” said Sununu, a Republican, in a statement announcing the executive order. “With identified community transmission, it is important that shoppers keep their reusable bags at home given the potential risk to baggers, grocers and customers.”

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New Hampshire isn’t the only state to revisit its plastic bag policies due to COVID-19: Maine has postponed a plastic bag ban that was set to go into effect on Earth Day, and New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation has said it won’t take any enforcement actions against retailers who violate the state’s new ban until May. But New Hampshire is the first state to take the additional step of banning reusable bags.

So will the reusable bag ban make grocery store shoppers and workers safer? The science on that is somewhat shaky. It’s highly unlikely for the virus to spread from one person to another via a reusable cloth bag or another fabric, Vineet Menachery, an assistant professor of microbiology at the University of Texas Medical Branch, told Grist earlier this month. While the novel coronavirus, like previous coronaviruses, has been shown to survive for up to three days on plastic and stainless steel surfaces if left undisturbed, it’s easily destroyed with soap and water, or rubbing alcohol. So washing a cloth bag with detergent would stop the virus in its tracks.

That said, grocery store workers obviously don’t know whether a person bringing a reusable bag into a store has cleaned it recently or not. Sununu is right that grocery store workers are on the frontlines of this public health crisis, and we should all probably be doing what we can to make their lives easier and less stressful these days. And the climate impact of plastic vs. paper vs. cloth bags is actually more complicated than you might think — although reusing a bag you already own is always a more climate-friendly option than creating demand for a new bag.

So eco-conscious New Hampshirites shouldn’t feel too bad about obeying the governor’s order for now. Just make sure to keep tabs on your reusable bags so you don’t have to buy new ones once the pandemic is over.

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One state just banned reusable shopping bags to fight coronavirus

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The report card is in: Green orgs are improving staff diversity, but still don’t reflect America

People of color are on the frontlines of the climate crisis: They live in areas disproportionately impacted by pollution, deadly heat waves, and extreme storms. So it stands to reason that the staffers and leaders of major environmental organizations should reflect the demographics of the communities most relevant to their work.

The Green 2.0 initiative, which was launched in 2013 to promote racial and gender diversity in the environmental movement, released its third annual diversity report card for the top 40 major non-governmental organizations and foundations on Wednesday. For the first time in its short history, the report brought good news: an overall increase in people of color and women on staff and boards of directors since Green 2.0 started collecting and releasing data in 2017.

According to the report, each green organization that provided data added 11 people of color to its staff between 2017 and 2019, on average. As for senior staffers, each organization added an average of two people of color to its upper ranks, while the number of women on senior staff remained unchanged over the same two-year period. (Overall, people of color constitute close to 30 percent of organizational staff; women constitute about 64 percent.) Each organization also added, on average, one woman and one person of color to its board. These improvements were determined to be statistically significant — though the numbers do exclude one unnamed outlier that skewed the results in a different direction.

Whitney Tome, the executive director of Green 2.0, said in a press call that the organization is “cautiously optimistic” after reviewing the findings. “We want the trend to continue and we want it to accelerate, so that it can match the racial demographics of the country,” she said.

Tome also highlighted the importance of further improvements to board composition. “When it comes to membership of the board, it is critically important that people of color sit on that stage,” Tome said. “The board needs to be as diverse as the country to ensure that its next leaders are people of color.”

For three years, Green 2.0 has surveyed the top 40 environmental NGOs and top 40 foundations across the country. NGOs were generally more active and willing to share their data than foundations. In fact, the participation rate among the top 40 NGOs increased from 82.5 percent to 90 percent between 2017 and 2019. Green 2.0 specifically called out the Pew Charitable Trusts, one of largest nonprofits with a mission to improve public policy by collecting data for research, for declining to participate in the survey multiple times. “It’s hypocritical,” Tome said in the press call.

Meanwhile, the participation rate among foundations remains stagnant at 35 percent, making it difficult for Green 2.0 to provide a concrete set of trends on the demographic composition of foundations.

Foundations funnel money to push policies, grants, and other resources as part of the environmental movement, so diverse viewpoints among their staff members are leaders are of critical importance. Ironically, many foundations ask grantees for their own demographic data, Tome pointed out — but the foundations themselves are unwilling to disclose their own data to the public.

“We recognize the environmental movement hasn’t always been as attentive to frontline communities and communities of color throughout its history,” Tome said. “So we really want to continue to push and advocate for having people of color in those senior leadership places, and for them to hopefully have a tremendous impact in policies going forward.”

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The report card is in: Green orgs are improving staff diversity, but still don’t reflect America

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The world’s energy report card just came out. We failed 3 subjects.

The world just got its energy report card … and at best, its grades are mixed.

Every year, the International Energy Agency releases a mammoth report detailing the world’s progress toward providing clean energy to all. This year’s report is 810 pages long, but here’s the take-home message: We’re improving in two areas (solar and offshore wind installation), but failing three subjects (transportation, equity, and overall progress).

PASS:

Solar photovoltaic panels

Solar power is “growing very strongly,” said IEA’s Executive Director Fatih Birol. With more government support that growth could accelerate: Birol pointed out that Africa generates less than 1 percent of the world’s solar power while boasting 40 percent of its solar potential. The IEA is projecting big increases in solar panels on the African continent. “I think energy developments in Africa are going to surprise many of the pessimists,” he said.

According to IEA data, solar capacity has already surpassed nuclear, and the agency projects that it will rapidly overtake wind, hydroelectric, coal, and gas. However, it’s important to remember that capacity is the amount of electricity any of these power sources could produce when running full out — something solar panels can only do in full sunlight.

Offshore wind

There’s a trillion-dollar industry waiting to be created with floating deep-sea platforms and skyscraper-sized turbines, according to the IEA. Ocean wind could easily supply all the world’s electricity, if price were no object. Realistic expense assumptions, however, still suggest rapid growth: Offshore wind turbines generate less than 1 percent of the world’s electricity, but cost reductions could allow that number to grow to more than 5 percent in the next 20 years.

Birol likened the potential to improvements in technology that had allowed fracking and solar prices to plummet. “Offshore wind has the potential to join their ranks in terms of steep cost reduction,” Birol said.

FAIL:

Transportation

The world is reducing emissions from cars by improving gas mileage and introducing electric vehicles. But those gains were swamped by an old villain, which Birol introduced ironically: “Ladies and gentlemen, our report shows that the star of the transformation in the automotive industry wasn’t electric cars, it was SUVs,” he said. Last month, the IEA reported that since 2010, the number of SUVs on the road has increased by 35 million — and the vehicle class is contributing more to climate change today than heavy industry.

Equity

Some 850 million people worldwide don’t have electricity, and many more — 2.6 billion — still rely on wood and dung for cooking, with disastrous consequences for both health and the environment. From Africa to South Asia, dozens of countries are doing important work to give people access to modern energy sources.

But to be successful in this mission, said Laura Cozzi, chief energy modeler for the IEA, “They will need cement, they will need steel, they will need electricity.” Cozzi said renewable energy is the most important lever in expanding access to electricity in Africa, but the world will also need to burn more fossil fuels to get the job done.

Overall progress

Even if countries fulfill their big energy ambitions, which IEA calls the world’s “stated policies,” it won’t be enough to drive down emissions and keep average global temperatures from warming more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). “For the moment, the momentum behind clean energy technologies is not enough to offset the effects of an expanding global economy and growing population,” said Tim Gould head of the World Energy Outlook at the IEA.

However, the IEA identified a suite of policies that could slow climate change: They call it the “sustainable development scenario.” (See the graph above.) Getting there is a tall order, requiring a doubling of the rate at which we’re building renewables while cranking up the pressure on energy efficiency, passing policies to force behavior change, and building massive carbon capture and sequestration plants.

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The world’s energy report card just came out. We failed 3 subjects.

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Indonesia might need a new capital because of climate change

Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, has its fair share of problems: terrible traffic that can turn a 25 mile drive into a two hour endeavor, dangerous air pollution, and the largest uncovered landfill in Southeast Asia. And now, with climate change in the mix, 10 million people live in one of the fastest sinking cities in the world.

Jakarta, built next to the Java Sea with 13 rivers criss-crossing the city, is sinking as fast as 9 inches a year in some neighborhoods. The problem is compounded by unlicensed groundwater extraction, which empties aquifers and causes the ground to cave. Right now, about half the city is below sea level. By 2050, if emissions aren’t drastically cut, 95 percent of Northern Jakarta is expected to be submerged.

Indonesia’s likely re-elected President Joko Widodo’s solution? Change the capital. In a closed cabinet meeting on Monday, Widodo made the decision to move the executive branch and associated ministries and parliament to a new city. Which city? He opened the discussion on Twitter:

“Jakarta now bears two burdens at once: as a center of government and public services as well as a business center,” Widodo tweeted. “Where do you think Indonesia’s capital should be?”’

Widodo isn’t the first to suggest relocating Indonesia’s capital. In 1957, Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, suggested that very thing. Every so often, presidents have brought up the issue to no avail, to the point where Indonesian residents are skeptical that the move will ever occur. And many are not sure they want it to, either.

“You don’t solve a problem by just moving it away,” Elisa Sutanudjaja, director of the Rujak Center for Urban Studies, told The Guardian. “Jakarta is quite similar to Tokyo in the 1960s, with its land subsidence, flooding, natural disasters and overcrowding. If you really want to solve the problem then they should tackle it, not just move it.”

That being said, this might be the time it finally happens. Things are approaching a tipping point, with natural disasters like last week’s floods increasing in regularity and severity. As Jakarta’s population continues to grow, and unsanctioned water extraction and climate change pull Jakarta below sea level, it’s about time that something happens.

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Indonesia might need a new capital because of climate change

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Enviros get ready to throw down over Trump’s border wall national emergency

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On Friday morning, President Trump declared a national emergency to secure funding for a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico. Opponents of the wall argue the issue does not warrant national emergency status. In usual Trumpian style, the president told journalists exactly what many were already thinking.“I didn’t need to do this,” he said. “But I’d rather do it much faster.” Whoomp, there it is!

The wall isn’t just an expensive political maneuver; its construction poses a threat to Tohono O’odham Nation land and culture, as well as biodiversity, wildlife refuges along the border, and endangered species. Case in point: One study shows that the wall threatens 93 endangered species.

Elected officials and the environmental community came out swinging against the executive order mere minutes after it was announced, promising lawsuits and counter-bills.

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The Sierra Club vowed swift legal action against the declaration. “We are repulsed by this unprecedented attack on the borderlands and on our democracy, and we intend to resist it with every tool possible,” the organization’s executive director said in a statement.

The League of Conservation Voters, an organization that keeps tabs on how Congress votes on environmental legislation, called the wall “xenophobic, racist and environmentally destructive” in an emailed statement.

And the National Butterfly Center, home to “the greatest volume and variety of wild, free-flying butterflies in the nation,” has already filed a restraining order to keep federal workers from trampling all over the sanctuary and its delicate inhabitants as they plan out a wall that would cut directly through the property.

On the congressional side, New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced on Twitter that she plans to introduce a bill with fellow Democrat Joaquin Castro to block the executive order. “[We] aren’t going to let the President declare a fake national emergency without a fight,” she said. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer released a statement calling the order “unlawful.”

Meanwhile, Trump is preparing for battle. “I expect to be sued,” he told reporters. You got that right, buddy!

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Enviros get ready to throw down over Trump’s border wall national emergency

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Trump’s Tweets Threaten His Travel Ban’s Chances in Court

Mother Jones

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President Donald Trump began the week with a barrage of early-morning tweets blasting the courts for blocking his travel ban executive order. But in doing so, he may have just made it more likely that the courts will keep blocking the ban.

These tweets followed upon several from over the weekend about the ban and the terrorist attack in London, including this one from Saturday evening:

In January, Trump signed an executive order banning nationals from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States for 90 days, as well as halting the refugee resettlement program for 120 days (and indefinitely for Syrian refugees). When the courts blocked it, rather than appeal to the Supreme Court, Trump signed a modified version of the order. The new ban repealed the old one, reduced the number of banned countries from seven to six, and added exceptions and waivers. Still, federal courts in Maryland and Hawaii blocked it, and now the Justice Department has appealed to the Supreme Court to have this second version of the ban reinstated.

The biggest question in the litigation over the ban is whether the courts should focus solely on the text of the order or also consider Trump’s comments from the campaign trail, and even during his presidency, to determine whether the order uses national security as a pretext for banning Muslims from the country. The president’s lawyers argue that the courts should focus on the text of the order and defer to the president’s authority over national security. Trump’s tweets Monday morning and over the weekend make it harder for the courts to justify doing that.

The travel ban is supposed to be a temporary remedy until the government can review its vetting procedures. But Trump’s tweets make it appear that the ban itself is his goal. Trump repeatedly and defiantly uses the word “ban” when his administration has instead sought to call it a pause.

The tweets “undermine the government’s best argument—that courts ought not look beyond the four corners of the Executive Order itself,” Stephen Vladeck, an expert on national security and constitutional law at the University of Texas School of Law, says via email. “Whether or not then-Candidate Trump’s statements should matter (a point on which reasonable folks will likely continue to disagree), the more President Trump says while the litigation is ongoing tending to suggest that the Order is pretextual, the harder it is to convince even sympathetic judges and justices that only the text of the Order matters.” And once the courts start looking at the president’s statements, it’s not hard to find ones that raise questions about anti-Muslim motivations.

Even the president’s allies acknowledge his tweets are a problem. George Conway, the husband of top Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, responded to Trump on Twitter by pointing out that the work of the Office of the Solicitor General—which is defending the travel ban in court—just got harder.

Conway, who recently withdrew his name from consideration for a post at the Justice Department, then followed up to clarify his position.

Trump may soon see his tweets used against him in court. Omar Jadwat, the ACLU attorney who argued the case before the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, told the Washington Post this morning that the ACLU’s legal team is considering adding Trump’s tweets to its arguments before the Supreme Court. “The tweets really undermine the factual narrative that the president’s lawyers have been trying to put forth, which is that regardless of what the president has actually said in the past, the second ban is kosher if you look at it entirely on its own terms,” Jadwat told the Post.

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Trump’s Tweets Threaten His Travel Ban’s Chances in Court

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Why Remembering Japanese-American Internment Really Matters This Year

Mother Jones

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Flowers were distributed prior to the interfaith service at the end of the ceremony. Matt Tinoco

As the long line of cars, trucks, and more than two dozen charter buses pulled into dusty, makeshift parking lots in the high desert below California’s snowcapped Eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains on Saturday morning, they were greeted by a National Park Service ranger. “Welcome to Manzanar,” she said. “It is very dry. Drink a lot of water.”

They’d descended on the remote Owens Valley, four hours north of Los Angeles, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Executive Order 9066—President Franklin Roosevelt’s February 1942 decision to forcibly detain 120,000 Japanese Americans until the end of World War II. Manzanar War Relocation Center, as the facility was formally called, was one of 10 internment camps nationwide; at its peak, the 5,415-acre site held more than 10,000 people in army-style barracks behind barbed wire.

In the language of the Roosevelt’s order, these actions were taken to establish “every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage to national-defense.” Approximately two-thirds of those incarcerated without due process were fully enfranchised American citizens by birth. The remainder were lawful permanent residents.

President Donald Trump’s harsh rhetoric about Muslims, Mexicans, and other immigrants has reignited scrutiny of this dark period in American history. Internment even made headlines in November when Carl Higbie—the former spokesman of the pro-Trump Great America PAC—cited American treatment of Japanese residents in WWII as an example of appropriate action to protect national security.

Banners signifying the 10 camps erected by the US government Matt Tinoco

So perhaps it was no surprise that the 2,500 people who showed up as part of the 48th-annual Manzanar Pilgrimage on Saturday were a record for the event, according to the Park Service. The blowing dust, the whipping wind, and the beating sun all set an elemental tone for the day’s program—a not-so-subtle reminder how, as Manzanar Committee co-chair Bruce Embrey later would tell me, “there was a vicious, just despicable drive to make sure that these camps were sites of suffering. That the people here were going to be isolated psychologically and physically, far from civilian populations, in desolate areas intended to make people suffer.”

Though the camp was almost entirely disassembled after World War II—concrete slabs and the occasional piece of rusted metal are all that remain of the camp’s former living areas—the pilgrims visiting Manzanar walked past full-size reconstructions of the camp’s latrines, its mess halls, and its tar-paper barracks on their way to the day’s ceremony. Wooden Park Service signs marking the locations of long-disappeared structures—a recreation hall, an outdoor theatre, a pet cemetery, an elementary school—dotted the path.

Matt Tinoco

Several people in the crowd wore shirts from various California-based Muslim organizations. Among them was Syed Hussaini, an organizer with CAIR’s Los Angeles chapter. Hussaini explained that, for the past few years, CAIR-LA has participated in the Manzanar Pilgrimage in order to keep alive the memory of internment—it is only briefly mentioned, if at all, in most schools—in the Muslim community.

“We have to stand very vigilantly, and make sure that we are upholding the tenants of democracy. If good people don’t do anything, this is what could happen again,” said Hussaini, who came to Manzanar on one of the three buses CAIR-LA chartered this year.

“When the executive order was signed back in the ’40s, only the Quaker community openly voiced dissent,” said Hussaini, echoing a point made a few minutes earlier by one of the event’s speakers. “But we have seen an outpouring of support from many other faith communities and many other civil rights organizations coming out to say that Trump’s words are not in keeping with American values, and will not stand.”

Preserving the memory of internment is the guiding mission of those who organized Saturday’s pilgrimage, as well as those who work to maintain and expand the facilities at Manzanar National Historic Site. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the generation of Japanese Americans born after internment began pushing for recognition and reparations. The Manzanar Pilgrimage, for example, began in 1969, kicking off decades of work to establish Manzanar as an officially recognized National Historic Site, which finally happened in 1992.

Matt Tinoco

The theme for this year’s pilgrimage was “Never Again, to Anyone, Anywhere,” emblazoned in red text on black banners and T-shirts scattered throughout the event. That message, it seems, is resonating more than ever: In 2016, more than 105,000 people visited Manzanar, a record attendance year. A few employees noted that, since Trump’s election, there have been better, deeper conversations between Manzanar’s guests and those who work at the site.

A couple of hours after the ceremony concluded, several hundred people made their way to Lone Pine High School, about 10 miles south, for Manzanar at Dusk. In the school gymnasium, the Nikkei Student Unions at several LA-area colleges put on a three-hour program that spawn intergenerational conversations about their daytime experiences at the Manzanar Pilgrimage, and to spread the oral tradition of those who spent years confined in the camp.

After a spoken word performance that wove together FDR’s E.O. 9066 with Trump’s E.O. 13769, a.k.a. the travel ban, the 300 attendees broke into two-dozen randomly sorted small groups for an informal, hourlong conversation. Sprawled out on high school’s front lawn in the twilight shadows of the Sierra’s highest peaks, the small group I joined consisted of 10 people, the youngest in high school, the oldest in his 70s.

We listened to the grandson of a woman who lived at Manzanar relay one of her stories about the dust, and how she remembered seeing the outline of her sleeping body sketched out in her bedsheets when she got up each morning. We discussed why people remained quiet about their time in camps for years following their internment. And, by the end of our hour, we were sharing the history of our own personal names, comparing notes about whether our parents gave us a name from the old country or one considered more traditionally “American.”

“History is always relevant. But there are times when what’s happening in the world magnifies that relevancy,” said Alisa Lynch, the chief of interpretation at Manzanar National Historic Site, said to me after Manzanar at Dusk had concluded. “Our job is to share history, not to please whoever’s in office. We’re here to help people learn about the history, and if they want to make parallel connections, they’re free to. People see them. We don’t have to point them out.”

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Why Remembering Japanese-American Internment Really Matters This Year

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A Federal Judge Just Blocked Trump’s Executive Order Targeting Sanctuary Cities

Mother Jones

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A federal judge in San Francisco blocked a January executive order that the Trump administration was using to threaten to withhold funds from so-called sanctuary jurisdictions refusing full cooperation with federal enforcement of immigration laws.

In issuing a nationwide preliminary injunction Tuesday, US District Judge William Orrick cited public comments by President Donald Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and other administration officials that warned cities that they would lose public safety funds if they did not comply with federal immigration agents’ attempts to locate and detain undocumented immigrants. “If there was doubt about the scope of the Order, the President and Attorney General have erased it with their public comments,” Orrick wrote.

But it wasn’t just these public comments that influenced Orrick’s ruling. He also found serious constitutional problems with the executive action. The judge’s decision states the executive order goes beyond the president’s authority under the 10th Amendment, which limits the federal government’s authority over local governments. “The Executive Order uses coercive means in an attempt to force states and local jurisdictions to honor civil detainer requests, which are voluntary ‘requests’ precisely because the federal government cannot command states to comply with them under the Tenth Amendment,” it reads.

The injunction comes out of a lawsuit brought by San Francisco and Santa Clara counties over Trump’s directive, with similar suits pending in other courts. Orrick’s order, which is based on the counties’ likelihood of success in their case, comes just a few days shy of Trump’s 100th day in office, when his administration is attempting to tout his accomplishments despite setbacks in Congress and in the courts.

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A Federal Judge Just Blocked Trump’s Executive Order Targeting Sanctuary Cities

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Jeff Sessions Announces a New Crackdown on Immigrants and "Filth"

Mother Jones

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This morning, Attorney General Jeff Sessions visited the US-Mexico border in Nogales, Arizona, to announce a new get-tough approach to immigration enforcement, directing federal prosecutors to pursue harsher charges against undocumented immigrants. “For those that continue to seek improper and illegal entry into this country,” Sessions said, “be forewarned: This is a new era. This is the Trump era.”

In his remarks, Sessions said nonviolent immigrants who enter the country illegally for a second time will no longer be charged with a misdemeanor—they’ll be charged with a felony. He also recommended that prosecutors charge “criminal aliens” with document fraud and aggravated identity theft, which carries a two-year minimum sentence. In January, President Donald Trump expanded the definition of which immigrants can be considered “criminal” to include anyone who has committed “a chargeable criminal offense,” which could include sneaking across the border.

As he proposed stiffer penalties for nonviolent immigrants, Sessions also targeted gangs and cartels “that turn cities and suburbs into war zones, that rape and kill innocent citizens and who profit by smuggling poison and other human beings across our borders.” Invoking unusually severe language in the written version of his announcement, Sessions proclaimed, “It is here, on this sliver of land, where we first take our stand against this filth.”

In contrast to the dire picture Sessions painted, crime rates in American border cities have been dropping for at least five years. Even after a year of increased violent crime—which officials said had nothing to do with cartels or spillover violence—El Paso, Texas, is among the safest of its size in the nation.

Sessions also promised to hire 125 new judges to address a backlog of immigration cases and prioritized the prosecution of offenses such as assaulting immigration authorities and smuggling more than three undocumented immigrants into the country. He urged prosecutors to crack down on people who reenter the United States after being deported. “The lawlessness, the abdication of the duty to enforce our immigration laws, and the catch and release practices of old are over,” Sessions stated.

Frank Sharry, the executive director of America’s Voice Education Fund, an immigration reform advocacy organization, issued a rebuke of Sessions’ statement. “Attorney General Sessions is grandstanding at the border in an attempt to look tough and scare immigrants. It’s yet another example of the Trump Administration treating all immigrants as threats and as criminals.”

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Jeff Sessions Announces a New Crackdown on Immigrants and "Filth"

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Want to Buy an Old CIA Rendition Jet?

Mother Jones

For $27.5 million you can own a valuable memento of a dark period of recent American history. The jet above is currently for sale in Dallas, Texas. The Boeing 737 business jet seats up to 16 passengers and includes one queen and two single beds, a lounge bar, and three built-in 42-inch TV screens. The jet’s listing does not mention, however, that in its former career, it was part of the Central Intelligence Agency’s extraordinary rendition program, transporting “high-value” terrorism detainees around the globe to “black sites” where they faced “enhanced” interrogation techniques.

The jet’s history can be pieced together from news clippings, human rights reports, and Federal Aviation Administration documents. In 2006, the Chicago Tribune reported on a specially modified 737 with the tail number N313P, which had been observed flying between the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. The paper linked the jet back to the CIA through a series of front companies around Washington, D.C. One of those companies was Premier Executive Transport Services, which had taken ownership of the new plane in May 2002. The Washington Post found that the names of 325 people ostensibly affiliated with this shadowy company could be traced back to five Beltway-area P.O. boxes. When reporters searched for some of those names in public databases, what little they could turn up was a bit spooky: “Although most names were attached to dates of birth in the 1940s, ’50s or ’60s, all were given Social Security numbers between 1998 and 2003.”

During its time with CIA-linked companies, N313P flew all around the world, landing in spots like Morocco, Afghanistan, Libya, Uzbekistan, and Guantanamo Bay. In September 2003, it touched down at a remote airport in Poland. As the Tribune later suggested, this trip may have had something to do with the Polish intelligence complex in Stare Kiejkuty, which the European Court of Human Rights later found housed a secret CIA site. Before the release of the Senate intelligence committee’s 2014 report on the CIA’s post-9/11 detention and interrogation program, the Washington Post reported that American intelligence officers had probably abused and tortured detainees at the black site at Stare Kiejkuty. N313P landed near Stare Kiejkuty at least once.

In 2004, the aircraft carried the “shackled and hooded” Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian who was held in Guantanamo from 2004 until 2009. A few days later, the jet is also believed to have transported Khaled al-Masri, a Lebanese-born German citizen who was held in an American-run prison in Afghanistan for five months. Al-Masri, who claims he was shackled, drugged, and beaten in captivity, was released after his captors told him they’d gotten the wrong man.

That same year, as reported by the Guardian, Fatima Bouchar and her husband, Abdel-Hakim Belhaj, were abducted by three Americans in Bangkok, Thailand, forced aboard the aircraft. The couple had fought against Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi during the 1980s and 1990s, and according to a Human Rights Watch investigation, their rendition back to Libya had been brokered in a deal between the CIA, British intelligence, and the Qaddafi regime for “mutual benefit.” During the 17-hour journey to Tripoli, Bouchar, who was four months pregnant, was bound to a stretcher and wrapped head-to-foot in tape. Belhaj was shackled in a painful stress position for the flight’s duration. Bouchar spent four months in detention in Libya. Belhaj remained in prison there until 2010.

The jet flew for the CIA for more than four years. Its time with The Company ended in 2006 when, according to FAA records, it was sold to MGM Mirage Resorts with a new tail number. (Premier Executive Transport Services disincorporated in 2008.) MGM Mirage operated the aircraft out of Las Vegas until last December, when it was sold to Embraer Executive Aircraft, a private jet manufacturer.

In addition to its executive trappings, the aircraft has a nifty seven-tank auxiliary fuel system—perfect for transatlantic flights from, say, Morocco to Cuba. With just 5,942 hours of flight time logged to date, this jet is practically new. (Commercial jets typically fly approximately 3,500 hours annually.)

A representative of the company brokering the aircraft’s sale was reluctant to speak but conceded that potential buyers would probably be aware of the jet’s history. “Everybody knows,” she said. Yet none of that should have any bearing on its value, she asserted. “It doesn’t have a heart and soul. It’s just a really beautiful piece of equipment.” Until a buyer is found, the certified pre-owned CIA rendition plane is available for viewing by appointment.

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Want to Buy an Old CIA Rendition Jet?

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