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    New York might decriminalize sex work. But will it do so safely and responsibly? | Geoffrey Mak

    New York might decriminalize sex work. But will it do so safely and responsibly?Geoffrey MakIn an odd twist, leftwing groups support a libertarian, free-market approach, while some sex trafficking survivors support a more cautious, regulated approach The New York state legislature is debating between two bills that decriminalize sex work. The bills agree on the need to decriminalize sex workers but offer very different approaches for doing so. The Stop Violence in the Sex Trades Act seeks to fully legalize the sex trade. The Sex Trade Survivors Justice and Equality Act, which is adapted from the Nordic model, would decriminalize sex workers while keeping in place laws penalizing pimps and clients.In an odd twist, the first bill, which takes a libertarian and free-market approach to sex work, is supported by leftwing groups including the Democratic Socialists of America. Sex trafficking survivor groups, political moderates and prosecutors have mostly supported the more cautious, regulated approach. I believe advocates for both bills want the best for sex workers. But the first approach – a blanket decriminalization of sex work, including of pimps and johns – may make sex workers less safe, not more.No one disputes that sex workers face serious and constant risk of violence, and that the status quo is unsustainable and unjust. Since sex work is illegal in all states except Nevada, sex workers – who are at high risk of violence by clients, pimps and the police – generally have no way to organize for better labor protections, or to report violence without risking incrimination. In other countries, decriminalizing sex workers has made them safer. Studies of Sweden and Northern Ireland found that even partial decriminalization reduced street prostitution, lowering client violence.Decriminalization also aims to break the vicious cycle of police violence, incarceration and deportation. “I have so many issues with the vice squad,” New York state senator Jessica Ramos, who co-sponsored the Stop Violence bill for full decriminalization, told me. She accuses the police of either doing too much or too little.When a Queens vice squad raided a Flushing massage parlor in 2017, a worker fell off a second-floor balcony and died. In 2018, police officers across New York, including members of a vice squad in southern Brooklyn, were arrested for providing protection for a sex trafficking ring. The ring operated across boroughs – including in the district Ramos represents, where mostly Latina sex workers, some of them undocumented immigrants, walk the streets.“People who are most often targeted for police harassment or arrests or for violence – due to or related to sex work – are women, poor people, people of color, immigrants and trans people,” Mark Mishler, the legislative director for New York state senator Julia Salazar, who sponsored the Stop Violence bill, told me.There’s some evidence that arrests of sex workers in New York might already be decreasing on their own. The NYPD cites an overall decline in prostitution-related arrests (including of buyers and pimps as well as workers) in recent years. Arrests went from 1,069 in 2019 down to 193 in 2021. In an emailed statement, an NYPD spokesperson told me, “The NYPD’s enforcement priorities shifted in early 2017, and have continued, leading to fewer arrests over recent years of sex workers for prostitution and a greater share of arrests of those who buy sex and promote sex for sale.”Nevertheless, advocacy for full decriminalization has conjoined itself with vast, increasing leftwing support for police abolition. Leftwing and sex workers’ groups have embraced the abortion rights slogan “My body, my choice,” readapting it to sex workers’ freedom to do whatever they choose with their bodies. Under the slogan “Sex work is work,” the DSA considers full decriminalization as “a central fight for the labor movement and for socialist feminism”.Perhaps. But a misguided legislative intervention can hurt more than help. In 2018, for example, Congress passed Fosta/Sesta, a law that banned online sex ads – inadvertently flushing more sex workers out into the streets, where rushed negotiations put them at even greater risk of client-perpetrated violence.The movement for full decriminalization is anti-discrimination, anti-carceral and anti-police. But what do its arguments have to say about the concrete reality of sex trafficking? The Stop Violence bill might be more ideologically photogenic, but its opponents worry that full decriminalization might provide loopholes – or a carte blanche – for sex trafficking, a prospect that supporters of the Stop Violence bill don’t seem to acknowledge.Alexi Meyers, a former prosecutor and a consultant for the partial decriminalization bill, told me that if the Stop Violence bill repeals a statute criminalizing “promoting prostitution” (which refers to pimps) at the felony level, it would take away “the bread and butter of trafficking cases”.In New York, sex trafficking laws look for material force – like drug use, physical violence, kidnapping by withholding someone’s passport, or the destruction of property – as evidence of sex trafficking. But force is often psychological, with consent manufactured.Cristian Eduardo, a Mexican immigrant and sex trafficking survivor, told me that his traffickers often made him believe that he was choosing the life. This was in 2015, when he lived in an apartment in Queens operated by traffickers who gave him food, housing and vital HIV medication – which they convinced him he couldn’t get elsewhere – in exchange for sex with whichever john they assigned him.“The sex buyers are often very violent and abusive,” Eduardo said about his years in trafficking. “I never knew what was going to happen. The only thing I knew was I was going to be used as an empty vessel.”He says that if had been asked in court if he had consented to his treatment, he probably would have said yes, at the time. “I didn’t know it was exploitation, I thought it was my own fault and my own choice,” he said.Meyers, who worked on trafficking cases at the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, added, “We don’t always have victims who are cooperative with prosecutors – whether they are so highly traumatized by what they’ve been through, or whether they are terrified of their trafficker.” For this reason anti-pimping statutes are all the more important; they are a way to get traffickers off the streets without having to prove in court that their victims were definitively coerced.Yet advocates for full decriminalization often seem blithely uninterested in this dilemma. When I asked Mishler, Julia Salazar’s legislative director, about trafficked workers who might be hesitant to testify against their traffickers for fear of violence or homelessness, he said, “That’s not our problem. The law is the law.”I put the same question to Mariah Grant, the research and advocacy director of the Sex Workers Project, which supports full decriminalization. “You aren’t going to arrest your way out of this problem,” she said. “What we need is money that is being wrongfully diverted towards trafficking cases – that, in fact, are not actually trafficking, but people who are adults consenting to work in the sex trades – to be instead moved towards social services.”But this stance – “not actually trafficking” – feels like willed ignorance, ethically lazy or naive in the extreme. Yes, trafficked sex workers need social services, but they also need laws, not ideals, to protect them. You can’t girlboss your way out of trafficking.According to the New York State Interagency Task Force on Human Trafficking, there were about 1,000 confirmed victims of sex trafficking in New York between 2007 and 2019, a number that Meyers told me is probably an undercount of the actual victims. If the Stop Violence bill passed, that number could go up. One 2013 study of 150 countries showed that, on average, countries where prostitution is legal reported larger human trafficking inflows. For instance, sex trafficking in Germany declined gradually through 2001, then – after sex work was decriminalized in 2002 – began to increase again.There are persuasive advantages to full decriminalization. Sex workers would be able to unionize. Third-party workers, like those operating phone lines or client screeners, could work without fear of being prosecuted as pimps, creating a safer workplace. An increased demand of buyers, once decriminalized, would give sex workers more bargaining power. A 2007 study in New Zealand has shown that after full decriminalization, almost 65% of sex workers found it easier to refuse clients, and 57% reported improved police attitudes towards sex workers.But even as “sex work is work,” the sex trade can’t be treated like any other service industry, because most service industries aren’t inextricably entangled with violence and organized crime. Any law decriminalizing sex workers needs to address the sex trade as a whole, and prioritize the needs of the most disadvantaged. It’s possible to reduce violence against sex workers while also protecting those in trafficking; partial decriminalization would accomplish that.“It’s just so sad that people are like, yes, sex work is empowering, sex work is work,” Eduardo said. “And I’m like, You are not fighting for the vulnerable when you’re not fighting for the ones who are in need. You’re fighting to give more power to those who already have it.”
    Geoffrey Mak is a New York-based writer
    TopicsUS politicsOpinionNew YorkSex workSex traffickingcommentReuse this content More

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    AOC calls Tucker Carlson ‘trash’ for saying she is not a woman of colour

    AOC calls Tucker Carlson ‘trash’ for saying she is not a woman of colour‘You’re a creep, bro,’ says New York congresswoman after Carlson attacked Ocasio-Cortez in Fox News segment The Fox News host Tucker Carlson attacked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Friday night, claiming the US congresswoman was not a woman of colour.“She’s a rich entitled white lady,” he said.In return, the New York Democrat, popularly known as AOC, said: “This is the type of stuff you say when your name starts with a P and ends with dejo.”Dictionary.com defines pendejo as “a mildly vulgar insult for ‘asshole’ or ‘idiot’ in Spanish”.It’s Trump’s time to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth | Lloyd GreenRead more“Once again,” Ocasio-Cortez added, “the existence of a wife or daughters doesn’t make a man good. And this one is basura.”Basura is Spanish for “trash”.She also accused Carlson of sexual harassment.Ocasio-Cortez’s mother is from Puerto Rico, her father from the Bronx. She has described herself as a woman of colour.Carlson said: “No one ever dares to challenge that description, but every honest person knows it is hilariously absurd.“There is no place on Earth outside of American colleges and newsrooms where Sandy Cortez” – Carlson’s derisory nickname for the New York congresswoman – “would be recognized as a quote, woman of color, because she’s not!“She’s a rich entitled white lady. She’s the pampered obnoxious ski bunny in the matching snowsuit who tells you to pull up your mask while you’re standing in the lift line at Jackson Hole. They’re all the same. It doesn’t matter what shade they are.”The leading provocateur in Fox News’ evening line-up was discussing a book about Ocasio-Cortez, Take Up Space: The Unprecedented AOC, written by Lisa Miller, a reporter at New York magazine.Carlson said Miller’s book was “like a box of Fig Newtons. You know it’s wrong to open it, but the temptation is strong, and so we did.”As the media watchdog Mediate put it, several of the passages Carlson read were “fawning in nature and weave mundane videos AOC has posted online – such as her assembling Ikea furniture – into a grand narrative about her life”.In one passage, Carlson said, the congresswoman is described as “pointedly” saying into a camera, “I’m alone today”.“Is it just us or does that sound like an invitation to a booty call?” Carlson said.“Maybe one step from ‘What are you wearing?’ Either way it’s a little strange. It’s definitely over-sharing and yet, according to the book, over-sharing is the key to Sandy Cortez’s success.”Ocasio-Cortez wrote: “Remember when the right wing had a meltdown when I suggested they exhibit obsessive impulses around young women? Well now Tucker Carlson is wishing for … this on national TV.“You’re a creep, bro. If you’re this easy with sexual harassment on air, how are you treating your staff?”TopicsAlexandria Ocasio-CortezFox NewsRaceUS politicsDemocratsNew YorkPuerto RiconewsReuse this content More

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    It’s Trump’s time to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth | Lloyd Green

    It’s Trump’s time to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truthLloyd GreenA New York judge has ruled Trump will have to testify in his fraud investigation, leaving Trump sweating and his investors shaking their heads Donald Trump’s bad luck continues. On Thursday afternoon, Arthur Engoron, a Manhattan judge, gave the thumbs up to subpoenas issued to Trump, favorite child Ivanka, and Donald Trump Jr, by Tish James, New York’s attorney general. The court’s ruling follows a decision by Trump’s accountants to walk away from the one-term president and disavow years of financial statements issued by his company.Much as the Trump trio tried, they could not shut down James’s investigation into the Trump Organization’s business practices, which could lead to a civil suit by James. Unlike a criminal prosecution, a civil action comes with a lower burden of proof for the government. At the same time, civil lawsuits can drag on – like right into 2024. Barring a stay, Trump and his two children have been ordered to appear at deposition within 21 days.Trump and two eldest children must testify in New York case, judge rulesRead moreIf they tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, who knows what liability may result? On the other hand, if they invoke their right to remain silent, they will probably be portrayed as criminals.“You see, the mob takes the fifth,” Trump observed on the campaign trail in 2016. “If you’re innocent, why are you taking the fifth amendment?”Time sure flies. And if the Trump family refuses to appear at deposition or simply stays mum when grilled, they risk being charged with contempt, a distinction presently held by Steve Bannon, Trump’s White House counselor and 2016 campaign guru.At this moment, Trump must be sweating while his lenders have to be shaking their collective heads. How much is Trump worth and how bad can things get are no longer hypothetical issues. In the absence of operative financial statements, restructurings and bank-called defaults have spilled into the realm of the real.As one Trump insider confided: “Hey, this might be serious. Could Donald Trump [and his business] be screwed? I don’t know, but I’m not as confident as I once was in saying, ‘No’.”Meanwhile, 2024 Republican presidential aspirants are likely stifling a collective smirk. Trump’s legal woes stand to broaden the Republican party’s presidential field, and for some it is downright personal.For Mike Pence, Trump’s hapless vice-president, these recent developments may well trigger a sense of schadenfreude. It wasn’t that long ago when Trump’s loyalists came with makeshift gallows for Pence as they stormed the Capitol, and Trump said nothing to deter the mob. Instead, he demanded loyalty from his No 2.As for Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, Trump’s troubles could not come at a better time. Trump has all but called DeSantis a coward for refusing to say whether he was vaccinated. Beyond that, Florida’s recent per capita Covid mortality rate is the seventh highest in the US, and DeSantis is having a hard time denouncing neo-Nazi violence.“So what I’m going to say is these people, these Democrats who are trying to use this as some type of political issue to try to smear me as if I had something to do with that,” the Sunshine state governor declared. “We’re not playing their game.”To be sure, Trump’s Maga base would stick with him through thick-and-thin. The party’s deep-pocketed donors are a different story. Trump may have delivered them a trove of tax cuts and ambassadorships, but he’s emotionally draining.Beyond that, his antics in the run-up to the 2020 Georgia runoff elections cost the Republicans control of the Senate. There are reasons Mitch McConnell rejects Trump’s lie that the election was stolen and is seeking to bypass the 45th president.Thursday’s ruling was scathing. At one point, the court concluded that the attorney general had uncovered “copious evidence of possible financial fraud”. Elsewhere, the judge excoriated Trump & Co for their flight to fantasy and fiction, invoking Alice in Wonderland, 1984 and Kellyanne Conway all in a single sentence.“The idea that an accounting firm’s announcement that no one should rely on a decade’s worth of financial statements that it issued based on numbers submitted by an entity somehow exonerates that entity and renders an investigation into its past practices moot is reminiscent of Lewis Carroll (‘When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said … it means just what I chose it to mean – neither more nor less’); George Orwell (‘War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength’); and ‘alternative facts.’”In the past, Trump managed to weather storms surrounding his finances and credibility. Trump University did not stop the ex-reality show host’s political ascent. What happens next remains to be seen.Right now, Joe Biden’s poll numbers are in the low 40s, inflation is on the loose, and Nancy Pelosi is poised to lose the speaker’s gavel. Against that tableau, Trump poses a distraction from Republican ambitions, an unwelcome detour from anticipated outcome.
    Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York. He was opposition research counsel to George HW Bush’s 1988 campaign and served in the Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992
    TopicsDonald TrumpOpinionUS politicsDonald Trump JrIvanka TrumpMike PenceKellyanne ConwayNew YorkcommentReuse this content More

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    Donald Trump’s legal woes threaten to engulf him as accountants abandon ship

    Donald Trump’s legal woes threaten to engulf him as accountants abandon shipMazars’ cutting ties with ex-president mark significant step in New York investigation of his financial affairs, among 19 current cases The news that the longtime accounting firm for the Trump Organization has cut ties with the company and retracted 10 years of its financial statements is a new and serious blow to Donald Trump’s increasingly frenzied battle to fend off the legal investigations that are rapidly engulfing him.The revelation that Mazars USA last week ended its relationship with the Trump family comes at a perilous moment for the former president as he strives to protect himself, his family and his business from legal threats that are now coming thick and fast.A Guardian tally this month found that Trump was facing a total of 19 legal challenges, six of which involve alleged financial irregularities.By withdrawing its stamp of approval from the documents, Mazars leaves Trump potentially exposed to substantial legal and financial trouble.The papers, known as statements of financial condition, were used by Trump and his family business to attract and secure hundreds of millions of dollars in loans. They are also at the centre of an escalating investigation by the New York state attorney general, Letitia James.Last month James tightened the screws on Trump and the Trump Organization by releasing details in a filing of several instances involving golf courses, real estate and other assets where the family had allegedly “falsely and fraudulently valued multiple assets and misrepresented those values to financial institutions for economic benefit”.In a letter dated 9 February, Mazars’ general counsel, William Kelly, told the Trump Organization that the annual financial statements it had prepared for the family business between 2011 and 2020 were no longer reliable.The accountants said they had based their decision partly on their own investigation into Trump’s finances and on the “totality of the circumstances”, concluding that “we are not able to provide any new work product to the Trump Organization”.On the back of James’s latest attack, Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney and an ex-vice president of the Trump Organization, told the Guardian that in his opinion “the House of Trump is crumbling”.James’s investigation is one of the most advanced and potentially dangerous of all the 19 legal actions bearing down on Trump. The inquiry is being pursued on both civil and criminal lines.James is working in tandem with a separate criminal investigation by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg. That inquiry is also looking into whether Trump and his family concern defrauded lenders or underpaid taxes by falsely representing his assets.The disclosure that Mazars had broken off relations with Trump was included in a new court filing from James on Monday as part of her ongoing attempt to force Trump and his two eldest children, Donald Jr and Ivanka, to testify under subpoena.Trump has consistently denied financial impropriety and has attempted to cast doubt on James’s investigation by denouncing it as a partisan witch-hunt. James is a Democrat, while Trump won the presidency in 2016 as a Republican.The Trump Organization said it was “disappointed” by Mazars’ decision but tried to spin the development in a positive light. It selectively cited a line in the Mazars letter that said that “we have not concluded that the various financial statements, as a whole, contain material discrepancies”, adding that the comment rendered the James and Bragg investigations “moot”.As Trump’s legal and financial woes deepen, he is also being assailed by a flurry of bad news surrounding the congressional investigation into the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. Trump, who is at the centre of the House select committee inquiry given that his “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen from him drew thousands of his supporters to the Capitol building that day, has been trying to persuade his closest advisers not to cooperate.This week it was revealed that John Eastman, a conservative law professor who was integral to attempts to persuade the then vice president, Mike Pence, to delay certification of Joe Biden’s victory on January 6, has handed over 8,000 pages of emails to the committee.It has also become known that Rudy Giuliani, who as Trump’s lawyer was a key figure in the campaign to overturn the presidential election results, has opened a dialogue with the committee that could see him testifying in some form.TopicsDonald TrumpNew YorkUS Capitol attacknewsReuse this content More

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    Blue states are rolling back mask rules – but experts warn it’s too soon

    Blue states are rolling back mask rules – but experts warn it’s too soonThe lifting of mandates is coming at a time when the CDC says a vast majority of the country is still seeing high Covid transmission Several US states, many of them governed by Democrats, began rolling back mask mandates this week, a move public health experts warn could set back progress battling Covid.On Wednesday, Massachusetts, Illinois, New York and Rhode Island joined California, Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey and Oregon in lifting mask mandates for some public places.The wave of relaxations comes after months of private meetings among state leaders and political focus groups after the November elections, according to reports. “Now, it’s time to give people their lives back,” Sean Maloney, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, tweeted in support of New York suspending its indoor mask-or-vaccine mandate.Covid-era Americans are using public transit less and having more car crashes Read moreYet the lifting of rules has not been universally applauded and is coming at a time when the vast majority of the country (99%) is still seeing high transmission of the virus, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Public polls show consistent support for mask mandates and other precautions, and experts say the time to relax precautions is not here yet – and acting prematurely could prolong this wave.“In my view, it’s too soon. I feel like we’re anticipating too much,” said Justin Lessler, a professor of epidemiology at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. “We’re being too confident that things are going to keep going the direction that they have been going.”The CDC’s director Rochelle Walensky also recently said that “now is not the moment” to drop masks in public, although the agency is reportedly weighing changes to its guidance on masks.While Covid cases have dropped from Omicron’s record-shattering peak, the US still has an average of more than 230,000 cases each day – similar to the height of last winter’s wave – and more than 2,300 people are dying from Covid each day, according to the CDC. While hospitalizations are beginning to fall, 80% of hospitals are still under “high or extreme stress”.Treatments, including antivirals and monoclonal antibodies, that keep Covid from progressing to serious illness and death are still in short supply throughout the country. Children under the age of 5 are not yet eligible for vaccines, while less than a quarter of kids ages five to 11 are fully vaccinated.“We have hundreds of thousands of people dying, we have millions who’ve been hospitalized and we have an unknown number who have long Covid and who will get long Covid as we roll back what little mitigation we have,” said Julia Raifman, assistant professor at Boston University School of Public Health and creator of the Covid-19 US state policy database.“Saying things are normal undercuts us in getting more people vaccinated and in helping people wear masks, because transmission actually remains quite high,” Raifman said. “The best way to help people think things are more normal is to reduce the amount of virus with the mitigation measures that we have.”The failure to set measures on when to drop or reinstate precautions “starts from the top”, including the CDC and the White House, Raifman said. “The whole of the pandemic response is being mismanaged, and only better leadership can help us come together to better address it.”Anthony Fauci, the president’s chief medical adviser, says the US is leaving the “full blown” phase of the pandemic. In September, he said controlling the pandemic meant having fewer than 10,000 cases a day.“This is not a declaration of victory as much as an acknowledgment that we can responsibly live with this thing,” said the New Jersey governor, Phil Murphy, who is also a key leader of the National Governors Association. Governors have reportedly urged Biden to “move away from the pandemic”.Many states – including Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Oregon, New Jersey and Rhode Island – are also set to lift school mask mandates. California is considering changes to the rules on school masks, while Illinois and New York will keep theirs for now. The governor of Pennsylvania lifted the school mask rule last month.Teachers’ unions have joined health experts in calling for science-based recommendations in order to keep educators and students safe, and to keep the virus from forcing further school closures caused by worker shortages.“I worry about taking off measures just because cases are trending down,” Lessler said. “At least some of the rate of decrease has to do with what little we’re doing to try to control transmission, and by stopping these measures – both directly and in the message it sends about the risk of the virus – you slow that down-trend.”A new variant could also emerge and change the situation yet again, he said. “We’ve time and time again been surprised by new variants.”Lifting measures too early and slowing the decrease in cases can result in “a lot of unnecessary cases and deaths that you might have avoided simply by waiting a few weeks”, Lessler said.“And if we change what we’re doing substantially, we may not get there, or it may take us longer to get there than anticipated.”TopicsCoronavirusOmicron variantDemocratsUS politicsCaliforniaNew YorkOregonnewsReuse this content More

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    ‘Food is doing more injustice than mass incarceration’: New York mayor Eric Adams on veganism

    Interview‘Food is doing more injustice than mass incarceration’: New York mayor Eric Adams on veganismEd Pilkington in New York Adams appears to have had some personal success with a vegan diet after a health scare, but can he replicate it among all New Yorkers?One morning in March 2016, before Eric Adams burst onto the national stage as the charismatic new mayor of New York City, he had a very rude awakening.The then Brooklyn borough president was startled to find that he could barely see the alarm clock that was sounding his morning call. His bedroom looked shrouded in mist.“I thought it was just sleep in my eyes and my eyes adjusting to the light,” Adams says. “But the cloudiness didn’t change. Something wrong was going on here.”He leapt out of bed only for the horror to intensify. Through the fog he could see that his right eye was bloodshot. His left eye was totally blind.“I had a piercing pain in my stomach which didn’t leave. I guess everything was breaking down all at once.”Adams is no stranger to fear. As he lays out in his book, Healthy At Last, he experienced plenty of it over more than two decades as an NYPD officer, patrolling the streets at night, raiding drug dens, investigating homicides, investigating the dark side of urban American life.This was different. This was the start of a journey into his physical dark side and the ugly truths he found there. He was quickly delivered a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes. Doctors told him that his condition and the multiple pills he would now be forced to swallow every day would define him for the rest of his life.American politics thrives on personal narratives of overcoming adversity, and Eric Adams is no exception. He didn’t accept the medical advice. He kept on searching until, with the help of scientists at the Cleveland Clinic, he discovered a way to beat his ailment with a radical whole-food plant-based diet.Now 61, Adams is reveling in his new stature as New York’s second Black (after David Dinkins in the 1990s) and first (almost) vegan mayor. Since he started in the post on 1 January he has been ubiquitous, popping up all over the city brandishing his trademark swagger. “When a mayor has swagger, the city has swagger,” is his mantra.There are many aspects of Adams’ first month in office that beg attention. He likes to present himself as the future of the Democratic party, a “radically practical” politician who is tough on both police brutality and crime, who gives working-class New Yorkers what they need and want while being scathingly dismissive of the progressive left.The stance clearly resonates with many New Yorkers who narrowly gave him victory in the Democratic primaries in July and with it the keys to Gracie Mansion. But Adams has had a troubled start, some of it self-inflicted.He tried to put his brother Bernard into a $210,000 job as his top bodyguard (the city’s conflict of interests board whittled that down to a $1 salary as an adviser). He appointed as head of public safety Philip Banks, who in 2015 came under federal investigation as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in a major NYPD corruption scandal.Adams doesn’t want to talk about all that. Before he sits down for an interview with the Guardian, his press team stipulates that he will answer no questions about politics – he will only talk about his journey back from ill-health and his exuberant championship of a plant-based diet, as laid out in his book. Even here Adams is placing himself in choppy waters. A few days after the Guardian interview, he incensed groups helping those impacted by the opioid crisis by likening excessive cheese consumption to heroin addiction.Then Politico came out with a report that quoted several people claiming to have seen Adams regularly dining out on fish. The story inevitably spawned the Twitter handle #FishGate, and forced Adams to put out a statement saying “I am perfectly imperfect, and have occasionally eaten fish.”Adams clearly needs to get his story straight. Is he a strict vegan who only ever eats plant-based foods? (No.) Is he a pescatarian? (Maybe.) Is he someone who was given the scare of his life by contracting a devastating disease and drastically changed his life as a result?At least that last one is a definite yes. After Adams received his diabetes diagnosis, he began asking himself difficult questions about his lifestyle. He started reflecting on all those years of NYPD night shifts and the terrible diet that entailed.There were the inevitable McDonald’s drive-throughs and Wendy’s shakes and burgers. He became a connoisseur of the dollar menu, the double cheeseburger, coffee and fried chicken at KFC. It took its toll – by the time of the blindness episode he had such a stunningly elevated blood sugar level that his doctor said it could have put him in a coma.And then Adams dug deeper. Looking further into the root causes of his condition, he thought about the soul food that he had grown up with in New York and that his mother Dorothy and forebears had consumed in rural Alabama. He thought about the sugared buttered rolls, the chitterlings (pigs’ intestines), pigs’ feet and ears, fried chicken, ham hocks, fried steak and catfish.He thought how delicious. And how deadly. So much of it smothered in sugar, high in cholesterol and saturated fats, contributing to the epidemic of modern American diseases – diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure and heart conditions.And then he thought, picking up on a debate that has been happening in African American communities for many years, this is not soul food, this is survival food, slavery food. “This was the diet our slave masters gave to us hundreds of years ago,” Adams writes. “We adopted a diet born from slavery and made it our own.”I asked Adams to elaborate upon the idea that the modern diet of millions of Americans today, in 2022, has its roots in the scraps of food tossed at slaves from the master’s table. All these years later, he replied, the long tail of slavery is still killing African Americans through morbid ill health.“Sometimes we think of being enslaved and we think about physical restraints,” he said. “Our hands and feet are in shackles. And we don’t acknowledge that the term ‘enslaved’ also applies to something you can’t free yourself of – and that’s what bad food is.”He goes on: “We have to free ourselves of it mentally. Sometimes physical restraint is easier to free yourself from than emotional restraint.”It’s striking that at a time when the enduring injury of slavery is increasingly being studied and debated, whether in terms of racial inequality or the injustices of the criminal justice system and mass incarceration, the same unbroken link to enslavement is rarely drawn when it comes to American food.“Food is doing more of an injustice than mass incarceration,” he says. “They are both bad, but the number of lives we are losing from bad food are X times the number lost to mass incarceration.”That’s a bold statement, given that there are about 670,000 Black people currently behind bars in the US. Yet Black Americans are almost twice as likely to be diagnosed with type 2 diabetes than white Americans, and that more than five million of them are assailed with the illness today.Certainly, he has witnessed the impact of food-related ill-health within his own family. He describes how diabetes was so rampant among his relatives that they even had a pet word for it – “sugar”. His aunt Betty died of sugar aged 57 – one year older than Adams was when he was struck with temporary blindness.No matter how prevalent disease has been among his community, it must have been a tall order trying to persuade people accustomed to soul and fast food to follow him into the strictly vegan, no-oil, non-processed, plant-based and whole food diet he has adopted. Among the recipes offered in his book are quinoa and tempeh stir-fry, chia oats with berries, and sweet potato and flaxseed smoothies. Try selling that to someone accustomed to St Louis ribs, hush puppies and oxtail.Adams said there have been times when friends would accuse him of elitism, turning his back on the traditional foods of his community and going all “white” on them. “There is a lot of pushback,” he told me.“Remember, when you talk about what a person is eating you are also talking about the emotions attached to what they are eating. When you talk about not eating soul food, people tend to believe that you are too good for it. ‘My grandmother was raised on this’, they’ll say.”So how does he go about trying to get beyond such resistance? “I give them the history. I make the connections. Sometimes people just need to connect the dots. When you start showing them the origins of fried chicken, the origins of chitterlings and pigs’ feet, of all the other food that were the scraps and waste from the slave master’s table, that hits folks and they begin to think differently about it.”It is ironic that his book, with its recipes and self-help bullet points, is focused very much on the individual. But out in East New York or in Brownsville, where Adams was born, and other low-income areas of the city, African Americans have scant chance of eating healthily even if they wanted to, given the food deserts they live in.Isn’t it the case that in neighborhoods where fast-food restaurants and delis stocked with sugary fatty products are the only outlets, a more systemic – rather than individualist – approach is needed?Yes, he says. “What I’m hoping to do, it’s almost like the Marines taking control of the beach. If I plant this seed in the minds of people while we are transforming these communities to have access to healthy food, then we will go from ‘Wait a minute, I don’t have access to it’, to ‘Hey, this is what Eric was talking about’.”I ask him what he means. “Imagine you see something on the shelf like quinoa and couscous, and you have no idea why you would want to eat those meals. But if you are given information before you walk into the supermarket then you might try this healthy meal next time round.”That’s all very well, but how are the food deserts in low-income African American neighbourhoods ever going to get access to the kinds of whole-grain, plant-based foods that Adams espouses? There is no shortage of guidance that Adams could draw on from other parts of the country where Black communities have long experimented with community gardens and vegan hot lunches in schools.When he was Brooklyn borough president he initiated “meatless Mondays” in local public schools, and campaigned to have all processed meat removed from school meals. Now that he’s mayor, he is expanding his push for healthy food. This week he introduced “vegan Fridays” for all New York public schools – a reform to the quality of school food that Adams still stands by despite his difficulties with #FishGate.Will there be more coming, and if so how will he use his new power to make lasting change? “How do I do it?” Adams says. “I look at where as government we are feeding people and I change that. We feed 1.1 million New Yorkers every day at school, people in hospitals, correction facilities, senior centres. How about giving them all healthy food?”It’s early days for the Adams administration, too early to make firm assessments. So far there are no signs of detailed plans emerging for actually carrying out such a food revolution.It leaves a question mark hanging over his undoubtedly powerful and positive mission to change what we eat. In his own life, the results of the transformation are dramatic and unanswerable, fish or no fish. He shed 35lbs, kicked diabetes, and now exudes glowing good health.He appears to have had some personal success, but can he replicate it among all New Yorkers?TopicsEric AdamsNew YorkUS politicsVegan food and drinkVeganismFoodinterviewsReuse this content More

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    Joe Biden on crime: ‘The answer is not to defund the police’ – live

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    Russia plans ‘very graphic’ fake video as pretext for Ukraine invasion, US claims

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    Today so far

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    Russia plans staged attack to justify invasion of Ukraine – reports

    10.40am EST

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    Isis leader detonated bomb to avoid US capture, Biden says

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    The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, became similarly defensive earlier today when a reporter pressed for more details about the deaths of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi and his family members.
    Joe Biden said that Qurayshi detonated a bomb to avoid capture by the US troops who carried out a special forces raid last night, and the explosion killed the Islamic State leader and several of his family members.
    NPR reporter Ayesha Rascoe asked Psaki whether the White House would present evidence to substantiate Biden’s claims that a suicide bomb killed Qurayshi and his family.
    “Obviously, these events just happened overnight. And so, I’m going to let the Department of Defense do a final assessment, which I’m certain they will provide additional detail on once it’s finalized,” Psaki said.
    Rascoe continued to press the issue, telling Psaki, “The US has not always been straightforward about what happens with civilians. And, I mean, that is a fact.”
    The US military initially described a Kabul drone attack carried out last year as a “righteous strike,” but Pentagon leaders were later forced to admit that the attack had actually killed 10 civilians and no Islamic State combatants.
    “The president made clear from the beginning, at every point in this process, that doing everything possible to avoid civilian casualties was his priority and his preference,” Psaki said.
    “Given these events just happened less than 24 hours ago, we’re going to give [the Pentagon] time to make a final assessment. And they’ll provide every detail they can.”

    4.14pm EST

    16:14

    The State Department spokesperson, Ned Price, clashed with a reporter at his press briefing after the journalist demanded evidence to substantiate US claims of Russia’s plans to stage an attack to justify an invasion of Ukraine.
    “You’ve made an allegation that they might do that. Have they actually done it?” AP reporter Matt Lee asked Price.
    “What we know, Matt, is what I just said, that they have engaged in this activity,” Price said. “We told you a few weeks ago that we have information indicating Russia also has already pre-positioned a group of operatives to conduct a false-flag operation in eastern Ukraine. So that, Matt, to your question is an action that Russia has already taken.”

    The Hill
    (@thehill)
    Reporter: “It’s an action that you say they have taken, but you have shown no evidence to confirm that. […] This is like – crisis actors? Really? This is like Alex Jones territory you’re getting into now.”Must-watch exchange between @APDiploWriter Matt Lee and @StateDeptSpox. pic.twitter.com/RPIPb2zwf5

    February 3, 2022

    Lee pointed out that the administration has not presented evidence to support the allegation of a planned false-flag operation either, and he pressed for concrete proof of Russia’s schemes in Ukraine.
    Specifically on the allegation of a planned fake video to justify an invasion, Lee said, “This is like – crisis actors? Really? This is like Alex Jones territory you’re getting into now.”
    Pointing to his decades of experience covering US foreign policy, Lee noted that the Pentagon has previously made wrong assertions about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the potential of Kabul falling to the Taliban.
    Price became defensive, telling Lee, “If you doubt the credibility of the US government, of the British government, of other governments and want to, you know, find solace in information that the Russians are putting out, that is for you to do.”

    3.48pm EST

    15:48

    Russia plans ‘very graphic’ fake video as pretext for Ukraine invasion, US claims

    The Guardian’s Julian Borger and Shaun Walker report:
    US officials claim they have evidence of a Russian plan to make a “very graphic” fake video of a Ukrainian attack as a pretext for an invasion.
    The alleged plot would involve using corpses, footage of blown-up buildings, fake Ukrainian military hardware, Turkish-made drones and actors playing the part of Russian-speaking mourners.
    “We don’t know definitively that this is the route they are going to take, but we know that this is an option under consideration,” the deputy national security adviser, Jonathan Finer, told MSNBC, adding that the video “would involve actors playing mourners for people who are killed in an event that they would have created themselves”.
    Finer added: “That would involve the deployment of corpses to represent bodies purportedly killed, of people purportedly killed in an incident like this.”
    The Pentagon spokesman, John Kirby, said the video would have purported to show a Ukrainian attack on Russian territory or Russian-speaking people in eastern Ukraine and would be “very graphic”. He added that the US believed that the plan had the backing of the Kremlin.
    “Our experience is that very little of this nature is not approved at the highest levels of the Russian government,” Kirby said.

    3.28pm EST

    15:28

    Trump Israel ambassador spills beans on embarrassing meeting

    Martin Pengelly

    Meeting then-Israeli president Reuven Rivlin in Jerusalem in May 2017, Donald Trump stunned advisers by criticising the then-prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for being unwilling to seek peace while Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, was “desperate” for a deal. More