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      Environmental groups hail Covid relief bill – but more needs to be done

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      Joe Biden’s pledge to make the climate emergency a top priority of his administration from day one has received a major boost from the $900bn Covid-19 relief bill that cleared Congress this week and now awaits Donald Trump’s signature.
      The president has demanded changes but nonetheless the package has been hailed by environmental groups as an important move towards re-engaging the US with international efforts to tackle the climate crisis and move towards a clean energy future.
      “The bill contains some truly historic provisions that represent the most significant climate legislation passed by Congress in over a decade,” said Sam Ricketts, co-founder of Evergreen Action.
      The Sierra Club, an environmental group which operates in all 50 states, expressed a sigh of relief that Republican intransigence, led by the president and Mitch McConnell in the Senate, had finally been overcome. Kirin Kennedy, the group’s deputy legislative director, expressed confidence that the bill would contribute towards “addressing major sources of pollution, growing clean energy, and making progress across government agencies to advance climate action”.
      But she added that the Biden administration had a lot of work still to do to, in the president-elect’s phrase, “build back better”. Kennedy said that meant “investing in clean, renewable energy that can power communities, not saddling them with false solutions or pollution for decades to come”.
      Set against the time-critical nature of the climate crisis and the need for immediate action to curb pollution and switch to renewable energies, the relief bill falls short both in the scale and ambition of its commitments.
      “Is this enough to meet the urgency of the moment? The short answer is plainly no – the package is smaller than we’ve called for and certainly smaller than the science demands,” Ricketts said.
      But contained in the bill are a number of provisions that represent a clear advance in the US stance on the climate crisis, at the end of four years of Trump administration attacks on environmental protections.
      By the far the most significant of those advances is the commitment to phase out hydrofluorocarbons, HFCs, which are widely used as coolants in air conditioners, fridges and cars.
      Under the terms of the relief bill, most HFC use would end by 2035. The overall global impact of such a firm gesture by the US could lead to 0.5C of avoided warming this century.
      Ricketts said that the move was not only important in its own right in the climate fight, but it also made a statement that the US was prepared to work with world partners. That was all the more poignant coming just a month after Trump took the US formally out of the Paris climate agreement.
      “This is a timely way of showing that we can still play on the international stage and meet our commitments,” he said.
      Among other measures in the bill that have received praise from environmental groups are extensions to tax credits for renewable energy technologies. Offshore wind could enjoy a particular boost with the incentives lasting five years.
      “This is an industry that is just starting to drive down the runway for take-off in the US,” Ricketts said. “There’s an enormous potential, especially in the north east, and the five-year tax incentive is critical.”
      A further area of significant reform is the pot of $35bn provided for research and development in a range of innovations designed to confront the climate crisis. They include the creation of more efficient batteries, carbon capture, and advanced nuclear reactor technology.
      Katherine Egland, environment and climate justice chair for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People national board of directors, said that for African American and other low-income communities the relief bill would impact lives. She lives in Gulfport, Mississippi, on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, and this year has experienced firsthand the confluence of the coronavirus pandemic, the climate crisis and racial injustice.
      “We have been confronted by a syndemic in 2020,” she told the Guardian. “We have had to cope with the disproportionate impacts of Covid and climate, during an unprecedented storm season and a year rife with racial unrest.”
      Egland said congressional action was welcome “after four years of climate denial. It is a positive step in the right direction”.
      But she said that the country would need to do much more to meet the scale of the crisis: “There is no vaccine to inoculate us against climate change.” More

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      Trump vetoes huge US defense spending bill but Congress set to override

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      Donald Trump vetoed a $740bn bill setting policy for the Department of Defense on Wednesday, despite its strong support in Congress, raising the possibility that the measure will fail to become law for the first time in 60 years.Although Trump’s previous eight vetoes were all upheld thanks to support from Republicans in Congress, advisers said this one looked likely to be overridden, just weeks before Trump leaves office on 20 January.Trump said he vetoed the annual National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, because it “fails to include critical national security measures, includes provisions that fail to respect our veterans and our military’s history, and contradicts efforts by my administration to put America first in our national security and foreign policy actions”.A key measure in the NDAA to which Trump objects is the move to rename US military bases currently named for leaders of the Confederacy, which seceded from the union over slavery, leading to the civil war of 1861 to 1865.Pressure to rename the bases grew this year amid nationwide protests over the killing by Minneapolis police of George Floyd, an African American man on whose neck an officer knelt for almost nine minutes.Trump also threatened a veto if the bill did not repeal part of a 1996 telecoms law which prevents online companies from being sued in relation to third-party content.If Section 230 is not “completely terminated”, Trump tweeted earlier this month, “I will be forced to unequivocally VETO the Bill when sent to the very beautiful Resolute desk.”In a message to the House of Representatives, on Wednesday, Trump also called the bill “a ‘gift’ to China and Russia”.Both the Republican Senate and Democratic House passed the 2021 NDAA with margins larger than the two-thirds majorities needed to override a veto. That means that Trump would have to persuade dozens of Republicans to throw out nearly a year’s work on the 4,500-page bill and start over.Top advisers urged Trump not to carry out his veto threat, citing the slim chance of stopping the bill. Many of Trump’s staunchest supporters, including Senate armed services committee chairman Jim Inhofe, said they would vote to override.“It’s simple, what this bill does,” Inhofe said when the measure passed the Senate. “It makes our country more secure, and it supports our troops who defend it.”Advisers said Trump had little to gain from a veto and it could hurt his party’s ability to hang on to two US Senate seats in Georgia in 5 January runoff votes.The Senate backed the bill 84-13, with the no votes coming from some of the most conservative Republicans and most liberal Democrats. The Democratic-led House backed the NDAA by 335-78, with some “no” votes also coming from liberal Democrats less likely to back a Trump veto.The NDAA determines everything from how many ships are bought to soldiers’ pay to how to address geopolitical threats. The measure vetoed by Trump was a compromise, combining separate measures already passed in the House and Senate.Lawmakers take pride in the bill having become law every year since 1961, saying it reflects their support for the military. Trump’s veto, if upheld, would delay a 3% pay raise for active-duty troops. More

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      Covid relief: Trump demands changes to sign $900bn bill

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      Outgoing president says $600 stimulus payout to most Americans should increase to $2,000, or $4,000 for a coupleDonald Trump has suggested he may not sign the bipartisan $900bn pandemic relief package that Congress passed on Monday night.Trump complained in a video that the bill delivered too much money to foreign countries and not enough to Americans. The bill has enough votes to override a veto should Trump decide to take that step. Continue reading… More

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      Who has Donald Trump just pardoned? A guide to the key figures

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      From figures in the Russia investigation to former Republican lawmakers, a look at who’s who in the latest round of pardonsDonald Trump has granted pardons to 15 people, a group that includes a former campaign aide, three former Republican lawmakers, a Dutch lawyer charged as part of the Russia investigation, and four former government contractors convicted of killing Iraqi civilians. He also commuted the sentences of five others.Here is what you need to know about the key figures. Continue reading… More

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      Trump pardons ex-campaign aide, Blackwater contractors and disgraced lawmakers

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      President grants pardons to 15 people, including contractors convicted in massacre in Iraq, and commutes others’ sentencesDonald Trump approved a wave of pre-Christmas pardons, granting clemency to a former campaign aide caught up in the Russia investigation, disgraced Republican lawmakers and several contractors convicted in a massacre in Iraq. Continue reading… More

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      Walmart sued by US over alleged role in fuelling America's opioid crisis

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      The US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Walmart on Tuesday, alleging that the retail giant filled “thousands of invalid prescriptions” for powerful painkillers, helping fuel America’s opioid crisis.Walmart runs more than 5,000 pharmacies across the country. Until 2018, the chain was a wholesale distributor of controlled substances for its own pharmacies, giving it extensive reach into many communities.The civil complaint points to the role Walmart’s pharmacies may have played in the crisis by filling opioid prescriptions and by unlawfully distributing controlled substances to the pharmacies during the height of the opioid crisis.“As a nationwide dispenser and distributor of opioids, and given the sheer number of pharmacies it operates, Walmart was uniquely well positioned to prevent the illegal diversion of opioids,” the 160-page civil suit, filed in Delaware federal court, said.“Yet, for years, as the prescription drug abuse epidemic ravaged the country, Walmart abdicated those responsibilities,” the suit added.In response, Walmart said the suit was “riddled with factual inaccuracies”.The DoJ document said the company “knowingly violated well established rules requiring it to scrutinize controlled-substance prescriptions to ensure that they were valid – that is, issued by prescribers in a legitimate manner for legitimate purposes, not for purposes of abuse or other diversion,” the suit continued. While Walmart was legally required to check potential red flags, it “made little effort to ensure that it complied with them”.Instead, Walmart made it hard for pharmacists to abide by these regulations. Managers pressured pharmacists to fill high volumes of prescriptions as quickly as possible “while at the same time denying them the authority to categorically refuse to fill prescriptions issued by prescribers the pharmacists knew were continually issuing invalid prescriptions”, the complaint charged.Even though Walmart’s compliance arm had amassed extensive information showing that people were repeatedly trying to get invalid narcotic prescriptions filled, the unit kept that data from pharmacists, authorities also said.Walmart filled prescriptions from prescribers who its own pharmacists had “repeatedly reported were acting as egregious ‘pill mills’ – even when Walmart was alerted that other pharmacies were not filling prescriptions for those prescribers. In fact, some of those pill-mill prescribers specifically told their patients to fill their prescriptions at Walmart.”So intense were the pressures on pharmacists that managers told them to “[h]ustle to the customer, hustle from station to station” because completing prescriptions “is a battle of seconds”, federal authorities alleged.As early as 2013, Walmart adopted a plan that used the number of prescriptions processed by an employee’s store as a factor in determining if the pharmacy staffer “was entitled to monetary incentive awards”.The DoJ contends that Walmart has committed “hundreds of thousands of violations” of the Controlled Substances Act. If Walmart is found liable for violating this act, each unlawfully filled prescription could result in a $67,627 penalty. Each suspicious order that was not reported to authorities could result in a penalty of up to $15,691. Civil penalties could reach “billions”, the DoJ said.More than 232,000 people died in the US from opioid-involved overdoses between 1999 and 2018, according to the DoJ.In a statement, Walmart said that the DoJ’s investigation was “tainted by historical ethics violations, and this lawsuit invents a legal theory that unlawfully forces pharmacists to come between patients and their doctors, and is riddled with factual inaccuracies and cherry-picked documents taken out of context”.“Blaming pharmacists for not second-guessing the very doctors the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) approved to prescribe opioids is a transparent attempt to shift blame from DEA’s well-documented failures in keeping bad doctors from prescribing opioids in the first place,” the company said.Walmart recently sued the DoJ and DEA, alleging that authorities wrongly ascribed blame to the company. The retailer’s suit wants a federal judge to determine that the government doesn’t have grounds to pursue civil damages, according to the Associated Press. More

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      More immigrant women say they were abused by Ice gynecologist

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      More women have joined an official legal petition alleging that they were medically abused by a gynecologist while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) custody in a move that significantly expands a case that has shocked America.The legal petition outlining these alleged abuses were filed in the Middle District of Georgia federal court late Monday night. More than 40 women have submitted written testimony attesting to claims of abuse, one attorney on their case said.These women, who have been detained by Ice at Irwin county detention center in Georgia, have alleged that they underwent invasive and unnecessary medical procedures. The women’s attorneys have also alleged that these women endured retribution for speaking out, including deportation in some cases. The petition largely echoed past legal filings and accounts by accusers.“Petitioners were victims of non-consensual, medically unindicated and/or invasive gynecological procedures, including unnecessary surgical procedures under general anesthesia, performed by and/or at the direction of [gynaecologist Dr Mahendra Amin],” the petition said. “In many instances, the medically unindicated gynecological procedures Respondent Amin performed on Petitioners amounted to sexual assault.”Officials were aware of this alleged misconduct since 2018, the petition further alleged, “but have nonetheless continued a policy or custom of sending women to be mistreated and abused by Respondent Amin … The experiences Petitioners had at the hands of Respondent Amin form part of a disturbing pattern of inhumane medical abuse and mistreatment at ICDC.”“This is an effort to protect women who have suffered horrendous medical atrocities while detained in US custody, and every effort has been made by both Ice and the contractors at this facility to cover up these medical abuses,” said Elora Mukherjee, director of Columbia Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, a leading attorney on the case.She added: “For more than two years, both the government, and the private contractors who run this facility, have turned a blind eye to the enormous suffering and intentional harm–and intentional medical abuse – that has taken place here.”“It’s unlike anything I ever expected to see in America,” Mukherjee said.The women’s allegations emerged after a shocking whistleblower report. This report, which was submitted on behalf of a former nurse at the facility, Dawn Wooten, alleged that an alarmingly high number of hysterectomies were performed on Spanish-speaking women. Wooten and other nurses feared that these women did not understand the procedures they underwent.Wooten alleged that the doctor performing these procedures, who was subsequently named as gynecologist Dr Mahendra Amin, had become notorious for performing these operations – so much so that she called him the “uterus collector” in her whistleblower account.“Everybody he sees has a hysterectomy – just about everybody,” Wooten stated in her complaint. “I’ve had several inmates tell me that they’ve been to see the doctor, and they’ve had hysterectomies, and they don’t know why they went or why they’re going.”Wooten also said that the medical center where these procedures were performed had unsanitary conditions, as well as poor safety measures against Covid-19.Amin has denied the allegations and told the Intercept that he had only conducted “one or two hysterectomies in the past two [or] three years”. He did not specify whether these procedures were performed on women in Irwin.The physician’s lawyer, Scott Grubman, said in a previous statement: “We look forward to all of the facts coming out, and are confident that once they do, Dr Amin will be cleared of any wrongdoing.” Ice contended that its records indicate just two referrals for hysterectomies at Irwin.The accusations have spurred comparisons with the US’s disturbing history of eugenics. From 1907 to 1937, two-thirds of US states passed laws that permitted involuntary sterilization – resulting in the sterilization of more than 60,000 people.An increase in federal funding for reproductive health procedures in the 1960s and 1970s, in conjunction with racism and anti-immigrant sentiment, resulted in “tens of thousands” of women of color undergoing sterilizations. Though forced sterilization was made illegal, it has continued. From 1997 to 2013, approximately 1,400 inmates were sterilized in California prisons. More

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      The Trump White House has entered its final stage: complete meltdown | Richard Wolffe

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      The last days of the Trump presidency increasingly resemble the fictional presidency in the movie Monsters vs Aliens.In case you missed this 2009 animated masterpiece, President Hathaway (voiced by Stephen Colbert) responds to an alien invasion with a team of unlikely heroes, among them a giant-sized TV reporter from Modesto, a cockroach-turned-mad-scientist, and an enormous blob of Jell-O.One of the running gags is that the president has installed two red buttons in his situation room. One is to make his morning latte, the other to launch all his nuclear weapons. He can never remember which is which.In the final month of Donald Trump’s time in the Oval Office, he has at last assembled his own team of outsized odds and ends, self-aggrandizing wingnuts, and brainless lumps of gelatin. You can decide for yourself if this latest incarnation of his “elite strike force” of advisers is more likely to launch all the nuclear weapons or make a fresh cup of coffee.At the center of the team to save Planet Trump are the unhinged characters of Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn, who reportedly met with the soon-to-be-ex-president in the White House over several hours on Friday.Both Powell and Flynn have previously been fired by the reality TV star turned president – who, after all, built a public persona around firing people on The Apprentice. But on Planet Trump, firings are not as final as they appear to be, which surely means it’s not too late for the Mooch to extend his 10-day record of service to the nation.Powell was ejected from the elite strike force of lawyers just one month ago for her outlandish claims that Joe Biden won the presidential election with mysterious “communist money” and the support of the long-deceased Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.But that was so November. Now, as the New York Times first reported, Powell’s outlandish claims are the basis for Trump’s desire to name her as special counsel to investigate the Venezuelan plot.Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr, told reporters on Monday that he saw no need to name a special counsel to investigate either the election or Biden’s son Hunter.But it is only a matter of time before Powell disinters the Chavismo corpse once more. Specifically, a couple of days: Barr leaves his office on Wednesday, mysteriously a few weeks before everyone else in the Trump administration.Friday’s surreal bull session included Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, who has the distinct honor of having been fired by both Obama and Trump – a rare point of agreement between the yin and yang of the American presidency. Flynn lied to Mike Pence and the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador, pleading guilty to the felony as part of the Mueller investigation.Newly pardoned by the man who fired him, Flynn is now reportedly advocating for Trump to invoke martial law to re-run the election. This would normally be key to executing a Chavista coup, but is obviously now the victim of a Chavista coup.One of the ringleaders of this madcap gang is Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock, who left the online retailer last year claiming that he had romanced a Russian agent on behalf of “the Men in Black”. Good luck making sense of that, or Byrne’s latest venture: what he calls “a team of hackers and cybersleuths and other people with odd skills”. For Trump’s favorite news channel, OAN, this constitutes an “elite cybersecurity team”.It’s quite possible that “elite” means something else on Planet Trump. It’s also possible there are giant-sized TV reporters in Modesto.This is the self-defeating, nonsensical house that Trump builtByrne, who tweeted that he was part of the long White House session with Flynn and Powell, says that Trump is being lied to by his own advisers and that his buddy can still win the election he so clearly lost.“It is 100% winnable. No martial law required,” he tweeted. “Sydney [sic] and Flynn presented a course that I estimate has 50%-75% chance of victory. His staff just try to convince him to do nothing but accept it. As a CEO, my heart broke to see what he is going through. He is betrayed from within.”It must have been heartbreaking to sit in the bunker, watching reason and the constitution push their way into the conversation, while our brave reality TV star battled against his own disloyal lackeys.Sadly the sickness is not confined to the Oval Office and will outlive its current occupant. Back on Earth, there is no chance of Trump successfully ordering the military to intervene in the election, and no chance of Congress overturning the electoral college. But these pesky facts won’t stop the Trumpista movement that is now the Republican party.Take Clay Higgins, the duly elected representative for Louisiana’s third district. Higgins is a reserve law enforcement officer with a strained relationship to reality, having made his name videoing outlandish Crime Stoppers messages that his own sheriff told him to stop.“If Biden is inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States on January 20th, it will mark the final hour of conspiracy to dismantle the American election process, and the first hour of conspiracy to dismantle America,” Higgins tweeted on Sunday. Normal presidents treat their final weeks in office like a presidential marshmallow test. While they may want, desperately, to opine about everything the president-elect is doing, they delay their gratification for their memoirs.They may be hoping for a post-presidential mission or at least some post-presidential reassessment of their place in history. But they maintain a dignified silence to buy themselves a little dignity after leaving office.That’s clearly not the Trump plan. There are no post-presidential missions, or historical reassessments. There are only more outrageous threats and tweets to cap a brief political career overflowing with outrageous threats and tweets.This is the self-defeating, nonsensical house that Trump built.“What idiot designed this?” President Hathaway asks his advisers about the twin red buttons in Monsters vs Aliens.“You did, sir,” says a general.“OK. Then go fire someone,” the president shoots back.Soon, there will be nobody left to fire. Or rehire. There will just be a Donald Trump, surrounded by a room full of wackadoodle theories with no staff to pretend to take them seriously. More