bro framed it and keeps it around his ass has NOT changed
another one
people really loving this fantasy that men the get live as violent bigots and still have a nice women that love him unconditionally.
also loving WoC never was a redemption from racism, bunch cops love their latina asian wives while brutalizing others.
Nah, the Internacional Committe is made up by dengists, whats more likely is that it was one of the causus or orgs that hates them of which there are quite a few like groundwork
WTF a NYC DSA 
Win?????
cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/21959
Daniel Herrera Carbajal
ICTArtificial intelligence in Indigenous communities was at the forefront at North America’s largest Indigenous tech conference.
In a world of generative AI used to write better emails or generate funny photos, Indigenous Tech Conference gathered in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada to discuss how AI can be used to create true impact in Indigenous communities.
“We don’t need more widgets in the world,” said Ryan St. Germaine, Metis, a founder and CEO of Indigenous Tech Conference. “Technology needs to be pointed towards the challenges of our time.”
Some of those challenges are data sovereignty and language revitalization.
According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, at least 40 percent of the 7,000 languages estimated to be spoken in the world are in danger and a language disappears every two weeks on average.
UNESCO is a UN agency that promotes global peace through international cooperation.
Michael Running Wolf, Northern Cheyenne and Lakota, is a co-founder and architect of First Nations Languages AI reality (FLAIR), an initiative that uses AI to support Indigenous communities in language revitalization and preservation efforts.
While many Indigenous languages have ongoing revitalization efforts, there are languages who have little to no speakers left, making large data collection unrealistic.
The organization’s aim is to reduce the number of data requirements required to build automatic speech recognition for various Indigenous languages.
He told ICT that AI can be used to create an immersive environment to enhance language learning
“You have this dynamic that even if there is funding, there are very few speakers in which to practice and so while every tribe is committed to revitalizing and reclaiming their languages, often there’s some practical barriers,” Running Wolf said. “For instance, you go to class or you go to the movies and camp, but what happens is you go home, watch Wheel of Fortune, watch TV or YouTube and that’s all in English. So what I can do is give you a tool where you can go home and practice saying ‘Turn your lights off’ in Lakota or Diné, and that’s where AI can be useful because it can make your language ambient to your home.”
While FLAIR works to reduce the data required to build automatic speech recognition for languages, other ASR and large language models still require vast amounts of data. Data which Running Wolf said was “unethically gathered.”
“These large language models have been built using stolen data,” he told ICT. “All our data, and the entirety of the internet has been scraped to create these large language models and now these large language model developers have a problem in that the internet is poison. It’s hard to tell if content is actually created by humans, which is the best kind of data And so now this puts a premium upon natural organic human data and what is the largest treasure trove of uninfected data and poisoned by AI? Indigenous data.”
Running Wolf equated data to land, and you wouldn’t give away your grandmother’s land for free.
“We are now in the era where our data is one of the last few reservoirs where we should obviously treat it like land,” he said. “You wouldn’t give away an acre of your grandmother’s land to someone for free. Similarly, with our data, if we treat it as a policy framework, as the equivalent of land, then we need to be very careful about it and guarded with it.”
Michael Running Wolf working remotely
In comes in the conversation of creating effective policy that protects and guarantees the sovereignty of Indigenous people’s data
“I think there needs to be more of an accurate depiction of who Indigenous people are and have our own digital sovereignty,” St. Germaine told ICT.
There are currently no federal or tribal policies that protect and guarantee the data sovereignty of Indigenous peoples.
“We don’t have strong intellectual property rights protection or data sovereignty protection currently. But what if tribes got together and created a co-op, like a data trust, a legal entity whose duty was to protect the data?” Running Wolf told ICT. “If we have strong tribal policy and strong agency over our data, and the strongest thing we can do is actually be the researchers ourselves, tribal research groups working on their own data, creating their own research.”
The post Treating data like land — data sovereignty in the AI age appeared first on ICT.
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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/21874
Aqqaluk Lynge was 19 years old when an American B-52 bomber carrying four thermonuclear weapons as well as conventional bombs crashed off the northwest coast of Greenland, the island where Lynge was born and raised. That was January 1968, and the plane was headed to Thule Air Force Base, a U.S. military installation in Greenland, now known as Pituffik Space Base. When the plane hit the Arctic waters, the conventional bombs detonated but the nuclear weapons did not.
Six American military personnel parachuted from the plane before it crashed, shivering on the frozen ground before Inuit dog sled teams found them and saved their lives. One service member trapped on floating ice 6 miles from Thule survived the negative 21-degree Fahrenheit weather by wrapping himself in his parachute.
Now, aged 78, Lynge wonders if the United States remembers that Inuit dogsleds saved American lives. Or the fact that Greenlanders fought for the U.S. in Afghanistan as enlisted members of the Danish military, dying at the second-highest rate of any country besides the U.S. That U.S. Air Force base is still operational and 150 American military personnel are currently stationed there. “Why should a friend for so many years be treated like this?” Lynge said. “We need support from democratic-minded people in the United States.”
An Inuit dog team stands on frozen Baffin Bay near site of crash of a U.S. B52 nuclear bomber on January 21, 1968. Bettmann via Getty Images
American military survivors of a B52 crash in Greenland smile for a photo in 1968. Keystone-France / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
President Donald Trump has demanded that the United States acquire Greenland and said that control of the island is necessary for national and international security. He has threatened European allies with tariffs and even hinted at seizing Greenland by force. On Wednesday, Trump backtracked on both threats and said he’d reached a “framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland” without giving any details; however Trump’s behavior over the island has already undermined America’s relationship with Europe by threatening longstanding alliances.
Less publicized is how Trump’s threats have refocused attention on the United States’ relationship and history with Indigenous peoples: Greenland is 90 percent Inuit and has maintained its traditions, language, knowledge, and land despite centuries of colonial rule, and is viewed as a model of Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty.
Lynge, who is Inuit, is part of that history. He co-founded the Inuit Ataqatigiit, a democratic socialist party in Greenland that advocates for independence. He helped lead the Inuit Circumpolar Council, an organization that represents Indigenous peoples in the Arctic. And he’s a former member of the Greenlandic Parliament, as well as the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, which helps advise the U.N. Economic and Social Council on issues related to Indigenous peoples.
Greenland is still part of the Kingdom of Denmark, a colonial relationship that’s existed since the 18th century, but thanks to the work of people like Lynge, the island has achieved a level of political independence that many Indigenous peoples aspire to. “The extensive self-governance of Greenland is an inspiring example of the implementation of Indigenous self-determination for many Indigenous Peoples worldwide,” said the United Nations special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples, José Francisco Calí Tzay, in 2023.
Aqqaluk Lynge, left, listens during a 2009 press conference on the Inuit Circumpolar Council on the effects of climate change. Casper Christoffersen / AFP via Getty Images
Yet despite the still-strong presence of Inuit peoples in Greenland, Stefan Aune, a historian and the author of the book Indian Wars Everywhere, said he’s been struck by how much Trump’s threats have been framed as conflict between the U.S. and Denmark or the U.S. and European countries, ignoring the presence of Indigenous peoples. “This really kind of evokes the way the history of North America often gets narrated, which is a kind of imperial squabble between the British, the French, and the Spanish, and then later the United States, despite the fact that there’s all these different Native nations that play a really equally important role in the war, the politics, the economics, and the diplomacy on the continent,” Aune said. “So there’s definitely a parallel there.”
Aune is among many experts who see Trump’s policies and rhetoric as echoes of historical entitlement to Native land reframed as a defensive struggle against Indigenous nations or other threats. “The iconic image of this is the surrounded wagon train, which you can see in all kinds of art, paintings, and then later movies and television and video games,” Aune said. “Settler colonialism consistently gets reframed as a defensive struggle rather than an invasion.”
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Peter Mancall, a historian and author of the book Contested Continent, said he was struck by how quickly Trump pivoted from the security reasons to capture Venezuela’s president to his plans to sell 50 million barrels of Venezuelan oil. “The rapid pivot from the pretext of the invasion to the extraction of resources [in Venezuela] was quicker than anything I had seen in the early American period,” he said. “We’ve seen this before, and it has often had catastrophic consequences for Indigenous peoples as well as deleterious impacts on various environments.”
Jonathan Kamakawiwoʻole Osorio, the dean of Hawaiʻinuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge at the University of Hawaiʻi, sees parallels to the U.S. overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, which he wrote about in his book Dismembering Lāhui. In the late 1800s, the U.S. was motivated to annex Hawai’i in order to cement economic control over the islands’ sugar plantations and to establish military control over Pearl Harbor.
“The fact that the president of the United States no longer feels that it’s necessary to justify imperialism in any other way except that ‘We need it’ is deeply revealing and clarifying,” Osorio said. “When you remove all of the pretext and you realize that all this has ever been about has been the acquisition of opportunities and other peoples and other peoples’ countries … it’s never been any different.”
Greenland is three times the size of Texas and home to about 56,000 people. The island has 39 of the 50 minerals that the U.S. considers to be critical for military technology and the U.S. economy, many of which are used for clean energy technology like electric vehicle batteries. Investors are hoping that melting ice caps due to climate change will make it easier for companies to mine minerals like gallium, which can be used to create computer chips.
A banner says “Decolonize Don’t Recolonize,” seen during a demonstration against the Trump administration in Copenhagen in 2025.
Kristian Tuxen Ladegaard Berg / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty ImagesBut Paul Bierman, a geoscientist who has studied ice sheets in Greenland, is skeptical. He said melting permafrost has led to cratering on U.S. Air Force runways and thinks mining infrastructure would face similar challenges. “If you’ve ever stood next to a melting glacier, you’re not putting a mine there. The ice is literally melting below your feet. It’s crumbling, it’s collapsing,” he said. “The idea that we’re going to walk in and in a year, start up mines and have minerals coming out and be rich, it’s a complete and utter fantasy. It doesn’t match the reality of being on the ground.”
That hasn’t stopped wealthy investors from yearning to profit from Greenland, from billionaire Ronald Lauder to Peter Thiel. Bierman said the greater risk to humanity is allowing climate change — which Trump has called a hoax — to continue to melt ice caps and inundate low-lying cities like Jakarta, eventually dislocating an anticipated half a billion people. “Compared to the value of strategic minerals in Greenland, it’s orders of magnitude more in damages from letting the ice melt,” said Bierman, who wrote a book on Greenland called When The Ice Is Gone.
Denmark has recognized Greenland as self-governing with a right to its own mineral resources, and Greenlanders have been extremely clear about their desire to maintain their sovereignty, as well as their affiliation with Denmark. “It is our country,” Lynge said. “No one can take it.”
Since World War II, Greenland has been a close military ally of the U.S., hosting not just Pituffik Space Base — which displaced an Inuit village — but also more than 20 American military bases that were eventually abandoned. Treaties dating back to 1941 give the U.S. enormous sway over what its military can do on the island and prevents other militaries from operating there, even though Trump has repeatedly claimed that Russia and China are doing so.
“[According to an] agreement from 1951, the United States is free to do what they want, and from 2014, they can do that by talking to us and the Danes,” said Lynge from Greenland. “The U.S. is the only military presence here in Greenland, so what’s the problem?”
Greenland residents and political leaders have publicly rejected suggestions by U.S. President Donald Trump that the Arctic island could become part of the United States. Greenland, an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, has emphasized that its future will be decided by its own people, with officials stating that the island is not for sale and does not wish to become American. Lokman Vural Elibol / Anadolu via Getty Images
After two centuries of colonial rule, in the 1960s, Denmark began taking steps to limit Inuit population growth by inserting intrauterine devices in about 4,500 women, including girls as young as 12 years old. The Danish government apologized last year and agreed to compensate the women who sued, arguing the government violated their human rights. The population limitation process was extremely effective, dropping birth rates substantially among Indigenous families and causing permanent infertility among some women. Denmark also has a decades-long history of removing Inuit children from their homes against their parents’ will, with research as recent as 2022 showing that Inuit children are seven times more likely to be removed from their parents’ homes than Danish children. In 2023, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples issued a report on the status of Greenland that said Denmark needs to implement many reforms to fully respect Indigenous rights, including embracing a reconciliation process to address historical trauma.
Despite these traumas, and perhaps motivated by them, Greenland’s independence movement has gained ground in recent decades, securing several major wins. In 1979, more than 70 percent of Greenland’s mostly Inuit residents voted in favor of more independence from Denmark. The referendum made the island a “constituent country” of the Kingdom of Denmark, rather than just a colony, and gave Greenlanders control over domestic policies such as their education, environment, health, and fisheries. The law also established the Greenlandic Parliament.
Protesters wave Greenland flags during a demonstration with the slogans “hands off Greenland” and “Greenland for Greenlanders” at City Hall Square in Copenhagen, Denmark, on January 17, 2026.
Kristian Tuxen Ladegaard Berg / NurPhoto via Getty ImagesIn 2008, more than three-fourths of Greenlanders again voted in favor of self-governance, expanding their control over the police and courts and giving Greenland more of a say over foreign policy. The law also made Kalaallisut, an Inuit language of Greenland, the official language of the country, and restored Greenland’s control over its mineral and oil revenue, with provisions for remitting some funding to Denmark. It also established a pathway to full independence, without a specific timeline, as the move would require support from both Greenland and Denmark.
Political leaders in Greenland have continued to explore the possibility of full independence, drafting a potential constitution as recently as 2023, and last year, polls showed that most people in Greenland wanted independence from Denmark, although voters differed on how and when it should happen. The vast majority, 85 percent, oppose any type of union with the U.S.
“They serve as a model for how to practice self-governance,” said Gunn-Britt Retter, the head of the Arctic and environmental unit of the Saami Council, which represents Indigenous Saami people in Europe. The council has come out in support of Greenland against Trump’s threats, and has been a longtime ally of theirs in the fight for climate action and Indigenous rights internationally. She added that the idea of the U.S. buying Greenland from Denmark makes no sense. “You can’t buy something that is stolen.”
To Lynge, Trump’s threats are not only misinformed, but also threaten the political autonomy that he has spent his lifetime building. And he doesn’t think Greenlanders are the only people at risk.
“We are in the middle of a situation in the world where small nations like us would be crushed if we don’t do anything,” Lynge said. “If the world allows what is happening right now, it will continue and destroy the world order as we know it.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Greenland is a global model for Indigenous self-governance. Trump’s demands for the island threaten that. on Jan 22, 2026.
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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/22051
A tray of eyed chinook salmon eggs are seen in an incubator at the Okanagan Nation Alliance’s kł cp̓əlk̓ stim̓ Hatchery in snpink’tn (Penticton) on Jan. 16, a week after they were transferred from the Colville Confederated Tribes’ Chief Joseph Hatchery. As salmon grow in their eggs, the dark spots of their eyes become visible through its shell – a stage early in their development known as the “eyed eggs” period. Photo by Aaron Hemens
First Nations fish hatcheries on both sides of the “Canada-U.S.” border are celebrating 10 years of a collaboration to help salmon blocked from migrating by dams and other threats.
Earlier this month, the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation in “Washington” transferred more than 6,200 chinook salmon eggs from their Chief Joseph Hatchery to the Okanagan Nation Alliance’s (ONA) kł cp̓əlk̓ stim̓ Hatchery in snpink’tn (Penticton), nearly 200 kilometres north.
This year marks one decade since the two tribal hatcheries started working together to restore the fish’s population throughout the Columbia River Basin.
The partnership has seen Colville Tribes send more than 115,000 eyed chinook eggs to the ONA over the past 10 years. One year alone, 2019, saw 40 per cent of those eggs transferred north.
“They don’t have to do that; they don’t have to give us anything,” said Tyson Marsel, a biologist at kł cp̓əlk̓ stim̓ hatchery and member of Lower Similkameen Indian Band.
“But for them to recognize that this is for the betterment of the environment and conservation, it’s not only helping us, but it’s also helping them.”
An educational tool features glass containers showing the stages of salmon fry development. Photo by Aaron Hemens
As salmon grow in their eggs, the dark spots of their eyes become visible through its shell – a stage early in their development known as the “eyed eggs” period.
Salmon have been a vital source of sustenance for Pacific Northwest Indigenous nations for thousands of years.
But several salmon species, particularly sockeye and chinook, have seen their runs and populations severely depleted across the Columbia River Basin in the last century.
As settlers built numerous dams along the waterway, they effectively blocked the fish from migrating up-river and into its tributaries.
Salmon populations have also been impacted by habitat loss, overfishing, and warming water temperatures linked to climate change.
Whether it’s sk’lwist (summer-run chinook) or ntitiyx (spring-run chinook), the fish have for decades become stuck at the Chief Joseph Dam on the Columbia River in “Washington,” which lacks a fish passage route.
Opened downstream to the dam in 2013, the Chief Joseph Hatchery catches adult fish blocked by the dam to collect their eggs. It’s part of a broodstock, or fish-breeding, program that spawns nearly three million young chinook each year.
“They’ll be collecting millions of chinook eggs in a year,” Marsel said. “Versus us, our best year is 10,000 that we’ve collected from the Okanagan River here.”
A closeup of eyed chinook salmon eggs transferred from the Chief Joseph Hatchery on Jan. 8, now stored in an incubator at the Okanagan Nation Alliance’s kł cp̓əlk̓ stim̓ Hatchery in snpink’tn (Penticton). As salmon grow in their eggs, the dark spots of their eyes become visible through its shell – a stage early in their development known as the “eyed eggs” period. Photo by Aaron Hemens
The salmon eggs sent from the Colville Tribes’ hatchery roughly doubled the ONA hatchery’s chinook population compared to last year, when it had just 6,500.
kł cp̓əlk̓ stim̓ Hatchery stores the transferred roe in an incubator, where water temperatures are gradually increased from 3 C to 10 C over the course of a few weeks, to help support their development.
The fish are expected to hatch around the end of this month, and will remain housed at the hatchery until June. Once they weigh between three to five grams, the ONA plans to release them into suwiw̓s (Osoyoos Lake).
The adult fish are expected to return between 2029-31.
Although much of the Okanagan River has been channelized — engineered to straighten the waterway — there’s a more naturally flowing portion north of Osoyoos Lake, in the town of “Oliver.”
It’s there that Marsel said the fish like to spawn.
Even if the fish can’t make it upriver past Osoyoos Lake, they’ll still reach the Chief Joseph Dam and Colville hatchery downriver.
“Some of our fish that we’ve released from our facility have gone into Chief Joseph Hatchery’s program,” Marsel said.
Baby chinook salmon swim in a raceway at the Okanagan Nation Alliance’s kł cp̓əlk̓ stim̓ Hatchery in snpink’tn (Penticton) on Jan. 16. Photo by Aaron Hemens
He added that “every fish counts,” especially when it comes to chinook. The species is a key cultural figure for the syilx Okanagan Nation, being ntytyix (Chief Salmon) of the Four Food Chiefs.
“People don’t realize how rare they are, and a lot of people don’t even know that there’s chinook in the system,” he explained.
While much attention has been paid to sockeye salmon restoration efforts, Marsel said chinook hold a particularly important place in the culture.
“For the syilx Nation and all the people here, it means so much more,” he explained. “Not that sockeye aren’t important, but ntytyix holds a lot more meaning.”
The partnership to help chinook recover by sharing eggs hasn’t just transcended the border, however. It might also be helping transcend some political divisions between First Nations.
In recent years, the Sinixt Confederacy of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation has at times been at odds with ONA, over legal and territorial claims related to the historically displaced Sinixt Nation, and which tribal council represents its descendants.
In recent years during the hatchery partnership’s decade, the tensions have resulted in chinook egg transfers being withheld, Marsel said — but he firmly believes the two tribal governments realize working together for salmon outweighs their inter-governmental disagreements.
“We have this same common goal,” he said. “Working together is what’s going to make it better.
“To have the collaboration is extremely important, not only for the people but definitely the environment, the salmon [and] everything that thrives off the salmon.”
But long before the two modern-day tribal organizations were formed, Marsel said Indigenous communities in the region always supported and traded with one another.
“We have family down in Colville Confederated Tribes,” he said. “There was trading constantly across that imaginary line that’s now put up.
“It’s not like this is a new thing where we’re working with Colville Confederated Tribes — but it’s exciting that now we’re working together for a common goal, and that’s conservation.”
The post Across a colonial border, First Nations share salmon eggs to bypass dams appeared first on Indiginews.
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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/22118
Amelia Schafer
ICTIf you know anything about Minnesota history, then you know about Fort Snelling, said Robert Rice, the owner of Powwow Grounds Coffee Shop.
Fort Snelling was a concentration camp used by the United States during the Dakota Indian Wars to imprison thousands of Dakota and Ho-Chunk people in abysmal conditions.
In early 2026, the Bishop Henry Whipple Building, located in Fort Snelling, Minnesota, emerged as a major center for immigration enforcement detainment processing, but the site has a much longer and more complex history.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration Enforcement Control programs have long used the Whipple building as a headquarters for its operations in the Twin Cities.
A plaque stands in Fort Snelling State Park Tuesday, Dec. 8, 2020, near Minneapolis, at a memorial at the site of what was a concentration camp where some 1,600 Dakota people were imprisoned in the aftermath of the 1862 U.S. – Dakota Conflict. Jacobs belongs to a Wisconsin-based Mohican tribe but was born in Minnesota and is well-versed in the grim chapters of its history regarding Native Americans. It is one of the historic sites in the Twin Cities area where he take social-justice groups on tours. (AP Photo/Jim Mone)
In 2019 local residents first raised awareness over concerns regarding its use for detainment.
As historic immigration raids emerged in the city in early 2026, the building has once again become a center for the processing of detained immigrants and in at least two confirmed cases, detained Indigenous people.
Jose Ramirez, Red Lake descendant, said he was held at the site for six hours following a confrontation with immigration officials resulting in his detainment.
Most recently, a Dakota woman was held at the site, council members from the Oglala Sioux Tribe told ICT. Reports have surfaced that four Lakota men were detained and held in Fort Snelling, though the tribe has been working to verify the information.
But prior to the building’s existence in 1965, the Fort Snelling area has long been the site of both creation and genocide for Indigenous people, said Kate Beane, executive director at the Minnesota Museum of American Art.
Bdóte, the place where the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers meet, is a creation site for the Dakota people, said Beane, a Mdewakanton Dakota citizen of the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe and a Muscogee descendant.
A young Dakota woman incarcerated at the Fort Snelling concentration camp is photographed in 1862. Survivors of the camp were sent via steamboat to the Crow Creek Reservation in South Dakota and the Santee Reservation in Nebraska. (Courtesy Minnesota Historical Society)
But in 1862, during the Dakota Indian Wars, that site was also where the United States constructed Fort Snelling, a concentration camp used to house Dakota and Ho-Chunk people before they were shipped to reservations in South Dakota and Nebraska.
The Whipple building, a federal administrative building in Fort Snelling where United States immigration agents have been holding individuals for processing and detainment, sits on that former site, Beane said.
The building was named after Bishop Henry Whipple, a vocal opponent of Dakota removal and genocide and religious leader during the 1800s.
“I’ve been in a different state of consciousness,” Beane said. “This is a space that’s so important for us. This is a place of love and beauty and our very makeup of who we are as humans, as people. Our grandparents were murdered there, we were imprisoned there, and now we’re worried about our family members being imprisoned there again.”
Beane grew up hearing about how her great-great-grandfather, Cloud Man, or Maȟpíya Wičhášta, was killed at Fort Snelling. Cloud Man, a significant Mdewakanton Dakota chief, died during the winter of 1862-1863 from the conditions at Fort Snelling.
“We don’t know where his remains are,” she said. “The place is literally scattered with graves.”
Today, Fort Snelling houses the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport, Fort Snelling State Park, several federal buildings including the Whipple building and the recreation of the historic Fort Snelling. The Whipple building is less than a mile from the Historic Fort Snelling complex.
The physical fort was built by the United States in 1805 in an effort to “stop fighting” between the Dakota and Ojibwe people, but that wasn’t the truth, Beane said.
“What we know today is that that military fort was put there to steal our lands,” Beane said. “It was put there as a place to assert power and to essentially have a central operation of a space to exert power. It was put there as a place to assert power and to essentially have a central operations of a space to exert power, dominate, and inflict genocide amongst Dakota people.”
Just under 60 years later, thousands of Indigenous people would be imprisoned at the site.
Famine, disease and malnutrition killed approximately 300 Dakota prisoners, a majority of which were women and children.
“What’s interesting is that what we’re seeing is history repeat,” Beane said. “And we know that history is a series of patterns. We as Dakota people know what this site has stood for since time began. We also know what it represents to the American government.”
Beane said she felt as if a blanket were dropped over her, covering her senses, when she first heard that Fort Snelling was being used as a detention facility. She felt numb. And she’s not alone.
“That’s what they did with our ancestors, put them in that concentration camp,” Rice said, who is White Earth Ojibwe. “And they’re sending people there now. There’s just nothing you can say about that. It’s terrible. It’s inhumane.”
‘Full Circle’: AIM patrols back on Minneapolis streets as tensions rise
The past few weeks have been traumatic for the community, Beane said. Aside from the knowledge that the former Fort Snelling grounds once again were being used to imprison Indigenous people, Beane said there’s an added sense that Native people in the Twin Cities are being hunted.
“We’re constantly on alert,” she said. “We have to carry documentation. We don’t know what’s going to happen. Our people are targeted. And for us as Indigenous people, the immigrants who are being detained within that space are our neighbors. Those are our relatives.”
For Indigenous people, the land is a moving living being, Beane described. Dakota people have been in the Minneapolis area for thousands of years, it’s one of their sites of creation, but that site isn’t exclusive to just the Pike Island area where the two rivers meet, she said. The whole area has been the site of Dakota life since time immemorial.
“That’s [detainment] not the integrity of this site,” she said. “The land is hurting, the land itself. She is who we were put here to protect. And as Dakota people, we’re never going to stop doing that no matter what.”
The post Former Native American concentration camp lies beneath current immigration detention center appeared first on ICT.
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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/22190
It almost felt like old times for the friends and family gathered at Robert Weatherspoon’s house. The living room couches and chairs were filled, a football game was on the TV, and the aroma of bacon and butter beans drifted in from the kitchen.
What was missing was Weatherspoon’s voice. While his friends usually bring the food or cook during get-togethers, Weatherspoon is counted on to supply the laughs. The 67-year-old with an expressive, cherubic face has a reputation for devastating one-liners, off-color game commentary, and stories — skewed somewhat for comedic effect — about people everybody knows in Gloster, a mill town in southern Mississippi too small to have strangers.
But shuffling from his bed to the living room had left him breathless. Weatherspoon took a puff from his inhaler, but his throat was locked and his chest was tight. He tried a joke on an old high school buddy across the room, and it fell flat, stalled between labored breaths.
His next utterance was darker, whispered to the person with the closest ear. “I thought I was dying last night,” Weatherspoon said. “For 20 minutes, I couldn’t get out of bed, couldn’t move.” An odd thought crossed his mind as he lay there, struggling for air. “I said, ‘Let me write something before I go. I want to tell about my life. I want to put it all down.’”
Robert Weatherspoon sits in his living room in Gloster, Mississippi. Weatherspoon used to garden and jog but he says air pollution from a nearby wood pellet mill has harmed his health and curtailed his outdoor activities. Kathleen Flynn / The Guardian
The story of Weatherspoon’s late middle age might have chronicled an energetic man who still liked to jog, grow okra and peppers in his garden, chase after women, and make his friends laugh. But in 2014, a massive mill that turns trees into peanut-size pellets opened in Gloster, and “everything changed for everybody,” he said.
Operated by the British energy giant Drax, the mill and two newer ones in Louisiana — near Urania in the center of the state and Bastrop near the Arkansas line — churn out billions of pellets each year to meet surging overseas demand for electricity produced by burning wood, what the company markets as “sustainable biomass.” Alongside the mills, in communities of mostly poor, Black residents, the air is tainted with cancer-causing gases and tiny particles that can burrow deep into people’s lungs and trigger a long list of health troubles.
It’s not clear whether Drax’s activity has caused any particular individual’s health problems, but the mills release chemicals at levels federal regulators and scientists say can be toxic to humans.
In living rooms around Gloster, on front porches, and between the crumbling facades and boarded windows along the town’s main street, it’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t believe their life was better before the mill, called Amite Bioenergy.
“When I go out, I can’t hardly catch my breath,” said Helen Reed, a Gloster native. “Everything is worse since Drax came here.”
Robert Weatherspoon and other residents of Gloster, Mississippi, say pollution for a large British-owned wood pellet mill has caused a host of health problems in the small town. Kathleen Flynn / The Guardian
Tucked into a remote corner of southwest Mississippi, Gloster is exposed to more particulate matter and releases of toxic air than most parts of the country, according to data from the Environmental Protection Agency. Rates of cancer, asthma, and heart disease are substantially higher than the national average. Gloster has other industrial facilities, but the EPA lists the Drax mill as the region’s only major emitter of toxic air pollutants.
Wood pellets have been touted by European countries as a greener, climate-friendly alternative to coal and gas. Made from sawdust and comparatively cheap trees grown in the American South, pellets now power a large share of the United Kingdom’s electrical grid. Drax has turned the U.K.’s largest coal power station, a mile-wide complex in rural Yorkshire, into what is essentially an immense wood stove fueled with Mississippi and Louisiana pine.
Raking in billions of dollars in both profits and government subsidies, Drax foresees substantial growth in the coming years — especially in the U.S., where it’s planning new mills and an ambitious push into the booming carbon capture and storage business.
In Gloster, the industry promised prosperity for the town’s 850 residents when Drax’s mill opened 11 years ago. Gloster, Urania, and Bastrop had once been booming mill towns, producing pulp, paper, and lumber for a global market. When those mills closed in the 2000s, the local economies collapsed. Drax was seen as a godsend — a rejuvenator of the jobs, money, and pride that come with a mill that roars with life. But many people say they’ve received little more than noise, dust, and toxic air: The three nearly identical Drax mills in Mississippi and Louisiana have been forced to pay millions of dollars for hundreds of pollution violations over the past five years.
The Amite BioEnergy wood pellet production facility in Gloster. Kathleen Flynn / The Guardian
In Urania, a central Louisiana town about two hours northwest of Gloster, the penalties are having little effect, said Glen Henderson, a longtime Urania resident who lives a mile from Drax’s LaSalle BioEnergy mill. “I was born and raised in the area, and I love it here,” he said. “But if I get a chance, I’m definitely going to move.”
Hassled by the mill’s lights and noise at night and sawdust coating his car in the morning, the peace and quiet Henderson hoped to enjoy in retirement disappeared when Drax opened the mill in late 2017.
“We’ve always been a mill town,” he said. “I worked in the old mill after high school. But the mills we had around here weren’t like this. This is something else.”
Michelli Martin, a Drax spokesperson, said the company is making strides to reduce pollution. “The safety of our people and the communities in which we operate is our priority, and we take our environmental responsibilities very seriously,” Martin said. “As a company dedicated to sustainable energy production, high standards of safety and environmental compliance are always our top priority.”
Drax’s mill has only hastened Gloster’s decline, said Carmella Wren-Causey at her home on the town’s edge, where subsidized apartments abut a dense monocrop of loblolly pines. “We’re being poisoned slowly, right before our eyes,” she said. Tears ran down her cheeks and slid under the plastic tubes funneling oxygen to her nose. Diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, Wren-Causey’s breathing has become so difficult that she can barely keep up with her grandson, a toddler who was scooting his bike near her oxygen tank.
“God gave me breath when he gave me life,” said Wren-Causey, who blames the mill for her declining health. “Nobody should tamper with that. But Drax took it away.”
Carmella Wren-Causey has had trouble breathing after Drax moved into her town of Gloster. Kathleen Flynn / The Guardian
When Patrick Anderson, an environmental attorney, first tried to convince Mississippi’s environmental regulators that Drax was violating the state’s pollution laws, he boiled things down to a simple equation: 1 = 1.
Because testing showed one large pellet mill in Florida had been emitting about 1,000 tons of volatile organic compounds, known as VOCs, every year, it stood to reason that the virtually identical mill in Gloster was emitting roughly the same amount, he told the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality in 2017.
But Drax was claiming its Gloster mill was keeping its emissions lower than 250 tons per year, the threshold that distinguishes “minor” from “major” sources of VOCs, a classification of pollutants that are harmful to breathe, especially for children, elderly people, and those who suffer from asthma and other lung conditions.
The minor-source designation allowed Drax to avoid more stringent regulations and higher costs associated with installing and maintaining pollution-control technologies. “One of the most troubling trends in the wood pellet industry is that facilities that should face the most rigorous air permitting standards are actually the least controlled and the dirtiest,” Anderson wrote in a 2018 report for the Environmental Integrity Project.
A year after the report, Anderson was proved right. In 2019, Drax disclosed to Mississippi regulators that the Gloster facility had been emitting an average of 796 tons of VOCs per year — more than three times the limit allowed under its permit, according to documents obtained through public records requests.
The revelation resulted in a $2.5 million fine from the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality in 2020 and elicited surprise and anger from Gloster’s residents, many of whom said they were unaware the mill posed risks to their health.
“When I first started having trouble breathing, I thought God was punishing me — but it wasn’t God doing that,” said Weatherspoon, who believes the mill’s emissions and his declining health are linked.
Krystal Martin, a community leader in Gloster, Mississippi, shows a photo of the Amite BioEnergy wood pellet mill. She says air pollution from the mill is hurting her predominantly Black, low-income town. Kathleen Flynn / The Guardian
In a letter to Mississippi’s regulators a few years later, Drax attributed its underestimated emissions for the Gloster mill to a lack of experience with pellet production. “The pellet production industry is a relatively young industry,” the letter said. “Several wood pellet facilities, not only Amite BioEnergy LLC, initially underestimated emissions in connection with the permitting of these facilities.”
In neighboring Louisiana, state regulators also found that Drax had been breaking air quality rules. Drax’s mill near Bastrop, for instance, was supposed to cap its VOC emissions at 250 tons but had actually been releasing about 1,100 tons per year, according to a company filing with the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality. In 2022, the state agency reached a legal settlement in which Drax paid $3.2 million but admitted no wrongdoing.
That settlement was the largest in more than a decade for Louisiana’s environmental regulators. But to Anderson, who now works for the Southern Environmental Law Center, it was also the extent of any serious efforts to rein in Drax’s pollution in Louisiana.
When Mississippi determined in early 2023 that the Gloster mill had also far exceeded the allowable limits of what regulators call “hazardous air pollutants,” Anderson asked Louisiana’s regulators if the mills in Urania and Bastrop were doing the same.
It was a question they couldn’t answer. A Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality spokesperson said the agency doesn’t require Drax to conduct routine testing for hazardous air pollutants, which include nearly 190 chemicals known or suspected to cause cancer, birth defects, and other serious problems, or a similar group of chemicals the agency refers to as “toxic air pollutants.” The state’s regulators also don’t conduct their own testing at Drax’s mills.
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In Mississippi, the hazardous pollutants Drax released into the air above Gloster included methanol, acrolein, and tons of formaldehyde, a chemical that’s far worse than being merely carcinogenic. “It’s also mutagenic and neurodegenerative, which is as awful as that sounds,” said Aisha Dickerson, an environmental health researcher at Johns Hopkins University. Formaldehyde has the potential to both mutate human cells and trigger brain disorders, affecting memory, learning ability, and behavior.
Anderson said it’s mind-boggling that Louisiana won’t test for chemicals it knows can cause cancer and a host of other illnesses. In his yearslong campaign to get the state to change its ways, he attempted the 1 = 1 tactic, demonstrating that the Gloster mill is comparable to the Bastrop mill in Louisiana and likely has similar pollution levels.
Drax itself has called the Gloster and Bastrop mills “nearly identical.” In letters to Mississippi’s regulators, the company attempted to avoid additional emissions testing by arguing that the Bastrop mill in Louisiana was so similar to the one in Mississippi that testing from one should apply to the other. “The (Bastrop) facility was built at the same time and is very similar to Amite, such that it has the exact same process design, equipment, production, rates, and the fiber is procured from a similar wood basket,” the company wrote.
Drax’s Louisiana and Mississippi mills turn ground-up trees and logging debris into tiny pellets that are shipped overseas and burned in a power station in rural England. Eric Shelton / Mississippi Today
In 2024, Drax admitted to what Anderson had been saying for years. Buried several pages into the company’s permit updates, Drax noted that both of its Louisiana mills had exceeded their “minor source” limits for hazardous air pollutants. Drax didn’t say specifically how much it had been violating the 25-ton limit for these contaminants, but the company noted a “proposed emission rate” of nearly 40 tons, according to permitting documents.
Despite Drax’s admission, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality has yet to issue fines, and a spokesman declined to say what steps, if any, the agency has taken to get Drax to comply with its emissions rules. The spokesman also did not answer several questions about its enforcement actions and air quality monitoring practices.
Allegations about Drax have also come from within. In 2020, Louisiana regulators received an anonymous complaint from someone with intimate knowledge of Drax’s two mills in the state. It contained a host of allegations about chemical releases, manipulated data, ignored safety testing, and poor wastewater management. The most serious accusation was that “each facility has literally hundreds of hours of uncontrolled venting” of harmful chemicals annually, including episodes that “would easily” exceed limits on acrolein, a chemical that can irritate eyes and lungs and, according to scientists, is “probably carcinogenic.”
“Any mention of these items will cause senior management to threaten termination,” the complaint said. It also alleged that the two mills “manipulate” data “to avoid defined permit deviations.”
When the state’s inspectors followed up, they found no evidence of emissions violations in data and equipment records provided by Drax. The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality’s inspection report did not address the alleged threats of firings or manipulated data. Inspectors partially substantiated the allegations about improper waste disposal: During an inspection of the Urania mill, they found that Drax was burning waste sludge without a permit.
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Drax denied the allegations, noting that the waste-disposal issue was “not a normal condition” and that the company continually works with regulators to address environmental concerns.
The ultrafine dust expelled by Drax’s mills is another major health concern, Dickerson said. The particles released during a mill’s operations are so tiny that they can slip past the lung’s defenses and penetrate the bloodstream.
“Eventually, these particles can be transported to the brain and other organs,” Dickerson said, listing cognitive impairment and stroke among the problems that can develop. “You may not see symptoms immediately, but constant exposure could mean issues down the line.”
Drax has made several upgrades and changes to reduce emissions, particularly VOCs. In 2021, the company installed a thermal oxidizer at the Gloster mill that breaks down these compounds.
“We care deeply about the safety of our people and the residents of the communities in which we operate, and we take our environmental responsibilities and compliance extremely seriously,” said Matt White, vice president of Drax’s North American operations. “Compliance is at the foundation of everything we do, and we have invested a lot of hours and resources with the goal of continuously improving our operations.”
Despite the upgrades, Drax continues to incur fines for pollution violations. In late 2024, Drax agreed to pay $225,000 for exceeding the Gloster mill’s limits for hazardous air pollutants, particularly methanol. The state also cited Drax for failing to conduct required emissions tests and maintain pollution controls and proper records.
The company’s financial penalties, which add up to about $6 million, are dwarfed by its profits, which have topped $1 billion in recent years. “Drax is so profitable and so subsidized that it powers through all of this,” Anderson said. “The fines don’t hurt their bottom line.”
In April 2025, amid complaints from residents, the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, or MDEQ, denied Drax permission to increase its emissions. Six months later, it reversed that decision, allowing the Gloster mill to become a “major source” of hazardous air pollutants. The October 15 permit ruling essentially gives Drax permission to release pollutants at the levels that got it in trouble when it was classified as a minor emitter.
A group of Gloster residents immediately filed a federal lawsuit against Drax, alleging that the company unlawfully exposed people to “massive amounts of toxic pollutants.”
Drax has “consistently failed to meet their legal obligations not to dump pollutants … and have continued to denude U.S. forests, all for the benefit of a British company,” the lawsuit alleges.
In a motion to dismiss the case, Drax’s lawyers argued that the lawsuit fails to show “particularized injury that is traceable to (the Gloster mill’s) conduct.”
A representative from the MDEQ declined to comment on the permit decision and lawsuit but said that “MDEQ takes seriously its obligations to protect human health and the environment.”
A Drax spokesperson said the company was “pleased that (MDEQ) has listened to the clear recommendations of its own technical staff and the voices of Gloster community leaders, local businesses, and a large number of our neighbors in Gloster,” adding that the “permit will allow our plant to continue to operate, enabling us to continue providing much needed well-paying jobs in this rural corner of Mississippi, and support hundreds more across the state’s forestry and lumber industries.”
The spokesperson said that “MDEQ’s conditions, inspection regime, and our commitment to continue to invest in compliance and improving operational standards will ensure that Drax at Amite operates as safely and efficiently as possible.”
A crane whisks logs into the Drax wood pellet mill in Gloster, Mississippi. Kathleen Flynn / The Guardian
Pellet manufacturers seem to have a particular set of criteria that guides them to places like Gloster, Urania, and Bastrop, said Erika Walker, an epidemiologist at Brown University who has been researching the effects of noise and pollution in communities that host pellet mills.
“It’s like there’s an algorithm that tells you where vulnerable communities are, and where people are not going to ask questions,” she said. “If you need to piss on the side of the road, where do you go? A dark area where nobody’s looking.”
Pellet mills in the South are 50 percent more likely to be located in communities with a high proportion of poor and nonwhite residents, according to a 2018 study by researchers from Tufts University and the Dogwood Alliance, a forest conservation group based in North Carolina. Of the 32 mills assessed in nine Southern states, including Mississippi and Louisiana, 18 were in counties or parishes with poverty rates above the state median. Louisiana and Mississippi are tied for the highest levels of poverty in the United States at 14 percent, according to federal data. The national rate is just under 9 percent.
Across the Deep South, state and local leaders are so desperate for economic activity that they don’t ask critical questions about what the facilities may mean for the environment or people’s health, said Dickerson of Johns Hopkins. “These communities all seem to have low-income, historically marginalized residents who might not have the time or resources to fight a permit allowing a pellet mill to come in,” she said.
Krystal Martin operates the Greater Greener Gloster organization from a small office in downtown Gloster, Mississippi. The group opposes the Drax wood pellet mill, arguing that it pollutes the town while providing few economic benefits. Kathleen Flynn / The Guardian
In Gloster and Bastrop, Black residents make up nearly 80 percent of the population, and more than 30 percet live under the poverty line, making less than $15,650 a year. Urania’s 700 residents are mostly white but look worse off economically. According to census data, the town had a poverty rate of 40 percent and a median household income of $12,400 — about a fifth of the national average.
Martin, the Drax spokesperson, denied that Drax is drawn to areas with few white people and high poverty. “The inference that Drax uses an ‘algorithm’ to take advantage of communities is untrue,” she said. “Drax uses a number of criteria to identify and select pellet mill locations, including proximity to low-grade roundwood and sawmill residuals, transport links, and access to local supply chain.”
Walker said that Drax could alleviate many concerns about pollution if the company built its mills far from where people live. The best place to put a mill is “in the middle of the woods,” she said. The Drax mill near Bastrop may approach this ideal. Located 10 miles north of the town, the mill is surrounded by forested tracts interspersed with logging roads.
“Honest to pea, I didn’t even know it was there,” said Linda Coker, who lives nearly 2 miles from the mill and is one of its nearest neighbors.
In Urania, Drax’s LaSalle BioEnergy sits just outside the town’s limits, but a school, medical center, two churches, and several homes sit within a mile of it.
The facility’s location in Gloster is particularly troubling, Walker said. It abuts a mobile home park and other houses and is about a mile from a children’s day care center. “Literally, my first question when I visited Gloster was, ‘Who zoned this?’” she said. “It’s right out in the open. No acoustical barriers, no buffer of trees. It was shocking to see it operating right in the middle of the community.”
Children walk home after being dropped off from their school bus in Gloster, Mississippi.
Kathleen Flynn / The GuardianWhen the town of Urania was carved out of pine forests more than a century ago, its founder, a timber baron with a visionary streak, promised two often-incompatible things: industry and tranquility.
In the late 1890s, Henry Hardtner knew “the living was really rough” around his expanding lumber mill, so he platted Urania far enough away from his business that his workers could enjoy “a welcome relief” from the noise, dust, and smoke, a local newspaper recounted in 1968. The town, nestled among towering, sweet-scented longleaf pines, was named after the Greek goddess of the stars because, in Hardtner’s view, the site was downright “heavenly.”
Henderson, the Urania resident who lives a mile from the Drax mill, wishes Hardtner could see Urania now. He’d have Hardtner sit with him on his porch at 2 a.m. to listen to the near-constant clanging and banging from the LaSalle BioEnergy mill and see its lights glowing over the tops of an ever-thinning band of trees nearly a mile away. At daybreak, Henderson would show off the powdery substance coating his truck.
“This noise and dust — what are the long-term effects of all that?” he asked. “Nobody seems to know, or they don’t want to know.”
There has been little scientific research into the environmental and health impacts of the relatively new wood pellet industry, but that’s starting to change. In 2024, Walker received a $5.8 million federal grant to conduct the first study of emissions from wood pellet mills on human health in the U.S. Awarded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the grant is funding a research team that’s in the early phases of a five-year study focusing on the noise, particulate matter, VOCs, and other emissions from Drax’s Gloster mill.
The first study by Walker’s team, which includes researchers from the University of Mississippi and Drexel University, found that the noise levels in the small towns with pellet mills approach those of big cities. “The noise pollution in Gloster rivals my neighborhood, which is by an interstate in a big, industrial city,” said Walker, who lives just outside Providence, Rhode Island.
Noise from the Gloster mill’s operations and a steady stream of truck traffic to and from the facility sometimes topped 70 decibels and rarely fell below 41 decibels. The rural Mississippi town of Mendenhall, which is similar in size to Gloster but lacks a pellet mill, was typically 10 decibels quieter. “That’s an enormous difference,” Walker said. “It’s like turning a faucet into Niagara Falls.”
IIn Urania, Henderson said the mill seems loudest at night and in the early morning, producing a discordant clattering when he’s trying to sleep. It’s especially bad on windy nights.
“Get a north wind, and it’s rockin’ and rollin’,” he said. “It sounds like logs tumbling in a dryer.”
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The impacts of noise pollution on human health are often overlooked or ignored, but a growing body of research has linked chronic exposure to high blood pressure, heart attacks, anxiety, and depression.
“Noise disrupts your sleep, disrupts your mood, and sets off a stress response that’s like your ‘fight or flight’ response, which makes your body ready to fight a threat or run from it,” Walker said. “The constant stimulation of that response can cause all kinds of health problems.”
Drax says it follows all federal guidelines on noise abatement and conducts annual surveys of its mills’ sound levels, which it characterizes as no worse than other industrial facilities.
“We also go above and beyond to insulate our buildings to mitigate any noise that would come from the hammermill and help prevent it from being audible beyond the fence line,” Martin said. “The noise from facility operation is consistent with the surrounding industrial plants and does not contribute to significant impacts above existing background noise.”
Walker’s research is ongoing, but a few preliminary findings have emerged. One is that air pollution is magnitudes higher in Gloster, especially with VOCs, she said. Data from dozens of air pollution monitors installed around the town show clouds of pollutants concentrated around the mill and in neighboring residential areas. It also showed unexpected spikes during the night. That matches the experiences of some in Gloster who said they notice foul odors and find it more difficult to breathe after dark. “At night, it’s always worse,” Weatherspoon said. “It smells disgusting.”
This could indicate pollution “dumping” during certain hours when people are less aware of the pollution, Walker said.
Drax denied that the mill releases more pollution at night. “Any suggestion that we manipulate our operations to avoid complaints or detection is completely false,” Martin said.
Another surprising trend was found in Gloster’s children. The closer a child lived to the mill, the heavier their body weight, the researchers found. “That was shocking,” said Walker, who has visited Gloster and communicates regularly with residents. “It fits with some of the things we heard at community meetings. People are steeped in the idea that you don’t want your kids playing outside because the air’s polluted. If they’re staying inside, how are they getting physical activity?”
The widening base of research is leading some residents to think that the pervasive health problems in Gloster may be tied to the air they breathe, said Wren-Causey, who is a plaintiff in the lawsuit against Drax. “It’s not just people’s lifestyles or the work they do,” she said. “It’s about what Drax is putting into the air. Now people are making a ruckus. People are starting to open their eyes.”
Robert Weatherspoon washes dishes at his home in Gloster, Mississippi. Weatherspoon says air pollution from a nearby wood pellet mill has harmed his health, and he now mostly stays indoors. Kathleen Flynn / The Guardian
Sitting in his living room while his friends watched football, Weatherspoon said witnessing the dual decline of his body and his town has sparked an anger that his doctor warned could further harm his health.
“The doctor tells me, ‘Don’t get pissed off or you’re gonna die,’” he said. A friend nodded in agreement, telling Weatherspoon he really should take it easy. Weatherpoon shook his head. “When I think about what’s happened to me and what’s happening here, I get pissed off in a heartbeat,” he said.
Late in the football game, an out-of-town guest got up to leave. Weatherspoon tossed him a little gallows humor on the way out.
“Don’t come back here if you want to keep living,” he said. “It’s no joke.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Europe gets ‘green energy’. These Southern towns get dirty air. on Jan 23, 2026.
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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/22251
Zohran Mamdani has the legal tools to end the Israeli settlement funding and sales pipeline in New York City — now, he just needs the political will to act.
When Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral race of New York City, many believed his election would transform not just municipal policy but how the city confronts injustice, at home and abroad. Many were inspired when, as an assemblyman in May 2023 at the CUNY School of Law, Mamdani introduced the “Not On Our Dime!: Ending New York Funding of Israeli Settler Violence Act” (NOOD Act), a bill that would have prohibited New York‑registered nonprofits from using tax‑exempt status to fund Israeli settlement expansion and other violations of international law. But despite his pre‑mayoral record and the sustained grassroots pressure, Mamdani’s actions since taking office have disappointed and not matched the urgency of the moment.
New York City is a national hub for Zionist charity infrastructure, with major nonprofits headquartered here and hundreds of millions in tax‑deductible funds raised annually by New York‑registered charities that support Israeli settlement activity, making the city a primary conduit for financial flows that sustain displacement and occupation. However, when activists recently protested a real estate event in Queens that they said was marketing settlement land, Mamdani publicly condemned the chants of protestors, saying “support of a terrorist organization has no place in our city,” referring to Hamas, while failing to address the reason they were protesting in the first place. Later, when asked if he had condemned the illegal land sales that recruit settlers to move to the West Bank, Mamdani clarified his opposition to the sale of occupied land, but failed to similarly issue a forceful statement against the settlement sales event.
While some of Mamdani’s supporters say it’s too early to criticize him for failing to take decisive action against New York City’s role in Israeli settlement activity across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, there are, in fact, several very concrete and simple actions he can take. And for Palestinians on the ground, action cannot come soon enough as settlements are rapidly expanding and intensifying today through escalating violence and displacing families off of their land.
Stopping Israeli settlement expansion now
Israeli settlement policy continues to breach international law, with plans to construct 20,000 housing units in East Jerusalem and 10,300 units in the West Bank, along with 49 newly established outposts. This is on top of an unprecedented number of illegal settler outposts that have been built in the West Bank since 2023. These figures are not abstract. In my own village, Beit Iksa, settlement expansion has led to the establishment of a new permit regime since September 2025 that amounts to de facto annexation. Residents are now required to obtain magnetic ID cards and special permits just to access their own homes. This reality illustrates exactly why organizers in New York have pushed to create a legal accountability framework like the Not On Our Dime Act (NOOD).
Organizers in Palestine and across the U.S. have long campaigned against the flow of money from U.S. nonprofits into settler organizations and projects. Years before Mamdani’s bill, community actions targeted nonprofit fiscal sponsors, and other mechanisms through which money and legitimacy are funneled into settlement‑linked activities, including direct campaigns demanding the NY Attorney General revoke 501(c)(3) status for groups linked to settler causes.
In recent years, community campaigns have exposed and interrupted events in New York that publicly advertise and market West Bank land, using direct action and legal filings to spotlight the issue and challenge permits and venues promoting such sales.
These campaigns have demanded that New York’s legal regime can and should be used to challenge settler funding and real estate marketing directly, and now Mamdani is in a position to do so. New York already has multiple overlapping legal avenues that could ensure the city acts against illegal settlement activity, tools the mayor could activate without passing new laws.
Here are four concrete actions Zohran Mamdani can take as mayor to challenge the funding pipeline to Israeli settlements in New York City:
From Mondoweiss via This RSS Feed.
cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/22162
The following is an interview of Cuban internationalist combatant Yohandris Varona Torres, who was in the unit that confronted the U.S. imperialist invasion of Caracas on Jan. 3. The interview was done by Ignacio Ramonet (author of “100 Hours with Fidel”). Translation: Walter Lippmann, publisher of Cuba News, a daily . . .
Continue reading Testimony of a Cuban combatant who defended President Maduro at Workers.org
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Link to the 🐼 Hexbear Matrix Chat https://matrix.to/#/#Hexbear:matrix.org 
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No current struggle session discussion here on the new general megathread, i will ban you from the comm and remove your comment, have a good day/night :meow-coffee:
That last part is never happening the 
is more of a satallite state and the 
have a bad track record in defending their allies, but its good they are thinking about guerrilla warfare instead of just giving up
on violence jajaja
i sometimes think he is doing a long bit by playing a character because its so funny (the 10 year undergraduate by posting, his dad video, the embassy bomb threat, the whole protest sign to 20k in debt saga, this thing he just did) but then i remember is actually a irl dude who is like this and that in a way its even funnier
Katana Zero