Headlines May 31,2023 from Democracy Now!

NYC Climate Protesters Call on Sen. Schumer to Remove Climate Concessions Before Passing Debt Deal

Here in New York, climate protesters rallied near the Brooklyn home of Senator Chuck Schumer to demand the final debt ceiling deal not include any concessions on the climate crisis. This is Betamia Coronel of the Center for Popular Democracy.

Betamia Coronel: “The deal that Senator Schumer and other Democratic leaders are cutting with Joe Manchin and the Republican Party really just proves to us that they don’t give a [bleep] about people. They don’t give a [bleep] about people. The debt ceiling will fast-track the Mountain Valley Pipeline, poisoning every poor community along its path and dumping millions of pounds of carbon, accelerating the crisis.”

Activists noted that Schumer received over $280,000 in donations this election cycle from NextEra Energy, a stakeholder in the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which is also a top donor to Joe Manchin.

In Canada, authorities in Nova Scotia have declared an emergency and evacuated over 18,000 people as wildfires rage outside Halifax amid record-breaking heat. Air quality alerts were issued in parts of New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Asia’s heat wave also continues to smash records, with Shanghai reaching its highest May temperature in over a century at 97 degrees Fahrenheit. In India, the thermostat hit 113 degrees Fahrenheit in recent weeks, as many laborers and poor workers have no choice but to keep working outdoors in the extreme heat.

Meanwhile, the EU said this week it is doubling its aerial firefighting fleet to tackle worsening summer forest fires due to the climate crisis.

Janez Lenarčič: “Disasters are occurring with increased frequency and intensity. In recent years, we have seen wildfires raging in countries in the central and even northern Europe. And we have seen historic floods just now in Italy or two years ago in Germany and Belgium. This is why we are scaling up our response capacity across the mechanism, including our ability to tackle wildfires.”

Hundreds of artificial intelligence experts, as well as tech executives, scholars and others, are warning that AI poses an existential threat. The ominous one-line statement reads, “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” Among the signatories is Geoffrey Hinton, who has been dubbed “the godfather” of AI. He recently quit Google so he could warn of the dangers of the technology he helped build.

Experts say the greatest dangers may come with the development of “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI, in which machines would have cognitive abilities akin or superior to human beings, and that it could happen sooner than previously thought. Many have called for a pause on introducing new AI technology until strong government regulations are put into place.

Fears are growing around AI’s threats to the workforce. Starting tomorrow, June 1, hotline operators at the National Eating Disorders Association are scheduled to be replaced by a “wellness chatbot” named Tessa. Workers say executives at the organization moved to fire them and replace them with AI in retaliation for unionizing.

The Sudanese army has suspended its participation in ceasefire talks as a shaky truce with the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, set to expire Monday, has been punctured by ongoing fighting in and around the capital Khartoum. The talks in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, aimed to protect and bring much needed humanitarian aid to the civilian population. The war has forcibly displaced 1.4 million people in the past six weeks, while the U.N. says some 25 million people — over half the population — need assistance.

NATO has announced it will deploy another 700 troops to northern Kosovo after at least 52 protesters and 30 NATO peacekeeping troops were injured during protests on Monday. The protests were held after Kosovo sent armed forces to install ethnic Albanians to serve as mayors in four heavily Serbian areas where ethnic Serbs had boycotted a recent election. On Tuesday, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić blamed the hostilities on Kosovo, which Serbia does not recognize as an independent country.

A U.N. special rapporteur warns international support for more than 1 million Rohingya refugees living in Bangladeshi camps is “grossly insufficient.” According to the U.N., about $876 million is needed to support Rohingya refugees for a year, but only 17% of that has been pledged to date. The World Food Programme has been forced to make additional cuts due to funding shortages, dramatically scaling back its food assistance efforts for Rohingya refugees.

In Yemen, the United Nations has begun an operation to salvage over 1 million barrels of oil from a decaying tanker anchored in the Red Sea. It comes after years of delay and mounting warnings of a potentially catastrophic oil spill off the Yemeni coastline after maintenance on the Safer tanker was suspended in 2015 due to the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led war in Yemen.

In Brazil, Indigenous groups took to the streets across the country Tuesday protesting a proposed law that would limit their ability to obtain protected status for their ancestral lands by excluding Indigenous communities that were expelled before October 1988, when Brazil’s current constitution was adopted. Brazil’s lower house approved the legislation after growing pressure from powerful agricultural groups. In São Paulo, police fired tear gas at demonstrators.

Kerexu Rete Guarani: “We are in a national protest with the original peoples of this territory. Today, in the name of Brazil, we are fighting for life. Here are my people, the Guaraní people, fighting, saying no to the law of death, saying no to the law of destruction, saying no to the timeframe.”

In April, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva recognized six ancestral lands, with the largest two in the Amazon, fulfilling a campaign promise to protect the rainforest from commercial exploitation.

A federal appeals court has ruled members of the Sackler family — the billionaire owners of OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma — can receive complete immunity from all current and future civil litigation related to their role in creating and fueling the opioid epidemic. The legal shield could lead to a settlement in the range of $6 billion for thousands of plaintiffs, including states, local governments and tribes. Tuesday’s ruling reverses a 2021 court decision that did not protect Sackler family members from liability as part of Purdue Pharma’s bankruptcy declaration. The case can still be appealed to the Supreme Court. Opioid overdoses have killed over half a million people in the U.S. over the past two decades, according to the CDC, including prescription and illicit drugs.

In New York, a detainee at Rikers Island died last week after becoming sick. Thirty-one-year-old Joshua Valles was being held at the psychiatric unit and was transferred to a hospital after complaining of a headache and vomiting. He died a week later. Joshua Valles is the third death at Rikers this year. 2022 was the deadliest year at the jail complex in almost a decade. A recent report by a federal monitor warned prisoners at Rikers are at “imminent risk” of harm, and renewed calls for a federal takeover of New York City jails.

In Pittsburgh, the federal death penalty trial of the gunman accused of killing 11 Jewish worshipers at the Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 is underway. On Tuesday, jurors listened to a 911 audio recording that contained the last words of 84-year-old Bernice Simon, one of the massacre’s victims. Simon told the dispatcher, “I’m scared to death,” over background audio of screams and gunshots.

Robert Bowers has pleaded not guilty to 63 charges, including hate crimes. Investigators say Bowers posted antisemitic comments and racist memes online in the months ahead of the shooting and called immigrants “invaders.” If convicted, he could face execution.