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Because things right about now can always get weirder, it turns out the Florida U.S. Attorney handling the case of the latest sick white guy inspired by hateful GOP lies about pet-eating Haitians to go hiding in the bushes to take down Trump with an AR-15 is one Markenzy Lapointe - the first Haitian-born American lawyer, and first black guy, to serve as a U.S. Attorney. We love the smell of irony and karma in the morning.
The alleged "assassination attempt," though the perp didn't fire any shots, took place at Trump's West Palm Beach golf course a couple of days after both lying authoritarian scumbags on the GOP presidential ticket re-iterated their claims that "illegal aliens" from Haiti are eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, which is def speaking truth to power and house-pets except it's all racist fiction. The migrants are here legally, and no pets have been harmed or consumed in the making of this absurd campaign lie.
That hasn't stopped the two white boys with shit for brains from doubling down on what Vance already conceded on TV is a tall ugly tale, which has now seen Haitians being terrorized, schools receiving at least 33 bomb threats and Springfield officials having to evacuate schools, cancel "CultureFest" and close multiple city offices. After Vance admitted to "creating" his own furry lies, he tried also charging that immigrants are spreading HIV and TB too. Nope. More faux hillbilly lies - about his own constituents, yet.
#OHNoYouDont, said the Ohio-based Red, Wine, and Blue that's organized against the hate and fear. They've now been joined by Lapointe, Haitian-born U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida and lead prosecutor of Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, charged with possession of a firearm as a convicted felon after a Secret Service guy spotted his gun in the bushes where he'd waited 12 hours to claim his 15 minutes of tawdry fame, hopefully taking a moment to thank Trump for revoking gun restrictions for people with mental illness.
Lapointe, 55, was born in Port-au-Prince. He came to the U.S. as a 16-year-old who spoke no English with his mother, a street vendor with no formal education and four other kids; they all shared a cramped two-bedroom apartment in Liberty City. Lapointe worked through high school and skipped his graduation to begin boot camp after signing up for the Marines. A reservist, he was called up to serve in the Gulf War - "I felt a tremendous debt to America (as) an immigrant" - before earning finance and law degrees at Florida State.
Lapointe was nominated by Biden in 2022 and has worked with Jack Smith on the classified documents case; he calls his journey "surreal" and "blessed." Trump might not agree on the blessed part, but he's already fundraising on the latest alleged effort to get rid of him, charging, "There are people in this world who will do whatever it takes to stop us." We can relate. For now, we can also savor the fact of a Haitian immigrant whose job is both to protect and prosecute him. One sage: "Sweet like justice, Karma is a queen."
A coalition of climate campaigners on Tuesday published a proposal "for how the U.S. can play a bigger role in tackling the global climate emergency."
Described as "a civil society model document for the U.S. climate action pledge submission to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change" under the landmark Paris agreement, the Fair Share Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) is a "comprehensive plan for the United States to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enhance climate action in an equitable way both domestically and internationally."
Russell Armstrong, international policy liaison at the U.S. Climate Action Network, a member of the coalition, explained that "the Fair Share NDC is more than just a pledge, it is a road map for how the U.S. can prevent the coming catastrophe."
The plan sets targets for the U.S. to slash domestic carbon dioxide emissions by 80% by 2035 from 2005 levels, in line with "scientific standards and universally accepted global justice principles."
Allie Rosenbluth, U.S. program manager at coalition member Oil Change International, said: "The U.S. has a long way to go to become the climate leader the world needs. It's the largest producer of oil and gas in human history, and it plans to expand fossil fuels far beyond what's compatible with a livable climate."
"The Fair Share NDC shows what the U.S. must do to change course, starting with an equitable phaseout of fossil fuels and paying its fair share to the countries dealing with the consequences of U.S. extraction," she added.
The proposal is centered on a phased approach to ending all fossil fuel production, with coal to be eliminated by the end of the decade and oil and gas by 2031. The plan also proposes the development of "robust public transportation infrastructure and transitioning to 100% clean energy by 2030."
"This transition will also be fair, funded, feminist, and equitable," the report states. "A funded fossil fuel phaseout means that wealthy Global North countries commit to paying their fair share for fossil fuel phaseout in their own countries and in the Global South. A feminist fossil fuel phaseout means a gender-just energy transition from an extractive, fossil-fueled economy to a regenerative, care-based economy that sustains life and well-being for all."
According to Oil Change International:
The U.S.' historic emissions are so large that the U.S. cannot mitigate enough emissions domestically to fulfill its "fair share" of responsibility for the climate crisis. It must also provide Global South countries annually with $106 billion in mitigation funding and $340 billion worth of adaptation and loss and damage funding by 2030. To mobilize money on such a scale, the U.S. can redirect funding for fossil fuel subsidies and military weaponry, and make wealthy elites and big polluters pay for the damages they've already caused. Finally, changing global rules on debt, taxes, trade, and technology will also significantly expand the fiscal space Global South countries have to finance their own transitions, lowering the overall bill.
The report warns that the U.S. must commit "to avoiding dangerous distractions and unproven technological solutions, such as
forest offsets; carbon market mechanisms; carbon capture and storage, direct air capture, enhanced oil recovery, and other false solutions that act as dangerous distractions to only delay phasing out of fossil fuel production."
Tuesday is False Solutions Day during the Global Week of Action for Climate Finance and a Fossil-Free Future, which runs from September 13-20 and focuses on pressuring Global North governments to "stop making empty promises" and "cease pandering to corporations to perpetuate fossil fuels."
Basav Sen, climate policy director at the Institute for Policy Studies, a member of the coalition, said in a statement that "the U.S. is the world's largest oil and gas producer and largest cumulative greenhouse gas emitter."
"It's time the U.S. took responsibility for its outsized role in causing the climate crisis," Sen added. "The Fair Share NDC is a pathway for the U.S. to actually become the climate leader it claims to be, both internationally and at home."
Thousands of autoworkers protested in Brussels on Monday following recent news that Audi, a subsidiary of the German automaker Volkswagen, would phase out production at its plant there, which is expected to mean layoffs for its roughly 3,000 employees by the end of 2025.
The phase-out announcement led to a labor dispute that's shuttered the plant for the last two weeks, with some employees forming an encampment protest outside. The plant is expected to resume operations on Tuesday even though the core issues underlying the labor dispute, which some unions have characterized as a lockout by management, haven't been resolved.
Between 5,500 and 11,000 demonstrators marched toward the European Parliament on Monday, bringing "chaos" to Brussels, where public transport was largely shut down. Unions not directly affected by the Audi plant's likely closure participated in solidarity.
"Their anger is very legitimate, very understandable, especially since Audi is not very clear on its plans," Bernard Clerfayt, a local employment minister, told AFP.
Charlie Le Paige of Belgium's worker's party, Parti du Travail de Belgique, wrote on social media that there were "lots and lots of people in the streets of Brussels in support of Audi workers and subcontractors."
Le Paige said that the company was treating employees as disposable while distributing huge amounts of money to shareholders, and declared that "workers are not adjustment variables!"
Beaucoup beaucoup de monde dans les rues de Bruxelles en soutien aux travailleurs et aux sous-traitants d'#Audi 🔥 Le groupe VW-Audi a distribué près de 12 milliards de dividendes l'année passée, les travailleurs ne sont pas des variables ajustement! pic.twitter.com/aUEgbCNZsl
— Charlie Le Paige (@charlielepaige) September 16, 2024
The state-of-the-art Audi plant in southern Brussels produces the Q8 e-Tron, an electric sport utility vehicle. Audi received about 27 million euros ($30 million) in public funding to retrain workers when it converted to electric vehicle production.
Audi announced in July that it was considering discontinuing production of the commercially unsuccessful Q8 e-Tron and closing the Brussels plant, and said earlier this month that it still hadn't found an alternative vehicle that it could produce there.
The following day, September 4, the plant's workers "downed tools" and set up protest camps on the premises, according to World Socialist Web Site.
On September 6, United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, a leading U.S. unionist, visited the plant in solidarity with the workers there.
About 1,500 Audi workers at the plant face the prospect of layoffs as early as next month, another 1,100 by May, and the remainder by the end of 2025. There are also many hundreds of subcontractor workers that would be impacted by a closure, unions have said.
Last week, workers took about 200 car keys from vehicles at the plant as an act of protest, prompting warnings of legal action by the company. The workers later returned the keys to try to facilitate discussions with management.
The plant's likely closure is seen as part of E.V. failures at Volkswagen and European carmakers more generally, prompting calls for the European Union to invest in and protect the industry. Audi reportedly plans to make the successor to the Q8 e-Tron in Mexico.
Many of the demonstrators on Monday spoke harshly about E.U. policy.
"We also want to send a strong signal to European authorities, which are making things difficult for Belgian industry, but also for European industry," Patrick Van Belle, a leading union official at Audi Brussels, told Reuters, in explaining the reasons for Monday's demonstration. "The manufacturing industry is mainly migrating away from our countries."
Volkswagen's layoffs may in fact extend beyond Belgium. The company made the surprising announcement earlier this month that it may shutter factories in Germany, drawing fierce opposition from unions there. The closures would be the first in Germany in the company's 87-year history.
Former European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi last week issued a report, commissioned by the E.U., calling for stronger industrial policy and a degree of trade protectionism, including in the auto industry, which is struggling to compete with heavily subsidized Chinese vehicles. Draghi, hardly considered a radical political thinker, drew criticism from neoliberal institutions for the proposals.
Local police said about 5,500 people attended the demonstration on Monday while unions put the figure at 11,000.
This is a developing story... Please check back for possible updates...
Update (6:18 pm):
The FBI said on Sunday that it was "investigating what appears to be an attempted assassination” of former U.S. President Donald Trump after members of the Secret Service fired shots at an individual who appeared to place the muzzle of a rifle over the perimeter of where Trump was playing golf in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Trump wrote in a fundraising email that he was "SAFE AND WELL" following the incident.
Several public figures issued statements condemning political violence.
Minnesota Gov. and Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz wrote on social media that he and his wife Gwen were "glad to hear that Donald Trump is safe."
"Violence has no place in our country. It's not who we are as a nation," Walz wrote.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said: "I am relieved that President Trump and those that were with him are safe. This is a deeply concerning time for our country, and I pray we can prevent this kind of violence and find ways to heal the divisions."
Earlier:
Former U.S. President and current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is "safe" after gunshots were fired "in his vicinity," the Trump campaign announced on Sunday.
Law enforcement officials told The Associated Press that Secret Service agents opened fire after they saw an individual appear to lift the muzzle of their rifle through the barrier surrounding Trump's golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida while he was playing. The suspect then fled in an SUV and was later apprehended by local law enforcement. An AK-style rifle was later found on the grounds of the golf course.
The Secret Service said that the incident took place around 2 pm Eastern Time.
Steven Cheung, the Trump Campaign's communications director, said there were "no further details at this time."
The incident comes a month and two days after Trump survived an assassination attempt while speaking at a rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania.
"I have been briefed on reports of gunshots fired near former President Trump and his property in Florida, and I am glad he is safe," U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, who is running against Trump in the 2024 presidential election, wrote on social media. "Violence has no place in America."
The White House said in a statement that it was "relieved" the Trump was safe.
Reproductive rights advocates have warned for years that abortion bans and restrictions like those now in place in 22 U.S. states would kill pregnant people, and have been dismissed as "hyperbolic" by right-wing lawmakers and activists.
On Monday, new reporting shed light for the first time on the case of one woman whose "preventable" death was the result of an abortion ban—and as ProPublica reported, "there are almost certainly others."
The outlet reported on the story of Amber Nicole Thurman, a 28-year-old mother of a six-year-old son in Georgia, who realized she was pregnant in July 2022—weeks after the right-wing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and just as the state's six-week abortion ban was going into effect.
Thurman had just passed the six-week mark in her pregnancy as the ban took effect on July 20, with "exceptions" that Republicans claimed would allow doctors to provide care to pregnant people who were facing life-threatening complications.
Unable to get an abortion in her home state, the medical assistant, who was planning to attend nursing school and had recently been able to move out of her family's home into an apartment with her son, scheduled a dilation and curettage (D&C)—a surgical abortion procedure—at a clinic in North Carolina, about four hours away. Scheduling the appointment required taking the day off work, finding childcare, and borrowing a relative's car.
Thurman hit heavy traffic on the way to the clinic and missed her appointment; with abortion bans going into effect across the Southeast, the facility was overwhelmed with out-of-state patients and was unable to schedule another D&C for her.
Instead, she was prescribed the abortion pills misoprostol and mifepristone, and took the first pill before heading back home with plans to take the second in Georgia.
After taking the second pill, however, Thurman experienced a rare complication, with some of the fetal tissue remaining in her uterus.
Before Georgia's abortion ban went into effect, she would have been able to obtain a D&C, with doctors removing the remaining tissue—a fairly routine procedure, and part of the standard care for a miscarriage.
As ProPublica reported, the year after the Supreme Court handed down the Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973, affirming that abortion care was a constitutional right in the U.S., the new availability of D&Cs for abortion and miscarriages slashed the maternal mortality rate for women of color by up to 40%.
But when Thurman arrived at Piedmont Henry Hospital in the Atlanta suburb of Stockbridge—having experienced increasing pain and heavy bleeding before vomiting blood and fainting—she encountered a medical team that delayed providing her the standard care for roughly 20 hours.
ProPublica noted that the "supposed lifesaving exceptions" in Georgia's six-week abortion ban prohibit doctors from using medical instruments "with the purpose of terminating a pregnancy," and specify that procedures such as a D&C can only be used if fetal tissue needs to be removed due to a "spontaneous abortion"—the medical term for a miscarriage.
Thurman had told the doctors that she had had a medication abortion, which Republican state lawmakers hadn't included in the exceptions—suggesting she shouldn't be provided care since she'd chosen to terminate her pregnancy. Violating the law could result in prosecution and a prison sentence of up to a decade for a doctor.
The morning after Thurman arrived at the hospital at around 9:30 pm on August 18, 2022, with an ultrasound showing fetal tissue remaining in Thurman's body, a doctor diagnosed "acute severe sepsis," but it was still hours before the staff provided care to remove the tissue.
According to ProPublica:
By 5:14 a.m., Thurman was breathing rapidly and at risk of bleeding out, according to her vital signs. Even five liters of IV fluid had not moved her blood pressure out of the danger zone. Doctors escalated the antibiotics.
[...]
At 6:45 a.m., Thurman’s blood pressure continued to dip, and she was taken to the intensive care unit.
At 7:14 a.m., doctors discussed initiating a D&C. But it still didn’t happen. Two hours later, lab work indicated her organs were failing, according to experts who read her vital signs.
At 12:05 p.m., more than 17 hours after Thurman had arrived, a doctor who specializes in intensive care notified the OB-GYN that her condition was deteriorating.
Thurman was finally taken to an operating room at 2 p.m.
By then, the situation was so dire that doctors started with open abdominal surgery. They found that her bowel needed to be removed, but it was too risky to operate because not enough blood was flowing to the area—a possible complication from the blood pressure medication, an expert explained to ProPublica. The OB performed the D&C but immediately continued with a hysterectomy.
During surgery, Thurman's heart stopped.
The state's maternal mortality review board, which includes 10 physicians, determined that the hospital's decision to delay providing care for nearly an entire day had a "large" impact on Thurman's "preventable" death.
ProPublica identified one other Georgia woman whose death was caused by delayed abortion care resulting from the state's ban, and plans to report on her story in the coming days.
"This is what abortion bans do," said writer and activist Jessica Valenti.
At The New York Times, columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote that "it was only a matter of time" before Americans would learn that an abortion ban had killed a pregnant person.
"The shattering fallout from abortion prohibition was entirely predictable for anyone who has paid attention to such bans in other countries," Goldberg wrote, citing the 2012 case in Ireland of Savita Halappanavar, who died of septicemia after doctors refused to treat her for a miscarriage because her fetus still had a heartbeat.
"In Ireland, the name Savita became a rallying cry" that led voters to overwhelmingly approve a referendum making abortion legal, wrote Goldberg. "The name Amber should be one here."
On Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, addressed Thurman's story, saying her death is "exactly what we feared when Roe was struck down."
"This young mother should be alive, raising her son, and pursuing her dream of attending nursing school," said Harris. "Women are bleeding out in parking lots, turned away from emergency rooms, losing their ability to ever have children again... And now women are dying. These are the consequences of [Republican candidate] Donald Trump's actions."
A spokesperson for Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp's office dismissed the medical board's finding that Thurman's death could have been prevented if not for the state's abortion ban, telling ProPublica that the law allows doctors to provide care in medical emergencies and calling the outlet's reporting a "fear-mongering campaign."
But Leah Greenberg, co-executive director of progressive advocacy group Indivisible, said Thurman death "was not a tragic mistake."
"It is the logical outcome of the Georgia abortion ban working exactly as intended," said Greenberg, "by horrifically punishing women who try to access abortion care."
The United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday passed a resolution demanding that the Israeli government end its occupation of Palestinian territories within 12 months, affirming a recent International Court of Justice opinion that deemed the decadeslong occupation unlawful.
The Palestine-led resolution, co-sponsored by dozens of nations, calls on Israel to swiftly withdraw "all its military forces" from Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. The final vote tally was 124 member states in favor and 14 against, with 43 nations abstaining.
Unsurprisingly, Israel and the United States—Israel's top ally and arms supplier—were among the 14 countries that opposed the resolution, which is not legally binding. The United Kingdom, which recently suspended some arms export licenses for Israel, abstained from Wednesday's vote, a decision that the advocacy group Global Justice Now (GJN) said shows "complete disregard for the ongoing suffering of Palestinians forced to live under military-enforced racial discrimination."
"The vast majority of countries have made it clear: Israel's occupation of Palestine must end, and all countries have a definite duty not to aid or assist its continuation," said GJN's Tim Bierley. "To stay on the right side of international law, the U.K.'s dealings with Israel must drastically change, including closing all loopholes in its partial arms ban and revoking any trade or investment relations that might assist the occupation."
The Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) Movement welcomed passage of the resolution, noting that the U.N. General Assembly voted "for the first time in 42 years" in favor of "imposing sanctions on Israel."
The resolution specifically calls on all U.N. member states to "implement sanctions, including travel bans and asset freezes, against natural and legal persons engaged in the maintenance of Israel's unlawful presence in the occupied Palestinian territory, including in relation to settler violence."
The resolution's passage came nearly two months after the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the U.N.'s highest legal body, handed down an advisory opinion concluding that Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories is illegal and must end "as rapidly as possible."
The newly approved resolution states that "respect for the International Court of Justice and its functions... is essential to international law and justice and to an international order based on the rule of law."
The Biden administration, which is heavily arming the Israeli military as it assails Gaza and the West Bank, criticized the ICJ's opinion as overly broad.
Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said in a statement Wednesday that "the Biden administration should join the overwhelming majority of nations around the world in condemning these crimes against the Palestinian people, demanding an end to the occupation, and exerting serious pressure on the Israeli government to comply."
"We welcome this U.N. resolution demanding an end to one of the worst and ongoing crimes against humanity of the past century," said Awad.
Ahead of Wednesday's vote, a group of U.N. experts said in a statement that many countries "appear unwilling or unable to take the necessary steps to meet their obligations" in the wake of the ICJ's opinion.
"Devastating attacks on Palestinians across the occupied Palestinian territory show that by continuing to turn a blind eye to the horrific plight of the Palestinian people, the international community is furthering genocidal violence," the experts said. "States must act now. They must listen to voices calling on them to take action to stop Israel's attacks against the Palestinians and end its unlawful occupation. All states have a legal obligation to comply with the ICJ's ruling and must promote adherence to norms that protect civilians."
"The need for U.S. support is more urgent than ever," said one advocate. "The lives and well-being of millions depend on it."
Rights groups on Thursday applauded three Democratic lawmakers for their proposal of a bill to restore United States funding to the United Nations' key agency tasked with providing services and humanitarian assistance to Palestinians in Gaza, six months after the U.S. suspended contributions following unverified accusations against the agency.
James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, expressed gratitude to Reps. André Carson (D-Ind.), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) for introducing the UNRWA Emergency Restoration Act of 2024, aimed at restoring funding to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East—legislation that Zogby said would be "lifesaving" if passed into law.
"UNRWA plays a vital role in providing essential services to millions of Palestinian refugees across the occupied Palestinian territory, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria," said Zogby. "The ongoing genocide in Gaza has resulted in increased displacement, starvation, and death. It is both inhumane and unconscionable to continue withholding financial support from UNRWA."
The U.S.—the largest international funder of the agency, which relies almost entirely on voluntary contributions from donor states—promptly suspended funding for UNRWA last January after Israel claimed without evidence that 12 out of the agency's 13,000 staff members in Gaza had been involved in a Hamas-led attack on southern Israel last October.
Congress later passed a bill prohibiting UNRWA funding through at least March 2025.
In 2022, the U.S. contributed more than $343 million to the agency.
"UNRWA is the backbone of humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip. U.S. funding should be restored immediately."
The Biden administration's decision to suspend donations to UNRWA pushed a number of U.S. allies to do the same, but countries including Germany, Sweden, Japan, and the United Kingdom have since reinstated their funding after an independent probe found that Israel had provided no supporting evidence of its claim.
"The United States should join our key allies in restoring this urgently needed funding for UNRWA. There is no time to lose," said Hassan El-Tayyab, legislative director for Middle East policy at the Friends Committee on National Legislation, expressing support for the newly introduced bill.
Bridget Moix, general secretary for the group, added that cutting of funding was "simply unconscionable" because the U.S.—as the Israeli military's largest international funder—bears responsibility for the "horrific violence and a massive humanitarian crisis" in Gaza.
"UNRWA is the backbone of humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip," said Moix. "U.S. funding should be restored immediately."
Cavan Kharrazian, senior policy adviser for Demand Progress, noted that since the U.S. suspended funding to UNRWA, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza has worsened, with U.N. experts warning in July that famine had spread across the enclave.
"The need for U.S. support is more urgent than ever," said Kharrazian. "The lives and well-being of millions depend on it."
"We call on leaders in Congress to take principled stands like this as future funding bills move," he added, "removing these harmful prohibitions against UNRWA funding."
"Online platforms use sophisticated and opaque techniques of data collection that endanger young people and put their healthy development at risk," said one children's advocate.
Child welfare advocates renewed calls for U.S. lawmakers to pass a pair of controversial bills aimed at protecting youth from Big Tech's "dangerous and unacceptable business practices" after the Federal Trade Commission published a report Thursday detailing how social media and streaming companies endanger children and teens who use their platforms.
The FTC staff report—entitled A Look Behind the Screens: Examining the Data Practices of Social Media and Video Streaming Services—"shows how the tech industry's monetization of personal data has created a market for commercial surveillance, especially via social media and video streaming services, with inadequate guardrails to protect consumers."
The agency staff examined the practices of Meta platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp; YouTube; X, formerly known as Twitter; Snapchat; Reddit; Discord; Amazon, which owns the gaming site Twitch; and ByteDance, the owner of TikTok.
"The report finds that these companies engaged in mass data collection of their users and—in some cases—nonusers," Bureau of Consumer Protection Director Samuel Levine said in the paper. "It reveals that many companies failed to implement adequate safeguards against privacy risks. It sheds light on how companies used our personal data, from serving hypergranular targeted advertisements to powering algorithms that shape the content we see, often with the goal of keeping us hooked on using the service."
The publication "also finds that these practices pose unique risks to children and teens, with the companies having done little to respond effectively to the documented concerns that policymakers, psychologists, and parents have expressed over young people's physical and mental well-being."
FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a statement that "the report lays out how social media and video streaming companies harvest an enormous amount of Americans' personal data and monetize it to the tune of billions of dollars a year."
"While lucrative for the companies, these surveillance practices can endanger people's privacy, threaten their freedoms, and expose them to a host of harms, from identify theft to stalking," she added.
Researchers at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard University published an analysis last December that revealed social media companies made nearly $11 billion in 2022 advertising revenue from U.S.-based users younger than 18.
According to the FTC report:
While the use of social media and digital technology can provide many positive opportunities for self-directed learning, forming community, and reducing isolation, it also has been associated with harms to physical and mental health, including through exposure to bullying, online harassment, child sexual exploitation, and exposure to content that may exacerbate mental health issues, such as the promotion of eating disorders, among other things.
The publication also flags "algorithms that may prioritize certain forms of harmful content, such as dangerous online challenges."
The report accuses social media companies of "willful blindness around child users" by claiming that there are no children on their platforms because their sites do not allow them to create accounts. This may constitute an attempt by the companies to avoid legal liability under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act Rule (COPPA). Last December, Khan
proposed sweeping changes to COPPA to address the issue.
Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay—a nonprofit organization "committed to helping children thrive in an increasingly commercialized, screen-obsessed culture"—said in a statement that "this report from the FTC is yet more proof that Big Tech's business model is harmful to children and teens."
"Online platforms use sophisticated and opaque techniques of data collection that endanger young people and put their healthy development at risk," Golin added. "We thank the FTC for listening to the concerns raised by Fairplay and a coalition of advocacy groups, and we call on Congress to pass COPPA 2.0, the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act, and KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act, to better safeguard our children from these companies' dangerous and unacceptable business practices."
On Wednesday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted to advance COPPA 2.0 and KOSA, both of which were overwhelmingly passed by the Senate in July.
However, rights groups including the ACLU condemned KOSA, which the civil liberties organization warned "would violate the First Amendment by enabling the federal government to dictate what information people can access online and encourage social media platforms to censor protected speech."
In May 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued an advisory on "the growing concerns about the effects of social media on youth mental health."
The White House simultaneously announced the creation of a federal task force "to advance the health, safety, and privacy of minors online with particular attention to preventing and mitigating the adverse health effects of online platforms."
Murthy has also called for tobacco-like warning labels on social media to address the platform's possible harms to children and teens.
According to a study published in January by the corporate power watchdog Ekō, in just one week that month there were more than 33 million posts on TikTok and Meta-owned Instagram "under hashtags housing problematic content directed at young users," including suicide, eating disorders, skin-whitening, and so-called "involuntary celibacy."
"It's time for our universities to become real climate leaders," said one organizer, "and cut ties with the fossil fuel industry once and for all."
Students at universities and colleges across the U.S. have long demanded that their schools cut ties with the fossil fuel industry as planetary heating has increasingly been linked to extreme weather and pollution-causing emissions have continued.
New findings released by student researchers with the Campus Climate Network on Wednesday, said the organization, "add more detail and evidence to what these students have already been campaigning for—fossil fuel funding has no place in universities' climate research."
The students spoke at a virtual press conference titled "Big Oil's Stain on Our Universities," presenting research compiled in six reports regarding fossil fuel industry ties at Columbia University, Princeton University, Cornell University, American University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and University of California San Diego.
The six institutions have collectively received more than $108 million in direct funding to the fossil fuel industry, published more than 1,500 academic articles and papers funded by oil giants, and count 10 people affiliated with the industry among the members of their university governance boards, according to the research—which follows the first-ever literature review of investigations into Big Oil's links to higher education, published in the peer-reviewed journal WIREs Climate Change earlier this month.
Columbia and Princeton were by far the biggest recipients of fossil fuel money, accepting more than $43 million each from companies and their foundations.
Sunrise Columbia, the Sunrise Movement's chapter at the university, published a report presented at Wednesday's press conference, detailing how Hess Corporation—an oil and gas company acquired by Chevron—was the largest fossil fuel donor to the prestigious university. The company contributed more than $15 million to Columbia from 2005-24.
Koch Family Foundations, "which have spent hundreds of millions to finance groups promoting climate denial," and liquefied natural gas (LNG) firm Cheniere Energy were also major contributors.
Fossil fuel money at Columbia has gone toward funding the Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP), the School of International and Public Affairs, and the university's Climate School—which "powers innovative research in the science, consequences, and human dimensions of climate change."
"CGEP, the Climate School, and Columbia repeatedly claim to produce unbiased, reputable research to advance climate solutions. Many of our findings directly contradict these missions."
The Climate School has received $741,967 from fossil fuel giants since it was established in 2020.
"CGEP, the Climate School, and Columbia repeatedly claim to produce unbiased, reputable research to advance climate solutions," reads the report. "Many of our findings directly contradict these missions—from Columbia being named explicitly by a BP [vice president] as essential for their outreach and influence to being specifically mentioned as a producer of biased research, Columbia has fallen short," said Sunrise Columbia.
At Princeton, student researchers wrote that the university "legitimizes and financially supports the fossil fuel industry," continuing to invest "approximately $700 million in privately held fossil fuel companies without justification," even after divesting its endowment of fossil fuel holdings worth $1 billion.
The report notes that the school's New Jersey campus "has not been spared" from extreme weather that's growing more frequent as the planet gets hotter and scientists warn that limiting planetary heating to 1.5°C is getting less likely.
"Last summer, our campus was shrouded by smoke from incinerated Quebecois pine trees, smoke that turned the sky a burning orange. Outdoor workers on and off campus were hit hardest," wrote the students. "Floods nearby destroyed transport infrastructure and made it harder for our community members to come to campus to work or to learn. Scorching temperatures at the start of each fall semester make it difficult to think."
But while students, faculty, and staff have suffered the effects of fossil fuel extraction, major fossil fuel companies including BP, Exxon, Shell, and TotalEnergies have spent more than $43 million on research at Princeton, funding papers containing "explicit applications for continued or expanded fossil fuel use."
At the virtual press conference on Wednesday, Campus Climate Network research manager Maddie Young said the articles detailed in the six reports focus primarily on methods for fossil fuel extraction, methods and "benefits" of "false solutions" like carbon capture, and extending and upholding "the social license of the fossil fuel industry to operate."
"So these might be articles that are connected to healthcare or health research and promote the image of corporate social responsibility connected to the fossil fuel industry," said Young, "and allow them to continue to leverage these relationships to universities and to greenwash their own image and present themselves as socially responsible."
The student researchers recommended that Princeton prohibit all research funding from the industry and complete divestment from all oil, gas, and coal companies, as well as cut ties with Petrotiger, a fossil fuel company that Princeton "appears to own," having earned nearly $140 million in the last 10 years in investment income and direct contributions.
"These recommendations are all within Princeton's power to achieve," said the student researchers. "The university must act upon these items with the urgency the climate crisis demands."
Young, who is also a student organizer at American University, said the student-authored reports are "only the beginning—we have a strong, national student movement that will continue to expose and cut the ties with Big Oil."
“It's time for our universities to become real climate leaders," said Young, "and cut ties with the fossil fuel industry once and for all."