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Family photos are seen taped to a window at a home in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian in San Carlos Island, Florida on October 1, 2022.
Fossil fuel corporations—the primary drivers of the climate emergency—are facing dozens of civil lawsuits that could see them pay billions of dollars for knowingly unleashing environmental destruction.
But a pair of legal experts argue they should be held criminally responsible for extreme weather-related deaths that occurred after the industry downplayed the dangers of burning coal, oil, and gas.
In a new paper titled Climate Homicide: Prosecuting Big Oil for Climate Deaths, Public Citizen’s David Arkush and George Washington University law professor Donald Braman contend that “if our criminal legal system cannot focus more intently on climate crimes—and soon—we may leave future generations with significantly less for the law to protect.”
“As of this writing, no prosecutor in any jurisdiction is bringing homicide charges of any kind against fossil fuel companies (FFCs) for even a single death related to climate change. They should,” states the paper, which is set to be published next spring in the Harvard Environmental Law Review.
According to Arkush and Braman:
The case for homicide prosecutions is increasingly compelling. A steady growth in the information about what FFCs knew and what they did with that knowledge is revealing a story of antisocial conduct generating lethal harm so extensive it may soon become unparalleled in human history.
FFCs have long understood the “globally catastrophic” risks that the production, marketing, and sale of their product generates. But when confronted with extensive internal and external research about the grave dangers posed by their business model, they did not notify the public, regulators, or legislators, much less work to find solutions or change their business model. Instead, they developed extensive disinformation and political influence campaigns to obscure the risks, confuse others, and block legal or regulatory restriction of their increasingly lethal conduct. Moreover, while they put their wealth to work reducing regulatory and legal risks to their profit margins, they privately used the data they disputed and obscured to reduce their own exposure to climate-change-related industrial risks to further maximize their future profits.
FFCs were technically sophisticated enough to know that they could hide the harms they were generating from lay observers for decades, allowing them to earn trillions of dollars while researchers, activists, and regulators struggled to overcome the sophisticated disinformation and political influence campaigns these profits supported. In recent years, the harms have become increasingly lethal and will likely continue to worsen for decades to come. These harms, while global, already include thousands of readily foreseeable deaths of residents of the United States, a toll that may escalate into the hundreds of thousands and, over time, potentially millions.
In the co-authors’ words, the preceding summary “describes the core elements of an ongoing mass homicide: conduct undertaken with a culpable mental state that substantially contributes to or accelerates death.”
“Regardless of whether FFCs knew their conduct would contribute to these lethal risks, were aware of the substantial and unjustifiable risks they were running, or merely should have known and should have investigated further—that is, whether they had a knowing, reckless, or negligent attitude towards these risks—they satisfy at least one of the culpable mental states required for some gradation of homicide,” Arkush and Braman argue. “Further, under misdemeanor manslaughter or felony murder laws, if prosecutors can prove that FFCs engaged in any related criminal conduct involving fraud, racketeering, anti-competitive practices, or safety violations, homicide liability could obtain independent of any mental state regarding the risk of death.”
“As additional evidence of FFCs’ knowledge of the lethal risks they were generating surfaces through leaks and court-mandated discovery, obstacles to a successful prosecution are falling away,” the scholars continue. “At the same time, with every new wave of climate-related deaths, the justification for prosecution grows.”
“Although some of the harmful externalities that FFCs generate may be suitable for tort or regulatory suits, the lethality of FFCs’ conduct, their awareness of the risks they are generating, and their efforts to obscure those risks make criminal prosecution for homicide particularly appropriate,” they add. “Perhaps most importantly, if FFCs continue to fight speedy reductions in the harms they are generating, and if they continue to obstruct or delay state and federal regulation and civil suits designed to reduce the lethal impact of their conduct, then homicide prosecutions may prove necessary.”
Last month, BP and Shell announced they are diluting their emission-reduction targets and expanding fossil fuel production after Big Oil enjoyed record-breaking profits in 2022 as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted global energy markets and gave firms an excuse to hike prices. Climate scientists have made clear that such decisions are, as United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres put it earlier this year, “inconsistent with human survival.”
After the U.N.‘s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest assessment report on Monday, Guterres said that limiting global warming to 1.5°C is possible, “but it will take a quantum leap in climate action,” including a prohibition on funding and approving new coal, oil, and gas projects along with a phaseout of existing fossil fuel production.
The deadly consequences of unmitigated greenhouse gas pollution, which has increased average surface temperatures by roughly 1.1°C over preindustrial levels to date, are already apparent.
For instance, a report released Monday by UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and Somalia’s health ministry found that an ongoing drought caused 43,000 excess deaths in the country last year. Nearly 130,000 people in Somalia and other countries in the Horn of Africa are at risk of dying prematurely this year from famine. In southern Africa, a record-breaking cyclone has killed more than 500 people this month, while last year’s unprecedented flooding in Pakistan killed more than 1,700 people.
This is just a small sample of recent climate change-intensified calamities affecting the residents of low-income countries who have contributed the least to planet-heating pollution but are disproportionately vulnerable to its impacts. Nevertheless, increasingly frequent and severe hurricanes, heatwaves, wildfires, and other extreme weather disasters that are consistent with scientists’ longstanding warnings are also wreaking deadly havoc in rich nations, including the United States.
Because their paper “addresses the question of criminal prosecution under domestic law,” Arkush and Braman focus their attention on the U.S., where an estimated 12,000 people died each year from climate change-related heat exposure between 1991 and 2018—an annual mortality figure that is expected to surge to 96,000 by the end of the century.
Speaking with E&E News on Monday, Arkush said prosecutors are already intrigued by the novel legal theory of “climate homicide.”
“We have some indication they’re at least listening and curious,” Arkush, director of Public Citizen’s climate program and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, told the outlet. “To someone who knows the criminal law, there’s a moment of ‘What!?’ and then, ‘It’s OK. It’s not crazy.‘”
“We concluded there aren’t really any legal or factual barriers to prosecution,” said Arkush. “The real potential barriers are political, cultural. Does this strike people as just too out there? Do the fossil fuel companies have too much power, culturally, politically, economically? Those are the real barriers.”
According to Braman: “What’s really probably stopping them is that no one has done it before. The level of culpability and the extent of the harm is so massive that it’s not the kind of thing that prosecutors are used to prosecuting.”
Anthony Moffa, an associate law professor at the University of Maine who has previously assessed the possibility of criminal liability for environmental policy decisions, told E&E News, “I think it’s the next thing.”
“If we’re doing it in these other instances and saying there was environmental harm, logically it’s hard to distinguish that from the climate crisis,” said Moffa. The causal link between burning fossil fuels and climate change-exacerbated storms might be “longer and maybe more attenuated, but it’s still a pretty direct line.”
As E&E News reported: “Corporations can’t be put behind bars even if they are convicted of a crime. But Arkush and Braman say they’ve identified an option for prosecutors to use in climate homicide cases that could lead to public good, rather than prison time or corporate dissolution. Companies that are convicted of criminal charges could instead face restructuring into a ‘public benefit corporation,’ a designation that gives a company latitude to focus on priorities other than simply maximizing shareholder value.”
According to Arkush and Braman’s paper, this could enable a reduction in “the production and distribution of fossil fuels at the fastest pace feasible—but not so fast as to cause harm—while protecting displaced workers and local economies and investing in the development and deployment of clean energy.”
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Fossil fuel corporations—the primary drivers of the climate emergency—are facing dozens of civil lawsuits that could see them pay billions of dollars for knowingly unleashing environmental destruction.
But a pair of legal experts argue they should be held criminally responsible for extreme weather-related deaths that occurred after the industry downplayed the dangers of burning coal, oil, and gas.
In a new paper titled Climate Homicide: Prosecuting Big Oil for Climate Deaths, Public Citizen’s David Arkush and George Washington University law professor Donald Braman contend that “if our criminal legal system cannot focus more intently on climate crimes—and soon—we may leave future generations with significantly less for the law to protect.”
“As of this writing, no prosecutor in any jurisdiction is bringing homicide charges of any kind against fossil fuel companies (FFCs) for even a single death related to climate change. They should,” states the paper, which is set to be published next spring in the Harvard Environmental Law Review.
According to Arkush and Braman:
The case for homicide prosecutions is increasingly compelling. A steady growth in the information about what FFCs knew and what they did with that knowledge is revealing a story of antisocial conduct generating lethal harm so extensive it may soon become unparalleled in human history.
FFCs have long understood the “globally catastrophic” risks that the production, marketing, and sale of their product generates. But when confronted with extensive internal and external research about the grave dangers posed by their business model, they did not notify the public, regulators, or legislators, much less work to find solutions or change their business model. Instead, they developed extensive disinformation and political influence campaigns to obscure the risks, confuse others, and block legal or regulatory restriction of their increasingly lethal conduct. Moreover, while they put their wealth to work reducing regulatory and legal risks to their profit margins, they privately used the data they disputed and obscured to reduce their own exposure to climate-change-related industrial risks to further maximize their future profits.
FFCs were technically sophisticated enough to know that they could hide the harms they were generating from lay observers for decades, allowing them to earn trillions of dollars while researchers, activists, and regulators struggled to overcome the sophisticated disinformation and political influence campaigns these profits supported. In recent years, the harms have become increasingly lethal and will likely continue to worsen for decades to come. These harms, while global, already include thousands of readily foreseeable deaths of residents of the United States, a toll that may escalate into the hundreds of thousands and, over time, potentially millions.
In the co-authors’ words, the preceding summary “describes the core elements of an ongoing mass homicide: conduct undertaken with a culpable mental state that substantially contributes to or accelerates death.”
“Regardless of whether FFCs knew their conduct would contribute to these lethal risks, were aware of the substantial and unjustifiable risks they were running, or merely should have known and should have investigated further—that is, whether they had a knowing, reckless, or negligent attitude towards these risks—they satisfy at least one of the culpable mental states required for some gradation of homicide,” Arkush and Braman argue. “Further, under misdemeanor manslaughter or felony murder laws, if prosecutors can prove that FFCs engaged in any related criminal conduct involving fraud, racketeering, anti-competitive practices, or safety violations, homicide liability could obtain independent of any mental state regarding the risk of death.”
“As additional evidence of FFCs’ knowledge of the lethal risks they were generating surfaces through leaks and court-mandated discovery, obstacles to a successful prosecution are falling away,” the scholars continue. “At the same time, with every new wave of climate-related deaths, the justification for prosecution grows.”
“Although some of the harmful externalities that FFCs generate may be suitable for tort or regulatory suits, the lethality of FFCs’ conduct, their awareness of the risks they are generating, and their efforts to obscure those risks make criminal prosecution for homicide particularly appropriate,” they add. “Perhaps most importantly, if FFCs continue to fight speedy reductions in the harms they are generating, and if they continue to obstruct or delay state and federal regulation and civil suits designed to reduce the lethal impact of their conduct, then homicide prosecutions may prove necessary.”
Last month, BP and Shell announced they are diluting their emission-reduction targets and expanding fossil fuel production after Big Oil enjoyed record-breaking profits in 2022 as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted global energy markets and gave firms an excuse to hike prices. Climate scientists have made clear that such decisions are, as United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres put it earlier this year, “inconsistent with human survival.”
After the U.N.‘s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest assessment report on Monday, Guterres said that limiting global warming to 1.5°C is possible, “but it will take a quantum leap in climate action,” including a prohibition on funding and approving new coal, oil, and gas projects along with a phaseout of existing fossil fuel production.
The deadly consequences of unmitigated greenhouse gas pollution, which has increased average surface temperatures by roughly 1.1°C over preindustrial levels to date, are already apparent.
For instance, a report released Monday by UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and Somalia’s health ministry found that an ongoing drought caused 43,000 excess deaths in the country last year. Nearly 130,000 people in Somalia and other countries in the Horn of Africa are at risk of dying prematurely this year from famine. In southern Africa, a record-breaking cyclone has killed more than 500 people this month, while last year’s unprecedented flooding in Pakistan killed more than 1,700 people.
This is just a small sample of recent climate change-intensified calamities affecting the residents of low-income countries who have contributed the least to planet-heating pollution but are disproportionately vulnerable to its impacts. Nevertheless, increasingly frequent and severe hurricanes, heatwaves, wildfires, and other extreme weather disasters that are consistent with scientists’ longstanding warnings are also wreaking deadly havoc in rich nations, including the United States.
Because their paper “addresses the question of criminal prosecution under domestic law,” Arkush and Braman focus their attention on the U.S., where an estimated 12,000 people died each year from climate change-related heat exposure between 1991 and 2018—an annual mortality figure that is expected to surge to 96,000 by the end of the century.
Speaking with E&E News on Monday, Arkush said prosecutors are already intrigued by the novel legal theory of “climate homicide.”
“We have some indication they’re at least listening and curious,” Arkush, director of Public Citizen’s climate program and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, told the outlet. “To someone who knows the criminal law, there’s a moment of ‘What!?’ and then, ‘It’s OK. It’s not crazy.‘”
“We concluded there aren’t really any legal or factual barriers to prosecution,” said Arkush. “The real potential barriers are political, cultural. Does this strike people as just too out there? Do the fossil fuel companies have too much power, culturally, politically, economically? Those are the real barriers.”
According to Braman: “What’s really probably stopping them is that no one has done it before. The level of culpability and the extent of the harm is so massive that it’s not the kind of thing that prosecutors are used to prosecuting.”
Anthony Moffa, an associate law professor at the University of Maine who has previously assessed the possibility of criminal liability for environmental policy decisions, told E&E News, “I think it’s the next thing.”
“If we’re doing it in these other instances and saying there was environmental harm, logically it’s hard to distinguish that from the climate crisis,” said Moffa. The causal link between burning fossil fuels and climate change-exacerbated storms might be “longer and maybe more attenuated, but it’s still a pretty direct line.”
As E&E News reported: “Corporations can’t be put behind bars even if they are convicted of a crime. But Arkush and Braman say they’ve identified an option for prosecutors to use in climate homicide cases that could lead to public good, rather than prison time or corporate dissolution. Companies that are convicted of criminal charges could instead face restructuring into a ‘public benefit corporation,’ a designation that gives a company latitude to focus on priorities other than simply maximizing shareholder value.”
According to Arkush and Braman’s paper, this could enable a reduction in “the production and distribution of fossil fuels at the fastest pace feasible—but not so fast as to cause harm—while protecting displaced workers and local economies and investing in the development and deployment of clean energy.”
Fossil fuel corporations—the primary drivers of the climate emergency—are facing dozens of civil lawsuits that could see them pay billions of dollars for knowingly unleashing environmental destruction.
But a pair of legal experts argue they should be held criminally responsible for extreme weather-related deaths that occurred after the industry downplayed the dangers of burning coal, oil, and gas.
In a new paper titled Climate Homicide: Prosecuting Big Oil for Climate Deaths, Public Citizen’s David Arkush and George Washington University law professor Donald Braman contend that “if our criminal legal system cannot focus more intently on climate crimes—and soon—we may leave future generations with significantly less for the law to protect.”
“As of this writing, no prosecutor in any jurisdiction is bringing homicide charges of any kind against fossil fuel companies (FFCs) for even a single death related to climate change. They should,” states the paper, which is set to be published next spring in the Harvard Environmental Law Review.
According to Arkush and Braman:
The case for homicide prosecutions is increasingly compelling. A steady growth in the information about what FFCs knew and what they did with that knowledge is revealing a story of antisocial conduct generating lethal harm so extensive it may soon become unparalleled in human history.
FFCs have long understood the “globally catastrophic” risks that the production, marketing, and sale of their product generates. But when confronted with extensive internal and external research about the grave dangers posed by their business model, they did not notify the public, regulators, or legislators, much less work to find solutions or change their business model. Instead, they developed extensive disinformation and political influence campaigns to obscure the risks, confuse others, and block legal or regulatory restriction of their increasingly lethal conduct. Moreover, while they put their wealth to work reducing regulatory and legal risks to their profit margins, they privately used the data they disputed and obscured to reduce their own exposure to climate-change-related industrial risks to further maximize their future profits.
FFCs were technically sophisticated enough to know that they could hide the harms they were generating from lay observers for decades, allowing them to earn trillions of dollars while researchers, activists, and regulators struggled to overcome the sophisticated disinformation and political influence campaigns these profits supported. In recent years, the harms have become increasingly lethal and will likely continue to worsen for decades to come. These harms, while global, already include thousands of readily foreseeable deaths of residents of the United States, a toll that may escalate into the hundreds of thousands and, over time, potentially millions.
In the co-authors’ words, the preceding summary “describes the core elements of an ongoing mass homicide: conduct undertaken with a culpable mental state that substantially contributes to or accelerates death.”
“Regardless of whether FFCs knew their conduct would contribute to these lethal risks, were aware of the substantial and unjustifiable risks they were running, or merely should have known and should have investigated further—that is, whether they had a knowing, reckless, or negligent attitude towards these risks—they satisfy at least one of the culpable mental states required for some gradation of homicide,” Arkush and Braman argue. “Further, under misdemeanor manslaughter or felony murder laws, if prosecutors can prove that FFCs engaged in any related criminal conduct involving fraud, racketeering, anti-competitive practices, or safety violations, homicide liability could obtain independent of any mental state regarding the risk of death.”
“As additional evidence of FFCs’ knowledge of the lethal risks they were generating surfaces through leaks and court-mandated discovery, obstacles to a successful prosecution are falling away,” the scholars continue. “At the same time, with every new wave of climate-related deaths, the justification for prosecution grows.”
“Although some of the harmful externalities that FFCs generate may be suitable for tort or regulatory suits, the lethality of FFCs’ conduct, their awareness of the risks they are generating, and their efforts to obscure those risks make criminal prosecution for homicide particularly appropriate,” they add. “Perhaps most importantly, if FFCs continue to fight speedy reductions in the harms they are generating, and if they continue to obstruct or delay state and federal regulation and civil suits designed to reduce the lethal impact of their conduct, then homicide prosecutions may prove necessary.”
Last month, BP and Shell announced they are diluting their emission-reduction targets and expanding fossil fuel production after Big Oil enjoyed record-breaking profits in 2022 as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted global energy markets and gave firms an excuse to hike prices. Climate scientists have made clear that such decisions are, as United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres put it earlier this year, “inconsistent with human survival.”
After the U.N.‘s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest assessment report on Monday, Guterres said that limiting global warming to 1.5°C is possible, “but it will take a quantum leap in climate action,” including a prohibition on funding and approving new coal, oil, and gas projects along with a phaseout of existing fossil fuel production.
The deadly consequences of unmitigated greenhouse gas pollution, which has increased average surface temperatures by roughly 1.1°C over preindustrial levels to date, are already apparent.
For instance, a report released Monday by UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and Somalia’s health ministry found that an ongoing drought caused 43,000 excess deaths in the country last year. Nearly 130,000 people in Somalia and other countries in the Horn of Africa are at risk of dying prematurely this year from famine. In southern Africa, a record-breaking cyclone has killed more than 500 people this month, while last year’s unprecedented flooding in Pakistan killed more than 1,700 people.
This is just a small sample of recent climate change-intensified calamities affecting the residents of low-income countries who have contributed the least to planet-heating pollution but are disproportionately vulnerable to its impacts. Nevertheless, increasingly frequent and severe hurricanes, heatwaves, wildfires, and other extreme weather disasters that are consistent with scientists’ longstanding warnings are also wreaking deadly havoc in rich nations, including the United States.
Because their paper “addresses the question of criminal prosecution under domestic law,” Arkush and Braman focus their attention on the U.S., where an estimated 12,000 people died each year from climate change-related heat exposure between 1991 and 2018—an annual mortality figure that is expected to surge to 96,000 by the end of the century.
Speaking with E&E News on Monday, Arkush said prosecutors are already intrigued by the novel legal theory of “climate homicide.”
“We have some indication they’re at least listening and curious,” Arkush, director of Public Citizen’s climate program and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, told the outlet. “To someone who knows the criminal law, there’s a moment of ‘What!?’ and then, ‘It’s OK. It’s not crazy.‘”
“We concluded there aren’t really any legal or factual barriers to prosecution,” said Arkush. “The real potential barriers are political, cultural. Does this strike people as just too out there? Do the fossil fuel companies have too much power, culturally, politically, economically? Those are the real barriers.”
According to Braman: “What’s really probably stopping them is that no one has done it before. The level of culpability and the extent of the harm is so massive that it’s not the kind of thing that prosecutors are used to prosecuting.”
Anthony Moffa, an associate law professor at the University of Maine who has previously assessed the possibility of criminal liability for environmental policy decisions, told E&E News, “I think it’s the next thing.”
“If we’re doing it in these other instances and saying there was environmental harm, logically it’s hard to distinguish that from the climate crisis,” said Moffa. The causal link between burning fossil fuels and climate change-exacerbated storms might be “longer and maybe more attenuated, but it’s still a pretty direct line.”
As E&E News reported: “Corporations can’t be put behind bars even if they are convicted of a crime. But Arkush and Braman say they’ve identified an option for prosecutors to use in climate homicide cases that could lead to public good, rather than prison time or corporate dissolution. Companies that are convicted of criminal charges could instead face restructuring into a ‘public benefit corporation,’ a designation that gives a company latitude to focus on priorities other than simply maximizing shareholder value.”
According to Arkush and Braman’s paper, this could enable a reduction in “the production and distribution of fossil fuels at the fastest pace feasible—but not so fast as to cause harm—while protecting displaced workers and local economies and investing in the development and deployment of clean energy.”
Italian labor unions led a massive 24-hour general strike on Monday to protest Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza, with estimates of hundreds of thousands of demonstrators rallying in dozens of cities across Italy.
Protesters took to squares, streets, transport hubs, ports, university campuses, and other spaces in more than 75 cities and towns, rallying under the call to "Block Everything." Places including schools, train stations, and retail stores were shut for the day.
"The strike is called in response to the ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip, the blockade of humanitarian aid by the Israeli army, and the threats directed against the... Global Sumud Flotilla, which has on board Italian workers and trade unionists committed to bringing food and basic necessities to the Palestinian population," explained Unione Sindacale di Base (USB), a grassroots union confederation known for its militant stance on labor and political issues.
In Rome, tens of thousands of Palestine defenders rallied at the Termini rail station, Italy's largest, with many of the demonstrators occupying the building.
While protest activities snarled traffic in some parts of the Italian capital, many Roman motorists showed solidarity with the demonstrators by honking their horns and raising their fists into the air.
Watch: Pro-Gaza protesters who blocked a highway near Rome were met with visible solidarity from drivers. Regional news coverage of the paralyzed Central Station showed only people expressing support for the protest.Source: Paolo Mossetti on X (@paolomossetti)
[image or embed]
— Drop Site (@dropsitenews.com) September 22, 2025 at 11:35 AM
Milan saw an estimated 50,000 people turn out to locations including the central rail station, where some protesters damaged property and clashed with police, who said 10 people were arrested and 60 officers were injured.
“If we don’t block what Israel is doing, if we don’t block trade, the distribution of weapons and everything else with Israel, we will not ever achieve anything,” protester Walter Montagnoli, who is the Base Unitary Confederation's (CUB) national secretary, told The Associated Press at a march in Milan.
In Bologna—home to the world's oldest continuously operating university—students occupied lecture halls and thousands of demonstrators took to the streets, including the Tangenziale, the ring highway around the city, where police attacked them with water cannons and tear gas.
Dockworkers and other demonstrators marched and blocked ports in cities including Genoa, Trieste, and Livorno.
Thousands of protesters also blocked the main train station in Naples.
Source: Potere al Popolo via X (@potere_alpopolo)
[image or embed]
— Drop Site (@dropsitenews.com) September 22, 2025 at 11:06 AM
In the Adriatic seaside resort of Termoli, hundreds of student-led Palestine defenders rallied in St. Anthony's Square and, with Mayor Nicola Balice's permission, draped a Palestinian flag from the façade of City Hall.
"Faced with such an important subject, the genocide in Palestine, we students... said this would be a nonpartisan demonstration because in the face of what is happening in the Gaza Strip—hospitals bombed, children killed every day—there can be no political ideology," said one Termoli protester. "We must all be united.”
Some participants in Monday's general strike pointed the finger at their own government.
"In the face of what is happening in Gaza you have to decide where you are," Italian General Confederation of Labor leader Maurizio Landini told La Stampa. "If you don’t tell the Israeli government that you have to stop and don't send them more weapons, but instead you keep sending them... you actually become complicit in what’s happening.”
While European nations including Ireland, Norway, Spain, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, Portugal, France, Luxembourg, and Denmark have formally recognized Palestine or announced their intent to do so since October 2023, Italy has given no indication that it will follow suit. More than 150 of 193 United Nations member states have recognized Palestine.
Although increasingly critical of Israel's 718-day genocidal assault—which has left at least 241,000 Palestinians dead, wounded, or missing in Gaza—right-wing Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has been accused of complicity in genocide for actions including presiding over arms sales to the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. Meloni has rejected the ICC warrants and said Netanyahu would not be arrested if he enters Italy.
"Meloni should listen to the voice of those who are peacefully protesting and asking her to act, rather than curling up to Washington to protect her friend, the war criminal Netanyahu," Giuseppe Conte, who leads the independent progressive Five Star Movement, said Monday on social media. "Meloni should take a stand with the facts against those who have slaughtered 20,000 children, rather than limiting herself to saying, 'I do not agree.' And she should stop running away from the debate in Parliament."
As US President Donald Trump faces mounting accusations of authoritarian conduct, the Supreme Court's right-wing majority on Monday empowered him to proceed with firing a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission and agreed to review a 90-year-old precedent that restricts executive power over independent agencies such as the FTC.
Trump in March fired the FTC's two Democratic commissioners, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, without cause. Slaughter fought back, and US District Judge Loren AliKhan allowed her to return to work while the case continued. The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld that decision, but it was halted Monday by the nation's top court.
Monday's decision was unsigned, though the three liberals collectively dissented, led by Justice Elena Kagan. In addition to letting Trump move forward with ousting Slaughter, the majority agreed to reconsider the precedent established with Humphrey's Executor v. United States, a 1935 case that centered on whether the Federal Trade Commission Act unconstitutionally interfered with the executive power of the president.
In Humphrey's Executor, the high court found that Congress' removal protections for FTC members did not violate the separation of powers. Along with revisiting the precedent established by that landmark decision in December, the justices plan to weigh whether a federal court may prevent a person's removal from public office.
The court's stay allowing Trump to fire Slaughter was granted as part of the court's emergency process, or shadow docket. In a short but scathing dissent, Kagan noted that it is part of a recent trend: "Earlier this year, the same majority, by the same mechanism, permitted the president to fire without cause members of the National Labor Relations Board, the Merits Systems Protection Board, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission."
"I dissented from the majority's prior stay orders, and today do so again. Under existing law, what Congress said goes—as this court unanimously decided nearly a century ago," she wrote. In Humphrey's Executor, Kagan continued, "Congress, we held, may restrict the president's power to remove members of the FTC, as well as other agencies performing 'quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial' functions, without violating the Constitution."
"So the president cannot, as he concededly did here, fire an FTC commissioner without any reason. To reach a different result requires reversing the rule stated in Humphrey's: It entails overriding rather than accepting Congress' judgment about agency design," she argued. "The majority may be raring to take that action, as its grant of certiorari before judgment suggests. But until the deed is done, Humphrey's controls, and prevents the majority from giving the president the unlimited removal power Congress denied him."
More broadly, Kagan declared that "our emergency docket should never be used, as it has been this year, to permit what our own precedent bars. Still more, it should not be used, as it also has been, to transfer government authority from Congress to the president, and thus to reshape the nation's separation of powers."
Kagan, of course, is correct that the Supreme Court will soon overturn Humphrey's Executor and allow the president to fire leaders of any independent agency (other than the Fed—maybe?!). She's also right to bemoan the fact that SCOTUS effectively overruled Humphrey's on the shadow docket already.
— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjsdc.bsky.social) September 22, 2025 at 3:20 PM
Sandeep Vaheesan, legal director at the anti-monopoly think tank Open Markets Institute, slammed the court in a Monday statement.
"Today, in a one-paragraph order, the Supreme Court authorized President Trump's illegal firing of Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and his ongoing destruction of the independent, bipartisan Federal Trade Commission," Vaheesan said.
"As Justice Kagan wrote in her dissent, Commissioner Slaughter was fired without cause and is clearly entitled to her position under the FTC Act and controlling Supreme Court precedent," he added. "The court could override Congress' decision to create an independent FTC on specious constitutional grounds but until it takes that step Commissioner Slaughter has a right to her job.”
While the justices agreed to take Slaughter's case, they turned away petitions from two ousted Democratic appointees referenced by Kagan: Cathy Harris of the Merit Systems Protection Board and Gwynne Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board. According to SCOTUSblog: "The court did not provide any explanation for its decision not to take up Harris' and Wilcox's cases at this time. They will continue to move forward in the lower courts."
The New York Times noted that "the justices are separately considering the Trump administration’s request to remove Lisa Cook as a Federal Reserve governor. The Supreme Court has yet to act, but has suggested that the central bank may be insulated from presidential meddling under the law."
However, as Law Dork's Chris Geidner highlighted on social media, the second question the justices will consider in the Slaughter case, regarding courts preventing removals from public office, "would have implications even for the 'Fed carveout' exception that the court suggested exists."
US Sen. Elizabeth Warren is calling for an investigation into the Department of Housing and Urban Development after several whistleblowers reported that Trump appointees have gutted enforcement of the decades-old law banning housing discrimination.
A New York Times report published Monday, quotes "half a dozen current and former employees of HUD’s fair housing office" who "said that the Trump political appointees had made it nearly impossible for them to do their jobs" enforcing the 1968 Fair Housing Act "which involve investigating and prosecuting landlords, real estate agents, lenders and others who discriminate based on race, religion, gender, family status or disability."
In a video posted to social media, Warren (D-Mass.) explained that “if you’re a mom protecting her kids from living with an abusive father or if you’re getting denied a mortgage because of the color of your skin, you have civil rights protection under US law. But the Trump administration has been systematically destroying these federal protections for renters and homeowners.”
According to the Times, when President Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency, formerly led by billionaire Elon Musk, launched its crusade to dismantle large parts of the federal government at the start of Trump's second term earlier this year, the Office of Fair Housing (OFH) had its staff cut by 65% through layoffs and reassignments, with the number of employees dropping from 31 to 11. Just six of the remaining staff now work on fair housing cases.
The number of discrimination charges pursued by the office has plummeted since Trump took office. In most years, it has 35. During Trump's second term, the office has pursued just four. Meanwhile, it's obtained just $200,000 total in legal settlements after previously obtaining anywhere from $4 million to $8 million per year.
Emails and memos obtained by the Times show a pattern of Trump appointees obstructing investigations:
In one email, a Trump appointee... described decades of housing discrimination cases as “artificial, arbitrary, and unnecessary.”
In another, a career supervisor in the department’s [OFH] objected to lawyers being reassigned to other offices; the supervisor was fired six days later for insubordination.
In a third, the office’s director of enforcement warned that Trump appointees were using gag orders and intimidation to block discrimination cases from moving forward. The urgent message was sent to a US senator, who is referring it to the department’s acting inspector general for investigation.
Several lawyers said they have been restricted from using past cases in enforcement and communicating with certain clients without approval from Trump's appointees.
A memo also reportedly went out to employees informing them that documents “contrary to administration policy” would be thrown out, and that “tenuous theories of discrimination” would no longer be pursued.
Among those supposedly "tenuous" cases have been ones involving appraisal bias—the practice of undervaluing homes owned by Black families—zoning restrictions blocking housing for Black and Latino families, and cases related to discrimination against people over gender or gender expression.
The administration has also abandoned cases related to the racist practice of "redlining"—the decades-old practice of denying mortgages to minorities and others in minority neighborhoods—with memos from Trump appointees calling the concept "legally unsound."
The changes follow a sweeping set of executive orders from Trump during his first week in office, targeting "diversity equity, and inclusion" (DEI) programs. Employees at the Office of Fair Housing told the Times that Trump appointees had begun to describe much of the department's work as "an offshoot of DEI."
A HUD spokesperson, Kasey Lovett, told the Times that it was "patently false" to suggest that the administration was trying to weaken the Fair Housing Act. She pointed out that HUD was still handling approximately 4,100 cases this year, on par with the previous year. As the Times notes, "Lovett did not address, however, how many of the cases had been investigated or had resulted in legal action."
According to the Times:
Hundreds of pending fair housing cases were frozen, and some settlements revoked, even when accusations of discrimination had been substantiated, according to the interviews and the internal communications.
In one instance, a large homeowner’s association in Texas was found to have banned the use of housing vouchers by Black residents. That case had been referred to the Justice Department, but the referral was abruptly withdrawn by the new Trump appointees.
Four current staff members have provided the trove of documents to Warren, who announced Monday that she'd sent a request to Brian Harrison, HUD’s acting inspector general, to open an investigation into its handling of discrimination cases.
Warren said that the documents "show the extent of the Trump administration's attack on civil rights and show how the administration appears to be ignoring the law."
In a press release from the Democrats on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, Warren, the ranking member, highlighted the particularly devastating impact staffing cuts have had on the enforcement of complaints under the Violence Against Women Act, which the Times says only two of the six lawyers remaining at HUD have experience with.
According to Warren, whistleblowers said the cuts were "placing survivors in greater danger of suffering additional trauma, physical violence, and even death."
Warren said that as a result of the hundreds of dropped cases, "Now people are asking, 'well, why would I file a case at all if nothing's going to happen?'"
Calling for an independent investigation, Warren said, "We wrote these laws to make this a fairer America, and now it's time to enforce those laws."