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For Immediate Release
January, 18 2016, 08:00am EDT
Contact:
Michelle Mascarenhas-Swan, (415) 359-7324,,media@ourpowercampaign.org,Angela Angel (510) 759-3177
Environmental Justice Leaders to Converge on All EPA Regional Headquarters Jan. 19, Challenge Obama's "Clean Power Plan"
WASHINGTON
Environmental justice leaders from frontline communities hardest-hit by climate change and pollution will converge on 10 Environmental Protection Agency regional office headquarters on Tuesday, January 19, 2016. [Day of Action]
While the political wrangling around the Clean Power Plan continues, frontline communities living with the daily reality of climate and economic disruption have quietly created a challenge to the Obama Administration's EPA Clean Power Plan: demanding that provisions to protect frontline, low-income, indigenous, and communities of color be strengthened. They will deliver this "Our Power Plan" concurrently to EPA Regional Administrators across 10 cities: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Dallas, Kansas City, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, and Seattle. [Our Power Plan]
This Day of Action falls deliberately between the national holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the final deadline for public comment to the CPP's Federal, or model, Implementation Plan. In the spirit of "nothing about us without us," the Our Power Plan will be used over the coming years as leverage to protect the integrity of the Clean Power Plan (CPP); and to make sure the CPP's State Implementation Plans adhere to principles of environmental justice.
"We're also pushing for something we call a Just Transition away from this extraction economy. We must keep all "dig-burn-dump" energy sources in the ground and out of our air and water. This country is completely capable of creating millions of meaningful jobs and putting our communities back to work building the infrastructure we really need to address the climate crisis. And we want to see working families hit hard by the recession, by pollution, and by climate disruption own and control the assets of this new clean energy infrastructure. This looks like clean community energy, and also zero waste; regional food systems; public transportation; efficient, affordable, and durable housing; and ecosystem restoration and stewardship." Michael Leon Guerrero, National Director, Climate Justice Alliance
Climate Justice Alliance (CJA) is a collaborative of over 35 community-based and movement support organizations uniting frontline communities to forge a scalable, and socio-economically just transition away from unsustainable energy towards local living economies to address the root causes of climate change.
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10,000+ Palestinians Buried Beneath Gaza Rubble in 'World's Largest Mass Grave'
"We call on the world to send international teams to recover the bodies of the missing," said the member of one civil society group. "We call on the world to provide the necessary equipment to recover the bodies."
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A civil society group in Gaza on Thursday appealed for international assistance to help recover the bodies of more than 10,000 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces who remain buried beneath the rubble of the flattened strip.
Referring to Gaza as "the world's largest mass grave," Aladdin Al-Aklouk, a spokesperson for the National Committee for Missing Persons in the Genocide Against Gaza, said that "these martyrs were buried under the rubble of their homes, which have turned into mass graves, without their final dignity being preserved or their bodies being retrieved."
"We express our shock and strong condemnation of the absence of an effective role by international organizations and humanitarian bodies, especially those concerned with the issue of missing persons, in light of the ongoing escalating humanitarian disaster," Al-Aklouk continued.
"The remnants are ticking time bombs and pose a danger to the population in the Gaza Strip. We need specialists alongside the teams working in the sector," he added. "We call on the world to send international teams to recover the bodies of the missing. We call on the world to provide the necessary equipment to recover the bodies."
"The remnants are ticking time bombs and pose a danger to the population in the Gaza Strip."
According to the Gaza Health Ministry—whose casualty figures have been deemed accurate by Israeli military officials and a likely undercount by multiple peer-reviewed studies—at least 68,875 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since October 7, 2023. Although a US-brokered ceasefire technically remains in effect, Gaza officials have documented over 200 Israeli violations in which more than 240 Palestinians have been killed and over 600 others injured.
More than 170,600 other Gazans have been wounded in a war which is the subject of an ongoing International Court of Justice genocide case and for which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder and forced starvation.
Palestinians are struggling to dig through more than 60 million tons of debris after over 80% of all structures in Gaza were destroyed or damaged by two years of Israeli bombardment. That's more than 200,000 buildings and other structures.
United Nations experts estimate it will take seven years for 100 trucks to remove all debris across Gaza, where more than three-quarters of roads are damaged and unexploded ordnance and Israeli booby traps beneath the debris continue to pose deadly threats to recovery workers and survivors in general.
Israel's destruction and denial of the heavy equipment needed for such a monumental recovery operation has left Palestinians reliant upon rudimentary tools such as shovels, pickaxes, wheelbarrows, rakes, hoes, and even their bare hands. They dig amid the stench of death and decomposition that lingers in the air.
The Abu Naser family lost more than 130 members in an October 29, 2024 strike on their five-story home in Beit Lahia, where over 200 people were sheltering when it was bombed. Mohammed Nabil Abu Naser, who survived the bombing, immediately started digging through the rubble, first in search of survivors and later, for bodies.
“It was all bodies and body parts," he explained. More than a year later, many of the victims have yet to be recovered.
"About 50 of them are still under the rubble to this day, a full year later," Abu Naser told The Guardian on Monday.
Often, Gazans survived initial bombings only to die slowly trapped beneath rubble. Two American volunteer surgeons, Drs. Mark Perlmutter and Feroze Sidhwa, last year described how wounded survivors suffered “unimaginably cruel deaths from dehydration and sepsis while trapped alone in a pitch-black tomb that alternates as an oven during the day and a freezer at night."
“One shudders to think how many children have died this way in Gaza," they added.
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'Major Victory': Federal Judge Orders Trump to Fully Fund November SNAP Benefits
"The court could not be more clear—the Trump-Vance administration must stop playing politics with people's lives by delaying SNAP payments they are obligated to issue," one lawyer said.
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A federal judge on Thursday called out President Donald Trump's recent social media post about the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and ordered the administration to release full funding for 42 million Americans' SNAP benefits by Friday.
Judge John McConnell, appointed to the District of Rhode Island by former President Barack Obama, previously gave the US Department of Agriculture a choice between making a partial payment by emptying a contingency fund or fully covering food stamps with that funding plus money from other sources. The USDA opted for the former, and warned that it could take weeks to get reduced SNAP benefits to recipients, millions of whom would lose the monthly food aid altogether.
Then, on Tuesday, Trump suggested that the administration would not disperse SNAP benefits until congressional Democrats voted to end what has become the longest government shutdown in US history. Although White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt later claimed that "the administration is fully complying with the court order" and "the president is referring to future SNAP payments."
That same day, lawyers for the municipalities, nonprofits, and labor groups behind the lawsuit that led to McConnell's initial ruling—one of two SNAP cases currently in the federal court system—filed an emergency request seeking further relief.
On Thursday, McConnell concluded that the USDA's plan ran afoul of his previous directive and issued the new oral ruling. He reportedly said: "Last weekend, SNAP benefits lapsed for the first time in our nation's history. This is a problem that could have and should have been avoided."
"The defendants failed to consider the practical consequences associated with this decision to only partially fund SNAP," the judge declared. "They knew that there would be a long delay in paying partial SNAP payments and failed to consider the harms individuals who rely on those benefits would suffer."
Despite the White House's attempted clarification, McConnell also said that Trump's post "stated his intent to defy the court order."
While the Associated Press reported that the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the order, it was celebrated by Democracy Forward president and CEO Skye Perryman, whose group is representing the plaintiffs with the Lawyers' Committee for Rhode Island. She said in a statement that "today is a major victory for 42 million people in America."
"The court could not be more clear—the Trump-Vance administration must stop playing politics with people's lives by delaying SNAP payments they are obligated to issue," Perryman continued. "This immoral and unlawful decision by the administration has shamefully delayed SNAP payments, taking food off the table of hungry families."
"We shouldn't have to force the president to care for his citizens, but we will do whatever is necessary to protect people and communities," she added. "We are honored to represent our brave clients and to have secured this major victory for those who deserve better than what this administration has done to them."
US House Agriculture Committee Ranking Member Angie Craig (D-Minn.) also welcomed the development, while ripping Trump and his secretary of agriculture, Brooke Rollins. The congresswoman stressed: "As we've said from the beginning, the Trump administration has the money and the power to fully fund SNAP in November. They chose to ignore the harm caused by their actions and cut benefits instead."
"President Trump and USDA need to do the right thing and comply with the court ruling rather than further delay food assistance from reaching 42 million Americans in need," she argued. "It is truly shocking and demoralizing just how far President Trump and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins have gone to take food out of the mouths of American children, seniors, working parents, veterans, and people with disabilities."
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Supreme Court Allows Trump to Impose Anti-Trans Passport Policy
“This decision will cause immediate, widespread, and irreparable harm to all those who are being denied accurate identity documents,” said a lawyer for the ACLU.
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The US Supreme Court issued an emergency order Thursday upholding President Donald Trump's discriminatory policy barring transgender and nonbinary Americans from changing the gender listed on their passports from the gender assigned to them at birth.
Reversing a lower court decision blocking the policy in June, the six conservative justices assessed in an unsigned majority opinion that by requiring passports to reflect a person's sex at birth, the State Department "is merely attesting to a historical fact without subjecting anyone to differential treatment."
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote the dissent, which was joined by the two other liberals, Justices Elena Kagan and Sonya Sotomayor. Lamenting the Trump administration's "routine" reliance on the court to issue emergency rulings, Brown wrote that she would have denied the request, because “the documented real-world harms to these plaintiffs obviously outweigh the government’s unexplained (and inexplicable) interest in immediate implementation of the passport policy.”
Last month, a group of transgender and nonbinary plaintiffs, represented by the ACLU, requested that the court reject the Trump administration's petition for a stay on the lower court's ruling blocking the policy. That ruling had come after transgender and nonbinary plaintiffs testified that they were afraid to submit passport applications to the government as a result of the policy.
"Forcing transgender people to carry passports that out them against their will increases the risk that they will face harassment and violence and adds to the considerable barriers they already face in securing freedom, safety, and acceptance," said Jon Davidson, senior counsel for the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project.
The attorneys argued last month before the Supreme Court that the policy "irrationally undermines the very purpose of passports—identifying a US citizen when they travel” and also is “motivated by anti-transgender animus.”
That animus has been on display since Trump's first day in office this term, when he signed an executive order declaring that his administration would only recognize “two sexes, male and female," based on one's “biological classification” at birth.
The passport policy has already led to confusion, which the actress Hunter Schafer—a transgender woman—put on display in February, when she was issued a passport that identified her as male in conflict with both her appearance and other legal documents like her driver's license.
“This decision will cause immediate, widespread, and irreparable harm to all those who are being denied accurate identity documents,” said Jessie Rossman, legal director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, following the Supreme Court's ruling Thursday. “The Trump administration's policy is an unlawful attempt to dehumanize, humiliate, and endanger transgender, nonbinary, and intersex Americans, and we will continue to seek its ultimate reversal in the courts.”
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