July, 27 2022, 02:01pm EDT
Statement of Advocates Fairplay, American Academy of Pediatrics, Center for Digital Democracy, and Eating Disorders Coalition on the Advancement of the Kids Online Safety Act and the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act
Today, the Senate Commerce Committee voted to advance the Kids Online Safety Act and the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act to a full floor vote.
Please see below for statements from representatives of organizations supporting these bills.
WASHINGTON
Today, the Senate Commerce Committee voted to advance the Kids Online Safety Act and the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act to a full floor vote.
Please see below for statements from representatives of organizations supporting these bills.
"This is an important step toward creating a safer and less exploitative internet for children and teens. Taken together, KOSA and COPPA will provide critical privacy protections for children and teens, limit surveillance advertising, and require platforms to prioritize young people's best interests. We urge Congress to pass these bills into law - for far too long, Big Tech has been allowed to regulate itself at great expense to the health and wellbeing of young Americans." - Josh Golin, executive director, Fairplay
"Pediatricians have long understood both the harms and opportunities of digital media on children and teens' health and development. We need protections and policies in place to keep children safe online and create a healthy digital ecosystem that better supports their needs. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) applauds today's advancement of the Kids Online Safety Act and the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act, two bills that together make meaningful strides toward this goal. The Academy thanks Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.) for their leadership on these important bills, and we call on the Senate to quickly take up and pass the legislation without delay." - Moira Szilagyi, MD, PhD, FAAP, President, American Academy of Pediatrics
"Senators from both sides of the aisle stood up today for America's children by supporting two historic bills that protect their privacy, safety and health. Now that the Senate Commerce Committee has passed the bipartisan "Children and Teens Online Protection Act" and the "Kids Online Safety Act" it is time for the full Senate to act. Without these much needed laws, kids will continue to be surveilled and manipulated by the largest social media and other digital platforms." - Jeff Chester, executive director, Center for Digital Democracy
"We are encouraged by the overwhelming show of support from the committee members for this vital legislation. The unanimous vote sends a strong signal to parents, kids and community advocates that their voices have been heard. We are hopeful that lawmakers are ready to do what's needed to protect young people from the unacceptable risks they face online every day in this country, but we know there is a long road ahead and we will keep fighting for common-sense oversight and protections on social media till the job is done." - S. Bryn Austin, ScD, Past President, Eating Disorders Coalition, and Director, Strategic Training Initiative for the Prevention of Eating Disorders
Fairplay, formerly known as Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, educates the public about commercialism's impact on kids' wellbeing and advocates for the end of child-targeted marketing. Fairplay organizes parents to hold corporations accountable for their marketing practices, advocates for policies to protect kids, and works with parents and professionals to reduce children's screen time.
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May Day Rallies Nationwide to Target Trump's Attack on Workers, Rule of Law, and Common Good
"We are demanding a country that puts our families over their fortunes—public schools over private profits, healthcare over hedge funds, prosperity over free market politics," organizers said.
Apr 30, 2025
Organizers expect tens of thousands of Americans to turn out on Thursday for rallies aimed at resisting U.S. President Donald Trump and "his billionaire profiteers" as part of a May Day national day of action, on the heels of mass mobilizations for nationwide "Hands Off!" protests just weeks ago.
"This May Day we are standing united. We are demanding a country that puts our families over their fortunes—public schools over private profits, healthcare over hedge funds, prosperity over free market politics," according to organizing materials from a national coalition of groups. "Stop the billionaire takeover. We are the many. They are the few."
May Day, also known as International Workers' Day, comes as the American people increasingly see and feel the effects of the Trump administration's various policies—from his crackdown on immigration, to targeting of foreign born students who exercise pro-Palestine speech, to the administration's dismissal of tens of thousands of federal employees, to sweeping tariffs.
On Thursday, one of more than 1,100 May Day rallies will be held at Philadelphia City Hall, where Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will join the city's AFL-CIO chapter under the banner, "For the Workers, Not the Billionaires."
Rallies are planned in New York, the District of Columbia, Chicago, and Atlanta, among other cities.
Nearly 200 groups are listed as coalition partners supporting the national May Day actions. They include unions, climate groups, grassroots organizations, and more. Among them is "50501"—a movement that began on Reddit and brought together organizers and regular Americans for a rally to resist the Trump administration back in February. Local and state-level 50501 groups are also listed as partners for the May Day actions.
In addition to mobilization through 50501, protests on Thursday will follow "Hands Off!" actions on April 5, when an estimated one million people turned out nationwide, according to Democracy Now!
50501 spearheaded yet another round of rallies on April 19.
The events are taking place more than two months into Sanders' Fighting Oligarchy tour, during which he and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) have drawn crowds of thousands in Republican districts in Nebraska, Iowa, Idaho, and other states.
In addition to the May Day national day of action, the group Free Speech for People, which has launched a campaign to drum up support for impeachment proceedings against Trump, will also hold a day of action on Thursday.
Free Speech for People has partnered with Citizens' Impeachment and the two groups will devote tomorrow to "generating calls and emails to Congress members, urging them to impeach Trump for his grave abuses of power."
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UNRWA Chief Accuses Israel of Torturing Staff as US Backs Ban on Agency at World Court
Nearly 300 UNRWA workers have been killed in Israeli attacks since October 2023, and dozens of other agency staffers have alleged torture during Israel Defense Forces detention.
Apr 30, 2025
As the International Court of Justice this week weighs an Israeli ban on a United Nations agency that provides lifesaving aid in Gaza, the program's leader called out attacks on its workers while the United States defended Israel—the recipient of billions of dollars in U.S. military assistance.
The ICJ is holding a week of hearings in The Hague, Netherlands following the U.N. General Assembly's December passage of a Norwegian-led resolution asking the tribunal, which is also known as the World Court, for an advisory opinion on Israel's legal obligation to "ensure and facilitate the unhindered provision of urgently needed supplies essential to the survival of the Palestinian civilian population."
Among the 38 nations and three regional blocs scheduled to address the 15 ICJ judges, only the United States and Hungary have so far defended Israel, whose forces have killed nearly 300 United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) workers during their nearly 19-month annihilation of Gaza.
"An occupational power retains a margin of appreciation concerning which relief schemes to permit," U.S. State Department legal adviser Joshua Simmons argued before the court Wednesday, referring to Israel's 58-year occupation of Palestine, which the ICJ ruled an illegal form of apartheid in a June 2024 advisory opinion.
"Even if an organization offering relief is an impartial humanitarian organization, and even if it is a major actor, occupation law does not compel an occupational power to allow and facilitate that specific actor's relief operations," Simmons continued, noting "serious concerns about UNRWA's impartiality, including information that Hamas has used UNRWA facilities and that UNRWA staff participated in the October 7th terrorist attack against Israel" in 2023.
"Given these concerns, it is clear that Israel has no obligation to permit UNRWA specifically to provide humanitarian assistance," Simmons added. "UNRWA is not the only option for providing humanitarian assistance in Gaza."
In what UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini described at the time as an act of "reverse due process," the agency fired nine employees in February 2024 following Israeli allegations that they were involved in the Hamas-led attack on Israel in which more than 1,100 Israelis were killed and 251 Israeli and foreign survivors were kidnapped.
Lazzarini admitted to terminating the staffers without due process or an adequate investigation of Israel's claims. A subsequent probe by the U.N. Office of Oversight Services "was not able to independently authenticate information used by Israel to support the allegations."
On Tuesday, Lazzarini reminded the world that "over 50 UNRWA staff—among them teachers, doctors, social workers—have been detained and abused" by Israeli forces since October 2023.
"They have been treated in the most shocking and inhumane way," he continued. "They reported being beaten up and used as human shields. They were subjected to sleep deprivation, humiliation, threats of harm to them and their families, and attacks by dogs. Many were subjected to forced confessions."
Those forced confessions spurred numerous nations including the United States to cut off funding to UNRWA. Almost all of the countries have since restored funding as Israel's claims have been debunked or questioned over a lack of evidence.
The U.S.—which has not restored funding for UNRWA—earlier this week abandoned its long-standing position that the body is immune from lawsuits, opening the door for cases by October 7 survivors and victims' relatives stemming from dubious claims of agency involvement in the attack.
In addition to accusing Israeli troops of torturing its staffers, UNRWA has also documented tortures allegedly suffered by Palestinians imprisoned by Israel, including interrupted drowning—also known as waterboarding—being shot in the knees with nail guns, sexual abuse of both men and women, and being sodomized with electric batons. The Israel Defense Forces is investigating dozens of in-custody deaths, many of them at the notorious Sde Teiman base in the Negev Desert.
While Israel's physical assault on Gaza has killed hundreds of UNRWA workers, its diplomatic war on the U.N. has seen the agency banned from operating in Palestine and U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres declared "persona non grata" in Israel after he included Israel on his 2024 "list of shame" of countries and armed groups that kill and injure children during wartime.
The U.S.-backed 572-day war waged by the far-right government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who is a fugitive from the International Criminal Court—has left more than 184,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing in Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Nearly all of the embattled enclave's more than 2 million people have been forcibly displaced and Israel's "complete siege" of the coastal strip has fueled widespread starvation and illness.
This week's ICJ hearing comes amid the tribunal's ongoing genocide case against Israel, which was brought by South Africa and is backed by dozens of nations either individually or via regional blocs. The court has issued three provisional orders in the case, all of which Israel has been accused of flouting.
Responding to the U.S. intervention in this week's ICJ hearings, Palestinian Ambassador to the Netherlands Ammar Hijazi toldMiddle East Eye that "everybody knows that Israel is using humanitarian aid as a weapon of war and is starving the population in Gaza because of that."
U.N. agencies and international humanitarian groups have warned in recent days of the imminent risk of renewed famine in Gaza as food stocks run out.
“ #Gaza: children are starving. The Government of Israel continues to block the entry of food and other basics. A manmade and politically motivated starvation. Nearly 2 months of siege. Calls to bring in supplies are going unheeded.” — UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini
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— UNRWA ( @unrwa.org) April 27, 2025 at 1:39 AM
"The U.S. intervention is very narrow in its scope, when it highlights the rights of an occupying power but ignores the so many layers of duties of that occupying power that Israel is in violation of," Hijazi added.
Among the countries defending UNRWA during Wednesday's ICJ session were Indonesia and Russia, which is currently waging a war against Ukraine. Indonesian Foreign Minister Sugiono affirmed "the Palestinian people's right to self-determination," while Maksim Musikhin, legal director of Russia's Foreign Ministry, argued that "international law should be respected by Israel" and that UNRWA deserves a Nobel Peace Prize.
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How Louisiana Advocates Are Continuing to Fight the Trump-Backed LNG Boom
"We always have had to take matters into our own hands, and we have protected ourselves against enormous companies," one local campaigner said.
Apr 30, 2025
Louisiana advocates and their allies are not giving up in their fight to stop the liquefied natural gas buildout that threatens the health and well-being of Gulf Coast communities—not to mention the stability of the global climate—even as the Trump administration doubles down on its commitment to expanding LNG infrastructure.
In a briefing on Tuesday, community members, local advocates, and international campaigners shared how they would continue to push back against Venture Global, an LNG company that has amassed a record of ecosystem destruction and air pollution violations at its currently operating Calcasieu Pass export terminal in Cameron Parish, Louisiana. Despite this, the Trump administration's Department of Energy granted conditional approval for the company’s nearby Calcasieu Pass 2 (CP2), undoing the pause that the outgoing Biden administration had placed on it and other LNG approvals as it considered the public interest ramifications of LNG exports.
Yet Gulf Coast campaigners, who are used to dealing with a lax regulatory environment at the state level, were not defeated.
"Anybody who reports here in Louisiana regularly understands that we've never been protected by our regulatory environment. Never," Anne Rolfes, who directs the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, told reporters. "And so we always have had to take matters into our own hands, and we have protected ourselves against enormous companies."
Misadventure Global
One key strategy that the Louisiana Bucket Brigade and others have used to get around the regulatory rubber stamping of bad actors is to raise public awareness of how the companies turning coastal Louisiana into a sacrifice zone really operate.
Case in point is Venture Global. Rolfe and John Allaire—a 40-year veteran of the oil and gas industry who lives next door to the Calcasieu Pass terminal—laid out its short but extensive record of environmental violations and unethical business practices.
Even before the original Calcasieu Pass began exporting, in January 2022, it had to clear a space for tankers to access the facility.
"It's understood that this is a volatile fuel to lock into, that you don't want to rely on a fuel that Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump control."
"They pumped hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of black viscous sludge from their marine berth out into the front of the Gulf of Mexico," Allaire said. "And that was the first indication of what was to come with Venture Global."
Since it began operating, the company has added air, noise, and light pollution to the water pollution that has devastated local fisheries.
Allaire has taken hundreds of videos and photos of flaring incidents.
"The light pollution is unbelievable," he said. "At night, I can literally read a book when the flares are going, and I'm over a mile away from their flare stacks."
Allaire's observations are backed up by the official record. In June 2023, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality sent Venture Global a compliance order detailing over 2,000 air permit violations from its first 10 months of operation, Allaire said. The company has yet to resolve the complaint, and the state sent them a warning letter in March covering their 2024 and 2025 rule-breaking.
The company also has a history of failing to report its flares and other excess emissions to the Department of Environmental Quality as required by the Clean Air Act.
If they reported and then investigated their violations, "that would enable them to really understand what's happening at their facility so that they could prevent future problems," Rolfe said. "They absolutely aren't doing that."
In March, the Louisiana Bucket Brigade and the Habitat Recovery Project notified Venture Global of intent to sue the company over Clean Air Act violations at its Calcasieu Pass facility.
But the environmental groups aren't the only ones suing Venture Global. The company stretched its commissioning phase—during which it is considered still in the process of establishing itself and can sell its products to the highest bidder rather than honoring its contracts—for three years and three months, beginning normal operations just this April.
"This is absolutely off from the industry norm," Rolfe said.
Now, other major fossil fuel companies, including Shell and BP, are pursuing arbitration claims against Venture Global for breach of contract. Investors have joined a class-action lawsuit against it, saying it violated federal securities law by misrepresenting its prospects.
Yet Venture Global has huge ambitions for the region. In addition to Calcasieu Pass and CP2, it wants to build three other export terminals in coastal Louisiana and more than triple its capacity from 30 million tons per annum (MTPA) of liquid gas—already over a quarter of the 88 MTPA exported by the U.S. exports in 2024—to 104 MTPA.
"As a review, they're flouting the Clean Air Act. They've manipulated the commissioning phase. They're being sued by everybody they've done business with. Is this a company that our country and our state should put such faith in?" Rolfe asked.
She answered her own question: "Of course, our answer is no."
Stall Tactics
Another strategy the Louisiana Bucket Brigade and their allies seek to employ is to delay Venture Global's ambitions long enough for the economic reality of the LNG boom to catch up with it.
In addition to the approval of CP2, Australian company Woodside announced on Monday that it had approved a Louisiana LNG project worth $17.5 billion. Yet the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis concluded in April that the massive growth in LNG capacity would exceed dwindling demand within two years.
"It's understood that this is a volatile fuel to lock into, that you don't want to rely on a fuel that Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump control. So people are trying to get off of gas," Rolfe said.
"The economics are going to catch up with them. I just want it to be before they destroy the coast of Louisiana."
This means that LNG companies like Woodside and Venture Global are behaving "like a kid in a candy store," Rolfe continued. "That kid, unchecked, will eat so much, they'll throw up. I think the same is true with this industry. Unchecked, it will do itself harm."
The key is therefore to stall the buildout long enough that many projects become infeasible. This tactic has worked for frontline communities during the first Trump administration, Rolfe said. Through a combination of public pressure, records requests, and legal action, community advocates were able to delay the construction of a plastic plant proposed by the Chinese company Wanhua Chemical U.S. Operation, LLC, which would have released the World War 1-era nerve gas phosgene into the already pollution-burdened St. James Parish.
The economic outlook for the plant had always been "dubious" Rolfe said, and eventually the company gave up on trying to build it.
"They could have gotten approval and gotten on their way within a month. But our suit and then our constant presence and making them table things and so forth, drew it out and let the economics catch up with them," Rolfe said.
Rolfe added that the gas industry has similarly gotten ahead of itself.
"They're greedy, right? They want to grab all the candy they can, and the economics are going to catch up with them. I just want it to be before they destroy the coast of Louisiana."
Very Risk Business
Another strategy to slow down the building of new LNG facilities like CP2 is to target the one thing, in addition to permits and funds, that they can't move forward without: insurance.
Insurance is one sector in which the economic impact of the climate crisis is already being felt, as Ethan Nuss, senior energy finance campaigner at Rainforest Action Network, explained.
For example, major insurer Chubb earns $1.5 billion a year in premiums from the fossil fuel industry, which was already canceled out early this year with the $1.5 billion in pre-tax losses they took from the Los Angeles wildfires. On a local level, some insurers have pulled out of Louisiana all together to avoid insuring against climate-fueled extreme weather events.
"Once they are really educated about the permit violations and the legal risks and the true risk landscape that they're facing by taking on this client, many of them are very concerned."
"This is not a time to build something like CP2 that would deepen the climate crisis," Nuss said.
Because insurers are on the books for both fossil fuel projects and the damage for climate disasters, and because many of them have climate and human rights policies, they are vulnerable to growing pressure from the climate movement to drop the oil and gas clients costing them so much money.
RAN in February published the names of the major insurers for Venture Global's Calcasieu Pass, which it obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request. These included Chubb subsidiary ACE American Insurance Company, AIG subsidiary National Union Fire Insurance Co., Allianz, Swiss Re, AXA, and Tokio Marine subsidiary Houston Casualty Company.
"That has kicked off a global effort to reach out to those insurers and begin to educate them about what is happening in Southwest Louisiana, the impacts from Calcasieu Pass, and what associated risks they're facing," Nuss said.
As a result of these efforts, Swiss Re has agreed to meet with the fishing community of Southwest Louisiana, to talk about the "devastating impacts on their livelihoods" from Calcasieu Pass' operations.
"Often with these global financial institutions, they aren't fully aware of what's really happening on the ground. That client is maybe just another line on the spreadsheet. But once they really start hearing the stories, once they are really educated about the permit violations and the legal risks and the true risk landscape that they're facing by taking on this client, many of them are very concerned," Nuss said.
Nuss hopes that, once fully informed, insurers would decide any project of Venture Global's is a "very risky business that they don't want to be involved in."
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