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On Sept. 21, at 11:08 p.m., Martina Correia leaned forward in her wheelchair on the grounds of the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson, Ga. Though weak from battling illness, she called out to Laura Moye, Amnesty USA's death penalty abolition campaign director.
On Sept. 21, at 11:08 p.m., Martina Correia leaned forward in her wheelchair on the grounds of the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson, Ga. Though weak from battling illness, she called out to Laura Moye, Amnesty USA's death penalty abolition campaign director.
"Laura, come here. I want you to meet this young woman. She drove all the way from San Francisco to be here." Correia asked Moye to be sure to plug the young woman into the abolition work taking place in California.
Neither Correia nor Moye had any way to know that at the exact moment Correia was recruiting the young activist into the movement, her brother, Troy Davis, had just succumbed to death by lethal injection.
The young woman was one of hundreds of thousands of people recruited, directly or indirectly, by Correia to the fight against her brother's death sentence. Nearly a million wrote letters and signed petitions on behalf of Davis. In the weeks after Georgia set his execution date, thousands took to the streets and marched in Atlanta and thousands more marched around the world. On Sept. 21, over 600 made the journey to Jackson to protest the execution and stand in solidarity with Troy Davis's family. It was an uproar, utterly unprecedented.
Almost exactly 20 years earlier, on the same prison grounds in Jackson, fewer than a dozen people were on hand for the execution of Warren McCleskey, a black man sentenced to death for killing a white police officer. There was no physical evidence that McCleskey was the shooter, leaving the state's main evidence a man who testified McCleskey had confessed to him. For years, the state hid the fact that the witness was a police informant, and that the police had illegally created the testimony by placing the informant in McCleskey's jail cell.
McCleskey the man is little remembered, but one of his appeals that reached the Supreme Court changed legal history. In McCleskey v. Kemp, the U.S. Supreme Court considered statistical evidence that Georgia's death penalty is carried out in a racially discriminatory manner. The evidence was undisputed, but the Court understood that if a death sentence could be overturned by statistics showing racial disparities, then no part of the criminal justice system would be safe from legal challenge. Racial disparities far more yawning than those surrounding the death penalty exist in arrests, detention and sentencing.
So the Supreme Court created an impossible test: McCleskey must show the racial discrimination was intentional. That is, McCleskey could only prove racial discrimination if the district attorney or trial judge stepped forward and proclaimed that they had acted on the basis of race.
With McCleskey, the Supreme Court decided it would rather tolerate a racist criminal justice system than open the floodgates to legal challenges about the system's racial disparities.
Troy Davis's case, fought as hard in the courts as McCleskey's, exposed another morally questionable judicial preference--for finality over truth. No matter how flawed the process that produces a conviction, the burden shifts to the convicted to prove claims of innocence. It is a standard designed to help the system bury its mistakes--in Troy's case, quite literally so. The judiciary would rather get it done than get it right.
For the last 30 years, the battle over the death penalty has been contained inside courtrooms and on the pages of legal briefs. The judicial system, asked to judge the foundations of its own house, papered over the problems of racial bias and doubt.
But then something extraordinary happened, as support for Troy Davis grew. These fundamental problems of doubt and racial bias moved outside the confines of the judiciary and shifted--quite abruptly--from being legal questions to personal ones.
Correia is most responsible for making things personal. People were drawn to Troy Davis's case because she insisted that people connect with her brother not as a convict or a death row inmate, but as a person. The connection between Troy and his supporters was at times literally made through his sister. In 2009, Correia patched Troy through from prison to a conference call with activists from Amnesty International.
"Everything is coming to a head and people are starting to wake up more and more," Davis said on the call. "This is just the beginning of something ... we're going to win this fight, we're going to continue to open these eyes, we're going to continue to open these prison doors, we're going to continue to hold accountable all those that are in charge of these unjust systems."
As activists sought out who to hold accountable, it became clear that what Justice John Paul Stevens famously called the "machinery of death" is in fact made up of individual human beings, each with their own moral compass, and so each one morally accountable.
There is Larry Chisolm, the Chatham County district attorney, who put in the request for a death warrant. There is the Superior Court judge named Penny Freesmann who signed it. The man who set the actual date and time of execution is Brian Owens, commissioner of the Georgia Department of Corrections. Five human beings comprise the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Parole, three of whom voted to deny Davis clemency. A group of correctional officers walked Troy to the execution chamber. Prison nurses prepared the IV lines. Carlo Musso, a doctor, collected $18,000 for overseeing the execution. Warden Carl Humphrey ordered over 125 CERT officers to dress out in full riot gear and stand guard so that those inside the prison could carry out the killing.
But the most significant shift into the personal can be understood through the blue Amnesty USA t-shirts that Troy supporters have been wearing for years, with white letters spelling, "I Am Troy Davis."
Initially, the t-shirts were a sign of solidarity with the plight of a possibly innocent man on death row. But many are now wearing them with a sense of anger and identification that is far wider and deeper than the issue of Davis's innocence. Davis's execution, the events leading up to it and the feelings growing out of it have mobilized those who have been targeted and under attack by our criminal justice apparatus, especially (but not only) young black men, particularly in the South, and their mothers, sisters, parents and grandparents. What was once primarily a badge of solidarity is now, for many, a declaration of identity.
These young black and brown men and women are taking to heart James Baldwin's plea in "An Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis" when she was awaiting trial: "we must fight for your life as though it were our own--which it is--and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night."
Angela Davis was acquitted, and years later in an essay advocating the abolition of not only the death penalty but the entire prison industrial complex, wrote that "we are fighting the same battles over and over again, but in doing so in community, we are ever enlarging, ever expanding our notion of freedom."
It is a sentiment echoed by Troy Davis, who repeatedly stressed that "we need to continue to stand together and educate each other and don't give up the fight."
The fight is not metaphorical. There are people determined to end capital punishment, and there are people determined to use it. The latest battle took place Sept. 21, 2011, in Jackson, Ga. Inside, hundreds of people carried out their parts in the script for killing Troy Davis, while outside, hundreds more--including four busloads of students from Armstrong, Savannah State, Morehouse, Spelman and Atlanta University--stood, prayed, and raged in opposition.
One of the people in the crowd at Jackson that night was Cara McCleskey, Warren McCleskey's now adult daughter. Twenty legal appeals and a small army of lawyers did not save her father's life. The million people who rallied behind Troy did not save his. The battles against the death penalty and against the racism of our criminal justice system will, as Angela Davis predicted, continue to be fought over and over again.
But something profound has shifted. Millions have had their eyes opened due to Troy Davis. For others, he made visible what they already knew, through personal experience, about the racism embedded in the criminal justice system. Thousands of young, African American men and women in the South are declaring "I am Troy Davis" as if their lives depend on it. We are standing together in a moment of expansion, which, if seized with the love and fury that surrounded the Davis family in Jackson last week, could bring us all closer to free.
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On Sept. 21, at 11:08 p.m., Martina Correia leaned forward in her wheelchair on the grounds of the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson, Ga. Though weak from battling illness, she called out to Laura Moye, Amnesty USA's death penalty abolition campaign director.
"Laura, come here. I want you to meet this young woman. She drove all the way from San Francisco to be here." Correia asked Moye to be sure to plug the young woman into the abolition work taking place in California.
Neither Correia nor Moye had any way to know that at the exact moment Correia was recruiting the young activist into the movement, her brother, Troy Davis, had just succumbed to death by lethal injection.
The young woman was one of hundreds of thousands of people recruited, directly or indirectly, by Correia to the fight against her brother's death sentence. Nearly a million wrote letters and signed petitions on behalf of Davis. In the weeks after Georgia set his execution date, thousands took to the streets and marched in Atlanta and thousands more marched around the world. On Sept. 21, over 600 made the journey to Jackson to protest the execution and stand in solidarity with Troy Davis's family. It was an uproar, utterly unprecedented.
Almost exactly 20 years earlier, on the same prison grounds in Jackson, fewer than a dozen people were on hand for the execution of Warren McCleskey, a black man sentenced to death for killing a white police officer. There was no physical evidence that McCleskey was the shooter, leaving the state's main evidence a man who testified McCleskey had confessed to him. For years, the state hid the fact that the witness was a police informant, and that the police had illegally created the testimony by placing the informant in McCleskey's jail cell.
McCleskey the man is little remembered, but one of his appeals that reached the Supreme Court changed legal history. In McCleskey v. Kemp, the U.S. Supreme Court considered statistical evidence that Georgia's death penalty is carried out in a racially discriminatory manner. The evidence was undisputed, but the Court understood that if a death sentence could be overturned by statistics showing racial disparities, then no part of the criminal justice system would be safe from legal challenge. Racial disparities far more yawning than those surrounding the death penalty exist in arrests, detention and sentencing.
So the Supreme Court created an impossible test: McCleskey must show the racial discrimination was intentional. That is, McCleskey could only prove racial discrimination if the district attorney or trial judge stepped forward and proclaimed that they had acted on the basis of race.
With McCleskey, the Supreme Court decided it would rather tolerate a racist criminal justice system than open the floodgates to legal challenges about the system's racial disparities.
Troy Davis's case, fought as hard in the courts as McCleskey's, exposed another morally questionable judicial preference--for finality over truth. No matter how flawed the process that produces a conviction, the burden shifts to the convicted to prove claims of innocence. It is a standard designed to help the system bury its mistakes--in Troy's case, quite literally so. The judiciary would rather get it done than get it right.
For the last 30 years, the battle over the death penalty has been contained inside courtrooms and on the pages of legal briefs. The judicial system, asked to judge the foundations of its own house, papered over the problems of racial bias and doubt.
But then something extraordinary happened, as support for Troy Davis grew. These fundamental problems of doubt and racial bias moved outside the confines of the judiciary and shifted--quite abruptly--from being legal questions to personal ones.
Correia is most responsible for making things personal. People were drawn to Troy Davis's case because she insisted that people connect with her brother not as a convict or a death row inmate, but as a person. The connection between Troy and his supporters was at times literally made through his sister. In 2009, Correia patched Troy through from prison to a conference call with activists from Amnesty International.
"Everything is coming to a head and people are starting to wake up more and more," Davis said on the call. "This is just the beginning of something ... we're going to win this fight, we're going to continue to open these eyes, we're going to continue to open these prison doors, we're going to continue to hold accountable all those that are in charge of these unjust systems."
As activists sought out who to hold accountable, it became clear that what Justice John Paul Stevens famously called the "machinery of death" is in fact made up of individual human beings, each with their own moral compass, and so each one morally accountable.
There is Larry Chisolm, the Chatham County district attorney, who put in the request for a death warrant. There is the Superior Court judge named Penny Freesmann who signed it. The man who set the actual date and time of execution is Brian Owens, commissioner of the Georgia Department of Corrections. Five human beings comprise the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Parole, three of whom voted to deny Davis clemency. A group of correctional officers walked Troy to the execution chamber. Prison nurses prepared the IV lines. Carlo Musso, a doctor, collected $18,000 for overseeing the execution. Warden Carl Humphrey ordered over 125 CERT officers to dress out in full riot gear and stand guard so that those inside the prison could carry out the killing.
But the most significant shift into the personal can be understood through the blue Amnesty USA t-shirts that Troy supporters have been wearing for years, with white letters spelling, "I Am Troy Davis."
Initially, the t-shirts were a sign of solidarity with the plight of a possibly innocent man on death row. But many are now wearing them with a sense of anger and identification that is far wider and deeper than the issue of Davis's innocence. Davis's execution, the events leading up to it and the feelings growing out of it have mobilized those who have been targeted and under attack by our criminal justice apparatus, especially (but not only) young black men, particularly in the South, and their mothers, sisters, parents and grandparents. What was once primarily a badge of solidarity is now, for many, a declaration of identity.
These young black and brown men and women are taking to heart James Baldwin's plea in "An Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis" when she was awaiting trial: "we must fight for your life as though it were our own--which it is--and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night."
Angela Davis was acquitted, and years later in an essay advocating the abolition of not only the death penalty but the entire prison industrial complex, wrote that "we are fighting the same battles over and over again, but in doing so in community, we are ever enlarging, ever expanding our notion of freedom."
It is a sentiment echoed by Troy Davis, who repeatedly stressed that "we need to continue to stand together and educate each other and don't give up the fight."
The fight is not metaphorical. There are people determined to end capital punishment, and there are people determined to use it. The latest battle took place Sept. 21, 2011, in Jackson, Ga. Inside, hundreds of people carried out their parts in the script for killing Troy Davis, while outside, hundreds more--including four busloads of students from Armstrong, Savannah State, Morehouse, Spelman and Atlanta University--stood, prayed, and raged in opposition.
One of the people in the crowd at Jackson that night was Cara McCleskey, Warren McCleskey's now adult daughter. Twenty legal appeals and a small army of lawyers did not save her father's life. The million people who rallied behind Troy did not save his. The battles against the death penalty and against the racism of our criminal justice system will, as Angela Davis predicted, continue to be fought over and over again.
But something profound has shifted. Millions have had their eyes opened due to Troy Davis. For others, he made visible what they already knew, through personal experience, about the racism embedded in the criminal justice system. Thousands of young, African American men and women in the South are declaring "I am Troy Davis" as if their lives depend on it. We are standing together in a moment of expansion, which, if seized with the love and fury that surrounded the Davis family in Jackson last week, could bring us all closer to free.
On Sept. 21, at 11:08 p.m., Martina Correia leaned forward in her wheelchair on the grounds of the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson, Ga. Though weak from battling illness, she called out to Laura Moye, Amnesty USA's death penalty abolition campaign director.
"Laura, come here. I want you to meet this young woman. She drove all the way from San Francisco to be here." Correia asked Moye to be sure to plug the young woman into the abolition work taking place in California.
Neither Correia nor Moye had any way to know that at the exact moment Correia was recruiting the young activist into the movement, her brother, Troy Davis, had just succumbed to death by lethal injection.
The young woman was one of hundreds of thousands of people recruited, directly or indirectly, by Correia to the fight against her brother's death sentence. Nearly a million wrote letters and signed petitions on behalf of Davis. In the weeks after Georgia set his execution date, thousands took to the streets and marched in Atlanta and thousands more marched around the world. On Sept. 21, over 600 made the journey to Jackson to protest the execution and stand in solidarity with Troy Davis's family. It was an uproar, utterly unprecedented.
Almost exactly 20 years earlier, on the same prison grounds in Jackson, fewer than a dozen people were on hand for the execution of Warren McCleskey, a black man sentenced to death for killing a white police officer. There was no physical evidence that McCleskey was the shooter, leaving the state's main evidence a man who testified McCleskey had confessed to him. For years, the state hid the fact that the witness was a police informant, and that the police had illegally created the testimony by placing the informant in McCleskey's jail cell.
McCleskey the man is little remembered, but one of his appeals that reached the Supreme Court changed legal history. In McCleskey v. Kemp, the U.S. Supreme Court considered statistical evidence that Georgia's death penalty is carried out in a racially discriminatory manner. The evidence was undisputed, but the Court understood that if a death sentence could be overturned by statistics showing racial disparities, then no part of the criminal justice system would be safe from legal challenge. Racial disparities far more yawning than those surrounding the death penalty exist in arrests, detention and sentencing.
So the Supreme Court created an impossible test: McCleskey must show the racial discrimination was intentional. That is, McCleskey could only prove racial discrimination if the district attorney or trial judge stepped forward and proclaimed that they had acted on the basis of race.
With McCleskey, the Supreme Court decided it would rather tolerate a racist criminal justice system than open the floodgates to legal challenges about the system's racial disparities.
Troy Davis's case, fought as hard in the courts as McCleskey's, exposed another morally questionable judicial preference--for finality over truth. No matter how flawed the process that produces a conviction, the burden shifts to the convicted to prove claims of innocence. It is a standard designed to help the system bury its mistakes--in Troy's case, quite literally so. The judiciary would rather get it done than get it right.
For the last 30 years, the battle over the death penalty has been contained inside courtrooms and on the pages of legal briefs. The judicial system, asked to judge the foundations of its own house, papered over the problems of racial bias and doubt.
But then something extraordinary happened, as support for Troy Davis grew. These fundamental problems of doubt and racial bias moved outside the confines of the judiciary and shifted--quite abruptly--from being legal questions to personal ones.
Correia is most responsible for making things personal. People were drawn to Troy Davis's case because she insisted that people connect with her brother not as a convict or a death row inmate, but as a person. The connection between Troy and his supporters was at times literally made through his sister. In 2009, Correia patched Troy through from prison to a conference call with activists from Amnesty International.
"Everything is coming to a head and people are starting to wake up more and more," Davis said on the call. "This is just the beginning of something ... we're going to win this fight, we're going to continue to open these eyes, we're going to continue to open these prison doors, we're going to continue to hold accountable all those that are in charge of these unjust systems."
As activists sought out who to hold accountable, it became clear that what Justice John Paul Stevens famously called the "machinery of death" is in fact made up of individual human beings, each with their own moral compass, and so each one morally accountable.
There is Larry Chisolm, the Chatham County district attorney, who put in the request for a death warrant. There is the Superior Court judge named Penny Freesmann who signed it. The man who set the actual date and time of execution is Brian Owens, commissioner of the Georgia Department of Corrections. Five human beings comprise the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Parole, three of whom voted to deny Davis clemency. A group of correctional officers walked Troy to the execution chamber. Prison nurses prepared the IV lines. Carlo Musso, a doctor, collected $18,000 for overseeing the execution. Warden Carl Humphrey ordered over 125 CERT officers to dress out in full riot gear and stand guard so that those inside the prison could carry out the killing.
But the most significant shift into the personal can be understood through the blue Amnesty USA t-shirts that Troy supporters have been wearing for years, with white letters spelling, "I Am Troy Davis."
Initially, the t-shirts were a sign of solidarity with the plight of a possibly innocent man on death row. But many are now wearing them with a sense of anger and identification that is far wider and deeper than the issue of Davis's innocence. Davis's execution, the events leading up to it and the feelings growing out of it have mobilized those who have been targeted and under attack by our criminal justice apparatus, especially (but not only) young black men, particularly in the South, and their mothers, sisters, parents and grandparents. What was once primarily a badge of solidarity is now, for many, a declaration of identity.
These young black and brown men and women are taking to heart James Baldwin's plea in "An Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis" when she was awaiting trial: "we must fight for your life as though it were our own--which it is--and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night."
Angela Davis was acquitted, and years later in an essay advocating the abolition of not only the death penalty but the entire prison industrial complex, wrote that "we are fighting the same battles over and over again, but in doing so in community, we are ever enlarging, ever expanding our notion of freedom."
It is a sentiment echoed by Troy Davis, who repeatedly stressed that "we need to continue to stand together and educate each other and don't give up the fight."
The fight is not metaphorical. There are people determined to end capital punishment, and there are people determined to use it. The latest battle took place Sept. 21, 2011, in Jackson, Ga. Inside, hundreds of people carried out their parts in the script for killing Troy Davis, while outside, hundreds more--including four busloads of students from Armstrong, Savannah State, Morehouse, Spelman and Atlanta University--stood, prayed, and raged in opposition.
One of the people in the crowd at Jackson that night was Cara McCleskey, Warren McCleskey's now adult daughter. Twenty legal appeals and a small army of lawyers did not save her father's life. The million people who rallied behind Troy did not save his. The battles against the death penalty and against the racism of our criminal justice system will, as Angela Davis predicted, continue to be fought over and over again.
But something profound has shifted. Millions have had their eyes opened due to Troy Davis. For others, he made visible what they already knew, through personal experience, about the racism embedded in the criminal justice system. Thousands of young, African American men and women in the South are declaring "I am Troy Davis" as if their lives depend on it. We are standing together in a moment of expansion, which, if seized with the love and fury that surrounded the Davis family in Jackson last week, could bring us all closer to free.
"Zeldin's assertion that the EPA shouldn't address greenhouse gas emissions is like a fire chief claiming that they shouldn't fight fires," said one critic. "It is as malicious as it is absurd."
U.S. President Donald Trump's administration faced an onslaught of criticism on Tuesday for starting the process of repealing the 2009 legal opinion that greenhouse gases endanger public health and the welfare of the American people—which has enabled federal regulations aimed at the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency over the past 15 years.
Confirming reports from last week, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin unveiled the rule to rescind the 2009 "endangerment finding" at a truck dealership in Indiana. According to The New York Times, he said that "the proposal would, if finalized, amount to the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States."
If the administration succeeds in repealing the legal finding, the EPA would lack authority under the Clean Air Act to impose standards for greenhouse gas emissions—meaning the move would kill vehicle regulations. As with the reporting last week, the formal announcement was sharply condemned by climate and health advocates and experts.
"Greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and are the root cause of the climate crisis," said Deanna Noël with Public Citizen's Climate Program, ripping the administration's effort as "grossly misguided and exceptionally dangerous."
"This isn't just a denial of science and reality—it's a betrayal of public trust and yet another signal that this administration is working for corporate interests, and no one else."
"Stripping the EPA of its ability to regulate greenhouse gases is like throwing away the fire extinguisher while the house is already burning," she warned. "The administration is shamelessly handing Big Oil a hall pass to pollute unchecked and dodge accountability, leaving working families to bear the costs through worsening health outcomes, rising energy bills, more climate-fueled extreme weather, and an increasingly unstable future. This isn't just a denial of science and reality—it's a betrayal of public trust and yet another signal that this administration is working for corporate interests, and no one else."
Noël was far from alone in accusing the administration's leaders of serving the polluters who helped Trump return to power.
"Zeldin and Trump are concerned only with maximizing short-term profits for polluting corporations and the CEOs funneling millions of dollars to their campaign coffers," said Jim Walsh, policy director at Food & Water Watch. "Zeldin's assertion that the EPA shouldn't address greenhouse gas emissions is like a fire chief claiming that they shouldn't fight fires. It is as malicious as it is absurd."
Dan Becker, director of the Center for Biological Diversity's Safe Climate Transport Campaign, similarly said that the proposal is "purely a political bow to the oil industry" and "Trump is putting fealty to Big Oil over sound science and people's health."
Earthworks policy director Lauren Pagel also called the rule "a perverse gift to the fossil fuel industry that rejects yearslong efforts by the agency, scientists, NGOs, frontline communities, and industry to protect public health and our environment."
"Donald Trump and Lee Zeldin are playing with fire—and with floods and droughts and public health risks, too," she stressed, as about 168 million Americans on Tuesday faced advisories for extreme heat made more likely by the climate crisis.
🚨 The Trump administration just took its most extreme step yet in rolling back climate protections.
[image or embed]
— Sierra Club (@sierraclub.org) July 29, 2025 at 4:58 PM
Justin Chen, president of American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, which represents over 8,000 EPA workers nationwide, said that the repeal plan "is reckless and will have far-reaching, disastrous consequences for the USA."
"EPA career professionals have worked for decades on the development of the science and policy of greenhouse gases to protect the American public," he continued, "and this policy decision completely disregards all of their work in service to the public."
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) highlighted that Chris Wright, head of the Department of Energy, joined Zeldin at the Tuesday press conference and "announced a DOE 'climate science study' alongside remarks that were rife with climate denial talking points and disinformation."
UCS president Gretchen Goldman said that "it's abundantly clear what's going on here. The Trump administration refuses to acknowledge robust climate science and is using the kitchen sink approach: making every specious argument it can to avoid complying with the law."
"But getting around the Clean Air Act won't be easy," she added. "The science establishing climate harms to human health was unequivocally clear back in 2009, and more than 15 years later, the evidence has only accumulated."
Today, Zeldin’s EPA plans to release a proposal to revoke the Endangerment Finding, which is the legal & scientific foundation of EPA’s responsibility to limit climate-heating greenhouse gas pollution from major sources.
[image or embed]
— Moms Clean Air Force (@momscleanairforce.org) July 29, 2025 at 12:58 PM
David Bookbinder, director of law and policy at the Environmental Integrity Project, was a lead attorney in the 2007 U.S. Supreme Court case Massachusetts vs. EPA, which affirmed the agency's authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act and ultimately led to the endangerment finding two years later.
Bookbinder said Tuesday that "because this approach has already been rejected by the courts—and doubtless will be again—this baseless effort to pretend that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses that cause climate change are not harmful pollutants is nothing more than a transparent attempt to delay and derail our efforts to control greenhouse pollution at the worst possible time, when deadly floods and heat waves are killing more people every day."
In a statement from the Environmental Protection Network, which is made up of ex-EPA staff, Joseph Goffman, former assistant administrator of the agency's Office of Air and Radiation, also cited the 2007 ruling.
"This decision is both legally indefensible and morally bankrupt," Goffman said of the Tuesday proposal. "The Supreme Court made clear that EPA cannot ignore science or evade its responsibilities under the Clean Air Act. By walking away from the endangerment finding, EPA has not only broken with precedent; it has broken with reality."
Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the youth-led Sunrise Movement, responded to the EPA proposal with defiance, declaring that "Donald Trump and his Big Oil donors are lighting the world on fire and fueling their private jets with young people's lives. We refuse to be sacrifices for their greed. We're coming for them, and we're not backing down."
Israel has already summarily rejected the U.K. leader's ultimatum to take "substantive" steps to end the war on Gaza by September, agree to a two-state solution, and reject West Bank annexation.
United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer was accused of "political grandstanding" after he said Tuesday that his country would recognize Palestinian statehood if Israel did not take ambiguously defined steps to end its war on Gaza—conditions that were promptly dismissed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
"Today, as part of this process towards peace, I can confirm the U.K. will recognize the state of Palestine by the United Nations General Assembly in September, unless the Israeli government takes substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza, agree to a cease-fire, and commit to a long-term sustainable peace, reviving the prospect of a two-state solution," Starmer said during a press conference.
"This includes allowing the U.N. to restart the supply of aid and making clear that there will be no annexations in the West Bank," the prime minister continued, adding that "the terrorists of Hamas... must immediately release all of the hostages, sign up to a cease-fire, disarm, and accept that they will play no part in the government of Gaza."
Member of Scottish Parliament Scott Greer (Scottish Greens-West Scotland) responded to Tuesday's announcement on social media, saying, "Starmer wouldn't threaten to withdraw U.K. recognition of Israel, but he's made recognition of Palestinian statehood conditional on the actions of their genocidal oppressor?"
"Another profoundly unjust act from a Labour government thoroughly complicit in Israel's crimes," Greer added.
British attorney and activist Shola Mos-Shogbamimu asserted that "Keir Starmer knows his time is up and pivots to save his career but it's too late."
"By placing a condition on recognizing Palestine this declaration is performative and disingenuous because before September he can claim Israel has substantively complied with the condition," she added.
Leftist politician and Accountability Archive co-founder Philip Proudfoot argued on social media that "decent" Members of Parliament "need to table a no-confidence motion in Starmer now."
"He has just used the recognition of Palestine as a bargaining chip in exchange for Israel following its BASIC LEGAL OBLIGATIONS," he added. "This is one of the lowest political acts in living memory."
Media critic Sana Saeed said on social media, "Using Palestinian life and future as a bargaining chip and threat to Israel—not a surprise from kid starver Keir Starmer."
Journalist Sangita Myska argued that "rather than threatening the gesture politics of recognizing a Palestinian state (that may never happen)," Starmer should expel Israel's ambassador to the U.K., impose "full trade sanctions" and a "full arms embargo," and end alleged Royal Air Force surveillance flights over Gaza.
Political analyst Bushra Shaikh accused Starmer of "political grandstanding" and "speaking from both sides of his mouth."
Starmer's announcement followed a Monday meeting in Turnberry, Scotland with U.S. President Donald Trump, who signaled that he would not object to U.K. recognition of Palestine.
However, U.S. State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce called Starmer's announcement "a slap in the face for the victims of October 7," a reference to the Hamas-led attack of 2023.
While the United States remains Israel's staunchest supporter and enabler—providing billions of dollars in annual armed aid and diplomatic cover—Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee have all expressed concerns over mounting starvation deaths in Gaza.
On Tuesday, the U.N.-affiliated Integrated Food Security Phase Classification warned that a "worst-case" famine scenario is developing in Gaza, where health officials say at least 147 Palestinians, including at least 88 children, have died from malnutrition since Israel launched its obliteration and siege of the enclave following the October 2023 attack.
Israel—which imposed a "complete siege" on Gaza following that attack—has severely limited the amount of humanitarian aid that can enter the strip. According to U.N. officials, Israel Defense Forces troops have killed more than 1,000 aid-seeking civilians at distribution points run by the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. IDF troops have said they were ordered to shoot live bullets and artillery shells at aid seekers.
Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza including murder and weaponized starvation—responded to the U.K. prime minister's ultimatum in a social media post stating, "Starmer rewards Hamas' monstrous terrorism and punishes its victims."
"A jihadist state on Israel's border TODAY will threaten Britain TOMORROW," Netanyahu said. "Appeasement towards jihadist terrorists always fails. It will fail you too. It will not happen."
The U.K. played a critical role in the foundation of the modern state of Israel, allowing Jewish colonization of what was then the British Mandate of Palestine under condition that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine," who made up more than 90% of the population.
Seeing that Jewish immigrants returning to their ancestral homeland were usurping the indigenous Arabs of Palestine, the British subsequently prohibited further Zionist colonization. This sparked a nearly decadelong wave of terrorism and other attacks against the British occupiers that ultimately resulted in the U.K. abandoning Palestine and the establishment of Israel under the authority of the United Nations—an outcome achieved by the ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Palestinian Arabs.
On the topic of annexing the West Bank, earlier this month, all 15 Israeli government ministers representing Netanyahu's Likud party recommended the move, citing support from Trump. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) found last year that Israel's occupation of Palestine, including the West Bank and Gaza, is an illegal form of apartheid.
Last week, French President Emmanuel Macron said his country would announce its formal recognition of Palestinian statehood during September's U.N. General Assembly in New York. France is set to become the first Group of Seven nation to recognize Palestine, which is currently officially acknowledged by approximately 150 of the 193 U.N. member states.
Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz subsequently threatened "severe consequences" for nations that recognize Palestine.
Starmer's announcement came on the same day that the Gaza Health Ministry said that the death toll from Israel's 662-day assault and siege on Gaza—which is the subject of a South Africa-led genocide case at the ICJ—topped 60,000. However, multiple peer-reviewed studies in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet have concluded that Gaza officials' casualty tallies are likely significant undercounts.
"Eric Adams is a complete non-factor in this race," remarked a founding partner of pollster Zenith Research.
A new poll of the New York City mayoral race found that Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani is very well positioned to win later this year and that former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is only competitive in the race if every other Mamdani opponent drops out.
The survey, which was conducted by polling firm Zenith Research, showed Mamdani holding what Zenith founding partner Adam Carlson described on X as a "commanding" lead of 28 points among likely voters in a five-way race featuring Cuomo, incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, Republican Curtis Sliwa, and independent candidate Jim Walden. Even in other scenarios where other candidates drop out of the race, Mamdani would still garner more than 50% of likely votes in each instance.
However, Mamdani's lead becomes much smaller when the poll is expanded to all registered voters, among whom he only holds a three-point advantage over Cuomo in a head-to-head matchup. This suggests that Cuomo has room to grow as long as he can convince Adams, Sliwa, and Walden to exit the race.
Even so, commented Carlson, Cuomo faces significant headwinds that could block his path to victory even if he succeeds somehow in making it a one-on-one race.
"Another thing that’s extremely tough for Cuomo is that 60% of likely voters (as well as 52% of registered voters) would not even consider voting for him," he explained. "Only 32% say they wouldn't consider voting for Mamdani. Cuomo will need to go scorched earth to bring that number up."
New Yorkers who oppose Mamdani will have to place their hopes in the disgraced former governor, given the dismal standing held by incumbent Adams.
"Eric Adams is a complete non-factor in this race," remarked Carlson. "He polls at 7% in the five-way race, 14% if Cuomo drops out, and 32% if Cuomo and Sliwa drop out. More than half of [likely voters] strongly disapprove of his performance and have a very unfavorable view of him. 68% won't consider voting for him."
The poll also found Mamdani with an overall lead among Jewish voters despite efforts by opponents to paint him as antisemitic given his opposition to Israel's war in Gaza and his past reluctance to criticize the slogan "globalize the intifada," which he told The Bulwark he viewed as "a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights." New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, a progressive Jewish ally of Mamdani's who has endorsed his mayoral bid, acknowledged before the election that some Jewish people view the phrase as a threat of violence.
Among likely Jewish voters, Mamdani leads Cuomo by 17 points in a five-way race. Although Cuomo holds a double-digit lead over Mamdani among likely Jewish voters over the age of 45, Mamdani dominates among young Jewish voters by pulling in more than two-thirds of likely Jewish voters between the ages of 18 and 44.