Core inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, rose to 8.7% year-over-year in August, up from 8.4% in July.
The post Pakistan’s inflation rises to 11.15% in August 2026 appeared first on BOL News.
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Aug. 31, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
President Donald Trump on Monday warned Americans that they risk becoming “backwards and poor” unless they allow Big Tech companies to build artificial intelligence data centers in their communities.
In a social media post, the president expressed indignation that any town or city wouldn’t welcome data centers, which have drawn nationwide opposition for generating pollution and jacking up utility bills.
“The only reason that communities throughout the USA should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor,” Trump wrote. “If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign.”
In reality, AI data centers create very few jobs once they are completed, as most of their functions are fully automated.
Trump then said that Americans “will only have yourselves to blame” if they “kill the Golden Goose” that is AI data centers.
“China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement,” Trump wrote. “Actually, they can’t believe it is happening!”
Building AI data centers has become massively unpopular throughout the US.
A poll conducted by Embold Research and published by Heatmap Pro earlier this month shows that 75% of Americans now oppose building AI data centers in their area, including 61% registering strong opposition.
While Republicans polled in the survey were more supportive of data centers than Democrats and independent voters, it nonetheless found that opposition among Republicans outweighed support by 43 points.
Polling analyst G. Elliott Morris marveled at how politically tone deaf the president sounds when it comes to data centers, commenting that “Donald Trump is actively trying to help as many Democratic senators as possible get elected.”
Longtime GOP operative Frank Luntz similarly noted data centers’ unpopularity, citing a recent Gallup poll showing 63% of Republican voters oppose having one of the facilities built in their communities.
“We’re about to see whether President Trump can sway those voters to support them, as he’s done on many issues before,” Luntz remarked.
Democratic US Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed wasted no time tying the president’s position on data centers to his opponent, Republican Mike Rogers.
“Make no mistake—this is Mike Rogers’ position on data centers,” wrote El-Sayed. “He’s got up to $2.6 million invested in companies cashing in on the data center boom, all while Michiganders watch their utility bills soar. You can’t trust a word out of Mike’s mouth because he’s only out for himself, for Donald Trump, and for Big Tech—not Michigan.”
Faiz Shakir, a longtime adviser to US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), observed that Trump is merely “sharing the perspective of Wall Street and Big Tech” and is showing “no interest… in grappling with the mass revolt across American communities, or to learn anything from them.”
Screenwriter David Simon, creator of the acclaimed television series The Wire, accused Trump of brazenly lying about data centers’ economic benefits.
“If data centers are a geographic benefit to communities, you can be sure they’d be siting and building them in affluent and politically connected environs,” wrote Simon. “Curiously, they’re dumped in poorer, less influential places. Go fucking figure.”
Republican Kentucky state Rep. Savannah Maddox took issue with the president disparaging communities opposed to data centers, which include many of the rural communities that voted for him in three presidential elections.
“Rural doesn’t mean ‘backwards and poor’ and development doesn’t always equate to being ‘successful and rich,’” wrote Maddox. “President Trump wouldn’t be president without the rural voters who inhabit America’s heartland. It is not wrong of us to question the sudden and wide-scale effort to convert arable land into data centers. We are not stupid for wanting to protect our rural way of life.”
An anti-corruption investigation reaching from Ukraine's Presidential Office into the management of state-owned Sense Bank has raised questions far beyond the alleged laundering of UAH 150 million. At stake are the governance of nationalised assets, the independence of Ukraine's anti-corruption institutions, a planned bank privatisation, an international arbitration worth more than $1 billion and Kyiv's credibility as it moves deeper into EU accession negotiations.
A week after Ukrainian anti-corruption investigators unveiled an operation carrying the improbable codename “Forrest Gump”, the affair has developed into one of the most consequential governance scandals to hit wartime Ukraine.
At its center is a deceptively simple question: Where did UAH 150 million — approximately $3.4 million — used to secure the release on bail of former Justice and Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko, a centerpiece of the biggest corruption scandal of Zelensky government, actually come from?
The answer alleged by Ukraine's National Anti-Corruption Bureau, NABU, and Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office, SAPO, is extraordinary.
Investigators say criminal proceeds under the supervision and manual management of deputy head of the Office of the president of Ukraine Iryna Mudra were converted into apparently legitimate funds through a series of companies and bank accounts. The source of the money is linked with the main suspect of another corruption scandal Timur Mindich, a close ally of president Zelensky, and the goal was to post bail for a suspect in the Operation Midas investigation into alleged corruption surrounding the state nuclear company Energoatom.
NABU's official account says members of a criminal organisation, acting with representatives and officials of a state-owned bank, arranged the laundering of UAH 150 million during June 2026. The cash was allegedly introduced into the legitimate financial system through accounts belonging to shell companies before being used for bail.
The most revealing evidence released by NABU is not just a bank transfer but Mudra’s own confessions, which give wider picture. In one recorded exchange, a female voice attributed to her says: “Corruption should be systematised and controlled… There is no need to fight it.” A male interlocutor adds: “And lead it.” This is said by one of the highest Ukrainian official in charge of judicial reform. Yet her own words are arguably more disturbing, presenting corruption not as an abuse to be eliminated but as a system to be organised and kept under political management.
Other recordings portray Mudra discussing state owned Sense Bank, where this money-loundering operation took place, as an asset to be under direct political control and used for enrichment. She recounts a proposed arrangement under which political figures politicians from Zelensky party Servant of the People would refrain from attacking the bank while “Sense Bank has to pay them”, and quotes an instruction she received from above to “take over the bank” because it contains “serious flows”. She then describes its managers as compliant figures who would carry money wherever a senior Presidential Office official instructed them, adding that they had “crawled” to her “like kittens” asking to be taken under protection.
NABU’s published recording also appear to show Mudra discussing protection from the institutions supposed to investigate such conduct. She asks how to mobilize votes for “our” candidates to NABU’s Public Oversight Council and describes SAP chief Oleksandr Klymenko as “not one of ours,” warning that if he secured a second term, “we’ll all be fucked.” Taken together, these phrases suggest something broader than participation in a single suspicious transaction: an alleged attempt to control a state-owned bank while influencing the bodies capable of investigating that control. If authenticated and confirmed in context, they would provide unusually direct evidence of political capture and consciousness of wrongdoing. Mudra denies criminal conduct and says the excerpts were released selectively and without their full context.
Revelations are shocking in many dimension and will have influence for years to come. One of the most striking revelation is usage of the state-owned Sense Bank as systemic money-laundering machine.
Sense Bank carries unusual political and legal baggage. Until 2022 it was known as Alfa-Bank Ukraine and was owned through corporate structures associated with ABH Holdings. Among the beneficial shareholders were Russian businessmen including Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven.
Ukraine subsequently imposed sanctions and, in July 2023, the government took Sense Bank into state ownership. Ukraine's Ministry of Finance says the measure was intended to maintain financial stability and protect depositors after sanctions were imposed on significant shareholders. The state today owns 100% of the bank.
It was therefore no ordinary commercial bank allegedly being exploited. It was an asset that Ukraine had taken into public ownership during wartime, in considerable part because of national-security concerns surrounding its previous ownership.
The source material examined by EU Reporter describes this as a crucial feature of the scandal: after nationalisation, the allegation is not simply that corrupt actors conducted transactions through Sense Bank, but that political influence was progressively established over the institution's governance.
That allegation remains contested and has not been established by a court. But documents released by NABU and widely reported by the Kyiv Independent and other leading Ukrainian media raise questions that are difficult for the Ukrainian authorities to ignore. The Kyiv Independent reported on 22 August that internal Nomination Committee records showed attempts to shape Sense Bank's supervisory board following nationalisation. The paper reported that Iryna Mudra, then deputy head of the Office of the President and chair of the committee involved in selecting supervisory-board members, strongly promoted Mykola Hladyshchenko for a place on the board despite objections concerning competence, potential conflicts of interest and previous employment. Hladyshchenko subsequently became chairman of the supervisory board.
The investigation also cited earlier leaked conversations in which prospective board candidates were allegedly described as “our guys”. Six people reportedly discussed in that context were subsequently appointed. EU Reporter has not independently authenticated those recordings or the leaked committee minutes, so their contents must remain attributed to the publications that obtained them.
However, now the anticorruption agencies established with support and guidance of the EU provide their findings suggesting that the bank was deliberately captured for criminal purposes. NABU says that by early June 2026 the alleged organisers had obtained de facto control of Sense Bank, enabling them to use accounts of controlled businesses in the laundering scheme. That allegation has now triggered action at the highest levels of financial regulation.
The alleged mechanics of the operation read more like a crime thriller than a banking-compliance investigation. According to the investigative material compiled in the source document and subsequent Ukrainian reporting, cash was allegedly concentrated through businesses associated with former MP and developer Maksym Mykytas before being exchanged or routed through companies capable of putting apparently legitimate non-cash funds into the banking system.
The source describes alleged deliveries of cash in bags and boxes, routing through companies including Metrobud and other entities, and discussions about how transactions could pass financial-monitoring controls.
Ukraine's anti-money-laundering regime establishes a UAH 400,000 statutory threshold for certain financial-monitoring obligations, alongside wider risk-based requirements. It would be inaccurate to suggest that every payment above UAH 400,000 is automatically prohibited; rather, banks are expected to identify, scrutinise and where necessary report transactions according to statutory and risk criteria.
The significance of the NABU allegation is therefore not simply the size of the payment. Investigators allege that people involved in the transaction were actively discussing how to overcome or circumvent compliance barriers. Published recordings attributed to members of the alleged group include discussion of a Sense Bank compliance official who could prevent the transaction. Mudra in one recording says that she received demand “from above” to fire a bank official who refuse to clear transaction. The scheme released by NABU paint a shocking picture: to make the transfer the bank's automated monitoring arrangements were temporarily taken out of operation during the transaction.
Those are NABU allegations presented to the court. But the Ukrainian government has already treated them seriously enough to take immediate action. This confirms that NABU accusations are well grounded.
On 19 August, the Cabinet suspended supervisory-board chairman Mykola Hladyshchenko for six months and initiated the suspension of management-board chairman Oleksii Stupak. The Finance Ministry explicitly said that its intervention was designed to address risks including the possible use of Sense Bank for money laundering and inadequate oversight of AML procedures.
The following day, National Bank of Ukraine Governor Andriy Pyshnyi went further. The NBU concluded that Hladyshchenko no longer satisfied the statutory independence requirements for membership of the supervisory board and opened proceedings to examine the collective suitability of the entire board. On 21 August, the government terminated Hladyshchenko's powers altogether. This regulatory reaction matters because it turns the episode from an allegation concerning individual criminal behaviour into a potential failure of corporate governance and banking supervision.
Sense Bank itself has said it is cooperating with the authorities. Following the NABU searches, the bank said it wanted the circumstances established “fully and objectively” and was providing investigators with the information required under legal procedures.
But the key question is different. There have been already multiple accusations of usage of nationalised Sense bank for allegedly corrupt or shadow schemes. NABU revelation did not come from nowhere and were not a separate incidental case. In previous NABU and journalistic investigations shocking facts of how bank has been used were presented. How was it possible that in time of war after nationalisation of one of the biggest banks it could turn into money-laundering machine?
The highest-profile suspect is Iryna Mudra. Mudra served as deputy head of the Office of the President and held responsibility for major legal and judicial-policy issues, including international mechanisms concerning Russian aggression and frozen Russian assets. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy dismissed her on 19 August. Presidential Decree No. 734/2026 confirms the dismissal but does not give a reason. NABU and SAPO served Mudra with a notice of suspicion. On 25 August, Ukraine's High Anti-Corruption Court ordered her held in custody for 60 days while allowing release if UAH 20 million bail is posted. Prosecutors had requested considerably higher bail.
Mudra denies criminal wrongdoing. She has argued that the published recordings have been presented selectively and out of context. Through her lawyers, she has said that she is cooperating with investigators and is prepared to answer their questions through the proper legal process. The underlying source document expressly records those objections and cautions concerning the provenance and quality of some recordings.
On 24 August President Zelenskyy said the anti-corruption bodies had “no questions” for him regarding the investigation.
There is another legal dimension. Former shareholder ABH Holdings commenced ICSID arbitration against Ukraine after the 2023 nationalisation, seeking more than $1 billion and alleging unlawful expropriation. UNCTAD records the dispute as ABH v Ukraine, ICSID Case No. ARB/24/1, concerning the former ownership of Alfa-Bank/Sense Bank. A separate proceeding, EMIS v Ukraine, also concerns alleged unlawful expropriation of Sense Bank.
The government's 2023 decision was taken in the context of sanctions and financial-stability considerations. Whether it complied with the relevant investment treaties is a matter for international tribunals, not for a criminal investigation conducted three years later. Nevertheless, evidence about how the asset was governed after nationalisation could become relevant contextual material in those proceedings.
ABH's case alleges that the taking of Sense Bank was unlawful. Ukraine will defend the nationalisation on its own legal and national-security grounds. A subsequent allegation that politically connected actors exploited the nationalised institution does not answer that legal dispute, but it could make the factual history of the asset considerably more uncomfortable for Kyiv. The source analysis supplied to EU Reporter correctly identifies this potential intersection. Forrest Gump can raise a question about bad faith in the original nationalisation and the consequences might go much further than a bail for one allegedly corrupt official.
And the cherry on the top: Mudra was also one of the officials responsible for formulating and publicly defending Ukraine’s position against ABH Holdings, the former owner of Sense Bank, in its more than $1 billion ICSID claim over the bank’s nationalisation; she later chaired Ukraine’s delegation in other major international proceedings. This creates a particularly damaging contradiction: an official who defended the takeover as a lawful national-security and financial-stability measure is now accused of helping place the same bank under political control and use it to launder criminal proceeds. The allegations do not by themselves prove that the 2023 nationalisation was unlawful, but they seriously undermine the factual and moral credibility of Ukraine’s case and offer ABH a powerful argument that the bank was not transferred into genuinely independent state management, but into a system vulnerable to political capture.
Forrest Gump is not an isolated investigation. Its roots reach into Operation Midas, NABU's investigation into alleged large-scale corruption at state nuclear operator Energoatom. NABU says Midas uncovered a criminal structure involved in substantial corruption and subsequent money laundering. Later investigative developments have continued into 2026.
The Forest Gump allegations concern money ultimately used as bail for an individual implicated in that wider investigation. This changes the character of the alleged conduct. If prosecutors prove their case, it would mean that money generated through criminal activity was not merely hidden or spent. It was allegedly recycled back into the criminal-justice system itself to secure the liberty of another suspect.
And here we come to the point vitally important for Brussels.
Ukraine formally opened negotiations on the EU's Fundamentals cluster on 15 June 2026. That cluster includes the judiciary, fundamental rights, justice and security, public procurement and financial control. Crucially, it is the first cluster opened and the last to close, and the European Commission has made clear that progress under it determines the overall pace of accession negotiations.
Ukraine is simultaneously receiving extraordinary financial support from the European Union. The Ukraine Facility provides up to €50 billion between 2024 and 2027, and support is tied to democratic mechanisms, the rule of law, sound financial management, anti-corruption safeguards and reform commitments.
The issue for Brussels is therefore not whether corruption exists in Ukraine. No serious accession process operates on the assumption that candidate countries are free of corruption.
The more important test is whether institutions can discover it, investigate it, prosecute it and correct the governance failures that allowed it without political obstruction. Viewed from that perspective, Forrest Gump presents two competing narratives. The negative interpretation is obvious: people occupying some of the highest positions in the Ukrainian state are alleged to have manipulated a nationalised bank and circumvented controls to launder criminal proceeds.
The more positive institutional interpretation is that Ukraine's own anti-corruption agencies investigated them, published evidence, served suspicion notices, triggered removals at a state bank and brought one of the country's most senior former presidential officials before an independent anti-corruption court.
Which narrative ultimately prevails will depend heavily on what happens next.
The US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) decision to allow 20 ZYN nicotine pouch products to carry a specific reduced-risk claim has created a striking contrast with the direction of European Union policy, as Brussels prepares new product rules and proposes EU-wide taxation of nicotine pouches.
The United States Food and Drug Administration has authorised 20 ZYN nicotine pouch products to be marketed with a statement informing adult smokers that completely replacing cigarettes with the pouches can reduce the risk of several serious diseases.
The decision, issued on 30 June 2026, represents the first time that the FDA has granted Modified Risk Tobacco Product orders to nicotine pouches.
“Using ZYN instead of cigarettes puts you at a lower risk of mouth cancer, heart disease, lung cancer, stroke, emphysema, and chronic bronchitis.”
The orders cover ten varieties of ZYN, each sold in nicotine strengths of 3mg and 6mg. The products include Chill, Cinnamon, Citrus, Coffee, Cool Mint, Menthol, Peppermint, Smooth, Spearmint and Wintergreen.
The manufacturer, Swedish Match USA, is owned by Philip Morris International. The products had already received FDA authorisation to remain on the US market in January 2025, but the new decision goes considerably further by permitting a specific comparative health claim.
The FDA said its decision followed an extensive scientific review and was intended to give adult tobacco users accurate information about differences in risk between products.
“FDA’s review of modified risk products is intended to ensure that adult users have clear, science-based information about the relative harms of tobacco products, so they can make informed choices,” said Bret Koplow, acting director of the FDA’s Centre for Tobacco Products.
The ruling does not mean that ZYN is harmless, nor does it approve the products as medicines or smoking-cessation treatments. Nicotine is addictive, and the FDA continues to advise people who do not currently use tobacco or nicotine not to begin.
The significance of the decision lies instead in the regulator’s formal recognition that nicotine products can present very different levels of risk.
A crucial qualification is contained in the phrase “instead of cigarettes”. The authorised claim applies to smokers who replace cigarettes with ZYN. It does not promise the same reduction in risk to consumers who use nicotine pouches while continuing to smoke.
Cigarettes burn tobacco, creating smoke containing toxic substances responsible for most smoking-related cancers, cardiovascular disease and respiratory illness. Nicotine pouches deliver nicotine through the lining of the mouth without burning tobacco or producing smoke.
This difference is central to the principle of tobacco harm reduction: smokers who cannot or do not wish to stop using nicotine may nevertheless reduce their health risks by moving away from combustible products.
The FDA’s decision therefore recognises an important distinction that is frequently blurred in political debate. A product can be addictive and unsuitable for non-users while still being substantially less dangerous than smoking.
UK-based public health commentator Clive Bates, a former director of Action on Smoking and Health, has argued that nicotine pouches could deliver benefits comparable to those associated with the use of Swedish snus in Scandinavia.
“Tobacco-free nicotine pouches with a consumer acceptable nicotine content have the potential to benefit public health in the same way that is documented for Swedish snus in Scandinavia, that is, by serving as a low-risk alternative to cigarettes”, Bates said.
“The European Commission should pay close attention to FDA’s exhaustive process and extensive reasoning. It’s unusual to have anything good to say about the Federal government these days, but this is an important exception, where the right answer has been reached for the right reasons”, he added.
Bates has also argued that poorly designed regulation, including excessively low nicotine limits, could make pouches less effective as substitutes for cigarettes and unintentionally protect the market for combustible tobacco.
The American ruling comes at a particularly important moment for the European Union.
The European Commission is simultaneously advancing a formal proposal to overhaul tobacco taxation (TED) and preparing a broader revision of the EU legislation governing tobacco and nicotine products, their presentation, sale, advertising and promotion.
Nicotine pouches are not comprehensively regulated at EU level under the current Tobacco Products Directive (TPD). Because they contain nicotine but no tobacco, they fall outside many of the harmonised provisions that apply to cigarettes, roll-your-own tobacco, heated tobacco and electronic cigarettes. The result is a fragmented European market.
Some member states permit nicotine pouches subject to national restrictions. Others have introduced nicotine limits, packaging and warning requirements or advertising controls, while France has pursued a prohibition.
Different national rules create uncertainty for consumers and manufacturers and complicate enforcement across the EU’s internal market.
The Commission’s April 2026 evaluation of the European tobacco-control framework identified the rapid growth of nicotine pouches, electronic cigarettes and heated tobacco products as one of the main challenges that existing EU legislation is no longer adequately equipped to address.
The evaluation concluded that EU rules had contributed to falling smoking rates and smoking-related deaths but were failing to keep pace with changes in products, marketing practices and consumer behaviour.
The EC is particularly concerned about the use of novel nicotine products among children, adolescents and young adults. However, the FDA decision introduces an additional issue that EU policymakers will now find difficult to avoid: whether new EU rules should recognise differences in risk between combustible cigarettes and smoke-free nicotine products.
The emerging difference between Washington and Brussels is not simply that one jurisdiction is permissive and the other restrictive.
The FDA subjects nicotine products to an exceptionally demanding premarket review. Products must receive authorisation before they can legally be marketed, and separate evidence is required before a manufacturer may make a modified-risk claim.
The FDA can impose marketing conditions, require post-market surveillance and withdraw an order if later evidence shows that the product no longer benefits public health.
Its approach nevertheless accepts that consumers should be told when credible evidence shows that completely switching from one product to another reduces disease risk.
The Commission’s current approach places greater emphasis on reducing the overall attractiveness and consumption of tobacco-related and nicotine products. Its taxation proposal explicitly presents nicotine pouches as products that can prolong addiction or act as substitutes for cigarettes, especially among young people.
The EU could impose age controls, marketing restrictions, ingredient standards and proportionate nicotine limits while still recognising that adult smokers may benefit from switching completely away from cigarettes.
It could also prohibit unsubstantiated commercial claims while creating an evidence-based process through which manufacturers could apply for permission to communicate verified differences in risk.
The alternative would be to impose increasingly similar taxation, warnings and advertising rules on products with significantly different health consequences.
The EC ran a public consultation on revisions to both the Tobacco Products Directive (TPD) and the Tobacco Advertising Directive (TAD) from 22 May to 14 August this year. The consultation, is intended to inform a revision of the legislative framework planned before the end of 2026.
It creates an opportunity to consider evidence that was not available when the current Tobacco Products Directive was adopted in 2014.
Nicotine pouches were then a marginal product. They now represent a rapidly expanding category, and national governments are adopting increasingly divergent responses.
The FDA decision does not compel Europe to follow the US model. The EU has different legal structures, public-health priorities and attitudes towards commercial nicotine.
One of the world’s most influential public-health authorities has concluded that there is sufficient evidence to tell adult smokers that completely switching to specified nicotine pouches reduces their risk of mouth cancer, heart disease, lung cancer, stroke, emphysema and chronic bronchitis.
That finding sits uneasily with any policy or public communication suggesting that cigarettes and smoke-free nicotine products are essentially equivalent.
The issue is particularly relevant to the Commission’s tax proposal. Taxation affects consumer behaviour partly by changing the relative prices of products. If pouches are taxed so heavily that the economic advantage over cigarettes is substantially reduced, smokers may have less incentive to switch.
Conversely, setting taxes too low could increase affordability and use among young people who have never smoked.
The task for EU legislators is therefore not simply to choose between regulation and deregulation. It is to develop a framework that calibrates restrictions, taxation and consumer information according to evidence about risk, behaviour and population-level effects.
While Washington is recognising that adults deserve accurate information about lower-risk alternatives, Brussels is looking for ways to restrict, tax or ban them.
Meanwhile, the EU is failing to control illegal disposable vapes, banned flavours, excessive nicotine levels and unauthorised devices moving through black-market channels. Regulated products are demonised, while illegal and unregulated products keep reaching consumers, including young people.
The forthcoming EU debate will test whether Brussels can reconcile its tobacco-free objective with the potential role of lower-risk alternatives.
The FDA decision makes three points that are likely to shape that discussion.
First, nicotine pouches are not harmless and should not be promoted to children or people who do not use nicotine.
Second, the absence of combustion means that their risks can differ substantially from those associated with cigarettes.
Third, the greatest potential benefit arises when smokers switch completely rather than using pouches alongside continued smoking.
The Commission is right to address gaps in the existing legislation and fragmentation between member states. Common product standards, youth protections and enforcement rules may be necessary for the Single Market to function properly.
But regulation that fails to acknowledge relative risk could also have unintended consequences.
Clive Bates and other harm-reduction advocates argue that treating all nicotine products as though they are similarly dangerous can preserve smoking by discouraging consumers from moving to safer alternatives. European health campaigners respond that the growth of commercially marketed nicotine products could create a new generation of dependent users.
As the EC completes its consultation and develops its legislative proposal, the American decision gives European policymakers a concrete case study rather than a theoretical argument.
The question is no longer whether a regulator could authorise a carefully limited reduced-risk claim for a nicotine pouch. The FDA has now done so.
The question for Europe is whether its forthcoming legislation will allow comparable scientific evidence to influence regulation, taxation and communication — or whether nicotine pouches will be treated principally as another product to be restricted, irrespective of their potential role in moving smokers away from cigarettes.
Thirty-five years after Kazakhstan closed one of the most notorious nuclear weapons testing grounds in history, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has used the anniversary to deliver a pointed message to the world’s nuclear powers: resume dialogue, strengthen arms control and ensure that nuclear testing never returns.
At a time when the international security order is under growing pressure and some of the agreements that helped contain nuclear rivalry after the Cold War have weakened, Kazakhstan is seeking to turn its own traumatic nuclear history into a renewed diplomatic argument for disarmament.
Marking the International Day against Nuclear Tests on 29 August, Tokayev called on nuclear-armed states to return to negotiations and urged the earliest possible entry into force of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, or CTBT.
“Our country’s position as one of the leaders of the global anti-nuclear movement remains unchanged,” Tokayev said, according to Kazakhstan's presidential administration.
He called for negotiations between nuclear powers and “decisive multilateral action to eliminate the threat of nuclear weapons use”.
For Kazakhstan, the date carries significance far beyond diplomatic symbolism.
On 29 August 1991, the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site in north-eastern Kazakhstan was closed. It had been the Soviet Union's principal nuclear weapons testing ground and the location of 456 nuclear tests between 1949 and 1989, including atmospheric and underground detonations.
The consequences extended far beyond the perimeter of the test site. The United Nations has estimated that nearly 1.5 million people were affected by nuclear testing, while extensive areas were contaminated by radiation.
That history gives Kazakhstan a distinctive voice in the international nuclear debate.
Tokayev described the closure of Semipalatinsk as a warning that should continue to resonate worldwide.
“Thirty-five years later, this date will serve as a reminder to all humanity of the tragic consequences of nuclear tests and as a call to prevent them from ever happening again,” he said.
Kazakhstan's argument is strengthened by another remarkable chapter of its post-Soviet history.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, Kazakhstan found itself with a huge nuclear weapons infrastructure on its territory. Rather than retain the capability, the newly independent country chose to relinquish the weapons and establish itself internationally as a non-nuclear state.
Tokayev described that decision as a deliberate choice in favour of peace and long-term security.
“By voluntarily renouncing the fourth-largest nuclear arsenal on the planet, Kazakhstan made a historic choice in favor of peace, security and sustainable development,” he said.
It has subsequently made nuclear non-proliferation one of the defining elements of its foreign policy.
Kazakhstan was also responsible for proposing the creation of the International Day against Nuclear Tests, an initiative unanimously supported by the UN General Assembly. The first international observance took place in 2010.
This history matters because Tokayev's appeal comes at an increasingly uncertain moment for nuclear arms control.
The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty was opened for signature in 1996 with a simple but profound objective: to prohibit nuclear test explosions anywhere in the world.
Thirty years later, however, the treaty has still not formally entered into force.
The CTBT currently has 188 signatories and 179 ratifications, demonstrating overwhelming international support. But its provisions require ratification by a specified group of 44 states possessing nuclear technology when the treaty was negotiated before it can become legally binding.
Nine of those states have yet to ratify: China, Egypt, India, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia and the United States.
India, North Korea and Pakistan have not signed it.
Russia had ratified the treaty but revoked its ratification in November 2023. China and the United States signed it in 1996 but have never completed ratification.
The treaty nevertheless represents one of the more successful international norms of the post-Cold War period.
More than 2,000 nuclear tests were carried out during the five decades before the CTBT opened for signature. Since 1996, nuclear tests have occurred on only ten occasions, according to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization, and North Korea is the only country to have conducted nuclear explosive tests during the 21st century.
Tokayev's warning is therefore also a defence of a system that has largely succeeded in suppressing nuclear testing — but whose legal foundations remain incomplete.
There is another important dimension to Kazakhstan's position.
Tokayev's opposition to nuclear weapons does not translate into opposition to nuclear technology.
On the contrary, Kazakhstan is now moving towards the development of civilian nuclear power. Tokayev emphasised that nuclear energy should be used for “exclusively peaceful and constructive purposes”, presenting civilian nuclear development as compatible with the country's anti-nuclear weapons philosophy.
Kazakhstan is already an important part of Europe's nuclear energy supply chain. According to the Euratom Supply Agency, Kazakhstan supplied 20.31% of the natural uranium delivered to EU utilities in 2025, making it the EU's second-largest source after Canada.
The connection became even more politically significant during Tokayev's visit to Brussels in June.
Following meetings with European Council President António Costa and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on 23 June 2026, the EU and Kazakhstan specifically identified energy security as an area for deeper strategic cooperation.
Their joint statement recognised Kazakhstan as an important supplier of oil and uranium to Europe and highlighted the potential for increased cooperation in both renewable energy and civil nuclear energy.
It is simultaneously one of the world's most prominent advocates of nuclear disarmament and one of the most important suppliers of the raw material on which civilian nuclear power depends.
Rather than regarding those positions as contradictory, Astana's policy is increasingly built around distinguishing sharply between the destructive and peaceful uses of atomic technology.
For the European Union, Tokayev's intervention is therefore not an abstract diplomatic message from a distant Central Asian state.
Kazakhstan has become increasingly significant to Europe's efforts to diversify energy supplies and strategic raw materials, particularly as Brussels attempts to reduce potentially dangerous dependencies.
During Tokayev's June visit to Brussels, European and Kazakh leaders agreed to deepen their strategic partnership in critical raw materials, transport, digitalisation and emerging technologies. They also reaffirmed their commitment to strengthening the international disarmament and non-proliferation regime.
It shares a vast border with Russia and another with China, while simultaneously developing closer political and economic relationships with the European Union and maintaining partnerships with the United States and other Western countries.
That makes Astana one of a relatively small number of governments able to maintain meaningful dialogue across increasingly divided geopolitical blocs.
In an era when communication between major powers has become more difficult, that may make Kazakhstan's diplomatic role increasingly relevant.
The ruins of Semipalatinsk remain a stark physical reminder of what the nuclear arms race once meant.
Between 1949 and 1989, explosions equivalent collectively to thousands of Hiroshima-sized bombs were detonated at the site, according to UN documentation. Communities surrounding the testing ground were exposed to radioactive fallout whose health and environmental effects endured long after the final explosion.
Kazakhstan has sought to transform that legacy from one of victimhood into one of diplomacy.
Semipalatinsk's closure was followed by the relinquishment of nuclear weapons, Kazakhstan's participation in the Central Asian Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone and its persistent advocacy of nuclear disarmament.
The political assumptions that allowed the world to move progressively away from nuclear testing after the Cold War cannot simply be taken for granted.
The CTBT is now 30 years old and still awaits entry into force. Relations between the major nuclear powers are deeply strained. Nuclear weapons have again assumed a conspicuous place in geopolitical confrontation.
Against that background, Kazakhstan's argument has an unusual moral force.
Few countries have experienced nuclear testing on the scale Kazakhstan did. Fewer still subsequently possessed nuclear weapons and voluntarily relinquished them.
Thirty-five years after the gates of Semipalatinsk were closed, Tokayev is effectively asking the world's nuclear powers to remember why they were closed in the first place.
The message from Astana is straightforward: nuclear deterrence may remain part of international politics, but nuclear testing does not have to be — and dialogue between nuclear powers is more essential when relations are deteriorating, not less.
For Europe, confronting war on its eastern frontier while simultaneously reconsidering energy security and strategic autonomy, that is a message worth hearing.
BVCamarateUma colisão entre um veículo ligeiro de passageiros e um motociclo provocou um ferido, na noite deste sábado, na zona do Campo do Rio, em Camarate. O condutor do automóvel colocou-se em fuga após o embate.
BVCamarate O alerta para a ocorrência foi dado às 20h21. Para o local foram mobilizadas uma Ambulância de Socorro e um Veículo de Socorro e Assistência Tático dos bombeiros, acompanhados pela Polícia de Segurança Pública, segundo os Bombeiros Voluntários de Camarate.
A vítima, que circulava no motociclo, recebeu assistência no local por parte da equipa de pré-hospitalar e foi posteriormente transportada para o Hospital de São José, em Lisboa. A PSP tomou conta da ocorrência e recolheu elementos para tentar localizar o condutor em fuga.
Por: Dino Frazão
Data: 29 de agosto de 2026
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O conteúdo Colisão entre carro e moto em Camarate deixa um ferido e condutor em fuga aparece primeiro em OS MONHACAS.
EU Reporter journalist Derya Soysal was among the members of the press given direct access to President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev in Astana after he cast his vote in Kazakhstan’s first elections to the newly established Kurultai — an opportunity that offered a rare first-hand insight into the President’s thinking on political reform, government, youth, artificial intelligence and the country’s future direction.
For a journalist covering the rapidly changing political landscape of Central Asia, there are moments when being in the room matters.
For EU Reporter journalist Derya Soysal (pictured with President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev) Kazakhstan’s historic Kurultai election provided precisely such an opportunity.
After President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev cast his vote in the country’s first election to the newly established Kurultai, Soysal was among the journalists with privileged access to the President during the press briefing that followed.
It gave EU Reporter a first-hand opportunity to hear Tokayev address some of the most important questions facing Kazakhstan as the country enters a new political chapter.
The exchanges went far beyond election day itself.
Questions ranged from the consequences of constitutional reform and the creation of the Vice Presidency to the future composition of the government, the role of younger politicians and the increasingly important place of artificial intelligence in Kazakhstan’s economic and social development.
The result was a revealing picture of how Tokayev sees the next phase of his country’s transformation.
Tokayev himself described the election as a historic milestone and the beginning of a new stage in Kazakhstan’s development.
The establishment of the Kurultai forms part of a much broader restructuring of the country’s political institutions.
During the briefing, the President was questioned about what ordinary citizens should expect from the constitutional reforms, how the newly created Vice Presidency would operate and what role the Kazakhstan People’s Council would play.
Tokayev portrayed the changes as essential components of a renewed political system.
He stressed the importance of the Vice Presidency as an institution capable of supporting effective governance during difficult periods, while describing the Kazakhstan People’s Council as a mechanism intended to strengthen public participation and national cohesion.
But the President’s vision was not restricted to political architecture.
He also pointed to ambitious infrastructure and development programmes encompassing healthcare facilities, rehabilitation centres, urban modernisation and environmental projects.
Among the most politically sensitive questions put to Tokayev concerned his own future.
Could he stand again for President?
Following recent constitutional developments concerning his eligibility for a future presidential election, journalists pressed Tokayev on whether he intended to seek another term.
His response was deliberately cautious.
While acknowledging that the legal possibility exists, Tokayev rejected speculation about a future campaign as premature.
Instead, he argued that Kazakhstan should be concentrating on the immediate challenges of modernisation, economic growth, social development and stability in an increasingly unpredictable international environment.
It was a response that sought to move attention away from political succession and back towards the governing agenda.
Soysal’s access to the presidential briefing also provided an opportunity to hear Tokayev set out his expectations of the people who will serve in the new political institutions.
Asked what qualities Kurultai deputies should possess, the President emphasised responsibility and accountability.
Members, he said, should be judged by the quality of the legislation they adopt, whether they fulfil promises made to voters and whether the programmes they pursue genuinely contribute to Kazakhstan’s development.
A recurring theme throughout the briefing was generational change.
Tokayev again argued that Kazakhstan needs younger people to play a greater role in public life.
New faces and new thinking, he suggested, will be essential if the country is to maintain momentum in the years ahead.
The creation of the Kurultai also has consequences for the government.
Journalists therefore questioned Tokayev about the future administration and whether Kazakhstan should expect major personnel changes.
The President praised the work of the existing government but confirmed that changes would come.
At the same time, he cautioned against replacing officials simply to create the appearance of political renewal.
For Tokayev, modernisation appears to mean continuous institutional renewal rather than political theatre: bringing in new energy and expertise where necessary while retaining effective administration.
Another important exchange concerned political competition.
Asked whether the campaign had demonstrated genuine competition, Tokayev pointed to televised debates, public engagement and particularly strong interest among younger voters.
He characterised the electoral process as another milestone in Kazakhstan’s continuing political modernisation and said the campaign had brought new political voices and new ideas into public debate.
For an international audience, however, the question of political pluralism remains one of the key issues against which Kazakhstan’s reforms will ultimately be judged.
The significance of the new institutions will therefore depend not only upon their constitutional design, but on how independently and effectively they operate in practice.
Young people repeatedly returned to the centre of the discussion.
With a significant number of younger candidates participating in the electoral process, Tokayev was asked whether this generation could genuinely transform the country’s political system.
His answer was notable for combining optimism with a measure of realism.
He acknowledged that not every young official promoted into senior positions in recent years had been successful.
Nevertheless, Tokayev insisted that Kazakhstan must continue putting its confidence in younger generations.
For a country with a comparatively young population, he suggested, long-term success will depend heavily upon the responsibility, engagement and leadership of its youth.
Some of the most revealing exchanges witnessed by Soysal moved beyond constitutions and elections.
Tokayev was questioned about his repeated calls for greater civic responsibility, discipline, respect and public ethics.
The President argued that national modernisation cannot be measured solely in economic growth rates or institutional reforms.
It also requires changes in behaviour and public culture.
He connected those ideas with the Taza Kazakhstan initiative, explaining that cleanliness should be understood both literally and symbolically — encompassing respect for public spaces but also ideas of dignity, moral responsibility and civic consciousness.
Perhaps the most forward-looking discussion concerned Kazakhstan’s digital ambitions.
Artificial intelligence has become a central part of Tokayev’s political and economic agenda.
Asked to assess progress in digitalisation, the President argued that Kazakhstan had already completed an important first stage in constructing a digital state by making electronic public services widely accessible.
Citizens can now carry out administrative tasks from home that once required lengthy bureaucratic procedures.
But Tokayev made clear that he regards this as only the beginning.
The next challenge, he said, is to move artificial intelligence and digital technology beyond conferences, presentations and policy documents and turn them into instruments that deliver practical economic benefits.
He highlighted entrepreneurs, farmers and regional communities as groups that should increasingly be able to use technology to improve productivity and generate income.
His message was strikingly simple: the smartphone should no longer be regarded merely as an entertainment device but as an instrument of economic opportunity.
For EU Reporter, Soysal’s participation in the presidential briefing provided something increasingly valuable in international reporting: direct access to the political decision-maker at the centre of the story.
Rather than interpreting Tokayev’s position through official statements alone, she was able to witness at first hand how the President responded when confronted with questions about political succession, institutional change, government performance and the expectations of Kazakhstan’s younger generation.
Soysal’s access is particularly significant at a moment when Kazakhstan is seeking to redefine both its domestic political institutions and its place internationally.
The country occupies an increasingly important strategic position between Europe and Asia, while its economic, energy and diplomatic relationships with the European Union continue to develop.
Understanding the direction Kazakhstan takes therefore matters well beyond its own borders.
What emerged from the presidential exchange in Astana was not simply a discussion about one election.
It was a debate about what kind of Kazakhstan should emerge from the reforms now under way.
How much influence will the new institutions exercise?
Will younger politicians genuinely reshape public life?
Can artificial intelligence translate into economic opportunity outside Kazakhstan’s major cities?
And how far will political modernisation alter the relationship between the state and its citizens?
Those questions will not be answered by one election or one presidential press briefing.
But Derya Soysal’s privileged position inside that briefing gave EU Reporter readers a valuable first-hand view of how Kazakhstan’s President himself answers them.
As the first Kurultai begins its work, the importance of the election may ultimately be judged not by the symbolism of its creation, but by what Kazakhstan’s new political institutions actually deliver.
For the moment, however, one thing is clear: the country has entered a new phase, and the political conversation about what comes next has already begun.
Derya Soysal is an EU Reporter journalist covering European and international affairs. She attended President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev’s press briefing in Astana following his vote in Kazakhstan’s first Kurultai elections.
An anti-corruption investigation reaching from Ukraine's Presidential Office into the management of state-owned Sense Bank has raised questions far beyond the alleged laundering of UAH 150 million. At stake are the governance of nationalised assets, the independence of Ukraine's anti-corruption institutions, a planned bank privatisation, an international arbitration worth more than $1 billion and Kyiv's credibility as it moves deeper into EU accession negotiations.
A week after Ukrainian anti-corruption investigators unveiled an operation carrying the improbable codename “Forrest Gump”, the affair has developed into one of the most consequential governance scandals to hit wartime Ukraine.
At its center is a deceptively simple question: Where did UAH 150 million — approximately $3.4 million — used to secure the release on bail of former Justice and Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko, a centerpiece of the biggest corruption scandal of Zelensky government, actually come from?
The answer alleged by Ukraine's National Anti-Corruption Bureau, NABU, and Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office, SAPO, is extraordinary.
Investigators say criminal proceeds under the supervision and manual management of deputy head of the Office of the president of Ukraine Iryna Mudra were converted into apparently legitimate funds through a series of companies and bank accounts. The source of the money is linked with the main suspect of another corruption scandal Timur Mindich, a close ally of president Zelensky, and the goal was to post bail for a suspect in the Operation Midas investigation into alleged corruption surrounding the state nuclear company Energoatom.
NABU's official account says members of a criminal organisation, acting with representatives and officials of a state-owned bank, arranged the laundering of UAH 150 million during June 2026. The cash was allegedly introduced into the legitimate financial system through accounts belonging to shell companies before being used for bail.
The most revealing evidence released by NABU is not just a bank transfer but Mudra’s own confessions, which give wider picture. In one recorded exchange, a female voice attributed to her says: “Corruption should be systematised and controlled… There is no need to fight it.” A male interlocutor adds: “And lead it.” This is said by one of the highest Ukrainian official in charge of judicial reform. Yet her own words are arguably more disturbing, presenting corruption not as an abuse to be eliminated but as a system to be organised and kept under political management.
Other recordings portray Mudra discussing state owned Sense Bank, where this money-loundering operation took place, as an asset to be under direct political control and used for enrichment. She recounts a proposed arrangement under which political figures politicians from Zelensky party Servant of the People would refrain from attacking the bank while “Sense Bank has to pay them”, and quotes an instruction she received from above to “take over the bank” because it contains “serious flows”. She then describes its managers as compliant figures who would carry money wherever a senior Presidential Office official instructed them, adding that they had “crawled” to her “like kittens” asking to be taken under protection.
NABU’s published recording also appear to show Mudra discussing protection from the institutions supposed to investigate such conduct. She asks how to mobilize votes for “our” candidates to NABU’s Public Oversight Council and describes SAP chief Oleksandr Klymenko as “not one of ours,” warning that if he secured a second term, “we’ll all be fucked.” Taken together, these phrases suggest something broader than participation in a single suspicious transaction: an alleged attempt to control a state-owned bank while influencing the bodies capable of investigating that control. If authenticated and confirmed in context, they would provide unusually direct evidence of political capture and consciousness of wrongdoing. Mudra denies criminal conduct and says the excerpts were released selectively and without their full context.
Revelations are shocking in many dimension and will have influence for years to come. One of the most striking revelation is usage of the state-owned Sense Bank as systemic money-laundering machine.
Sense Bank carries unusual political and legal baggage. Until 2022 it was known as Alfa-Bank Ukraine and was owned through corporate structures associated with ABH Holdings. Among the beneficial shareholders were Russian businessmen including Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven.
Ukraine subsequently imposed sanctions and, in July 2023, the government took Sense Bank into state ownership. Ukraine's Ministry of Finance says the measure was intended to maintain financial stability and protect depositors after sanctions were imposed on significant shareholders. The state today owns 100% of the bank.
It was therefore no ordinary commercial bank allegedly being exploited. It was an asset that Ukraine had taken into public ownership during wartime, in considerable part because of national-security concerns surrounding its previous ownership.
The source material examined by EU Reporter describes this as a crucial feature of the scandal: after nationalisation, the allegation is not simply that corrupt actors conducted transactions through Sense Bank, but that political influence was progressively established over the institution's governance.
That allegation remains contested and has not been established by a court. But documents released by NABU and widely reported by the Kyiv Independent and other leading Ukrainian media raise questions that are difficult for the Ukrainian authorities to ignore. The Kyiv Independent reported on 22 August that internal Nomination Committee records showed attempts to shape Sense Bank's supervisory board following nationalisation. The paper reported that Iryna Mudra, then deputy head of the Office of the President and chair of the committee involved in selecting supervisory-board members, strongly promoted Mykola Hladyshchenko for a place on the board despite objections concerning competence, potential conflicts of interest and previous employment. Hladyshchenko subsequently became chairman of the supervisory board.
The investigation also cited earlier leaked conversations in which prospective board candidates were allegedly described as “our guys”. Six people reportedly discussed in that context were subsequently appointed. EU Reporter has not independently authenticated those recordings or the leaked committee minutes, so their contents must remain attributed to the publications that obtained them.
However, now the anticorruption agencies established with support and guidance of the EU provide their findings suggesting that the bank was deliberately captured for criminal purposes. NABU says that by early June 2026 the alleged organisers had obtained de facto control of Sense Bank, enabling them to use accounts of controlled businesses in the laundering scheme. That allegation has now triggered action at the highest levels of financial regulation.
The alleged mechanics of the operation read more like a crime thriller than a banking-compliance investigation. According to the investigative material compiled in the source document and subsequent Ukrainian reporting, cash was allegedly concentrated through businesses associated with former MP and developer Maksym Mykytas before being exchanged or routed through companies capable of putting apparently legitimate non-cash funds into the banking system.
The source describes alleged deliveries of cash in bags and boxes, routing through companies including Metrobud and other entities, and discussions about how transactions could pass financial-monitoring controls.
Ukraine's anti-money-laundering regime establishes a UAH 400,000 statutory threshold for certain financial-monitoring obligations, alongside wider risk-based requirements. It would be inaccurate to suggest that every payment above UAH 400,000 is automatically prohibited; rather, banks are expected to identify, scrutinise and where necessary report transactions according to statutory and risk criteria.
The significance of the NABU allegation is therefore not simply the size of the payment. Investigators allege that people involved in the transaction were actively discussing how to overcome or circumvent compliance barriers. Published recordings attributed to members of the alleged group include discussion of a Sense Bank compliance official who could prevent the transaction. Mudra in one recording says that she received demand “from above” to fire a bank official who refuse to clear transaction. The scheme released by NABU paint a shocking picture: to make the transfer the bank's automated monitoring arrangements were temporarily taken out of operation during the transaction.
Those are NABU allegations presented to the court. But the Ukrainian government has already treated them seriously enough to take immediate action. This confirms that NABU accusations are well grounded.
On 19 August, the Cabinet suspended supervisory-board chairman Mykola Hladyshchenko for six months and initiated the suspension of management-board chairman Oleksii Stupak. The Finance Ministry explicitly said that its intervention was designed to address risks including the possible use of Sense Bank for money laundering and inadequate oversight of AML procedures.
The following day, National Bank of Ukraine Governor Andriy Pyshnyi went further. The NBU concluded that Hladyshchenko no longer satisfied the statutory independence requirements for membership of the supervisory board and opened proceedings to examine the collective suitability of the entire board. On 21 August, the government terminated Hladyshchenko's powers altogether. This regulatory reaction matters because it turns the episode from an allegation concerning individual criminal behaviour into a potential failure of corporate governance and banking supervision.
Sense Bank itself has said it is cooperating with the authorities. Following the NABU searches, the bank said it wanted the circumstances established “fully and objectively” and was providing investigators with the information required under legal procedures.
But the key question is different. There have been already multiple accusations of usage of nationalised Sense bank for allegedly corrupt or shadow schemes. NABU revelation did not come from nowhere and were not a separate incidental case. In previous NABU and journalistic investigations shocking facts of how bank has been used were presented. How was it possible that in time of war after nationalisation of one of the biggest banks it could turn into money-laundering machine?
The highest-profile suspect is Iryna Mudra. Mudra served as deputy head of the Office of the President and held responsibility for major legal and judicial-policy issues, including international mechanisms concerning Russian aggression and frozen Russian assets. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy dismissed her on 19 August. Presidential Decree No. 734/2026 confirms the dismissal but does not give a reason. NABU and SAPO served Mudra with a notice of suspicion. On 25 August, Ukraine's High Anti-Corruption Court ordered her held in custody for 60 days while allowing release if UAH 20 million bail is posted. Prosecutors had requested considerably higher bail.
Mudra denies criminal wrongdoing. She has argued that the published recordings have been presented selectively and out of context. Through her lawyers, she has said that she is cooperating with investigators and is prepared to answer their questions through the proper legal process. The underlying source document expressly records those objections and cautions concerning the provenance and quality of some recordings.
On 24 August President Zelenskyy said the anti-corruption bodies had “no questions” for him regarding the investigation.
There is another legal dimension. Former shareholder ABH Holdings commenced ICSID arbitration against Ukraine after the 2023 nationalisation, seeking more than $1 billion and alleging unlawful expropriation. UNCTAD records the dispute as ABH v Ukraine, ICSID Case No. ARB/24/1, concerning the former ownership of Alfa-Bank/Sense Bank. A separate proceeding, EMIS v Ukraine, also concerns alleged unlawful expropriation of Sense Bank.
The government's 2023 decision was taken in the context of sanctions and financial-stability considerations. Whether it complied with the relevant investment treaties is a matter for international tribunals, not for a criminal investigation conducted three years later. Nevertheless, evidence about how the asset was governed after nationalisation could become relevant contextual material in those proceedings.
ABH's case alleges that the taking of Sense Bank was unlawful. Ukraine will defend the nationalisation on its own legal and national-security grounds. A subsequent allegation that politically connected actors exploited the nationalised institution does not answer that legal dispute, but it could make the factual history of the asset considerably more uncomfortable for Kyiv. The source analysis supplied to EU Reporter correctly identifies this potential intersection. Forrest Gump can raise a question about bad faith in the original nationalisation and the consequences might go much further than a bail for one allegedly corrupt official.
And the cherry on the top: Mudra was also one of the officials responsible for formulating and publicly defending Ukraine’s position against ABH Holdings, the former owner of Sense Bank, in its more than $1 billion ICSID claim over the bank’s nationalisation; she later chaired Ukraine’s delegation in other major international proceedings. This creates a particularly damaging contradiction: an official who defended the takeover as a lawful national-security and financial-stability measure is now accused of helping place the same bank under political control and use it to launder criminal proceeds. The allegations do not by themselves prove that the 2023 nationalisation was unlawful, but they seriously undermine the factual and moral credibility of Ukraine’s case and offer ABH a powerful argument that the bank was not transferred into genuinely independent state management, but into a system vulnerable to political capture.
Forrest Gump is not an isolated investigation. Its roots reach into Operation Midas, NABU's investigation into alleged large-scale corruption at state nuclear operator Energoatom. NABU says Midas uncovered a criminal structure involved in substantial corruption and subsequent money laundering. Later investigative developments have continued into 2026.
The Forest Gump allegations concern money ultimately used as bail for an individual implicated in that wider investigation. This changes the character of the alleged conduct. If prosecutors prove their case, it would mean that money generated through criminal activity was not merely hidden or spent. It was allegedly recycled back into the criminal-justice system itself to secure the liberty of another suspect.
And here we come to the point vitally important for Brussels.
Ukraine formally opened negotiations on the EU's Fundamentals cluster on 15 June 2026. That cluster includes the judiciary, fundamental rights, justice and security, public procurement and financial control. Crucially, it is the first cluster opened and the last to close, and the European Commission has made clear that progress under it determines the overall pace of accession negotiations.
Ukraine is simultaneously receiving extraordinary financial support from the European Union. The Ukraine Facility provides up to €50 billion between 2024 and 2027, and support is tied to democratic mechanisms, the rule of law, sound financial management, anti-corruption safeguards and reform commitments.
The issue for Brussels is therefore not whether corruption exists in Ukraine. No serious accession process operates on the assumption that candidate countries are free of corruption.
The more important test is whether institutions can discover it, investigate it, prosecute it and correct the governance failures that allowed it without political obstruction. Viewed from that perspective, Forrest Gump presents two competing narratives. The negative interpretation is obvious: people occupying some of the highest positions in the Ukrainian state are alleged to have manipulated a nationalised bank and circumvented controls to launder criminal proceeds.
The more positive institutional interpretation is that Ukraine's own anti-corruption agencies investigated them, published evidence, served suspicion notices, triggered removals at a state bank and brought one of the country's most senior former presidential officials before an independent anti-corruption court.
Which narrative ultimately prevails will depend heavily on what happens next.
Parliamentary elections on 23 August completed the formation of Kazakhstan’s new legislature — the Kurultai — the central element of the country’s renewed political system following constitutional reform. Seven political parties took part in the vote. Turnout stood at 74%.
The first convocation of the Kurultai has cemented the completion of the institutional transition and marked the country’s entry into a new political cycle.
The decisive factor enabling this far-reaching transformation of the political system has been President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev’s consistent course toward democratic renewal in Kazakhstan.
It was within this framework that constitutional amendments were initiated, the role of representative institutions expanded, political competition strengthened, and powers redistributed among the branches of government.
For European partners this carries particular significance: it demonstrates that the institutional overhaul was not ad hoc but systematic and phased, grounded in political will and a long-term reform strategy.
For the European Union, Kazakhstan remains one of its key partners in Eurasia, primarily in the domains of energy, logistics, and raw materials.
The renewal of the institutional system enhances the predictability of engagement — a quality of particular importance for long-term European projects.
Energy Cooperation and Market Transformation
Energy continues to form one of the central pillars of Kazakhstan–EU relations.
Institutional stabilisation after the elections strengthens the durability of the contractual framework in the energy sector, while the new legislative structure facilitates the coordination of long-term economic initiatives.
Special emphasis is placed on the development of the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, which the EU regards as a strategic alternative to traditional trade arteries.
A stable institutional environment increases the investment attractiveness of these projects.
The formation of the Kurultai creates a more transparent decision-making system, thereby reducing regulatory risks for European partners.
This is reflected in:
•growing investment activity;
The 23 August elections have concluded the phase of institutional renewal in Kazakhstan and opened the period of practical implementation of reforms. For the European Union, this means a more predictable foundation for cooperation with Kazakhstan in the key spheres of energy, raw materials, and transport infrastructure. Kazakhstan enters a new political cycle with an updated institutional system, reinforcing its position as a strategic partner of the EU in Eurasia.
The Central Election Commission announced preliminary results of the elections for deputies of the Kurultai of the Republic of Kazakhstan, which took place on 23 August, reports a correspondent for the Kazinform agency.
According to preliminary data, the Adilet party received 6,528,948 votes, or 71.17%. The National Social Democratic Party received 469,058 votes, or 5.11%.
The Green Party "Baytak" received 97,751 votes, or 1.07%, the People's Party of Kazakhstan - 285,395 votes, or 3.11%.
The Auyl party received 574,621 votes, or 6.26%. The Ak Zhol Democratic Party of Kazakhstan received 478,083 votes, or 5.21%, and the Respublica party received 509,631 votes, or 5.56%.
In addition, 2.51% of voters voted against all.
Earlier, Kazakhstan announced the results of exit polls on preliminary vote counts for the Kurultai elections.
After a deadly “derecho” storm and flash floods slammed the midwest in early August, downing trees and power lines, tens of thousands of residents in and around Gary, Indiana have been surviving without power for 12 days and counting. According to the Associated Press, “Northern Indiana Public Service Co. said 68,000 customers were still without power as of Thursday morning, the majority of them in Lake County beside the Illinois border. The utility said it has restored power to 306,500 others since Aug. 11. But power is not expected to be fully restored until Tuesday [Aug. 25] in some places, including Gary.” In this urgent episode of Working People, we speak with a panel of residents and community leaders about the ongoing blackout in Gary and the conditions that led to this avoidable national tragedy. Panelists include: GlenEva Dunham, president of the Gary Teachers Union, AFT Local 4; Freida Graves, Project Director at the faith-based nonprofit Families Anchored in Total Harmony (FAITH) CDC; and Reverend John Jackson, Pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ.
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The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we are in Gary, Indiana with an urgent update on the ongoing nightmare tens of thousands of residents are living through after having to survive 10 days without power as of this recording. And we’re recording on Saturday, August 22nd. So yesterday, the Associated Press reported this. “In Gary, Indiana, schools remain closed after the deadly August 11th storm down trees and power lines. Residents turned to social media to find open laundromats and working wifi while others sought food, diapers, and cleaning wipes for low income neighbors. Meanwhile, heavy rains in central Ohio brought flash flooding that covered roadways Thursday morning in Columbus, the state capitol, where emergency crews rescued motorists from stranded cars and saved a 12-year-old boy who was swept off a bridge.
Northern Indiana public service companies said that 68,000 customers were still without power as of Thursday morning, the majority of them in Lake County besides the Illinois border. The utility said it has restored power to 306,500 others since August 11th, but power is not expected to be fully restored until Tuesday in some places, including Gary. Like Baltimore, Gary is a majority Black town that has been through and is going through a lot. And it is frankly a national disgrace and a moral outrage that it isn’t a bigger news story and a national emergency that an entire chunk of the country and tens of thousands of our neighbors have just been living in darkness for 10 days and counting. And the stories that I’ve been seeing and hearing from working people in Gary are so strikingly and unbearably similar to the stories that I’ve been seeing and hearing from working people in Cuba who are being strangled by the oil blockade imposed by our own government.
It is all just devastating and horrifying and it’s unacceptable. And working people are being crushed and abandoned and they need help. And people in and around Gary, Indiana need help right now. And I’m really grateful to be joined today by three guests who are going to help us understand what is happening, what is and isn’t being done, and what you can do to help. Please introduce yourselves to our listeners and tell them what is happening, what you are seeing around you, what you and your community need, and what they can do to help.
Freida Graves:
Hi, good afternoon. My name is Freida Graves. I’m a lifelong resident of Gary, Indiana. I am director of Food as Medicine for Faith CDC and a member of Progressive Community Church. What I see going on and what I feel went on, this is unprecedented. We’ve never had this kind of damage from the derecho tornado that hit, the land-based tornado that hit. For my prospect, there are certainly things that could have been done to prepare ourselves for this kind of weather event that we felt was coming. For our part, our church is solar. So at our point, we knew that at some point, and we have a solar backup battery. We’ve been fearing that for 10 years because we knew at some point as the weather changed, the weather events were going to get worse and worse. And we’d been speaking about this for years, probably to deaf ears, but some people pay attention to the environmental people pay attention, but the people that need to pay attention and make some changes could have previously done so had they listened.
But right now, I’m not saying we’re the end all be all, but I am saying that there’s some things that we could have done to prepare ourselves a little bit better. Now, as for the second part with the trees down and the poles down, I definitely think NIPSCO could have did a better job over the years of maintaining some of that. Some of this could have been avoided with some maintenance and paying attention. Gary was named Tree City several times. So to let you know how many trees we have and how many old trees and how many trees that are native and not native. I do think that some of this could have been possibly avoided had NYPSCO over the years, maintained it and kept up with what was going on, cutting down the trees that need to be cut down and maintaining the wires and the base.
So I’m not going to say total blame is with NIPSCO because it’s a lot of things that Gary sometimes gets ignored on certain things. But I do think with my mindset, they could have absolutely done a better job and we probably would not be in a position. We might’ve had some outages, but not to the point we have now. My power’s not on after 11 or 12 days. And everybody can afford generators. And we have senior buildings where today our church for two days has been passing out water and household supplies and all these kind of things like that for people that are coming down. Yesterday we did over a thousand people. Today I sent $500 worth of stuff to senior buildings. That’s just one senior building that has no air conditioning, no power, and the people are suffering. So from my point, I think things could have been done better on NIPSCO.
And I think for the mayor and administration, yes, they’re trying to get out there and work, but he can’t do it alone. It has to be NIPSCO. It has to be downstate. It has to be all these things that are regulated and made to be better. So I’ve been trying to keep positive. That’s why we’re doing the giveaways. That’s why we’re doing everything we did. Yesterday was 12 hours today. I’ve been out here 10 hours doing giveaways and sending them to seniors apartments. So because all of us are coming together here, churches, faith-based organizations, people are coming together. That’s what’s made everything better. That’s why we kept maintaining our positive spirit because people are coming together and moving together and working together. Thank you pastor for letting me go. And thank you, Ms. GlenEva, for letting me go. I’m going to have to go back outside, but things definitely could have been done better if they had maintained these trees and poles and all these things.
And I thank you for that. Let me be on the show and everyone have a blessed
GlenEva Dunham:
Day. All right, I’m GlenEva Dunham, president of Gary Teachers Union, AFT Local Number four, also president of State Federation of AFT in Indiana. When the tornado or the storm came on the August 11th, we were in school. And so our whole focus was trying to get the children out safely, and we were successful in that, and that was great. All of our schools, we have 10 buildings. They have been down with power. Right now, six of our schools do have power. So we plan on going back into the buildings on Monday, but no students. Four of our buildings will go into our career center and they will just do some professional development and just getting ourselves together before we bring the students in. So what I’m finding about the whole situation, so School City has been feeding the children. We’ve been having drive through lunches every day since school has been out, and that’s been a great thing to make sure they’re fed.
The city opened up the YWCA where a lot of our children have been going, and that has been a 24-hour service. And a lot of our teachers have been to the YWCA and have found some of their students and able to give them work as well. And so that’s been the focal point. Mayor Melton, we’re good friends. We worked together when he was a senator, getting our schools back. Our schools were taken over by the state. And so he’s been working really, really hard. Social media has really been hard on him, but he’s really been working really, really hard. And so I’m proud of the administration. I’m proud of our city. I’ve been driving around. I’ve been here at Gary all my life. I’ve worked all over because I’ve worked in many schools. I’ve been teaching 48 years, and I’ve really seen the devastation. I’ve never seen anything like it.
As far as the comparison with the neighboring communities, are they getting their service sooner than us? It looks like they are, but I know that Gary has more square footage than any of our regional cities, East Chicago, Hammond. Matter of fact, I’m the state fair president. I have 27 locals and 10 of my locals are right here. Lake Station, Porter County, East Chicago, Hammond, Whiting, Griffin, all of those are my locals. So I’ve been in touch with all of them. And also, there was devastation on the south end of our state, which is not really included, but me being a State Fair president, they had a lot of flooding down there. So they didn’t get it like we got it, but they got it pretty bad. But I’m proud of the city. I’m proud of, like Frida said, people coming together. Now that the folks have got a word about it, people are coming from all over the country and helping us.
And so sometimes bad things happen, but in bad things, good things can come out of that. And that’s what I’m seeing, and that’s what I’m hoping. And I’m praying that we all get our power on. I mean, 10 days for us was hard. We did have a generator, but still when the lights came on, Reverend Jackson, I though I was in heaven. It was so bright. I was so happy. So I’m saying I’m a positive person. And so it’s been a lot of back and forth about on social media, should you be positive? Can you express your feelings? Can you say what you think about the administration or whatever? But at the end of the day, we’re going to get through this because I lean on big shoulders. I always go back to my ancestry. Our ancestors, they went through a lot of stuff. And so we have to go back and think about how did they get over?
And we also have to put God in the picture. We can’t just leave God out and think that he’s forgot all about Gary Indiana because I’ll never believe that. So I believe that we’re going to get through this. I’m praying that it won’t be Tuesday because if it’s Tuesday, a lot of people will lose all hope because that’s just too, too long. The mayor was kind of a positive this morning saying that he hope he got the message through on the front page of the Post Tribune, our daily paper. Bron, the governor was on the headlines pushing NIPSCO to do better. And so like I say, I’m seeing a lot of trucks, so I’m just hoping that we’ll get our power before Tuesday.
Rev. John Jackson:
I’m John Jackson and I pastor the Trinity UCC congregation in the great city of Gary, Indiana. I also write a column in the Gary Crusader spiritual column that connects spirituality. I try to show the merging of the secular and the sacred in those columns. And I’m framing this this way as kind of a Katrina 2.0. Gary and Northwest Indiana, from my vantage point, are experiencing a Katrina moment. And as we know, the hurricane that hit in 2005, it did massive destruction. But what it really did in addition to that was pull the covers off, as I think Gleneva was saying, pull the covers off of the lack of maintenance in New Orleans for the levees. As the levees broke, it showed that in the working people’s area of Black, brown and poor whites, what they had been dealing with all along. And so it pulled the covers off of the same thing I see happening here in Gary, Indiana and Northwest Indiana.
Bulgaria, Indiana in particular because it is an older city, if not the oldest city. And as Friday said, it’s a lot of space, a lot of area. And as Gleneba pointed out, there’s a lot of trees. And what it showed is that the maintenance on the trees really had not been done. And so NPSCO has not been faithful in doing the maintenance, which it would have lessened the effect of trees falling on wires and then power outages. And so that’s one issue. But then it opens up the other issue of the rate hike. NPSCO just got a rate hike. And so when you look at that, and now you’ll hear some of the executives talking about how much money it costs for this, how much money it costs for that, well, those things don’t line up together. Then you put in, and I’m staying on the area of rates right now, because there is this legislation called Construction Work in Progress.
And what that legislation allows NIPSCO to do is bill customers for work they plan to do in the future. So that’s part of our bill. And I don’t understand how you bill somebody for something that you’re not doing right now. I don’t understand how that goes. The other part is that if a tree falls on the wire and the wire connected to your house pulls your meter out, my understanding is that the resident has to hire an electrician to affix and get that meter back. Then NPSCO comes out, connects to power.
There’s some disconnect here, there’s some problem here. And with that, in this time, there are not all electricians, but there are some that see the opportunity to gouge people. So there’s a need for electrical engineers and electricians who are honest and who will take care of that. And in fact, it’s really NPSCO’s responsibility, in my humble opinion. I was in a meeting that Good Mayor Melton had called on Thursday with a couple of NIPSCO executives, the president of NIPSCO, and I think the vice president or something of night source. And so he had leaders in the community, political leaders, religious leaders, grassroots persons, civic organizations were in the room. And so one of the things that was said by the NIPSCO executives is that they’re not coming on your property to trim the tree. And my thought was, “Well, if I give you permission to do that, you should be doing that ahead of time.
But when the tree falls on the wire, you got to come in there anyway.” So these things have exacerbated this moment where you have people who have been sitting. My church is still without power. People have been sitting in hot homes and apartments for 11 days now. And when the first estimates of restoration came out, Gary wasn’t on the list. Now, this is in conjunction with a tornado that came through in June that did massive destruction and a lot of the same things were happening that we’re experiencing now. So there are people that have been recovering from that. And then you have this now and this extended delay in restoring power. I know that ComEd in Illinois has more people, but still, I don’t understand why Gary is always last on the list to get restored. So after the meeting Thursday that Mayor Melton had called with the executive, then they said that very night we’re going to put a new list of days and times for power to get back on.
Once again, Gary last on the list with the prospect of being restored on Tuesday. Why does Gary always have to take the backseat for other areas? And knowing that it’s an older city and the infrastructure needs restored, how come the infrastructure was not taken care of five years ago? Three years ago? How come they haven’t been working all day? These are questions that I’m just relating questions that persons in my own congregation are raising. And then again, people have lost food. And so we do a lot of food giveaways. So as best we can without power, we’ll get food and we have to give it away right away. But people without food and without just the ability to have decency and hygiene, everybody’s not able to have generators. And those that have generators has spent close to a fortune in getting gas for it in 11 days.
And so what compensation will NIPSCO offer? Here’s another question I’m getting from a congregation. So for 11 days, there’s been no power. Why do we got to pay a bill? Why isn’t a moratorium on paying a bill for the next month or two? Because the objective in a transaction is that if I pay my money, then I’m going to get the goods or the service in return. Now, if I pay my money and I don’t get those goods and services, then I’m expecting that there’s going to be some compensation that will help reduce the difficulty that I’ve been placed in because you don’t have the ability to provide what I’m paying for. So these are questions that I’m just fueling for my congregation with what happened in June and then now and this extended thing and all of the excuses that we have now. It was a massive storm.
It was unprecedented. But as I think GlenEva pointed out, we’ve known for years now that the tornado alley has been shifting because of climate change. That means I know the executive of NIPSCO have been apprised of that too. So therefore there is been opportunity to beef up the infrastructure that can help reduce the level of challenge that people are facing.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I appreciate y’all so much for laying that out for me and our listeners, all of us. It’s really helpful information, even if it’s hard to hear. You’re right. It’s like the echoes of Katrina are just so loud and like Katrina and not just Katrina. I mean, I’ve been going around to places all over this country where working people are experiencing toxic explosions, constant pollution, or huge blackouts like this, or they’re being locked out of their jobs at poisonous facilities. I was just interviewing the BP workers over in Whiting who have been locked out of their jobs for five months. And for listeners, we’re talking about the same area that’s all right around the same area. And so I wanted to hook that into a question. Pastor Jackson, you were laying out the conditions that set Gary up for failure. The conditions that weren’t addressed by the company to mitigate the vulnerabilities that were there in case a major storm hit and certainly prepared for an emergency if this many people are without power.
How the hell are they going to get help? How are we going to reimburse them for the costs and how are we going to make this right? That’s a question that I think is on everyone’s mind right now. But I wanted to hook that into the conditions of Gary itself and life for working people in Gary as well. I wanted to ask if you guys could say, because Gleneva, you’re president of the teacher’s union, and we interview working people in education and all over the place, including BP oil workers in Whiting, Indiana, because we just talk to people about their lives, their jobs. And what we hear from folks is life’s getting harder. We’re working longer for less. Schools are more packed or they’re under-resourced. So that also makes our communities vulnerable to these kinds of catastrophes. I mean that also amplifies the burden that poor and working people have to bear in an economy that’s already asking them to bear too much.
And so I wanted to ask if you could just also help listeners understand what working people in and around Gary have been going through up until this as well. Are they making enough money? Is the air safe to breathe? How are people doing before a catastrophe like this hits?
GlenEva Dunham:
We have to remember, we go back about maybe about two months ago, NISCO was on strike. And I don’t know if you know that, Mr. Alvarez, that they were on strike. I was on the picket line with them and it was for working conditions. And I believe some years ago they did lay off 200 linemen. And so they’re working short-staffed. I sit on the board of the AFL CIO and one of my brothers, he just retired 35 years with NISCO. So he came on Facebook and did a diagram of how the process goes, how the trees and all of this. And then I want to say a couple of things about what Reverend Jackson said. So Mayor Milton did say that the governor, I did get a copy of his declaration because my whole thing was getting my teachers and my paraprofessionals paid. Although we didn’t work, we have in our contract, if it’s anything beyond our control, we get paid.
So that’s part of our working conditions. But there’s a $5,000 per household from the government if you can produce receipts, which is going to be hard because my husband’s been getting gas every night, but the gas stations haven’t had receipts. So that’s going to be hard from your food, if you have receipts from food that you threw away also. And we also have a foundation called the Legacy Foundation where they’re going to help with those monitors or meters that Reverend Jackson is talking about too. So I’m just trying to say there aren’t things working in our favor as far as things that’s not working in our favor. So working conditions, I mean schools, Gary schools were taking over for five years. We just got our schools back last year. This is the second year we’ve been out of state takeover. Then Mayor Melton was Senator Melton, and he was very instrumental in getting our school corporations back.
And it was all about money, but then that’s all about the state. I’m a State Federation president as well. The formula for funding, public education is like trash. Indiana has a, what, $4 billion surplus. And so always people talk about Indiana, I always just say, “Hey, Mike Pitce was our governor.” So it’s always about them being conservative, fiscal, so they can get on Trump’s bandwagon. Bron is, I call him baby Trump. So we’re not getting services. He just passed a law where his children won’t get fed next summer in summer programs, didn’t get fed this summer. When churches have their programs, they usually can rely on the government to bring in lunches. So all of that has been snatched away from us. So yeah, all of that. Big government, NPSCO, people talk about the monopoly. People have said we need another company. NPSCO has been around since I’ve been born, so I don’t even know how that works.
I know it’s all about big money, money talks. But working conditions, like I said, NPSCO was on the picket line. They went back in, their clericals stayed out because they didn’t get. But from my understanding, they really didn’t get what they were out there about, but they just came on back in. Well, BP Amico, theirs was much different. They’re trying to take insurance, everything. They’re trying to strip them and still, still trying to. So they had a bigger fight. So that’s a picture of economics and education. And Gary is always just, people look down on us. I thought Richard Hatcher was the greatest mayor ever, but if you listen to people talk, the detriment to our city started with him. But then it was about the black and white thing. We had the big convention here, the Black convention in West Side, and that’s when we gave the platform for Black America to go forth.
And a lot of people got elected after that. And so that’s on Gary. And then we had the great white flight. I was part of the integration movement. I lived in the projects, was bused to Glen Park, which is our white part of town back in the day where they thought that was better for us. So I mean, it’s a lot of history in Gary about why we are where we are. But I like to think about in the moment. In the moment, I sit on the Redevelopment Commission now appointed by the mayor. I finished one term. We have a lot going on. I hate this happened, but I just see it as a bigger picture. We have Glenn Robinson, one of our NBA players, he just donated $100,000. He did not cancel the Jackson weekend. So I’m sure they’re coming in town. I mean, we had the premier of that movie here.
So that second generation of Jacksons are friends with our mayor. So I can’t, being a union leader, I have to look at it on a positive because I deal with kids. I taught kindergarten for 31 years, so you have to be positive. And so that’s where I am. And I get it. I know the history of Gary. I know Hurricane Katrina. I saw all of that. But still where I sit, I have to think that better days are coming. We’re going to get through this because I’ve never seen what I’ve seen. I’ve never seen all these people coming together. A 18-wheeler truck out of Tree of Life. My husband just left from over there and people on Facebook saying what they got, Pampers and all that. I mean, lay people, a lot of my teachers who got little organizations, nonprofits, they’re meeting on corners, giving out supplies.
I just think it’s going to get better. I see in my own neighborhood, my husband is 80. I see the young man, they helped him pull his choke on his generator. They helped him get his generator fixed. So I’m seeing that in our communities and our communities have always come together in hard times. And I’ve seen it year after year after year. And so that’s what I’m relying on. Yeah, we got to get to the core of what happened. I believe Eddie, he reached across the aisles. He knows how to work with the people across the aisles. That’s how we got things that we’re getting now. That’s how we got all this money for demolition of the blight. Things are going down, things are coming up. So he’s a smart man. And so I put my money on him any day. No matter what anybody says, I know his heart, I know his spirit.
I know like attracts like people coming to our city because tomorrow Jamal Bryant will be here from Atlanta. My son is talking about the Keith B or whoever his name is. I don’t know him, but my son is 33 and that’s exciting. The young folks, the other young folks want to come and do stuff for us. And so I’m looking at it like that. I’m passionate about all of this, but I was out with power for 11 days too. And so I had no ideas. And I got senior citizens, I got retired teachers who I’m looking at. I’m like, how much more can they take? And so I’m glad Reverend Jackson was in on that meeting. I know my superintendent was there, and I know they put a word down in ISCO. And I’m just, like I said, 20 new trucks in our neighborhood. So I don’t know if I answered the question, but there you go.
Rev. John Jackson:
Yeah. GlenEva really set the stage when she went over the challenges Gary has had. Another framing point I tend to use is historically, Gary is similar to what happened in Haiti. When Haiti in 1804 was the first nation to liberate itself from oppression and servitude to France, it sent shock waves throughout the hemisphere. And after that, France, America, Britain has been punishing Haiti ever since, to the point of even forcing Haiti to pay restitution and reparations to have the unmitigated gall to declare that they’re human beings and would not be subjugated. But the people in Haiti are resilient people. They are a positive people. They are hopeful people, which is why they have been able to endure some horrific conditions that have been forced upon them. Like you mentioned And Cuba and how Cuba’s being strangled by this country as we speak. And so Gary has been under attack ever since.
It had the unmitigated gall to declare that Black folk know how to run stuff too and elected Mayor Richard Gordon Hatcher. And so that is when the vicious attack came from downstate in Indiana and then from after the Carter administration, then from the national government. And so the resilient and prideful and strong people of Gary have been enduring this for all of these years. So that’s part of the backdrop of it.
The federal dollars and all of the corporate dollars have not flowed in over the years. So people have had to use gum and duck and everything to put things together and have done a pretty admirable job. But the fact of the matter is we pay taxes and those taxes are supposed to go to making sure that working class people, poor people can have life with dignity. And so one of the other challenges that has been already lifted up is there has been not enough attention to Gary in this moment. This is an incredible moment in the sense that an unprecedented storm comes through and does massive damage and you don’t have national news. Now, Gleneva mentioned that Pastor Jamal Bryant is coming and then there are a lot of social media folk that are moving and using their resources. I’m getting calls from all over Chicago and whatnot because I work with an organization that’s a social justice organization, the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference.
And so there’s mobilization among people, grassroots organizations, everyday people, residents, helping their neighbors get through, cutting down trees so that they can get it off of people’s cars and help folk get the trees off their houses as much as possible, getting the streets clear as much as possible. Of course, folk do this in crisis because of their resiliency and their strength and their love for living and humanity. But the fact of the matter is we shouldn’t have to bear this burden like this. We shouldn’t have to bear the neglect that has happened. It’s not just NIPSCO. It is broader than that. And the line workers for NYPSCO, the people that are going out, getting on the poles and all of that, these people are working hard. They’re working. So it’s not about them. It’s about the institution itself. Because what we’re talking about is institutional.
You were talking about predatory capitalism, these things. So that’s why from this spiritual as a pastor vantage point, I see my faith and as a follower of Jesus Christ who also was a community organizer against the empire of Rome so that he could create an alternative community against the predatory nature of the Roman Empire, which had created society of oppression for people extracting from them profit and not caring about people. And so this is where the vantage point that I come from and therein is the hope because people are going to resist. People are going to build. People are going to help each other get together. But my focus is, okay, the lights are going to come back on. We can’t go back to business as usual. And a lot of people, all of us, you get happy when the light comes on. And again, that’s another metaphor for the light of our faith.
We get joy when the light comes back on, but the light also brings heat. And that heat then has to be applied so that we don’t get to this point again so that we can have a utility company that works better for the people. Now, I really hope that the executives have been listening and hearing the people so that they can take back the changes that need to be made. We’ll see. But we have to not allow the moment to just die down.
We got to keep pushing so that Gary can get the attention and the resources and the work that needs to be done so that again, there’s going to be another storm. It could be another storm in another few days. We are in this season of storms. Now, if things go the way they have been going, we’re going to do this again. And this is something we can’t do. It shows again, it covers all that there’s some stuff that needs to be done to strengthen. One of the executives, because the question was ask, well, how come the wires, the lines are not underground? There are places in Northwest Indiana where the lines are underground. They experience less outages than other places where the wires are on top of the ground. Well, the executive said it costs 10 times more to do that than to do what they’re doing right now.
I understand that, but NIPSCO is recording record profits. I’m going to leave it at that.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I’m not because I’m like, they’re recording record profits and they’re saying it’s costing more to put the lines underground. And what they’re also saying is that that cost is less tolerable to us than the cost of tens of thousands of people going two weeks without power. That is what they’re saying is that costs, they could pay that cost, but they would rather working people, poor people, regular people bear that cost ourselves of their negligence. We are bearing the costs not just of their negligence, but of their profits. Those profits come in our expense. I don’t know if you could get a more clear cut example than this. Record profits for the same company while people that pay for their service are left without power for 10, 11 days and counting. So sorry, I’m just so fired up and frustrated about all of this. I was even going to say, well, we got to wrap up, but no way we can wrap up on that because I wanted to give y’all just one more chance to hop in because I appreciate you so much for your time.
I know I got to let you go, but I wanted to ask if you could just finish with any final messages you have for listeners about what they can do to help folks in Gary now and what advice you have to them about how they can put that lesson into practice Reverend Jackson spoke of, that there’s a lot of work that needs to be done to make sure that this kind of catastrophe doesn’t happen again or keep happening or keep getting worse every time the news cycle resets.
GlenEva Dunham:
I just want to say, if this is going to our Gary residents, first and foremost, we have to vote. We have to vote. Our voting record is dismal. So we have to get involved. We can’t just wait until crisis and things like that to want to come out. We have to get involved. We have to go to the meetings. We have activists like Carolyn McCrady herself who they have meetings all the time and they call the NPSCO execs to the meetings. And those meetings are not attended by the people who are in line right now. And I know sometimes it’s hard to get to meetings and stuff, but we have to become aware of what’s going on to us. So we just got to put our voice out there. That’s number one. Number two, I know the city has on their website, they have all kind of paid.
They have set up a fund. So there’s people because a lot of people are talking, a lot of people have platforms, and we are suffering. Some people are suffering and need help. And so if you can’t get to Gary, there are places where you can do donations and make sure that the donations get where they need to be. One of them is a legacy foundation that is a not-for-profit in our community.
Just continue to pray for us because I believe in the power of prayer. Tomorrow is Sunday. If you are gathering and worshiping, make sure Gary is spoken out loud, that you pray for us, that we get our power on, and that also we pray for folk like CEOs. We can’t forget them. We need to pray that their hearts are touched, that they would do a better job of the people who keep them living. Like Reverend Jackson said, we pay their salaries. And that’s where we fight all the time as a union leader. We have to tell the people we are taxpayers. These schools, that’s a whole nother thing, they belong to us. So we have to let people know that we are taxpayers and we do know how to protest. And Reverend Jackson again is good at that. His church is Afrocentric and they are a cornerstone in our community.
So we just want you to keep us in your prayers financially if you can, because it’s going to take a lot. I have a neighbor across the street who’s waiting, he has a tree in his yard, and he said that he’s in the queue. We have a 311 that you put your name in there, but I don’t think that they’re going to get his tree out his yard. I don’t think that he’s going to have to get somebody to do that. And I know financially he probably can’t. And so come to the community, get online, see some of the people who are talking, DM them, see what they need, the schools, all of us. So just offer us the assistance that you can.
Rev. John Jackson:
Frida and Gleniva, they are examples of ordinary people who just love God and who love our people and who love to be of service to people, just ordinary people who take on these roles because they want to help people’s lives be better. They are replicated by hundreds of thousands in Gary, Indiana. And so that just gives you an idea of the quality of people that we have. I forgot to mention when you asked about what has the residential Gary had to put up with. I work with a group called GUARD, Gary Advocates for Responsible Development. And just a couple of months ago, we had a town hall meeting dealing with the steel mill, US Steel that has been purchased by Nippon Steel, Japanese company. The town hall was about challenging Nippon Steel who pledged something like $4 billion when they purchased Gary as investments and challenging them to use funds to update the blast furnaces from the toxic furnaces they have to the clean steel.
Because that’s another issue in Gary because of the steel mill, because of a lot of factories and things like that, which there’s a high rate of health problems from breathing problems to cancer. It is a high rate because of this. So you’ve got this going on and now you got this going on. It is a heavyweight to carry. So one of the things that going forward, there is no Citizens Action Coalition for Gary, CAC, which help monitor to help put some accountability to NPSCO. So that’s one thing that needs to happen, that the Citizen Action Coalition would get established. And as Gleneba pointed out, prayer is always necessary because that’s the engine that drives us, that’s the connection that gives us strength because we are a believing people. But also going forward, the right attention and not always trying to find a negative and magnifying it.
Every community has negatives in it, but there has been campaigns to try to magnify a few negatives and not look at the great work and the great citizens of this great city. And so we need more persons like yourself, Brother Alvarez and others and the national attention to point out what actually is missing here. What is not being provided in this city of 60,000 plus people and the needs that they have from the schools to. And we can, as Laniba said, these are other areas that we could have a whole show on. Because again, it comes down to we are taxpayers and our taxes should be used to make sure that life is better. It should not be profit over people. It should not be price over principle. It should not be money over meeting. It should not be those things. And so from the federal government to corporations on down, we need more of the attention to point out that people are enduring and they’ve got joy, but they shouldn’t have to bear the burden alone.
That’s why we pay taxes. And voting, yes, voting is connected to these things. Voting is connected and we have to exercise. It’s one tool in the toolbox, but like a good carpenter, you use all the tools in the toolbox. So voting is important.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank all of our guests from Gary, Indiana. GlenEva Dunham, president of the Gary Teachers Union, Freida Graves, Project Director at Faith Farms, and Reverend John Jackson, Pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring about this. We do this work for you and we cannot do it without you. Working People is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and The Real News Network. This show is produced by the great Jules Taylor and is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network because we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of working people’s struggles around the US and across the world.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Check out our great podcasts like Under the Shadow and the Marc Steiner Show, and connect with us on social media and get updates on our reporting there. And please help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter now. It really, really does make a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.
The Council of State annulled operating licenses for three private universities in Greece, following an appeal by a professor of the public Law School of Athens. The Council of State proceeded with the annulment of three operating licenses of private (non-state) universities, as announced on Thursday afternoon. As announced on Thursday, August 13, 2026, the […]
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For the last five months, oil giant British Petroleum (BP) has locked 800 workers out of their jobs at a crude oil refinery in Whiting, Indiana. The facility, located on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan, is BP’s last unionized oil refinery in the United States. BP says it is pursuing “modernized job structures, training, and upskilling,” but workers and their union—United Steelworkers Local 7-1—say that the company has not bargained in good faith, that its contract proposals pose blatant existential threats to workers’ jobs, pay, and collective bargaining rights, and that the company is illegally trying to crush the union out of existence with the lockout. In this episode of Working People, we speak with three locked out workers at the BP oil refinery in Whiting: Eric Schultz, president of USW Local 7-1; Leno Miller, assistant griever for USW Local 7-1; Tim Powell, a 19-year member of USW Local 7-1, and a volunteer for the lockout assistance committee.
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The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and The Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we are going to Whiting, Indiana, where for the last five months, oil giant British Petroleum or BP has locked 800 workers out of their jobs at a crude oil refinery on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan. This is the last unionized BP refinery in the United States, and this is a really important struggle and a really important story. But with everything in the world and the news being so crazy these days, it has not gotten the attention that it deserves from national media.
But that is why we are so lucky to have someone like Sarah Lazare, a brilliant journalist and the editor of the excellent Workday Magazine going where others won’t and lifting up the stories that need to be told and heard. In her recent report titled Locked Out Refinery Workers Say BP is Trying to Starve Us and Crush the Union, which was jointly published by Workday Magazine and the American Prospect. Sarah writes, “British Petroleum, one of the 10 largest oil and gas companies on earth, kicked out its workforce at the Whiting Crude Oil Refinery, which at its peak produces 440,000 barrels a day on March 19th. The previous contract expired in January and United Steelworkers Local 7.1 declined management proposals that workers say would existentially threaten the local. The union has been locked out for over 140 days, and it says it is fighting for its survival against an employer that wants to cut pay in jobs, undermine workers’ ability to strike and tear the local away from national bargaining.
The lockout is illegal,” the union says. By late May, United Steel workers had filed 15 unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging that the company is refusing to bargain in good faith and using threats, coercive statements, and surveillance. The fight has become a test of endurance. On one side are workers who are not receiving the equivalent of strike pay, though members can ask for help from an assistance fund financed by the United Steel workers. On the other side is an oil company that brought in $189.2 billion in revenue in 2025. In an email to Workday Magazine and the prospect, BP spokesperson Cesar Rodriguez said that the company is pursuing, “Modernized job structures, training, and upskilling.” But workers say that this is just code for greater disposability and degraded conditions, and they declare a new pay progression would make it easier for BP to fire people and harder for workers to get to the highest rates of pay.
They’re also concerned about the proposed loss of dozens of jobs from the bargaining unit. On March 2nd, management presented the local with their last, best and final offer and the union membership voted it down. A revised settlement was offered the next day, but it too was rejected. On March 17th, the union gave a counter offer. Just four hours later, the company rejected our counterproposal, issued notice of the cancellation of rolling extensions and a notice of intent to lock us out of our jobs effective at midnight on March 18th, according to the United Steel workers. To talk about all of this, I am really grateful to be joined on the show today by three guests. Eric Schultz is the president of United Steel Workers Local 7.1. Leno Miller is an assistant griever for USW Local 7.1. And Tim Powell is a 19-year member of USW Local 7.1 and a volunteer for the Lockout Assistance Committee.
Eric, Leno, Tim, thank you so much for joining me today on the show, especially with everything that you guys got going on. I really, really appreciate it. And I do wish we were meeting under less horrifying and infuriating circumstances. And we’re going to talk about the lockout and everything that’s going on right now. But before we do, I’d love for listeners to get to know you first because most people have never met or spoken to folks in your line of work. So tell us more about yourselves, how you got into this work, and the kind of jobs that you do on a day-to-day basis before this lockout began.
Eric Schultz:
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for taking the time to have us. Again, my name’s Eric Schultz. I’m a machinist in the refinery. I hired in October of 2009. I started off in our machinist apprenticeship program. So that was a four-year apprenticeship where you learn the refinery inside and out from a mechanical standpoint. What machinists do out here? It’s kind of an amalgamated trade. It’s more like a millwright machinist. We’ll do anything from repairing pumps in the field, turbines, compressors. We have shop work where we repair relief valves, the pumps and the turbines inside the shop. So we do a lot of things from A to Z as far as a maintenance millwright mechanic would do. And then so that was 2009, about 2014, July of 2014, I came onto the union board as a divisional rep. I represented our machinists and our instrument in electrical groups.
And then about five years ago, I became president of local.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, man. You machinists need to rebrand as the MacGyver union because you’re out there fixing things that I didn’t even know existed or that are taped together and you got to have an intimate knowledge of this machinery and the kind of machinists I’ve talked to from the railroad industry to the gas and oil industry to Kellogg’s. There are just so many nuances that none of us understand. So I can only imagine the kind of stuff that you guys are doing out there in the field.
Eric Schultz:
Yeah. Especially in an oil refinery, it’s a very niche market. You run into equipment that you wouldn’t run into in many other fields. We’ve got equipment from the 1940s and 1950s all the way up to incredibly modern equipment. So you kind of need to know the gamut. And we’ve got some amazing machinists out here that they’re absolutely experts on their units. They’re the ones that our operators will turn to to ask for help troubleshooting. Even our engineers walk into the main shop where our pump mechanics are, turbine mechanics, and ask them to help diagnose what went wrong and what they could do to fix it. So we’ve got some amazing mechanics out here, machinists. Hey,
Leno Miller:
My name’s Leno Miller. I’m a operations specialist for the refinery. I grew up in the area. I’ve carried a card my entire adult life, first of which out of high school, I carried a Teamsters card for a couple years. I worked at the local UPS plant. After that, I ended up in an automotive plant. I carried a UAW card before I got into the refinery. I hired in just shy of 20 years ago. So if BP refuses to come back to the table and bargain in good faith, I can get 20 years on the outside locked out, which not a good feeling, but that’s where we’re at. Inside the refinery, like I said, it’s been almost 20 years. So I started out as an operator, which do rounds, take samples, monitor the equipment on a day-to-day basis. We work 12-hour shifts, swing shifts. From there, I became a board operator, a council operator, which is a specialist by trade what’s referred to in the refinery.
And then I ended up becoming a chief operator as well, a chief operator and a council operator, which is a cross-qualified position, which is one of the positions that the company is proposing to do away with. So I would essentially get bumped down from a chief operator and a board operator to a technician. I would lose my specialist qualification and my pay that comes with it.
Tim Powell:
I’m Tim Powell. I started almost 20 years ago. It was 19 years this January. Started at the Cats and it was spent just about 10 years.
Eric Schultz:
No one’s gonna know what the Cat is…
Tim Powell:
Yeah. So I started over at basically a gasoline processing unit. Spent 10 years there. Had an opportunity to transfer to another part of the refinery where we were basically make diesel using high pressure hydrogen and crude oil. And I was an outside operator for most of that time. About six years ago, I got onto the console board operator job as well. So specialists, we take training every year. We do training every quarter going through computer training. Now they’re trying to say that we need to interview for these jobs again and see if we’re still qualified to be there if they’re even going to keep the job. I’m third generation USW on both sides of my family. There’s been union people throughout my family from coal miners to steel workers, city bus drivers. I mean, my family has lived on a union paycheck for generations.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, let’s talk about that.Because I started this show eight years ago not knowing much about unions at all. I did not grow up in a union family. In fact, back in the day, we were more of an anti-union family. We didn’t know anything. And to be honest, the few union jobs that my brother had had at a Rite Aid just weren’t good. And so I think now that we’re at a point in this country where less than 10% of the workforce is actually in a union, it’s important to talk to folks out there about what being in a union means. And so I wanted to ask you guys, why is it important for workers in this industry especially, and workers in general, to have a union? Tell us more about why being in a union is important to you and your family. And then let’s sort of unpack some of the nuances of labor relations in this industry that listeners need to know about.
Because again, we’re talking about the last unionized BP refinery in the United States.
Eric Schultz:
Yeah, sure. I mean, from my perspective, the first thing that most people come to, they think about is pay. Pay, retirement, when they think of a union. For me personally, I feel like in this industry, it’s more about the ability to collectively bargain, meaning we have 800 people that get to stand shoulder to shoulder, elect representatives, the representatives, then go sit down with the company. And you’re on as close to equal footing as you’re going to get. Without a union, it’s each man or woman for themselves. So the byproduct of that collective bargaining, yeah, it gets pay and it’s retirement, but to me, most importantly, it’s having a voice on the working conditions inside the plant, safety issues. We’ve got a contractual joint health and safety committee where members of the union sit down with members of management monthly to identify safety issues and then create programs to try to address those issues.
So at the end of the day, we do make good money because we work in an incredibly profitable industry and it’s a highly complex job that all of us do out here. But what good does that do if at the end of the day, you’re going to go home and you’re not going to be the same way that you left? You’re going to go home injured or even worse. And this is an industry that when things go wrong, they can go wrong real fast. Incidences can turn into fatalities very fast in this industry. An incident that spirals out of control inside of an oil refinery is highly likely to affect the community. And if you follow along in the news in the last year or two, it seems like once a month we’re reading about a refinery fire in which the community is ordered to shelter in place because of toxic releases that are getting into the community.
So to me, the most important piece of a union is to make sure that we go home safe and that when you retire, you actually can enjoy your retirement and not be struggling with debilitating injuries or diseases, which are very prevalent in this industry. You look at the cancer rates for an oil worker versus any other line. You look at mesothelioma, different issues. We have asbestos is all over the refinery. Everywhere you look, there’s stickers on piping that say warning asbestos. So we live with these things every day. And that’s to me the biggest thing that a union could do is help protect its workforce.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and just to sort of underline everything that you said in red pen, listeners are going to have the hairs on the back of their neck standing up the same way I am because I’ve interviewed on this show a worker, Leo Linder, who was on the deep water horizon when it blew in the Gulf. So if folks are wondering how bad could it get, that’s how fucking bad it can get. Pardon my French. But it can get bad in so many other ways like we’ve been covering on this show. We talked to folks in Roseland, Louisiana near the Smitty Supply Plan where that massive explosion in fire happened and people said it was raining black sludge all over the place. I mean, we’ve talked to residents of East Palestine, Ohio where that Norfolk Southern train derailed over three years ago. And you’ve heard the hell that they’re going through.
You’ve heard the hell that railroad workers are going through and how they are being crushed into oblivion while all of our communities, our supply chain are being put at long-term risk for the sake of short-term, massive profits for Wall Street shareholders and company executives. This is part of the same horrible, vicious cycle that we’re hearing about from working people in different industries in different parts of the country all over the place. So please, I beg you, pay attention to what these guys have to say. Leno, sorry to hop in there. Please hop back in.
Leno Miller:
No, you’re spot on. And the refinery operates not only in Whiting, it’s basically in the center of three communities. It operates in Hammond, Indiana as well and also East Chicago. So it’s in the middle of a very populated area that has accepted the risks of operating a large crude oil refinery in the middle of it. But the promise that was made was the community was going to get some of the benefit of that. We were going to get the jobs. And it’s like you said, that’s where they’re breaking the promise. So if you’re bringing in workers from out of state to try to replace us and you’re trying to extract wealth out of the community, not even wealth, you’re just trying to extract a basic income and a basic way of life from the area in order to send it to shareholders and wealthy executives, especially it’s a foreign oil company.
So I mean, that’s the goal, right? And that’s what people need to understand. They’re trying to take from our community and from people that actually live and work here in order to send it elsewhere.
Tim Powell:
To build on something that Eric said too about the equal footing to have when we’re talking, when we’re negotiating with this company, a union honestly to me is the only way that everybody who has a particular job is going to get that same pay. Doesn’t matter how much the guy next to you is kissing ass to the company. It doesn’t matter if you’re a bad woman or what color you are. You’re getting that pay. It’s not that your friend across the aisle is going to get an extra 20 bucks an hour because he’s buddies with the boss. Everybody gets the pay for that work. And that’s the only guarantee honestly to me in this country that you have that.
Eric Schultz:
Yeah, absolutely. One of the company’s large proposals that they have on the table is to eliminate seniority as a means for promotion. And they view it as, well, it’s a flawed system. It’s not always the best person that gets it with seniority. They want to go what they call merit-based. Well, you look at, well, let’s look at reality. Let’s look at outside of a union facility. Do women and men in this country make the exact same amount of money for doing the exact same job? Why not? Because the merit-based system is so effective. Do minorities make as much money as white men in this country for doing the exact same job? Absolutely not. I mean time and time again, no one would even argue that case. Well, is that a merit-based system? It is. So merit, they act like merit is some great system that only the best and the brightest rise to the top.
And they’re full of shit and everybody knows that. The guy who plays softball and goes to the bar with the supervisor afterwards is more likely to get the good jobs and get better pay. The executive’s nephew that gets brought right into the plant and gets to go to the front of the line, that guy is more likely to make more money than everybody else. That’s what merit-based systems are. So absolutely, that’s one of the main issues with them. And back to the safety piece, another one of their issues, and I don’t want to get too much into the nuances of the proposals because we would need a three-hour show probably. But what one of them is the reclassification of all of our jobs. So as Leno was saying, right now he’s risen to the level of an operations specialist. We have operation specialist field, operations specialist board, and then operations specialist cross qualified, which is you do them both.
That is the top of the top. So they want to eliminate those roles, but then still have us do the same work. But they want to call us tech threes and tech fours, and then the company would get to pick the tech fours. But then they also, for our operators, they want them to have to know five different jobs throughout the refinery. Places that are, it might take you 15 minutes to get from this unit to the next unit, and that’s hoping there’s not a train stopped in the middle of the refinery. So they want to spread everybody out and make them the term jack of all trades, the ace of none. Well, if you just go back a few years ago, our sister refinery in Toledo, Ohio, which BP has since sold, it’s no longer a British Petroleum facility, but there was a double fatality.
Two brothers were killed in a fire out there. And the Chemical Safety Board, when they came back, when they finally concluded their study, one of their findings that they punished the company for was rotating the operators too much so that they didn’t just get good in one area. So the company’s taking credit for, well, I’ve got this many operators that can handle this many jobs, but they can’t do it. They necessarily can’t do it well. You do it better when you specialize. So flash forward, so the Chemical Safety Board says that the company was wrong for the way that they were handling operations. So what does this management group decide to do? They decide to put a proposal on a table to do exactly here what they were doing in Toledo and spread our operators too thin. And people just saw the proposal, the average person in the community, they wouldn’t understand the implications of the company’s proposals.
And it would make it incredibly unsafe out here. Not to mention making these guys do a lot more work for less money, but again, more importantly, you’re going to have a bunch of people who just aren’t going to be as familiar with the equipment. When stuff goes wrong, you need the people that just know instantaneously, instinctively how to get out there and what to do.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and I mentioned earlier that this is the sickness that we’re seeing spread to industries all across the board. And even though people may not understand the nuances of y’all’s contract, they understand that sickness of the corporate-minded Wall Street-minded obsession with cutting costs year after year, piling more work onto fewer workers, removing important layers of security to save a buck, and all at the expense of the workers who are being asked to do way too much for less than they were getting before. That leads to hazards all over the damn place. That’s the same stuff that we’ve heard from your fellow machinists at Boeing who described like, “Hey, how did job conditions and planes get so bad at Boeing over the years?” Well, this is part of it. That worker that I interviewed on the Deepwater Horizon when it blew in the Gulf, he said the same thing.
BP was pushing speed over safety and look at the results. I mean, the same thing was said to us by the railroad workers. They’ve been cutting jobs. They’ve been making the trains longer and heavier. They’ve been making workers be on call twenty four seven, running them into the ground. And it’s only a matter of time until those short-term profits run out and you end up with a massive, massive, dangerous problem that’s going to take years to fix. And that is, again, I really, really want to stress for folks, those are the stakes of what we’re talking about here, not just for frontline workers in these industries, but for fence line communities living near these industries or living near a railroad track, living near the Gulf of Mexico or any coast where your ability to go outside is basically in the hands of wealthy corporations that are making disastrous decisions that could impact you and your family.
But I don’t want to belabor the point because I know we have limited time here. And I wanted to, before we get really into the lockout itself, Eric, I wanted to ask if you could unpack for our listeners the baseline of understanding that we need to have for labor relations in this industry, how this is working with bargaining with BP. I mean, because we had to learn that four years ago when the railroad workers almost went on a national strike. I had to become a PhD in the Railway Labor Act and explain quickly that there are 13 craft unions. There are four major rail carriers. Everyone’s bargaining in sort of different fashion. So listeners of this show are a little familiar with hairy labor questions like that. But I guess just for your average lay listener, what are the things that folks need to understand about how bargaining works in this industry so that they understand everything that we’re going to talk about with the lockout?
Eric Schultz:
Yeah, sure. So in the oil industry, we bargain at a national level. Not every facility, but every USW facility is in one way or another part of the national oil bargaining pattern agreement. And that’s been since the 1960s. Since the 1960s, there’s only been. We haven’t had a national strikes. We had one in 2015. Prior to that, 1980, I believe. So there’s really, yes, how is the labor relations in the industry? National oil bargaining, it’s been a stabilizing influence for both our members and the companies. Usually when we’ve got our final settlement offer on the table, the top table will bargain it and then it gets passed out to everybody else across the country and we put it across the table locally. Typically, you always feel like, “Man, I wish we got more. It wasn’t great, but 90-something percent of the membership votes yes for it.” And that’s probably how good bargaining works is neither party walks away feeling like they absolutely got the whole hog.
Both parties feel like, yeah, we got something, we gave up a little bit of something and we move on. So that’s how it’s typically been. Now this is a lockout, and there’s only been two lockouts in the oil industry in the last 25 years that we’re aware of. And there’s one common denominator between the two lockouts is there’s one guy that was at ExxonMobil on the HR team, on the negotiating team that was part of the lockout in Beaumont, Texas. Again, it was an Exxon refinery in Beaumont, Texas. They were locked out for 10 and a half months. While they were locked out, British Petroleum liked what they saw. They hired one of the guys from that team, his name’s Jordan Marks. They hired him and he came to Whiting and started working in the background. He wasn’t at the table with us in the first round of bargaining, but he had been there looking at the contract and trying to devise a way to do here what he did in Beaumont, Texas.
And so that’s where we’re living right now. Part of the reason that we believe that we filed so many labor board charges is that it was apparent that the company was at best surface bargaining. They had no intent to get an agreement this round of bargaining. Their intent was to push us into a strike. And then eventually if we didn’t strike, then they were just going to lock us up. So this was preordained. The company had this in mind the entire time, and that’s absolutely apparent. Now, national bargaining, everybody else, every other corporation that’s a part of it agreed to the patent. There was only one other site. There’s a site in California that’s having issues too. But the rest of the country, the membership all voted yes, and the companies all voted yes on national oil bargaining. We are in an absolute different spot than our peers.
When we get together with our sisters and our brothers from other locals, people that work for Marathon, people that work for Exxon, Chevron, they don’t have these problems. Most of their negotiations were not contentious. Obviously they didn’t get everything they wanted, but they all got a deal on time. So that’s kind of where we’re at is we’re just in this spot where British Petroleum chose years ago to go down this road in an effort to break the union here, to eliminate the union.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Let’s talk a little more about that. Let’s talk about how we got to this point. And what are the key contract issues and working conditions that you’re fighting with the company over right now? And how far back does this fight go?
Eric Schultz:
So it started, I mean, they kind of tested the waters in our last round of bargaining. So our last contract negotiation period was in 2022. It was another round where the rest of the country, the companies and the unions all agreed to national pattern and moved on down the road. We had to roll our contract for weeks after the expiration of the contract because British Petroleum had a 120-day strike and lockout notice on the table, which is something that they also did. Jordan and his cronies in Beaumont, Texas, there was a little bit less, but they put a strike and lockout notice on the table for them, the previous contract. So again, it’s lazy just bringing the exact same lazy playbook. So that was last round of bargaining. And eventually we had enough people in management that had a spine and could push back against corporate interests that were pushing for that 120-day strike and lockout notice.
And they pulled it off the table and we went down the road. So really it started last round of bargaining where you could see the items on the walls. Our smaller bargaining units, we also represent a plant right across the street called White and Clean Energy, which is a British petroleum plant. We represent our plant guards, our pipeline employees. And we’ve seen the company coming just absolutely trying to gut their contracts. And that’s what we saw this round. I mean, it’s hard to answer what are the issues because it’s everything. They basically took the contract book and went from cover to cover. And they’re proposing to change pretty much anything that benefits a union worker. Again, with the job reclassifications, we have decades of memorandums of agreements, letters of understandings, side agreements that govern how our job classifications work and how they’re policed. They want to eliminate all those and start all over again and then put management’s rights on everything.
Once we ink the deal, their proposal is going forward, the company can make any changes they want that they see fit. So who would sign a contract that the very next day it’s rendered useless because the company could go and change it however they want? And that’s where our job classifications, how we’re trained, what kind of work we have to do, how they can eliminate someone, how they can terminate someone for the company’s, their interpretation of lack of ability. So that elimination of seniority for the bidding into higher positions, elimination of plant seniority for the purpose of layoffs. So right now their proposal is they could basically, once we sign the deal, if they wanted to eliminate one of our groups, our lab, we represent our laboratory employees. As soon as we sign the deal, the company could then give us a piece of paper saying, “Oh, by the way, we’re going to lay off 50 people in the lab.
And then it would just go by that. Whereas right now we have plant seniority. If they wanted to lay off 50 people, it’s the 50 junior people, which makes it painful on the company. But what it does is it forces them to come sit down and be reasonable and have a conversation about how can, okay, you have to reduce headcount. We don’t want to talk about it, but we will. We’re not afraid to have hard conversations. And then we’ll work out a way to try to help them meet their goals, but at the same time protect our members. They want to eliminate that. I mean, it just goes on and on and on. Management’s rights for the use of AI. Their original proposal was that the contract language would survive the life cycle of the contract. They said it would go into perpetuity, meaning you’re going to agree to something that forever you’ve given up your rights, your local, state and federal rights to bargain over the use of artificial intelligence forever.
And that’s just ridiculous, absolute ridiculous language. But again, it just goes on and on and on. Any one of these issues during a regular year would’ve been a very contentuous issue that could have led to a strike or a lockup. And instead, they decided to throw the entire kitchen sink at it.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And the way that they’re trying to sweeten this deal is offer one time payments to you guys. Basically blood money to say like, “Hey, take this couple thousand dollars and sign away your collective bargaining rights.” I mean, that’s nuts. And that’s me speaking. That’s just me editorializing, but this is kind of making my head spin. And I know I could talk to you guys for hours, but we don’t have that long. And so with the time that we have, I wanted to go back around the table and just ask if you guys could sort of tell listeners how this whole lockout situation has unfolded as you’ve experienced it. Give us a worker’s eye view breakdown of events on the ground since the lockout began to now. How are you guys holding up after five months of this?
Tim Powell:
Well, with me being on the assistance committee, we’re meeting at least three days a week, sometimes more, usually six to seven hours a day. And everybody brings in their necessity bills. They bring in your mortgage, your rent, your car note, your car lease, your medical bills if they’re broken down in the monthly things, insurance, our medical insurance. The things we need to live that we can no longer provide for ourselves because BP took away our paychecks. We on the assistance committee hear the sad stories every day of like, “Well, we had to cut this back. We weren’t able to do this with the kids this summer. We weren’t able to do this. I had to sell this.” And you get jaded to it because you’re hearing it all the time, but every day there’s another heartbreaking story that you’re hearing because this person put in between.
I’ve got guys who have put in two years, I’ve had families that have come in, the guys have been here 25 years and they can’t provide how they’ve been providing for their family for the last 25 years. It’s crazy.
Leno Miller:
Yeah, it hurts. And that’s by design. I mean, that’s what BP is the company that we’ve, all three of us have been here on average close to 20 years. And by design, the company that we’ve. I mean, we’ve all missed holidays, birthdays. We’ve been dedicated workers for 20 years. And in order for short-term gains to be able to take from us, this company just posted in three months they made $5.7 billion and they’re paying a bigger dividend. We’ve been here sacrificing our personal lives for 20 years and they are intentionally hurting us and our families. So it’s shameful.
Tim Powell:
Now just are the holidays we’ve missed, but you mentioned 12 hour shifts, 16, 18 hour shifts, 12 to 19 shifts in a row. I mean, yeah, it’s great money when we’re working, but you don’t see your family for 19 days. You go home and you say hey to the wife and you fall asleep. For them not to think that this is a sacrifice every day that what we’re doing for them to then make a sacrifice even farther on this, it just drives you out of your mind.
Leno Miller:
That goes back to you asked the benefits of a union. We’re the union. The union is its workforce. The union is voted by us. It represents us. It is us. It’s the workforce. A Fortune 500 company, the workers are a line item. You’re a number on a spreadsheet. You mean absolutely nothing to them. Nothing at all. So Bernie’s Petroleum has no loyalty to us whatsoever. The only thing they care about is their shareholders. That’s it. It’s short-term value. Like I said, they made $5.7 billion in three months and increased their dividend while we were locked out.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So where do things stand now? Like what can be done and what can folks listening to this do to stand in solidarity with y’all and the other 800 folks who have been locked out here?
Eric Schultz:
So unfortunately, we’re at a standstill right now. Again, as Leno just mentioned, that’s by design. They didn’t lock us out with the intent to hurry up and get a deal. They locked us out knowing that they have a number in their mind. They know how many months that they wanted this to go. They’re going to want to put as much economic stress and pain on families as possible with the intent that eventually will crack. Eventually enough of the membership will be. When they’re visiting the assistance committee asking for help, those conversations will turn from uncomfortable right now, painful, turn to hostile and panicked. That’s what the company wants. We’re not there yet. We’re not even close to there yet, but that’s their design. We don’t foresee, unfortunately, this ending anytime soon. The things that we’re trying to do, we’re hoping to make some headway is public pressure, try to make sure that the community understands what’s going on and then try to ask the community to be vocal, to stand up and support us and tell British Petroleum to end the lockout and get back to the table.
And for the first time, actually come seriously with the desire to bargain. We’re asking the same of our local leaders, whether it’s political leaders or community leaders. We’re asking the same of state officials, federal officials. We feel like if we can get enough public pressure, enough political pressure, enough economic pressure on maybe somebody in London will finally say, “All right, enough’s enough. Let’s go. Go get a deal.” So that’s kind of where we’re at right now is just in this holding pattern and doing everything we can to keep our membership and their families propped up. Just yesterday, one of our representatives, Carolina Ramsey, she’s also the one that runs our. She oversees our entire assistance committee. She helped organize a school supply giveaway and backpack giveaway. That was really well attended. We had a lot of local political leaders pitched in and put the word out to get these supplies sent in, book bags and everything that would be needed to go inside of them.
So between things like that, the food pantry, we’ve had our local food bank, Northwest Indiana Food Bank, teamed up with the United Way and we had four mobile distributions where they came out to the union hall and dropped off food. Like Tim was talking with our assistance committee. We’ had our assistance committee up and running since about maybe a month into this. And we’ve given out quite a bit of money, and we’ll continue to do so. And everything we’re doing is with the intent to try to make sure that people stay calm, that people have at least their basic needs met and just kind of supplement them while at the same time asking them to go out and find work because that’s how we’re going to win this is by being able to withhold. And we’ve had numerous people go out of state to find jobs.
It’s an interesting spot to be in. Some people had no problem right away going to find a job. It depends what field you came from. If you were in the local pipe fitters union before you came and worked here and you still paid your dues in the background and still kept your car, you probably went right back to work. Same thing if you were in the electrician’s union, carpenter’s union. But some of our operators are in a much different spot because this is such a niche field. Where do you go to the next refinery to go find a job? And that’s where people are having to go out of state to go find work. And a lot of people can’t because we’re almost, it’s like we’re toxic to them because they know, “Oh, well, why would I waste money to hire this guy or gal if they’re going to leave and go right back to British Petroleum once the lockout’s over?” So we’ve had a lot of people say, “They told me they loved me.
They loved everything about the interview and my resume. They’d hire me, but they ask that I commit to I’m not going to go back to the refinery when the lockout ends.” And when people would honestly tell them, “I can’t promise that,” then they’d say, “Well, thanks. If you change your mind, let us know.”
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and what you’re talking about goes the other way as well. I mean, for folks out there listening, the question of why should anyone stand in solidarity with 800 union workers who’ve been locked out by their employers? Because you stand with your fellow worker. I mean, you do it because it’s what’s right to do. That’s our policy on this show. It’s been our policies from the beginning. But on top of that, I think anyone living near this facility in Indiana or Illinois would want to know that that dangerous, complex facility is being operated by undertrained scab workers right now. And we don’t ever want to punch down and say your fellow worker is your enemy. I mean, those people who have taken those jobs have their own bargain with God that they’re going to have to kind of deal with. But the point of fact is, is that the trained specialists that you’re talking about are not operating the specialized machinery in that oil refinery right now.
Leno Miller:
Yeah. To expand on that too, one of their proposals that’s a sticking point for us, as Eric mentioned, that they brought to the table last time as well is the strike and lockout. Right now we can serve 24-hour strike notice. Currently, they want 150 days. Their BP stance publicly that they keep repeating over and over is that they need that. They need at least that 120 to 150 day strike notice to be able to continue to operate the refinery safely in the event of a work stoppage. How much notice did they give us when they locked us out? 24 hours. So both things can’t be true. Either you don’t need it or you’re lying, right? Or you are operating unsafely currently in the community. If it’s unsafe to operate without that much of a notice and preparation, then that’s how you’re currently operating unsafely.
Eric Schultz:
And to point out the 24-hour notice that we have, that’s not Wildcat 24-hour notice. That’s not mid-contract. That’s only after the contract expires. So I think a lot of people in the community don’t see that, don’t understand that. So they think just on any random Tuesday, I could just wake up in a bad mood and serve the company 24-hour strike notice. No, no. This is after you’ve spent months negotiating a contract. You knew that February 1st was the contract expiration. And our goal is to be as early as possible to hash out any issues so that by February 1st, you got a deal. You get that national agreement comes down from the top table. You take it to membership, you vote on it, and you move on. What they want to do is make that February 1st where we’re now that once February 1st comes, now we can serve notice.
And it’s something that we don’t take lightly. We could have done it this round of bargaining. And a lot of our members were upset that we weren’t serving strike notice when the contract expired because of all the ridiculous proposals that the company had on the table. So it’s something that we’re not going to just flippantly serve strike notice. We understand that people, it’s painful for us to be on strike. We’re willing to do it, just we don’t take it lightly. Well, so February 1st comes, now what they want to do with this 150-day strike and lockout notice is they won’t even start really bargaining, seriously bargaining until about 148 days into that 150-day strike and lockout notice, because that’s how they’re working it now. Our contract expires February 1st. They’re not serious about the proposals until the end of January. They just keep wanting to play mess around and they want to do this art of the deal stuff where they just put crazy things on the table knowing that, hey, we’re going to pull them off and we’ll meet in the middle type of thing.
So that’s all they’re going to do. They’re going to shift us 148 days down the road. Now maybe they’ll start to bargain. Meanwhile, the rest of the country, the national pattern folks all went back to work.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and Tim, I wanted to toss it to you to have the final word here. Being a volunteer for the lockout assistance committee, any final notes that you wanted to give for folks out there listening? Folks in the area or folks listening from around the country, anything that they can do to help?
Tim Powell:
You touched on a point about not punching down on your fellow workers, whether it’s in your union or out in the community. This is 800 families who don’t have the money right now to go out to eat. They’re cutting down on all of their summer projects, their summer vacations. Things aren’t getting the jobs that you normally do around the house during the summer, like doing your deck, your fence, and that kind of stuff. We’re not able to spend that. We’re not able to employ a contractor. We’re not able to tip the waitress at the restaurant because we’re not even going to the restaurants. Everybody is seeing a reduction in the wages because we are cut out. We have a couple of websites. I’m sure that we can share those, but I can’t remember all of them right off the top of my head right now, but Eric can get to that.
But we gladly appreciate any donation that we can get. Any help is helping. I was here yesterday handing out backpacks and notebooks and all the school supplies yesterday. It’s not just taking that money off the people’s hands. It was also like your wife isn’t having to freak out at the store trying to figure out how she’s going to buy the stuff.
Eric Schultz:
Yeah, I will say to your point, the website, you ask how people can help. The easiest way is we propped up a website specifically for what we’re dealing with. It’s called supportoilworkers.com. On that website, it answers all those questions. If you wanted to send a check to help our assistance committee help pay bills or that money also goes to help just run the hall on a day-to-day basis, making sure that we have food for picketers, making sure that we’ve got the toiletries and things like that at the hall. So there’s an address and a way to send a check there. There was a link to an Amazon store for us, and that’s been fantastic. Every day we get shipments in here of diapers, formula, non-perishable food items, toiletries, things like that. They go, we stock them on the shelves and then members are free to come and take anything that they need.
So support oilworkers.com. And then today, hopefully today it’s going to start. We’ve been working with a company that we’ve used for years for all of our swag, our t-shirts and hats, ImagePoint. And today, hopefully we’ll have this store up and running. We’re going to have a pop-up store. There’s two shirts that people can pick from, and it’s going to be nationwide. We’ll be blasting this out every which way we can. It’s only going to be up for two weeks. And you can pick either of these shirt designs and a multitude of colors and styles, anything from a hooded sweatshirt to a tank top to a regular t-shirt. And then the proceeds for that will go help our strike and defense fund. So again, today I will send you that link once we get it up and running. We’re just getting the bugs ironed out of it.
There’ll be a couple of shirts. It’ll run for two weeks, then it’ll shut down. They’ll print, they’ll go into production, and they’ll start mailing out all the shirts to whoever purchased one. And then a couple weeks later, we’re going to pop up a second store with two different shirts. So all in, there’s going to be four different shirt designs for people to pick from. And we’re kind of hoping that some people that if you have the means and you really want to show some support, we hope that some people will choose to try to collect all four of those shirts.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Alright, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, Eric Schultz, President of United Steel Workers Local 7.1, Leno Miller, Assistant Griever for USW Local 7.1, and Tim Powell, a 19-year member of USW Local 7.1, and a volunteer for the Lockout Assistance Committee. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Check us out across our YouTube channel, our podcast feeds, our website, and our different social media pages, and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today.
I promise you guys, it really does make a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.
I periodi di caldo si allungano e interessano mesi in cui le scuole sono aperte. Ciò ha conseguenze sugli apprendimenti e sul benessere degli studenti. Ci sono buone ragioni per investire subito in misure di raffrescamento degli edifici scolastici.
L'articolo Perché le scuole al caldo sono un problema da risolvere proviene da Lavoce.info.
It takes a lot to get your typical white-bread American riled up enough that they’re willing to go to jail. Getting arrested is a massive pain, bringing court dates, fines, and a record that can shadow your job and housing prospects for the rest of your life.
For most folks, just the threat of jail time is enough to keep them on their best behavior. Yet in 2026, data centers have become one of the rare issues pushing more and more of Americans to risk it anyway.
So far in the US, Futurism has counted at least 37 arrests stemming from protests related to data centers this year. There were an additional 12 cases where police intervened to prevent protestors or speakers from confronting civic leaders, though in reality that number is likely much higher, as these cases aren’t as likely to make the news.
Unlike in other moments of political unrest in recent memory, it’s hard to pigeonhole these anti-data center activists demographically. They range from landowning farmers to physics teachers, zoomers to boomers, rural townspeople to suburban parents.
Despite their differences, the arrestees all have one thing in common: they each felt the actions of democratically elected officials are failing to reflect the wishes of their constituents, instead deferring to massive tech corporations.
Take the case of 42-year old Pablo Payan, a maintenance manager from Indiana. During a public meeting in May held to discuss plans to erect a massive Amazon data center in the city of Hobart, Payan refused to identify himself for the record before speaking, resulting in an attempted removal by police.
As officers were escorting him out, Payan says he asked why he was being removed, which prompted officers to place him under arrest for criminal trespass and disorderly conduct.
“In my opinion, I was kicked out to prove a point that the law is on their side and if people continue to try and express themselves and speak, they will also be intimidated or arrested by law enforcement,” Payan told Fox32 after the fact. “So I think it was a flex of power.”
Far from the “anti-tech extremism” that law enforcement agencies and the Trump administration have warned about, these demonstrations are overwhelmingly peaceful, escalating into physical confrontations only when police lay hands on a person to remove them. Many of the charges come when anti-data center activists break petty clerical rules, like going slightly over the allotted time for a public comment.
Lux Claridge, a physics teacher from Emporia, Kansas, is an exemplar of the absurd ways civic leaders can weaponize police to stifle dissent. At a public meeting earlier this month, Claridge was arrested after clapping in support of another community member speaking out against a proposed 1,000 acre data center campus — running afoul of a commissioner’s rule against “snapping” and “clapping.”
“I am fully of the notion that clapping is a First Amendment right that I have,” Claridge said in an interview with 404 Media after the fact. “I can exercise that as long as I’m not disrupting, and I still argue that I was not disrupting at all.”
“I have a right to clap,” Claridge continued, “and if you want me out, you’re going to have to drag me out.”
address-to-the-armed-forces (Elysée)
France’s highest administrative court reinstated a mandatory QR code requirement Tuesday for members of the public attending the country’s annual Bastille Day military parade on the Champs-Élysées, reversing a lower court ruling only hours before the event.
The Council of State, France’s top administrative court, said the security measures were justified given the exceptional circumstances surrounding this year’s celebration, which includes the attendance of dozens of foreign leaders and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The decision restores a security system requiring spectators to obtain a personalized QR code issued by the French presidency and present government-issued identification before entering the secured viewing areas along the parade route.
The legal dispute unfolded in less than a day.
On Monday, the Paris Administrative Court sided with the civil liberties group Vigie Liberté, ruling that authorities could not require members of the public to obtain presidential authorization in the form of a personalized QR code to attend the event.
But shortly after 2 a.m. Tuesday, the Council of State overturned that decision, concluding that suspending the security measures only hours before the parade would pose unacceptable risks.
The court found that the urgent legal procedure invoked by the plaintiffs—reserved for immediate threats to fundamental freedoms—did not outweigh the government’s responsibility to ensure public safety during one of France’s most sensitive security operations of the year.
Vigie Liberté President Amine Elbahi criticized the ruling but acknowledged the authority of the court.
“The rule of law also means accepting court decisions, even when they are not in our favor,” he said, adding that the organization intends to continue challenging the measure through other legal avenues.
French officials have described this year’s Bastille Day celebration as one of the most sensitive in recent memory.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is among dozens of international leaders expected to attend ceremonies in Paris, dramatically increasing security requirements.
Authorities say the QR code system enables security services to verify the identity of every person entering the protected perimeter surrounding the Champs-Élysées, providing an additional layer of screening amid heightened concerns over terrorism, espionage, and geopolitical tensions linked to Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Paris Police Prefect Laurent Nuñez welcomed the court’s decision, saying it would help manage crowd access while maintaining strict security standards.
Beyond its ceremonial importance, the 2026 Bastille Day parade is designed to showcase France’s expanding military capabilities and Europe’s growing defense cooperation.
President Emmanuel Macron has dedicated the event to what his office describes as France’s “strategic rearmament” and Europe’s renewed commitment to collective security.
Nearly 6,800 service members will participate—the largest contingent ever assembled for the annual parade.
Military equipment on display will include approximately 300 armored and support vehicles and 130 aircraft, roughly 30% more than last year’s event.
The parade will also feature troops from the Coalition of the Willing, an international group led by France and the United Kingdom to coordinate military support for Ukraine. About 500 coalition troops are expected to lead the procession, accompanied by 25 Ukrainian soldiers marching under their national flag.
Aircraft from several NATO allies—including Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, Norway, Greece, and Croatia—will participate in the flyover.
One of the parade’s most symbolic moments will feature two French Mirage fighter jets flown alongside Ukrainian military officers who completed flight training in France.
French officials say the demonstration reflects the country’s long-term commitment to strengthening Ukraine’s defense capabilities through training, military cooperation, and equipment transfers.
Army helicopters and armored vehicles will conduct tactical demonstrations inspired by modern battlefield operations, while approximately 60 military drones will highlight the increasing role of autonomous technologies in French defense planning.
For the first time during a Bastille Day parade, participating aircraft will carry mock weapons, underscoring the event’s emphasis on operational readiness rather than ceremonial display.
The Council of State’s ruling may establish an important legal precedent for future high-profile public events in France.
Government officials argue that personalized digital credentials are becoming an essential security tool whenever major international gatherings involve numerous heads of state or elevated security threats.
Civil liberties advocates warn that such measures could gradually normalize government tracking of attendees at public events, while French authorities maintain that the restrictions are narrowly tailored to extraordinary circumstances.
The debate reflects a broader challenge facing democracies worldwide: balancing individual freedoms with increasingly complex security demands in an era of international conflict and persistent terrorist threats.
L’article France Reinstates QR Code Requirement for Bastille Day Parade Amid Heightened Security est apparu en premier sur FrenchDailyNews.
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