The Democratic National Committee today greenlighted resolutions that call for abolishing ICE and implementing “full and consistent enforcement” of two federal statutes known as the Leahy law. The author of the law, former Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), has stated that it applies to Israel, as critics have long asserted.
Both resolutions were submitted by Michele Johnson, a DNC member from Louisiana, who spoke for them before the Thursday vote at the DNC’s Resolutions Committee meeting. Approval of the resolutions by the full DNC is expected at a closing session of the meeting in Austin on Saturday.
One resolution puts the DNC on record that it “urges Democratic members of Congress to craft legislation abolishing ICE and enacting immigration reform that provides pathways to citizenship, protects workers, and ensures dignity for all impacted people.” The resolution also “urges Democratic members of Congress to pursue civil and criminal accountability for any federal agent, attorney, or official who lied under oath, misrepresented evidence, or gave false testimony regarding DHS conduct, and to remove qualified immunity and other protections shielding DHS and ICE personnel and subcontractors
who have injured protesters or journalists, fired into moving vehicles, or caused deaths in custody, whether of detained individuals, U.S. citizens, or immigrants regardless of nationality or documentation status.”
Johnson’s other resolution states that “the Democratic National Committee reaffirms its support for the full, consistent, and impartial enforcement of the Leahy Laws with respect to every recipient of United States security assistance, in every region of the world, without exception.” It adds that the DNC “calls for strengthened vetting capacity, clear remediation standards, and regular public reporting on the
implementation of the Leahy Laws by the Department of State and the Department of Defense,” and that the DNC “encourages Democratic members of Congress to conduct robust oversight of Leahy Law implementation and to support legislative measures that close documented enforcement gaps.”
Beginning early Thursday, before the vote on the resolutions, a mobile electronic billboard sponsored by RootsAction – saying “HEY DNC, UPHOLD THE LEAHY LAWS. SUPPORT HUMAN RIGHTS!” – circled the hotel where the DNC is meeting.
Sam Rosenthal, RootAction’s political director, was among the activists who attended the Resolutions Committee meeting. “These were twin victories for human rights, at home and abroad,” he said. “Approval of the resolutions for abolishing ICE and upholding the Leahy law point the way for the Democratic Party to move in directions consistent with what voters want. Getting sufficient turnout from the party’s base at election time will require a change in the approach of the party’s national leadership so that it is clearly responsive to the views of Democrats nationwide.”
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A hypothetical asteroid impact scenario is in play prior to a major gathering of planetary defense specialists next year. The International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) is an independent non-governmental organization recognized by the United Nations. IAA is hosting the Planetary Defense Conference 2027. Impact date Date of the hypothetical potential impact on Earth is pegged […]
The U.S. government is attempting to use conspiracy charges to imprison organizers, just as it did in its war against the Black Panther Party, New Left, and other 1960s and ‘70s radicals through its counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO. Through this method, the Trump regime shares the goal of the Nixon administration of disrupting and attempting to destroy domestic opposition to its authoritarian agenda.
Two weeks after the September 2025 murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump issued the National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), entitled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” The memorandum created a category of “domestic terrorist” that, while lacking legal authority, broadly includes anyone who believes in things deemed as constituting “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” NSPM-7 openly calls for “investigative” tactics designed to “disrupt” and “dismantle” political movements and organizations.
Following the recent use of conspiracy charges to successfully convict people in both the Prairieland case in Texas and the Spokane 3 case in Washington, 15 community members in the Twin Cities were indicted on June 16 for resisting the Trump administration’s December 2025 immigration crackdown dubbed “Operation Metro Surge.” According to the indictment, all defendants are identified as “members and associates of … Direct Action Minnesota (‘DAMN’),” which helped organize Minnesota’s resistance. That organization is now defunct in light of the arrests and revelations about government infiltration.
The primary charge against these 15 community members is that each of them “did knowingly conspire, with other persons known and unknown … to prevent by force, intimidation, and threats officers and employees of the United States Department of Homeland Security from discharging the duties of their officers.” Those accused of “conspiracy” are alleged to have done such routine organizing activities as moderating meetings, engaging in fundraising, posting on social media, and communicating on the secure texting app Signal. Some are also accused of participating in an anarchist speaking tour, called “Breaking the ICE: Lessons from the Resistance in Minnesota,” which followed the collapse of the government’s campaign against the people of Minnesota.
Though the mainstream media headlines touted an “Antifa conspiracy,” anarchists are mentioned more in the 94-page indictment, with references to anarchism on 17 pages. While there are many local anti-fascist groups, and exponentially more people who identify as anti-fascist, the way the government is using “Antifa” to signify a single organization is simply false. People with a wide variety of beliefs and political commitments consider themselves anti-fascist. Anarchists historically have fought fascists as far back as the 1936 Spanish Revolution, prior to World War II, as they believe in the possibility of a cooperative world that is diametrically opposite the one that fascists envision. In painting the defendants as members of antifa and as anarchists, the government is attempting to both scare the public and to marginalize and isolate the accused. The U.S. has a long history of targeting anarchists, going back to repression against immigrant anarchist labor organizers in 1880s Chicago, when four outspoken anarchists were hanged for organizing for the eight-hour workday.
Anarchists traditionally oppose all forms of hierarchy, exploitation, and domination, while both advocating and practicing democratic decision-making. Anarchists pose an intersectionally informed opposition to the contemporary cultural, political, and economic organization of society, while offering an alternative vision of a just, cooperative, and free society.
In the interview that follows, organizer Cameron Kennedy, one of the so-called “Minnesota 15” defendants, discusses his thoughts on anarchism, the role it played in organizing opposition to Operation Metro Surge, and how other communities can organize resistance.
The interview that follows has been lightly edited for clarity.
Paul Messersmith-Glavin:What does anarchism mean to you?
Cameron Kennedy: I think anarchism is deeply misunderstood by most. To me, it’s an egalitarian blueprint for resisting oppression and building a better world that democratizes every aspect of society. That democratizes our communities and workplaces and gives each of us agency and responsibility; where resources are distributed evenly and fairly and not hoarded by the billionaire class.
This wasn’t just a movement without leaders — this was a movement where everyone became a leader.
Maybe more importantly to me personally, it’s a code of conduct that guides my actions and my thinking: to always treat others with respect and grace, to always question and adapt to my surroundings, to educate and work to better myself, to engage with my neighborhood and community, to recognize oppression in all its forms and have the courage to confront it in any capacity I can, as we struggle for a just society.
What aspects of the Twin Cities’ response to Operation Metro Surge, starting late in 2025 until earlier this year, resonate most with anarchist practices and principles?
I think the resistance we saw here in the Twin Cities is deeply and directly influenced by anarchism. There is a strong anarchist and labor history in the Twin Cities that goes back more than 100 years. Anarchists have been deeply involved in movements here, especially since the 2008 Republican National Convention, and in the many uprisings against police brutality, like those around the police murders of Jamar Clark, Philando Castile, George Floyd, and too many others. I think this involvement played a role in introducing the wider population to anarchists’ organizing.
The resistance to Metro Surge was entirely decentralized, meaning there were no leaders and everything was organized on a hyperlocal scale by average working people, connected through apps like Signal and WhatsApp, giving everyone the ability to coordinate in unison at a macro scale. Mutual aid, long associated with anarchism, became a practice that every neighborhood committed to — for instance, to get food and rent money to our immigrant neighbors who were too under threat to leave their houses.
The raids and indictments woke the Twin Cities up again.
The rapid-response loops and Whipple Watch were designed to observe and report all ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] activity through this decentralized network, in which nearly 100,000 people participated at the height. [Whipple Watch is a counter-surveillance project comprised of locals using their constitutional right to observe law enforcement, specifically at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, where most ICE operations are based.] This gave us the ability to respond to ICE raids in as little as three to five minutes almost anywhere in the Twin Cities. This wasn’t just a movement without leaders — this was a movement where everyone became a leader, and that’s exactly what anarchism is. That self-agency, the air-tight community communication, confrontational nature, and adaptability are why our resistance was so successful against Operation Metro Surge.
How have the indictments of the 15 of you been received by the wider community, namely the 100,000+ people that turned out in subzero temperatures to resist ICE?
My co-defendant Cal said it best: “Homeland Security really kicked the hornets’ nest with this one.” The movement against ICE had burned out post-Metro Surge, after the state of Minnesota moved toward a strategy of local law enforcement cooperating with ICE to arrest immigrants on low-level offenses, turning folks over to ICE at county jails. This allowed ICE to quietly and more effectively carry out its work without the constant flashy confrontations of Metro Surge. The raids and indictments woke the Twin Cities up again. Hundreds have rallied at our court dates and the community is mobilizing for another wave of repression. Bluntly, the raids enraged the Twin Cities back into action.
For myself, I’ve received nothing but support here. My neighbors have offered to help my partner and I any way they can, donating money and food. People recognize me on the street and thank me for the work I’m alleged to have done. It’s very clear that the government’s claim that we are “a danger to our own community” is a load of horseshit and just about anyone in the Twin Cities will tell you as much.
Do you have any advice for how organizers can best use the Signal app for secure communication? What are the best protocols for using that app to organize securely and effectively?
The number one rule is: “Always assume there is a fed in the chat and don’t say anything you don’t want read back to you in court.” I firmly believe mass-oriented organizing is crucial, but in that type of approach, it is impossible to avoid infiltration from the state. I don’t think there is any point in vetting large rapid-response groups, but I don’t think we should then throw the baby out with the bathwater and abandon mass organizing just because of that. Smaller groups doing mutual aid in the Twin Cities, who were being directly targeted by ICE for supporting their neighbors with grocery runs and rent money, restricted their chats to small groups on a need-to-know basis with trusted individuals. There is no bulletproof way to do this work though. Right now, the State Department is using rapid-response chats that nearly 100,000 people were in as evidence of “conspiracy.” Under an authoritarian state, resisting means taking necessary risks to protect our community and even very legal methods will be targeted if they are effective.
Also in rapid-response chats, it’s really important to use the SALUTE method of reporting ICE activity. SALUTE stands for size, activity, location, uniform, time, equipment. So, for example, that might look like utilizing your constitutionally protected right to observe ICE in your neighborhood and reporting to your local rapid-response group something like: “It’s 8:17 am. There are six ICE officers armed with assault rifles, less-lethal weapons, and riot gear. At 38th and Chicago, that are currently detaining one person. No one else on scene.” By giving accurate and precise information, we avoid the rumor mill and unneeded panic that further confuses and spreads fear in the community.
What lessons have you learned from the successful resistance to the ICE surge that you can pass on to other communities that may be targeted in the future?
I think this decentralized hyperlocal organizing is key, as is being confrontational and taking risks (if you can). Protests still serve a purpose, but it’s clear our politicians aren’t listening and they aren’t protecting us; in fact, they are using local police to attack our community and protect ICE despite what they may say in speeches. This is why it’s up to us to take personal responsibility to protect our communities and not show fear when we confront the state that is murdering our neighbors in the streets.
The government’s claim that we are “a danger to our own community” is a load of horseshit and just about anyone in the Twin Cities will tell you as much.
Activating every element of society — from neighborhoods, workplaces, places of worship and even hobby groups — and then combining them in an informal alliance working together to resist ICE is also essential. Combining unions, activist groups, and rapid-response networks is what lead to the first successful general strike in the U.S. in generations. Those connections built a foundation for society to resist effectively together.
Final note: I want people to study what we did in Minneapolis with a critical lens, then apply and adapt it to where you are. The Twin Cites won the battle of Metro Surge while losing more than 1,700 people to deportations and two people to state-sanctioned street executions. The larger war ICE is waging against communities across the country is still raging and intensifying, and in the last few weeks, we have seen record amounts of families being ripped apart.
I firmly believe that solidarity with each other, including groups you might normally never work with, is key: organizing at a micro level with agency, like anarchists, instead of under the control of a large organization, taking orders from leadership like our dysfunctional political system has indoctrinated us to do. And having the courage to confront the brutality of ICE in a way that effectively protects our immigrant neighbors and isn’t merely performative.
Take responsibility, take risks, take care of each other, and never rely on the very state that is ripping our communities apart and murdering our people to solve the problem that both political parties created. Together, we will march arm-in-arm through the ruins that capitalism has brought on itself into a far better world of our own making.
With no secondary school in the southern half of the Isle of Mull, children must leave home for the mainland at the age of eleven, living in a youth hostel during the school week. It’s a system that has existed for generations—but what does sending children away so young do to a community? Fernando Pinho gently follows the families who must navigate this rite of passage, and explores the political decisions that have kept this structure in place.
You know that Monday morning dread, she said, when you hate your job and you can’t face going back? The children get that on a Sunday.
Sunday is the day of washing, drying and ironing, because the clothes that came home on Friday have to be packed again for Monday. And then the bag sits at the bottom of the stairs. You come down, and you see it, she said, and it’s this little reminder of what’s coming.
Sometimes there’s an invitation, a barbecue at someone’s house, all of them welcome, just a couple of hours, you’ll be home in time. But her son doesn’t want to leave the house on a Sunday, and she won’t leave him. How do I say I can’t go, she told me.
The Netanyahu government has just declared war on your Bible. They are calling for religious scripture to be “rewritten” by artificial intelligence to remove problematic elements and create a new “Zionist edition” to replace the traditional Bible. [...]
Frontline healthcare workers and the patients they serve are facing a major crisis at the University of Vermont Health network—the state’s leading healthcare provider. “In June, UVM Health eliminated over 140 positions across its network, a third of which were union positions,” Matt More reports at The Rake Vermont. “The cuts, which the hospital estimated will save $9.5 million, comes as the network faces a $300 million budget shortfall… Later that month, UVM Health handed down a speed-up order to its Medical Group, which includes outpatient clinics and more than 1,000 physicians, which practitioners say will result in briefer appointments with patients.”
How did Vermont’s flagship health network end up in this crisis? How is it affecting healthcare workers and their patients? And what can be done to fix it? In this episode of Working People, we speak with Melissa Lavallee, secretary of UVMMC Support Staff United and VP of healthcare for AFT-Vermont; and Teagan Cook, lead outpatient chemotherapy scheduler at her hospital and a chief steward in UVMMC Support Staff United.
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 just like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we are headed north to the state of Vermont, where frontline healthcare workers and the patients they serve are facing a major crisis at the University of Vermont Health Network, the state’s leading healthcare provider. In an article published in the Rake Vermont, which is an independent worker-owned news outlet based in Vermont, writer Matt Moore breaks down the situation like this. “In June, UVM Health eliminated over 140 positions across its network, a third of which were union positions, according to AFT Vermont, which represents workers there.
The cuts which the hospital estimated will save $9.5 million comes as the network faces a $300 million budget shortfall. Rules set by the Green Mountain Care Board, which regulates Vermont hospitals, will require UVM Health to cut expenses by that amount over the next three years. Later that month, UVM Health handed down a speed up order to its medical group, which includes outpatient clinics and more than a thousand physicians, which practitioners say will result in briefer appointments with patients. Owen Foster, the former chair of the Green Mountain Care Board, took aim at what he saw as the excesses of UVM Health in a board meeting last September. “It’s essentially an expensive and ineffective layer of overpriced and unnecessary corporate bureaucracy that has proven itself both physically and spiritually distant and unconnected from the mission of our flagship academic medical center and the needs of Vermonters,” Foster said.
Foster found that the surplus revenue earned by UVM Medical Center was being siphoned off by UVM Health to subsidize its hospitals in New York State that the network has been unable to manage profitably to the tune of over a hundred million dollars over the last several years. He noted that at the same time that UVM Health was shutting down kidney dialysis services in St. Alban’s, Rutland, and Newport, it was moving $10 million from UVMMC to its New York hospitals. Multiple executives, many of whom had received a combined $3 million in bonuses in 2024, were laid off in October of 2025 as part of a restructuring process. However, the most recent round of cuts and likely future cuts are aimed directly at the caregiver and support levels, leading to reductions in the quality of care for a majority of Vermonters.” To talk about all of this, I am really grateful to be joined on the show today by two guests.
Melissa Lavalle is secretary of UVMMC Support Staff United and VP of Healthcare for AFT Vermont. And Teagan Cook is lead outpatient chemotherapy scheduler at her hospital and a chief steward in UVMMC Support Staff United. Melissa Teagan, thank you both so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it. And I know we got a lot to dig into here, and I want to talk to you about everything that’s happening now at the UVM system with these devastating cuts or restructurings or whatever we’re calling them and the events that led to this point. But before we do that, I’d really love to start by getting to know more about you all and the work that you do. Every week we strive to remind listeners that there are flesh and blood human beings and fellow workers behind every name tag, every job title, and every one of us has a story worth telling.
So please tell us more about yourselves and how you got into this work and the kind of jobs that you do.
Melissa Lavalle:
Thank you so much for having us. I’m Melissa and I’ve lived in Vermont my whole life. I was born here. My family lives here. I was the kid that moved furthest away because I was 45 minutes from mom and dad. I’ve worked retail. I’ve been a grocery store clerk. I was a photographer inside a Kmart for Holy Mills. And when they were going to cut my health insurance, I decided it was time to get into a job line that would give me health insurance. And that’s what brought me to working in medical. I’ve been a medical assistant and I am currently the finance and admin assistant for the psychiatry and mental health departments. There’s a lot of backend bureaucratic needs, paperwork, vacation time, continuing education stuff. And so I am the department Santa. I love my job and love serving the folks that are giving wonderful and such needed mental health care to our community.
Teagan Cook:
Thank you so much for having us. I’m Teagan. Like you said, I’m the lead outpatient chemotherapy scheduler here at UVMMC. And I got into my job after previously working in law, which is where I have a degree. Not the one you can actually do something with, but still a degree in law. And the industry of law has just so many miserable soul-sucking problems without a lot of real emotional reward, at least that I was feeling. So I ended up moving into healthcare, which is a place where you can actually make a real difference to real people. And not all of it is couched in a bunch of pseudo-Latin nonsense. A lot of it is just making real connections with your patients, understanding what their daily lives look like. A lot of what my day-to-day looks like, if you came behind my computer, it would look like I was playing Tetris a lot of the day because I’ve got the blocks of each person’s treatment that we’re trying to all stack together to make fit to get as many people as possible safely treated in the amount of time and the amount of space that we have.
It’s very rewarding. I get to make contact with a lot of different people from across the state. I’ve got patients in New York, I’ve got patients in New Hampshire, I’ve got some patients in Canada. And working here has been really incredibly rewarding. But unfortunately, as time has gone on over just the past three years that I’ve been here, sometimes the stress and the weight has started to outweigh that reward in some ways that are really specifically related to the way that our labor as workers here is treated.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I want to really talk to y’all about that at the shop floor day-to-day level. But I guess I need your help here because I want to talk about the crisis that is happening right now in the UVM Health Network. And first we need to help our listeners understand what is this crisis exactly? What do folks need to understand? Is it a budget crisis? Are you facing draconian cuts? Is it a shortfall? I guess we don’t have to get too far into the weeds that we lose sight of the whole plot, but help us understand what exactly the nature of the crisis that y’all are facing there at UVM is right now.
Melissa Lavalle:
It is incredibly complex, and I can kind of scratch the surface. For years, for decades, management at the top was kind of left alone to do what they want. And what they wanted to do was give incredible salaries to the folks at the very top. We went from being Fletcher Allen to University of Vermont Medical Center, and then the Health Network was formed. So now the network encompasses five hospitals in Vermont, and I think two or maybe three in Northern New York as well. So that necessitated an extra level of administrative folks at the top, and they’re not the ones making $20 an hour by any stretch of the imagination. Vermont’s really unique that we have what’s called the Green Mountain Care Board. It came out of the work of activists in 2011 in the passing of Act 48, which ostensibly created universal healthcare in Vermont.
We never had a governor that was able or willing to find funding for that. So instead this advisory board was created and yearly Green Mountain Care Board reviews and either approves or denies budgets for hospitals in the state. About three years ago, Green Mountain Care Board really put their foot down. Vermont is the most expensive state in the country to buy or get healthcare. And they said, “This is insane. UVM Health has an obvious monopoly on the state. You folks have been making way too much profit for too long, and now it’s going to be a cut.” So the budget, instead of having any growth to it, actually had a reduced amount of profit that was allowable. So now that they’re not able to charge the most exorbitant prices for literally everything, they are saying, “We’re losing money every day. Austerity measures need to go into place.” And what that looks like is those 140 cuts and staff just being overworked in almost all locations.
Teagan Cook:
Yeah, Melissa has a much more of a bird’s-eye view of it than I do because Melissa is much deeper into the daily goings on of the union. So she’s much more well-briefed than I am. But as far as how I’ve seen this in my day-to-day work, it’s been, for example, in my clinic, which is the outpatient cancer clinic at the flagship hospital in the network, the scheduling team is about three weeks behind at any given moment, which doesn’t necessarily sound like a big deal if what you’re generally familiar with as far as healthcare scheduling is just a primary care physician’s office. If you’re three weeks behind looking at that, generally it’s not going to be a huge deal for scheduling. But here in the outpatient cancer clinic, these are patients who are coming in twice a week or every single day, five days long once a month, or they’re coming in every other week, which means that if we get three weeks behind, we are operating so far behind the patient’s actual reality that it functionally doesn’t even make sense for us to be doing our jobs because we are working with outdated information that we then have to crosscheck with the more up-to-date information that we’re seeing in the chart.
Everything takes longer because we have to do that. We get further and further behind. Patient care falls further and further behind. And we’re all very concerned about the safety of the care that we’re able to deliver because of this. And this could be solved with safer, better staffing by increasing our numbers by just two or three more people. And we’ve been refused for months and months and months. Even while going through an official grievance process to try to address the issue, we have continued to be denied.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, I want to ask one more kind of clarifying question here because it seems like in all the kind of research I was able to do before we started recording this episode, there’s some competing narratives going on here, and that’s sort of muddling the picture and making it hard for folks to understand what’s going on here and why it’s so egregious. So I wanted to ask who is behind the narrative that this is a $300 million budget shortfall that requires squeezing people at the bedside level, people in the office level, and cutting back the most essential labor and piling more work onto the most essential workers?
Melissa Lavalle:
So there’s always yours, mine and theirs, but Green Mountain Care Boards saying, “You folks have made way too much money off of Vermonters for way too long. You need to lower your prices.” UVM Health is saying, “Oh my God, we used to make this much money, but now we’re only allowed to make this much money.” So normally in my mind, folks would lower the prices of things. What they’ve done instead is lower the number of available inpatient beds. So they’re seeing fewer patients, so therefore less money is getting made. And there was a law that went in that said they had to drop their prices on cancer infusion drugs because those were just astronomical through the roof. So care board says you’re making too much. Hospitals says we’re not making enough any longer. And from the union’s perspective, we’re saying this was poor management over decades and you’re now asking your lowest paid workers to bear that burden.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, let’s talk about that sort of how we got here question. Because sadly, this is a story that I have heard from healthcare workers across the country in different contexts. I’ve talked to workers on the picket line at a private Catholic hospital here in Baltimore saying very similar things. I’ve interviewed workers on strike at Kaiser Permanente in the Pacific Northwest saying similar things. Workers in Chicago at a university healthcare system there, very similar story. But the devil is also in the details and not every story’s the same. But it feels like the effects that people are feeling are very similar, which is that workers are being burnt out because they’re being asked to do more with less for less while either hedge fund type corporations are buying up their hospitals and forcing them to speed up production for the sake of more profits. Or you got a system like your guys’ system where you’re being forced to claw back your operations to sustain an unreasonably poorly managed from the top down system.
Again, those are different situations, but the effect is very similar on the workers and the patients. But as you said, Melissa, that didn’t happen overnight. And so I wanted to ask how the hell did it happen? And how did you all as rank and file workers experience this over that time?
Melissa Lavalle:
A fact I heard once that really blew my mind was most hospitals used to be owned by the doctors. They were kind of co-ops that the doctors owned. And so if something terrible happened, you know whose door to knock on to complain. But letting hedge fund managers, letting private equity into healthcare. And even in Vermont, UVM Health is a nonprofit network, but letting business managers run health decisions does not work. And every other industrialized country in the world has figured it out that it’s most effective not to be paying these insurance middlemen to do nothing but mostly deny folks. Are governments capable of administering Medicare, which folks are generally happy with. With Medicaid, folks are generally happy with. And this introduction of the business element into health is where things went wrong, to be totally honest. Folks are making money off of something that should not be a money-making enterprise.
Teagan Cook:
I mean, I think what it boils down to, to your point, Melissa, is the fact that hedge fund managers, extremely well-paid executives in the healthcare industry, it’s kind of like the final frontier of late stage capitalism. This is the last way that you can profit off of not only your workforce, but the physical bodies of your workforce and the people around you. UVM Health has a monopoly on healthcare in Vermont, which means that all of their workers are here receiving care from them for the vast, vast majority, which means that not only are we struggling to get them to pay us wages that are meaningful in the economy of Vermont, which is total trash garbage right now, but there’s also the fact that we are functionally handcuffed to whatever decisions they’re making about what our healthcare is going to be like. I know, and I’m not alone in this, my fiance and I have been having to have really serious talks about when we get married, what’s going to happen to his healthcare?
Is it going to be worth it? Are we going to have to delay our wedding? I don’t know when I’m going to be getting married until we get a new contract for our union because I don’t know what my healthcare is going to look like. I don’t know what guarantees I’m going to have, and I’m not going to be able to get married if I have to pay $800 a month for me and my fiance to both have care as chronically ill people.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Jesus, man. I don’t know how people can hear stories like that from everybody everywhere all over the place. And we all just accept it as like, well, I guess that’s just the way things got to be, but that’s not the way things got to be. And I do want to talk about in the end, what can be done? What can folks listening do? But by way of getting there, I wanted to bring things back down to that worker and patient eye level. Can you tell us how, since those initial cuts, what this is translating to for frontline workers providing healthcare and for patients seeking healthcare?
Melissa Lavalle:
Patients seeking healthcare are definitely experiencing waits. They know it. They know why. When my husband goes to his primary care that’s part of the network, there’s one person to check in and check out folks in an office with 25 providers. You’re waiting longer when you call in to try to talk to a nurse to get a prescription refilled from your primary care. It’s just more work, more stress. You know that the cuts happened. And it’s so weird how they always seem to happen a couple of months before bargaining. So we have been in bargaining. And when we did our pre-bargaining survey, we’re doing combined bargaining between our support staff unit and the technical professionals unit of the VFNHP nurses union. So your radiologists, your respiratory therapists, those sort of folks.
But the layoffs really also energized our members to see that this is why we’re bargaining. And when we did our pre-bargaining survey, 3,300 members across the board, the priority was safe staffing. And our folks are not in great economic shape. We know wages are a thing, but we work in healthcare because we care about our patients and because we know we are the patients as well. And that was far and away what folks cared about, that when community members are coming to us, that we are safely staffed and they’re not going to get worse because they came to UVMC for care.
Teagan Cook:
Yeah, I think that the staffing is really the critical issue. And some of those layoffs did affect union members and some of them were non-unionized staff. For example, folks in IT, folks who were in MGET, which is medical group education and training. Those are the folks who train newly oncoming doctors how to use our health record system, which is byzantine and complex. So you know how it is. The money that the people at the top are getting is never going to trickle down, but the consequences that the people at the top impose trickles down. So it takes longer for these doctors to get appropriately onboarded. It takes longer for them to get the hang of how things are supposed to be done in these systems so that things are going through workflows correctly so that people like me are making sure that you are getting scheduled out for your treatments appropriately and safely.
People in IT getting laid off. I have had a ticket out for a fax machine that my unit uses to get looked at since April, and nothing has happened about it. And that doesn’t sound like a big deal except for the fact that not all outside facilities will accept electronic faxes. And that means that we are not able to, until that gets addressed, send imaging orders to those other hospitals because they won’t accept them because they’re only e-faxable right now because we don’t have a fax machine, which can result in patients getting delayed care in something as important as getting imaging done to figure out if their chemotherapy is working or not.
It’s difficult. The layoffs and the threat of more layoffs has created such an environment of paranoia and distrust, which is the exact opposite thing that anyone needs. We’re already all struggling enough, but it’s just created an incredibly difficult work environment from the things that are tangible, like the stupid fax machine, to wondering every day when you come into work, is this the day where I find out that I don’t have a job anymore and that my patients are going to call in and just end up waiting on the line for three hours to get a simple answer.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So where do things stand now and what can be done about this? And what can anyone who is listening to this conversation right now do to help?
Melissa Lavalle:
The base of the problem is the for-profit healthcare system. That just has to be the foundation that we’re working from. In our bargaining, like I said, priority safe staffing, we’re fighting for safe staffing committees. The hospital came proposing takebacks from our first contract. So that is one of the places where we’re kind of far apart. But one of the things we’re also doing on top of joint bargaining is a common good platform. We’re asking for protections for our immigrant coworkers. If they get detained, they don’t lose their jobs position, they don’t lose their health insurance. They get time off to go to these appointments when they need to, even if it’s short notice, like we know is happening more and more often. We’re asking the hospital to join our local community group as Migrant Justice, and they have a Milk with Dignity program to only source milk from farms in Vermont that treat their workers appropriately, give them safe housing, give them safe work conditions, pay them fairly.
And we are also saying that the hospital, in all its poverty, stop using its very high paid lobbyists and publicity folks to fight us in our plate for universal healthcare. Act 48 is on the books. We intend to get it funded and enforced. And every time we’ve tried in the past, the hospital, which is a huge economic driver in the state, has had their people at the state house pushing back, pushing back. And the time has come to stop. We cannot cut our way out of this. And I would encourage everybody listening, if they don’t have a union that they can get involved in and push them to fight for universal healthcare, get involved with a grassroots organization. They are just literally everywhere. Folks see this problem, and we know what the solution is. It’s a single-payer healthcare system.
Teagan Cook:
Yeah. I mean, what Melissa said, what it comes down to is that the for-profit healthcare system is functionally a vampire that is sucking us out of money without any real significant payoff. I don’t know anyone who has gone from being on Medicaid or Medicare to being on private health insurance and gone, wow, this is so much better.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, Melissa Lavalle, Secretary of UVMMC Support Staff United and VP of Healthcare for AFT Vermont, and Teagan Cook, lead outpatient chemotherapy scheduled at her hospital, and a chief steward in UVMMC Support Staff United. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here 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 makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.
As droughts and wildfires damage economies, 350.org called on governments to push for a global tax treaty that can make big oil and gas corporations pay for mounting climate costs.
This week in New York, governments wrapped up negotiations for the UN Tax Convention with some governments strongly pushing for a global tax system aligned with the Paris Agreement and other environmental treaties, which can hold big polluters accountable for climate damage.
Campaigners called on governments to support a global tax on fossil fuel profits to raise critically needed funds to help communities and countries hit hardest by climate disasters and ensure a fast, fair shift to renewable energy. Revenues can also be directly channeled to households struggling to pay bills or put food on the table due to spikes in energy and food prices.
While tax treaty negotiations took a step in the right direction, several rich countries tried to halt progress by sidelining positions that push for stronger environmental taxation and taxing rights for developing countries.
Set to be finalized in 2027, the UN Tax Treaty talks will resume in December, with the inclusion of a “polluters pay” principle on the table. If adopted, a legally binding mechanism can be set up to collect a global tax on the profits of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies, which posted more than $90 billion dollars in profits in the second quarter of 2026 alone.
"Big Oil’s staggering second quarter earnings prove that the money we need for solutions exists, it’s just in the wrong hands. As droughts and heatwaves drain public budgets and push up the cost of living, countries need these funds now to protect people from extreme heat and rising bills. The momentum for permanently taxing fossil fuel profits is here. Our leaders must not squander this chance to put that wealth where it belongs – into building a safer and more livable planet, not a hotter and more destructive one.”
Josh Bayly, Director of Sustainability at Consumers International, said:
"Affordability stands out as the top consumer concern worldwide. Spiking energy and food prices have turned essential daily activities like cooking a meal or using the air conditioner into a dilemma for ordinary households. Globally, consumer trust in fossil fuel companies is low, and the outstanding profits they just posted only deepens this distrust. The UN Tax Convention gives governments a real chance to make the energy system fairer: tax excess profits to ease the burden on consumers.”
Notes to the Editor:
Analysis by Eurodad and the Global Alliance for Tax Justice estimates that a 20% surtax on profits of the world's 100 largest oil and gas companies could have generated more than $1.08 trillion since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015.
Pat Caldwell is 69 years old and, as Chris Stanton gushes in this uproarious Q&A, “a legend to IMAX nerds.” Caldwell loves Vision3 film stock, hates Joker: Folie à Deux, and has discovered more than one dead body in a movie theater. His decades-long career as a projectionist includes a stint at a Tennessee porn theater with “very good equipment,” and he once spent half a year screening Lawrence of Arabia four times daily. When Stanton reached out to Caldwell on the occasion of The Odyssey, he may have landed the year’s most entertaining interview.
So Sam taught me how to run the projectors, and he got drunk, passed out on the couch. And after the concession stand in the box office closed, I would go up and run the rest of the movies for him. This went very nicely until one night there’s a knock at the door. I opened the door and here’s this old man standing there. And I said, “Well, who are you?” He says, “I could ask the same question. Who are you? I’m the business agent of the local projectionists’ union.” I explained what was going on. He woke up Sam, chewed him out. And the next day they made me an apprentice. I trained for a year with no pay at all the local theaters in Nashville.
A Chinese man hired a Florida surrogate, then didn’t pick up his kids because of visas issues, sparking a custody battle that could upend the lucrative, largely unregulated industry. Emi Nietfeld spent more than a year reporting this rollercoaster of a feature. One particularly harrowing turn involves the father hiring people to retrieve the babies for him:
As the men continued knocking on her door, Simpson’s phone convulsed with notifications. Zhou messaged her nonstop. He called 53 times. “If you don’t give my babies to us, we have to report to the police. And you will be arrested immediately,” he warned. Then came pleas—or were they threats? “Think about your daughter,” he wrote, referring to Simpson’s 5-year-old. “I don’t think you want to have her be live without you for several years!”
Halfway across the world, Zhou paced in his apartment, chest seizing in panic. Over and over, he’d tried to explain his predicament to Simpson. He was still waiting for his visa interview; without her help, he couldn’t get his kids home. Running out of money and options, he’d hired the handlers as a last resort. Now, as his calls and messages went ignored, he feared she’d fallen in love with his children and would never let them go.
Astronomy, our window into the rest of the universe, happens in the dark. Planets, stars and galaxies – all the mysteries of the cosmos – only reveal themselves at night. But the night sky may be getting much brighter, thanks to an American company with a plan to conquer darkness itself by sending 50,000 giant mirrors into space.
What you are reading first appeared as a cover story for The Atlas, our new global publication with The Continent. Sign up here to get the next edition delivered to your inbox on August 27.
Astronomers are panicking.
It is an “existential threat” to optical astronomy, says the European Southern Observatory. A “disastrous” idea that will “permanently scar” the night sky, according to the Royal Astronomical Society. The American Astronomical Society told Nature it “would probably mean the end of ground-based astronomy, or optical astronomy, at least.”
Sthabile Kolwa agrees. “It will take away a very crucial part of our civilization,” she tells The Atlas. Kolwa, a senior lecturer in astronomy at the University of South Africa, studies the life cycles of galaxies, but today her concerns are more immediate. “It might come to this, that we just have to find them in the parking lot and say, ‘Hey, what are you guys doing? You’re going to ruin science for us.’ ”
Like Uber, but for the sun
The parking lot in question is in Hawthorne, California, outside the headquarters of Reflect Orbital. They call themselves The Sunlight Company. The start-up is celebrating: Earlier this month, the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved the launch of Eärendil-1, likely in a few months time.
This satellite, named for a character in JRR Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, will unfurl an 18m x 18m mirror in low Earth orbit. It’s designed to reflect sunlight onto the dark side of the earth, lighting a 5km2 patch of land with the strength of four full moons.
It is a proof of concept.
By 2035, Reflect Orbital wants 50,000 of its mirrors in space, delivering illumination “comparable to daylight” on demand to paying customers (“sunlight is the new oil,” says chief executive Ben Nowack). The company says this will allow solar panels to generate clean energy overnight; provide “safer, evenly-lit streets” to cities that pay for it; and keep construction sites and farms working 24/7.
There will be an app, of course, offering “sunlight as a service” – lighting up the night will be as easy as ordering an Uber.
Clean, renewable energy is at the heart of the company’s vision, a spokesperson told The Atlas in a statement. Reflect Orbital declined to respond to specific queries and said it is in constant dialogue with astronomers, scientists and environmental researchers to mitigate the impact of the light pollution: “We are able to dim the brightness of the service and turn it off at any stage. We control where the light shines when serving an authorised customer. Most people and most places will never see this light. It is precise, targeted and customers will require permits to receive the service.”
Circadian arrhythmia
A new research paper, published in May, challenges Reflect Orbital’s position. Its author, the European Southern Observatory’s Oliver Hainault, concluded that the company’s 50,000 satellites would increase the background brightness of the sky by 300% – even when their mirrors are pointed somewhere else. This, coupled with a proposal from Elon Musk’s SpaceX to build vast data centres in space, would go “beyond the limit” of what astronomy can withstand.
What that means, in practice, is that the images from ground-based telescopes will be dramatically less useful, marred by streaks of light from passing satellites. The most distant light sources won’t be visible at all.
This will obscure evidence of other galaxies, hinder research into black holes and other cosmic phenomena, and potentially prevent early warnings of asteroid approaches. Cutting-edge astronomy will only be possible from space-based telescopes like the James Webb and the Hubble – access to which is already massively oversubscribed, and subject to political interference.
The night sky will look different to the naked eye, too. “The next time you’re away from urban light pollution, spend some time outdoors after dark and enjoy the view of the Milky Way and the constellations that have inspired awe since humankind woke to consciousness. Chances are those views are not here to stay forever,” wrote journalist Tereza Pultarova for Space.com.
Anna Jibladze
Running out of space
The night sky is already a lot brighter than it was 150 years ago, when light bulbs started to become commonplace. According to Dark Sky International, a US-based nonprofit that advocates against light pollution, 80% of Earth’s human population already lives under some form of sky glow, most of which is generated on land. This has forced astronomers to seek out “dark sky places,” like the Atacama Desert in Chile or the Upper Karoo in South Africa, for their telescopes.
Humans can adapt to less darkness. But it is much harder for animals and ecosystems that have evolved alongside predictable rhythms of day and night. Nocturnal predators lose the ability to hunt; sea turtle babies can’t find their way to the sea; migratory birds are thrown hopelessly off course; and moths expend all their energy helplessly chasing artificial light sources.
“It’s almost like we are on a mission to obliterate natural darkness from earth,” said Ruskin Hartley, Dark Sky’s chief executive. “And now rather than do it street by street and bulb by bulb, let’s do it from space.”
Space is, in theory, protected by the Outer Space Treaty, a 1967 agreement signed by 110 countries, including all the major space superpowers. It states that “space is the province of all mankind." But that’s not what’s actually happening, Hartley argues. “In the US, it’s the most wealthy, most powerful individuals who are gobbling up as much of that orbital space as they can before someone else can get that opportunity” – with China, Russia and Europe all scrambling too for a greater presence in low Earth orbit.
“Who gets to choose that we light up the night sky? Who gets to make that decision?” Ruskin asks. In the US, it is the FCC’s job to decide what satellites are allowed in space. But it has said that assessing the impact of light pollution or environmental damage is not within its remit. Instead, it wants to slash regulation so American companies can take advantage of the “space industrial revolution.”
And Reflect Orbital has rich and powerful backers. Earlier this year, it secured a $1.5-million contract from the US air force, hinting at possible military applications for its mirrors. Last year, it raised $20-million from three venture capital firms, including Sequoia Capital, one of the biggest investors in Silicon Valley. Sequoia also owns a multibillion-dollar stake in SpaceX, which has its own plans for low earth orbit.
There are already more than 10,000 Starlink satellites up there, giving Elon Musk unprecedented influence over global communications. The company wants to launch one million more satellites over the next few years to build a network of space-based data centres. In addition to the light pollution, astronomers worry the potential for collisions will increase dramatically, as will risks to the ozone layer.
A brighter future
On her blog Higher Dimensions, the astronomy professor Janna Levin contemplates our brighter future. “It is quite possible that the hot glow of the swarm of data satellites will saturate the night, washing out the stars from our perspective on Earth. We’ll look up into the sky and instead of Zeus transformed into a swan outlined in a constellation of a few stars, the machine gods will literally loom above us, glowing with radiant heat, making declarations, predicting the weather, forecasting then determining our fate.”
Kolwa, the South African astronomy lecturer, offers a different metaphor: that of empires “colonizing low Earth orbit.” This was an ambition of one of the most infamous imperialists of them all, Cecil John Rhodes, who said that he looked up at the stars and thought: “I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.”
But it hasn’t been colonized just yet.
“I’m still trying to figure out what we can do, what responsibility we have as scientists,” says Kolwa. “How could we engage our communities to stand up to these corporations and say no? We must keep our night skies dark, as dark as possible.”
Award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv recently published a collection of essays about the relationships between mothers and daughters. She talked to Lucy McKeon about her longstanding interest in stories about families and about revisiting old topics through new lenses:
LM
You write in the preface about your own experience of this. Not only in your relationship to your own mother, which I want to ask you about, but you describe revisiting some of these stories, years after first reporting and writing them, now as a more experienced writer, and a mother yourself. Through new insight, and in some cases encountering details you’d previously overlooked, you decided to make some revisions. I wonder how it felt to look back on this work by a younger version of yourself.
RA
I think I was most surprised by how one’s curiosity changes—by the moments where I realized I had failed to be curious. And where my present-day self would have identified a particular episode or trauma as foundational, I had breezed past it [back then]. It was about age, it was about being a different kind of writer, maybe. I kept noticing that I had omitted lost babies or dead babies—in three different stories. It fundamentally wasn’t registering to me as a significant life event. Those are some of the things that I felt newly attentive to, that I couldn’t just leave be. I felt I needed to address [them].
Polish model Joanna Krupa, who currently resides in the United States, said she has no romantic relationship or ongoing contact with Polish lawmaker Dominik Tarczyński after paparazzi photos of the pair sparked speculation.
“I’ve seen this guy maybe three times in my life,” Krupa said in an interview with the Polish outlet Pudelek, later aired on the program Portret.
“I have no contact with him at all. The fact that I was at dinner with a group of friends, what does that mean? Nothing.”
Poland is much safer than the US, says Polish-American supermodel Joanna Krupa.
She directly refers to the murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska, who was killed by a career criminal with 14 convictions.
Paparazzi previously photographed Krupa embracing Tarczyński, a member of the European Parliament from Poland’s Law and Justice party. The images quickly fueled online rumors of an affair. Krupa had already addressed the speculation earlier, stressing there was no romantic involvement.
In the latest comments, she described Tarczyński as one of many acquaintances across the political spectrum.
“I have various colleagues who are on this or that side. I look at a person who is a good person,” she said. “Is Dominik a good man? I don’t know him closely enough to say if he’s a good person. The media made who knows what out of it.”
The conversation also touched on U.S. politics. Posts on Krupa’s Instagram had led some observers to believe she was closely aligned with President Donald Trump. However, she declined to take a firm position on the U.S. leader.
“Empathy? I don’t know if he has any empathy,” Krupa said. “Here, I won’t say I’m on his side or not. There were moments where, for example, he supported animals. When it comes to things like that, I agree.”
She described herself as an empath and said she does not see the same quality reflected in Trump’s broader approach, while noting agreement on animal-protection issues.
A shocking new case has come to light, which involves three Syrians gang raping a 10-year-old girl, with the men also urinating on her and smearing her with feces. Incredibly, there are no public news reports about this incident. The case was only revealed due to prominent national victim advocate Michael Kyrath, who disclosed he is actively working with the victim as part of his victim outreach efforts.
Kyrath described the details of the case during an appearance on ServusTV during a debate with a number of speakers on immigration, crime, and politics. which was published yesterday,
3 Syrians gang raped and urinated on a 10-year-old girl in Germany.
"The youngest victim I am supporting was raped over several hours by three Syrians. They urinated on her, smeared her with feces, beat her, and kicked her. This girl is 10 years old. 10 years old!" said… https://t.co/1gMXJ9ZlJYpic.twitter.com/FKYbxKdbTu
“We are currently caring for over 1,000 victim families. We are currently supporting 36 young women who have become victims of sexual violence, including so-called gang rapes, which didn’t exist here at all 10 or 15 years ago. The youngest victim I am supporting was raped over several hours by three Syrians. They urinated on her, smeared her with feces, beat her, and kicked her. This girl is 10 years old. 10 years old!” said Michael Kyrath during his appearance.
He continues by saying: “These perpetrators cannot be rehabilitated through therapy, if only because the training of our therapists is tailored to Central European socialization… That means we aren’t even capable of rehabilitating these people.”
There is no public record of this case, which may have to do with the age of the victim. However, similar cases have also come to light in recent years, including the recent trial involving two Iraqis who raped a 7-year-old child in Essen. In that case as well, there was extremely limited coverage, with the case only coming to light once the trial started, with only one news outlet reporting on the details with an incredibly short news clip.
It raises the question of how many cases are not being publicized by the news media regarding young victims being raped in Germany by immigrants. While the issue of foreigners raping Europeans has proven politically explosive, children being raped is a step even further. With each such case coming to light, it could shift public sentiment even further towards the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which may also be a political factor regarding why these cases are being suppressed.
Kyrath’s own daughter, 17-year-old Ann-Marie, was stabbed to death dozens of times by a Palestinian migrant, along with her 19-year-old boyfriend Danny. Kyrath now works as a tireless advocate for families and victims of migrant violence, making frequent appearances on debate panels on major television networks.
During the interview, he also discussed the role of immigration and crime in the country.
“It’s always the same perpetrator profile, it’s almost always the same weapon, it’s virtually the same sequence of events, it’s the same motives, and for 11 years, it’s been the same empty phrases from responsible politicians that we’ve been hearing ever since—that it’s not that bad, you have to differentiate, you have to be careful, we must not play into the hands of the right, and all the other things we hear. People are dying every day, children are dying every day. And here we are, debating right versus left,” he said.
He further addressed the state of Germany and the so-called “fight against the right,” a theme that dominates the public media networks.
“We can go on, we can completely open up this topic. If you come to Germany: our schools are crumbling, the healthcare system is broken, internal security is eroded, trains don’t run on time, planes don’t run on time. But the main thing is: the fight against the right. Do you think any citizen whose children are beaten up at school because they eat pork cares about the fight against the right, or the right and the left? That doesn’t interest any citizen anymore. I am terribly sorry, but they are far removed from reality and what citizens see out there.”
Kyrath notes that in his work as a master craftsman, every step is documented and regulated, and yet, migration involving hundreds of thousands of foreigners remains a black hole for German authorities, who often do not know which country these individuals are from, or even the real name or birth date of tens of thousands of migrants.
“We don’t know how many illegal people are in this country, where they are, what their goals are, what their views are, or if they are willing to respect our way of life. Instead, we put them in container villages, give them a few euros every month, and call that successful integration. That is a completely false example from certain people living in a prosperity-decayed bubble, applauding themselves for how great they are. In reality, that has nothing to do with humanity or Christianity,” he said.
Claims that migrants are a boon to the job market are also sharply squashed by Kyrath.
“And here we come to the topic of skilled workers, as you mentioned earlier. As a master craftsman, I can tell you what requirements we have to meet today just to hire or employ someone, with all the documentation duties. I am terribly sorry, but 90 percent of the people coming here cannot be employed by us because we are simply not allowed to, because they don’t meet the requirements. They don’t have the schooling, the training, or the security checks,” he stated.
He even touched on a growing theme that Remix News has published on extensively, which is the fact that artificial intelligence and automation are in the process of rendering mass immigration pointless. As Asia increasingly shows, migration is not necessary for successful economies. In fact, it may even be an impediment, as cheap labor hinders capital investment in automation. Countries like South Korea, Japan, and China — all nearly zero immigration countries — are pulling ahead of Europe in countless areas, including renewable energy, AI, robotics, and the automotive sector, all while embracing science over ideology.
While addressing a point made about Spain and its inability to integrate migrants into the workforce and education system, Kyrath stated: “That also touches on a philosophical question: what will things look like in 10 to 15 years? With AI-supported technology, do we even need humans for these jobs in the future? Today, you don’t need a doctor when you have an Apple Watch, you don’t need taxi drivers, garbage collectors, or even teachers. Where are all these people supposed to go in 10 to 15 years? How will they be employed?”
Regarding the murder of his daughter Ann-Marie, the host said: “The perpetrator had multiple previous convictions, had stabbed another man in the neck the year before, had no right of residence, and moved from state to state. Have you received any answers from politicians regarding how such a person was still in the country?”
To which Kyrath answered, “On a state level, politicians listened to us and took our concerns seriously. But at the federal level, very few engage with the topic. We invited the Federal President, the Chancellor, and all 16 state premiers to an event in Frankfurt, and we received unanimous rejections, claiming they couldn’t attend every small association event.”
For decades, Mozilla has been one of the strongest advocates for an open internet. Today, as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly central to how businesses and governments operate, the organization is...
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A hypothetical asteroid impact scenario is in play prior to a major gathering of planetary defense specialists next year. The International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) is an independent non-governmental organization recognized by the United Nations. IAA is hosting the Planetary Defense Conference 2027. Impact date Date of the hypothetical potential impact on Earth is pegged […] 
Poland is much safer than the US, says Polish-American supermodel Joanna Krupa.
3 Syrians gang raped and urinated on a 10-year-old girl in Germany.
