Plan International Press Release

One year on since the conflict in Sudan began the country faces a “catastrophic humanitarian crisis”, according to girls’ rights organisation Plan International.

The conflict, which began on 15 April last year, has now killed over 13,900 people and left 25 million people in need of humanitarian assistance – 14 million of these are children. Over 8.4 million people have been displaced, of whom 1.7 million have fled to neighbouring countries, this includes refugees who had previously sought safety in Sudan.

“A year into this devastating conflict, children in Sudan, especially girls, continue to live through a catastrophic humanitarian crisis every day. They’ve witnessed unimaginable horrors, and many have lost family or friends. Most children have not been able to attend school for nearly a year. Ongoing fighting also means that Sudan could be in famine within a month – we are witnessing malnutrition levels rise at alarming speed’ says Mohammed Qazilbash, Country Director for Plan International Sudan.

“This crisis is not isolated to Sudan – our offices in Chad, CAR, Ethiopia, South Sudan and Egypt are responding to the consequences of this conflict. If a political solution to the crisis in Sudan is not found, the entire region could be destabilised. In Chad for example, this is the first time we are seeing so many schoolteachers settling there as refugees which is concerning because these are the people you count on to rebuild a country and its population.”

As the conflict spreads to new areas inside Sudan, families are constantly on the move, seeking safety. The high numbers of people fleeing their homes means that after facing unimaginable trauma, many are enduring overcrowding and poor conditions at displacement camps.

Plan International is particularly concerned that schools across Sudan have been closed for a year, with more than 170 school buildings now being used to shelter displaced people. This means that an entire generation of 20 million children – a population close to the entire size of Australia – is missing out on their right to an education.

The consequences of this conflict will have a devastating impact on the development of children and their mental well-being. Children out of school are at increased risk of sale, sexual abuse, exploitation, family separation, abduction, trafficking, and recruitment and use by armed groups. 

“The biggest concern for the children is their unclear future, they don’t know if they will have the chance to go back to school again, or back to their homes,” says Hawa Eltigani, Plan International Sudan’s Child Protection in Emergencies Specialist.

“The language spoken by many children is what I would call ‘conflict language’. Children are just talking about guns, shooting. They now know different types of guns, of planes. There’s also a lot of retraumatising because adults are constantly speaking about the conflict in front of the children who are now not hearing anything else.

“Most of the children are moving from one place to another as the war spreads. As soon as they have settled somewhere, the conflict starts there, triggering trauma [once again].”

Since the start of the conflict, which has created the world’s largest displacement of children, Plan International has responded by providing mobile, child friendly spaces, where children are encouraged to play, draw, sign and use techniques such as storytelling to support them process their trauma.

In the regions of North Darfur and South Kordofan, Plan International has recently launched a project designed to provide classrooms for informal education at a gathering point for displaced people.

14-year-old Mai has been able to attend these classes; “I started learning the basic subjects included mathematics, Arabic, English and Islamic. I received a school kit, a mat for sitting on in the classroom and food for me and my friends. I want to continue studying to reach my dream of becoming a great person that can help my people.

“I believe that with a space for learning, we will shine and do our best to succeed. I will never stop going to my lessons as it’s a new space for me and my friends. I enjoy chatting about new things, apart from the conflict. I’m enjoying being back in school and making new friends.”

The humanitarian and girls’ rights organisation is appealing for €11million in funding from donors, to continue to reach children and their families with life-saving humanitarian assistance.

In Australia, humanitarian organisations including Plan International Australia are calling on the Australian Government to urgently provide $50 million in new and additional funding to the humanitarian catastrophe occurring in Sudan. Australia’s peers have recognised the urgency and scale of this crisis. The European Union, Canada, the United Kingdom and Germany having all committed more than $160m each to the Sudan response, compared to Australia’s $20.45 million to date.

We are calling on the Australian Government to double its contribution to the humanitarian emergency fund, from $150 million to $300 million, to meet the needs of hundreds of millions of people impacted by the massive increase in emergencies, conflicts and disasters that have unfolded around the world in recent years.

Plan International Australia has also launched an emergency Sudan appeal to help children and families engulfed in this invisible crisis.

By James Moore  

The first criminal trial of an American president is likely to bring more division, and even suffering, to the country he proposes to once more lead. The salaciousness of the story that has brought him before the bar of justice will further demean the highest office in the land, which tends to bear the imprimatur, “Leader of the free world.” The nation’s entire population, already agape over the reportage, will hear details of sex with an adult film actress while the future first lady was home with a new baby, and how money was paid to keep the porn star quiet about a tryst with the man who would be president.

I wonder if a $130,000 payoff to cover up extramarital sex can make our political divisions even more acutely dangerous. The accused’s anger is not likely to be constrained by a courtroom and he will send out emails to supporters, many who are struggling to pay their own bills, to give him money because none of this is fair and he’s a victim, and they will send their cash and credit and debit card payments to a man who claims to be among the world’s richest. Even our horror and embarrassment will become transactional, which is unsurprising for a president who has specialized in bankruptcies and failed businesses. Pollsters say a felony conviction for cooking his books to hide the bribe will cost him support, even among his red-hatted minions.

The former president laces his reelection rhetoric with terms like “bloodbath” and phrases suggesting “all hell will break loose,” determined to suggest a dystopia awaits Americans if they do not end his prosecutions and restore him to the White House. Little imagination is required to envision a scenario where the republic comes undone, at least partially, after a conviction of the serial adulterer and the reelection of the incumbent. Anger on the right might manifest in violence, though the notion of a civil war seems improbable. Putting on camouflage clothes, grabbing a gun, and shooting fellow citizens randomly only makes you a criminal, not a patriot. Our differences cannot be resolved by an internal American conflict involving combat, but they are too stark to be simply swept from the room by an electoral vote.

I do not understand how any citizen can support a man who ridicules the handicapped, calls members of the military “suckers and losers,” fails to pay the vendors who work on his projects, demeans women with blunt sexual allusions and brags about taking away their right to control their bodies, continues to claim he won an election that more than 60 courts said he lost, and lied, according to the Washington Post, more than 30,000 times during his four years in office. What does it take to disqualify him from the job in the minds of MAGA men and women? Is it okay for a president to pathologically lie and believe in a reality that exists only in his troubled mind? There is no remaining rational right wing when every Republican officeholder hurries to Florida to politically genuflect before a man who sprays his face orange and brown when he arises in the morning.

The verdict in the New York trial, and the outcome of November’s election, will not end the great American political rift. In fact, it will likely deepen. New theories of stolen votes will circulate, regardless of the lack of proof, and MAGA warriors will add fanciful implications to the hackneyed mantra of, “Take our country back.” Who took it from us? Perhaps, we gave it away to a conman. The former president’s campaign operatives are already scheming methodologies for challenging the vote while there are, undoubtedly, Q-Anon clowns and angry incels just waiting to take to the streets with their patriotic delusions. We might all be Americans, but we are of different types, and the middle ground has been washed away by a sea of vitriol.

The idea of a new Civil War seems preposterous to me. A more likely scenario that occurs over the course of decades is a kind of “Balkanization” of this country, a breakup into regions that are each independently governed and influenced by relationships with foreign powers. Imagine the traditionally liberal Northeast aligned, economically and politically with Europe, the West with Asia-Pacific influences, Mexico and cartels might gain some control in the Southwest, and Central and South America pull strings in Dixie and the Southeast. That’s a movie I’d like to see, and not completely improbable if we cannot reconcile deep differences in our politics and public discourse.

Alex Garland’s new movie, Civil War, suggests a modern version of the War Between the States is not impossible. The trailers make the film appear more like a war movie than an examination of how failed political debates can lead to catastrophe. Audiences are more compelled by bang, bang and explosions than watching politicos argue until guns are pulled, I suppose. There is one scene in the trailer, however, which implies a contemporary cause for the fictional conflict. Austin actor Jesse Plemons, one of the combatants, confronts a small family on the run from the violence, and decides he needs to know their allegiances. When he is told, “But we’re Americans,” Plemons is not satisfied.

“Yeah,” he says. “But what kind of Americans are you?”

The idea that there is more than one kind of American is as disturbing as it is factual, and violence and brutality related to our politics has been inescapable. Some of this can be passed off as the growing pains of a nation, but almost thematically, killing each other over what we believe is the best for our country, has never abated. There is no better example of this than the American life of Robert Todd Lincoln, the slain president’s eldest son, which presents a thread that connects numerous historical tragedies. The only son of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln to survive into adulthood was present at three presidential assassinations, and they were not the only sorrows and heartbreak attendant to his life.

On April 14, 1865, Lincoln had been invited by his parents to attend the play, “My American Cousin,” but declined the offer, claiming he needed rest. The Harvard trained lawyer had often publicly lamented that he’d had no more than ten minutes conversation with his father while he was serving as president, and that may have added more tears and emotional weight the next morning as he knelt crying by the bedside where his father had died. The president, of course, had taken a bullet to the head from Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth. Lincoln had led the nation through a great battle to save its union of states and end human slavery, an idea incomprehensible to most Southerners of influence.

Robert Lincoln had dropped out of law school while hoping to serve in the Army during the war. His mother refused to countenance his plans and compromised with the president that their son might serve on the staff of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, which put the young Lincoln at Appomattox Court House when the articles of surrender were signed by Robert E. Lee. What he must have seen even at the edges of the war’s great battlefields was a loss and sadness wrought of politics and compounded by his family’s tragedies. Edward Lincoln, Robert’s younger brother, died at age 4 from consumption, a name given to tuberculosis prior to proper diagnosis; sibling Willie Lincoln died from typhoid fever at age 12 while living in the White House, and the youngest Lincoln child, Thomas, known affectionately as Tad, passed at age 18 from an undisclosed illness.

Robert Lincoln had moved to Chicago with his widowed mother and his youngest brother to practice law before he was cajoled into returning to Washington by President James Garfield. He was serving as Secretary of War and meeting with Garfield as the president departed the train station in the national capitol city on July 2, 1881. Lincoln was only 40 feet distant when the president was gunned down by Charles Guiteau, just sixteen years after Robert’s father had been slain. Garfield passed 80 days after being shot from surgical complications. Contemplating the loss of his three brothers who were already deceased, his presidential father, and Garfield, Lincoln was quoted by a New York Times reporter as asking, “My god, how many hours of sorrow have I passed in this town?”

Robert Todd Lincoln at the Dedication of the Lincoln Memorial, May 1922

He was to accumulate more hours of sorrow, losing his own son, Abraham Lincoln II, to a post operative infection at just 16 years of age. Robert, at that time, was serving President Benjamin Harrison in England as Minister to the Court of St. James. After returning to the states, Lincoln went to work for the Pullman Palace Car Company, a manufacturer of passenger cars for trains, and eventually became CEO. He was traveling with his wife from New Jersey to Chicago and decided to stop in Buffalo at the Pan-American Exposition, a type of World’s Fair promoting trade between North American countries. A messenger was waiting for the Lincoln’s with a telegram when the train arrived that said McKinley had been shot twice in the abdomen a few hours earlier at a public appearance in Buffalo and was in serious condition. Lincoln went immediately to the president’s bedside and was assured the would-be assassin, Leon Czolgosz, had failed to take down McKinley. Unfortunately, the president died seven days later, also of infection.

Lincoln, though, lived a long life and was present for the dedication of the memorial to his father on the Washington Mall in 1922, and died four years later just shy of his 83rd birthday. Almost exactly a century after the murder of his father in Ford Theater, another president was killed by the country he was serving. The assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy is still rending the garments of American politics because the facts of what happened are seemingly unknowable after botched investigations and misinformation, a process now borne digitally to voters with the express purpose of distorting their perceptions of reality. We are a nation that often seems to kill its best and brightest, or at least have found no way in our body politic to deploy effective means of prevention. Who knows what kind of country we might have become had JFK, RFK and MLK lived to inspire and guide our government and its policies? There is sufficient cause to wonder how the republic itself has survived.

Which may not happen if we fall again for the lies of 2016.

This article was originally published on Texas to the world.

Charles Darwin University Media Release

Compulsory income management (CIM) in the Northern Territory is perceived to be ineffective in reducing harm, can contribute to situations of family violence and is incompatible with the needs of welfare recipients, a new study led by Charles Darwin University (CDU) has found. 

The study, conducted by members of CDU’s Faculty of Health alongside Monash University, interviewed 26 participants who are experts in social welfare programs or policies, highly experienced in providing support to welfare recipients, or have an in-depth understanding of CIM in the lives of welfare recipients.

CIM was established in the Northern Territory in 2007 and restricts a portion of a participants income support payment which cannot be used to gamble, purchase alcohol and other prohibited products. The BasicsCard is still active in the NT, alongside the Enhanced Income Management program launched in March 2023. 

The participants were asked a series of questions about their thoughts on the long-term role and impact of CIM in the Northern Territory.

The findings explored the impact of CIM on social harms, regional and remote areas, the administrative burden it places on individuals and organisations, CIM as the dominant source of welfare provision, and CIM as a method of social control.

Lead author and CDU Senior Lecturer in Professional Practice – Families and Communities Dr Steven Roche said the study concluded CIM was considered a punitive approach to reducing harm and was incompatible with the needs of welfare recipients. 

“The findings detail CIM’s negligible impact on behaviour change around social harms and suggest that CIM can exacerbate issues such as family violence, where CIM is weaponised by men who use violence in situations of family violence,” Dr Roche said. 

According to Dr Roche, study participants detailed how welfare recipients found ways to bypass CIM to purchase prohibited items, how CIM doesn’t prevent or reduce family violence, and how it doesn’t address the underlying issues of harm from alcohol and other drugs. 

“A key theme also identified among participants was the challenges that CIM could create for welfare recipients residing in regional and remote areas,” Dr Roche said. 

“CIM was viewed by participants as exacerbating the existing cost of living pressures, particularly in remote areas where consumer choice is limited, and travel is expensive.”

Dr Roche said participants considered CIM a “top-down approach” with little effort made to work with communities to identify ways to address social harms among welfare recipients. 

“A policy reform agenda involving genuine community consultation is desperately needed to better understand the complexities of CIM in the NT that holds principles of community-based policy development at its heart,” Dr Roche said. 

Perspectives on the ongoing impact of compulsory income management in the Northern Territory was published in The Australian Journal of Social Issues. 

Walking stiffly, largely distracted, and struggling to focus on the bare essentials, US President Joe Biden was keeping company with his Japanese counterpart, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, when asked the question. It concerned what he was doing regarding Australia’s request that the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange be returned to Australia. 

Assange, who has spent five tormenting years in Belmarsh Prison in London, is battling extradition to the US on 18 charges, 17 tenuously and dangerously based on the US Espionage Act of 1917.

The words that followed from the near mummified defender of the Free World were short, yet bright enough for the publisher’s supporters. “We’re considering it.” No details were supplied. 

To these barest of crumbs came this reaction from from Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on ABC’s News Breakfast: “We have raised on behalf of Mr Assange, Australia’s national interest, that enough is enough, that this needs to be brought to a conclusion, and we’ve raised it at each level of government in every possible way.” When pressed on whether this was merely an afterthought from the president, Albanese responded with the usual acknowledgments: the case was complex, and responsibility lay with the US Department of Justice.

One of Assange’s lawyers, the relentless Jennifer Robinson, told Sky News Australia of her encouragement at Biden’s “response, this is what we have been asking for over five years. Since 2010 we’ve been saying this is a dangerous precedent that’s being set.  So, we certainly hope it was a serious remark and the US will act on it.” Assange’s brother, Gabriel Shipton, also told Sky News that the statement was significant while WikiLeaks editor-in-chief, Kristinn Hrafnsson thought the utterance “extraordinary”, cautiously hoping “to see in the coming days” whether “clarification of what this means” would be offered by “those in power” and the press corps.

The campaign to free Assange has burgeoned with admirable ferocity. The transformation of the WikiLeaks founder from eccentric, renegade cyber thief deserving punishment to prosecuted and persecuted scribbler and political prisoner has been astonishing. 

The boggling legal process has also been shown up as woefully inadequate and scandalous, a form of long-term torture via judicial torment and deprivation. The current ludicrous pitstop entails waiting for a UK Court of Appeal decision as to whether Assange will be granted leave for a full reconsideration of his case, including the merits of the extradition order itself. 

The March 26 Court of Appeal decision refused to entertain the glaringly obvious features of the case: that Assange is being prosecuted for his political views, that due process is bound to be denied in a country whose authorities have contemplated his abduction and murder, and that he risks being sentenced for conduct he is not charged with “based on evidence he will not see and which may have been unlawfully obtained.” The refusal to entertain such material as the Yahoo News article from September 2021 outlining the views of intelligence officials on kidnapping and assassination options again cast the entire affair in a poor light.

Even if Assange is granted a full hearing, it is not clear whether the court will go so far as to accept the arguments. The judges have already nobbled the case by offering US prosecutors the chance to offer undertakings, none of which would or could be binding on the DOJ or any US judge hearing the case. Extradition, in other words, is likely to be approved if Assange is “permitted to rely on the First Amendment”, “is not prejudiced at trial (including sentence) by reason of his nationality” and that he “is afforded the same First Amendment protection as a United States citizen, and that the death penalty not be imposed.” These conditions, on the face of it, look absurd in their naïve presumption. 

Whether Biden’s latest casual spray lends any credibility to a change of heart remains to be seen. In December 2010, when Vice President in the Obama administration, Biden described Assange as a “high-tech terrorist” for disclosing State Department cables. He failed to identify any parallels with previous cases of disclosures such as the Pentagon papers. 

Craig Murray, former British diplomat and Assange confidant, adds a note of cautious sobriety to the recent offering from the president: “I’m not going to get too hopeful immediately on a few words out of the mouth of Biden, because there has been no previous indication, nothing from the Justice Department so far to indicate any easing up.”

For all that, it may well be that the current administration, facing a relentless publicity campaign from human rights organisations, newspapers, legal and medical professionals, not to mention pressure from both his own party in Congress and Republicans, is finally yielding. Caution, however, is the order of the day, and nothing should be read or considered in earnest till signatures are inked and dried. We are quite a way off from that.

By James Moore  

We were young when we lived near the Rio Grande and sometimes on Fridays the boss took us out on his boat and a few of my colleagues were pulled on water skis. I mostly remember the children sitting on their haunches in the canebrakes and how they stared at us with dark confused eyes. I assumed they wondered about the strange world along the north bank and the people who had boats for toys and never worried about food or where they might sleep at night.

There were times we slept on the beach down where the big river meets the Gulf, and we drank cold beer and watched the gulls as they whirled around the shrimp boats. In the mornings before the sun was above the coastline, I ran along the levees that were filled with water to grow the orange and grapefruit trees and I saw the open gates that let the water into the aloe and vegetable fields. When it got too hot, I jumped off the levee into the canal and swam with the slow current, kicking with my running shoes.

Our first season in the sub-tropics of Texas a moderate hurricane spun up from the Bay of Campeche and flooded the valley with torrential rains for a few days. Roads were closed and in the big colonias the farmworkers were washed out of their houses and into the mud. In the summer, giant thunderstorms rose across the fields and the humid air felt too thick to breathe. Wind across the Gulf and up through the palm rows felt like a hot, fuzzy cloth on the skin.

There seemed to be water everywhere in the Rio Grande Valley, though I never saw a lake, which was more than confusing. There were resacas, small bodies of water like ponds that were oxbow lakes cut off from the river, but the nearest big inland body of water was northwest up the border toward Laredo. Falcon Lake, however, was a reservoir that had been backed up behind a dam on the Rio Grande. During a long drought I took a small motorboat out on the water there with a camera crew, and we floated through an old stone church that had been disappeared beneath the water off the shore of the town of Zapata.

My childhood had been spent surrounded by water. The Great Lakes were in every direction, except to the south, and there were recreational lakes in such abundance it often felt like there was one at the end of every street. My parents found jobs in a factory town when they came up from the South, but we were of very modest means and I did not see a Great Lake until I was 18 and hitchhiked over to stand on a shoreline, even though we lived only an hour from Huron. In school, I had stared at pictures of the freighters filled with iron ore that moved across the big waters and I had always wanted to see one of the leviathans as a boy. Instead, on those rare days when my parents had time and the slightest amount of residual energy, we might go to a nearby lake for relaxation. There were untold thousands of crystalline blue bodies of water, too many, in fact, for each to have a name.

I always assumed an abundance of water was available in the world, but as I moved my journalistic and peripatetic soul around Texas, I came to the crushing comprehension that water was more precious than oil. All the water that will ever be is the water that exists presently, and it is readily apparent Texas was a bit shortchanged by geology. During a 250-million-year period of the Paleozoic Era, 600-350 million years ago, Texas was awash in vast inland seas to the West of the Llano uplift, which is in the central part of the state. Today, there are only rivers that have been dammed to create reservoirs. Underground aquifers also provide water, but they are increasingly mismanaged and endangered.

The rivers I knew in my youth ran mostly wild and free and we rented or found old and dented aluminum canoes to ride their rapids on weekends from college. The White River, Pine, and Au Sable moved placidly and sometimes rapidly through birch and white pine forests, running past cabins and under country roads toward the big lakes. There was no need for dams with such an endless surplus of water, but every river in Texas seems to be stopped to provide water for communities and agriculture, and even offer flood control. I believe the state’s only remaining unimpeded rivers are the Devil’s and the much fought over Pecos, which is a timid stream coming down from New Mexico and across the Chihuahua Desert to the Rio Grande at Lake Amistad.

Even barricaded, though, Texas rivers can be deadly. The weather seems too often to be about extremes, almost bombast in this state. Biblical floods and epic droughts torture the landscape of Texas. Rainfall in extreme amounts has its power amplified by the characteristics of runoff. The ground west of the Balcones Escarpment, a geographic break in the land that runs from near San Antonio to Fort Worth, is mostly rock and does not adequately absorb moisture. Water races downward to arroyos that feed rivers and can generate giant waves racing down riverbeds.

I saw the consequences of hard rain on rock many years ago when floods moved through the watersheds of the Pedernales and Guadalupe Rivers. In 1983, young campers in Pedernales Falls State Park were swept away by a flood in the night, and five died. Warning horns were later installed on the riverbank to let people know downstream of approaching high water. The sedate Blanco River, which lowers itself out of the Texas Hill Country through tall stands of cypress trees and long limestone cliffs, rose 28 feet in 90 minutes in late May of 2015, and killed more than a dozen people, many sleeping in riverside vacation homes. The water crested at 40 feet above flood stage when 13 inches of rain had fallen in the upstream watershed.

The most tragic flash flood incident in recent memory, however, was in 1987 on the Guadalupe River near Comfort. A group of campers from a Dallas church were cut off from safety as the water rose. An attempt to cross a low concrete bridge in their bus turned deadly when the engine stalled. A young student athlete named John Bankston Jr. rescued several of the smaller children by carrying them out on his back as the water kept climbing up the side of the bus. He was unable to save himself, however, and was taken away by the rushing water and died with nine of his friends that morning. His body was the only one not recovered.

I will never forget flying up and down the river in a helicopter with John Bankston Sr., convinced he was going to find his son alive, clinging to a tree, even five days later. Thirty-seven years after the tragedy, the river has not given up all of its dead and no trace of Bankston Jr. has ever been found.

Texas is, however, as deadly dry as it is wet. Historic droughts are becoming dangerously recurrent as the state’s population dramatically increases with in-migration from the West and North. Newcomers, accustomed to green lawns and irrigation systems for their yards, move up into the arid Hill Country and plant thirsty St. Augustine grass. Every new home is another straw sipping from the reservoirs, which, increasingly in the added heat of climate change, have turned into what a Texas drought expert refers to as “giant evaporation ponds.” In fact, evaporation rates of surface water in the Hill Country are approximately 57 inches per year.

A significant portion of water in Texas that is not consumed by lawn sprinklers, washing cars, or getting flushed down toilets, is evaporating from the surface of lakes. The city of Las Vegas, Nevada is trying to stop the waste of water on what it describes as “ornamental grass.” The definition does not include front lawns but put an end to watering medians on roadways and grass berms between sidewalks and pavement. The Southern Nevada Water Authority says there are eight square miles of “non-functional turf” in the Vegas area and eliminating its irrigation will reduce water consumption by about 15 gallons per person, per day.

A similar policy would help Texas conserve water.

“The easiest and quickest thing you can do – after patching up leaks – is restrict ornamental lawns,” said Alyssa Burgin of the Texas Drought Project. “Our major cities are growing so fast – we have to restrict it NOW. Folks who come here from elsewhere, where there is water, are just going to have to adapt. Heck, people who move to San Antonio from Bell County, where HOA/deed restrictions against xeriscaped lawns are enforced even when state law now states otherwise – are just going to have to adapt, because when the aquifer goes down, you’re going to go brown. Period.”

Storing water below ground, protected from summer heat in the Southwest, is also an effective strategy. The practice of aquifer storage and recovery is being used in San Antonio and Kerrville with considerable success. A billion gallons of fresh drinking water are stored in the Kerrville aquifer facility, which was the first deployed in Texas and only the third in the entire country.

The frenzy of dam building that began after the historic drought of the 1950s has not solved our water problem in Texas. There are more than 200 dams in the state but every year they seem to approach dangerously low levels of storage. Because of our southern geographic coordinates on the map, Texas did not experience the southward movement of the ancient ice masses and, consequently, there are no glaciated bodies of water in the state, just small freshwater ponds, and little lakes, which has prompted a dependence on reservoirs.

The other problem, which legislators refuse to confront, is Texas does not have a uniform statewide water usage policy. We rely on outdated frontier water laws that preserve claims of “first in time, first in right,” and the “right of capture.” The latter expression, almost self-explanatory, means you own whatever water is under your land if you have a pump to bring it up. The right of capture empowers you to pump dry an aquifer you share with a neighbor simply because you might have the resources to buy a pump, and she does not. Obviously, there is no argument to be made that this approach serves a common good in the parched American West.

The Ogallala Aquifer, as an example, is being pumped dry by farmers pulling up water from beneath their land to irrigate crops that would not otherwise survive. Ogallala, a vast inland and underground sea that stretches from South Dakota to the South Plains of Texas, might take millennia to recharge if it is drawn down toward dry. Without the Ogallala, the cotton and wheat fields stretched across the Texas Panhandle and down through the Cap Rock will disappear, if the rains don’t come.

The Ogallala Aquifer

I remember an exploratory trip through Western Nebraska that led to reporting on an irrigation project in the sand hills. Center pivot rigs were crawling up and down the low hills, spitting out water and nitrate fertilizer. The project seemed absurd, but a western beef producer had decided to vertically integrate its business and grow its own corn for cattle feed, and the sand hills were close to operations, easily fertilized, and abundant water in the form of the Ogallala was just below the surface. The operation, even through my youthful eyes, seemed astonishingly stupid. The nitrates leached into the groundwater, polluted the aquifer, reduced its volume, and became health risks for anyone drinking water from an Ogallala source.

Why do we allow such things to happen?

My personal belief is that the north and the Midwest will undergo an economic and population resurgence in the coming decades because of water. Single states with thousands of lakes can support businesses and families far more affordably than the desert Southwest. Phoenix and Los Angeles consume most of the water of the Colorado River and leave nothing more than a sand bar at the Gulf of California because the river is used up before its arrival. Arizona diverts Colorado River water into the Salt River Project canals for delivery to Phoenix, one of the hottest, driest, and fastest growing cities in the entire world.

Why has America not devised a sustainable strategy for water use? I cannot understand the lack of attention to such a critical issue, though, I am a desert rat now, drawn for decades to the high, dry expanses of the American West, the long, jagged horizons, and impossible sunsets. The bright red buds of an ocotillo in spring or a blooming prickly pear will make anyone believe it is possible to thrive in an arid land. Even glorious desert flora need water, though.

We are all haunted by waters.

This article was originally published on Texas to the world.

By Callen Sorensen Karklis  

Dear Readers,

Seventeen years ago I was inspired by the change that the 2007 federal election saw after the aggressive rollout of WorkChoices, and the fear with it that everyday people’s working rights would be taken away. In Kevin Rudd I saw the promise of change from somebody with a vision on climate action, restoring workers’ rights, policy reforms that would bring Australia into the 21^st century, bringing in the NBN and Fair Work and apologizing to the Stolen Generations which for me was important as a First Nations Quandamooka person.

During high school I had a part-time job in retail, hearing everyday people’s personal issues no matter how mundane or extreme. I decided then that I’d one day become involved in politics. I joined my union and became active in helping the Australian Labor Party upon finishing school. My first involvement was in the 2012 Qld State Election, which was brutal. I saw the Bligh Government decimated by 44 seats from 51 to a rump of 7 seats in Opposition when Campbell Newman was elected in a super majority landslide, no thanks to the GFC asset sales backlash! What transpired, however, under Newman was more asset sales but on steroids!

The LNP sadly defeated the former progressive coalition of Independents, Labor, and Greens under the Hobson led Redland City Council in 2012 as well after a term in office. This saw the LNP on all three levels of government by 2013 locally. Unfortunately, the LNP pushed hard on overdevelopment proposals such as building at Ramsar wetlands in Toondah Harbor.

I became heavily involved in the ALP branches of my area and Young Labor climbing the party executive ladder as an organizer assisting the Labor Left with the naïve view, I could change the world piece by piece in the fight for progressive rights for all. All while starting my studies at Griffith University studying political studies, international relations, and business.

I ended up campaigning for the ALP at the 2014 by-elections and 2015 Qld State Election where we saw the rise of Annastacia Palaszczuk and her Labor Left deputy Jackie Trad. As the party gained traction electorally locally and in QLD however, I discovered while becoming involved in policy roles that the ALP had U-turned its previous opposition to the Toondah Harbor development proposals and expanding it from a proposed 800 units to 3600 units in Ramsar Wetlands.

Plans of old proposed by the “Sir Joh” Nationals white shoe brigade era of government in the 1970s–80s built the Raby Bay and Gold Coasts on the power of money, brothels, and white snow. The Goss and Beattie State Labor era policies to protect Ramsar Wetlands were being abandoned. Upon discovering this I joined with groups such as Redlands 2030, Labor LEAN, CARP, Save Straddie, and later Birdlife Australia, KAG, the ACF, and local Indigenous elders in council to fight against the development of Ramsar Wetlands.

In the fight to Save Toondah I became disillusioned with the ALP, including on the unfolding Adani issue and left the party in a public spat across media headlines in 2017–2018. I took it upon myself to fight a tough campaign to run for City Council in Redlands against the LNP aligned incumbent. I ended up amid bitter infighting among the ALP as a colleague and friend in my local FEC and I competed against each other against the LNP incumbent during the Covid council election in 2020. We both lost and learnt lessons in our campaign. I gained 19% of the vote. I ended up helping a TEAL run for the seat of Oodgeroo on the Toondah issue helping the union movement during the Pandemic with both workers and students losing their livelihoods during lockdowns.

Rejoining the ALP in 2020 I worked briefly for former Brisbane Labor leader Cr Peter Cumming and assisting Labor during the 2022 Federal Election. Sadly, my final stray with the ALP was human rights breaches on youth offenders, rental, and cost of living crisis due to increasing inflation. It was the Toondah issue that pushed me further into community radio and journalism while I also contemplated on how to find the best cause fighting for my people as an Indigenous person. This is why I left the ALP to join the Greens. On the plus side the campaign harnessed how I developed my skills in campaigning and enhancing my advertising skills which I worked in briefly, whilst eyeing for the right candidates to assist.

While I commend the actions of the ALP Federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek in rejecting the Toondah PDA and doing the right thing, I lost faith with Labor for the Toondah PDA for happening in the first place. That said, there were good people in Labor, particularly LEAN and former State Ministers like Rod Welford and Pat Comben advocating with unionist and ALP party members to say “NO!” to the development against Labor MPs and RCC Crs Labor and LNP alike in favor of the development. What we saw was a stacked rort against the everyday working taxpayer and locals being passed the buck for a shitty idea! Greenies like Jono Sri, Michael Berkman, Amy MacMahon, Emerald Moon, the Mazlins, Larissa Waters, Penny Allman Payne, Carmen Lawrence and Max Chandler Mather did great by pushing hard on Labor to do the right thing in all levels of government. They were supported by progressive Independents in Redlands like Cr Wendy Boglary, Cr Lance Hewlett, Cr Paul Bishop and former Cr Craig Ogilvie and Cr Adelia Berridge. But it wasn’t politicians that won the day, it was pure people and grassroots that won the day!

Groups like Redlands 2030, ACF, and Birdlife Australia coordinated large, coordinated protests in Cleveland with thousands in attendance; numbers not seen since the anti-Raby Bay and original Toondah protests in the 1980s at GJ Walter park, Raby Bay Harbor, and RCC council chambers in Cleveland. This created large mass media attention including roadside actions, rallies, letters to the editor, media interviews, letters to politicians, mass petitions with the highest gaining over 70,000 signatures, and heaps of letterbox drops, street stalls, shopping centre stalls, and door knocking constituents. Yes, this was exhausting, time-consuming and extremely taxing including on one’s personal mental health, but it was certainly rewarding in the people we met along the way!

The Current Politics of the Proposal

We applied the same skills and tactics of a hard fought 10-year campaign to finally flip the Redland City Council elections. We were 2 votes short of a majority in Redland City Council, but we were successful in flipping the Mayoral race away from the LNP for the first time in 12 years as Redlands has only had three non-LNP Mayors since 1991. We applied the same tactics of grassroots people power to get a progressive TEAL up as Mayor. The QLD State Government remains coy on the issue having previously supported it until the change of Premier.

The LNP majority re-elected Cr Julie Talty as Deputy Mayor who served under the Williams LNP council era in 2020-2024 who also ran against ALP MP Mick De Brenni in Springwood. Because Mayor Jos Mitchell was short of the 2 required votes she could not overrule the majority needed to disclosures the Williams LNP led Council made in after 2012. (Which prevented Jos from being able to speak out against the development.)

In true Australian spirit reminiscent to a story straight out of classic 1997 Aussie film The Castle when the Kerrigan family took on a developer from destroying their home and neighborhood from an airport expansion, the Toondah saga has been a long 10 years for many locals since 2014. But as the family lawyer points out “It’s the Vibe!” in this case Saving Toondah, it’s the vibe! But we need your help as progressive readers to send a powerful message to the minister! To have community voices heard not just in the Redlands but Australia wide!

With 10 days given for a right of reply for all parties involved in this debacle

You can have your say with Federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek here: EPBC Act Public Portal

Minister Plibersek is asking the community right now if she should continue to reject the development at Toondah Harbour. Please send her a short quick email supporting her to save the bay: Her email address is: minister.plibersek@dcceew.gov.au

Kind Regards, Callen Sorensen Karklis

Progressive contributor to The Australian Independent Media Network

“Together we can SAVE TOONDAH!”

The latest building activity data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics has confirmed there is still a long way to go before Australia overcomes the housing crisis.

Master Builders Chief Economist Shane Garrett said work started on just 163,285 new homes during 2023, a 10.5 per cent reduction on the previous year.

“During 2023, detached house starts dropped by 16.4 per cent to 99,443. This is the lowest in a decade.

“The final three months of the 2023 quarter saw higher density home starts drop for the third consecutive quarter.

“A total of 62,720 higher density homes were commenced during 2023 overall – the worst performance in 12 years.

“The mismatch between the supply of new homes to the rental market and demand for rental accommodation is particularly worrying.

“Rental inflation continues to accelerate at a time when price pressures across the rest of the economy have been abating,” Mr Garrett said.

Chief Executive Denita Wawn said today’s result means that 934,400 new homes have been started across Australia over the past five years.

“Yesterday, Master Builders Australia released its latest industry forecasts which showed we are on track to fall over 110,000 homes short of its Housing Accord target.

“When it comes to signing new contracts, the pen is not making it to paper as the investment does not stack up.

“Since 2019 we have seen the cost of home building increase by 40 per cent.

“Governments need to work to change this. The cost of delivering projects needs to go down and the time to completion must be shortened.

“To achieve these targets, builders are ready to take on the challenge, but clearing the barriers on the road is necessary to get the job done,” Ms Wawn said.

Remorseless killing at the initiation of artificial intelligence has been the subject of nail-biting concern for various members of computer-digital cosmos. Be wary of such machines in war and their displacing potential regarding human will and agency. For all that, the advent of AI-driven, automated systems in war has already become a cold-blooded reality, deployed conventionally, and with utmost lethality by human operators. 

The teasing illusion here is the idea that autonomous systems will become so algorithmically attuned and trained as to render human agency redundant in a functional sense. Provided the targeting is trained, informed, and surgical, a utopia of precision will dawn in modern warfare. Civilian death tolls will be reduced; the mortality of combatants and undesirables will, conversely, increase with dramatic effect.

The staining case study that has put paid to this idea is the pulverising campaign being waged by Israel in Gaza. A report in the magazine +972 notes that the Israeli Defense Forces has indulgently availed itself of AI to identify targets and dispatch them accordingly. The process, however, has been far from accurate or forensically educated. As Brianna Rosen of Just Security accurately posits, “Rather than limiting harm to civilians, Israel’s use of AI bolsters its ability to identify, locate, and expand target sets which likely are not fully vetted to inflict maximum damage.”

The investigation opens by recalling the bombastically titled The Human-Machine Team: How to Create Human and Artificial Intelligence That Will Revolutionize Our World, a 2021 publication available in English authored by one “Brigadier General Y.S.”, the current commander of the Israeli intelligence unit 8200. 

The author advances the case for a system capable of rapidly generating thousands of potential “targets” in the exigencies of conflict. The sinister and morally arid goal of such a machine would resolve a “human bottleneck for both locating new targets and decision-making to approve the targets.” Doing so not only dispenses with the human need to vet, check and verify the viability of the target but dispenses with the need to seek human approval for their termination.

The joint investigation by +972 and Local Call identifies the advanced stage of development of such a system, known to the Israeli forces as Lavender. In terms of its murderous purpose, this AI creation goes further than such lethal predecessors as “Habsora” (“The Gospel”), which identifies purportedly relevant military buildings and structures used by militants. Even that form of identification did little to keep the death rate moderate, generating what a former intelligence officer described as a “mass assassination factory.”

Six Israeli intelligence officers, all having served during the current war in Gaza, reveal how Lavender “played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians, especially during the early stages of the war.” The effect of using the AI machine effectively subsumed the human element while giving the targeting results of the system a fictional human credibility. 

Within the first weeks of the war, the IDF placed extensive, even exclusive reliance on Lavender, with as many as 37,000 Palestinians being identified as potential Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad militants for possible airstrikes. This reliance signalled a shift from the previous “human target” doctrine used by the IDF regarding senior military operatives. In such cases, killing the individual in their private residence would only happen exceptionally, and only to the most senior identified individuals, all to keep in awkward step with principles of proportionality in international law. The commencement of “Operation Swords of Iron” in response to the Hamas attacks of October 7 led to the adoption of a policy by which all Hamas operatives in its military wing irrespective of rank would be designated as human targets.

Officers were given expansive latitude to accept the kill lists without demur or scrutiny, with as little as 20 seconds being given to each target before bombing authorisation was given. Permission was also given despite awareness that errors in targeting arising in “approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.” 

The Lavender system was also supplemented by using the emetically named “Where’s Daddy?”, another automated platform which tracked the targeted individuals to their family residences which would then be flattened. The result was mass slaughter, with “thousands of Palestinians – most of them women and children or people not involved in the fighting” killed by Israeli airstrikes in the initial stages of the conflict. As one of the interviewed intelligence officers stated with grim candour, killing Hamas operatives when in a military facility or while engaged in military activity was a matter of little interest. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”

The use of the system entailed resorting to gruesome, and ultimately murderous calculi. Two of the sources interviewed claimed that the IDF “also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians.” Were the targets Hamas officials of certain seniority, the deaths of up to 100 civilians were also authorised.

In what is becoming its default position in the face of such revelations, the IDF continues to state, as reported in the Times of Israel, that appropriate conventions are being observed in the business of killing Palestinians. It “does not use an artificial intelligence system that identifies terrorist operatives or tries to predict whether a person is a terrorist.” The process, the claim goes, is far more discerning, involving the use of a “database whose purpose is to cross-reference intelligence sources… on the military operatives of terrorist organizations.”

The UN Secretary General, António Guterres, stated how “deeply troubled” he was by reports that Israel’s bombing campaign had used “artificial intelligence as a tool in the identification of targets, particularly in densely populated residential areas, resulting in a high level of civilian casualties.” It might be far better to see these matters as cases of willing, and reckless misidentification, with a conscious acceptance on the part of IDF military personnel that enormous civilian casualties are simply a matter of course. To that end, we are no longer talking about a form of advanced, scientific war waged proportionately and with precision, but a technologically advanced form of mass murder.

MITOCHONDRIAL DISEASE A $1 BILLION HIT TO AUSTRALIA’S ECONOMY

A groundbreaking new study has revealed for the first time the true cost of mitochondrial disease (mito), stripping more than $1 billion from Australia’s economy each year.  

Commissioned by the Mito Foundation, the first of its kind Preventable burden of mitochondrial disease report by the Centre for International Economics details the economic impact of the rare and debilitating genetic disorder that affects around 4,500 Australians.

There are around 124,000 Australians with a genetic risk factor for mito, who could be experiencing the early effects of the disease without knowing they have it.

Mito Foundation CEO Sean Murray said the report’s findings are a major step towards understanding the wider impact of mitochondrial disease, which can lead to better treatment and greater prevention.

“This report is a groundbreaking development in the fight against mitochondrial disease because for the first time we are able to see just how much it is costing Australians,” Mr Murray said.

“This research has shown that more than 80 per cent of the $1 billion cost of mito is due to the lost quality-of-life of those who either die from the disease or have to live with the pain and disability it causes. This severely impacts their ability to contribute to society in ways that most of us wouldn’t think twice about.

“The productivity cost of mito alone is $196 million, but we can reduce the impact. Improving how mito is diagnosed, ensuring access to prevention options and increasing research into new treatments are all part of the solution.”

Each year 10 children and 70 adults lose their lives to mito in Australia, with those living with the condition being robbed of a combined 1,805 years of better health.

Emily Wells, a 26-year-old aged care nurse with mito, said the findings will come as no surprise to those who experience the effects of the disease daily.

“When I was finally diagnosed with mito I cried with relief. No one could pinpoint why I was so fatigued, why my white blood cells were high for months or why I would get pain in my legs. But after around seven years of pain and wondering what was wrong, I finally had a diagnosis that I could start to move forward from,” Emily said.

“Mito is very difficult to explain because it affects everyone differently. Even when I end up in hospital, many doctors don’t fully understand the disease.

“I love my job as an aged care nurse, but recently I had a flare-up in my nerves. Normally I would take a couple of days to rest and recuperate and then go back to work, but I’ve now been off work for around three months, which is hard on my workplace and also myself financially.

“They always say listen to your body, because I knew something was wrong, and there are Australians who are probably having a similar experience right now. I want everyone to be aware of mito and its impacts so that we have earlier diagnosis and a better understanding of how to manage the disease.”

Mito Foundation is calling on the government, researchers and health professionals to work with the mito community to do the following:

• Remove barriers to genetic testing, including banning the use of genetic test results by life insurance companies.
• Improve the health workforce’s ability to recognise symptoms of mito, including encouraging GPs to complete the Maybe It’s Mito training.
• Continue to support the mitochondrial donation program, mitoHOPE.
• Provide funding for the expansion of reproductive genetic carrier screening to improve access to testing, counselling, and reproductive support services.
• Grow a network of accessible Centres of Expertise in mito to provide multi-disciplinary care.
• Secure sustainable funding of Mito Foundation’s support services.
• Support an increase in the number of clinical trials in Australia by funding further targeted research.

Mito Foundation is the only organisation in Australia dedicated to supporting people affected by mito.

Its work ranges from raising funds for pioneering research to providing support services for patients and their families.

To donate to Mito Foundation, or for more information on the impact of mito, visit mito.org.au

Can it get any busier? The World Court, otherwise known as the International Court of Justice, has been swamped by applications on the subject of alleged genocide. The site of interest remains the Gaza Strip, the subject of unremitting slaughter since the October 7, 2023 cross-border attacks by Hamas against Israel. The retaliation by Israel has been of such brute savagery as to draw the attention of numerous states, including those not directly connected to the conflict.   

Given that genocide is a crime of universal jurisdiction abominated by international law, and given the broad application of the UN Genocide Convention intended to suppress and punish it, countries not normally associated with the tormented and blood-drenched relationship between Israel and the Palestinians have taken a keen interest. South Africa got matters moving with its December application last year seeking a judicial determination that Israel was committing genocidal acts in the Gaza Strip. 

Since then, Pretoria has convinced the court to issue two interim orders, one on January 26, and another on March 28. While the court has yet to decide the issue of whether Israel is culpable for genocide in waging in Gaza, the interim binding orders demand a lifting of restrictions on humanitarian aid, the prevention of starvation and famine, and observing the UN Genocide Convention. These all hint strongly at the unconscionable conduct on the part of the IDF against the civilian populace.

The implications of such findings also go to Israel’s allies and partners still keen to supply it with weapons, weapons parts, and support of a military industrial nature. Germany has been most prominent in this regard. In 2023 30% of Israel’s military equipment purchases totalling US$326 million came from Berlin. The Scholz government has also been a firm public supporter of Israel’s offensive. “There is only one place for Germany at this time, and that is by Israel’s side,” proclaimed German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to German lawmakers on October 12 last year. Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock curtly stated that “It was not the job of politicians to tell the guns to shut up.” 

Baerbock’s remarks were all the more jarring given the 2006 views of Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who was then serving as Germany’s foreign minister. With puffed up confidence, he claimed then that Europeans and Germans had played a seminal role in ending the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon in “silencing of the guns.”

Cognisant of such a stance, Nicaragua is now taking the South African precedent further by alleging that Germany is complicit in a genocidal enterprise. While its own human rights record is coarse – the government of Daniel Ortega boasts a spotty record which involves, among other things, the killing of protesters – Nicaragua has form at the ICJ. Four decades ago, it took the United States to the world court for assisting the counterrevolutionary Contras in their attempt to overthrow the Sandinista government.

Its 43-page submission to the court insists that Germany is responsible for “serious violations of peremptory norms of international law taking place” in Gaza in its failure to prevent genocide “against the Palestinian people” and “contributed” to its commission by violating the Genocide Convention. It further alleges that Germany failed to comply with humanitarian law principles derived from the Geneva Conventions of 1949, its protocols of 1977 and “intransgressible principles of international law” in failing to “ensure respect for these fundamental norms in all circumstances.” 

The application also compacts Israel’s attack on Gaza with “continued military occupation of Palestine”, taking issue with Germany’s alleged “rendering aid or assistance” in maintaining that status quo in the Occupied Territories while “rendering aid or assistance and not preventing the illegal regime of apartheid and the negation of the right of self-determination of the Palestinian people.”

Stretches of the Nicaraguan case would make troubling reading. It notes that “by sending military equipment and now defunding UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency] which provides essential support for the civilian population, Germany is facilitating the commission of genocide” and had failed, in any case, “in its obligation to do everything possible to prevent the commission of genocide.”

Such conduct was all the more egregious “with respect to Israel given that Germany has a self-proclaimed privileged relationship with it, which would enable it to usefully influence its conduct.”

With these considerations in mind, the application by Nicaragua argues that Germany is obligated to “immediately” halt its military support for Israel “that may be used in the commission of genocide, crimes against humanity, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, attacks directed against civilian objects or civilians protected as such, or other war crimes.” Germany is further asked, not merely to “end its assistance to Israel” but “cooperate to uphold international law and to bring the perpetrators of these atrocities to justice.”

On April 8, the ICJ opened preliminary hearings. Alain Pellet, representing Nicaragua, argued that “Germany was and is fully conscious of the risk that the arms it has furnished and continues to furnish Israel” could be used in the commission of genocidal acts. Another legal representative, Daniel Mueller, called the provision of humanitarian airdrops to “Palestinian children, women and men” a “pathetic excuse” given the furnishing of “military equipment that is used to kill and annihilate them.” Nicaragua’s ambassador to the Netherlands, Carlos José Argüello Gómez, derided Berlin’s seeming inability “to be able to differentiate between self-defence and genocide.”

Berlin’s defence follows on April 9. A sense of its bitter flavour can be gathered from one of its top legal briefs, Tania von Uslar-Gleichen. “Germany completely rejects the accusations. We never did violate the Genocide Convention nor humanitarian law either directly or indirectly.”  Berlin was “committed to the upholding of international law.” 

If the defence fails to sway the judges, the case may well chart a line about third party responsibilities on preventing genocide in international humanitarian law. At this point, the momentum towards some clarity on the point seems inexorable.

ActionAid Media Release  

By James Moore  

There is a strong element of the crazed adrenalin junky in most journalists. We want adventure with the same fervor we seek the facts of a story. I was brimming with excitement driving toward hurricane landfalls and thought it thrilling that the road in the other direction was lined with vehicles seeking distance from the storm. I cannot recall all the hurricanes I covered but a few of the larger category names were Andrew and Opal and Fran, and many of weaker power, but still dangerous. Whether it was an earthquake or a flood or a commercial plane crash or a tornado or the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco, my reportorial soul cried for me to move in the direction of the story. Only infrequently did we think of the risks.

I was not, however, addicted to the dangers of TV news, and intended to live a long and interesting life. The idea of a story being worthy of putting your very existence in jeopardy was, to me, profoundly absurd, though, traditionally, it has been essential to get at facts. While on a brief assignment in Central America during the years of the Nicaraguan Civil War, I worked a few days with a combat photographer from Miami. He casually traveled the world from one conflict to the next, never getting enough of the dopamine high from frightening assignments. Over dinner in our hotel one evening, I suggested he was, maybe, just a little imbalanced.

“Oh Jimbo,” he said. “You don’t get it, man. The moment a bullet whizzes past your ear, it changes your life forever.”

I gave his assertion only momentary consideration before responding. “Maybe there’s a possibility you don’t get it, too,” I said. “Because the moment a bullet whizzes into your ear, it ends your life forever. Why take the chance?”

He did not feel further explanation was required.

There was, of course, an inevitability to being exposed to precarious situations while reporting, and my initial experiences with their consequences did not leave me as stunned as I had anticipated. My first hurricane was Anita, destined for landfall on South Padre Island down near the Mexican border. I was a radio reporter, and as police swept the beaches and hotels to insure complete evacuation, I hid behind a restaurant with plans to get a firsthand view of nature’s power. While the storm surge rose, I stood in a phone booth with an open line to the Associated Press in Washington, describing the water rising up my legs and debris flying through the air while also hoping the wind would die and the ocean might recede back across the sand. Eleven people died in Mexico as the storm drifted south of the Rio Grande and 25 inches of rain left 25,000 homeless in the mountains of Tamaulipas. The reporting, more foolish than courageous, got me an on-camera audition, which led to my first TV job.

The slowly developing characteristics of hurricanes make preparations possible for improving the safety of journalists on the scene. We can find leeward positions out of the wind for ourselves and the expensive broadcast gear. Tornadoes allow no such planning. Their unpredictability make them often deadly to anyone in the vicinity. A twister can spin up in a matter of minutes when the right conditions are present. The first time I saw the violence of such a weather phenomenon was at Wichita Falls in 1979. Our TV newsroom in Austin had gotten the wire reports describing an outbreak of tornadoes in the Red River Valley near Wichita Falls, and I was on a charter flight to report details of what was described by initial witnesses to be great devastation. Thousands of feet above the city, we shot sweeping panoramic views before approaching the airport. Wichita Falls looked as if a giant, petulant child had kicked over a toy town he had assembled. There were 58 fatalities in “Red River Outbreak,” and almost 2000 were injured. The deadliest funnel was an F4, only one category less than the strongest ever measured.

I am not sure why tornadoes became recurrent in my journalism but just over a year after the “Terrible Tuesday” in Wichita Falls, I was in Grand Island, Nebraska to report on a swarm of twisters that also included a deadly F4 with winds as high as 260 miles per hour. Seven funnel clouds scraped the Earth of most signs of human endeavor and left a path of rubble a half mile wide and six miles long. Instead of moving at a normal 30-40 miles per hour, the twisters spent four hours passing through the agricultural community just north of the Platte River and along the historic Lincoln Highway. The “Night of the Twisters” killed five people and injured 266 as it did a quarter billion dollars of destruction. Hundreds of homes simply disappeared. Even as I walked the streets of Grand Island and knew that what I was witnessing was real, I still struggled to process the scene as an actuality. The totality of the destruction was incomprehensible.

Nothing, however, had readied me for the 1987 tornadoes that came down out of the Davis Mountains of West Texas and obliterated the tiny desert town of Saragosa. The super cell had developed improbable cloud tops that reached 60,000 feet into the atmosphere and evolved into four twisters, including an F4. Saragosa was mostly a town of poor immigrant workers on Highway 17 between Pecos and Balmorhea. There were no warning sirens in the community and as the dark wall cloud approached, 100 people, a quarter of the population, was in the community center attending graduation ceremonies being held for their Head Start kindergartners. The cider block structure, lacking steel reinforcement, was not able to withstand F4 cyclonic winds, and 22 persons died as the structure collapsed. Children were saved by parents covering them with their bodies. There were a total of 30 fatalities in the community, most of whom were buried in the gravelly cemetery northwest of town. Although the storm was well-predicted by the National Weather Service and area media, Saragosa’s residents lacked technology and systems to receive timely warnings.

Saragosa, Texas, May 1987

Because of its vast land mass and the state’s geographic locale, Texas usually has more tornadoes annually than any other region of the U.S., which is why I was hardly surprised one spring day to get an emergency message from my editors telling me to race north on I-35 from Austin and toward the town of Jarrell. Warnings were blasting across all communications frequencies and devices. Photographer Kirk Swann and I looked at a dark cloud that covered much of the horizon and assumed it was an approaching rain storm, but we discovered later that it comprised the base of an F5 tornado, just one of 20 twisters that touched down in Texas on May 27, 1997. We went down the exit ramp and turned west, rushing through main street in the town of 400 people, and we saw no evidence of damage until we met a cop, standing, hands on his hips, outside his cruiser. I approached.

“Sounded pretty bad on the scanner, officer,” I said. “But we haven’t seen any damage.”

“Look harder,” he said. “Out there.” He pointed to what appeared to me like a field of sorghum with stripped stalks.

“Don’t see much.”

“‘Cause there ain’t nothin’ to see. The twister took it all.” He pointed again. “There were a lot of houses and people living out there. You see them now?”

“No, sir. Guess I don’t.”

I saw concrete foundations, upon closer inspection, and random two-by-fours standing upright, but no homes, people, or vehicles. I hoped they had escaped harm but 27 had been killed, including three entire families, the Igos, Moerhings, and Smiths. Remains of the dead were discovered in 30 different locations and had endured such trauma that they were difficult to distinguish from animals that had been dismembered and mutilated. When we drove over to Double Creek Estates to survey the neighborhood, much of the chip seal Ranch Road we crossed had been stripped away by the winds of 261-318 miles per hour.

The science of tornadoes is sufficiently frightening that I am marginally dumbfounded that a profession has arisen called Storm Chasers. These hearty, possibly misguided entrepreneurs and nature gazers, use all available technology to search atmospheric conditions to identify storms. They race to locations of anticipated funnel development and deploy their cameras and measurement instruments to record and understand tornadoes. Information they have provided meteorologists and emergency alert systems has had an impact on reducing the number of fatalities each year by improving advance warning systems. TV news, weather networks, and universities, dispatch these experts across the American plains each spring and summer and they usually return with astonishing videos and recordings of weather extremes. Their work has also spawned a legion of amateur chasers who crowd rural roads, gaping, as darkness, and possibly death, approach across the prairie.

The photographer who covered the Saragosa follow up stories with me, Austin Anderson, had begun chasing storms for the Weather Channel and other cable networks. I was always comforted by his presence when we were on assignments in tropical storms and other troubling circumstances, maybe because he was made of different stuff than me. One night on a charter flight returning from an assignment, our pilot managed to get our small, two engine plane, caught in a thunderstorm. Hail began pinging the wings and battering the fuselage. I was on the verge of bending the armrests into taffy. Austin, though, looked at me and shrugged.

“Not much I can do about this,” he said. “Guess I’ll take a nap.”

Which he did, snoring slightly, as the plane was kicked around the sky for another hour by ridiculous winds. I guess that fearlessness had a bit to do with putting him in a storm chaser car, shooting video out the window, as his team tracked a funnel on the ground near El Reno, Oklahoma on the evening of May 31, 2013. The tornado is still the widest ever recorded, 2.6 miles at its base, and contained some of the highest wind speeds ever observed at the Earth’s surface. Austin was in a car with Mike Bettes and Reed Timmer of the Weather Channel, and, as always, had his camera rolling, pointed out the window at the striated, black funnel, running parallel to them down an Oklahoma field.

In the car in front of them, were three other chasers. Tim Samaras, a research scientist and engineer, his 24-year-old son Paul, and Carl Young, a professional meteorologist and friend. No one had done more to advance storm chasing from a crazy hobby to serious scientific endeavor than Samaras. His work was disciplined, and he practiced safety, diligently, to the point where his investigations were funded with numerous grants from the National Geographic Society. Eventually, he was given a TV show, titled, predictably, Storm Chasers on the Discovery Channel. They were conducting lightning, sound, and air pressure research when the El Reno tornado formed and they set out along its path.

Tornadoes invariably exhibit erratic behavior and the trio ahead of Austin’s car had been judiciously watching the slightest movements off any course. Their conversations over the radio were being monitored by other researchers and law officers in the area. Meteorologist Young mentioned that it seemed weird that there was no rain around them and that the wind had grown “eerily calm.” Samaras reacted by saying, “Actually, I think we’re in a bad spot.” Shortly after that exchange, Oklahoma Highway Patrol Trooper Betsy Randolph said she heard the three men screaming over her radio. “We’re going to die! We’re going to die!” The sub-vortex winds grabbed their vehicle, lifted it off the road, and tossed the car off the pavement.

The Samaras and Young Car After the Twister

In the trailing car, the trio stopped and tried to reverse course, but the veering storm was already coming in their direction, too. The wind lifted them into brief weightlessness and threw the SUV into a field, where it rolled multiple times. No one was killed but my friend Austin suffered a broken breast plate, ribs, and damaged vertebra. When the storm had passed, Austin was airlifted to Oklahoma City for surgery and early recovery before getting a hospital charter flight home. His healing and rehabilitation took months. I doubted Austin would ever again pick up a TV camera or chase a storm.

The Car in Which Austin Anderson was Riding

Samaras, his son, and meteorologist Young, all died when the tornado crushed their car. Eighteen people were killed that day by a dispersed set of twisters, including a local man fascinated with tornadoes, Richard Henderson. He took a photo of the El Reno funnel and sent it to a friend while driving down the country road, which was the final act of his life. Henderson’s last words described debris hitting his truck, and then he was killed by the violence of the natural world that had made him curious.

Reporting on what a storm hath wrought is almost cowardice compared to going close to see and understand its power. I always thought tornadoes were to be run away from, not chased. There are, though, pressures to make a living. TV news executives want entrancing video. The closer a crew gets to a tornado, the more impressed are their editors, and the higher the pay. Adrenalin is not the only reason storm chaser photographers take their regular risks. They don’t just love the money, adventure, and independence, either; they love their craft. My buddy Austin’s back healed as camera technology shrank and he was able to go back out into the world of weather and get back on the job for the networks. He still runs to blizzards and hurricanes and tornadoes and floods and earthquakes.

And I like watching his work on TV.

Austin was driving the Weather Channel’s Tornado Hunter car near El Reno, Oklahoma when a funnel abruptly changed course and lifted his vehicle. Reports vary on how far it was thrown through the air but it was discovered on the far side of a barbed wire fence after rolling over several times. Mike Bettes, another journalist riding with Austin, said they were “weightless for a moment” and then started tumbling. He escaped serious injury but my old friend Austin is in a hospital in Oklahoma City where he is facing surgery for a broken breastplate, ribs, and damaged vertebra. He is, however, alive. A doctor has indicated it will be at least three months before he can again pick up a camera. But he will pick up a camera again. And he will still be one of the best in the business.

A few of my colleagues from my days in television, and those who never worked in that industry, have expressed dismay that a person might put themselves at risk to get a better, more dramatic piece of video. But that is the mandate of the profession: get more and better than the other crew. Great photographers are also subject to a psychological phenomenon called “distancing,” which allows their brains to process what they are seeing through their lens as not real or a part of their immediate environment. There is no other explanation for combat photographers getting video in the midst of fire fights or my friends Jim Peeler and the late Dan Mulloney who stood with their cameras in the crossfire between ATF agents and the Branch Davidians of David Koresh to record some of the most famous news video in history.

This article was originally published on Texas to the world.

A “colossal” increase in humanitarian aid to Gaza is needed immediately to stop children from dying needlessly, restore dignity and ease psychological suffering, warns child rights NGO Plan International.

This Sunday (7 April) will mark six months since Israel launched its military offensive in response to the 7 October attack by an armed Palestinian group, which killed 1,200 people in Israel. The death toll in Gaza is now feared to be in excess of 32,000, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, including 13,000 children. More than 100 people are still believed to be held hostage inside Gaza.

Six months of constant aerial bombardment has left nearly all of Gaza’s civilian population reliant on humanitarian aid for survival, however, aid agencies have only been able to negotiate permission to deliver a small fraction of the supplies required to sustain Gaza’s 2.1 million people.

The withdrawal of multiple NGOs from Gaza after seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen were killed in an air strike on Tuesday (2 April) will compound an already desperate situation, warns Plan International. Together with humanitarian and human rights organisations around the world, the organisation calls on all parties involved in the conflict to guarantee the safety of aid workers and civilians in line with international humanitarian law.

Last month, the IPC partnership predicted that food shortages caused by Israel’s restrictions on aid and prolonged military assault mean famine could occur in Gaza anytime between now and May.

According to Plan International, for every child at risk of death from an air strike, starvation or lack of medical assistance, countless more will bear long-lasting psychological scars as a result of witnessing family or friends dying, life-changing injuries and being deprived of the basics of childhood.

In March, an average of 161 aid trucks crossed into Gaza each day – well below the combined capacity of the Kerem Shalom and Rafah crossings, which is 500 per day.

Dr Unni Krishnan, Plan International’s Global Humanitarian Director, says: “Time is slipping away rapidly for the children in Gaza, more urgently than ever. A significant surge in vital humanitarian aid is crucial and urgent. To make this a reality, ensuring the safety of aid workers and civilians is paramount.

“Just a few minutes’ drive from Rafah, where families are sheltering in the most unimaginable and rudimentary conditions, there are thousands of trucks containing food and other life-saving supplies. It is absolutely critical that safe humanitarian access to Gaza is guaranteed at speed, so that aid agencies can deliver supplies to civilians in desperate need, especially malnourished children and pregnant women.

“Right now, Gaza is known as the most intricate humanitarian response context in the world. It is the most dangerous place in the world to be a child and an aid worker. We know from experience that the catastrophic psychological impact of war will continue to haunt children and their caregivers long after fighting stops. An 18-year-old living in Gaza today will have lived through conflict in 2006, 2008, 2012, 2014, 2021 and now since October 2023, witnessing things no child ever should. This has a profound impact on a young mind.

“We urge all parties to guarantee safe, unimpeded access for humanitarian workers and vital relief supplies in Gaza. We also continue to call for a permanent, complete and immediate ceasefire, as the only way to truly bring this suffering to an end.”

Since October 2023, Plan International has been scaling up support to humanitarian partners to provide critical humanitarian assistance inside Gaza. Since the start of Ramadan, Iftar meals have been provided to a total of 6,000 internally displaced people in Rafah via Taawon, a local partner.

Plan International has also been working with Egyptian Red Crescent to deliver supplies via the Rafah crossing in Egypt. To date, 600 food baskets, 1,000 first aid kits and 1,600 cartons of water have been delivered.

The organisation is currently working to deliver female protection kits to women in Gaza, containing supplies such as abayas, hairbrushes, underwear and winter shawls – items which have been in desperately short supply.

Fatima, a 23-year-old youth activist who has fled with her family to the east of Gaza, told Plan International how her family now uses animal feed for baking, while her brother takes the risk of going to the eastern line in search of vegetables.

She says that food shortages have left her feeling “helpless”, and that she worries her young sisters are not getting the nutrition they need for their growing bodies to develop.

“Since the beginning of the conflict, we have been collecting wild plants from the land to eat including hibiscus, chard and lentils. When we can’t find anything growing near to us, my brother, who is 18 years old, goes to the eastern line to look for chard, but this is dangerous because of the occupation and the risk of being bombed.

“Flour is expensive and very scarce, so we use animal feed for baking. My uncles travel for long distances to get flour from the aid distributions. There are no vegetables or fruit for sale anywhere and the price of meat and chicken is very expensive, around 50 USD per kilo. A bag of flour is about five hundred dollars per bag. The food stocks in our house are almost gone.

“I feel sad that I can’t have the food I want, it makes me feel helpless and that my existence has no value.

“Yesterday was the first time that we have eaten meat in five months. We raise pigeons and decided to eat one as we have nothing else left. It made me feel happy because I haven’t eaten good food for a long time.”

By James Moore

“Television is called a medium because it is neither rare nor well done.” – Ernie Kovacs.

In the newsroom, they called her “Sky Queen.” The nickname was clearly a riff on the black and white TV series from the fifties, which was about a rancher who used his Cessna to rescue hikers and help capture bad guys. The aircraft was named “Songbird” and his niece Penny was often a part of the successful outcomes of Sky’s adventures.

“Sky Queen,” though, was not old enough to have even heard of the TV show that gave her the moniker she took around the city of Denver and the Rocky Mountains. Twenty-eight-year-old Karen Key, though, was shining up a star for herself in the competitive business of television news. Blonde and telegenic, Key was the first female helicopter news pilot in the history of TV journalism. The fact that she could pull pitch on the collective, fly a Bell Jet Ranger, and talk into the camera with the Rockies as a backdrop, meant her career was ascending as fast as her takeoffs when racing to cover breaking news.

Which, it turned out, was too quick.

The era of helicopter news reporting is considered to have begun in 1971 with pilot Jerry Foster, in Phoenix, Arizona, and KOOL-TV executive, Homer Lane. Foster, a local search and rescue pilot, was offered a job by Lane to fly a small chopper and get the station’s reporters to the scene of stories faster than driving, and do traffic reports. Foster’s aviation skills, which included taking great risks, and his personality, provided KOOL-TV with big wins in a competitive broadcast market. The idea of using helicopters to cover the news spread quickly to major metros, and, eventually, stations across the land were trying to outrace the competition to be the first to big stories, which was followed by promotional bragging on the air.

When I was offered a job by the ABC-TV affiliate in Denver, I was met at Stapleton International Airport by the news executive, who had arrived on the station’s helicopter. My assignment was to cover Colorado, and points beyond, west of the Continental Divide. My new employer had decided my engagement was to begin with a flight over the Rockies into Glenwoood Springs to meet my partner and photographer over dinner, and check out the news bureau inside the historic Hotel Colorado. After we crossed the divide, the pilot chased a herd of elk and then ducked us under a rainbow that was flashed across the sky by a passing thunderstorm. I had already hitchhiked and motorcycled Colorado’s back roads several times and thought that I was about to begin the best job in American TV news.

Only a few weeks had passed when the Sky 9 chopper had crossed over the mountains to pick us up and begin a search for a downed aircraft. We flew grids for three days until spotting a debris field. The mountains had shredded a twin-engine plane into what looked like beer cans scattered across a snowfield in the sun. Nine souls had been onboard. There were numerous other flights we made looking for the lost and missing and every time I went up there were reminders about the dangers of flying in the Rocky Mountains. In the summer, rain storms materialized in minutes like monsoons in the tropics, and even on clear days the winds down the canyons and up the ridge lines and across the ragged peaks were dangerously twisting, diving and rising with a power to transform light aircraft into scraps of aluminum.

I had no fondness for traveling anywhere via helicopter. In Omaha, the station where I was employed prior to Denver, used a Hughes 269C chopper, which was little more than a bench seat in a plastic bubble attached to a four-cylinder engine. On hot days, getting air borne with two passengers and TV gear tended toward the excessively adventurous. I often felt like we were vibrating to the point that bolts were going to come undone. The chopper was known less than affectionately in the newsroom as “Roto-Death.” My decision about accepting employment with the Denver station might have been different, too, had I been aware the year prior to my arrival their helicopter had flipped and landed upside down while flying a search near Fort Collins. The pilot and photographer were not injured, but the incident was suggestive of potential tragedies in the coming years.

The Denver TV news market in the early 80s was extremely competitive and the three network stations were joined in helicopter battles to attract viewers. The aircraft were painted with bright logos and became flying billboards promoting the newscasts as they moved across the dramatic backdrop of the Front Range. Because managing aircraft over and between mountains is dangerous, pilots hired by TV news executives had experience ranging from Huey gunships in Vietnam to flying bush in the jungles of New Guinea or lifting logs above forests in the Pacific Northwest. Aviation safety was always the primary consideration when flying journalists to assignments, and the pilots all displayed great skills. There was, therefore, no simple method for distinguishing excellence or luring more viewers.

Unless you could find a star.

She was down in Phoenix, competing against Jerry Foster, the pilot who has started the trend of TV choppers covering the news. Karen Key was 28 and had acquired her license with the requisite 200 hours of flight time. Immediately, she attracted attention, on and off the air. In the rank sexism of those years, one writer described her by saying she could have been “Madonna’s stunt double, and like Madonna could rock a skintight jump suit.” Looks are attributes that help on television, not flying complicated aircraft, and Key, with her limited experience, had trouble keeping up with Foster. The cops and emergency techs all knew Foster and he was usually tipped on stories before Key got word. She tried charm to reduce the competition and wrote Foster a letter telling him there was no reason for him to feel “threatened by the little blonde with the cute behind.”

The executive who had hired me in Denver, meanwhile, had been lured away to the station across town and was looking to make a quick impact for his new employer. A tape of Karen Key had shown up on his desk, and after a visit for an interview, she was offered the job of pilot and reporter for KOA-TV. Key had told her new boss that she had 1800 hours in her flight log books but there was never any indication the station had sought confirmation of her records. In fact, a few calls to Phoenix would have provided information that police were certain she had arrived at one story with alcohol on her breath and that they did not trust her piloting skills. Knowledge of her reputation might not have made a difference in the environment of the TV news business in the early 80s, but some consideration ought to have been given to the fact she was operating her aircraft mostly in sunny skies over open deserts, which is considerably different than finding your way through the constantly changing weather of a massive mountain range. Regardless, Key expressed great confidence in her abilities in her conversations with management and the Denver station was apparently reassured to hear she had also flown early in her career for Bell Helicopter in Fort Worth. 

Key had to have felt the competitive pressures in Denver the day she took her first flight. There were times when the other two pilots were able to make it over Loveland Pass to reach a news story and she would set her ship down before Eisenhower Tunnel on Interstate 70. Hardly a year after she had arrived in Colorado, Key’s pager beeped with news of an airplane crash. A Pioneer Airlines turboprop had gone down between Colorado Springs and Pueblo. She raced to JEFFCO airport, hoping to be the first into the air to search for the missing aircraft. The weather, however, had turned bad with freezing rain and fog mixed with snow. Pilots for the other two stations, who also kept their helicopters at the same location, were not going to fly. The ceiling was too low, and weather too risky. Key was urged not to go up, but ignored the pleadings.

Larry Zane, who was also 28, a flight mechanic and friend of Key’s, had agreed to go with her on the search mission. JEFFCO tower gave her a clearance and the KOA helicopter rose to just below the cloud ceiling and began to follow I-25 southbound in the direction of the anticipated location of the wrecked Swearingen SA-227AC passenger plane. Key had to be hopeful she was about to win praise for getting to the wreckage when the more experienced pilots refused to risk a search mission. Motorists along the Interstate described seeing the helicopter flying low and slow with landing and searchlights sweeping the roadway in the snow. Several indicated they had been able to keep pace with the aircraft until the highway bent away from the mountains and Key turned toward the west. 

The KOA helicopter was not discovered until the next morning. Key and Zane had died when the aircraft hit the tops of pine trees on a knoll near Larkspur, Colorado, and then fell on its side. She was apparently impaled by the control stick. A toxicology test indicated a blood alcohol content of .093 percent, which was just below the legal limit at that time. An FAA investigation cited numerous other factors in the cause of accident report in addition to “pilot impairment.” Those reasons for failure included Key’s overconfidence in her personal ability, a lack of total instrument time, inadequate preflight preparation, self-induced pressure, snow, ice, and fog. Investigators might have added that she was working in an industry that placed less value on her life than it did on an additional rating point to show advertisers. 

Karen Key and Larry Zane died in their youth for a news story that might have run 90 seconds to two minutes on a newscast. The station manager, Roger Ogden, who had hired Key, told the Denver Post in a copyrighted story that he had been told by Key that she had more than 1800 hours of flying time in helicopters. Did he ever see her flight logs? According to the newspaper, her claims were considered “highly unlikely” by other news copter pilots and her assertion that she had flown for Bell Helicopter was flatly false. Federal Aviation Administration records accessed by the paper’s reporters indicated that Key had 200 hours air time when she was granted a commercial pilot’s license but would have had to get more than 100 hours every month she worked in Phoenix to accumulate the 1800 she claimed when she was hired by KOA-TV in 1981. The day after the crash the station acknowledged on the air that it had still not seen her pilot’s logs. Bell Helicopter in Fort Worth said she had simply been an administrative assistant and never flew for the manufacturer. 

The station’s editorial staff lionized Key as a hero who was always trying to help people in trouble, which was, in some respects, demonstrably true. Anchors, though, went on the air and blamed the criticisms of her skills on “male chauvinism” and interviewed her FAA examiner who claimed her skills were “well above minimums,” which is hardly a description that offers confidence to passengers rising up above the Rockies sitting next to a pilot with Key’s experience. Astonishingly, one editorial by an anchor concluded by saying Key was “not the first, nor will she be the last journalist to die doing their jobs.” The narrative suggested that she was a casualty in a “great tradition that had kept Americans some of the most informed people in the world.” Her death was obviously nothing like the story the station’s writers were selling. Key was a victim of her own ambition, bad judgment, and a toxic competitive environment that took risks with employees’ lives to make more advertising dollars. 

Nothing changed after the crash that killed Key and Zane. Between 1980 and 1994, my former station lost six helicopters and five employees. Almost thirty years passed from that treacherous December night in 1982 when Key’s ship went down, before Denver news executives realized the absurd cost and risk of rushing to news in helicopters. An agreement was forged in 2011 for the three legacy network stations to share the lease of a single helicopter and to have equal access to all video acquired through its dispatches. There seems not much doubt the helicopter facilitated and even expedited the coverage of news in major metro areas like Denver, Houston, and Dallas, where traffic is an impediment and the cities sprawl across broad landscapes. The question no one bothers to answer in the industry is whether it is truly important to be first by a few minutes.

And is winning the race worth the risk?

This article was originally published on Texas to the world.

Oxfam Australia Media Release  

Miniscule amount is less than 12% of average daily calorie needs.

People in northern Gaza have been forced to survive on an average of 245 calories a day (1025 kilojoules) – less than a can of beans – since January, as Israeli forces continue their military onslaught. Over 300,000 people are believed to still be trapped there, unable to leave. 

The miniscule amount of food represents less than 12 per cent of the recommended daily 2,100 calorie intake needed per person, calculated using demographic data considering variations by age and gender. Last week, the Israeli government told UNRWA, by far the largest aid provider in Gaza, that its convoys would no longer be allowed into the north.

Oxfam’s analysis is based on the latest available data used in the recent Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) analysis for the Gaza Strip. Oxfam also found that the total food deliveries allowed into Gaza for the entire 2.2 million population – since last October – amounted to an average of just 41 per cent of the daily calories needed per person.  

The Israeli government has known for nearly two decades exactly how many daily calories are needed to prevent malnutrition in Gaza, calculating this according to both age and gender within its Food Consumption in the Gaza Strip – Red Line document. Not only did it use a higher calculation of 2,279 calories per person, it also took into account domestic food production in Gaza, which the Israeli military has now virtually obliterated.  

A mother trapped in northern Gaza said: “Before the war, we were in good health and had strong bodies. Now, looking at my children and myself, we have lost so much weight since we do not eat any proper food, we are trying to eat whatever we find – edible wild plants or herbs daily just to survive.” 

Oxfam also found that less than half the number of food trucks needed to reach the daily 2,100 calories intake for everyone are currently entering Gaza. Using IPC and UNRWA data, Oxfam’s analysis found that an absolute minimum of 221 trucks of food alone are needed every day, not accounting for wastage or unequal distribution. Currently just 105 trucks of food are entering Gaza daily on average. 

The IPC report found that famine is imminent in northern Gaza and that almost all the population is now experiencing extreme hunger; with 1.1 million people experiencing catastrophic food insecurity. Horrifyingly, children are already dying from starvation and malnutrition, often worsened by disease.  

Hunger and its impacts are exacerbated by the near-complete destruction of civilian infrastructure including hospitals, water and sanitation services and community health support by Israel, leaving people even more vulnerable to disease. In addition to the limited availability of food, the ability to find or buy a nutritious, varied diet is not feasible across Gaza. For the little fruit and vegetables still available, extreme price rises due to scarcity have put them out of reach for most people. Specialised nutrition products and centres to treat malnourished children are also difficult or impossible to find. 

Lyn Morgain, Oxfam Australia Chief Executive said: “Israel is making deliberate choices to starve civilians. Imagine what it is like, not only to be trying to survive on 245 calories day in, day out, but also having to watch your children or elderly relatives do the same. All whilst displaced, with little to no access to clean water or a toilet, knowing most medical support has gone and under the constant threat of drones and bombs.  

“Israel is ignoring both the International Court of Justice order to prevent genocide and UN Security Council resolutions. Only last week the ICJ ordered new provisional measures, stating famine is no longer looming, but ‘setting in’ in Gaza. All countries need to immediately stop supplying arms to Israel and do all they can to secure an immediate and permanent ceasefire; only then can we stop this horrifying carnage for the 2.2 million people who have endured six months of suffering. Israel cannot weaponize starvation any longer.”   

Oxfam is calling for a permanent ceasefire, the return of all hostages and the release of unlawfully detained Palestinian prisoners, for countries to immediately stop supplying arms to Israel and for full humanitarian aid access. The global response for Gaza must include both adequate and nutritious food for everyone, the full restoration of hospitals and health services, water, and sanitation infrastructure and for all reconstruction materials to be allowed across the border.