Important Summer Read: "Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis"

 By Jonathan Blitzer 

 Reviewed by Richard Feinberg

 Drawing on his extensive contributions to The New Yorker, Blitzer explores the traumas of displaced Central American migrants as they bravely confront the opaque and rapidly evolving U.S. immigration system. Having gained access to many key Washington policymakers, he is especially convincing when describing the zigs and zags of U.S. immigration policies as the bureaucracy struggles to manage a growing influx of asylum seekers while weighing solutions to the crisis that are both realistic and humane. The task of assessing a migrant’s “credible fear of persecution” if repatriated is especially fraught. Blitzer’s finely crafted, multifaceted book illustrates well the dilemmas of underfunded and understaffed U.S. government agencies. He also deplores the brutalities and the hypocrisies of the local elites and their backers in Washington. His sympathies lie with immigrant advocates and the progressive left; as a professional journalist rather than a policy analyst, however, he does not offer definitive answers or recommendations.

Many remember solid economy under Trump, but his record also full of tax cut hype, debt and disease by JOSH BOAK,

 It was a time of fear and chaos four years ago.

The death count was mounting as COVID-19 spread. Financial markets were panicked. Oil prices briefly went negative. The Federal Reserve slashed its benchmark interest rates to combat the sudden recession. And the U.S. government went on a historic borrowing spree — adding trillions to the national debt — to keep families and businesses afloat.

 

But as Donald Trump recalled that moment at a recent rally, the former president exuded pride.

“We had the greatest economy in history,” the Republican told his Wisconsin audience. “The 30-year mortgage rate was at a record low, the lowest ever recorded ... 2.65%, that’s what your mortgage rates were.”

 

But as Donald Trump recalled that moment at a recent rally, the former president exuded pride.

“We had the greatest economy in history,” the Republican told his Wisconsin audience. “The 30-year mortgage rate was at a record low, the lowest ever recorded ... 2.65%, that’s what your mortgage rates were.”

The question of who can best steer the U.S. economy could be a deciding factor in who wins November’s presidential election. While an April Gallup poll found that Americans were most likely to say that immigration is the country's top problem, the economy in general and inflation were also high on the list.

Trump may have an edge over President Joe Biden on key economic concerns, according to an April poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs. The survey found that Americans were more likely to say that as president, Trump helped the country with job creation and cost of living. Nearly 6 in 10 Americans said that Biden’s presidency hurt the country on the cost of living.

 

But the economic numbers expose a far more complicated reality during Trump's time in the White House. His tax cuts never delivered the promised growth. His budget deficits surged and then stayed relatively high under Biden. His tariffs and trade deals never brought back all of the lost factory jobs.

And there was the pandemic, an event that caused historic job losses for which Trump accepts no responsibility as well as low inflation — for which Trump takes full credit.

If anything, the economy during Trump's presidency never lived up to his own hype.

DECENT (NOT EXCEPTIONAL) GROWTH

Trump assured the public in 2017 that the U.S. economy with his tax cuts would grow at “3%,” but he added, “I think it could go to 4, 5, and maybe even 6%, ultimately.”

If the 2020 pandemic is excluded, growth after inflation averaged 2.67% under Trump, according to figures from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Include the pandemic-induced recession and that average drops to an anemic 1.45%.

 

By contrast, growth during the second term of then-President Barack Obama averaged 2.33%. So far under Biden, annual growth is averaging 3.4%.

MORE GOVERNMENT DEBT

Trump also assured the public that his tax cuts would pay for themselves because of stronger growth. The cuts were broad but disproportionately favored corporations and those with extreme wealth.

The tax cuts signed into law in 2017 never fulfilled Trump's promises on deficit reduction.

According to the Office of Management and Budget, the deficit worsened to $779 billion in 2018. The Congressional Budget Office had forecasted a deficit of $563 billion before the tax cuts, meaning the tax cuts increased borrowing by $216 billion that first year. In 2019, the deficit rose to $984 billion, nearly $300 billion more than what the CBO had forecast.

Then the pandemic happened and with a flurry of government aid, the resulting deficit topped $3.1 trillion. That borrowing enabled the government to make direct payments to individuals and small businesses as the economy was in lockdown, often increasing bank accounts and making many feel better off even though the economy was in a recession.

 

Deficits have also run high under Biden, as he signed into law a third round of pandemic aid and other initiatives to address climate change, build infrastructure and invest in U.S. manufacturing. His budget deficits: $2.8 trillion (2021), $1.38 trillion (2022) and $1.7 trillion (2023).

The CBO estimated in a report issued Wednesday that the extension of parts of Trump’s tax cuts set to expire after 2025 would add another $4.6 trillion to the national debt through the year 2034.

LOW INFLATION (BUT NOT ALWAYS FOR GOOD REASONS)

Inflation was much lower under Trump, never topping an annual rate of 2.4%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The annual rate reached as high as 8% in 2022 under Biden and is currently at 3.4%.

There were three big reasons why inflation was low during Trump's presidency: the legacy of the 2008 financial crisis, Federal Reserve actions and the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump entered the White House with inflation already low, largely because of the slow recovery from the Great Recession, when financial markets collapsed and millions of people lost their homes to foreclosure.

The inflation rate barely averaged more than 1% during Obama's second term as the Fed struggled to push up growth. Still, the economy was expanding without overheating.

But in the first three years of Trump's presidency, inflation averaged 2.1%, roughly close to the Fed's target. Still, the Fed began to hike its own benchmark rate to keep inflation low at the central bank's own 2% target. Trump repeatedly criticized the Fed because he wanted to juice growth despite the risks of higher prices.

Then the pandemic hit.

Inflation sank and the Fed slashed rates to sustain the economy during lockdowns.

When Trump celebrates historically low mortgage rates, he's doing so because the economy was weakened by the pandemic. Similarly, gasoline prices fell below an average of $2 a gallon because no one was driving in April 2020 as the pandemic spread.

FEWER JOBS

The United States lost 2.7 million jobs during Trump's presidency, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If the pandemic months are excluded, he added 6.7 million jobs.

By contrast, 15.4 million jobs were added during Biden's presidency. That's 5.1 million more jobs than what the CBO forecasted he would add before his coronavirus relief and other policies became law — a sign of how much he boosted the labor market.

Both candidates have repeatedly promised to bring back factory jobs. Between 2017 and the middle of 2019, Trump added 461,000 manufacturing jobs. But the gains began to stall and then turned into layoffs during the pandemic, with the Republican posting a loss of 178,000 jobs.

So far, the U.S. economy has added 773,000 manufacturing jobs during Biden's presidency.

 

An Israeli airstrike killed 45 Palestinians in an encampment for displaced people by Hadeel Al-Shalchi ,Anas Baba

 

RAFAH, Gaza — The Gaza health ministry said that an airstrike in Rafah on Sunday killed 45 Palestinians and injured dozens more. It said that there are still victims under the rubble and that the majority of those killed were women and children.

The Israeli military said it was targeting a Hamas installation and killed two senior Hamas militants. The strike caused a fire in an encampment just west of Rafah in a neighborhood called Tal al-Sultan, where dozens of Palestinians were sheltering. The area was not under Israeli evacuation orders.

The strike came days after the United Nations International Court of Justice ordered the Israeli military to end its operation in Rafah. The order was related to one of several provisional measures that South Africa added to a broader case it filed with the ICJ in December against Israel accusing it of genocide. It also ordered Israel to open its border with Egypt to let aid in and allow a U.N. fact finding mission to enter to investigate accusations of war crimes.

 

Abu Mohammed Abu el-Sebeh, 67, had taken shelter in the encampment and was surveying the damage after the strike.

“At around 6:30 p.m. yesterday, I heard a huge noise. I heard an explosion, it sounded like an earthquake,” he told NPR. “I couldn’t get out of the door so I jumped out of the window and saw injured children… one without a head.”

Before this month, Rafah had been the last refuge for Palestinians during the war, with so much of Gaza being devastated. Almost 1.3 million Palestininans were sheltering in Rafah at one time but the U.N. says more than 800,000 have fled since the Israeli military expanded its ground operations there. Rafah is still densely populated in the areas that are not under an evacuation order.

 Dr. James Smith, an emergency doctor who is working just outside Rafah, said that the injured were taken to a trauma stabilization center in Tal al-Sultan and then referred to surrounding field hospitals for further treatment. Many hospitals in Rafah and neighboring cities were ordered to be evacuated and shut down by the Israeli military in the past months.

 “People [were] literally burned alive in their tents,” Smith told NPR. “This is unlike anything I have seen in the six-plus weeks I have been back here in Gaza. Truly one of the most horrific massacres to have occurred in recent days here in Rafah and across the Gaza Strip.”

 Israel’s war in Gaza has killed more than 36,000 Palestinians, according to health officials there. About 1,200 people were killed in Israel and more than 240 were taken hostage during the Hamas attack on Oct. 7. About 120 hostages remain in Gaza.

 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is under increasing domestic pressure to negotiate a ceasefire deal to bring the remaining hostages home. Israel has been rocked by weekly protests by families of hostages and others calling for the resignation of Netanyahu. He is also under pressure by hard liners in his government that do not want a complete ceasefire.

Israeli media is reporting that officials say that negotiations are supposed to resume next week. There were some high level discussions in Paris this weekend between the Israeli Mossad’s David Barnea, the U.S. CIA’s William J. Burns and the Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahma al-Thani.

Talks have been breaking down for months and Qatar as the U.S. and Egypt have been trying to bring Hamas and Israel closer to a deal.

The Texas School District That Provided the Blueprint for an Attack on Public Education by Jessica Winter

 When conservative activists began waging battle against diversity plans, some had a much bigger target in mind.

 

In October, 2018, on the night of a high-school homecoming dance in Southlake, Texas, a group of white students gathered at a friend’s house for an after-party. At some point, about eight of them piled together on a bed and, with a phone, filmed themselves chanting the N-word. The blurry, seesawing video went viral, and, days later, a special meeting was called by the board of the Carroll Independent School District—“Home of the Dragons”—one of the wealthiest and highest-rated districts in the state. At the meeting, parents of Black children shared painful stories of racist taunts and harassment that their kids had endured in school. Carroll eventually convened a diversity council made up of students, parents, and district staffers to address an evident pattern of racism in Southlake, although it took nearly two years for the group to present its plan of action. It recommended, among other things, hiring more teachers of color, requiring cultural-sensitivity training for all students and teachers, and imposing clearer consequences for racist conduct.

As the NBC reporters Mike Hixenbaugh and Antonia Hylton recounted in the acclaimed podcast “Southlake,” and as Hixenbaugh writes in his new book, “They Came for the Schools: One Town’s Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America’s Classrooms,” Southlake’s long-awaited diversity plan happened to emerge in July, 2020, shortly after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer sparked Black Lives Matter protests against racism and police brutality across the United States. It was also the same month that a journalist named Christopher Rufo published an article in City Journal headlined “Cult Programming in Seattle,” which launched his campaign to make “critical race theory”—an academic discipline that examines how racism is embedded in our legal frameworks and institutions—into a right-wing panic button. A political-action committee called Southlake Families PAC sprang up to oppose the Carroll diversity plan; the claim was that it would instill guilt and shame in white children and convince them that they are irredeemably racist. The following year, candidates endorsed by Southlake Families PAC swept the local elections for school board, city council, and mayor, with about seventy per cent of the vote—“an even bigger share than the 63 percent of Southlake residents who’d backed Trump in 2020,” Hixenbaugh notes in his book. Some nine hundred other school districts nationwide saw similar anti-C.R.T. campaigns. Southlake, where the anti-woke insurgency had won lavish praise from National Review and Laura Ingraham, was the blueprint.

“Rufo tapped into a particular moment in which white Americans realized that they were white, that whiteness carried heavy historical baggage,” the education journalist Laura Pappano writes in her recent book “School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education,” which also digs into the Southlake controversy. Whiteness could feel like a neutral default mode in many communities because of decades of organized resistance to high-density housing and other zoning measures—the bureaucratic backhoes of suburbanization and white flight. Today, the Carroll school district, though still majority white, has significant numbers of Latino and Asian families, but less than two per cent of the district’s students are Black.

In this last regard, Southlake is not an outlier, owing largely to persistent residential segregation across the U.S. Even in highly diverse metro areas, the average Black student is enrolled in a school that is about seventy-five per cent Black, and white students attend schools with significantly lower levels of poverty. These statistics are dispiriting not least because of ample data showing the educational gains that desegregation makes possible for Black kids. A 2015 analysis of standardized-test scores, for instance, identified a strong connection between school segregation and academic-achievement gaps, owing to concentrated poverty in predominantly Black and Hispanic schools. A well-known longitudinal study found that Black students who attended desegregated schools from kindergarten to high school were more likely to graduate and earn higher wages, and less likely to be incarcerated or experience poverty. Their schools also received twenty per cent more funding and had smaller classroom sizes. As the education reporter Justin Murphy writes in “Your Children Are Very Greatly in Danger: School Segregation in Rochester, New York,” this bevy of findings “lends support to the popular adage among desegregation supporters that ‘green follows white.’ ”

 These numbers, of course, don’t necessarily reflect the emotional and psychological toll of being one of a relatively few Black kids in a predominantly white school. Other recent books, including Cara Fitzpatrick’s “The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America” and Laura Meckler’s “Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity,” have also considered how those costs have been weighed against the moral imperative of desegregation. This is the axial force of a lineage that runs from the monstrous chaos that followed court-ordered integration in the nineteen-fifties and sixties and the busing debacles of the seventies to the racist slurs thrown around at Southlake. As my colleague Louis Menand wrote last year in his review of Rachel Louise Martin’s “A Most Tolerant Little Town: The Explosive Beginning of School Desegregation,” “It was insane to send nine Black teen-agers into Central High School in Little Rock with eighteen hundred white students and no Black teachers. . . . Desegregation was a war. We sent children off to fight it.” To Rufo and his comrades, there was no such war left to be fought; there were only the bitter-enders who hallucinate microaggressions in the wallpaper and whose books need to be banned from school libraries. A mordant irony of Rufo’s imaginary version of critical race theory is that Derrick Bell, the civil-rights attorney and legal scholar who was most closely associated with C.R.T., eventually came to be skeptical about school-integration efforts—not because racism was effectively over or because legally enforced desegregation represented government overreach, as the anti-C.R.T. warriors would hold today, but because it could not be eradicated. In a famous Yale Law Journal article, “Serving Two Masters,” from 1976, Bell cited a coalition of Black community groups in Boston who resisted busing: “We think it neither necessary, nor proper to endure the dislocations of desegregation without reasonable assurances that our children will instructionally profit.”

 

Hixenbaugh bookends “They Came for the Schools” with the experiences of a mother who decided to move her family from Los Angeles to Southlake, despite no family or community ties, so that her three Black kids could benefit from its top-flight local schools and beautiful green spaces. Years later, she watches from the stands at Southlake’s Dragon Stadium as her youngest child takes the stage to receive his high-school diploma, walking past seven school-board members “who’d voted to kill a diversity plan meant to teach students how to be kind to people who looked like him.” The young man would be off to college soon, back in L.A., and his mom was putting their house on the market. If she could do it all over again, she tells Hixenbaugh, “I wouldn’t have come.”

In the years before Brown v. Board of Education was decided, the N.A.A.C.P.—through the brave and innovative work of young lawyers such as Derrick Bell—had brought enough lawsuits against various segregated school districts that some states were moving to privatize their educational systems. As Fitzpatrick notes in “The Death of Public School,” an influential Georgia newspaper owner and former speaker of the state’s House declared, in 1950, “that it would be better to abolish the public schools than to desegregate them.” South Carolina, in 1952, voted 2–1 in a referendum to revoke the right to public education from its state constitution. Around the same time, the Chicago School economist Milton Friedman began making a case for school vouchers, or public money that parents could spend as they pleased in the educational marketplace. White leaders in the South seized on the idea as a means of funding so-called segregation academies. In 1959, a county in Virginia simply closed down its public schools entirely rather than integrate; two years later, it began distributing vouchers—but only to white students, as Black families had refused to set up their own segregated schools.

 

Despite these disgraceful origins, vouchers remain the handmaiden of conservative calls for “school choice” or “education freedom.” In the run-up to the 2022 midterms, Rufo expanded his triumphant crusade against C.R.T. into a frontal assault on public education itself, which he believed could be replaced with a largely unregulated voucher system. “To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public-school distrust,” Rufo explained. He had been doing his best to sow that distrust during the previous two years.

Twenty states currently have voucher programs; five states launched universal voucher programs in 2023 alone. But reams of evidence show that vouchers negatively impact educational outcomes, and the money a voucher represents—around eight thousand dollars in Florida, sixty-five hundred in Georgia—is often not nearly enough to cover private-school tuition. In practice, then, vouchers typically act as subsidies for wealthy families who already send their children to private schools; or they pay for sketchy for-profit “microschools,” which have no oversight and where teachers often have few qualifications; or they flow toward homeschooling families. Wherever they end up, they drain the coffers of the public schools. Arizona’s voucher system, which is less than two years old, is projected to cost close to a billion dollars next year. The governor, Katie Hobbs, a Democrat and former social worker, has said that the program “will likely bankrupt the state.”

Back in Texas, Governor Greg Abbott has become the Captain Ahab of school choice—he fanatically pursued a voucher program through multiple special sessions of the state legislature, failed every time to sink the harpoon, and then tried to use the rope to strangle the rest of the education budget, seemingly out of spite. Abbott’s problem is not only that Democrats don’t support vouchers but that they’ve also been rejected by Republican representatives in rural areas, where private options are scarce and where public schools are major local employers and serve as community hubs. (Southlake’s state representative, a Republican with a background in private equity, supports Abbott’s voucher scheme—a bizarre stance to take on behalf of a district that derives much of its prestige, property values, and chauvinism from the élite reputation of its public schools.) White conservatives in Texas and elsewhere were roused to anger and action by Rufo-style hysteria. But many of them may have realized by now that these invented controversies were just the battering ram for a full-scale sacking and looting of public education

'You have to destroy in order to create' – How the Sex Pistols sparked outrage by Myles Burke

 

With its provocative title and lyrics that openly attacked the UK establishment, on this day in 1977 the Sex Pistols' God Save The Queen sparked outrage with its release. Six months earlier, the BBC tried to get to the bottom of the chaotic youth movement that seemed to be challenging the very foundations of British society.

On 27 May 1977, during the patriotic run-up to the 25th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II's accession to the throne – the punk group The Sex Pistols released an incendiary single that ignited a firestorm of controversy and brought them overnight notoriety. 

The song, God Save the Queen, was a searing critique of the monarchy and the established political order it represented. Powered by stripped-back guitars, raw energy and furiously scathing lyrics, it proclaimed that the Queen "ain't no human being", people had "no future" and the UK was "a fascist regime".  

The record, and the timing of its release just before the Silver Jubilee, seemed a very direct challenge to the traditional reverence afforded to the monarch at the time. Within days, the BBC had rushed to issue a total ban on its radio and TV airplay.  

BBC Radio Two controller Charles McLelland branded the song as "gross bad taste", while Labour MP Marcus Lipton denounced it, saying "if pop music is going to be used to destroy our established institutions, then it ought to be destroyed first".  

Many shops, like Woolworths, simply refused to stock the single.  

The Sex Pistols had emerged as part of a punk movement that was rapidly spreading in the UK in the mid-1970s, as the country grappled with economic stagnation, rising unemployment, power blackouts and bubbling racial tensions. 

With its DIY spirit and anti-authority stance, punk was a response to boredom, social conformity and alienation that many young people felt. The music that came out of it articulated the hypocrisy that they saw in both the British establishment and UK's mainstream culture.  

Unapologetic, unruly and confrontational, The Sex Pistols, personified this punk ethos. 

Six months before the single's release, in November 1976, one such establishment institution, the UK's national broadcaster, the BBC, had invited the band in to be interviewed on current affairs programme, Nationwide.  

The broadcaster was keen to get to grips with a cultural movement reflecting the anger, frustration and disillusionment that seemed prevalent among the nation's youth and which was so clearly worrying its older viewers. 

Kids want excitement, they want things that are going to transform what is basically a very boring life for them right now – Malcolm McLaren

 

The band at the time was made up of singer Johnny Rotten (aka John Lydon), guitarist Steve Jones, drummer Paul Cook and bassist Glen Matlock, who would leave the following year to be replaced by Sid Vicious. They were introduced with a segment that aimed to bring the audience up to speed with what they described as "the cult of punk".

"Well, it may not be the best rock 'n' roll in the world, but it is certainly the most controversial," intoned a clearly disapproving voiceover from presenter Lionel Morton, which warned viewers that one London newspaper had called the Sex Pistols "the most aggressive, nasty band ever".

His co-presenter Maggie Norden, who was actually much younger than the band's manager Malcolm McLaren, also seemed to struggle to understand the appeal to so many young people of this visceral, nihilistic garage rock and the band's contempt for authority. She put it to McLaren that they were "more into chaos than anything else".

"Well, that's an accusation by people who really don't understand what kids want," said McLaren. 

Kids want excitement, they want things that are going to transform what is basically a very boring life for them right now, and music, young rock music, is the only thing they have, that they thought that they controlled. And if you look in the charts, they don't really have anything to do with it." 

'Worthless, nasty'

Norden took the band to task – saying that "they were trying to shock everyone" – as well as calling their clothing "bizarre" and asking Johnny Rotten if he was happy with the term punk, saying it meant "worthless, nasty".   

"The press gave us it. It's their problem, not ours. We never called ourselves punk," he replied enigmatically.

She went on to press them on what was wrong with bands of the 1960s who were still going, like The Rolling Stones and The Who, which she seemed more comfortable with as a sound of teen rebellion.

Johnny Rotten merely dismissed them as being established, saying: "They just do not mean anything to anyone." 

BBC's Nationwide had also brought in music journalist Giovanni Dadomo, who at the time wrote for music papers Sounds and ZigZag, to challenge the band.  

He accused their music as being "a bit derivative", and the Pistols' attitude as being "boring".  

"Destruction for its own sake is dull, ultimately," said Dadomo. "You know it doesn't offer any hope, it doesn't really want to change. It's just saying, 'we don't like this, we're different, look at us'." 

McLaren countered: "You have to destroy in order to create, you know that. You have to break it down and build it up again in a different form."  

It is uncertain how sincere Dadomo was himself in his own view, since the following year he would go on to form and front his own punk rock group called The Snivelling Shits. 

McLaren was defiant in his belief that the band would overcome the concerted resistance from the music business, the media and the political establishment, believing young people had the power to change public opinion.  

It won't be the journalist, it won't really be the music industry. It will be the kid on the street because he's the guy who buys the record," he said. 

"Does it matter if the record doesn't sell?" Norden asked. 

"There's no question it'll sell," McLaren said in response. 

He was talking about the Sex Pistols' debut single, Anarchy in the UK, which would make it to number 38 in the UK singles chart. That record would also end up being banned from BBC airwaves after the band's controversial and sweary appearance on the TV programme Today descended into chaos. 

This time, however, the attempts to suppress God Save the Queen only served to fuel its popularity. The record flew off the shelves in the shops that did stock it, climbing the charts to number two. It was denied the top spot, somewhat ironically given its banned status, by a song titled I Don't Want to Talk About It by Rod Stewart.  

This led to allegations that the single chart had been manipulated to stop the Pistols reaching number one, which was seen by punks as yet more evidence of the establishment's efforts to quell dissent. 

And for all the questions during the BBC's Nationwide interview about dangerous behaviour at the Sex Pistols' gigs, it was band members or those associated with their songs who were subject to violence. Following the outrage generated by the record, on 19 June 1977, Johnny Rotten and the song's producers, Chris Thomas and Bill Price, were attacked with razors outside a pub in Highbury, London. The drummer, Paul Cook, was assaulted by six men armed with knives outside Shepherd's Bush tube station on the following day. 

The Sex Pistols' impact reverberated far beyond their brief career, and God Save the Queen has lost none of its potency

On 7 June, less than two weeks after God Save the Queen's release, the band chartered a boat to go down the River Thames, defiantly performing the song as they cruised past the Houses of Parliament. The Sex Pistols invited music journalist Allan Jones on their boat trip and to see them play live. 

"Of course, when they did God Save the Queen, I mean that boat could have imploded. It was just amazing," he told the BBC in 2012. 

But it would be short-lived. The police forced the boat to dock, resulting in a fight and 11 people, including McLaren, getting arrested. 

The controversy, and the bans, would not end for the band with God Save the Queen.  

Their debut album Never Mind the Bollocks, released later the same year, was also swiftly banned by major retailers Woolworths, Boots and WHSmith. And it triggered an obscenity trial after a Virgin Records shop manager in Nottingham was arrested for displaying its "indecent printed matter" album cover, the work of designer Jamie Reid.  

Just three months following the album's release, the Sex Pistols broke up following a calamitous and chaotic US tour.  

But the band's impact reverberated far beyond their brief career, and God Save the Queen, with its ragged musicality, has lost none of its potency, remaining an embodiment of the anti-establishment spirit of punk. 

"The song has lost none of its power over the intervening years," Jones told the BBC in 2012. 

"The emotions behind the song, the sense of defiance, rebellion are still entirely relevant and it will still sound more exciting than anything else that's in the charts at the moment."

 

What’s better for the climate: A paper book, or an e-reader? Chloe Veltman

 

The summer reading season is here.

Some people will opt for paperbacks because they're easy to borrow and share. Others will go for e-readers, or audiobooks streamed on a phone.

But which is the more environmentally sustainable option? Reading's carbon footprint is not something most people consider when choosing how to read a book. But it's important to think about in a world facing the devastating impacts of human-caused climate change.

A complicated question to answer

Whether it's better to read books in print or on a device is complicated, because of the complex interplay of the resources involved across the entire lifecycle of a published work: how books and devices are shipped, what energy they use to run, if they can be recycled. 

 Digital reading is on the rise — especially audiobooks. According to the Association of American Publishers, they now capture about the same share of the total US book market as e-books — roughly 15%. But print is still by far the most popular format.

 

"Publishers are interested in preserving the business that they've created over hundreds of years," said Publishers Weekly executive editor Andrew Albanese, explaining why the industry is focusing most of its efforts on improving the sustainability of paperback and hardcover books, rather than digital formats. "They are looking to run those print book businesses as efficiently as possible, as cleanly as possible, as green as possible."

On the one side: traditional book publishing

Traditional print publishing comes with a high carbon footprint.

According to 2023 data from the literary industry research group WordsRated, print book publishing is the world's third-largest industrial greenhouse gas emitter, and 32 million trees are felled each year in the United States to make paper for books. Then there's the energy-intensive processes of pulping, printing and shipping — to say nothing of the many books that are destroyed because they remain unsold.

Although it's standard practice in the industry, publishers don't want to destroy books. So instead, many are donating unsold copies, switching to on-demand printing, or, like Chronicle Books, are reducing their initial print runs to see how well the titles sell before they print more. 

 

"We felt that it was better to have a higher cost and have less waste," said Chronicle Books president, Tyrrell Mahoney.

Chronicle Books, like many other publishers, is also trying to use more sustainable paper.

"We have this great partner in India who has now figured out how to use cotton-based up-cycled materials to print as paper," Mahoney said.

Publishers are also rethinking book design. It might be a surprise, but certain fonts can be more climate-friendly by using less ink and less paper.

 So far, these subtle, imperceptible tweaks have saved more than 200 million pages across 227 titles since September," said Harper Collins' senior director of design Lucy Albanese.

On the other: digital publishing

All well and good. But digital reading seems to have a considerable eco-advantage over print because it is paperless, so it saves trees, pulping and shipping. Moreover, tech companies that make e-readers such as Amazon, which sells the market-leading Kindle e-reader, offer recycling programs for old devices. 

 

"By choosing e-books as an alternative to print, Kindle readers helped save an estimated 2.3 million metric tons of carbon emissions over a two year period," said Corey Badcock, head of Kindle product and marketing.

But digital devices also come with a substantial carbon footprint, predominantly at the manufacturing stage. Their cases are made with fossil-fuel-derived plastics and the minerals in their batteries require resource-heavy mining.

The short answer to which is better: it depends

"It's not cut and dried," said Mike Berners-Lee, a professor of sustainability at Lancaster Environment Centre in the United Kingdom, of the comparative climate friendliness of digital versus print reading.

Berners-Lee, the author of The Carbon Footprint of Everything, said the average e-reader has a carbon footprint of around 80 pounds.

"This means that I've got to read about 36 small paperback books-worth on it before you break even," he said.

 

Figuring out whether to take a digital device or a paperback to the beach ultimately depends on how voraciously you read.

"If you buy an e-reader and you read loads and loads of books on it, then it's the lowest carbon thing to do," Berners-Lee said. "But if I buy it, read a couple of books, and decided that I prefer paperback books, then it's the worst of all worlds."

Yet Berners-Lee said that reading is still, relatively speaking, a pretty sustainable activity — regardless of whether you read using an e-reader, phone or old-fashioned paperback. 

 

How a global seafood giant broke Red Lobster by Nathaniel Meyersohn, CNN

 

When seafood conglomerate Thai Union Group became Red Lobster’s leading shareholder in 2020, gaining 49% control of the chain, Red Lobster employees were assured Thai Union would not interfere in key decisions.

Thai Union will “not be involved in Red Lobster’s day-to-day operations, including [its] supply chain standards and processes,” according to a document titled “Seafood Supplier Talking Points” viewed by CNN that was approved by top Thai Union and Red Lobster executives.

“We intend to maintain relationships with all current seafood suppliers,” the talking points said. 

 

Those pledges didn’t last.

By 2022, representatives from Thai Union in Thailand, whose $4 billion empire includes brands like Chicken of the Sea and John West Foods, were embedded in Red Lobster’s Orlando headquarters, serving in top roles and closely directing the largest seafood restaurant chain in the world.

“We are much deeper involved in the management of Red Lobster,” Thai Union finance chief Ludovic Garnier said on an analyst call in November 2022.

Now, Red Lobster has drowned in a relentless supply of Thai Union-supplied shrimp. Red Lobster filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Sunday, and it plans to sell its business to its lenders. In turn, Red Lobster will receive financing to stay afloat. 

 

Thai Union’s damaging decisions drove the pioneering chain’s fall, according to 13 former Red Lobster executives and senior leaders in various areas of the business as well as analysts. All but two of the former Red Lobster employees spoke to CNN under the condition of anonymity because of either non-disclosure agreements with Thai Union; fear that speaking out would harm their careers; or because they don’t want to jeopardize deferred compensation from Red Lobster.

Thai Union earlier this year blamed the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as “sustained industry headwinds, higher interest rates and rising material and labor costs” for Red Lobster’s struggles.

In a statement to CNN, Thai Union said it “has a been a supplier to Red Lobster for more than 30 years, and we intend for that relationship to continue.” A bankruptcy process “will allow Red Lobster to restructure its financial obligations and realize its long-term potential in a more favorable operating environment,” the company said. Thai Union did not respond to CNN’s questions about the specific allegations raised in this story.

Former Red Lobster employees say that while the pandemic, inflation and rent costs impacted Red Lobster, Thai Union’s ineptitude was the pivotal factor in Red Lobster’s decline.

“It was miserable working there for the last year and a half I was there,” said Les Foreman, a West Coast division vice president who worked at Red Lobster for 20 years and was fired in 2022. “They didn’t have any idea about running a restaurant company in the United States.”

Thai Union asserts control

At Red Lobster headquarters, employees prided themselves on a fiercely loyal culture and low turnover. Some employees had been with the chain for 30 and 40 years.

But as Thai Union installed executives at the chain, dozens of veteran Red Lobster leaders with deep knowledge of the brand and restaurant industry were fired or resigned in rapid succession. Red Lobster ended up having five CEOs in five years.

Thai Union CEO Thiraphong Chansiri visited Red Lobster’s headquarters in 2022 and toured restaurants around the country. He brought along a feng shui consultant named Angel to Orlando, former senior leaders at Red Lobster headquarters told CNN. The consultant determined that executive offices in Orlando were “bad Feng shui and no one should use them,” one former leader told CNN. The executive offices sat empty. 

 

Former Red Lobster employees describe a toxic and demoralizing environment as Thai Union-appointed executives descended on headquarters and interim CEO Paul Kenny eventually took over the chain in 2022. Kenny, an Australian-born former CEO of Minor Food, one of Asia’s largest casual dining and quick-service restaurants, was part of the Thai Union-led investor group that acquired Red Lobster.

Kenny criticized Red Lobster employees at meetings and made derogatory comments about them, according to former Red Lobster leaders who worked closely with Kenny. Commenting on a woman’s weight at a Red Lobster annual conference in 2022 in Dallas as she walked across a stage to accept an award, Kenny said, “we need to institute an exercise program in this company,” another former Red Lobster executive told CNN.

Kenny did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment on these allegations.

Under Kenny, Red Lobster also cut two of its longtime shrimp suppliers— and competitors to Thai Union — to purchase more shrimp from Thai Union at higher costs, according to Red Lobster’s bankruptcy filing. Kenny’s decision came “in apparent coordination with Thai Union and under the guise of a ‘quality review,’” Red Lobster said.

These changes culminated in a $20 endless shrimp promotion in 2023 that would come back to haunt Red Lobster.

“Thai Union exercised an outsized influence on the Company’s shrimp purchasing,” Red Lobster alleged in its bankruptcy filing. Red Lobster said it was “investigating whether Mr. Kenny’s decision-making process circumvented the Company’s normal supply chain and demand planning.”

Thai Union told CNN that Red Lobster’s accusations in the bankruptcy filing were “meritless,” and the company looks forward to a “full representation of the facts.”

Red Lobster also slowed investments in dining room upgrades, raised prices and cut labor under Thai Union, former executives and operations leaders say. These decisions pushed away customers and cut into Red Lobster’s sales. Red Lobster’s annual customer count has dropped by 30% since 2019, Red Lobster said in its bankruptcy filing.

Paul Kenny steps in

Red Lobster was started in 1968 by Bill Darden, an architect of the casual dining revolution in America. General Mills quickly bought Red Lobster and in 1995 spun the chain off into a new company, Darden Restaurants, named after its founder.

In 2014, Darden sold Red Lobster to Golden Gate Capital, a private equity firm, for $2.1 billion.  To help fund the deal, Red Lobster spun off its real estate. The arrangement wound up hurting Red Lobster because it became stuck with leases it no longer could afford to pay as the business struggled.

Two years later, Thai Union took a $575 million minority stake in Red Lobster. In 2020, Thai Union expanded that stake, leading an investor group to buy out Golden Gate Capital and acquire Red Lobster.

During the first half of 2021, Red Lobster posted an operating profit, and Thai Union touted Red Lobster’s strength on calls with analysts and company presentations.

“Red Lobster’s turnaround continued amid the pandemic,” Thai Union said in a quarterly earnings presentation in August of 2021. There was “clear improvement in Red Lobster operations.”

Red Lobster re-hired 26,000 employees from January to August of 2021, Thai Union said in the presentation, and appointed Kelli Valade CEO. Valade brought on a new leadership team, including a new head of finance, chief marketing officer and chief information officer.

But Kenny, then a Red Lobster board member, soon began exercising more control. 

 

In early 2022, Kenny began visiting Red Lobster’s headquarters more frequently and touring restaurants, former Red Lobster employees who worked closely with Kenny say.

At a tense board meeting in late March 2022, Kenny disagreed with Valade that significant further investment was needed in Red Lobster, according to a former Red Lobster leader. He chastised Red Lobster’s management team, which included Valade’s three recently hired executives, this person said. Within 48 hours, Valade resigned, just eight months into her tenure. Another Red Lobster board member who had decades of experience running casual dining restaurants in the United States resigned a day after.

Valade was appointed Denny’s CEO two months later. She did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment.

Severe cuts

Kenny was initially described in a press release announcing Valade’s resignation as a “liaison” between Red Lobster’s leadership and the board of directors “during this time of transition.”

But, at the direction of Thai Union, Kenny became interim CEO, according to Red Lobster’s bankruptcy filing.

In the months after Kenny took over, Valade’s leadership team and other veteran leaders left. In July of 2022, the chief operations officer and six vice presidents of operations overseeing restaurants were abruptly fired shortly before Red Lobster’s annual general manager conference.

Kenny appointed a Thai Union frozen seafood manager, Trin Tapanya, as Red Lobster’s chief operations officer overseeing restaurants. Tapanya had no experience running restaurants. He did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment.

Other Thai Union representatives also became more closely involved across Red Lobster’s supply chain, finance, operations and strategy teams. 

 

Under Kenny, changes to restaurant operations and menus alienated customers and staff and hurt sales. Red Lobster started charging for a side salad for the first time, angering some customers.

“When you spend $43.99 for a meal the salad should be part of it,” one customer said recently on Facebook. “Texas Roadhouse does not charge extra for a side salad. Red Lobster was my favorite place to eat, but no longer.”

The chain started leaving tails on shrimp in pasta and eliminated sauté stations in kitchens to save on labor costs, according to a different former Red Lobster employee.

It also squeezed Red Lobster’s waitstaff, switching from servers covering three tables to 10 and removing a host at the entrance during lunch hours. Thai Union said at the time it was to improve customer service, but former Red Lobster employees say the change taxed restaurant staff.

Overstretched restaurant staff had fewer managers and cooks than ever, said Barry Fulghum, who started out as a dishwasher at Red Lobster in the 1970s and worked his way up to become an operations director, retiring last year.

“There would be times we would have one or two people working the kitchen line,” he said.  “What those cooks did on the line was amazing given the staffing situation they were dealt.”

Removing longtime suppliers

Meanwhile, Thai Union took a larger role in Red Lobster’s supply chain decisions, despite pledges in 2020 that it would not interfere.

Red Lobster had spent decades developing a wide array of suppliers to buy at competitive prices and mitigate the risks of becoming too reliant on any single supplier.

Thai Union blew that up.

Red Lobster employees say they were pressured by Thai Union representatives to buy more seafood from Thai Union. Thai Union representatives also began sitting in on meetings between Red Lobster and seafood suppliers, said one of the former Red Lobster employees who witnessed these conversations. Thai Union was the direct competitor of these other seafood suppliers, and suddenly had intimate access to their products, prices and strategy.

“Our suppliers were really upset that [Thai Union representatives] were in those meetings with them,” this person said.

Shrimp dishes also became a larger focus of Red Lobster’s menu under Thai Union, which was a large shrimp supplier to Red Lobster.

“Every promotion was shrimp-centric,” this person said.

Endless shrimp

Then came the endless shrimp.

Endless shrimp had been a successful limited-time promotion at Red Lobster for nearly 20 years. But last summer, Red Lobster turned $20 “Ultimate Endless Shrimp” into a permanent menu item instead.

Kenny had been warned by Red Lobster leaders that $20 was too cheap to make a profit, according to a former employee who witnessed these conversations. But Red Lobster went ahead, turning it into an everyday offer in June 2023 and pushing the promotion heavily.

(Kenny’s decision was met with “significant pushback from other members of the [company’s] management team,” Red Lobster also said in its bankruptcy filing.) 

 

“We have a very, very bold proposition for the consumers in the US. It’s $20, so it’s really affordable,” Thai Union finance chief Ludovic Garnier said on an earnings call in August 2023.

But the move backfired.

Customers sat at tables for long stretches of time, eating course after course of shrimp. Service slowed and wait times grew.

Red Lobster lost $11 million following the deal, its bankruptcy filing states.

Endless shrimp was an embarrassment for Red Lobster, spoofed on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” and social media. To former Red Lobster employees, it was the latest sign Thai Union was ill-suited to run the chain.

Thai Union announced in January it was divesting from Red Lobster and taking a $530 million loss on its investment. A month later, Thai Union CEO Chansiri said the company was looking to sell the chain.

Red Lobster, he said, “is done [and] over with.” 

 

Plastic junk? Researchers find tiny particles in men's testicles by Will Stone

 

Whether it's our bloodstream, brain, or lungs, microscopic fragments of plastic seem to turn up every time scientists scour a new corner of the human body.

The male reproductive organs are no exception.

New research published this month finds microplastics can build up in the testicles of humans and dogs — raising more questions about the potential health impacts of these particles.

Animal studies have shown exposure to microplastics can impact sperm quality and male fertility, but scientists are still in the early stages of translating this work to human health.

"Microplastics are everywhere," says Dr. John Yu, a toxicologist in the College of Nursing at the University of New Mexico and lead author of the study. "The quantification of those microplastics in humans is the first step to understanding its potential adverse effects."

 

When he set out to do the study, Yu didn't expect microplastics would have penetrated the male reproductive system so extensively, given the tight blood-tissue barrier around those organs. To his surprise, the research team unearthed a wide range and heavy concentration of microplastics in the testicles of about two dozen men and close to 50 dogs.

The results may also be relevant to a well-documented global decline in sperm count and other problems related to male fertility. This trend has been linked to a host of environmental and lifestyle factors, including certain endocrine-disrupting chemicals found in plastics.

The growing numbers of studies like this one are "compelling and should be a wake up call for policymakers," says Tracey Woodruff, director of the Environmental Research and Translation for Health Center at the University of California, San Francisco. 

 

How much and what kind of plastics were in the testicles?

This is the largest study to measure how much of these microplastics that permeate the water, food and even air end up in the most intimate recesses of male reproductive anatomy.

It follows a smaller analysis, published last year by a team in China, that detected microplastics in about half a dozen human testicles and in semen. 

 

For the current study, researchers at the University of New Mexico collected the testicles from autopsies of people ranging in age from 16 to 88 and from nearly 50 dogs after they were neutered at local veterinary clinics.

Dogs can function as "sentinel" animals for disease and harmful chemical exposure because they're so embedded in the human environment, plus canine spermatogenesis is more similar to the human process of producing sperm than lab rats, says Yu. 

 

Instead of trying to count each microplastic particle, the researchers were able to quantify the total amount of plastic by dissolving all the biological tissue and separating out the solids.

About 75% of what remained was plastic.

Polyethylene, or PE, made up a large portion of that. It's the most widely used plastic in the world, showing up in packaging, bags and any number of products.

Matthew Campen, who has examined these tiny particles up close, describes them as "shard-like, stabby bits" because of the way they've become "old and brittle and fragmented."

"What they do in the body, we don't know," says Campen, a professor at the UNM College of Pharmacy and one of the authors of the study, "Obviously, little tiny particles can disrupt the way cells behave."

Polyvinyl chloride — what's in PVC piping — emerged as another prominent culprit and was the second most common in the dog testicles. Vinyl chloride is classified as a carcinogen and long-term exposure, for example in drinking water, can increase the risk of cancer.

What's more, Yu and his team found a correlation between lower sperm count in the dog testicles and the presence of PVC (the analysis couldn't be done on the human samples because of how they had been stored).

There was also an association between greater levels of PVC and decreased weight of the testicles. The same was seen with Polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, another common source of plastic, which recent research suggests may be harmful. 

 

Woodruff says weight is a somewhat "crude" marker for the effects on testicular health, although it's frequently used by regulatory agencies to evaluate the impacts of chemicals.

Implications?

The research comes with many caveats and cannot prove microplastics directly cause problems with male fertility. Nonetheless, Yu says the results are "concerning" and lay the foundation for more targeted studies on the "relationship between microplastic exposure and its potential impact on sperm."

An emerging body of evidence suggests microplastics can have toxic effects on reproductive health.

In a 2022 review of the evidence for the state of California, Woodruff and her colleagues concluded that microplastics were "suspected" to harm sperm quality and testicular health, but she says that may soon tip over from "suspected" to "likely" because more high-quality studies are being published.

"In the history of looking at chemical or environmental health issues, at the beginning you see these indicators of health harms and then those that have some type of evidence behind them just tend to grow," says Woodruff, "I anticipate we're just going to see more health harms from these microplastics."

In the University of New Mexico study, the concentration of microplastics in human testicles was on average three times higher than in dogs.

Campen says there are still many unknowns, like what specific concentration would pose a threat to health, or how that might vary depending on the kind of microplastic or where they accumulate in the body.

"We're just at the tip of the iceberg," says Campen, who has used this same technique to quantify the levels of microplastics in other tissues and organs.

The amount in the testicles is considerably higher than what was discovered in placenta, and second to what they observed in the brain, says Yu.

Exactly how the microplastics are making their way into the testicles requires further study. Campen suspects they could be "hitchhiking" through the gut via tiny fat particles that get metabolized and then fan out across the body. 

 

It's plausible the build-up of microplastics in the testicles could affect reproductive health in any number of ways. Yu says microplastics could physically disrupt spermatogenesis, mess with the barrier between the testicles, or be a vehicle for harmful chemicals.

They could lead to inflammation and cause oxidative stress, which down the road might affect fertility, says Dr. Sarah Krzastek, a urologist at Virginia Commonwealth University.

"It's probably one more piece of the puzzle of things that are contributing to declines in male fertility over the years as these environmental exposures keep accumulating," she says, "We don't know the clinical ramifications of that yet."

Richard Lea, a reproductive biologist at the University of Nottingham, calls the findings "alarming."

"Having something unnatural like that in the testes is not particularly good news for good reproductive health," says Lea.

In his lab, Lea has found that exposure to phthalates, which are chemicals that can leach from plastics, can reduce the ability of sperm to swim and increase the fragmentation of DNA in the sperm head. This is one likely contributor to the decline in sperm quality in household dogs over the last several decades, a trend that mirrors what's seen in humans.

Of course, the testicles are just one part of the male reproductive system.

Lea says there's now research showing these chemical contaminants can affect the hormonal control of reproduction, at different levels in the body, including in the brain.

How to study a substance that is ubiquitous

Dr. Shanna Swan, a reproductive epidemiologist who has documented the global decline in sperm count, says she's concerned about the accumulation of microplastics. But it's not yet clear finding them in the testicles rather than other parts of the body is more worrisome from the standpoint of reproductive health.

For example in her work, she's looked at how prenatal exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals like phthalates can affect male reproductive function and "lead to lifetime of reproductive damage."

 

Swan says a limitation running through many of the recent studies on microplastics is that the samples may be inadvertently exposed to microplastics in the environment and that leads to skewed impressions of what was actually present in the person.

She notes there were similar quality control issues nearly a quarter century ago when scientists first started measuring phthalates in human tissues.

"I think there have to be a lot of caveats saying this is really the beginning," says Swan, a professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, "It's suggestive, it's important, and it's preliminary."

The University of New Mexico researchers developed a quality control process to protect the samples from being accidentally exposed to microplastics as much as possible. Campen says there's so much plastic in the human body, the amount that might contaminate the samples is "trivial."

More broadly, though, he acknowledges the field faces some huge challenges moving forward — especially as they try to draw a stronger link between these tiny particles and a decline in reproductive health or disease.

"A lot of the problem is they're so ubiquitous. There are no proper controls anymore. Right? Everybody's exposed," he says.