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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/25909

A cozy cafe in the heart of Minneapolis, Minnesota, has become a staging ground for Indigenous-led patrols working to keep Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) off their streets. Pow Wow Grounds, opened in 2011 by Bob Rice, has been both a gathering place for community members attempting to make sense of the scale of violence they have witnessed over the past few weeks and a place to strategize an autonomous response.

During Truthout’s visit to the cafe at the end of January, wagons full of supplies — from food and gas masks to Narcan — passed in and out of Pow Wow Grounds’ front door, which for the first time was kept locked to keep ICE agents out. The door was unlocked again and again to allow the wagons into the newly repurposed All My Relations gallery space, which is housed with Pow Wow Grounds in the Native American Community Development Institute.

“Look outside,” Rice said during an interview with Truthout in the cafe. “This is the American Indian Cultural Corridor, the heart of Native life here in Minneapolis. They come here to try to intimidate us, but we will not bow down.”

“They come here to try to intimidate us, but we will not bow down.”

Rice’s efforts to supply the Native community and its allies with “soup and supplies,” as he told Truthout, have been successful. Members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and of the Many Shields Warrior Society (an Indigenous community security group) have been patrolling the streets of Minneapolis’s Phillips neighborhood since the start of the occupation, and they do not plan to stop.

“We all have a place. My place is to make sure people are fed and get a cup of coffee,” Rice said.

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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/25918

Settler activists wish to expel and even exterminate Palestinians in order to 'settle all over Gaza'

Hundreds of Israeli settlers held a protest and briefly entered Gaza on 7 February as part of a broader effort to establish Jewish settlements on the ruins of Palestinian cities in the devastated enclave.

“Gaza belongs solely to the people of Israel! The time has come to settle in Gaza!” the Nachala settlement movement stated in a post on social media documenting the protest.

Knesset member Ariel Kallner, from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, gave a speech at the demonstration.

“The nation of Israel’s rebirth will come when an Israeli flag flies over Gaza — when Jewish communities thrive in Gaza. That will be the absolute victory over absolute evil,” Kallner claimed.

“We will not surrender to Trump’s dictates: No to an international Gaza, yes to a Jewish Gaza,” one of the slogans read.

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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/25919

Don’t believe anyone who tells you that the fight against Trump and the Far Right is impossible. A little over a month after the start of Operation Metro Surge, and mere weeks after the murders of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, announced that 700 federal immigration forces were going to leave the state.

The battle isn’t over yet. There are still over 2,000 agents who will continue to terrorize the streets of Minnesota, not to mention the hundreds of local law enforcement agents who work with them. Yet, even this partial retreat was made possible not because of any sort of goodwill or bipartisanship, but forced by a community in revolt.

For over a month, federal agents have rained terror on immigrants in Minnesota, especially in the Twin Cities, in what they describe as the “largest immigration operation ever.” They’ve snatched people, including children as young as five, off the streets, from outside their homes, store parking lots, and schools. And it’s not just immigrants — agents have terrorized and even shot people who’ve tried to document their actions or get in their way.

But Minnesotans have refused to sit idly by while their neighbors and friends are kidnapped. While the whole country watched as tens of thousands took to the streets in the middle of some of the coldest days this winter, ready to shut it all down in the face of these attacks, the community is still showing up every day. Neighborhood patrols are everywhere, specially near schools. Whistle networks are activated at a moment’s notice to alert the community of ICE’s presence. Whether its raising money for rental assistance for immigrant neighbors sheltering in place or dropping food off at their homes, communities have come closer together to weather this challenge.

While sanctuary committees have formed in schools nationwide, Minneapolis has become their ultimate proving ground. Here, city schools have emerged as fortresses against ICE, anchored by a vast solidarity network of teachers, students, and parents. Forged through years of shared struggle, this network now serves as the first line of defense for immigrant families.

Eager to hear their stories, we spoke with three elementary school educators on a Tuesday afternoon.

Protecting the Community in the Classroom

The degree to which teachers and their community have been transformed by Trump’s ICE offensive has become impossible to ignore. The threat of removal, harassment, and deportation are constant. Empty desks are common as almost half their students are staying at home in the face of ICE’s terror, and teachers are adapting to a new reality of hybrid learning. For one teacher, only about a third of her class size of 26 is attending classes in person.

But what is learning in these conditions, even? One of the teachers, R, wonders out loud if she’s being a “good” teacher when she moves away from teaching the curriculum in these times. But she’s okay with it. It’s more important to her, she stresses, to hold space for her students who are living in constant fear of their families and friends being taken away and help them navigate these big feelings.

They all concur that every teacher in the school has a student who has personally experienced or witnessed someone detained or harassed by ICE. As they teach every day, ICE’s presence looms large, whether in the sound of shouts and whistles from the streets pouring in through the video call during class, or a student having to step away because ICE was on their street, in their building, or even at their door.

The impact of ICE’s repression extends far beyond immigrant families, too. It’s not just immigrants who are being targeted now — many of their Indigenous and Black students are also staying home. Long targeted by police violence, these communities understand that repression does not stop at immigration status; and that when the state escalates, it moves against all those it has historically oppressed.

But none of these teachers have stood idly by. Spurred by the initiative of some parents that the teachers have dubbed “supermoms,” teachers were quick to mobilize alongside the community as Operation Metro Surge began in December, just as winter break was setting in.

A Network Emerges

Recognizing that many of their kids’ friends and classmates were the very targets of this offensive, teachers and parents were quick to mobilize around the needs of the families who were “sheltering in place.”

What began as largely weekly deliveries of groceries and other necessities for these families, quickly grew into much more. They drive students and parents not just to and from school, but also to appointments and events. When parents have been unable to work, teachers and parents have fundraised for rental assistance so they don’t face further precariousness and eviction.

And then there’s the creativity. Whether cooking or crafts, to help generate extra income, parents have organized remote workshops with those who have skills to share. It is a complex operation, moving between spreadsheets and forms and different chats at a moment’s notice as ICE changes their tactics and forces them to change theirs. But the care never stops.

Amidst it all, teachers are in the classroom, managing their students’ the fears and confusion against their own place in the world, as educators, parents, immigrants, and neighbors. They talk about this looming presence constantly closing in. One teacher reflected, “I feel relieved that we can support families staying home. Can you imagine kids being here, constantly worried that their parents are being kidnapped by ICE? The damage happening now will last for years. This doesn’t end when ICE leaves.”

It hits closest to home for M, a Latina teacher who’s long been a citizen and raised a family here, now confronting her new reality in this place she calls home. She tells us of her son who lives out of state who implored her to carry her documents. This isn’t about legal status anymore, he reminds her; his childhood friend got picked up by ICE.

But that fear and loss picks at everyone. One of them spoke of their family members self-deporting, as well as the trials of having to teach through that pain and show up for her students. Others describe waking up at 3 a.m., scared about ICE being outside the door when she’s helping immigrant families. With the battle lines drawn, ICE hasn’t shied away from going after those who stand with immigrants either. S, a woman in her 60s, describes the fear she felt when attempting her first grocery dropoff back in December. She called R, decades her junior, to accompany her. In the time since, they’ve also found these roles reversed. It is as they say, they’re really all in it together.

It’s not possible to face this and find hope and confidence without community, they all stress. For them, it’s a community they’ve built through shared struggle. First, there was the Covid-19 pandemic, before being faced with new struggles mere months later in the face of the murder of George Floyd and a city in revolt against racist and police violence. It’s a community that was reinforced and strengthened by dancing together in the cold at the picket lines during the 18-day-long teachers’ strike in March 2022 — the first in Minneapolis in 50 years. At the time, fighting against racism and for more resources for their students, they emphasized that their teaching conditions were their students’ learning conditions. Far before Operation Metro Surge, they were already mobilizing to defend immigrant students.

Unions Must Actively Join the Fight

In Minneapolis schools, teachers are not only educating under fire, but are also helping build the infrastructure of resistance that the working class needs to survive and fight back. To defeat ICE, the labor movement has to actively join the struggle.

When unions, faith leaders, and community organizations called for a day of “no work, no school, no shopping,” teachers unions in the Twin Cities joined the call. But our unions need to do more than offer strong statements with only symbolic solidarity — they need to actively mobilize and put all of their resources toward the defense of the community, using everything in our power to defeat ICE terror.

Teachers are already doing enormous work. If the unions joined this struggle actively, schools could become bastions that centralize the resistance. Teachers acutely understand the needs of the community, interacting with them every day. Assemblies and meetings in every school could be an immense step forward in coordinating the struggle, where teachers, students, and parents can come together to not only discuss how to keep each other safe, but also what they need.

These bodies could further coordinate and centralize their response at neighborhood and citywide levels. Unions have this infrastructure in place already and could lead the charge to coordinate resources across the district. Teachers unions could work with service workers unions, and bus drivers could provide safe passage for families. Union halls and resources could go towards supporting workers and families sheltering in place, including mutual aid efforts. These committees could become the structures that coordinate not just the everyday needs and defense against ICE, but also where workers can plan and execute large days of action to actually strike and shut it all down.

We can’t put it off anymore. Trump’s first steps of retreat show the immense potential of what is possible when we stand and fight together. ICE and Trump came for immigrants — but the wall they found was the resistance in Minneapolis, which is moving a nation to action. Teachers, alongside students, parents and the community are determined to defeat ICE. As one teacher put it: “We don’t want them to go to other places; we want to defeat them here so they don’t do it elsewhere.”

The time for that resounding defeat is now.

The post Teachers Organizing Against ICE in Minneapolis Schools Are the Heart of the Resistance appeared first on Left Voice.

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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/25692

This article by Obed Rosas originally appeared in the February 5, 2026 edition of Sin Embargo.

Mexico City, On February 20, 2025, the Chihuahua Health Department reported a case of measles in a 9-year-old boy from a Mennonite community in the municipality of Cuauhtémoc who had traveled to Seminole, Texas, a settlement where measles cases had already occurred with one known death at the time of the visit.

The boy’s school in Chihuahua was closed after more cases were detected. A month later, on March 20, the National Institute of Diagnosis and Reference (InDRE) confirmed that the virus isolated in the first patients belonged to the same lineage of measles previously identified in Seminole, Texas.

This is how Irma Leticia de Jesús Ruiz González, from the Chihuahua State Health Department, and Rubén Morales Marín, from the Autonomous University of Chihuahua, describe the reintroduction of measles in the state, in an article published last November in the American Journal of Field Epidemiology. The text warns that the outbreak occurred in “a highly susceptible population, such as the Mennonite community in Chihuahua, where there is low adherence to vaccination for religious or cultural reasons, in addition to close interconnection with other unvaccinated populations.”

Mennonites in Mexico

The outbreak occurred within an adverse regional context. In November 2015, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) declared that the Americas had once again lost their measles elimination status. The reintroduction of the virus led Mexico to face its largest outbreak since it interrupted endemic transmission in 1997. Chihuahua became the main epicenter of infections and deaths on the continent, with figures that even surpassed those of the entire United States.

This week, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) confirmed that Mexico leads the Americas in COVID-19 infections, with 6,428 cases and 24 deaths. Of that total, Chihuahua accounts for 4,495 cases and 21 deaths; followed by Jalisco, with 1,034 cases and one death; Chiapas, with 432 cases; Michoacán, with 261; and Guerrero, with 257.

Of the total infections, 275 were imported, 4,054 were related to importation, and 2,839 remain with the source of infection under study.

The report in the American Journal of Epidemiology highlights that 10 of the deaths occurred among Indigenous communities in Chihuahua, where 569 cases were recorded. Three deaths were recorded in the rest of the population, in addition to the death of a Wixárika child from Nayarit.

“The Rarámuri indigenous population of Chihuahua had a mortality rate 18 times higher than the rest of the population, and this excess was statistically significant,” the study notes. The age distribution shows especially high rates in children under six months and in infants aged six to 11 months, with levels 41.4 and 82.5 times higher, respectively, than those observed in people aged 50 and over. The second most affected group was the 20-39 age group.

In mid-January, another study conducted by researchers from the University of Guadalajara, with participation from the Tlajomulco de Zúñiga campus and the University Center of Los Altos, identified five key findings. The first: the outbreak was highly concentrated, with 73 percent of the cases in Chihuahua and 76.8 percent in just 45 municipalities.

The second finding was the existence of two independent introductions of the virus: one across the northern border and a separate importation into Oaxaca. Third, the analysis describes a three-stage transmission pattern: introduction through networks of temporary agricultural workers, amplification in under-vaccinated communities, and subsequent spread to marginalized Indigenous populations.

The fourth point highlights that vaccine effectiveness remained high, supporting the theory that the outbreak was due to an accumulation of susceptible individuals rather than vaccination failures. The fifth point identifies age, living conditions in indigenous communities, lack of vaccination, and residence in rural areas as independent risk factors.

The report also documents the concentration of the outbreak in closed communities with persistent immunity gaps, such as the Mennonites of Chihuahua, a pattern similar to that observed in the 2015 outbreak in Texas, which resulted in 762 cases and two deaths. Comparable episodes have been recorded in recent years in Orthodox Jewish communities in New York and Amish communities in Ohio, reinforcing the existence of “hotspots of susceptible individuals” capable of triggering large epidemics even in countries with seemingly high national coverage.

This resurgence is occurring within a complex regional context. In November 2025, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) warned that the Americas had once again lost their measles elimination status, just one year after regaining it. The combination of ongoing imports and inequalities in access to vaccination threatens to reestablish endemic transmission.

Although the study acknowledges limitations—such as self-reporting of vaccination status and the partial availability of genomic data—it is the most comprehensive epidemiological analysis conducted to date on a measles outbreak in Latin America. It integrates individual surveillance data, genetic information, and social determinants at the municipal level in all 32 states of the country.

The conclusion is stark: measles did not return due to vaccine ineffectiveness, but rather due to the accumulated neglect of entire communities. Without targeted campaigns, strengthened molecular surveillance, and specific strategies for mobile, Indigenous, and rural populations, Mexico will remain vulnerable to new outbreaks. This major setback in nearly three decades offers an uncomfortable lesson: measles elimination is not lost overnight; it erodes slowly.

• 

  News Briefs

  A Child with Measles Arrived in Mexico from the US, & Then the Virus Was Everywhere

  February 6, 2026February 6, 2026

  This major setback in nearly three decades offers an uncomfortable lesson: measles elimination is not lost overnight; it erodes slowly.

• 

  Analysis | Interviews

  Attack on Venezuela: Mexico’s Response

  February 6, 2026February 6, 2026

  An interview with Daniela González López of Observatorio de Derechos Humanos de Los Pueblos.

• 

  News Briefs

  Sheinbaum: The Regime of Privileges Will Not Return

  February 5, 2026February 6, 2026

  The Mexican President spoke at the 109th anniversary of the 1917 Mexican Constitution, which was one of the most advanced social constitutions at its time, & inspired the Soviet constitution.

The post A Child with Measles Arrived in Mexico from the US, & Then the Virus Was Everywhere appeared first on Mexico Solidarity Media.

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Caracas, February 6, 2026 (venezuelanalysis.com) – Venezuelan Acting President Delcy Rodríguez held meetings with oil executives from Repsol (Spain) and Maurel & Prom (France) on Wednesday as part of ongoing efforts to secure energy investments amid US pressure and unilateral sanctions.

“We discussed the models established in the reformed Hydrocarbon Law to strengthen production and build solid alliances toward economic growth,” Rodríguez wrote on social media.

State oil company PDVSA, represented at the meetings by its president, Héctor Obregón, touted the prospects of establishing “strategic alliances” and “win-win cooperation” with the foreign multinational corporations.

The Rodríguez administration recently pushed a sweeping reform of Venezuela’s Hydrocarbon Law. Corporations are set to have increased control over crude extraction and exports, while the Venezuelan executive can discretionally reduce taxes and royalties and lease out oil projects in exchange for a cut of production.

Venezuelan leaders have defended the pro-business reform as a step forward to attract investment for a key industry that has been hard hit by US coercive measures, including financial sanctions and an export embargo, since 2017, as part of efforts to strangle the Venezuelan economy and bring about regime change.

Former President Hugo Chávez had overhauled oil legislation in 2001 to reestablish the state’s primacy over the sector with mandatory majority stakes in joint ventures, increased fiscal contributions, and a leading PDVSA operational role. Increased revenues financed the Bolivarian government’s aggressive social programs of the 2000s, which dramatically reduced poverty and expanded access to healthcare, housing, and education for the popular classes.

Repsol and Maurel & Prom currently hold stakes in several oil and natural gas joint ventures in the South American country. The two firms, as well as Italy’s Eni, have operated in a stop-start fashion in recent years as a result of US sanctions.

The European companies have consistently lobbied for increased control and benefits in their projects in the molds now established in the reformed energy legislation.

Since launching military attacks and kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on January 3, the Trump administration has vowed to take control of the Venezuelan oil sector and impose favorable conditions for US corporations. Senior US officials have praised Caracas’ oil reform.

According to reports, the White House has dictated that proceeds from Venezuelan crude sales be deposited in US-run accounts in Qatar, with an initial agreement comprising 30-50 million barrels of oil that had built up in Venezuelan storage as a result of a US naval blockade since December.

On Tuesday, the US Treasury Department issued a license allowing Venezuelan imports of US diluents required to upgrade extra-heavy crude into exportable blends. On January 27, Washington issued a sanctions waiver allowing US companies to purchase and market Venezuelan crude. The exemption requires payments to be made to US-controlled accounts and bars dealings with firms from Russia, Iran, Cuba, and North Korea.

The US Treasury is additionally preparing a license to allow US companies to extract Venezuelan oil, according to Bloomberg.

The White House has urged US corporations to invest in the Venezuelan oil sector and promised favorable conditions. However, executives have expressed reservations over significant new investments. According to Reuters, US refiners have likewise not been able to absorb the sudden surge of Venezuelan heavy crude supplies, while Canadian WCS crude remains a competitive alternative.

Vitol and Trafigura, two commodities traders picked by the White House to lift Venezuelan oil, have offered cargoes to European and Asian customers as well. India’s Reliance Industries is reportedly set to purchase 2 million barrels. In recent years, the refining giant has looked to Venezuela as a potential crude supplier but seen imports repeatedly curtailed by US threats of secondary sanctions.

US authorities have reportedly delivered US $500 million from an initial sale to Venezuelan private banks, which are offering the foreign currency in auctions that are said to prioritize private sector food and healthcare importers. Nevertheless, Venezuelan and US officials have not disclosed details about the remaining funds in a deal estimated at $1.2-2 billion.

Besides controlling crude sales, the Trump administration has also sought to impose conditions on the Venezuelan government’s spending of oil revenues. On Tuesday, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told House Representatives that the flow of oil funds will be subject to outside audits.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio had told a Senate committee last week that US authorities would scrutinize Caracas’ public expenditure and claimed that Venezuelan leaders needed to submit a “budget request” in order to access the country’s oil proceeds.

Washington’s attempted takeover of the Venezuelan oil industry also has an expressed goal of reducing the presence of Russian and Chinese companies. On Thursday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told media that the country’s enterprises are being “openly forced out” of the Caribbean nation at the behest of the US.

In mid-January, the US’ naval blockade drove away Chinese-flagged tankers on their way to Venezuela. With crude shipments partly used to offset longterm oil-for-loan agreements, Beijing has reportedly sought assurances of the repayment of debts estimated at $10-20 billion. For their part, independent Chinese refiners have moved to replace Venezuelan supplies with Iranian heavy crude.

The post Venezuela: Rodríguez Courts European Investment as US Greenlights Diluent Exports appeared first on Venezuelanalysis.

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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/25614

Kathleen Watts’ flowers bloom much brighter now that the wind no longer blows black. Pulling weeds in the garden outside her redbrick house, she recalled when coal dust would sometimes drift through her quiet corner of northern England, a rolling patchwork of farms and villages under the shadow of what was once the United Kingdom’s largest coal-burning power station.

“When the dust came our way, we’d have to come out and clean our windows,” said Watts, who has lived in the North Yorkshire village of Barlow for more than 30 years. “And when we’d get snow in winter, there’d be a lot of black over it.”

Thankfully, she said, the wind usually blew northeast, pushing the station’s smoke and dust toward Scandinavia. Locals liked to joke that the air pollution was mostly Norway’s problem. There, it caused bouts of acid rain that damaged forests and poisoned lakes.

The U.K. has quit coal — a lengthy process culminating in the closure of the country’s last deep-pit coal mine in 2015 and the shutdown of the U.K’s last coal plant in 2024.

The giant station near Barlow, however, is busier than ever, fueled now by American forests rather than English coalfields. Trees felled, shredded, dried, and pressed into pellets in Louisiana and Mississippi are shipped across the Atlantic Ocean, loaded onto trains, and then fed into the station’s immense boilers. Operated by Drax Group, the station gradually stopped burning coal until it made a full switch to wood in 2023. It now burns enough pellets to generate about 6 percent of the country’s electricity.

Purple flowers crowd a field near the Drax power station in Drax, England. The former coal plant now runs entirely on wood pellets, which the company markets as “sustainable biomass.” Tristan Baurick / Verite News

The U.K. government, in a bid to meet its ambitious climate goals, is giving Drax the equivalent of $2.7 million a day in subsidies to keep burning pellets, which the company touts as “environmentally and socially sustainable woody biomass.”

But a growing number of Brits aren’t buying it. After years of celebrating the shift away from coal, U.K. residents are realizing that wood pellets aren’t the cleaner, greener alternative they were supposed to be.

“I still have difficulties in my little brain figuring out how you can grow wood at the other end of the Earth, chip it, ship it to here … and then burn it, and say, ‘Isn’t that nice and green?’” said Steve Shaw-Wright, a former coal miner who serves on the North Yorkshire Council.

Burning wood for power instead of one of the dirtiest fossil fuels offers the illusion of sustainability and robust climate action, said William Moomaw, an emeritus professor of international environmental policy at Tufts University. But in reality, it’s doing more harm to the environment than burning fossil fuels, he said. “England is off coal — isn’t that wonderful?” Moomaw said. “But there’s no mention of the fact that it’s because they’re now burning wood from North America, which emits more carbon dioxide per kilowatt of electricity than does coal.”

Sawdust piles up at Drax’s wood pellet mill near Urania, Louisiana. The mill presses sawdust into pellets that are burned in a former coal plant in Yorkshire, England. Eric J. Shelton / Mississippi Today

The Drax station in North Yorkshire emitted more than 14 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2024, making it the largest single source of CO2 in the U.K., according to a report last year from the climate research group Ember. That amount is more than the combined emissions from the country’s six largest gas plants and more than four times the level of the U.K.’s last coal plant.

A Drax spokesperson called Ember’s research “deeply flawed” and accused the group of choosing to “ignore the widely accepted and internationally recognized approach to carbon accounting,” which is used by the United Nations and other governments.

But several scientists say burning wood can’t help but produce more emissions. Wood has a lower density than coal and other fossil fuels, so it must be burned in higher volumes to produce the same amount of energy. Between 2014 and 2019 — a period when coal was in steep decline — the country’s CO2 emissions from U.S.-sourced pellets nearly doubled, according to a report by the Chatham House research institute in London. “Almost all of this U.K. increase was associated with biomass burnt at Drax,” the report’s authors wrote.

The station’s cross-continental supply chain is also heavy on emissions. For every ton of pellets Drax burns, about 500 pounds of CO2 are released just from making and transporting the product, according to Chatham House. About half of Drax’s supply chain emissions are tied to production, while transportation via trucks, trains, and ships accounts for 44 percent, according to the company’s estimates.

The switch from coal to pellets created a new pollution problem in Louisiana and Mississippi, where most of the station’s fuel is produced. Drax’s pellet mills have repeatedly violated air quality rules at its two Louisiana mills, located near Bastrop and Urania, and its mill in Gloster, Mississippi. The mills emit large quantities of formaldehyde, methanol, and other toxic chemicals linked to cancers and other serious illnesses, according to regulatory findings and public health studies. Residents of these poor, mostly Black communities say the mills’ dust and pollution are making them sick. In October, several Gloster residents sued the company, alleging that Drax has “unlawfully released massive amounts of toxic pollutants” in their community for nearly a decade.

The Drax spokesperson said the company is improving its mills’ pollution controls in line with a longstanding dedication to “high standards of safety and environmental compliance.” On its website, Drax says the company is “committed to being a good neighbor in the communities where we operate,” offering funding for environmental education programs, ensuring its wood is sourced from “well-managed forests,” and supporting land conservation efforts, including the establishment of a 350-acre nature reserve near Watts’ home in Barlow.

Much of the timber that Drax harvests comes from private lands in the Southern United States that function more as tree farms than natural forests. But in recent years, Drax has sourced an increasing share of its wood from western Canada, including from British Columbia’s treasured old-growth forests.

In 2024, Drax agreed to pay a nearly $32 million penalty after U.K. energy regulators determined the company had been misreporting data on where it sources its wood and how much of it comes from environmentally important woodlands. The practice of pelletizing Canada’s mature trees appears ongoing, according to a recent report by the environmental group Stand.earth. Citing logging data from 2024 and 2025, the group claims Drax has been accepting truckloads of trees from British Columbia that were hundreds of years old. Drax downplayed the report, emphasizing that the logs were legally harvested and of insufficient quality to go to sawmills.

Drax sees itself as one of the most environmentally conscious companies on the planet. “Sustainability is the cornerstone of long-term success and the transformation of our business,” said Miguel Veiga-Pestana, Drax’s chief sustainability officer, in a statement.

While most pellets Drax makes in the U.S. are derived from logged trees, the company also uses sawdust and other leftovers from lumber mills. The company supports forest thinning, a practice it says can ease crowding in densely planted timberlands, improve the health of the remaining trees, and diversify habitat for wildlife.

“By ensuring that we source sustainable biomass, and that we embed sustainable practices into every facet of our operations, we can build lasting value,” Veiga-Pestana said.

Water vapor escapes a cooling tower at the Drax power station in Drax, England. The station is the largest wood pellet-burning facility in the U.K. and was originally developed to burn coal. Gary Calton / The Guardian

The value of the entire utility-scale wood pellet industry depends on what many scientists call an “accounting loophole” entrenched in some of the earliest international policies aimed at combating climate change.

During the 1990s, the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol established land use and energy use as two separate categories for counting a country’s greenhouse gases. To avoid double counting wood burning across both land-use and energy-use categories, the U.N. assigned wood pellet emissions only to the land-use sector, believing that normal forest regrowth would keep pace with the modest harvests for pellet production. The wood pellet industry at the time was tiny, selling the bulk of its products to homeowners with small pellet-burning stoves. Any carbon released by burning would be balanced by new trees that work as natural CO2 absorbers, the thinking went.

The effect, though, was that regulators would count CO2 from burning oil and coal, but CO2 from burning timber could stay off the books.

“Drax and other bioenergy companies took that and said, ‘Look, we have no impact — we’re instantly carbon neutral,’” said Mary Booth, director of the environmental organization Partnership for Policy Integrity.

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This exemption was incorporated into the Kyoto Protocol, the first international treaty that set legally binding greenhouse gas reduction targets. Experts were soon warning of troubling consequences. In a study published in the journal Science in 2009, scientists said the exemption was an “accounting error” that could spur deforestation and hinder attempts by governments to curb emissions.

“The error is serious, but fixable,” said Tim Searchinger, a Princeton University energy policy expert, in a statement at the time. “The solution is to count all the pollution that comes out of tailpipes and smokestacks whether from coal and oil or bioenergy, and to credit bioenergy only to the extent it really does reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Other scientists challenged the industry’s claim that planting trees would neutralize power station emissions. According to a study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it can take 44 to 104 years for forest regrowth to pay back the carbon debt from pellet burning. While the planet waits decades for the trees to regrow, glaciers melt, seas rise, and weather from droughts to hurricanes grows more extreme.

Trucks haul lumber in and out of the Amite BioEnergy wood pellet production facility operated by the Drax group in Gloster, Mississippi, on September 24, 2025. Kathleen Flynn / The Guardian

Despite these warnings, the European Union latched on to wood burning as a relatively quick and cheap way to meet tighter climate mandates. Rather than blanket the landscape with wind turbines and solar panels, countries could dust off old coal plants and put them on a diet of “carbon-neutral” pellets.

The shift toward bioenergy accelerated in 2009, when the European Union set a target of getting 20 percent of its energy from renewables by 2020. Pellet demand in Germany, Belgium, Italy, and other European countries immediately began to increase, but in the U.K., the growth was explosive. Between 2012 and 2018, the U.K.’s pellet consumption surged by 471 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The U.K. left the European Union in 2020, and it remains the world’s biggest buyer of wood pellets. In 2024, the country imported nearly 10.3 million tons, a record high spurred partly by a dip in pellet prices.

Wood burning has helped the U.K. come within striking distance of its goal to eliminate oil and gas from its electrical generation by 2030. Nearly 74 percent of the national grid is powered by what the government calls “low carbon” energy sources. Wood pellets and other forms of bioenergy supply about 14 percent of the low-carbon mix, with wind, solar, and hydropower accounting for the rest.

Every workday, Ian Cunniff climbs into his orange overalls, pounds his helmet tightly on his head, and steps into a cage that drops 459 feet into a maze of dark tunnels littered with old machinery.

The stout Yorkshireman is one of the last miners still working in the coal pits, but now his job is to lead tours along the rich seams he once risked his life to dig out. Cunniff is a guide for the National Coal Mining Museum at Caphouse Colliery, a former West Yorkshire mine dating back to the 1790s. His last “real” mining job was at Kellingley Colliery, the U.K.’s last deep coal pit and a major feeder of Drax’s power station before it switched to wood.

In the depths of the Caphouse mine, Cunniff grew wistful over the coal still embedded in the walls. The seams once provided nearly everything a man and his family needed, he said. “It was your future; it was your retirement. So much of it has never been touched.”

Miners, union members, and the local community take part in a protest march in 2015 in Knottingley, England, marking the end of deep-pit coal mining in Britain.
Christopher Furlong / Getty Images

Wood pellets didn’t kill the U.K.’s coal industry. It began to wither as the country shifted from cheaper, imported coal in the 1980s to natural gas in the 1990s. Coal’s decline left gaping holes in Yorkshire’s economy and social fabric. The wood pellet industry has contributed some jobs and tax dollars, but it can’t replace what the region once had, said Shaw-Wright, the county council member.

“With coal, you didn’t really need to get an education much because you were going to get a job at the pit,” he said. “And if you had a job at the pit, you would have it for life.”

At its height between the two world wars, the industry employed 1.2 million people in the U.K. In some northern England counties, 1 in 3 residents was employed in coal mining. The Selby Complex, a group of deep-pit mines near the Drax power station, employed about 3,500 workers before it shut down in 2004. The industry also supported cooperative groups that funded social halls, community brass bands, libraries, sports clubs, and welfare programs for injured miners and their families.

In contrast, the Drax-dominated bioenergy industry employs about 7,400 people across the U.K., including about 1,000 people at the Drax station. The increasingly automated industry has seen its job numbers fall by more than a third since 2014, according to data from the U.K.’s Office of National Statistics.

A similar trend is playing out in Louisiana and Mississippi, where the three Drax wood pellet mills employ far fewer people than the older pulp and paper mills that once played a dominant role in the Deep South. The paper mill in Bastrop, for instance, once employed 1,100 people. Drax’s pellet mill near the town has just 71 workers on its payroll.

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Shaw-Wright appreciates the economic activity the wood pellet industry brings to Yorkshire but said most of the region’s recent job growth actually comes from a surge in distribution centers for online retailers — a trend that has turned Yorkshire into the country’s “capital of warehousing.” Many of these massive facilities now sit on former coal fields, including the old Kellingley Colliery, yet the work of unloading and sorting parcels doesn’t provide the pay, stability, or sheer number of jobs that mining once did.

After giving another tour, Cunniff rested in the colliery’s old locker room. He knows coal isn’t coming back, but he doesn’t believe cutting and burning trees to power the grid is any better — for Yorkshire or the planet.

“So you’re taking away what’s cleaning the atmosphere, and you’re burning it?” he said. “That’s the big picture, isn’t it?”

The Drax power station is the dominant feature across several miles of North Yorkshire countryside. Its 12 cooling towers are each big enough to hold the Statue of Liberty. Every day, about 17 trains full of pellets arrive to top off four storage domes with a combined 360 million-ton capacity. The pellets are pulverized as fine as flour and blown into several boilers. Stored in hangar-like structures in the station’s center, the boilers consume some 8 million tons of pellets each year with fires that reach 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit.

Just outside the station’s 3 miles of razor-wire fencing is a village, also called Drax, with one tiny pub. Inside, there was little love for the big neighbor.

“They’re taking wood from where they shouldn’t be taking it,” Tony Emmerson said as he sipped a beer at The Huntsman’s bar. “I think we should go back to coal, personally. We’ve got a hundred years of coal right here just waiting to be burned.”

Many of Drax’s post-coal era promises — lower energy bills, cleaner air, and a decarbonized grid — have proven hollow, Emmerson said.

“They get all this tax money but we don’t get cheaper power bills,” said Peter Rust, The Huntsman’s owner. “And they say they’re carbon neutral, but how’s that possible when you have to bring the pellets across an ocean?”

Trains unload wood pellets into giant storage domes each day at the Drax power station in Yorkshire, England. Gary Calton / The Guardian

The growing doubts about the wood pellet industry are seeping into public debate, leading the government to rethink its support for Drax. Last February, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government decided that the current subsidies for Drax would be cut in half in 2027. The subsidy renewal, which lasts until 2031, also requires Drax to increase the proportion of “sustainably sourced” biomass from 70 percent to 100 percent. Michael Shanks, the energy minister, told Parliament that the government made the move because Drax was making “unacceptably large profits” and “simply did not deliver a good enough deal for bill payers.”

Shanks, however, emphasized that wood pellets will still play a key role in powering the U.K.’s grid, and he welcomed Drax’s new efforts to bolster its green credentials. That includes a massive investment in carbon capture and storage technology. For years, Drax has been planning a pipeline that would divert about 8.8 million tons of the station’s CO2 emissions into storage under the North Sea. Reduced subsidies, though, are likely to slow these projects, the company has warned.

Many Yorkshire residents knew exactly — and proudly — where the Drax station’s coal came from. They’re much less sure about where the wood is sourced. Watts, the gardener in Barlow, assumed the trees were grown on English farms. Shaw-Wright was also far off the mark, thinking the pellets came from Australia. At The Huntsman, guesses were slightly closer, with people calling out South America and Eastern Europe — regions that together supply only 10 percent of the station’s fuel. The fact that the U.S. meets nearly 80 percent of the station’s demand was a surprise to many.

Environmental groups, meanwhile, have been campaigning for a broader understanding of the industry’s impacts. U.K.-based Reclaim the Power and Biofuel Watch have been highlighting the concerns about emissions as well as the pollution affecting mill towns in Mississippi and Louisiana.

Several groups had planned to stage a large protest outside the Drax station in August 2024. Drawing hundreds of activists from around the country, the “Drax Climate Camp” was to feature five days of “communal living and direct action.” But police preemptively arrested 25 protesters and halted a convoy of vehicles carrying tents, composting toilets, wheelchair-accessible matting, and other gear. Activists staged a much smaller protest outside the police station where their fellow campaigners were held, but the groups decided the camp couldn’t continue without the equipment.

Climate protesters hold signs outside a police station in York, England, in August 2024. Several of their fellow activists were arrested during preparations for a protest near the Drax power station in rural Yorkshire. Gary Calton / The Guardian

Police patrol outside the Drax power station in Yorkshire. Dozens of officers were called to the station in 2024 to prevent a planned protest encampment. Gary Calton / The Guardian

The aborted protest got Shaw-Wright thinking more about the connection between the pellet mills in the Deep South and the electricity that lights his home.

“Louisiana, that’s where they make the ‘gumba’ and they love cooking crocodiles, right?” Shaw-Wright said, half joking. “I think people will be surprised where the wood comes from and … know nothing of how it’s produced or what it entails. We need to be educated more about the communities that, in essence, benefit the Drax power station. And we all benefit from it. But if it’s at the expense of others, it gives you a different perspective.”

Rust, the pub owner, wasn’t so reflective, but he was deeply disappointed the camp was quashed. “I thought we were going to get loads more customers,” he said. “I bought loads more bottles when I heard about it. I thought finally Drax was going to do some good for me.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The UK quit coal. But is burning Louisiana’s trees any better? on Feb 6, 2026.

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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/25610

For more than a decade, the clean energy economy has been on a steep growth trajectory. Companies have poured billions of dollars into battery manufacturing, solar and wind generation, and electric vehicle plants in the U.S., as solar costs fell sharply and EV sales surged. That momentum is set to continue surging in much of the world — but in the United States, it’s starting to stall.

According to a new report from the clean energy think tank E2, new investment in clean energy projects last year was dwarfed by a cascade of cancellations for projects already in progress. For every dollar announced in new clean energy projects, companies canceled, closed, or downsized roughly three dollars’ worth. In total, at least roughly $35 billion in projects were abandoned last year, compared to just $3.4 billion in cancellations in 2023 and 2024 combined.

“That’s pretty jarring considering how much progress we made in previous years,” said Michael Timberlake, a director of research and publications at E2. “The rest of the world is generally doubling down or transitioning further, and the U.S. is now becoming increasingly combative and antagonistic towards clean energy industries.”

Timberlake said the Trump administration’s attacks on renewable energy are the main driver of the slowdown. Companies began pulling back their investments shortly after the November 2024 election, when a victorious Trump telegraphed that he would promote fossil fuels over solar, wind, and other clean energy technologies. For instance, TotalEnergies, the French oil-and-gas giant, paused development of two offshore wind projects in late November 2024, citing uncertainty after Trump’s election. The company has not restarted the projects since.

Trump followed through on those promises once in office: One of his first actions in office was to pause leasing and permitting for offshore wind. The freeze resulted in several wind developers indefinitely pausing or abandoning their projects while lawsuits trickled through the courts. (Federal judges have issued judgments in favor of the wind companies in recent months.) Trump’s administration also pulled billions of dollars in funding for a range of clean energy projects and cancelled or retooled Biden-era policies favorable to the industry, such as energy-efficiency measures, IRS tax guidance, and loans for a transmission line expected to carry solar and wind power.

Congress, at the behest of Trump, also passed the One Big Beautiful Act over the summer. In addition to sunsetting lucrative tax credits for renewable energy production, the law hammered the electric vehicle industry from multiple sides: It ended investment credits supporting the buildout of battery manufacturers, and simultaneously nixed the $7,500 tax credit available to American consumers who purchase EVs.

Timberlake cautioned against pinning clean energy’s disappointing year on any one policy. While the One Big Beautiful Act was the “biggest signifier” of the shift, “the overall policy and regulatory attack” is to blame for the glut of project cancellations, he said. “It’s not an environment that encourages more investment because no one knows what six months from now will look like.”

Electric vehicle and battery manufacturing have been hit the hardest over the past year. Each sector lost roughly $21 billion in investment over the past year, according to E2’s analysis, which includes some overlapping projects that serve both purposes. The industries also lost an estimated 48,000 potential jobs. These two industries likely lost the most investments because they had been growing the fastest in recent years, meaning they had more projects in the pipeline to cancel or downsize once President Trump was elected. The EV industry’s outlook, in particular, changed once Congress repealed consumer tax credits made available by former President Joe Biden. That, along with the general policy uncertainty, led to automakers revising their expectations for EV demand in the U.S. and reallocating their investments accordingly.

Some states were hit harder than others. In 2025 alone, Michigan lost 13 clean energy projects worth $8.1 billion — more than twice as many as any other state, due to its role as the capital of the U.S. auto industry. Illinois, Georgia, and New York also lost billions of dollars in investments.

Many automakers that scaled back electric vehicle plans last year redirected those investments rather than abandoning them outright. Ford, for example, had originally planned to build all-electric commercial vehicles at its $1.5 billion Ohio Assembly Plant in Avon Lake. But after revising its EV ambitions, the company pivoted the facility toward gas-powered and hybrid vans. Because Ford did not scrap the plant altogether, Timberlake said, facilities like Avon Lake could still be retrofitted for electric vehicle production if market conditions and policy outlooks improve.

“The silver lining view is they’re hopefully maintaining those facilities so that when there is certainty, those factories will still be available for making EVs down the road,” said Timberlake.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The US lost $35B in clean energy projects last year on Feb 6, 2026.

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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/25701

Charles Fox
Special to ICT

As the 2026 Winter Olympics open in Italy, the nephew of American hockey pioneer Taffy Abel will ask President Donald Trump to give Abel the Presidential Medal of Freedom — and the official recognition he has long been denied.

The request is the latest in a decades-long effort from nephew George Jones for honoring the Ojibwe athlete, who is widely recognized as the first Indigenous American in the Winter Olympics and the first to break the color barrier in the National Hockey League.

“I think it would be a great thing for Native Americans … not just for our family, but for Native Americans,” Jones told ICT. “It starts to tell some of the untold history of Native Americans.”

More than 100 years ago, Abel was a member of the silver-medal-winning U.S. hockey team in the very first Winter Olympics in 1924, played outdoors in Chamonix, France. He was also the flag-bearer for the United States and recited the Olympic oath for the team.

A Soul on Ice: The quest for recognition after 100 years for hockey great Taffy Abel

While Abel is believed to be the first Native American to participate in the Winter Olympics — and the only Indigenous American to carry the flag in Olympic history — he kept his Ojibwe heritage secret at the time.

Due to his light skin color, Abel racially passed as White during the Olympics and throughout his 333-game career in the National Hockey League, though he is widely believed to have been the first player of color to take the ice.

Abel’s parents began the practice of concealing their race to avoid having their two children taken from them and sent to Indian boarding schools in the early 1900s. His family was multi-racial, with Taffy’s father, John Abel, a White man, originally from Fort Wayne, Indiana, and his mother, Charlotte Gurnoe Abel, from the Chippewa (Ojibwe) Sault Tribe.

It is likely Able would not have been put on the Olympic team or given the opportunity to play in the NHL if he had disclosed his Ojibwe heritage.

Because of his racial passing, however, the NHL has not recognized his pioneering achievements, despite being on two Stanley-Cup winning teams. While he was sometimes referred to as “Superman with skates” due to his physical play and size, not revealing his heritage by racially passing would be his kryptonite in later getting recognition.

Jones sees his uncle as the “Unseen Warrior” who used a White disguise “because of the deep societal prejudices against Indians in the early 1900s.”

The NHL has not responded to repeated requests from ICT for comment.

New life to an old resolution

The first day of 2026 was almost the last for Jones. He suffered a coronary event, and it is estimated he was dead for approximately 8 minutes before CPR by his wife and defibrillation by paramedics brought the 76-year-old man in Winter Haven, Florida back to life.

The under-14 Soo Lakers hockey team practices on Sept. 29, 2025, at the Taffy Abel Arena on the campus of Lake Superior State University in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. The arena, named for the Ojibwe hockey great, is the only NCAA hockey arena that has more seats (4,000) than the university has students. The Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians donated $3 million to the renovation. Credit: Charles Fox/Special to ICT

The near-death event, which Jones described as “transforming,” gave Jones yet another chance to win recognition for his uncle. While campaigning for a Congressional Medal of Honor or induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame requires convincing a large number of individuals to vote in Abel’s favor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom is strictly the decision of the U.S. president.

In the end, it will require one man to convince one man of another man’s achievement.

“So, he’s [President Trump] got an America First policy. Well, why the hell not honor some of the first Americans here, too? That’s my point. They deserve it,” Jones told ICT.  “Maybe he will, maybe he won’t. So, it’s not a foregone conclusion either way, but that’s not going to extinguish my advocacy to be on the right side of history.”

As of January 2025, 673 individuals have been awarded the medal but only six Native Americans — Wilma Mankiller, Suzan Shown Harjo, Eloise Cobell, Billy Frank Jr., Jim Thorpe, and Annie Dodge Wauneka.

The very low percentage of Native honorees, Jones feels, could work in his favor.

‘Errors of omission and silence’

This year also marks the 100th anniversary of the historic moment on Nov. 16, 1926, when Abel stepped onto the ice for the New York Rangers, becoming the first Indigenous American player in the National Hockey League. It was also the opening game in the inaugural season of the New York Rangers.

Clarence “Taffy” Abel, Ojibwe, was the first Indigenous athlete to play in the National Hockey League. He joined the Chicago Blackhawks in 1929 and played until 1934. This photo is from the 1929-1930 hockey season, when he began playing with the team. Credit: Photo courtesy of the Jones Family Collection

But there are numerous factors that work against Jones’ campaign.  Getting recognition for his uncle has often put him at odds with NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman. Trump has a long-standing relationship with Bettman and has praised the hockey commissioner for the “incredible” job he has done. In 2025, Trump appointed Bettman to his President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition.

Jones has never hesitated to speak poorly about Bettman in strong, condemning language and has accused the league of bypassing his uncle through “errors of omission and silence.”

Bettman and other league executives credit Willie O’Ree, the first Black (African-Canadian) player in the NHL, with breaking the league’s color barrier in 1958, proclaiming him the “Jackie Robinson of hockey.” It has been an ongoing point of contention between Jones and the NHL.

To strengthen his cause, Jones hopes to gain the support of the governors of Michigan, New York, Illinois, and Minnesota — the states where Abel played. He is also hoping for grassroots support.

While not reacting specifically to Jones’ campaign, the Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians Chairman Austin Lowes responded in an email to ICT.

“Taffy Abel is a hero in our community for being both an Olympian and the first American Indian to also play in the NHL,” Lowes said. “Our Tribe contributed several millions to support the renovations to the Lake Superior State University ice arena in the mid 1990s. In turn, the university named the university ice area the Taffy Abel Arena.  We are very proud of Taffy and support recognition of his accomplishments.”

Jones said he will remain focused on his goal.

“I’m talking about my uncle’s legacy,” he said. “I think his legacy was forgotten.”

The post Winter Olympics bring new push to recognize hockey great Taffy Abel appeared first on ICT.

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Last Updated on February 6, 2026 Anti-Indigenous rhetoric and policy actions have started trending in Canada, Australia, the United States and New Zealand, reflecting what can only be described as a coordinated rollback of hard-won gains and an emboldened backlash against Indigenous self-determination. What was once debated at the margins has moved into mainstream politics. Governments and opposition movements alike are questioning the legitimacy of Indigenous governance, narrowing interpretations of historic agreements, and rolling back institutions designed to address long-documented inequalities.

At the same time, online harassment, public hostility and, in some cases, violence directed at Indigenous peoples have intensified, creating a climate of normalization around racism that had previously been more openly condemned.

From challenges to Te Tiriti o Waitangi in New Zealand to efforts to dismantle tribal sovereignty protections in the United States, these developments are not isolated. Instead, they reflect a shared political playbook that minimizes colonial history and treats Indigenous rights as an obstacle to national unity rather than a foundation of justice.

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