(FILES) In this file photo taken on February 27, 2019 US President Donald Trump (R) holds a meeting with North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un during the second US-North Korea summit at the Sofitel Legend Metropole hotel in Hanoi. Source: Saul LOEB / AFP
THE United States is accusing North Korea of breaching a UN-imposed ceiling on fuel imports by carrying out dozens of ship-to-ship transfers this year, according to a report obtained by AFP on Wednesday.
Backed by 25 countries including Japan, France and Germany, the United States asked a UN sanctions committee to rule that the annual cap of 500,000 barrels had been exceeded and order all countries to immediately halt fuel deliveries to North Korea.
“The United States and its partners remain gravely concerned about the degree of UN Security Council resolution violations that are occurring in relation to North Korea’s import of refined petroleum products,” said the report sent to the committee on Tuesday.
Countries on the sanctions committee, including Russia and China, have until June 18 to raise objections to the request to cut off fuel shipments to North Korea.
The cap on fuel imports is among a series of tough sanctions adopted by the UN Security Council in response to North Korea’s ballistic missile and nuclear tests.
The United States insists that “maximum pressure” from the sanctions must remain on North Korea until it agrees to dismantle its weapons program.
The US move at the United Nations came as President Donald Trump said he had received another “beautiful letter” from Kim Jong Un and indicated he was willing to hold a third summit with the North Korean leader.
A summit in Vietnam in February collapsed over North Korea’s demands for an immediate lifting of sanctions.
Illicit fuel from ship transfers
The United States and Japan have documented at least eight illegal ship-to-ship transfers of fuel involving North Korea-flagged tankers, the report said.
An additional 70 instances of fuel deliveries on the high seas were detected by the United States between January and April, although the volume of fuel unloaded from the ships was not known.
The report argued that even if the tankers were only one-third laden, North Korea would still be in breach of the quota for this year.
The 15-page report included images of North Korean tankers moored alongside ships for the transfer of fuel, which were then taken to North Korea’s port of Nampo.
The 26 countries are asking the sanctions committee to declare that “the cap has been breached, and to subsequently notify UN member states of the violation and confirm that all subsequent transfers of refined petroleum to the DPRK must immediately halt.”
The United States last year accused North Korea of exceeding the quota on fuel imports through illegal ship transfers, but Russia and China raised questions about the data and no action was taken.
This year, Washington began raising its concerns about the sanctions-busting with Beijing and Moscow weeks ago, arguing that without enforcement, the cap on fuel imports will be “completely meaningless,” a council diplomat said.
The US has “begun a much more robust discussion with Russia and China on these issues,” said the diplomat, who asked not to be named.
A report by a panel of experts in March found that North Korea was resorting to a “massive increase in illegal ship-to-ship transfers of petroleum products and coal” to circumvent sanctions.
Israelis will attend a US-led conference in Bahrain next week on proposals for the Palestinian economy as part of a forthcoming peace plan, Foreign Minister Israel Katz said on Sunday.
FM Israel Katz (AFP)
The US has billed the gathering as a workshop to boost the Palestinian economy as part of a broader effort by President Donald Trump's administration to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
A source briefed on the event told Reuters that Israel would send a business delegation but no government officials to the 25-26 June workshop, which is being boycotted by the Palestinian leadership.
"Israel will be at the Bahrain conference and all the co-ordinations will be made," Katz told Israeli Channel 13 News in New York.
On Twitter, Katz later added that Israel's representation had yet to be decided and that the country's high-tech and innovation capabilities could greatly benefit development in the region.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on what level of representation Israel was expected to have at the conference, Reuters said.
US officials have said they are inviting economy and finance ministers, as well as business leaders, to Bahrain to discuss investment in the Palestinian territories.
Palestinian officials have refused to attend, accusing the Trump administration of trying to buy off their political demands for a state and an end to Israeli occupation, the Washington Post reported. They say the Trump cannot act as an honest peace broker after moves such as cutting aid and recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
"There will be no Palestinian participation" at the meetings, Ahhmed Majdalani, a member of the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, said last month. "Any Palestinian who would take part would be nothing but a collaborator for the Americans and Israel."
The Palestinians say the still unpublished US peace plan falls short of their goal of statehood. They blame a halt in US aid and Israeli restrictions for an economic crisis in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Palestinian advocates have also stressed that investments and business initiatives will not fulfil the quest for equal rights and statehood. Not only is "economic prosperity" an inadequate substitute for human rights, it's not possible without Palestinian sovereignty, said George Bisharat, a Palestinian-American professor at UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco.
'Dignity for dollars': Palestinians reject 'deal of the century' as false promise of prosperity
"It's hard to have genuine, sustainable economic development and growth, unless you have control over your own resources - your borders, airspace, water and the like," Bisharat recently told Middle East Eye.
A White House official said on Tuesday that Egypt, Jordan and Morocco planned to attend the conference.
Egypt and Jordan's participation is considered particularly important because they have historically been major players in Middle East peace efforts and are the only Arab states that have peace treaties with Israel.
One of the sources briefed on the event told Reuters that US and Bahrain had deliberated over whether a non-official Israeli presence was preferable to a government-level delegation, given that Israel currently has a caretaker government in place, pending a September election.
Trump's plan faces delays amid political upheaval in Israel, after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to form a government last month and must fight a second election this year, set for 17 September.
Trump's Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt said the unveiling of the peace plan may be delayed until November, by which time a new Israeli government is expected to be in place.
Under the state’s legislation, it would be illegal to speak out in public institutions against Israel’s human rights violations.
This means that someone advocating for a single democratic state in which Israeli Jews, Palestinians and all others have full, equal rights could fall afoul of the law.
Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis signed the state bill while on an official trip to Israel and the occupied West Bank. During his trip, DeSantis visited Ariel University located in a settlement in the West Bank, which is illegal under international law.
At Ariel, he received an award in honor of “his dedication, leadership and commitment to the State of Israel.” He also met with Sheldon Adelson, a top funder of the Republican Party.
Florida’s House Bill 741 redefines anti-Semitism to include “applying a double standard to Israel by requiring behavior of Israel that is not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation or focusing peace or human rights investigations only on Israel.”
The law also says that speech “delegitimizing Israel by denying Jewish people their right to self-determination and denying Israel the right to exist” is considered anti-Semitism.
Such tropes are classic attempts to censor criticism of Israel’s state ideology, Zionism.
The law uses language similar to the definition of anti-Semitism from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which has been pushed by Israel lobby groups.
“Used as a tool to censor advocacy for Palestinian freedom, the redefinition [in the Florida law] chills free speech rights and suppresses badly needed debate about US and Israeli policies that abuse Palestinian rights,” warned the civil rights group Palestine Legal.
In March, Florida lawmakers advanced the bill with bipartisan support.
The bill claims that its examples of alleged anti-Semitism related to criticizing Israel do not “diminish or infringe upon any right” to free speech and “shall not be construed to conflict with state or federal laws.”
But FIRE, a free speech advocacy organization, called this caveat “an inadequate attempt to salvage the constitutionality of the bill.”
Florida's new anti-Semitism law dramatically undermines the Governor's initiative to promote campus free speech. It labels criticisms of Israel as anti-Semitism, & will serve as a tool to suppress student & faculty speech around one of the most hotly debated topics of our time.
FIRE has pointed out that the law contradicts a recently-passed resolution that aims to uphold free speech on Florida’s university campuses.
“The new Florida law will invite punishment of students and faculty who wish to speak out for Palestinian freedom and human rights,” Meera Shah, senior staff attorney with Palestine Legal, told The Electronic Intifada.
The law’s specific targeting of human rights investigations into Israel’s record “will chill speech, reporting, research and advocacy around Palestinian human rights and will lead to a culture of intimidation on US campuses,” Shah added.
Palestine Legal and allied civil rights organizations are “looking closely” at a legal challenge, Shah explained, “not only because the law demands that schools violate Floridians’ free speech rights, but also because it undermines the right to advocate for justice and universal human rights.”
At least 27 states have passedanti-BDS measures. Laws in Texas, Arizona and Kansas have been blocked by federal judges over free speech concerns.
Increasing alliance with apartheid
While in Israel, DeSantis signed academic partnership agreements between Haifa University and Florida Atlantic University, Miami Dade College, Florida A&M and the University of North Florida. He also signed an agreement between the Israeli tourism ministry and Florida’s tourism department.
The governor announced that Florida would lift its official restrictions against the vacation rental company Airbnb following the company’s reversal of its decision last year to delist properties inside Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank, which Palestinians are prohibited from accessing.
Airbnb faced heavy pressure by Israeli and US officials, including DeSantis, who claimed that the move was “discriminatory” against Israeli settlers.
The governments of Florida and Texas had directed all state contractors to cease doing business with Airbnb in retaliation for its November 2018 decision to respect international law and delist the properties.
During his Israel trip, DeSantis said that Airbnb’s reversal in April was a “victory in the battle” against the BDS campaign, according to the Miami Herald.
DeSantis held a meeting of his cabinet in Israel. Prior to the trip, Palestine Legal and other organizations warned the governor that holding his cabinet meeting there would violate state law.
The groups argued that “conducting any state decision-making in a place that most Floridians cannot attend” was a “violation of the Florida constitution.”
Cory Booker supports restrictions on free speech
Meanwhile, Cory Booker, a New Jersey senator and Democratic presidential hopeful, stated last week that he supports federal legislation that encourages states to punish supporters of the BDS movement.
Booker’s move is a complete reversal of his decision to vote against the legislation in February.
The bill was introduced by four US Republican senators, including Marco Rubio of Florida and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. It would uphold the rights of states and local governments to pass anti-boycott measures and urges them to pass such laws.
In an interview with HuffPost, Booker says he “does not support BDS” and claims that the law will “protect American companies from being forced by foreign international organizations from complying with things that they shouldn’t have to comply with.”
Those “things” are international laws and human rights protections.
The website Mondoweiss has published a transcript of Booker’s comments.
Booker has been a top recipient of Israel lobby donations.
The senator has also insisted he wants to establish “a unified voice from Congress” in opposition to BDS, according to leaked recordings from a meeting he had with the leading pro-Israel group AIPAC.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. began the Supreme Court’s term last fall seeking to assure the American public that his court does not “serve one party or one interest.”
He will end it playing a pivotal role in two of the most politically consequential decisions the court has made in years.
One initiative is to include a citizenship question in the 2020 Census, which has fueled a partisan showdown on Capitol Hill. The other could outlaw the partisan gerrymandering techniques that were essential to Republican dominance at the state and congressional level over the past decade.
The politically weighted decisions, by a court in which the five conservatives were chosen by Republican presidents and the four liberals were nominated by Democrats, threaten to undermine Roberts’s efforts to portray the court as independent.
They are among two dozen cases the court must decide in the next two weeks, and never before has the spotlight focused so intently on the 64-year-old chief justice.
Three judges have found that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross gave a phony reason for adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census.(Meg Kelly, Joy Sharon Yi, Atthar Mirza/The Washington Post)
Roberts sits physically at the middle of the bench in the grand courtroom, and now, for the first time since he joined the court in 2005, at the center of the court’s ideological spectrum. With the retirement of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy last summer, the most important justice on the Roberts Court became Roberts himself.
Roberts in the past has shown himself to be far more conservative than Kennedy, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg suggested recently that has not changed.
Kennedy’s retirement, she told a group of judges and lawyers in New York, was “the event of greatest consequence for the current term, and perhaps for many terms ahead.”
Roberts has been on a mission to convince the public that if the court is ideologically split, it is about law, not politics.
“We do not sit on opposite sides of an aisle, we do not caucus in separate rooms, we do not serve one party or one interest, we serve one nation,” Roberts told an audience at the University of Minnesota in October.
He repeated the message at Belmont University in Nashville in February. “People need to know we’re not doing politics,” he said.
In between was the well-publicized spat with President Trump, who just before Thanksgiving criticized an “Obama judge” serving on a lower court who had ruled against his administration in a contentious case centered on immigration policy and border security.
Roberts issued a rare public statement: “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”
Trump shot back on Twitter: “Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have ‘Obama judges,’ and they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country.”
So the citizenship question and gerrymandering cases, which have generally split along party lines, do not come at an opportune time.
The battle for Roberts has been joined.
Brianne J. Gorod, chief counsel of the liberal Constitutional Accountability Center, said the many questions about whether Trump’s citizenship question is intended to benefit Republicans should be a warning for Roberts.
“If Roberts votes to uphold this plainly unlawful administration action, it will give credence to Trump’s claim that he can simply look to the conservative justices on the Supreme Court to save him,” Gorod wrote on the Take Care blog.
“That would be a deeply troubling state of affairs — both for the court and for the country.”
Lawyers challenging the census question seemed to make a similar overture in an unusual motion filed Wednesday, months after the case was argued.
They asked the court to either affirm lower courts that have ruled the question can’t be added to the census form or delay a ruling until those courts can examine new evidence about a Republican political operative’s role in Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s decision to add the citizenship question, which critics contend is discriminatory and politically motivated and will result in a significant undercount of the nation’s immigrant population.
“This court should not bless the secretary’s decision on this tainted record, under a shadow that the truth will later come to light,” they said.
The administration has said the new allegations are more like conspiracy theories than legal analysis. Conservatives said it was a familiar ploy to portray the court as apolitical only if one of the conservative members agrees with liberals, not the other way around.
“Whenever you read ‘legitimacy’ in a sentence about the court, you know it’s a political missile aimed directly at Chief Justice John Roberts,” wrote the conservative editorial board of the Wall Street Journal.
Josh Blackman, a law professor at South Texas College of Law and a frequent conservative legal commentator, picked up the theme on Twitter: “At some point, the ‘legitimacy’ missiles will begin to bear diminishing returns. Abortion: legitimacy. Census: legitimacy. Gerrymandering: legitimacy. Obamacare: legitimacy. Death penalty: legitimacy.”
The focus on Roberts is unsurprising, said Curt A. Levey of the conservative Committee for Justice. Although the jury is still out on Trump appointee Brett M. Kavanaugh, the justice who replaced Kennedy, Roberts is the conservative most likely to be in play, Levey said.
“I think it is a predicament for him,” Levey said. The chief justice is the member of the court most sensitive “to what history and the nightly news says about you.”
Levey recently wrote that proposals from Democratic presidential candidates and members of Congress to restructure the Supreme Court — increasing the number of justices, for instance, or trying to impose term limits — are better seen as attempts to push Roberts to more moderate outcomes in the court’s decisions.
“Such a shift, after all, is progressives’ only real hope of avoiding a conservative majority,” Levey wrote.
After arguments in the census case, it appeared the court’s conservative majority would agree with the Trump administration that Congress has given it wide authority to add questions to the form.
Lawyers for the government said Ross considered objections from his own experts — who said the question would cause an undercount of those reluctant to disclose that noncitizens lived in their households — but decided the additional information would still be worth the risk.
Lower courts said Ross’s stated reason for adding the question — that it would aid enforcement of the Voting Rights Act — was pretext. Challengers contended that adding the question would lead to undercounts in Democratic areas and be beneficial to future Republican redistricting plans. But the justices seemed more focused on whether Ross had the authority to add the question than his motivations.
But since those April arguments, the case has gotten only more political.
On Capitol Hill, the House Oversight Committee voted to hold Ross and Attorney General William P. Barr in contempt for not turning over documents about the administration’s decision to add the question.
The nearly party-line vote came hours after Trump asserted executive privilege to shield the materials from Congress.
In the gerrymandering cases, the court’s decision could have far-reaching results for how elections are conducted in the United States. The court often polices redistricting plans drawn by the states to ensure they do not discriminate based on race, but it has never found a plan so infected by politics that it violates voters’ rights.
On the surface, a decision that courts have no role in trying to decide when there has been too much partisan interference would not help Republicans more than Democrats. The court is considering a North Carolina plan drawn by Republicans to give the party a huge edge, and a Maryland congressional district drawn by Democrats to oust a longtime Republican incumbent.
But as a practical matter, being able to draw districts to help the party in control currently benefits the GOP. The party is in control of both the governorship and legislature in 22 states, compared to 14 for Democrats.
The Republican National Committee, the Republican National Congressional Committee and the National Republican Redistricting Trust filed briefs supporting North Carolina’s plan. Democratic committees stayed out of the cases.
Decisions in any of the 24 remaining cases on the court’s docket could come as soon as Monday.
Argentine President Mauricio Macri called the massive blackout that left tens of millions in South America without power on Sunday ''unprecedented'', and promised a thorough investigation.
Gwyneth loves them, Adele can’t sing without them and Kim Kardashian uses them to deal with stress. Many of us are lured by their beauty and promise of mystical powers, but are ‘healing’ crystals connecting us to the earth – or harming it? by Eva Wiseman-Sun 16 Jun 2019 Crystallisation is a transition from chaos to perfection; the evolution of the crystal industry has been less simple. Millions of years ago liquid rock inside the earth cooled and hardened, and this is how crystals formed at the twinkling centre of the earth. Piece by piece they’ve been mined to become the centre, too, of an international industry that hangs on their rumoured metaphysical healing properties. But recently something else has emerged from the rocks – a darker truth. Rather than connecting with the earth, those buying crystals are damaging it, fatally.
Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen gifted guests black tourmaline to keep negative energies at bay
In three short years, crystals have risen from niche new age interest to valid hobby, firmly embedded in the mainstream consciousness. In 2017 crystals became a multibillion-dollar slice of the $4.2trn global wellness industry, with shamans using them to advise entrepreneurs on investment opportunities, and Gwyneth Paltrow selling them to encourage serenity and to “purify” water. Their investment status is compared to fine art. Women have been persuaded to welcome their presence in beauty products and fashion accessories, not by spiritual healers, but celebrities. At a New York Fashion Week presentation, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen gifted guests “black tourmaline to keep negative energies at bay”, and “white clear quartz to promote harmony and balance”. Kate Hudson “adds a little energy” to her moisturiser by storing it beside crystals; Adele blamed a bad performance at the Grammys on the fact she’d lost hers; and Kim Kardashian used them to recover from the stress of a robbery.
When Jennifer Lawrence moved into her new home there were crystals embedded in the walls. “The house was crystalled out,” she told Vogue, but she didn’t want visitors to think she was a “crystal person”. She was advised not to treat them casually, to employ the official “crystal lady” that had installed them to remove them, too, but of course she scoffed, and got a builder to rip them out. “I just had all the crystals yanked out. Sold them,” she said, before adding, pointedly, “And then my fucking house flooded.” Today, even those who don’t identify as “crystal people” have been persuaded of their power.
But while it’s claimed crystals help people harness the energy of the earth, the more they are mined, the more that earth is suffering. Here is the dirty truth of crystals, and it’s not simply that their efficacy as healing objects is unproven. It’s that, as Emily Atkin at The New Republic reported last year, their origins are murky, and their environmental impact worrying. Much like diamonds, crystal mining is an industry buried in conflict. There are issues around sustainability: crystals are a non-renewable resource. There are issues around labour: most jobs are low paid, unsafe, and sometimes performed by underage workers. And there is an issue around accountability: the industry is unregulated, allowing exploitation to go unchecked.
Dark materials: searching for amethyst, miners dig tunnels through the mountains in southern Brazil. This kind of mining is known for its harmful dust. The silicon dioxide particles can trespass the filter masks causing silicosis disease. Photograph: Caio Guatelli“Mining has an environmental impact, whether it’s for ‘healing crystals’, the copper in your phone, or the gold in your ring,” explains Payal Sampat of nonprofit organisation Earthworks. The quote marks are her own. “‘Healing crystals’ are mined in places like Myanmar and the Democratic Republic of Congo where mineral extraction is linked to severe human-rights violations and environmental harm.” In the DRC, seven-year-old children work in the cobalt and copper mines, where covetable “healing” stones such as citrine and smoky quartz abound. International NGO Global Witness found that the Taliban earns up to $20m a year from Afghanistan’s lapis mines, lapis lazuli being, as crystal websites explain, one of the best stones for activating psychic abilities. “As with most minerals,” adds Sampat, “it is impossible to know for sure if your crystal was obtained via an environmental and human rights horror show.”
Crystals are found on every continent, but it’s difficult to find a crystal seller who will specify the origins of individual stones and even harder to find one willing to talk honestly about the effects of mining. There’s no governing body requiring they do so, no regulator for an industry mired in exploitation and secrecy. Stephen Wells at Kacha Stones is one of a handful of sellers who prides himself on his ethical practices. He emails from India where he’s sourcing moonstone, tourmaline and kyanite despite their rarity and his infected root canal. “If something is cheap and available in huge quantities,” he writes, “the odds are it’s the result of a huge commercial enterprise, often the by-product of mining entirely unrelated to crystals.”
For Wells, the importance of ethical crystal mining is not solely about the impact on the planet, but also on the crystal itself – he believes the mining of a stone affects its healing properties. “Taking something by force, destructively, has an effect on any living thing. Crystals are archetypal pure frequencies, nature’s perfect geometric tuning forks. Can anyone imagine the shockwaves of explosions having no impact?” At home, using a garden fork and trowel, he digs for Welsh quartz. “I don’t dig indiscriminately. I fill in the small holes I make and try not to exploit myself in the process. That’s as eco-friendly as mining gets, but it isn’t going to make much of an impact on global trade.” The more we talk, the more surprising it seems that crystal consumers, the kind of people who wouldn’t eat a battery-farmed egg, let alone meat they couldn’t trace, are yet to question the provenance of their crystals.
An industrial park in Watford, and rain beats down on the plastic roof of the warehouse where the Crystal Geode, a wholesale crystal supplier, stores its salt lamps, amethysts and complicated fairy ephemera. Neil Ashcroft, director of the family business, explains first the expansion of the company, and then the expansion of his mind. In 1986, when he was in his late 20s and working for the police, Ashcroft was in a motorbike accident that hospitalised him for two years. It technically killed him three times and lost him his left leg. He had “out-of-body experiences”; when he finally returned home, he was different. An ex introduced him to crystals, which helped him feel more “grounded”.
He never planned to make much money from selling them and still, today, spends much of his time advising customers on, “say, which stones are best for anxiety, or which are best for blood disorders.”
Hard labour: a worker grades amethysts by colour in Uruguay. Photograph: Andres Stapff/Reuters
But as celebrities began broadcasting their interest, says Ashcroft, he saw the industry explode. While sales are up, the pressure to undercut prices online is rising too, which makes it harder for Ashcroft to maintain his insistence on high-quality crystals, ethically mined. And while he attempts to work only with suppliers he trusts, he’s clear there’s much he’ll never know: crystals are rarely the primary product that miners are looking for, but rather the shiny byproducts found alongside more valuable elements used in our phones and TVs – so mining supply chains are complicated and often shrouded in mystery.
Ashcroft releases a defeated sigh: “All I can do is ensure that at least quality and genuine crystals are coming into the market. We’re buying from the best possible sources. But sometimes unethical mines are the only sources of the crystals people want. I try to stay as aware of their origins as possible, but I can be concerned about it while also feeling… impotent?” He shakes his head. “Most retailers feel they want to [be ethical], but can’t implement it.” As we descend from the office into aisles lined with cardboard boxes containing carved angels and jade tumble stones, he tries to elaborate – the market is so huge, the demand is so high, the internet is so vast… But his words tail off.
The truth is, many retailers have no idea where their crystals come from. Many, like tourmaline, amethyst, quartz and citrine (used to “manifest abundance and prosperity”) are found in gold, copper or cobalt mines, but even publicly traded industrial mines aren’t required to disclose profits from byproducts. And rather than directly from mines, or even the factories where the stones are cut and polished, retailers like the Crystal Geode buy from go-betweens, independent traders who sell at touring shows, who, even if they have documentation to prove their supply chain, are disinclined to share it, in part for fear of doing themselves out of a job.
The experience of taking a train into the suburbs, then driving through an industrial park, then picking through the boxes of a crystal retailer felt like an odd reflection of the experience of trying to understand the dark origins of crystals themselves: a step-by-step sloughing off of glamour, of magic.
Their story is not dissimilar to that of cocaine, a drug that wealthy westerners buy because it makes them feel fun and interesting, choosing to ignore the fact people have almost definitely been tortured and beheaded earlier in its supply chain in order to provide their weekend buzz. Consumers buy a product they benefit from, whether through the brief bitter high of cocaine, or the compliments garnered from a £5 party dress, or the feeling of inner peace from wearing a crystal, and therefore, doesn’t it make sense that we share in the moral culpability for the unethical practices that brought it to us?
Window shopping: a display of healing crystals in a British shop. Photograph: David J Green/Alamy Stock Photo
In Notting Hill, it’s easier to forget.The Financial Times’s “How To Spend It” profile of the owners of Venusrox begins with a vision of wealthy wellness: “Matt and Victoria Forster are smooth-skinned, clear-eyed and radiate a happiness and harmony that most of us could spend a lifetime failing to achieve. Ask them their secret and they answer in unison: ‘Passion for crystals.’” One bright morning (after they twice turned down interview requests), I visited their showroom, a gallery of stones all of which are labelled with the country they’ve come from, and some also labelled with the mines. There were small smooth stones (including lapis lazuli from Afghanistan and shattuckite from the DRC) for a few pounds, and large glittering rocks the size of a newborn baby for tens of thousands. It was here that the secondary ethical dilemma of the crystal industry became immediately apparent. It’s one thing to market a crystal for its decorative purposes, but another with the promise it will, like amethyst, “help overcome addictions”.
The appeal of crystals is two-tiered. Their infinite sparkliness has an obvious draw, but their value relies on a belief in their healing powers. Emma Lucy Knowles, author of The Power of Crystal Healing (her celebrity clients include Victoria Beckham) explains it to me like this: “We work with crystals to draw out the ‘negative’ and ‘heighten’ the positive, such as love, protection, abundance or seeking to detoxify from fear, guilt, worry. They can be used to filter that property into the energy centres, the chakras.” She recommends placing quartz by photos of people you love, “to promote that vibration in their direction”. “Crystals are formed under pressure, much like ourselves. The power of life force – what’s not to love about that?” It’s a hypothetical question.
Standing among the quartz and citrine in Notting Hill, I breathe deeply, and consider my flow. In 2001 Dr Christopher French, a psychologist at Goldsmith, set out to test the effects of crystals on 80 volunteers. Half were given a piece of quartz to meditate with, while the rest were given a piece of similar-looking plastic and told it was a crystal. They were also given a booklet explaining 10 of the sensations they might experience, which included tingling, more focused attention, improved sense of wellbeing, a rise in hand temperature and “activation of all levels of consciousness”. Out of the 80, only six failed to experience at least one of these sensations. “The fact that the same effects were found with both genuine and fake crystals undermines any claims that crystals have the mysterious powers which they are claimed to have,” said French. Dr Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, added: “The power of crystals is in the mind instead of in the crystals. Clearly there is an effect, but people are paying hundreds of pounds for crystals and they might as well pay just a couple of quid.”
On the rocks: a young woman at a crystal healing session. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
But who really wants to hear this? Who wants to pull back the wizard’s curtain? Neil Ashcroft of the Crystal Geode is clear that crystals have helped him: “They work – whether it’s a placebo effect or not, they worked for me.” For most of his customers a belief in the healing power of crystals, rather than the power of placebos, is a kind of faith. An understandable choice, it could be argued, in a time when people report feeling ever more critical of experts and “facts”, keen for a release from technology, disconnected from traditional systems of care and desperate for something shiny that might save them. While it might be possible to debate the efficacy of healing crystals, it is harder to argue the often murky ethics of the process that delivers them.
As the crystal market continues to grow, so does the need for an international reckoning. In 2000 campaigning from organisations such as Global Witness resulted in a United Nations resolution, and the establishment of the Kimberley Process in 2002 virtually eliminated “conflict diamonds”. It’s possible that the government could bring in similar regulations for crystals, but it’s currently unlikely – despite the celebrity-led boom, the healing crystal industry is still nowhere near as profitable or powerful as the diamond industry. A crystal revolution would rely on a tipping of emotion. A consumer push.
“It would be a great shame,” says Sophia Pickles, the campaign leader at Global Witness, “if consumers buying goods that they believe help them ‘connect with the Earth’ are, in fact, making purchases that are connected to grave human-rights abuses, environmental destruction, conflict and corruption. Unfortunately, this is a very real risk for products like crystals.”
Until retailers are required to prove responsible sourcing and reveal their supply chains, she says, crystal consumers must acknowledge they’re participating in practices that are having devastating environmental and social impact. “The responsibility of companies to address harms to people and planet in their supply chains is gaining increasing traction. Industries selling ‘wellbeing’ that do not make it their business to take steps to ensure they are sourcing their materials responsibly are at risk of accusations of deep hypocrisy.”
A slow change is rumbling. A petition demanding Paltrow’s Goop sell only ethically sourced crystals runs at almost 17,000 names, under the line, “No amount of sage can get rid of the bad vibes that come from human exploitation and environmental destruction.” The growing number of people who use crystals, whether to “detoxify”, reduce anxiety, or decorate iPhones must acknowledge their healing crystals are likely to have contributed to human trauma or environmental destruction.
If more people knew this, wouldn’t they begin rocking the boat? Campaigning as we have with food and fashion, people could start asking questions, demanding transparency about a crystal’s origins, about the conditions of the mine, and the route it took to arrive in their warming hand. Because the power of a healing crystal is nothing compared with the power of a hundred thousand crystal buyers closing their purses. And now they know.
Revealed: Removing cladding from private buildings could cost £2bn
This week Grenfell survivors and bereaved have been shining a light on what they believe is a wholly inadequate response from the authorities to the fire that killed 72 people, writes Symeon Brown.
Two years on what’s been become clear is this wasn’t a freak accident. It was just waiting to happen.
Experts say there are possibly more than a thousand buildings around the UK covered in similar, potentially dangerous cladding systems.
Leaseholders from all over the country have found themselves not only in danger, but owning properties now estimated to be almost worthless and deemed unsafe by the fire service.
So far the government have pledged £200m to fix ACM cladding on private buildings, but the Local Government Association estimate the total cost to fix all unsafe cladding could be closer to £2bn.
The government are scheduled to test six different types of potentially flammable cladding which could be on thousands of homes around the UK.
Perhaps the most shocking part of this scandal is that some people living in these suspect buildings don’t even know they could be at risk.
It was a surprise to discover I worked for the CIA. As a large white man in the Hong Kong protests, I certainly stood out from the crowd, where the overwhelming majority of the million-plus participants were locals of Chinese descent who took to the streets against an extradition bill that could send dissidents into the maw of mainland power. But my presence was enough to get pro-Beijing operatives to distribute a picture of me labeled as “CIA spy.” That spirit of paranoia is now being echoed at the top, where Beijing officials are accusing the United States of being the “meddling foreign forces” behind the Hong Kong protests.
But the protests were driven by locals—including the odd American-born Hong Konger such as me, having become a veteran of protest on behalf of my adopted city. They were intentionally diversified, disunified, and, as much as possible, anonymized—an adaptive move against a government that seeks to criminalize dissent. Hong Kongers’ experience of resistance has made the protests sharply effective—but may not be enough in the teeth of a hostile state.
Reading American political scientist Charles Tilly’s work on contentious politics while taking part in the 2014 Umbrella Movement felt like striking an intellectual gold mine. Social movements, he argued, were derivative performance “repertoires.” Most protests are borrowing from a shared library of scripts that are localized and incessantly improvised. Hong Kongers didn’t invent the idea of “occupying” busy urban centers, but we created something fundamentally unique and infinitely adaptable.
The Umbrella Movement started in Hong Kong’s Admiralty district and was followed by occupations in several other locations, the most significant of which was Mong Kok. The two sites borrowed and learned from each other yet had very different styles and culture. Participants in both sites collectively learned the same tactics: how to shut down busy roads, how to resist police attempts to shut the occupations down, and how to evade arrest.
This shared collective knowledge was put to use again this June 12 in follow-up protests to the enormous march on June 9. With virtually no planning or organization to speak of, and word spreading primarily through memes and artwork jumping between open social media platforms (Facebook and Twitter) and private messaging app groups (Telegram and WhatsApp), Admiralty was occupied in less than an hour, and tens of thousands of people arrived to fill it. Umbrella Movement veterans knew what to do without instruction, and a new generation of college students learned by watching. Most knew that the Hong Kong Police Force (HKPF) would respond violently and prepared for their expected tactics: pepper spray, tear gas, and batons.
Somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 people showed up to an unlawful assembly, knowing that there were severe repercussions to getting arrested. Having experienced the protests in 2014, I knew the risk of arrest is both random and unevenly distributed. The risk is highest for those at the front line during “clashes,” but the front line can move to where you stand with little warning. Outside that context, the risk seems randomly distributed to anyone caught on camera, and personally identifiable, doing nearly anything aggressive or committing “incitement to incite public nuisance” with words.
Internalized lessons from experience guided my preparation for joining what we euphemistically called the “picnic” on Wednesday. The bag I brought contained a camera I hide behind, two shirts to change into later, and a face mask. The aim of joining a protest like Wednesday’s anti-extradition bill occupation is to be seen, and counted, without being easily identified.
Resisting easy categorization is an essential tool. As a veteran of Hong Kong street politics who has seen too many arrests and baton charges, I’ve had to learn the timing of when to slip on my camouflage. The mask needs to come on before you enter the occupied zones, but not so early that you stand out from the general public.
Once inside the occupation, my camera comes out to blur the distinction between “observer” and “activist.” Wide-angle and aerial shots of the occupation will capture my presence in a pixel or two as a protester, but I’m typically believed to be a journalist by people around me. This is intentional. I’ve left a trail of photos on my SD card and tweets simply giving situation updates to point to should I find myself in handcuffs.
As with other observer-activists, my key role was reconnaissance. Your camera is cover for taking high ground positions on bridges and flyovers next to media to gather spatial and temporal situational awareness of an environment that can radically change without notice. You try to understand the geographic contours of the protest: Where are fellow protesters gathered and in what density? Where are people moving to? Are more people arriving than leaving? Where are the barricades and are they being pushed further out?
More important, however, is answering the same questions about your counterparts in the Hong Kong Police Force. Protesters experience these illegal protests the same way soldiers often describe war—long periods of boredom punctuated by terrifying episodes of violence. The key is to determine when the police will move, where they’ll come from, and what tactics they’ll likely use. Most protesters have learned from experience the importance of knowing when to “fall back,” and not to get caught somewhere without a predetermined exit route.
That only about a dozen people were arrested on-site Wednesday is a testament that even those on the front lines know how and when to leave the scene and evade arrest. Remove the protective gear that obscured our faces and replace a sweat-drenched shirt and you’ll look nothing like what was caught in photographs or videos. Time it right and it would take hours to reconstruct a CCTV footage-based timeline that captures an image of your face, tracks you through the crowd going to the front line, and then catches you engaging in an action that could land a criminal charge. Of the tens of thousands of people there on Wednesday, the HKPF will likely only invest the time to identify a few dozen “worst offenders” for later arrest.
It’s impossible to count how many hours I’ve spent over the past five years thinking about how to stay firmly in the “gray zone” side of the law while participating in an unlawful assembly.
Our form of protest, occupation of major roads in busy districts, pushes the frontiers of the gray zone because it intentionally attracts curious onlookers. Protesters are safest when tourists, families, and people in business suits are walking amongst them. The gray zone is broad, but knowing where and when it transforms to sharp edges is crucial if you want to get home safely that night and avoid a knock at your door in following days.
There are moments on these streets where you feel a degree of sympathy for the HKPF. Less than an hour before their most violent assault in Hong Kong’s living memory, other protest veterans thought the police were outmanned. Their only options were curfews or something akin to martial law, which would functionally amount to the general strike many of us hoped for. Just after 4 p.m. they declared the occupation a riot and attacked with 150 rounds of tear gas, rubber bullets, airsoft “pepper balls,” and beanbags fired from shotguns. Harcourt Road, occupied for 79 days in 2014, was cleared within an hour. As Tilly would have reminded us: Regimes borrow and improvise repertoires too.
Later that night, the HKPF arrested four protesters seeking treatment for injuries at local hospitals. The following night they reportedly appeared at Hong Kong University dormitories. The purpose and intent were unclear, but the fear and panic they caused were palpable.
As they did in the wake of the Umbrella Movement, they’ll be sifting through gigabytes of multimedia, social media, and other digital records to collect evidence to charge people who were there in the coming weeks, months, even years. I suspect that the police response to our numbers and tactics will be to instill a latent fear that nobody got home as safely as we supposed.
Ron DeSantis met with Benjamin Netanyahu on a trip to prove his loyalty to Israel. (
Protesters hold placards and shout slogans during a rally against the extradition law proposal in Hong Kong on June 9. 