a Better Bubble™

Aggregator

Thursday, May 29 - Farmers are taking on more debt

1 month 1 week ago
While agricultural incomes are expected to rebound this year, farmers have been taking on more debt lately. Coupled with high costs to run a business, some are worried. It makes it really tough. A look at why loan demand is up — and why some ag economists believe it could be a sign of better things to come.

Newtok, Alaska, Was Supposed to Be a Model for Climate Relocation. Here’s How It Went Wrong.

1 month 1 week ago

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with KYUK. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

This story is not subject to our Creative Commons license.

NEWTOK, Alaska — A jumble of shipping containers hold all that remains of the demolished public school in Newtok, Alaska, where on a recent visit, a few stray dogs and a lone ermine prowled among the ruins.

Late last year, the final residents of this sinking village near the Bering Sea left behind the waterlogged tundra of their former home, part of a fraught, federally funded effort to resettle communities threatened by climate change.

Nearly 300 people from Newtok have moved 9 miles across the Ninglick River to a new village known as Mertarvik. But much of the infrastructure there is already failing. Residents lack running water, use 5-gallon buckets as toilets and must contend with intermittent electricity and deteriorating homes that expose them to the region’s fierce weather.

Newtok’s relocation was supposed to provide a model for dozens of Alaskan communities that will need to move in the coming decades. Instead, those who’ve worked on the effort say what happened in Newtok demonstrates the federal government’s failure to oversee the complex project and understand communities’ unique cultural needs. And it highlights how ill-prepared the United States is to respond to the way climate change is making some places uninhabitable, according to an investigation by The Washington Post, ProPublica and KYUK radio in Bethel, Alaska.

Dozens of grants from at least seven federal agencies have helped pay for the relocation, which began in 2019 and is expected to cost more than $150 million. But while the federal government supplied taxpayer dollars, it left most of the responsibility to the tiny Newtok Village Council. The federally recognized tribal government lacked the expertise to manage the project and has faced high turnover and internal political conflict, according to tribal records and interviews with more than 70 residents as well as dozens of current and former members of the seven-person village council.

Faith Carl, 7, checks on plants on the windowsill at the home of Frieda and Phillip Carl, her grandparents. (Ash Adams for The Washington Post)

Federal auditors have warned for years that climate relocation projects need a lead agency to coordinate assistance and reduce the burden on local communities. The Biden administration tried to address those concerns by creating an interagency task force led by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Interior Department. The task force’s report in December also called for more coordination and guidance across the federal government as well as long-term funding for relocations.

But the Trump administration has removed the group’s report from FEMA’s website and, as part of its withdrawal of climate funding, frozen millions in federal aid that was supposed to pay for housing construction in Mertarvik this summer. The administration did not respond to a request for comment.

“We’re physically seeing the impacts of a changing climate on these communities,” said Don Antrobus, a climate adaptation consultant for the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium. “And the fact that we don’t have a government framework for dealing with these issues is not just an Alaska problem, it’s a national problem.”

Newtok’s relocation follows the resettlement of Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, where land vanished under rising sea levels. Both relocations have been labeled as “blueprints” for the federal government’s response to climate change. Both have been mired in complicated and disjointed funding systems and accusations that the government neglected traditional knowledge.

For centuries, the area’s Indigenous Yup’ik residents lived a nomadic subsistence lifestyle, timing their seasonal movements with the arrival of migratory birds in spring, fish in summer and the ripening of berries in early fall. But that changed in the 1950s after a barge, loaded with construction materials to build a school, got stuck near present-day Newtok and couldn’t navigate farther upriver. So the Bureau of Indian Affairs built the school there.

At the time, elders knew the location wasn’t fit for permanent settlement because the low-lying ground would shift as the permafrost froze and thawed seasonally, said Andy Patrick, 77, one of two residents who remember life in the old village before Newtok.

“My grandma used to tell me, ‘It’s going to start wobbling,’” he said. But they moved because the BIA required their children to attend its school.

First image: Tiny homes in Mertarvik, Alaska. Second image: Connor Queenie watches television in the home of Andy Patrick, a Mertarvik elder. (Ash Adams for The Washington Post)

Born and raised in Newtok, Jack Charlie was relieved when he moved into a modest brown house in Mertarvik in 2022. His old plywood home in Newtok was moldy and sinking into the tundra as the permafrost that supported the land thawed.

But within months, the light fixtures in his new house filled with water from condensation, and gaps formed where the walls met the ceiling in his bedroom. Charlie started stuffing toilet paper into the cracks to keep out the persistent coastal winds.

“Once I found it was leaking and cold air drifting in, I said: ‘Hell! What kind of house did they build?’” he said.

An aerial view of Mertarvik (Ash Adams for The Washington Post)

Charlie is one of multiple residents who complained about problems with their newly built houses. When KYUK asked for inspection reports, the tribe and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said they didn’t have any. In the absence of an official inspection, KYUK hired a professional with expertise in cold climate housing to examine seven of the 46 homes in Mertarvik, which were built by three different contractors.

According to the inspection performed last year, Charlie’s home is among 17 houses, built by one contractor, that are rapidly deteriorating because they were designed and constructed the same way. The foundations are not salvageable, and the buildings do not meet minimum code requirements, said the inspector, Emmett Leffel, an energy auditor and building analyst in Alaska.

“This is some of the worst new construction I’ve ever seen, and the impact is so quickly realized because of the coastal climate,” Leffel said in an interview.

His inspection report concluded: “The totality of the work needed to correct these conditions and issues may cost substantially more than the original construction.”

There are other problems beyond housing. The BIA committed more than $6 million for roads but failed to coordinate with other agencies to install water pipes underneath, according to a former project manager, the tribal health consortium and the Denali Commission, an independent federal agency tasked with providing critical infrastructure support to Alaska’s most remote communities. As a result, none of the houses in Mertarvik has a flush toilet or shower. Residents go to the town’s small well to fill jugs for household use.

As more people have moved to Mertarvik, the town’s power plant hasn’t kept up with electricity demand, leaving residents without heat or power in the winter, said Calvin Tom, the tribal administrator. And a wastewater system that handles sewage from the school, health clinic and a dormitory for construction workers has been overwhelmed for more than a year, he said. Last spring, sewage backed up into the school’s basement.

The BIA, the largest funder of the relocation that helped plan the community, did not agree to an interview request. The agency said in an email that it’s working closely with the Newtok Village Council and that the council has established a plan to repair the homes. The tribe’s attorney, Matt Mead, said, “NVC does have a repair plan and is seeking funding from multiple sources to allow for implementation of the plan.”

That was news to council secretary Della Carl and council member Francis Tom, whose home has some of the worst problems. Both said they knew of no such plan, and Mead declined to provide one. Four other council members (one seat is vacant) declined to comment or didn’t return calls or emails. Mead said the plan to fix the houses needs to be better communicated to council members and residents. He said the tribe disagrees that the homes are deteriorating and declined to comment about its management of the project.

Francis Tom lives in one of the homes built by LeMay Engineering & Consulting. (Ash Adams for The Washington Post)

Patrick LeMay, the Anchorage-based contractor whose company was hired by the tribe to build Charlie’s and 16 other deteriorating houses, was fired last year because of the construction and design problems, according to tribal council members. LeMay didn’t respond to questions or comment on Leffel’s report other than to say, “I do not work for Newtok any longer.”

Greg Stuckey, administrator for HUD’s Office of Native American Programs in Anchorage, said the agency is not required to inspect the LeMay houses because the grant went directly to the tribal government. Federal law allows tribes to administer government programs themselves to recognize their independence and cultural needs.

“So they can’t say it’s the federal government,” Stuckey said, “because they chose this.”

Mead said the Newtok Village Council didn’t dispute that.

The Government Accountability Office, however, has repeatedly recommended that federal agencies provide more technical assistance to small tribes in climate relocations.

“When you have 20 or 30 different programs that can all interact together and they all have different rules,” said Anna Maria Ortiz, the GAO’s director of natural resources and environment, “that’s going to cost more in the long run and can be nearly impossible for some villages.”

In 1996, after decades fighting erosion from storms and the deteriorating permafrost, the Newtok tribe began negotiating with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to exchange land for the relocation. Congress approved the trade in 2003. For the next two decades, the tribe worked with federal and state agencies to plan the new community at Mertarvik. Storm damage shut down the public school for good last year, and the Newtok Village Council voted to finish the evacuation.

First image: The former Bureau of Indian Affairs school in Newtok. Second image: The school in Mertarvik is still under construction with a projected finish date of fall 2026. (Ash Adams for The Washington Post)

Dozens of remote communities in Alaska face similar threats from climate change, according to a 2019 report by the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The issues affecting such communities are well understood in Arctic regions around the world, but policymakers aren’t heeding warnings from relocation experts, said Andrea Marta Knudsen, a relocation and disaster recovery specialist in the Iceland prime minister’s office.

“It’s not like this is a new thing or hasn’t been researched,” she said. “The government should maybe say: ‘Oh wow, we’re dealing with a disaster or relocation. Who knows this? Let’s have a team of experts working with the government on this.’”

Over the years, several government bodies tried to coordinate efforts in Newtok. At first, Alaska’s commerce department formed the Newtok Planning Group to coordinate assistance for the relocation. But in 2013, the group’s work stalled because the BIA paused its funding for the tribe after a political dispute resulted in two competing tribal governments. The planning group has met only three times since 2019.

The Denali Commission took on project management responsibilities in 2016 but ceded control to the BIA three years ago after the agency announced a $25 million grant funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

This inconsistent oversight and coordination has significantly affected the quality of housing, according to experts who have worked on the relocation.

Walter Tom and Dionne Kilongak harvest a ring seal and walrus while their 2-year-old son plays with their dog, Pobby. Tom and his family live in a tiny home in Mertarvik that is intended to be temporary. (Ash Adams for The Washington Post)

The first two housing projects in Mertarvik received high ratings from Leffel, the inspector hired by KYUK. The Alaska-based nonprofit Cold Climate Housing Research Center designed 14 homes to maximize energy efficiency and withstand the harsh weather. The houses also provide space for residents to cut fish, dress moose and host large family gatherings — activities integral to the Yup’ik lifestyle. An additional 15 houses were built by a regional housing authority that has decades of experience on Alaska’s Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.

Charlie’s home and 16 others were part of a third round of houses, designed and built by LeMay Engineering & Consulting. At various times, LeMay was also employed by the tribe in other roles, including tribal administrator and relocation coordinator. Representing the tribe while simultaneously earning money from it could create a potential conflict of interest, said Ted Waters, an attorney who specializes in federal grants administration.

According to Leffel’s inspection, the foundations of Charlie’s home and the others designed and built by LeMay “do not meet minimum code requirements for corrosion resistance, adequate supports” or “structural integrity requirements.” Two years of fuel usage data provided by the tribe shows residents in the LeMay houses pay more than twice as much for energy each year compared with the other two housing projects.

Francis Tom, the council member, said outside entities like LeMay and federal agencies often ignored his community’s needs. “They don’t know. They weren’t born here,” he said. “They don’t spend enough time here.”

First image: The Carls’ home has mold, leaks and other structural issues. Second image: Photographs of life in Newtok adorn their refrigerator. (Ash Adams for The Washington Post)

A year before Leffel examined the houses, a group of BIA officials took a tour and saw the water pooling in light fixtures and moisture damage in several of the LeMay homes, council members said. It’s unclear what they did with that information. The BIA said its staff has made three trips to Mertarvik since, and the tribe’s attorney said multiple homes were inspected by independent engineers this past year, something both council members Carl and Tom disputed. Charlie and nearly a dozen other residents said no one other than Leffel had been inside their homes to inspect them. The attorney declined to provide copies of any inspections.

HUD was also made aware of problems after a 2022 report submitted by the tribe showed occupancy numbers that exceeded the agency’s overcrowding standards.

In addition to the problems with the LeMay homes, several other residents said they’re facing similar issues with some of the temporary tiny homes that were shipped in by barge in the fall because of the urgent need to move. Rosemary John’s was among the last families to relocate. John, who grew up in Newtok and raised her six kids there, said the move has been agonizing. Seven people are now living in her house. This winter, John posted a video to social media that showed water running down a wall and pooling on the floor.

Next door, in Dionne Kilongak’s temporary house, the windowsills are already covered in mold. She works at her kitchen table every day while her children, ages 2 and 4, scurry up and down the narrow hallway. She said winds bring water into her house.

“I think these aren’t for Alaska,” she said.

With no solution in sight, Charlie has tried to make his house feel more homey. Tired of white paint that did nothing to hide the water damage, he found scrap paneling from one of the housing authority’s projects and fastened it to his walls.

Like most people in these houses, he said he hopes they’ll be fixed, but he’s unsure where to turn.

“I have no idea who’s gonna be responsible for these homes,” he said.

A home in Mertarvik at night (Ash Adams for The Washington Post)
by Emily Schwing, KYUK

Sunburnt

1 month 1 week ago
How door-to-door solar salespeople can scam homeowners, and what the government could do to stop it.
Emma Janssen

Nike Repeatedly Raised Concerns About Repression in Cambodia. It Expanded Its Factory Workforce There Anyway.

1 month 1 week ago

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

When police used stun batons to hit garment workers seeking a $14 monthly raise from a Nike factory in Cambodia in 2013, reportedly leading one pregnant woman to miscarry, Nike said it was “deeply concerned.”

The following year, when Cambodian police opened fire and killed four garment workers during widespread demonstrations over low wages, Nike and other brands sent the government a letter expressing “grave concern.”

In 2018, after the government curbed union rights, Nike and other brands again protested, this time in a meeting with government officials. An industry representative described the companies in a news release as “increasingly concerned.”

A year later, another letter: “We are concerned.”

Despite the varying shades of corporate concern, Cambodia continued descending deeper into authoritarian governance, and the size of Nike’s contract workforce there kept going up.

While Nike has been shrinking its footprint in China, its presence in Cambodia has grown, from about 16,000 factory workers in May 2013, to nearly 35,000 in 2019, to more than 57,000 as of March. Today, Cambodia is the athletic apparel giant’s third-largest supplier of garments other than shoes, nearly overtaking its clothing production in China.

Other Western brands have also continued expanding in Cambodia. The country’s garment exports climbed from $4.9 billion in 2013 to $9.3 billion in 2022, according to World Bank data.

Along the way, labor leaders have been jailed; opposing politicians have gone into exile and been arrested or killed; journalists have been locked up and killed; and independent media outlets have been shuttered by the government.

Sabrina Manufacturing workers gather at their union headquarters in Phnom Penh while protesting for higher wages at the Nike supplier in 2013. (Damir Sagolj/Reuters)

The curbs on unions and free speech are in tension with Nike’s code of conduct, which recognizes workers’ rights to join trade unions and participate in union activities without interference. In countries that restrict union rights, Nike says factories must have an effective grievance process that allows employees to voice concerns over working conditions without fear of retaliation.

Nike’s continued growth in Cambodia underscores the level of political and labor repression the company has been willing to tolerate in countries that provide inexpensive labor — letters of concern notwithstanding.

“A lot of brands have been signing letters for years as a substitute for real pressure, real change,” said Jason Judd, executive director of Cornell University’s Global Labor Institute.

Brands increasing their orders from Cambodia while raising concerns about labor rights are “obviously mixed messages,” Judd said. “And one message, the purchase order, has a lot more weight than the other. Until those are credibly threatened, the government has no reason to act.”

Khun Tharo, program manager at the Center for Alliance of Labor and Human Rights, was targeted last year after his organization published a report identifying gaps in factory oversight. The government began auditing the legal aid group; Khun faced a criminal complaint that he said his lawyer had been unable to see.

Khun Tharo (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)

Khun told ProPublica that brands often speak up about worker rights because of prodding by civil society groups or the ire voiced by trading partners.

For Nike and other brands, “it’s about protecting their market and accessibility and also credibility. That’s all,” Khun said. Without pressure on brands to take action, he said, “they will not do it. They will just start to ignore it.”

Nike did not respond directly to written questions from ProPublica about its expansion in Cambodia amid the country’s intensifying political repression. Instead, it said in a statement: “We continue to engage with suppliers, industry organizations and other global stakeholders to develop broad-based approaches to help mitigate longer-term impacts.”

Labor rights are tenuous in Cambodia. The U.S. State Department said in a 2023 human rights report that “significant and systematic restrictions on workers’ freedom of association” exist in Cambodia and that the government “failed to effectively enforce laws that protected union and labor rights.” Human Rights Watch said in a 2022 report that the government’s repression of independent unions had only intensified after the COVID-19 pandemic began.

Former Khmer Rouge battalion commander Hun Sen led Cambodia from 1985 until handing control to his son, Hun Manet, in 2023. Hun Sen was brazen in his public dismissals of threats from the West over its assault on labor rights and civil society, said Carlyle Thayer, emeritus professor of politics at Australia’s University of New South Wales, Canberra. The threats included warnings from Europe, U.S. lawmakers and international clothing brands.

The Cambodian government yielded just enough to avoid the full force of economic sanctions, Thayer said.

He pointed to an episode in which the European Commission threatened to end tariff exemptions for Cambodian exports over concerns about human rights and labor abuses. Hun Sen directed the country’s courts to quickly decide cases pending against union officials, Thayer said, leading to suspended sentences for some and dropped charges for others.Instead of following through on its threat, the European Commission imposed a scaled-down set of trade restrictions.

Brands, including Nike, have had some influence. After workers were killed while protesting for higher wages in 2014, brands supported increasing the minimum wage. The Cambodian government eventually established a process to annually negotiate wage increases.

A spokesperson for Cambodia’s Ministry of Labor and Vocational Training said the incidents that led foreign brands to raise concerns with the government were “old,” misleading and had been politicized. The spokesperson did not respond to subsequent questions after a reporter noted that the most recent incident happened within the last year.

Ken Loo, a spokesperson for the Cambodian garment industry’s trade association, said thousands of unions are registered in the country. “I do not agree with your presumption that there is a repressive environment here in Cambodia,” he said. “Individual incidents do not make up the whole story.”

Many of Cambodia’s unions are government-aligned groups that Human Rights Watch has called “instant noodle” unions because they take less time to make than a cup of noodles. Independent unions have long been under assault there, according to American, European and other labor rights observers.

Yang Sophorn, president of the independent Cambodian Alliance of Trade Unions, was threatened in a July 2020 letter from the country’s labor ministry after joining workers who protested outside a garment factory, Violet Apparel. The factory had closed suddenly during the pandemic.

The former Nike supplier went on to become the subject of a long-standing dispute between labor advocates and Nike over wages that workers said they were still owed. Ramatex, Violet Apparel’s parent company, did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment. Nike has said publicly it’s found no evidence to support the allegations.

Yang Sophorn (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)

In its 2020 letter, the government told Yang that she was breaking the law by inciting workers and pressuring the closed factory to pay its employees. The letter said the labor ministry might dissolve her independent union, which represents more than 5,000 workers who make clothes in Nike factories. (The Cambodian labor ministry did not respond to ProPublica's request for comment about the letter.)

The labor leader had already received a suspended criminal sentence. The government said she instigated protests over wages, which occurred in 2013 and 2014. That conviction was eventually vacated in what Human Rights Watch said was an effort to placate European officials threatening Cambodia’s trade access.

Yang told ProPublica she was not scared by the Cambodian government’s threats against her and her union. “If they still want to dissolve it,” she said of the union, “let it be.”

Yang said she welcomes investments by Nike and other brands because they provide more jobs for people in her country. But she said workers need good wages, the right to assemble and protections when factories close without paying them. “If they just come to exploit our workers, I don’t want them,” she said.

Nike has prided itself on the story of its turnaround since co-founder Phil Knight acknowledged in 1998 that its products had become “synonymous with slave wages, forced overtime and arbitrary abuse.”

One former senior Nike executive, who requested anonymity so they could speak freely about their former employer, said the company had expanded in Cambodia to help diversify its supply chain. The executive said Nike and other brands’ presence had benefited workers in Cambodia and other countries where it manufactures.

“Nike has clearly stated that the rule of law and respect for labor rights are significant factors in where the company decides to place orders,” the executive said.

But, the person said, “Are things imperfect, and are there a lot of screwups? Absolutely. Are we concerned when Vietnam or Cambodia takes steps backward? Of course.”

After Nike last year underwent $2 billion in cost cutting that disproportionately targeted its sustainability staff, including people working on foreign factory oversight, the former executive said they worried that Nike’s cuts had affected the company’s ability to engage with its stakeholders in the countries where its factories operate.

Nike was silent last year when Cambodian authorities cracked down on the Center for Alliance of Labor and Human Rights, the legal aid group. The government launched what was described as a “national security audit” of the organization, also known as CENTRAL, after it reported on oversight gaps by a United Nations-backed factory watchdog.

Two industry groups, one of which counts Nike as a participant, wrote to the government on July 12 saying they had “serious concerns” that the audit’s only purpose was retaliation, condemning it “in the strongest possible terms.”

Nineteen major clothing companies — from Adidas to VF Corp., owner of the North Face brand — followed up Sept. 10 with a joint letter protesting Cambodia’s assault on the group, also saying they had “serious concerns.” Nike did not sign that letter.

“A vibrant civil society, guaranteed in part by freedom of speech, is a key part of what makes Cambodia an important sourcing partner for the apparel and footwear industry,” the companies said.

Nike did not explain why it was not a signatory when asked by ProPublica.

Bryony Lau, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, said with the steady deterioration in workers’ rights in Cambodia and President Donald Trump’s cuts to U.S. foreign aid, Western apparel companies have an imperative to speak up in Cambodia.

“Nike and other brands sourcing from Cambodia have an interest in ensuring that organizations like CENTRAL continue to exist and can speak about labor rights issues,” Lau said.

Khun, the CENTRAL staffer, said he knew the Nike employee who focused on corporate social responsibility in Cambodia, but he said she left the company within the last year. Khun said he didn’t know whether anyone had replaced her. (She did not respond to ProPublica, and Nike did not respond to questions about her departure.)

CENTRAL this year faced a new government problem. When Trump began to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development in January, CENTRAL and two other groups received notice that they were losing $1.5 million in funding promised for a project intended to document human rights violations and counter Cambodia’s repression.

Less than two months later, the Trump administration attempted to gut Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, some of the only news sources available in Cambodia’s native language that reported on the country’s authoritarian turn. Former Prime Minister Hun Sen praised Trump’s “courage,” posting an image from 2017 of the two men shaking hands and smiling.

Trump was giving a thumbs up.

After Donald Trump attempted in 2025 to gut federally funded agencies that published news about Cambodia’s political repression, Hun Sen, Cambodia’s longtime leader, shared photos of himself meeting the U.S. president in 2017. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

Keat Soriththeavy and Ouch Sony contributed reporting and translation.

by Rob Davis

Judith Shaw: Upended

1 month 1 week ago

Bruno David Gallery is pleased to present Upended, a sculpture installation by multi-disciplinary artist Judith Shaw. This is Shaw’s second solo exhibition with Bruno David Gallery. ‘Upended’ is part of […]

The post Judith Shaw: Upended appeared first on Explore St. Louis.

Myranda Levins

Levin, Bernard "Bud"

1 month 1 week ago
Bernard (Bud) Levin, devoted Zionist, Mensch, and lifelong advocate for Jewish causes and the State of Israel. He was a teacher of Jewish history and a lifetime student. On Memorial Day, May 26th, 2025, he lost a long battle with…

Tschappler, Edward "Eddie"

1 month 1 week ago
Entered into rest on Monday, May 26, 2025 at the age of 72. Beloved husband of 31 years of the late Lynn C. (nee Holzwarth) Tschappler; best brother-in-law in the world to Lori Holzwarth; son of the late Elmer &…