(TEHRAN, IRAN) — While Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi was holding up Gen. Qassim Soleimani’s photo on Wednesday at the United Nations General Assembly podium grieving over his killing by the U.S., Soleimani’s picture was being torn down in his home city of Kerman and set on fire by protestors.
Protests against the Iranian regime started across the country last Friday following the suspicious death of a young woman was arrested and detained for allegedly wearing a hijab improperly by hijab police three days earlier.
Mahsa Amini, 22, was on a trip to Tehran with her 16-year-old brother when the hijab police, also called the “morality police,” arrested her for not wearing the outfit that fully matched the Sharia-based hijab laws of the country. Despite her brother’s resistance, she was taken into custody only to be announced dead at a hospital three days later, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency
The head of the Forensic Medicine of Tehran said Amini was suffering from a background condition. Her father denied those claims in an interview with the BBC.
With the news of Amini’s arrest going viral, criticism against hijab laws and the confrontation of the morality police against women intensified on social media.
Protests soon developed beyond the morality police after her death and addressed a long list of the Islamic Republic’s actions over the past four decades.
The first big protests broke out on Sept. 17 during Amini’s funeral in Saqqez, her home city in northwest Iran.
Pictures of the burial protests went viral. The hashtag #MahsaAmini and her name in Farsi got 18 million mentions on Twitter and about 150 million on TikTok, making it the biggest trend on Persian Twitter, BBC Persian reported Thursday.
Amjad Amini, Mahsa Amini’s father, said Tuesday in an interview with Iranian news website Emtedad that the police did not let the family see Mahsa Amini’s body. Only he could briefly check her daughter’s legs and saw they were bruised.
“The person who hit my daughter should be put on trial in a public court,” Amjad Amini told the outlet.
While the news program of Iran’s state-run TV announced Thursday that 17 people had been killed in the protests, the Iran Human Rights group, IRH, reported that at least 31 killed had been killed through Thursday.
Videos shared on social media from the protestors show many women burning their headscarves on the streets. Many celebrities have removed their hijab and shared the clips on social media.
In an act of solidarity, many men and women from different countries have also shared videos of themselves cutting their hair short and expressing their anger over Mahsa Amini’s death.
President Joe Biden said America supports the growing protests in his address to the U.N. on Wednesday.
“Today we stand with the brave citizens and women in Iran who right now are demonstrating to secure their basic rights,” Biden said.
The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control designated Iran’s morality police “for abuse and violence against Iranian women and the violation of the rights of peaceful Iranian protestors.”
“Mahsa Amini was a courageous woman whose death in Morality Police custody was yet another act of brutality by the Iranian regime’s security forces against its own people,” Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen said in a statement Thursday. “We condemn this unconscionable act in the strongest terms and call on the Iranian government to end its violence against women and its ongoing violent crackdown on free expression and assembly.”
However, to many Iranians, western countries who negotiate with the Islamic Republic over the nuclear deal are giving the country a chance to buy time and continue its oppression, such words and moves are “too little, too late.”
“I have given up hope from the West. They have proved they only care about the nuclear program not the human rights,” Nina, a 35-year-old protestor, told ABC News. Nina did not want her real name mentioned for safety reasons.
“All I want from people in the West is not to forget us, especially now that the internet is either cut or very slow,” Nina added. “Seeing the people in the world hear and celebrities help us to be heard makes up keep up our spirit.”
Sarah, 39, a protester from Tehran, said there is a huge “mix of anger, hope and fear” in the protests. “But no matter what, we will stay on the streets,” she said.
Referring to the main slogans of the protests in different cities, “woman, life, freedom,” and “death to dictator,” Sarah, who is also not using her real name over fears for her safety, said the movement does not merely address restrictions on women.
“Slogans target the very bases of the regime. They address the leader himself calling him a ‘shame’ to the country,” she said. ‘What matters the most is that these slogans are heard by the world.’
While the Internet was throttled from the beginning of the protests, it was cut or severely slowed down in the country on Wednesday, according to NetBlocks. In addition, WhatsApp and Instagram –the last social media outlets that were still accessible in Iran– were filtered in an attempt by the regime to restrict the circulation of information even more severely.
“Our anger is definitely overgrowing their power,” Sarah said. “I hope people in different countries recognize this anger and their government joins them and stop negotiating with this regime.”
Pedro Portal/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service/Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has released its 2022 Summer Climate Report, which outlines the extreme weather events from June to August in the U.S.
The report also describes where this year ranked compared to previous summers, using data from dozens of weather stations in each state.
US record temperatures
The summer of 2022 ranks third-warmest on record, with an average temperature across the contiguous United States at 73.9 degrees, according to the report. That’s 2.5 degrees above average, coming in only 0.01 degrees behind 1936 (when the dust bowl was in full swing) for the No. 2 spot. The hottest summer on record was in 2021.
It wasn’t just the highs that were sweltering, it was often the lows. The average minimum temperature across the country hit a record of 62.3 degrees this August, meaning there wasn’t much relief during the overnight hours. Houston broke several records for warmest low temperature, only bottoming out at 86 degrees after reaching highs above 100 degrees on multiple occasions. Without any cooler temperatures at night, the cumulative heat can be dangerous.
Heat is the No. 1 weather-related cause of death each year, and communities have recently taken it more seriously by opening cooling shelters to those most at-risk during heat waves.
Rainfall
While some parts of the country suffered from serious to exceptional drought, others dealt with major flooding. Taking the whole country into account, the precipitation turned out average, but how much rain you saw heavily depended on which region you were in. For example, Arizona had its seventh wettest summer, while Nebraska came in at third driest, according to NOAA.
Monsoon season in the Southwest is a typical occurrence during the summer months, but it started earlier than normal this year and brought flash floods to highly populated areas at times. Las Vegas experienced major flooding across the city in late July and again in early August, flooding casinos and leaving two dead.
August also brought a relentless surge of rainfall to northern Louisiana and Mississippi.
The several-day deluge caused major flash flooding in Jackson, Mississippi, where cars were submerged and people were left standing on their roofs waiting for rescue. More than 153,000 residents didn’t have clean drinking water for weeks after the water treatment facility went offline in the flood.
1,000-year floods
A 1,000-year rainfall event means that there is a 1 in 1,000 chance that a flood of that magnitude will occur in any given year. Three such events happened in August.
On Aug. 2, southern Illinois picked up a foot of rain in only 12 hours. Near Newtown, Illinois, an incredible 14 inches fell in those 12 hours, according to the National Weather Service.
Death Valley isn’t known for its rainfall, but on Aug. 5, the National Park was drenched with 1.70 inches of rain, leading to damaging flooding and trapped visitors. That rainfall broke a record that had stood for more than 34 years.
Then, on the morning of Aug. 22, the rain began in Dallas and didn’t stop. Hefty downpours led to catastrophic flooding across the city, with many nearby towns recording more than a foot of rainfall.
The governor declared a disaster for 23 counties in Texas due to the rainfall. Although it was destructive for many, it was bittersweet because it helped alleviate the exceptional drought that plagued that area for months. Water reservoirs rose significantly after being at record low levels just a week before, and the U.S. Drought Monitor noted major improvement in its update following the flood event.
Drought
Even though there were several drought-busting rain events across the country, the U.S. finished up the summer with 45.5% of its land mass in drought conditions, the NOAA report said.
The northeast was one region that saw the drought ramp up during the summer months. Lawns that were a healthy shade of green in May were crunchy and yellow by August, as the rain stayed away for weeks. As a result, Massachusetts saw extreme drought spread across the eastern half of the state, and severe drought expanded to Rhode Island, Connecticut and New York, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
Meanwhile, the intense drought set the stage for a supercharged wildfire season in the west. Gusty winds helped easily spread these fires that had no resistance from the weather.
Tropics
In the tropical Atlantic, there was only one word to describe the situation: quiet. From July 3 to Sept. 1, there were no named storms in the Atlantic basin. That stretch of 60 days was the longest stormless stretch since 1941, according to the National Hurricane Center.
In September, the tropics began to heat up. Several named storms formed right around the historical peak of hurricane season in the Atlantic. The strongest of which was Hurricane Fiona, which peaked as a Category 4 storm after dropping catastrophic rainfall on Puerto Rico.
Roasting in Europe
Across the pond, records were just as prevalent as they were in America this summer. Europe experienced its hottest summer on record, with several countries roasting in a mid-summer heat wave that shattered long-standing records. It peaked on July 19, when dozens of weather stations across the U.K. topped 100 degrees. London soared to an incredible 104 degrees that day, according to the U.K. Met Office.
Around the world
Globally, the June-August period tied for the fifth warmest in the 143 years of records.
“The five warmest June-August periods on record have occurred since 2015,” according to NOAA,
Both hemispheres came in above average, and while June-August is winter in the Southern Hemisphere, temperatures were not nearly as cold as they typically are. Antarctic sea ice during that time frame ended up at record low levels, according to climate scientists at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab.
In terms of rain, Pakistan dealt with some of the worst floods in recent history. Extreme monsoon rainfall in August is estimated to have killed more than 1,500 people and destroyed more than 1.7 million homes.
Connection to climate change
While not every weather event can be attributed to climate change, some are undoubtedly enhanced by our warming world, as explained in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2022 Assessment.
An example of this is the extreme flooding rain events. With ocean temperatures significantly higher than average, there is more moisture in the air due to evaporation. Also, higher temperatures can hold more water content, so the likelihood of heavy rain events rises with the temperature.
(UKRAINE) — Woman and girls in Ukraine and around the world have suffered disproportionately as the men of the country fight against the invasion by Russia, a new report by the United Nations has found.
The policy paper, published as the U.N. Security Council meets to discuss the war in Ukraine, reveals how the war and its global impacts on food, energy and finance have caused women in Ukraine and globally to suffer numerous hardships.
The report states that 265,000 Ukrainian women who were pregnant when the war broke out in February either had to flee or give birth in a time of conflict.
It also highlights how the crisis in Europe is exacerbating existing inequalities around the world, especially surrounding the scarcity of food.
The war-induced food price hikes and shortages have widened the global gender gap in food insecurity, the report shows. Many women have even reduced their own food intake to provide for other household members.
The report states that spiraling energy prices have caused families to return to using less clean fuels and technologies, exposing women and girls to household air pollution, which already kills 3.2 million people per year — the majority of whom are women and children.
Women-headed households in Ukraine were already more food insecure prior to the war, with 37.5% experiencing moderate or severe levels of food insecurity, compared to 20.5% of male-headed households, according to the report.
The fate of women in rural territories occupied by the Russian military remains dire. The women are increasingly unable to perform agricultural work due to high insecurity and lack of resources, but they continue to rise to the challenge of accommodating and feeding internally displaced people, which then multiples their unpaid care and domestic work responsibilities, according to the report.
In addition, school-aged girls are even more at risk of being obliged to drop out of school to get married for dowry or bride-price income for desperate families, officials stated. The report shows that there are alarming increases in gender-based violence, transactional sex for food and survival, sexual exploitation and trafficking, and early child marriage and forced marriage as a result of these worsened living conditions in conflict, crisis and humanitarian contexts worldwide.
“Systemic, gendered crises require systemic, gendered solutions,” Sima Sami Bahous, the executive director of U.N.-Women, said in a statement. “That means ensuring that women and girls, including from marginalized groups, are part of all the decision-making processes. That is simply the only way to be certain that their rights and needs are fully taken into account as we respond to the clear facts before us.”
The policy brief calls for solutions from the international community to prioritize women’s and girls’ voice agency, participation and leadership in conflict response, recovery and peacebuilding as well as to enhance gender statistics and sex-disaggregated data to build the evidence base for gender-responsive policy.
The U.N. also recommended that international communities promote and protect the right to food by targeting the specific nutrition needs of women and girls and accelerate the transformation towards more equitable, gender-responsive and sustainable food systems, equitable access to access to inputs, technologies and markets by women.
(WASHINGTON) — During an August campaign event in Durham, North Carolina, former state Chief Justice Cheri Beasley, the Democratic candidate for Senate, proudly proclaimed that she does not support defunding the police.
“It’s important that they have the resources to make sure that law enforcement officers stay safe,” she said.
As Republicans have hammered President Joe Biden and his party as, in their words, soft on crime and insufficiently supportive of law enforcement, Beasley and other Democrats in swing-state races have been pushing back, running advertisements touting their support for police and appearing with local law enforcement officials on the trail.
For Beasley and Florida’s Democratic Senate hopeful Val Demings, a state lawmaker and former Orlando police chief running against Sen. Marco Rubio, that also means touting their credentials.
“I’ve been a judge for over two decades,” Beasley said at that Durham event. “I served as a judge and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina. And as a judge, I have always worked hard to uphold the rule of law as well as upholding the Constitution.”
“As chief of police [in Orlando], I had to manage people, resources, and balance a $130 million budget during good times and bad times,” Demings told ABC News in a statement
“The buck stopped with me,” she added. “I always chose tough jobs and I know I made a difference in my community. I am proud to tell that story.”
Both Beasley and Demings have either proposed changes to policing or, in Demings case, co-sponsored a major bill that Democrats said would overhaul the system in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. But Demings has also stressed her support for increasing law enforcement funding — with her website describing her as “tough-on-crime.”
During the Durham campaign event, Beasley detailed how as a senator she would lobby for protecting due process rights for officers, increasing funding for training, addressing staff shortages and providing mental health services for law enforcement officers
Beasley and Demings’ Republican opponents have also branded themselves as law enforcement supporters. Rep. Ted Budd, running in the North Carolina Senate race, has touted his endorsement from the state’s trooper association. Meanwhile, Rubio has run ads featuring some law enforcement officers attacking Demings for her record on policing while in Congress.
Why Democrats are cautious about ‘defund the police’
Broadly speaking, the “defund the police” movement is skeptical of law enforcement’s accountability and effectiveness. It encourages divesting funds from police departments and allocating the money to non-policing forms of public safety and community support, such as expanding mental health and social services for people in crisis rather than tasking officers with responding.
The movement reached new heights following Floyd’s murder by a police officer in Minneapolis in 2020.
While “defund the police” quickly became prominent among activists and many parts of the Democratic base — and was embraced by some progressive lawmakers — leaders in the party have long cautioned against the slogan, saying it’s not their view or that it’s reductive. On CNN in December of 2020, when asked if Democrats being tied to “defund” contributed to their losing House seats in the 2020 election, House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn said that he had come out before the election against “sloganeering.”
“John [Lewis] and I sat on the House floor and talked about that ‘defund the police’ slogan, and both of us concluded that it had the possibilities of doing to the Black Lives Matter movement and current movements across the country what ‘Burn, baby, burn’ did to us back in 1960,” Clyburn said.
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chair Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, D-N.Y., likewise said in May 2021, during a caucus call, that Republicans’ attacks on the defund the police movement proved to be more damaging in the 2020 election than anticipated.
In his first State of the Union address, earlier this year, President Joe Biden made clear his stance on law enforcement, saying they need to be funded.
“The answer is not to defund the police,” he said.
Some progressives disagree: “All our country has done is given more funding to police. The result? 2021 set a record for fatal police shootings,” Missouri Rep. Cori Bush wrote on Twitter in March, rebutting Biden.
During an interview on “This Week” earlier this year, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was asked about the rise in certain kinds of crime and Democrats’ division on the issue. Pelosi said defunding police is “not the position of the Democratic Party.”
The Pew Research Center released a poll in October 2021 which showed that 47% of adults said that spending on policing in their area should be increased.
Beasley and Demings’ messaging on law enforcement reflects both their values, they say, and what strategists call a campaign season calculation to appeal to voters. The two are major Senate candidates in battleground states, in a cycle in which Democrats need almost every victory in order to retain their majority in Congress from a resurgent GOP.
“There were allegations made that Democrats support defunding the police and it took a bit of time for Democrats to finally respond,” said Xochitl Hinojosa, a Democratic strategist unaffiliated with either race. “And they responded forcefully because it is not true and Democrats do not support defunding the police. So now you’re seeing Democrats tackle that issue head-on, which I think is smart to do.”
Hinojosa told ABC News that Beasley and Demings are in a “unique situation” to discuss supporting police while still voicing support for some changes.
“I think that because of their backgrounds in law enforcement, they’re able to not only talk about what they would do if they were to be elected, but they’re talking about what they have done and their experience that puts them in a unique situation to tackle the issue head-on,” Hinojosa said.
The issue of crime could be impactful in battleground races across the country. A Marquette University Law School Poll released earlier this month analyzing Wisconsin’s Senate and governor race showed that 61% of registered voters were concerned about crime. The issue ranked among the top five issues for voters in the state.
When broken down by political affiliation, 71% of state Republicans were concerned compared with 47% of Democrats and 61% of independents.
Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette University Law School Poll, told ABC News that the GOP had seized on crime as an issue to use against Democrats in the midterm elections.
“In the [Wisconsin’s] Senate race, early negative ads and now current negative ads try to link [Lt. Gov.] Mandela Barnes to crime,” Franklin said, referring to the Democratic challenger to incumbent Sen. Ron Johnson. (A Barnes aide told ABC News in response to the ads, “He [Johnson] loves to point fingers about crime, but then voted against police funding while Lt. Governor Barnes and Governor Evers actually invested in public safety and law enforcement.)
Hinojosa, the outside strategist, said that Democrats need to make clear their messaging on law enforcement, given voters’ feelings. House Democrats — mindful of the midterm elections and at the request of moderates sensitive to GOP attacks — on Thursday worked to pass a package of police funding bills.
“They are talking more about tackling crime and community policing and ensuring that our law enforcement is trained and has the resources to be trained,” Hinojosa said.
Demings, too, is keeping her credentials in focus on the trail. Her campaign emails still refer to her as “chief.”
(CARACAS, VENEZUELA) — The military contractor known as ‘Fat Leonard’ – real name Leonard Francis — has been caught, the U.S. Marshals Service told ABC News late Wednesday night.
He was found after an Interpol notice went out and was found in Caracas, Venezuela, while trying to board a flight.
The arrest was made by Venezuelan authorities based on a “Red Notice” from Interpol. The arrest was made on Tuesday but is just now becoming known.
“A Red Notice is a request to law enforcement worldwide to locate and provisionally arrest a person pending extradition, surrender, or similar legal action,” according to the Interpol website.
Leonard was set to be sentenced on Sept. 22 after being found guilty in 2015 for bribing Navy officials with lavish gifts, prostitutes and cash. Authorities say he cut off his ankle monitor last week and had not been seen since.
In one instance, according to the Justice Department, Francis was able to have a ship moved to a port he owned in Malaysia.
To date it remains one of the biggest naval scandals in United States history.
On Sept. 6, U.S. Marshals showed up at Francis’ home after being alerted that his GPS ankle monitor was being tampered with, according to a press release from the agency.
Since 2013, there have been more than 30 U.S. Navy officers charged in connection with his case. A judge ruled that Francis had to forfeit the $35 million he was convicted of defrauding the U.S. government by when he over-billed government contracts and bribed naval officials.
The Marshals were offering a $40,000 reward for any information leading to Leonard’s arrest.
(WATERBURY, CT) — Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is testifying in a Connecticut courtroom Thursday in a second defamation trial to determine what the InfoWars host should pay to Sandy Hook families.
The tempestuous testimony was so frequently interrupted by objections and sidebar conferences at the bench, Judge Barbara Bellis at one point told the jury, “You’re going to get your exercise in today, those of you who wear Fitbits.”
Jones, who has suggested the families who successfully sued him for defamation have a political agenda because they’ve done work on gun control, acknowledged the risks involved in his profession as a conspiracy theorist and provocateur.
“The world isn’t an easy place. When people become political figures they get in the arena,” Jones said.
The plaintiffs’ attorney, Chris Mattei, pounced.
“Were you just trying to suggest that my clients, these families, deserve what they got because they stepped into the arena?” Mattei asked.
Jones answered “no” as his lawyer objected to the question.
Jones’ testimony will resume this afternoon following a lunch break.
Bellis last year found Jones and Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, liable in a defamation lawsuit for calling the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School a hoax.
The jury will decide how much in damages Jones should pay to an FBI agent who responded to the scene and eight families of victims that Jones called actors.
Prior to testifying, Jones has spoken out amid the trial outside the Waterbury courthouse this week, calling the judge a “tyrant” and the trial a “political hit job.” In a press briefing Wednesday, he told reporters did not “premediatively question Sandy Hook,” and that he apologizes if he has caused anyone pain but “didn’t create the story” of Sandy Hook being a hoax.
He repeatedly said he would not perjure himself by saying he’s guilty.
“You can’t have a judge telling you to say that you’re guilty when you’re not. That is insane,” he said.
There is no guilt in civil trials like this one. The plaintiffs successfully sued Jones for defamation in November 2021 over his comments, which included calling them “crisis actors,” saying the massacre was “staged” and “the fakest thing since the three-dollar bill.”
Bellis found Jones liable for damages by default because he and his companies, like Infowars, showed “callous disregard” for the rules of discovery. The jury will now determine much Jones and Free Speech Systems will have to pay the families of children killed in the massacre.
The jury so far has heard from several parents, including Jennifer Hensel, whose 6-year-old daughter, Avielle Richman, was among the 20 children killed in the massacre. She told the jury Wednesday that she still fears for her family’s safety after years of receiving hate mail from people questioning that her daughter had died and checks the backseat of her car before getting in.
After her husband, Jeremy Richman, died by suicide in 2019, she started receiving emails from people calling his death fake as well, she said.
“People were in the cemetery around Avielle’s grave marker looking for evidence that Jeremy had died,” Hensel said.
Other parents have also testified about death threats, rape threats and confrontations outside their homes.
The Connecticut trial comes a month after a Texas jury ordered Jones to pay nearly $50 million in damages to the parents of one of the victims.
In that defamation trial, Jones was successfully sued by the parents of a 6-year-old boy who was killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre after he claimed that the shooting — where 20 children and six adults were killed — was a hoax, a claim he said he now thinks is “100% real.”
(NEW YORK) — High levels of chemicals called per-and polyfluoroalky substances (PFAS) were detected in water-proof or stain-resistant school uniforms in the United States and Canada, according to a new study published Wednesday in the Journal of Environmental Science and Technology.
PFAS chemicals, often called “forever chemicals” because of their slow breakdown, are widely used for their non-stick properties. They are ubiquitous and found in a range of everyday products such as non-stick cookware, stain and water repellants on carpets, food packaging and personal care products such as shampoos and cosmetic products.
Researchers studied more than 72 products from nine different brands, finding that school uniforms had high amounts of these potentially harmful chemicals. The highest levels were detected in clothing that was labeled as 100% cotton or cotton/spandex.
Due to widespread use and their slow breakdown, these chemicals can build up in humans and the environment over time. Current scientific research suggests that exposure to high levels of certain PFAS may cause a range of health problems, from delays in development in children to increased risk of some cancers, with the highest risk associated with drinking or eating contaminated food over an extended time. Scientists, however, are continuing to learn about the health effects of exposure to different types and levels of PFAS.
Researchers are especially concerned about possible high exposure, especially for children.
“Our findings are concerning as school uniforms are worn directly on the skin for about eight hours per day by children, who are particularly vulnerable to harmful chemicals,” said Dr. Arlene Blum, a study co-author and the executive director of the Green Science Policy Institute.
It’s not clear if PFAS chemicals cause health problems if exposed on the skin, but researchers who led the study said that they may end up in children’s bodies through skin absorption, eating with unwashed hands, hand-to-mouth behaviors and mouthing of fabric by younger children.
“These chemicals are not well studied. We still have a lot to learn and we are not sure what harmful effects, if any, these chemicals have by skin exposure and clothing,” said Dr. Stephanie Widmer, a medical toxicologist and an emergency medicine physician.
According to the study, the PFAS levels in some uniforms exceeded the tolerable daily intake set by European regulators. In the United States, regulators have yet to set similar allowable limits for clothing. But given these concerns, bills in New York and California that require the phasing out of PFAS in textiles, including school uniforms, by Jan. 1, 2025, were passed by state lawmakers.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said exposure to PFAS chemicals may be associated with increased cholesterol levels, changes in liver enzymes, decreases in infant birth weights, decreased vaccine response in kids, increased risk of birth complications in pregnant women and increased risk of some cancers.
“The reality is the health concerns that have been reported in association with PFAS cannot be ignored, and while we are learning more about PFAS and their potential dangers, we should all try to limit our exposures as much as reasonably possible,” said Widmer.
Added Blum: “Concerned parents should check if any of their children’s uniforms are labeled ‘stain-resistant.’ If so, they should ask school administrators to update their uniform policies and when purchasing new uniforms, specify PFAS-free uniform options.”
(LAKELAND, FL) — Leo Schofield has been sitting in a prison cell for over 30 years, convicted in 1989 of killing his first wife Michelle two years earlier, and is still fighting to prove his innocence.
“Innocent is no part in it, no plan in it, didn’t know it was happening, didn’t know it was going to happen, and didn’t want it to happen. That is me,” he told “20/20” in an exclusive interview from prison that airs Friday, Sept. 23 at 9 p.m. ET.
Prosecutors argued that Leo Schofield, then 21, was a man filled with anger and waiting to explode against his wife.
Schofield’s defense attorney argued that there was no physical evidence connecting him to the stabbing homicide, and that the state’s timeline of events did not make sense.
Schofield’s second wife Crissie and the non-profit organization The Innocence Project of Florida are among the supporters who have believed Schofield’s story and have worked to exonerate him.
Evidence discovered in the past decade that Schofield and his supporters say link the murder to another man has become central to Schofield’s case, but even that avenue has hit several legal roadblocks.
Michelle Saum Schofield, then 18, didn’t arrive to pick up Leo from her job at a restaurant in Lakeland, Florida, on Feb. 24, 1987. Leo Schofield said he became concerned and began driving around town with his father and mother and talking to friends and family to find his wife.
Police, friends and family searched throughout the area and eventually found her car abandoned and broken into. Three days after she went missing, Michelle’s body was found in a canal in Bone Valley, a region in central Florida.
She had been stabbed 26 times.
“I was so angry at God at that moment. I ripped my shirt off. I punched a tree, punched the ground, I was pulling grass out of the ground,” Leo Schofield said.
Leo Schofield’s past bouts of anger would become a factor in the investigation as neighbors, friends and family told investigators that he was volatile and argued with Michelle in their home. Multiple witnesses also described incidents of physical abuse by Leo against Michelle, including one account by Michelle’s best friend that Leo threatened to kill his wife.
A critical part of their investigation was an interview with a neighbor, Alice Scott, who told police that she heard the couple fighting from her bathroom the night Michelle Schofield went missing and that claimed she later witnessed Leo Schofield put a large object into the trunk of the car and drive off.
A couple who lived near the Schofield’s told police that on the morning after Michelle Schofield’s disappearance they saw her car and a truck belonging to Leo Scofield’s father near the location where her body was found.
Police arrested Leo Schofield in June 1988.
Schofield’s attorney questioned Scott’s testimony at trial, claiming the timing of the alleged fight in the home conflicted with accounts of where he was seen at the time. Schofield’s attorney said that Scott’s testimony claimed the argument took place shortly before Leo Schofield was with his wife’s father, which was several miles away.
The attorney contended that he couldn’t have traveled from their home to his father in law’s residence that quickly.
“In any case that you’ve looked at, you’re going to find some discrepancies with witness testimony,” former Polk County State Attorney Jerry Hill, who presided over the Schofield criminal investigation, told 20/20, “It’s human. I don’t think any witness was looking at their watch saying, ‘There’s Leo.’ I think they were being as honest as they could be in approximating exactly what they observed.”
Alice Scott could not be reached by ABC News for comment.
During the trial, prosecutors called in 21 character witnesses who testified about accounts where they saw Leo Schofield act aggressively and violently. Some described events where they say Leo Schofield was physically abusive towards his wife including pulling her hair.
On the stand Schofield denied claims made by witnesses but admitted to slapping his wife twice.
Schofield maintained to 20/20 that he never physically hurt his wife during their relationship.
“Physical abuse is one type of abuse and then you have the emotional abuse, which I’m guilty of,” he said. “I did a lotta yelling…and I wasn’t beyond punching a wall and being very theatrical,” he said.
In the end, a jury convicted Schofield of first-degree murder and he was sentenced to life in prison.
Schofield continued to maintain that he was not involved in his wife’s murder for years, and things began to change after he met Crissie Carter, a former state probation officer who later became a therapist and taught at Schofield’s prison, in 1991.
After listening to Schofield’s story and reviewing the court records on this case, Carter told “20/20” that she, too, believed he was innocent based on what she said were holes in the prosecution’s case.
“What the state said is not lining up and what he’s saying lines up exactly,” Crissie Carter Schofield told “20/20.”
Their relationship would soon become personal and the pair eventually married and adopted a baby.
During her research, Crissie says she came to a major discovery: fingerprints that investigators had found inside Michelle’s car had never been identified.
“Whoever’s fingerprints are in that car had to know something. We’ve got to figure out who that person is,” she said.
Crissie Schofield hired a new defense attorney, Scott Cupp, who was able to obtain a copy of the fingerprints from the Florida State Police in 2004.
The prints were later run through the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, which was not available to Polk County investigators at the time and matched those of convicted murderer Jeremy Scott, who was serving a life sentence for a 1988 homicide.
Jeremy Scott is not related to Alice Scott, the neighbor who testified against Leo Schofield.
Questions also arose after the then St. Petersburg Times began reporting on the case and published an in-depth investigative article in 2007.
Alice Scott’s testimony came under scrutiny after her ex-husband, Ricky Scott, told the St. Petersburg Times that she had a tendency to twist the truth. “No way Alice could’ve seen and heard from that little bathroom window what she said she heard and saw at the Schofields’ that night,” he alleged to the St. Petersburg Times reporters.
When reporters later questioned Alice Scott about her ex-husband’s statement, she explained, “When I couldn’t see and hear from the bathroom window that good, I walked to the screened porch where I could,” which differed from her testimony in Schofield’s trial.
“She never said that at trial,” Gilbert King, a Pulitzer-prize winning author who is the host of a new podcast about the case, “Bone Valley,” told “20/20.” ” That was all new.”
When asked about Alice Scott’s statement to the St. Petersburg Times, Jerry Hill told “20/20” that he believed Alice Scott was “credible” at the time that she testified and that his investigators verified her account.
“We had no less than three separate individuals go confirm that she could actually see what she said she saw, from where she said she saw it,” he said.
Leo Schofield’s new defense team requested a trial based on the fingerprint evidence. During his 2010 deposition with Leo Schofield’s attorney’s, Jeremy Scott admitted to being a car stereo thief in the area during that time, but denied killing Michelle Schofield.
The request for a new trial was denied, as the court found that Scott’s fingerprints alone would not likely have led to an acquittal on retrial and ruled there were no issues with the trial evidence that would have led to Leo’s exoneration.
The decision devastated the Schofields, their attorney and other supporters.
“This was personal to me. I knew then the same thing I know now: Leo’s an innocent man and it just hit me to my core,” Cupp, now a circuit judge in Florida, told “20/20.”
In 2016, Leo Schofield’s defense attorney Andrew Crawford spoke with Jeremy Scott by phone and claimed that Scott confessed to him that he was responsible for Michelle Schofield’s murder. The conversation, however, was not tape recorded.
“This is a huge deal, what Jeremy is telling me, because never before had he ever admitted any involvement in the homicide,” Crawford told “20/20.”
When questioned by state investigators, Jeremy Scott denied confessing but said he would take the rap for any murder if paid $1,000.
“Jeremy Scott, he’s a red herring,” Jerry Hill said, “but he’s the only herring they’ve got. And so they’re going to stick with it.”
In 2017, Crawford enlisted an investigator to interview Scott again, this time with a tape recorder.
It was during this interview that Scott claimed that Michelle Schofield offered him a ride, and there was a struggle after a knife fell out of his pocket.
“Next thing I know, I lost it. I done stabbed her,” Scott said during the interview. “I’m like panicking now because I don’t know what just happened.”
Crawford teamed up with The Innocence Project of Florida and made another request for a retrial, which led to an evidentiary hearing.
An emotional Jeremy Scott took the stand and testified that he killed Michelle.
During cross-examination, the prosecution pointed out multiple times over the years where Scott denied any role in Michelle Schofield’s murder, as well as certain details that he could not recall or got wrong in his testimony, such as the clothes she wore that night.
The hearing took a dramatic turn when Scott was presented with Michelle’s autopsy photographs, at which point Scott stated “I didn’t do that.”
“They took that as a flip flop that he recanted,” Crissie Schofield said.
However, on redirect examination, Scott affirmed to the court that he did in fact kill Michelle.
“I killed her,” he said.
Ultimately, Leo was again denied a new trial. The court ruled that the evidence did not meet the legal threshold for a new trial, and also made a finding that the testimony of Jeremy Scott was not credible.
An appeals court upheld the decision in 2020.
“I wish I could come up with a better word than devastation and disbelief and just madness. There’s no way to understand it,” Crissie Schofield said of her reaction to the court decision.
In 2018, Gilbert King, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Devil in the Grove, which led to the exonerations of four innocent men, was at a conference of circuit judges in Naples, Florida, when he was approached by Cupp and given information about Leo Schofield’s story and his case.
King was at a conference of circuit judges in Naples, Florida in 2018, when he was approached by Cupp and given information about Leo Schofield’s story and his case.
Since then, King , along with “Bone Valley” researcher Kelsey Decker, has been investigating the case and working on a Lava For Good 9-part true crime podcast on Leo’s story, “Bone Valley,” that launched Sept. 21, 2022. Lava for Good is run by Jason Flom, one of the founding board members of the Innocence Project and a well known advocate for wrongly convicted.
Scott was recently interviewed for the podcast and claimed to Gilbert King that “Leo [is] innocent. That man didn’t do nothing. He’s innocent.”
During her exclusive TV prison interview, “20/20” co-anchor Amy Robach played Jeremy Scott’s recording for Leo Schofield.
“I have a lot of anger about it. He murdered my wife,” he told Robach. “It’s a hard thing to forgive.”
Leo Schofield is eligible for parole next year, and even if he does get out on parole Crissie Schofield said she is insistent on clearing her husband’s name.
“It doesn’t end with Leo getting out. This is Michelle’s story,” she said.
(NEW YORK) — Twenty years ago, Tallie Ben Daniel was a college student wandering the campus of the University of California, Santa Cruz, when she came across a bumper sticker that read “Free Palestine.” Born to an Israeli family in Los Angeles, Ben Daniel had never heard the phrase before. “I had zero context for what that meant. And I didn’t understand,” she recalled. “Free Palestine from what?”
Today, Ben Daniel is an advocate for Palestinian human rights. She’s currently the managing director of Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization that challenges the way the Israeli government treats Palestinians. But her past confusion makes sense against the backdrop of the early 2000s.
In general, U.S. support for Israel was a common, unquestioned stance on both sides of the aisle, while the aftermath of 9/11 only deepened Americans’ rapport with Israel from the lens of solidarity against terrorism claimed by Islamic extremists. Even among those concerned for the Palestinians, many clung to the fleeting optimism that the Oslo Accords of the 1990s could yield a peaceful two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians.
In 2001, when Gallup polled Americans on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, views were clear and consistent: Only 16 percent of Americans sympathized more with the Palestinians, while 51 percent sympathized more with the Israelis. Back then, this wasn’t even a particularly partisan issue — only 18 percent of Democrats sympathized more with Palestinians.
Two decades later, though, the landscape has changed. The share of Americans with more sympathy toward the Palestinians has ticked up to 25 percent. And that support has more than doubled among Democrats: Today, 39 percent report feeling more sympathy for the Palestinians.
A confluence of factors over the past decade seems to be driving this shift. Social media has changed how war is witnessed across the globe — especially among young people — and a growing awareness of social inequities in the U.S. may be reshaping how some Americans perceive conflict internationally, too. But most of all, the Palestinian-Israeli question has become a topic that embodies an intra-party identity issue for Democrats, one that has increasingly pushed liberals to reconsider what constitutes progressive politics.
Summer 2014 marked one of the most deadly episodes of violence in Gaza. In May that year, Israel Defense Forces soldiers killed two Palestinian teenagers. In June, three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped while hitchhiking in the West Bank and ultimately killed, and the IDF launched a full-force defense operation in response. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 73 Israelis were killed — 67 soldiers and six civilians. Meanwhile, 2,251 Palestinians were killed, 551 of them children. Those casualty numbers affected the way the world saw the conflict, and the narrative of justified self-defense that the IDF presented wasn’t universally accepted outside Israel, said Dov Waxman, director of the Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies at UCLA.
“It’s really the last decade, during which so many events and shifts and factors have changed thoughts in the public domain,” Waxman said.” Indeed, myriad dynamics — for example, how U.S. social-justice movements drew parallels to the escalating violence of the 2010s and how Donald Trump’s allied stance toward Israel raised eyebrows during his presidency — have gradually moved the needle on how the American public views the Palestinians.
Notably, what happened in 2014 was the first large-scale escalation in the age of widespread social media. In the years since, researchers have pointed to the ways in which social media has reframed how the international community observes war in real time, whether over the past decade with the Palestinians or this year with the Ukrainians. Whereas bumper stickers once spread messages locally, hashtags were now sending information buzzing around the globe. Until then, most wide-scale information, particularly about life in Gaza, came through mainstream media outlets. Now, for the first time, people around the world were exposed and had access to firsthand accounts from Palestinians, many of which challenged (or at least contextualized) the details reported by large outlets. Some posts also singled out headlines and language used by such publications, accusing their framing of the violence as unfairly neglecting the Palestinian struggle.
“That summer, it was just so clear, how disproportionate the violence was,” said Ben Daniel. “The Israeli government will often talk about their assaults as ‘it’s a war,’ but it became clear that there was only one side with a military.”
Her change in perspective is indicative of how Americans’ opinions on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict have shifted, too — with change especially pronounced among younger Americans. According to Pew Research Center data from March, 61 percent of American adults under 30 have a favorable view of the Palestinian people, compared with 56 percent who have a favorable view of the Israeli people. Ben Daniel thinks it’s important that these young Americans have also been witnessing growing civil rights movements at home.
“Around the same time, Black Lives Matter was having a resurgence. And alliances between folks at, say, Ferguson [Missouri] and Palestine shifted consciousness in general,” said Ben Daniel. She believes that the violence in Gaza in 2014 and the support of Black Lives Matter happening in tandem and underpinned by social media helped circulate comparisons to the conflict by paralleling police brutality in the U.S. with IDF tactics in Gaza.
Indeed, the Black Lives Matter movement, which formed following the July 2013 acquittal of the neighborhood-watch volunteer who killed Trayvon Martin, has aligned itself with the Palestinian cause. In 2014 and again in 2021, pro-Palestinian activists and Black Lives Matter activists have demonstrated their support for each other on social media.
As a growing share of Americans began confronting uncomfortable and embedded injustices in their own country, the parallel details in Palestinian accounts of systematic oppression contextualized a conflict halfway across the world in a new light.
This comparison has been moving. But it has also been controversial.
“It can be a starting point for people new to the conflict, but I caution against taking the comparison too far. That’s ignoring a lot of more complicated dynamics and history,” said Laura Birnbaum, the national political director of J Street, a prominent pro-Israel advocacy group that supports a two-state solution. Comparing the BLM and pro-Palestine movements isn’t something everyone will see as fair, Birnbaum said. She and other supporters of Israel don’t think it’s reasonable to analogize Jews in Israel as white, slave-owning colonizers when the Jewish state exists because of the historical oppression of its people. And some still see Israel in a precarious position as the only non-Muslim-majority country in the Middle East, Waxman said.
This is another place where age may come into play. Whereas some older generations of Americans lived through the latter half of the 20th century, when Israel’s existence was not necessarily considered a guarantee, millennials and Gen Zers are more likely to view Israel as a strong nation with ample financial and military power, Waxman said.
At the very least, the use of the BLM comparison shows how the framing of this conversation has changed. What was once a debate over the logistics of land division has now, for liberal Democrats, turned to a discussion about Palestinians’ human rights.
And that, Waxman said, helps explain why the pro-Palestine position has become a facet of progressive and Democratic identity. “In the past, supporting Israel was seen as aligned with or consistent with liberal values. And, increasingly, it’s seen as contradicting liberal beliefs and values,” he said. This shift has happened primarily among the most liberal Democrats. Gallup polling from February 2021 indicates that liberal Democrats sympathize more with Palestinians compared with Democrats as a whole, by 48 percent to 39 percent. Moderate and conservative members of the party still tend to sympathize more with Israel.
And that is exactly what we’ve seen with a small but growing set of politicians. Pew research from April 2016 showed a widening gap on this issue between supporters of Hillary Clinton and supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders. Meanwhile, the most publicly pro-Palestinian members of Congress — Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who herself is Palestinian American, and Rep. Ilhan Omar, whose hijab renders her visibly Muslim — have also aligned themselves with the party’s progressive left arm. This divide between moderate and liberal Democrats on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is evocative of recurring debates in the direction of the party across a host of issues.
And the schism occurring within the Democratic Party over Israel is only further facilitated by how staunchly Republicans have doubled down on their support. Conservatives are more sympathetic toward Israel than ever, and interestingly, evangelical Christians, who skew overwhelmingly Republican, report even stronger pro-Israeli beliefs than Jewish Americans according to Pew. Meanwhile, Waxman and Ben Daniel also suggested that Trump’s close allyship with Israel’s then-prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and controversial decision to recognize Jerusalem — a city claimed by both Israel and Palestine — as Israel’s capital only drove the notion of unconditional support for Israel further to the right.
The Palestine-Israel question has become an increasing variable in politics, determining campaign funding for certain candidates. Earlier this year, in the Democratic primary for North Carolina’s 4th Congressional District, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, helped raise about $2 million for state Sen. Valerie Foushee, who ran against and ultimately defeated pro-Palestinian and hijabi candidate Nida Allam, a Durham County commissioner. As is usually the case, however, the money in Foushee’s campaign didn’t go toward pro-Israel campaign messaging but instead to closer-to-home everyday issues that resonated with constituents on the ground, like Foushee’s pro-choice abortion stance.
That is indicative of the fact that, while the pendulum is shifting for Democrats, it hasn’t really affected policy yet, Waxman said. That’s because no matter their political identity or age, Americans don’t rate Israel as a high priority issue in their daily lives. “Americans aren’t voting on this, really,” Waxman said. “It’s too far removed compared to other, more everyday issues.”
That said, opinions on the Palestinian cause show that issues don’t have to dictate votes to be relevant within a party. This topic will likely continue to matter for Democrats, even if it doesn’t help get them elected.
(SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO) — Hurricane Fiona, which has become a Category 4 storm as it heads toward Bermuda, left in its wake large-scale devastation in Puerto Rico.
The storm reportedly left at least one person dead, caused catastrophic flooding and knocked out power across the island.
The blackout reminded many of the destruction wrought five years ago by Hurricane Maria, which caused roughly 2,975 deaths and demolished much of the island’s infrastructure.
Over a million customers in Puerto Rico have experienced intermittent power outages since Hurricane Maria, with many losing electricity this time even before Fiona made landfall. As of Tuesday morning, electricity had not been restored for an estimated 1.18 million customers.
Things were expected to change after Hurricane Maria. Billions of dollars in federal support were set aside to repair the island’s energy system but the problems persist.
“Outages have been occurring for one reason or another,” Tom Sanzillo, the director of financial analysis for think tank the Institute of Energy and Economics and Financial Analysis, told ABC News. “It’s beyond belief how bad the system is.”
Here’s what you need to know about Puerto Rico’s power grid and why it remains fragile:
Didn’t a power outage happen five years ago with Hurricane Maria?
Yes, it did. When Hurricane Maria made landfall on Puerto Rico, in September 2017, the storm devastated the island’s electricity grid. It took 328 days, or roughly 11 months, for the island to restore power to all of the customers who lost it during the hurricane, which marked the longest blackout in U.S. history.
The electricity infrastructure had shown signs of fragility even before Maria, said Sanzillo. As the economy in Puerto Rico weakened in the 2000s, the maintenance budget shrank and what has been deemed mismanagement exacerbated the shortfall, he added.
“The system is old and it’s undermaintained,” Sanzillo said. “Maria brought it to light.”
The hurricane’s impact prompted sharp scrutiny of the public utility in charge of the power grid — the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA). Months before Maria, PREPA had declared bankruptcy, citing a $9 billion debt load. PREPA had issued bonds to finance the energy grid, but could not pay them back.
What was done to fix the electric grid after Hurricane Maria?
The years following Hurricane Maria brought a mix of public and private efforts to improve the country’s electrical infrastructure.
Three years after Hurricane Maria, in September 2020, the Trump administration announced nearly $9.6 billion in federal funding for the repair of the island’s power system. The sum made up more than half of the support that PREPA would need to modernize its electric grid over the ensuing 10 years, bond credit rating service Moody’s said at the time of the announcement.
Billions in additional funds from FEMA brought the total support allocated for rebuilding the power grid to roughly $12.8 billion, FEMA said in June.
But FEMA has only spent a fraction of the overall money, and an especially small amount of the funds dedicated to “permanent works,” or projects that aim to replace or restore a damaged facility for long-term use.
FEMA has spent $1.6 billion in emergency categories and $7.1 million for permanent works, Manuel A. Laboy Rivera, the executive director of Puerto Rico’s Central Office for Recovery, Reconstruction and Resiliency said in a press release in June.
In other words, as of June, the amount spent by FEMA on projects to permanently restore the power grid makes up 0.05% of the overall funds made available by the federal government.
The delay owes primarily to disagreement between FEMA and the government of Puerto Rico over the implementation of the funds, said Sergio Marxuach, policy director at the Center for a New Economy, a Puerto Rico-based nonpartisan think tank.
“This is a huge, gigantic megaproject and the scope of work for each component has been argued over with FEMA,” he told ABC News.
A report released last week by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan oversight agency, cited as a key impediment the conflict between FEMA and Puerto Rican government entities over the scope of projects. In addition, officials from the government of Puerto Rico said the island has struggled to obtain the materials needed to commence projects, causing delays of as long as 24 months, the report said.
Another reason for the slow progress centers on a system of reimbursement tied to the funds, which requires local officials to put forward the money for approved projects and later receive reimbursement from FEMA, said Cecilio Ortiz-García, a professor of public affairs at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley who studies Puerto Rico.
“The municipalities are broke,” Ortiz-García told ABC News. “So that right there is basically a black hole.”
Meanwhile, the island also privatized its electric system. In June 2021, a Canadian-American business partnership called LUMA Energy took over management of the electric grid.
The poorly maintained energy grid poses LUNA with a difficult task, but even so the company has performed “below expectations,” Marxuach said. He cited the ongoing power outages that preceded Fiona and the slow repairs that followed them. “LUMA probably underestimated the scope of what they were undertaking,” he said.
PREPA and LUMA Energy did not immediately respond to ABC News’ requests for comment.
LUMA said in a press release this week that its crews have been “assessing damage, performing critical repairs and working with PREPA and private generators” to reenergize the grid in the wake of Hurricane Fiona.
“We want our customers to know that LUMA has been and will continue to work around the clock to restore power to Puerto Rico following the island-wide outage that began early Sunday afternoon,” Abner Gómez, the company’s public safety manager, said Monday.
Sanzillo said a “fundamental reason” for the intermittent power outages since Hurricane Maria stems from the electric grid’s reliance on imported fossil fuels, noting that heightened energy costs amid the pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war have exacerbated a budget crunch as the rates paid by customers fail to offset higher costs. Meanwhile, the grid struggles to address facility deterioration tied to longstanding neglect, he added.
Renewables power 3% of the island’s total electricity, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration based on the fiscal year 2021.
“The system is in a state of disrepair,” Sanzillo said. “We’re at the same place we were five years ago.”
What happens next?
Most immediately, Puerto Rico needs to get its power restored. Gov. Pedro Pierluisi declined to say how long it would take to fully restore the grid, but he said for most customers it would be “a question of days,” the Associated Press reported on Tuesday.
In the long term, additional federal funds are set to make their way into energy infrastructure projects on the island.
Annie Brink, an associate administrator at FEMA, said last week that the agency had made $9.5 billion available for a massive infrastructure project to fix Puerto Rico’s energy grid. She vowed that the project would “build it back better.”
Many advocates, including Sanzillo, have called for further investment in renewable energy, both as a means of relieving financial woes for the energy system and bolstering resilience in the event of another major storm.
The island’s government appears to share that goal. The Puerto Rico Energy Public Policy Act, signed into law in 2019 by then Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló, sets a goal for the island to obtain 40% of its energy from renewables by 2025.
“We should use money from the government to maximize investment in renewable energy,” Sanzillo said. “If they did those things they’d be very far down the way of having a grid that works.”
Ortiz-García said the prospect of future storms adds urgency to the task faced by Puerto Rico.
“There will be more Fiona’s,” he said. “There will be more frequent and more severe extreme weather events. The question is not on the side of the events. We know the events are coming.”
