Not a good record to have.....

28 deaths at a California skydiving center, but the jumps go on

Records obtained by SFGATE reveal a string of deadly accidents and lax regulation of the sport

By Andrew Chamings

The skies were blue over the Lodi Parachute Center as Francine Turner and her son, Tyler, 18, arrived with his two best friends. It was Saturday morning, Aug. 6, 2016, and the three boys were there to celebrate their high school graduation with their first skydiving experience before heading to UC Merced together in the fall.

The day before, over lunch, the boys had half-joked about their chutes not opening. Now, a few minutes before boarding the plane, Francine joined them in the hangar that sits just off Highway 99, a few miles north of Stockton in California’s Central Valley. Francine said that the boys were shown a safety video at the same time as they received safety waivers to read and sign, making it impossible to focus on both. She also recalled the boys being ushered into the next room for a harness fitting before the video was over.

“It was hurried and rushed, and seemed very lackadaisical for something that is, you know, your life,” Francine told SFGATE in July last year.

The boys were signed up for tandem jumps — a kind of ride-along that allows novice parachutists to fly through the air while harnessed to an experienced skydiver. Tyler was paired with Yong Kwon, a 25-year-old who had moved from South Korea two months earlier and spoke very little English.

Francine spent a few extra dollars to have a videographer fly up with the boys and film the dive. Then she said goodbye to her son. “He gave me a big hug and said, ‘I love you,’” Francine said. Before boarding the plane, Tyler knelt and said a little prayer on the runway. It was the last time his mother saw him alive.

A few minutes later, Francine saw some people walking back from the drop zone. None of them were Tyler. Francine would later learn that Tyler and Kwon’s main and reserve parachutes had tangled, preventing either from opening; both Turner and Kwon were killed on impact when they hit the ground in a nearby vineyard.

Francine would soon learn that 21 people had died in accidents tied to the center since 1985, as reported in a detailed investigation by the Sacramento Bee; five more have died there in the years since her son’s death. Kwon’s parents, still in Korea, would learn of their son’s death on Facebook.

After her son’s body was taken away, Francine was left bewildered and angry that the planes just kept going up, loaded with skydivers.

“We didn’t stop because we don’t like the guy, we didn’t stop because we weren’t interested in the guy,” the center’s former owner, Bill Dause, told the local TV station, KFSN-TV, that day. “We didn’t stop because life goes on.”

‘I will not contribute to any story that will denunciate the skydiving community’

It’s impossible to calculate the fatality rate per jump at the Parachute Center, because no one keeps track of how many people jump out of planes there — or how many have died while doing so. In 2018, Dause told Sacramento’s KXTV-TV even he wasn’t sure how many deaths had occurred at his business. Dause declined to speak with SFGATE for this story.

In response to a records request in 2023, the San Joaquin County Medical Examiner’s Office provided SFGATE with coroner’s reports detailing many of the 28 fatalities conclusively linked to accidents at the center, the first in 1985 and the most recent in 2021. But there’s no central repository to track the deaths, and no federal or state agency specifically tasked with investigating what happened. Records of numerous investigations into wrongdoing at the Lodi Parachute Center, carried out by the Federal Aviation Administration over the years, were obtained by FOIA request.

The lack of data on fatalities is not unique to the Parachute Center (or to Skydive Lodi, or Acme Aviation, or any of the other names the center has operated under over the years). As federal watchdog the National Transportation Safety Board put it in a 2008 report, “the FAA does not have data on the number of parachute jump operators or the number and type of aircraft used in parachute jump operations in the U.S. The absence of these data precludes any calculations of safety statistics for parachute jump operations, including accidents rates.”

FAA communications manager Ian Gregor told SFGATE the agency does investigate skydiving deaths, but not the cause of them, and its authority to regulate the sport is limited.

“FAA investigations of skydiving accidents and incidents typically focus on inspecting the packing of the parachute and reserve parachute, and rules of flight for the pilot and aircraft. If an accident involves a tandem jump, we also look at the instructor’s qualifications,” Gregor said. “The FAA does not investigate to determine the cause of the event.”

There is no special license for skydiving pilots, and few training requirements for people who want to jump out of planes for fun. The FAA has a handful of specific certification requirements, including for people who want to pack parachutes or lead tandem jumps. But the agency outsources almost all of the training, certification and maintenance of records to parachute manufacturers and the United States Parachute Association, a private industry and lobbying group.

The USPA itself does collect and publish member organizations’ self-reported death rates in aggregate every year, but membership in the group is voluntary. According to its data, there were 10 fatalities out of an estimated 3.65 million jumps in 2023. Many so-called drop zones, including the Parachute Center, are not members, and their numbers are not included in the reports.

The NTSB has repeatedly criticized what it has called the “insufficient regulatory framework” around skydiving, including in 2019, after a skydiving plane crash killed 11 people in Hawaii. The USPA, meanwhile, is currently lobbying against a federal bill that would increase requirements for plane maintenance, which was written in response to the Hawaii tragedy. 

“I will not contribute to any story that will denunciate the skydiving community,” USPA spokesperson George Hargis told SFGATE in November, when asked if someone at USPA would be open for an interview.

The group’s public materials make both its position on regulation and its cozy relationship with the FAA quite clear. “The FAA and USPA rely on self-regulation from within the skydiving community for most training and operational requirements,” according to the USPA website. The USPA’s Skydiver’s Information Manual, which the FAA officially recommends as a resource, is even more direct about the group’s stance on governance.

“USPA has no obligation to anyone concerning his or her skydiving activities,” the introduction to the manual reads. “All references by USPA to self-regulation refer to each individual person regulating or being responsible for him or herself.”

In an emailed statement sent in March, Hargis wrote that the USPA does not oppose increased regulation in the sport, “when it is necessary and appropriate based on data-driven decisions.” She added that deaths in the sport have decreased over the decades, and that fatalities are not counted by region or facility “since that is almost never a factor.” 

“The reality is that the vast majority of skydiving accidents are a result of simple, individual human error,” she wrote.

‘We did not witness the pilot consuming alcohol’

Last year, SFGATE requested both FAA and NTSB investigation records of accidents at Lodi Parachute Center. The agencies replied with page after page of documents, an exhausting chronology of crashes, deaths and near misses.

The first recorded fatality at the Parachute Center was 38-year-old Sunnyvale agricultural worker Michael Abbott, who plummeted to his death on Jan. 27, 1985. According to the coroner’s report, other skydivers in the group lost sight of Abbott as they fell; Abbott’s girlfriend found his body and unopened parachute in a nearby vineyard.

On April 7, 1993, 15-year-old Devon Whittaker of Roseville went skydiving with his mother, who jumped after her son. According to the coroner’s report, she saw his bridle, which helps release the parachute, billowing out of the side before watching her son hit the ground below. (USPA-affiliated sites maintain a minimum age of 18, but there is no law setting age limits for skydiving.) Dause told reporters that the teenager seemed like a mature young man, and had previously completed 10 jumps without incident.

Whittaker’s was the fifth of 28 deaths connected to the Parachute Center since 1985. The map below shows the locations and details of each of the fatal accidents.

There have also been a large number of accidents at the Parachute Center that did not result in deaths.

In May 2016, a few months before Turner’s death, there were two serious plane crashes at the center. In the first, a plane with 17 passengers crash-landed into a field. The momentum sent the plane skidding across a road and into a moving truck before carrying it into a vineyard, where it flipped upside down and came to a halt. The plane was destroyed; no passengers suffered major injuries, but one person caught video of the nightmarish experience.

After the crash, NTSB inspectors placed partial responsibility on a “mechanic’s inadequate inspection” of an important clamp while replacing a fuel line the night before. Ten days later, another plane stalled and crash-landed in a field, resulting in no injuries but “significant damage” to the aircraft.

FAA inspections have documented a plethora of code violations over the years, particularly around maintenance. In 2009, an inspector found numerous problems with both plane safety and record-keeping, leading a concerned official to write that aircraft maintenance at the Parachute Center “seems to be secondary,” and that Dause’s priority was getting planes in the sky. The inspector wrote that a mechanic at the center was “clearly overwhelmed” by the requirements of keeping four planes airworthy. In 2010, an inspector again found a large number of safety concerns, including a plane which Dause had allegedly damaged by cutting 38 holes out of the rear bulkhead to “allow airflow.”

Several of the reports bring to mind the NTSB’s complaints about regulatory laxity. In 2013, for instance, the FAA received an anonymous complaint alleging that a pilot at Lodi had consumed alcohol before flying the plane. In addition, the complaint reported the pilot had smoked a cigarette “in proximity” to a worker who was refueling a plane with the engine running, a dangerous and often-prohibited practice known as “hot fueling,” all while passengers boarded the plane. The complaint also alleged that jumpers were not using seat belts during takeoff and landing.

In response, two FAA officials went to the airport and observed the operation, where they witnessed someone hot fueling a plane, but not while smoking or drinking. “At that time we did not witness the pilot consuming alcohol,” the investigators reported. “We were unable to determine if jumpers were wearing safety restraint harnesses during any phase of the skydiving operations.”

The officials spoke with Dause, according to their report, and agreed to send him a letter “presenting our recommendations to review. No other actions will be taken at this time.”

‘They agreed to stop doing the jumps for now’

In 2010 and 2011, the FAA issued two fines against Dause and his business for failing to comply with federal aviation regulations, totaling $933,000. But FAA spokesperson Gregor told SFGATE that the fine was never collected by the agency, which eventually referred the matter to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for further action. The Justice Department did not respond to questions about whether the fine was ever paid.

The deaths of Turner and Kwon, though, seemed to be a turning point for the business, both for its legal standing and its reputation. The FAA, USPA, NTSB and U.S. Attorney’s Office all launched investigations related to or stemming from the incident.

Investigators quickly determined that Kwon had been neither officially certified nor properly trained to lead tandem jumps in the U.S., a finding that led California Assemblywoman Susan Talamantes Eggman to introduce a bill known as Tyler’s Law, which made operators of skydiving establishments legally responsible for vetting their instructors’ credentials and training. It was passed by the Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2017.

In 2018, Turner’s parents filed a wrongful death suit against both Dause and the Parachute Center; three years later, a judge awarded the family a $40 million judgment, writing in the decision that Dause was personally responsible for the payment. Francine Turner told SFGATE the family has never received any payments from Dause or the Parachute Center.

In 2019, an FAA inspector met with Dause at Lodi and told him to halt tandem jumps while investigations into Turner’s and Kwon’s deaths proceeded. The report concluded with the investigator telling Dause that “if they were caught doing them (tandem jumps) I would have to do another enforcement against them. They agreed to stop doing the jumps for now.”

In 2021, the U.S. Attorney’s Office filed a federal indictment against Robert Pooley, an instructor who taught tandem courses at the Parachute Center, including the class Kwon took to become a “certified” tandem instructor. The indictment accuses Pooley of conducting tandem trainings after the USPA had suspended his certification to do so, and of forging the signature of another, still-certified tandem instructor on more than 100 students’ certification documents, including Kwon’s. Pooley faces charges of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft in a trial set to begin in May.

In 2016, shortly after Turner’s and Kwon’s deaths, the USPA reviewed 140 instructors who had been trained at Lodi, resulting in the suspension of 12 other instructors’ certifications. It also revoked both Dause’s and Pooley’s membership, according to the Sacramento Bee. The USPA declined to tell SFGATE why it revoked either man’s membership, or Pooley’s tandem certification. As a private organization, it is not subject to either state or federal open records laws.

A 2017 analysis of the case prepared for California legislators strongly suggests a cause for Pooley and Dause’s revocations. “According to USPA,” the authors wrote, “the owner of the Skydive Lodi Parachute Center was well aware that the instructor [Kwon] was not certified and had been trained by an instructor-examiner whose credentials had been suspended.” In addition, the indictment against Pooley alleges that Dause received a portion of the money Pooley is accused of collecting fraudulently.

In a 2020 deposition during the Turner family’s lawsuit, Pooley, too, said that Dause had been aware his tandem certificate had been suspended. He also stated that Dause, and no one else, was managing the drop zone at the time of Tyler’s death, as he had been since 1981, according to court testimony by Dause.

‘Don’t you realize someone just died?’

In the two years after Turner’s and Kwon’s deaths, there were three more fatalities at the Parachute Center: X-ray technician Matthew Ciancio, 42, of June Lake, California; Alamo resident Brett Hawton, 54; and Nena Mason, who fell to her death in a nearby alfalfa field.

In 2019, the death of Maria Vallejo, 28, made national news. Planes flew out of Lodi despite high winds, which pushed Vallejo over to Highway 99, where she hit a moving big rig before landing on the road. “It’s only a matter of time before more and more of that happens and more people die,” local trucker Rick Costa told KCRA-TV.

The most recent death at the center occurred in April 2021, when 57-year-old Watsonville woman Sabrina Call slammed into the ground after her parachutes tangled.

“We’re sad, but it’s just like a car wreck or anything else,” Dause told reporters at a press conference two days later. “You have to go on.”

When asked who could actually shut down a site like Lodi, SFGATE was given contradictory answers. According to NTSB spokesperson Peter Knudson, “the FAA has oversight responsibilities and the authority to end operations in the interest of safety.” FAA spokesperson Gregor, meanwhile, told SFGATE this simply isn’t true, as skydiving companies themselves do not require certification.

San Joaquin County Board of Supervisors spokesperson Katie Albertson told SFGATE they have no authority over the site.

Carrying on is a common refrain for Dause. On the stand during the Turner case, for instance, Dause was asked whether he ever closed the business over the course of its many name changes. “Well, other than the sun going down,” Dause told Turner’s lawyer. “That would be the stop.” One coroner’s report, that of Marvell Strawn in 2004, reported that Dause cut the parachute off the victim’s lifeless body before “going back to business.”

On paper, at least, a few things have changed since Turner’s and Kwon’s deaths. In 2021, Dause handed over legal ownership of the operation to an acquaintance named Richard Smith, according to a deposition Smith gave during the Turner lawsuit in 2022. At the end of 2023, though, Dause — now age 81 — was still a familiar presence at the Lodi center, answering phones, taking payments and piloting planes full of parachutists into the sky over Highway 99, as reported by the Sacramento Bee.

Smith, meanwhile, lives in Carson City. He said in his deposition that he does not visit Lodi daily, and that there’s “not much business” at the drop zone. He estimated at the time that the center was taking up “less than three loads a day on average.”

Today, the center is a bleak sight. The only signage visible from Highway 99 is the word “Skydive,” painted on a battered wooden board propped up by a car tire. Beyond that, the rusted frame of an old barn and a derelict phone booth stand next to the hangar where first-time divers nervously wait for their turn to hit the skies.

But back in 2016, the site was a hub of activity, according to Tyler Turner’s mother, Francine. In an interview with SFGATE, she recalled the minutes and hours after her son’s death.

Kwon and Turner’s bodies were found “tucked inside” each other, according to the coroner’s report; Kwon’s hand was still gripping tightly to the ripcord he had failed to deploy. Both bodies were put into the same large red body bag and taken to the morgue.

After the coroner’s van left the vineyard, Francine’s brother led her back to the center. Inside, she was appalled to see instructors going about their business, rolling up parachutes and taking cash from excited customers. She approached a man there with his young family and pleaded with him not to jump.

“I said, ‘Don’t do it, don’t do it,’” she said. “‘You’re going to leave your wife and your kids with no dad.’”

She recalls screaming at Dause, and then wandering the center in a state of shock.

“What are you doing?” she asked, to no one in particular. “Don’t you realize someone just died?”

Sgr A*

What's happening to the big black hole in the center of our galaxy? It is sucking in matter from a swirling disk -- a disk that is magnetized, it has now been confirmed. Specifically, the black hole's accretion disk has recently been seen to emit polarized light, radiation frequently associated with a magnetized source. Pictured here is a close-up of Sgr A*, our Galaxy's central black hole, taken by radio telescopes around the world participating in the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration. Superposed are illustrative curved lines indicating polarized light likely emitted from swirling magnetized gas that will soon fall into the 4+ million mass central black hole. The central part of this image is likely dark because little light-emitting gas is visible between us and the dark event horizon of the black hole. Continued EHT monitoring of this and M87's central black hole may yield new clues about the gravity of black holes and how infalling matter creates disks and jets.

AI to Reinvigorate?

Liz Shuler Wants AI to Reinvigorate the Labor Movement

The head of one of America’s most storied labor organizations sees changing technology as a great risk — and great opportunity.

By TOM MCGRATH

Liz Shuler was standing inside a university lab one day a few years ago when she saw the future of everything — in a cutting board.

At the time Shuler was secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, one of America’s most storied labor organizations, and she’d come to Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University with a delegation that included members of Unite Here, the union representing hundreds of thousands of workers in the hospitality industry. Their mission: to get a glimpse at how technology might impact the workplace in the years ahead. It didn’t take long before that impact became clear, at least in the kitchen. One of the professors at CMU, a school known for its prowess in technology and design, was demonstrating a cutting-edge cutting board that was able to measure how fast someone sliced vegetables, as well as the quality of their motion.

“It was easy to see we were basically one step away from having the technology cut the vegetables,” Shuler remembers. “That was kind of a wake-up call where we thought — this isn’t just about industrial kitchens. It’s about every setting you can imagine.”

Fast forward a few years, and the world has evolved. Shuler is now the president of the AFL-CIO, having moved into the top spot in the summer of 2021, following the death of the organization’s longtime leader, Richard Trumka. Thanks to artificial intelligence, anxiety about technology’s impact on job security has only increased — not only among kitchen workers, but also white-collar professionals who long saw themselves as immune from disruption: writers, lawyers, health care professionals, marketers, financial analysts.

Meanwhile, the labor movement, after a decadeslong fallow period, suddenly seems to be having a moment, at least in part due to all that AI anxiety. The Writers Guild of America got much of what it wanted in its monthslong strike against Hollywood producers last summer. Union autoworkers not only won the support of Joe Biden in their walkout against U.S. car manufacturers last year, but scored historic contract gains that could ripple across other industries. And overall support for organized labor is at a 60-year high, with more than 70 percent of Americans saying they approve of unions.

The only wrinkle? For all the love labor is getting, actual union participation is at a modern low, with just 1 in 10 private-sector workers carrying a union card.

It’s a paradox, but it’s also a moment in which Shuler sees opportunity. Thanks in part to rising trepidation about AI, Shuler believes workers — including professionals who’ve traditionally stood outside the labor movement — need unions more than ever. And she’s determined not only to return organized labor to a place in American life that it hasn’t occupied for decades, but for labor to help shape our technological future.

“The Writers’ Guild got everyone’s attention because they were talking about the dumbing down or gig-ifying of their work based on AI,” Shuler told me when we chatted one day last summer. “They were being asked to just plus-up what Chat GPT writes for Hollywood. That is not only dehumanizing, but it’s taking away the creativity and the craft and dumbing it down to ones and zeroes. And it’s sort of woken up the entire country around the potential for this kind of technology and how it’s going to impact work.”

Shuler’s main goal — not easily accomplished, given the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence and the hurdles that unions still face — is for labor to have “a seat at the table,” as she puts, in the roll-out of AI, meaning she wants workers to have a voice in everything from how technology is developed to how it’s regulated to how it’s deployed in individual companies. Among the companies is AI innovator Microsoft, with whom the AFL-CIO recently inked a new partnership that gives workers the kind of input Shuler talks about.

Of course, in some respects what Shuler is pushing for symbolizes something even deeper. Two of the most disruptive events in American life over the past 40 years — deindustrialization and the rise of digital technology — were more or less imposed on the American public without average people having much say in what happened. When it comes to the AI revolution that’s now upon us — a revolution that could be very good or very bad — Shuler wants to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

If the world — and potentially the labor movement — are entering a new era, Shuler herself is also something new: She’s the first woman ever to lead the AFL-CIO, the consortium of more than 60 unions that represent more than 12.5 million workers across the country. (Its member organizations range from the Communication Workers of America to the NFL Players Association.) Shuler, who’s 53, has arguably been prepping for the job her entire life. She grew up in a union household in Oregon, and she tells a story about successfully negotiating equal pay for babysitters in her neighborhood — when she was 11. While she studied journalism at the University of Oregon (her dream was to be the next Nina Totenberg), after graduation she instead found an even deeper calling in the labor movement, going to work for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and then, in 2009, for the AFL-CIO.

Since becoming AFL-CIO president in the summer of 2021, Shuler has built upon work started during Trumka’s 12-year tenure while also trying to modernize the organization. She’s emphasizing diversity — she wants to ensure unions are welcoming of all genders, races and nationalities — and trying to look around the bend at how the next wave of technology will impact the workplace.

At the forefront of the latter effort is the Technology Institute of the AFL-CIO, a unit launched several months before Trumka succumbed to a heart attack and that Shuler has championed. Its portfolio includes convening member unions to talk about the impact of technology, as well as attempting to influence policymakers as they wrestle with regulating AI. (Both Shuler and Technology Institute executive director Amanda Ballantyne participated in the Senate’s AI Insights Forums last fall.) Maybe most notably, the Technology Institute is partnering with universities, including Carnegie Mellon, to provide worker input on new technology as it’s being developed.

In one project with CMU, the Technology Institute arranged for union bus drivers to offer their perspectives on self-driving buses. In a subsequent white paper, CMU professors noted that while autonomous buses have the potential to improve safety, they’ll actually make operators’ jobs more complicated. What’s more, the report noted, self-driving technology is no substitute for the more human part of what bus operators do in attending to passenger needs (say, assisting an elderly person) and looking out for passenger safety.

“We’re really interested in the applied use of technologies — we want to make sure they work,” says Steven Wray, executive director of the Block Center for Technology and Society at CMU. “Often it’s going to be people who are using the technology who are going to give you the best insight into that. We want to make sure that we’ve thought about all the potential negatives that come about.”

For Shuler, such projects are an example of why it’s so important to get worker input before a new technology is deployed.

“Instead of [corporations] saying, OK, we’re going to tell you how the technology is going to be implemented, we need to actually be upstream in the development of the technology and have workers’ voices in those labs shaping what happens,” she says. “Unless you have the ability to come together with your co-workers and shape [technology], put guardrails around it, negotiate what your role is in it, then it’s not going to benefit us all in the way that it needs to.”

That’s the exact idea behind a first-of-its kind partnership the AFL-CIO and Microsoft announced in December. The new collaboration seeks to ensure that workers’ perspectives will inform the approach of Microsoft’s developers as they move forward with AI, creating a mechanism for labor to share insights and concerns with the people actually developing the technology. Equally important, the agreement also calls for Microsoft to remain neutral if any group of its U.S workers seeks to form a union and for the company and the AFL-CIO to work together on policy recommendations about AI.

In announcing the new initiative, Shuler talked about a “co-creation process” — with labor having a strong voice in how technology is implemented. It’s something she thinks has long been missing. As she put it to me during an interview, “I really do find that we talk about the future of work, and very few people talk to workers.”

Shuler’s focus on shaping the future is, to an extent, an attempt to avoid repeating the past. From both a public opinion and participation standpoint, the labor movement’s high-water mark was in the 1950s and 1960s, a period — not coincidentally, some would argue — when the American economy was booming and the middle-class was growing. But by the late 1970s, unions had begun what turned out to be a decades-long descent. One factor, ironically, was the rise of the middle class that organized labor had arguably helped to create. As more and more middle-class families were able to afford to send their kids to college, those kids increasingly ended up in professional or managerial jobs — occupations that largely fell outside labor’s footprint. (The number of MBAs awarded in America grew from fewer than 5,000 in 1960 to nearly 60,000 in 1980. It’s now around 120,000 per year.)

At the same time, the once-thriving U.S. economy began to struggle with high inflation and low productivity, and unions — with their demands for ever-fatter contracts — were blamed for hurting corporate competitiveness. By the time Ronald Reagan famously fired members of the federal air traffic controllers union in the summer of 1981 (a union that had actually endorsed him the previous year in his race against Jimmy Carter), the ground had shifted. Nearly 7 in 10 Americans supported Reagan’s actions, and unions were on the outs. By the time Bill Clinton was passing NAFTA in the early 1990s, even Democrats, long labor’s biggest defenders, were keeping their distance.

But the lack of labor voices at the table — both within individual industries and in public policy more broadly — has arguably had some harsh consequences. From 1979 to 2019, American manufacturing jobs, long an entryway to the middle-class for workers without college degrees, dropped from 20 million to 13 million, with positions either off-shored or automated out of existence. Meanwhile, even as the American economy expanded and white-collar professionals at the top of the pyramid grew wealthier — CEO pay exploded 1,400 percent between 1978 and 2021 — income for everyday Americans stalled. According to research from Pew, between 1979 and 2018 median incomes in America, when adjusted for inflation and buying power, “barely budged.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, 2018 was around the time that public support for unions began to inch back up. And it’s continued moving in that direction, as workers at high-profile companies like Amazon and Starbucks have launched — sometimes successfully, sometimes not — union-organizing efforts.

While closing the wage gap remains at the top of the labor agenda, it now sits side-by-side with having a voice in the technology that’s likely to only further disrupt the workplace. Shuler believes it’s an effort that will help unions gain even more support from the public, many of whom have grown uncomfortable with the power that Big Tech has exercised over the last decade.

“For the most part technology is just thrown out into the marketplace, and it just wreaks havoc,” she says. “There’s no thought process — or safety mechanism or, heaven forbid, regulations — that can actually assess and model what’s going to happen before it happens. Like Chat GPT — it just showed up one day because Microsoft and OpenAI were like, look at this great thing we developed!” She pauses. “We need, like, an FDA for AI. You don’t put a vaccine out there without testing and going through the rigors of the scientific community and forecasting what’s going to happen. You need the same kind of approach for AI because it’s going to be equally impactful, and people will be harmed if we don’t think about and aren’t intentional about how we’re introducing things into our economy.”

The big difference between today and the 1970s, of course, is that artificial intelligence won’t just affect manufacturing — it’s coming for everyone. That’s one reason public anxiety about its impact is palpable. Long-term, the concern is existential — could AI theoretically wipe out the human race? Short-term, it’s more practical — will AI take my job? In one survey of 2000 working Americans, 77 percent said they were concerned about job loss due to artificial intelligence. And the positions potentially at risk aren’t just blue-collar ones, but white-collar ones as well: coders and software engineers, financial analysts and traders, marketers and content creators, graphic designers and people working in the legal industry.

Is the anxiety justified? David Autor, an MIT economist who’s spent his career studying the labor-market impact of technological change, says … maybe. His position: While there’s no doubt that AI will disrupt the world of work, it remains too soon to tell exactly how.

Autor explains that what gives labor its value in the marketplace is expertise — a body of knowledge or a competence you possess that most people don’t have and that the world says is important. Expertise is what differentiates a crossing guard from an air traffic controller — both occupations regulate the flow of traffic, but the training and education it takes to keep a 7-year-old out of harm’s way is less than that required to stop two huge airliners from colliding. Hence, air traffic controllers earn more.

Part of the promise of AI, Autor says, is that it has the potential to give people greater expertise, which could increase their productivity and ultimately their value. He gives as an example a nurse practitioner or physician assistant who, thanks to the extraordinary power of artificial intelligence, could begin to make medical diagnoses that right now can only be done by an M.D. who has many years of intensive training. Indeed, Autor continues, the exciting thing about AI is that it could help people who don’t have elite educations — the type of workers left behind economically in the last several decades — expand what they can do and increase their worth in the workplace.

“The last four decades devalued the work of people who don’t have college degrees,” he says, noting the impact of both technology and deindustrialization. “They used to do skilled office work or skilled production work — now many of them do food service and security and cleaning.” Deployed the right way, AI could give such workers the tools to reverse that trend.

But there’s also the possibility that artificial intelligence could spin out in a different way. In making abundant certain types of expertise that are now relatively scarce — financial analysis, writing, graphic design, healthcare delivery, just to name a few — AI could allow companies to eliminate positions or pay people less, since what they do will have become a commodity. While such an approach might be more efficient and actually help the broader economy grow, it raises the question of whom that growth would benefit. Corporate bottom lines might improve, but we could simultaneously see an even more intense version of what we’ve seen over the last four decades — those at the top doing very very well, those in the middle or at the bottom struggling.

As with any new technology, Autor says the real unknowns about AI are all the ways people will use it that, right now, we can’t even imagine. He compares it to GPS, which was initially conceived and developed by the U.S. government as a way of guiding weapons systems. GPS does that, but decades later it does a lot more, from powering the geo-location functions in our smart phones to playing an integral role in the electrical grid.

“We often don’t know what the killer app of a new technology is because we think of it as a simple replacement for something we already have,” he says.

The good news when it comes to AI, Autor believes, is that nothing is yet determined. We can decide the tasks we want AI to do; we can control how it’s integrated into our jobs and lives; we can retrain people for new jobs AI will create. “I think we have agency in this,” he says. “It’s such a valuable tool, and there are many ways to use it.”

This is where Autor’s views come together with Shuler’s: The best course forward, both believe, is not to stop the development of AI or even the elimination of some jobs, but rather to include workers in the conversation so that we get the big upside of AI without a massive downside.

So what’s the best way to give people a voice in what’s coming?

Shuler, predictably, believes it’s through unions. “We think collective bargaining is actually the tool to manage this — labor and management sitting across the table, figuring it out together in partnership,” she says. “If we have the trust, and if we can look around the corner and see a better future, we’re going to be partners in that, rather than resisting it.”

Helping Shuler’s argument is not only the current momentum that labor has in the U.S., but also the fact that job anxiety is spreading to white-collar professions that never before felt threatened. “The level of insecurity that low-wage workers in manufacturing lived through now is coming after the professional class, who didn’t feel they had to face that level of disruption before,” says Patricia Campos-Medina, executive director of The Worker Institute at Cornell University and a Democratic candidate for Senate in New Jersey. “I think you’re going to see more labor activity and more labor unrest in the professional class as they have to face disruption in their careers and lives.”

Indeed, white collar professions were seeing a small uptick in union activity even before Chat GPT was unveiled in the marketplace in 2022. Tech workers at Google and Apple have organized in the last few years, as have video game developers, museum workers and medical residents (including those at high-profile institutions like Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania and Mass General Brigham in Boston).

“People are starting to see unions in a new and different light,” Shuler believes. “Because many people forgot that unions were the way to achieve a kind of justice in the workplace. Or they had a certain stereotype or perception of what a union was: Oh, that’s for industrial settings. Or that was before we had labor laws. Well, no, actually, it’s this thing called a union that enables you to come together with your co-workers for fairness on the job.”

Despite Shuler’s optimism, there remain huge obstacles to unions regaining the position they once held in American life and to them being the vehicle that best protects workers against the negative impact of AI. One challenge is cultural. Will, say, a group of financial analysts, with zero history of union participation, suddenly opt to bargain collectively over which tasks AI handles and which remain done by humans? An even bigger hurdle is structural. As Shuler points out, under current labor laws, the path to forming a union is long and fraught.

“It takes an act of absolute heroism to form a union these days through the NLRB process,” she acknowledges. “Most companies will fire you, harass you, intimidate you — they’ll do anything they can to prevent a union coming into their workplace.

“If we really had a free and fair way to form unions without fear of retaliation and reprisal,” she argues, “we would see tremendous growth.” While more recent data is hard to find, a 2017 survey from the Economic Policy Institute appears to back Shuler up on that point, with 48 percent of nonunion workers saying they’d vote to create a union in their workplace if they could.

A final impediment is one that hurt organized labor so much in the 1970s and 1980s — the perception that greedy unions can undercut corporate competitiveness. David Autor says that’s a particular bug of the American approach to unions.

“The structure of collective bargaining in the U.S. is problematic,” he says. “It’s fundamentally adversarial. It’s establishment by establishment. It’s a kind trench warfare.”

That makes Autor somewhat skeptical that the union movement is necessarily the best way to ensure worker rights in the rollout of AI. “I think we need a stronger framework for worker protection in the United States,” he says. “But will our 90-year-old union structure do that very effectively? I don’t want to say it can’t happen. I don’t say I don’t want it to happen. But it doesn’t seem very likely to happen.”

Autor says what might work better is the type of sectoral bargaining that happens in many western European countries, where, say, all auto workers essentially get the same contract, no matter which company they work for. (He acknowledges there’s not much political will for this, though progressives and some populist Republicans support it, and the AFL-CIO sees it as one way for workers to have a seat at the table.) Such an approach levels the competitive playing field for businesses, making them more likely to view labor as a partner, not an adversary. Autor also believes government regulation should play a role when it comes to protecting workers.

Broadly speaking, AI is one area where, at least at the moment, there’s political bipartisanship. In Congress, four senators — Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.); Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.); Todd Young (R-Ind.); and Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) — have taken the lead on the issue, meeting frequently and organizing the AI Insight Forums to gather input from a wide array of voices. Meanwhile, last fall the Biden administration issued a sweeping executive order about AI that touches on everything from national security to protecting workers. Rather than laying out specific rules, the order mostly asks various federal agencies and departments to begin developing guidelines for AI. The devil — and the bipartisan fights — will likely be in the details.

When it comes to AI’s specific impact on the labor market, the politics seem particularly tricky for Republicans. Can they give the workers who are now part of their base protections from AI — while still appeasing a business class that’s focused on profits and wants low taxes and minimal regulation? It’s a challenging needle to thread. (Senators Young and Rounds didn’t respond to interview requests on the topic.)

Shuler says politicians and government officials have a long way to go before they can even become a voice in what’s happening. “These days I feel our regulatory environment, and our decision-makers, are so far behind the curve,” she says. It’s why she’s hopeful that, as people look for a kind of control they haven’t had in decades, they’ll turn somewhere else.

“Most people feel pretty scared and powerless when it comes to what’s on the horizon because there’s so much change happening,” she says. She mentions the ongoing impact of Covid-19, as well as climate change and now technology. “These are all big threats, and if you’re managing it by yourself, it’s pretty daunting. But if you’re coming together collectively in a union, you probably have a better shot at making it work for you.”

Weaknesses

Trump’s weaknesses with GOP voters go beyond the suburbs

Primary results from more than 1,000 counties show clear warning signs for Trump with Republican voters in exurbs and small towns.

By JESSICA PIPER and ZACH MONTELLARO

The battle for Trump-skeptical Republican voters isn’t just about the suburbs.

It’s true that the hundreds of thousands of GOP primary voters who voted against former President Donald Trump this year were concentrated in highly educated, suburban areas that have swung blue over the past decade.

But a POLITICO analysis shows there’s also a significant bloc of voters who did not want Trump in more exurban, red-leaning counties — the kinds of places that were skeptical of Trump in the 2016 GOP primary and, while largely voting for him in the 2016 and 2020 general elections, have remained somewhat resistant to his takeover of the Republican Party.

The analysis of GOP presidential primary results from more than 1,000 counties shows warning signs for Trump, especially as Republican voters continued to vote against him in closed primaries after he clinched the nomination. And it makes clear that, while independents and crossover voters may have boosted former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley in some primaries, a chunk of true Republican voters still wished for someone else to be the party’s nominee.

“You hear a lot of moderate Republicans now who say that they’ll never vote for Trump again,” said Parker Fairbairn, county GOP chair in Emmet County, Michigan, on the northern end of the state’s Lower Peninsula, where Trump won 55 percent of the vote in the 2020 general election. In last month’s primary, he got two-thirds of the vote there.

What distinguishes Emmet County and similar geographies from the other suburban ones is their broader politics. These aren’t the kinds of suburbs on the outskirts of major cities, where wealthy, educated professionals have already fled the Republican Party.

They’re farther away from urban areas. They’re less densely populated, and they have fewer voters with college degrees. These places — which include North Carolina’s Republican-leaning exurbs, and conservative but less Trump-inclined counties several hours north of Michigan’s major cities — still vote predominantly for Republicans, both at the presidential and local levels. In 2016, when both parties held contested primaries, the Republican voters in these counties backed candidates like Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) over Trump, and in the general election they voted for Trump at lower rates than the deep-red rural areas.

Republicans are banking on the fact that partisanship usually wins out. This is far from the first contentious primary to leave bruised egos and hurt feelings, and usually the vast majority of voters come home to their party’s presidential nominee eventually. By Election Day, voters tend to return to their partisan camps.

And the skepticism of Trump doesn’t mean Biden has an easy road. Voters looking for what Fairbairn described as “commonsense conservatism” aren’t likely to find it with the incumbent Democratic president, either. And Trump could benefit from a political environment where polls have repeatedly shown a majority of American voters are dissatisfied with the state of the economy and the direction of the country.

“The cost of living has just skyrocketed. So I think Trump has that going for him,” said Fairbairn, the Emmet County chair.

But in a close election fought on the margins, even small shifts matter. Republicans’ success at bringing those voters back into the fold will help determine whether Trump ousts Biden from the White House. Democrats’ ability to draw away even a small percentage of the non-Trump GOP voters — or, at the very least, convince them to stay home — can help keep him there.

That push and pull sets the stage for a battle over the hundreds of thousands of non-Trump primary voters. Biden’s campaign has been overt in its overtures, including releasing an ad on Friday that featured a string of Trump’s insults of Haley and implored her supporters to join his campaign instead. If Democrats can buck historical trends, such voters could play a particularly outsize role in deciding swing states: Candidates other than Trump got at least one quarter of the Republican primary vote across more than 60 counties across North Carolina, Michigan and New Hampshire.

In Georgia, which held several weeks of early voting before Haley dropped out, Trump struggled among early voters in key areas, including Cobb County, a longtime GOP stronghold that has swung sharply toward Democrats over the past two presidential elections.

And in Arizona and Florida, two states with closed Republican primaries that voted after Trump became the party’s presumptive nominee, candidates other than the former president still got around 20 percent of the vote.

“We will pick up a few of these Republicans, I believe that,” said Sam Edney, Democratic county chair in North Carolina’s Transylvania County, a county southwest of Asheville where Trump got 67 percent of the GOP primary vote this year.

“I also hope a substantial number simply don’t vote in the Trump and Mark Robinson races, that will help Democrats as well,” he added, referencing the Republican gubernatorial nominee, who is an ally of the former president. “You know, it’s politics.”

The challenge for Democrats is overcoming the partisan polarization that has come to dominate elections, and Republican voters’ deep skepticism of Biden. The reality is that many Republican primary voters are, in matters of ideology and policy, closer to Trump than the Democratic president. That makes crossing party lines a tough sell, despite the aversion toward Trump that Democrats are hoping to capitalize on.

“Republicans’ substantive policy differences with President Biden’s administration vastly outweigh any objections there may be with President Trump’s unique personality and approach,” said North Carolina state Sen. Tim Moffitt, a Republican who represents a western North Carolina district that includes Henderson County, in an email to POLITICO.

One figure exemplifying that: New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, who endorsed Haley and traversed his home state arguing a GOP ticket headed by Trump would lead to major losses for the party. He has now backed Trump.

“For anyone to act surprised that when the contest is left between President Biden and President Trump — that, ‘how dare Governor Sununu support President Trump?’ — at the end of the day, Gov. Sununu is a solid Republican,” said Jason Grosky, GOP chair in the state’s swingy Rockingham County, along the border with Massachusetts. “What else was he going to do? Vote for President Biden? Zero percent chance.”

Of course, some of the Haley voters weren’t really Trump voters — or even Republicans — in the first place. In states with open primaries, some committed Democrats crossed party lines for the opportunity to vote against Trump in the primary, alongside independents and moderates who favored Biden in 2020 and voted for Haley, but fall firmly in the category of anti-Trump voters. Those types of voters should be easier pickups for Democrats, but would not improve Biden’s margins compared to four years ago.

“Where President Trump gets hurt is educated, suburban women and independents,” said Michigan state Rep. Mark Tisdel, a Republican and Haley backer who represents a swath of Detroit suburbs won by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2022. “If he’s going to win this election, he’s going to have to find a way to bring those soft Republicans and those independents back to our side of the ledger.” (Tisdel said there was an “overwhelming probability” he himself would vote for a straight Republican ticket in November, “no matter who’s at the top.”)

But Haley’s vote share, particularly in Republican areas, also reflected that some tried-and-true Republicans wanted to avoid Trump as the nominee.

Those voters are the target for groups like the super PAC Primary Pivot, which relaunched this month as Haley Voters for Biden after the former South Carolina governor dropped out.

Republican voters would be “the most difficult group” to win over, said the group’s senior adviser, Robert Schwartz. He said the super PAC has learned some early lessons as it works to refine its messaging, including not talking about Jan. 6, which “most conservative voters don’t like hearing about even if they think it was wrong.” Schwartz said messaging on things like “loyalty to the military, or talking about NATO and being anti-Russia” are more appealing topics.

But most important is reaching these voters soon.

“There’s still a lot of raw feelings about how Nikki Haley and her family were treated, and about the way that MAGA and Donald Trump are treating Nikki Haley supporters and the whole ‘permanently barred from MAGA,’” he said. “As we get closer to the election, those kinds of feelings of resentment are going to fade away. … We want to lock in that feeling of resentment and disgust toward the way Trump treated them.”

He acknowledged “a significant amount of” the non-Trump GOP primary voters will end up voting for the former president in November. But, he argued, “This year is different than most years in terms of just a deep enmity of these people toward coming back home to Trump again.”

Democrats hope so. Even if voting for Biden may be out of the question for some, Democrats know that those who would otherwise vote GOP choosing to stay home or cast their ballots for a third party would also improve the party’s chances.

“We’ve got to educate these Republicans who are disgruntled with Trump,” said Edney, the Democratic chair in Transylvania County, North Carolina.

Those voters will also be a particular target in newer battlegrounds like Cabarrus County, North Carolina — a rapidly growing Charlotte exurb that Trump won by a bit under 10 points in the 2020 general election that is among the counties where the Biden campaign is already opening field offices. Last cycle was the first time in more than four decades that a Republican presidential candidate didn’t win by double digits there. And in the state’s GOP primary this month, Trump got 73 percent of the vote.

“We have to chase every vote,” said Mackenzie Reedybacon, chair of the Cabarrus County Democratic Party. “Every single one of those 27 percent of folks who didn’t vote for him is someone worth talking to.”

Polling below 100 seats

UK Conservatives polling below 100 seats, survey shows

New analysis suggests Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s party would win just 98 seats in next election.

BY ZIA WEISE

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party is on track to win fewer than 100 seats in the next election, with Labour likely to score a landslide victory, a new poll suggests. 

A seat-by-seat analysis based on a survey of 15,000 voters sees Sunak’s governing party winning in just 98 constituencies compared to Labour’s 468, the Sunday Times reports. 

The poll, conducted by agency Survation on behalf of the Best for Britain campaign group, puts Keir Starmer’s Labour Party at 45 percent of the overall vote, a 19-point lead over the Tories. 

Reform U.K., the right-wing populist party set up by Nigel Farage, would score 8.5 percent and win seven seats, with the Liberal Democrats getting 22 seats, according to the survey. 

In Wales and Scotland, the Conservatives would see a complete wipeout, winning no seats, according to the report. The analysis gives the Scottish National Party 41 seats and Plaid Cymru two seats. 

The poll did not account for undecided voters, which represented 15 percent of the people surveyed. 

Bridge reconstruction

No timeline on debris removal or bridge reconstruction, Buttigieg says, but work is ‘underway’

The bridge collapsed early Tuesday when a cargo ship slammed into a key support pillar.

By KELLY GARRITY

It’s still not clear how long it will take to clear debris from the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Sunday, but efforts to remove the remains of the bridge and the cargo ship that sank it — and reopen the vital shipping lanes at the Port of Baltimore — are underway.

“We haven’t received a timeline yet, but what I can tell you is the work is now underway. Parts of the nonfederal channel are already being worked on, and there is a 1,000-ton capacity lift crane on a barge being put into place — now there’s another 600 ton crane on its way to back it up,” Buttigieg said Sunday during an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

The bridge collapsed early Tuesday morning when a cargo ship slammed into a key support pillar. Initial reports from the National Transportation Safety Board and videos of the collision shared on social media suggest that the ship suffered a power outage just before it struck the bridge.

The crash sent a tangle of debris into the water, cutting off a major U.S. shipping lane, and a key entry point for cars, trucks and agricultural machinery. Around 8,000 people work directly in the port, and a prolonged closure would have far-reaching impacts on supply chains across the country.

It’s also still unclear how long it will take to rebuild the bridge, Buttigieg said Sunday, but federal money is already flowing to Maryland.

The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration swiftly approved $60 million in emergency funds on Thursday. The original bridge took five years to complete in the 1970s, Buttigieg said, “but that doesn’t necessarily inform us about the timeline on the reconstruction.”

In a news conference last week, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore predicted a long road to rebuilding the fallen bridge.

“This work will not take hours,” said Moore. “It will not take days. It will not take weeks,” he said.

End exclusive control over ticket sales

California lawmaker wants to end exclusive control over ticket sales

The bill is directly aimed at the embattled seller Ticketmaster.

By LARA KORTE and DUSTIN GARDINER

A state lawmaker wants to end exclusive control by companies like Ticketmaster over the sale of concert and sporting tickets, setting up a battle between consumer groups and a powerful sector of the entertainment industry that is still reeling from the 2022 Taylor Swift ticketing fiasco.

The Assembly bill from Oakland Democrat Buffy Wicks, first reported by POLITICO, would go further than some of the proposals that stalled in the California Legislature last year amid fierce lobbying from industry giants. In addition to lifting restrictions on reselling tickets, Wicks’ bill would allow fans more choice in purchasing.

Instead of buying tickets through one company — like Ticketmaster, which typically has an exclusive contract with the venue — fans could instead choose from a variety of companies, similar to the way travel websites like Kayak or Hotels.com operate, Wicks said.

“We want to make sure that we have competition and choice for consumers so we don’t end up with situations like the Taylor Swift concerts — like ‘Lord of the Flies’ attempts to get tickets,” she said.

The bill is a direct attack on Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation Entertainment, which has faced ongoing government scrutiny since the two entities merged in 2010. The discontent reached a fever pitch after Ticketmaster’s chaotic handling of the pre-sale for Swift’s Eras Tour, which was followed by a Senate hearing and an antitrust investigation from the Department of Justice. The probe is still ongoing.

Wicks, who chairs the Assembly Appropriations Committee and has also proposed ambitious housing and privacy policies, is one of the more powerful lawmakers in Sacramento. But Live Nation is a formidable opponent, able to dilute or stall legislation in California and around the nation.

The company enjoys support from groups like the National Independent Venue Association and the Music Artists Coalition, whose board members include major celebrities like Anderson .Paak, Meghan Trainor and Dave Matthews. The groups have raised concerns that the legislation will hurt small businesses and artists by empowering third-party ticket resellers.

“You can bet that the music artist community will come out against this bill unless some substantial changes are made,” Jordan Bromley, a lawyer and board member, said of Wicks’ bill.

Dan Wall, Live Nation Entertainment’s executive vice president of corporate and regulatory affairs, said Wicks’ bill would benefit ticket resellers, not consumers.

“When we and others who have a true stake in producing events — like artists, teams, and venues — explain the real effect of these bills, and how they mainly promote ticket scalping, legislators figure out on their own that they aren’t good for consumers,” he said in a statement.

A ticketing bill proposed last year by Los Angeles-area Democrat Laura Friedman, which would have barred primary sellers like Ticketmaster from restricting the reselling of tickets, was pared down so severely that it lost the support of the Consumer Federation of California, which had co-sponsored it.

Republican state Sen. Scott Wilk similarly introduced a bill last year to break up exclusive ticketing contracts, but his office confirmed he intends to shelve the bill.

“We were asked to take amendments that would essentially make the bill useless,” Wilk’s spokesperson, Nicholas VaVerka, said in an email. “We expected it to be an uphill battle in the Assembly.”

Live Nation has a powerful presence in Sacramento, acknowledged Robert Herrell, executive director of the Consumer Federation of California, which is co-sponsoring Wicks’ bill this year. But in the absence of action from Washington, he argued, the state needs to lead in taking on what he sees as a monopoly.

“We cannot rely, in California, on the feds to do this for us,” he said. “If you’re waiting for them to act, it’s going to be like Waiting for Godot, and we all know how that plays out.”

Drought in southern Africa

Extreme drought in southern Africa leaves millions hungry

The situation in Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi has reached crisis levels.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS

Delicately and with intense concentration, Zanyiwe Ncube poured her small share of precious golden cooking oil into a plastic bottle at a food aid distribution site deep in rural Zimbabwe.

“I don’t want to lose a single drop,” she said.

Her relief at the handout — paid for by the United States government as her southern African country deals with a severe drought — was tempered when aid workers gently broke the news that this would be their last visit.

Ncube and her 7-month-old son she carried on her back were among 2,000 people who received rations of cooking oil, sorghum, peas and other supplies in the Mangwe district in southwestern Zimbabwe. The food distribution is part of a program funded by American aid agency USAID and rolled out by the United Nations’ World Food Programme.

They’re aiming to help some of the 2.7 million people in rural Zimbabwe threatened with hunger because of the drought that has enveloped large parts of southern Africa since late 2023. It has scorched the crops that tens of millions of people grow themselves and rely on to survive, helped by what should be the rainy season.

They can rely on their crops and the weather less and less.

The drought in Zimbabwe, neighboring Zambia and Malawi has reached crisis levels. Zambia and Malawi have declared national disasters. Zimbabwe could be on the brink of doing the same. The drought has reached Botswana and Angola to the west, and Mozambique and Madagascar to the east.

A year ago, much of this region was drenched by deadly tropical storms and floods. It is in the midst of a vicious weather cycle: too much rain, then not enough. It’s a story of the climate extremes that scientists say are becoming more frequent and more damaging, especially for the world’s most vulnerable people.

In Mangwe, the young and the old lined up for food, some with donkey carts to carry home whatever they might get, others with wheelbarrows. Those waiting their turn sat on the dusty ground. Nearby, a goat tried its luck with a nibble on a thorny, scraggly bush.

Ncube, 39, would normally be harvesting her crops now — food for her, her two children and a niece she also looks after. Maybe there would even be a little extra to sell.

The driest February in Zimbabwe in her lifetime, according to the World Food Programme’s seasonal monitor, put an end to that.

“We have nothing in the fields, not a single grain,” she said. “Everything has been burnt (by the drought).”

The United Nations Children’s Fund says there are “overlapping crises” of extreme weather in eastern and southern Africa, with both regions lurching between storms and floods and heat and drought in the past year.

In southern Africa, an estimated 9 million people, half of them children, need help in Malawi. More than 6 million in Zambia, 3 million of them children, are impacted by the drought, UNICEF said. That’s nearly half of Malawi’s population and 30% of Zambia’s.

“Distressingly, extreme weather is expected to be the norm in eastern and southern Africa in the years to come,” said Eva Kadilli, UNICEF’s regional director.

While human-made climate change has spurred more erratic weather globally, there is something else parching southern Africa this year.

El Niño, the naturally occurring climatic phenomenon that warms parts of the Pacific Ocean every two to seven years, has varied effects on the world’s weather. In southern Africa, it means below-average rainfall, sometimes drought, and is being blamed for the current situation.

The impact is more severe for those in Mangwe, where it’s notoriously arid. People grow the cereal grain sorghum and pearl millet, crops that are drought resistant and offer a chance at harvests, but even they failed to withstand the conditions this year.

Francesca Erdelmann, the World Food Programme’s country director for Zimbabwe, said last year’s harvest was bad, but this season is even worse. “This is not a normal circumstance,” she said.

The first few months of the year are traditionally the “lean months” when households run short as they wait for the new harvest. However, there is little hope for replenishment this year.

Joseph Nleya, a 77-year-old traditional leader in Mangwe, said he doesn’t remember it being this hot, this dry, this desperate. “Dams have no water, riverbeds are dry and boreholes are few. We were relying on wild fruits, but they have also dried up,” he said.

People are illegally crossing into Botswana to search for food and “hunger is turning otherwise hard-working people into criminals,” he added.

Multiple aid agencies warned last year of the impending disaster.

Since then, Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema has said that 1 million of the 2.2 million hectares of his country’s staple corn crop have been destroyed. Malawian President Lazarus Chakwera has appealed for $200 million in humanitarian assistance.

The 2.7 million struggling in rural Zimbabwe is not even the full picture. A nationwide crop assessment is underway and authorities are dreading the results, with the number needing help likely to skyrocket, said the WFP’s Erdelmann.

With this year’s harvest a write-off, millions in Zimbabwe, southern Malawi, Mozambique and Madagascar won’t be able to feed themselves well into 2025. USAID’s Famine Early Warning System estimated that 20 million people would require food relief in southern Africa in the first few months of 2024.

Many won’t get that help, as aid agencies also have limited resources amid a global hunger crisis and a cut in humanitarian funding by governments.

As the WFP officials made their last visit to Mangwe, Ncube was already calculating how long the food might last her. She said she hoped it would be long enough to avert her greatest fear: that her youngest child would slip into malnutrition even before his first birthday.

Secular opposition surges

Turkey’s Erdoğan suffers blow in crucial mayoral elections as secular opposition surges

Opposition’s triumph in Istanbul, where the president had invested significant electoral resources, boosts a party that was left reeling by a general election defeat last year.

BY ELÇIN POYRAZLAR

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan suffered a major blow on Sunday, with initial results showing the country’s main opposition party notched up regional election victories around the country.

The opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) held onto or captured the country’s five biggest cities in Sunday’s vote, which had been seen as a make-or-break moment for a movement still reeling from Erdoğan’s victory in the Turkish presidential contest in May 2023.

The CHP saw its biggest triumph in Istanbul, where Ekrem Imamoğlu was reelected mayor. Europe’s biggest city, Istanbul accounts for 18 percent of Turkey’s population and a third of its economy.

In his victory speech delivered late Sunday, Imamoğlu said the local election results would have big implications for the country’s political future.

“Turkey will blossom into a new era in democracy as of tomorrow. March 31, 2024 is the day when democratic erosion ends and democracy begins to recover,” he told a big crowd in Istanbul. 

Imamoğlu is seen as a future challenger to Erdoğan, and winning the city which catapulted the current president to national prominence when he won the mayorship 30 years ago is a symbolic achievement.

Erdoğan conceded defeat and promised to listen to the message delivered by Turkish voters. “March 31 is not an end for us, but a turning point,” he said.

Turkey’s long-serving leader — in office as president or prime minister since 2003 — had vowed to recapture the city where he had made his political career, and sent no fewer than 17 government ministers to campaign in Istanbul ahead of voting.

The CHP also won in Turkey’s capital, Ankara, as well as Izmir, Bursa and Adana, pushing its support to 37.4 percent nationwide with more than 90 percent of the votes counted.

Erdoğan’s Islamist-based AK party trailed on 35.7 percent, losing conservative strongholds including Adıyaman, Afyonkarahisar and Zonguldak.

Selin Nasi, a visiting fellow at the European Institute of the London School of Economics, said the election suggested economic factors had trumped Erdoğan’s variety of identity politics. 

Turkey has been wrestling with sky-high inflation for several years and according to official figures prices are still rising by 67 percent a year.

“Conservative voters punished the AKP at the ballot box for the cost of living crisis,” Nasi said, adding that the CHP had expanded beyond its coastal strongholds, increasing its vote in Turkey’s Anatolian heartlands.

Nasi added that the election would not only “inject new life into the CHP,” but also consolidate the position of Imamoğlu, who previously won the city’s mayorship twice in 2019 after the authorities annulled his initial election.

“He is the only politician who succeeded in beating Erdoğan three times,” Nasi said.

Imamoğlu swept the megacity with more than 51 percent of the votes, with the AKP’s candidate Murat Kurum trailing almost 10 points behind him.

A victory in Istanbul — widely considered a microcosm of Turkey — could have given Erdoğan the political momentum and economic resources to move ahead with his goal to amend the constitution to prolong his time in office.

Utku Çakırözer, a CHP member of parliament, hailed the result as a warning from voters to Erdoğan’s AKP.

“Voters gave a yellow card to the government,” he told POLITICO, arguing that with massive support behind the opposition he now sees early elections as more likely.

THE ORANGE FUCK, WHILE SUCKING A PUSS FILLED DICK, EXHIBITS IT'S MENTAL CAPACITY....

In ALL-CAPS Easter message, Trump rips into his foes

The message revived old grudges against his legal nemeses.

By DAVID COHEN

Former President Donald Trump’s Easter Sunday message on Truth Social consisted of seven words about Easter and 161 complaining about the legal system and various enemies of his.

The all-caps message began “HAPPY EASTER TO ALL” and ended “HAPPY EASTER EVERYONE!” but it otherwise consisted of attacks on those leading the legal cases against him, including Special Counsel Jack Smith, Fulton County (Ga.) District Attorney Fani Willis (whom he brands as “MRS. FANI “FAUNI” WADE) and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, with a secondary swipe at President Joe Biden and the Justice Department.

Descriptive words in the message include “EVIL,” “SICK” (which appears in quotes), “DERANGED” (also in quotes), “CORRUPT,” and “CROOKED,” which shows up twice. The post also includes “ILLEGAL” and “ILLEGALLY.”

Trump has been indicted on 91 charges in various cases, though he has yet to be convicted on any of them.

The post was not unusual for a holiday greeting from the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. His posts last year on Christmas Eve and Christmas covered similar terrain with one ending “IT’S CALLED ELECTION INTERFERENCE. MERRY CHRISTMAS!” Another message concluded: “MAY THEY ROT IN HELL. AGAIN, MERRY CHRISTMAS!”

Trump’s jam-packed TruthSocial feed Sunday also included derogatory material about Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), who is set to retire from the House in April, as well as Judge Arthur F. Engoron and Judge Juan Merchan — and Merchan’s daughter. There were also polling stories and a photo of him receiving a golf trophy from Jack Nicklaus, winner of 18 major championships and perhaps the most accomplished golfer of all time. Trump boasted last week that he had won championships at his club in West Palm Beach, Florida.

In contrast, Biden posted Sunday: “Jill and I send our warmest wishes to Christians around the world celebrating Easter Sunday. Easter reminds us of the power of hope and the promise of Christ’s Resurrection.”

Biden’s message ended: “From our family to yours, happy Easter and may God bless you.”