 Welcome to Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. Two warring factions of Sudan's military have announced a 72-hour ceasefire, coinciding with the start of the Muslim holiday of Id al-Fitr. Despite the announcement, residents of Sudan's capital Khartoum and neighboring cities report gunfire and shelling have continued. The World Health Organization reports at least 413 people have been killed, and more than 3,500 others injured in the week since fighting erupted between Sudan's army and the rapid support forces paramilitary group. Earlier today, Sudan's top general and de facto ruler Abdel Fattah al-Burham made his first public remark since the fighting broke out. There remains hope that we are with our great people, and we will overcome this tribulation and emerge from a unified, strong and coherent, and our slogan will only get stronger, one army, one people. In his speech, the general claims Sudan's military is committed to a transition to civilian rule, even though he led the coup 18 months ago that toppled Sudan's civilian prime minister, Abdel Handak. CNN is reporting the Russian mercenary Wagner Group has been supplying Sudan's rapid support forces with missiles that could not be independently confirmed. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has been rotating more troops into its base in Djibouti to prepare for the possible evacuation of U.S. diplomatic personnel from Sudan, they say. A new study finds the vast ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica are melting three times faster than they were just 30 years ago. Study co-author Ruth Motrum described the findings as disastrous, warning coastal communities will face increasing amounts of flooding as sea level rise accelerates due to the melting ice. On Thursday, the European Commission's Climate Agency reported last year was the continent's second warmest year on record, and warned this year is on track to set more record temperatures across Europe and around the world. This is Samantha Burgess of the Copernicus Climate Change Service. We saw prolonged and extensive heat waves and also prolonged and extensive drought over much of the continent. We had the highest emissions of carbon from wildfires in a number of countries, and those wildfires were bigger than average. They started earlier than average, and the season persisted longer than average. We also saw record ice melt from glaciers in the European Alps. So climate change isn't a future problem, it is a current problem. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg made a surprise visit to Ukraine's capital Kyiv Thursday for talks with President Volodymyr Zelensky. During a joint press conference, Zelensky said it's time for NATO to invite Ukraine to join the military alliance. Stoltenberg replied, the issue would be discussed at the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania in July. This will be high on the agenda of the meeting, and also in the lead-up and the preparations for the Vilnius summit. Ukraine's future is in the Euro-Atlantic family, Ukraine's future is in NATO. All allies agree or not. This week, Ukraine received U.S.-made surface-to-air Patriot missile systems for the first time. Meanwhile, Russian officials have admitted a Russian warplane bombed the city of Belgrade near Ukraine late Thursday after it accidentally fired a weapon. Russia's defense ministry said some buildings have been damaged, but no one was injured in the blast, which left a huge crater in the street near several apartment buildings. President Biden's pick to lead the Labor Department testified before a Senate panel Thursday as her nomination hearings got underway. Julie Su appears to face roadblocks by both Republicans and conservative Democrats who oppose her pro-worker, pro-union track record. Su, who's serving as deputy labor secretary and is also a civil rights attorney, would be the first Asian-American to serve as secretary in Biden's cabinet. After law school, I spent nearly two decades representing workers. What I learned is that too many people still work full-time, year-round, and live in poverty. Too many are denied a fair day's pay for a fair day's work. At the same time, I learned that working people, when given a chance to organize, to be heard, not only make things better for themselves, but help to bring the American dream within reach to those around them. In Uganda, President Eurima Sevani has refused to sign into law a draconian anti-LGBTQ bill, which allows for the death penalty in some cases and criminalize even identifying as gay. Instead, the president urged the Ugandan Parliament to make the legislation even harsher. He made the announcement Thursday as he praised lawmakers for their efforts and rejected international pressure to undo the controversial measure. The intensifying violence against the LGBTQ community has forced many to flee. This is a Ugandan photographer and LGBTQ activist speaking from Johannesburg, South Africa. Queer people can't get medication, queer people can't get education, and at the moment, there is a lot of more justice that is happening, beating people up, killing people. Society rates are also rising, because again, within the crisis of this, it's traumatic. Many people can't really handle that, so before the government kills you, people killing themselves. To see our interview with Ugandan LGBTQ activist Frank Mogisha, go to our website, democracynow.org. Back in the United States, the Republican-controlled House has passed a bill that would ban transgender women and girls from competing in sports at schools and colleges that receive federal funding. The measure has no chance of passing the Democratic-led Senate, while the White House said President Biden would veto the bill if it made it to his desk. Bans on transgender athletes are being challenged by the ACLU in Idaho, Tennessee and West Virginia. This week, North Dakota became the latest state to enact a law criminalizing gender-affirming care for minors. Over 450 bills attacking the rights of transgender people have been introduced in state legislatures nationwide. In Atlanta, Georgia, protesters rallied outside the Fulton County Jail on Thursday, demanding the closure of the 11-story, 1,300-bed facility demanding justice for Lashawn Thompson. The 35-year-old black man, who was being held in the jail's psychiatric wing, was eaten alive by insets and bedbugs in his cell last year. According to Thompson's family, civil rights lawyer Ben Crump reports former NFL quarterback and activist Colin Copernick has agreed to pay for an independent autopsy of Thompson's body. Meanwhile, Fulton County commissioners have approved $5 million in funding for emergency improvements to the jail. Thompson's family and local activists are calling on the Department of Justice to launch an investigation. Tiffany Roberts of the Southern Center for Human Rights said, quote, how long will we hide from the reality that Fulton County is chronically dysfunctional and there is no humanity in a system like this, she asked. To see our Democracy Now! broadcast exclusive interview with the family attorney, as well as Lashawn Thompson's brother and sister, go to democracynow.org. Oklahoma's Court of Criminal Appeals has denied the latest requests by death row prisoner Richard Glossop for a new trial, paving the way for his execution May 18. Thursday's ruling came after Oklahoma's attorney general asked for Glossop's 1998 murder conviction to be vacated in a decades-long case in which Glossop narrowly escaped execution three times. Glossop has always maintained his innocence. Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow and staunch Trump ally, was ordered to pay $5 million for losing his 2021 Prove Mike Wrong challenge after a computer forensics expert showed that there was no Chinese interference in the 2020 election, as Lindell had claimed. An arbitration panel found Robert Seidman, a Republican who twice voted for Trump, to disprove Mike Lindell's data, which he called manufactured and bogus. SpaceX is claiming success after the first launch of its massive new rocket-dubbed starship. The two-stage prototype lifted off Thursday morning from SpaceX's sprawling base on Texas Gulf Coast near the U.S. border with Mexico, becoming the largest and heaviest machine ever to fly under its own power. At least six of the rocket's 33 engines failed during flight, and the vehicle self-destructed over the Gulf of Mexico about four minutes after liftoff. Residents of Port Isabel near the launch site reported particulates rained down on their neighborhoods. The fiery end to the launch was the latest in a series of explosions around SpaceX launch site near the Lower Rio Grand Valley National Wildlife Refuge, after headlines will go to Brownsville, Texas for the latest. BuzzFeed News is shutting down. The announcement was made by BuzzFeed's CEO and co-founder Jonah Peretti in an email to staff, where he said the company is lying off 15 percent of its employees across multiple divisions. HuffPost, which BuzzFeed acquired in 2020, will now be the company's sole news brand. This came on the same day the digital news media company Insider, formerly known as Business Insider, said it would cut 10 percent of its workforce. And in Chile, President Gabriel Boric announced he is moving to nationalize his country's lithium industry. Chile has one of the largest lithium reserves of the world. It is a mineral that, being in bus and electric cars, energy storage, batteries, is key in the fight against the climate crisis and in the fight against climate change. This is an opportunity for economic growth that will be difficult to beat in a short term. Any private companies extracting lithium will have to partner with the state, which will hold majority stakes in new production contracts. This comes as environmental activists this week protested Chile's approval to extend Anglo-Americans' copper mining activities in the Andes, which advocates say threatens a nearby glacier and the area's water supply. And those are some of the headlines. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. It has been another deadly week in the United States as gun violence shattered families and communities across the country. In one of the most shocking cases, a white homeowner in Kansas City shot a black teenager in the head who rang his doorbell by mistake. Senators say 84-year-old Andrew Lester exchanged no words with 16-year-old Ralph Yarl before opening fire on him through a glass door, striking him in the chest and head. Yarl had simply gone to the wrong house to pick up his younger twin brothers. Yarl survived. He's now recovering from a traumatic brain injury. The shooter's grandson appeared on CNN Thursday and described his grandfather as a racist who avidly watched Fox News and embraced conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, in New York, a 65-year-old man has been charged with secondary murder for fatally shooting a 20-year-old woman named Kailin Gillis, who'd mistakenly pulled into the wrong driveway. In Elgin, Texas, two cheerleaders were shot by a man in a parking lot of a grocery store on Tuesday after one of them mistakenly tried to get into his car thinking it was her own. Meanwhile, a North Carolina man has turned himself in after shooting a six-year-old and her parents after the girl tried to retrieve a basketball that had rolled into the man's yard. The number of mass shootings in the United States this year has now reached 166. On average, there's been more than one mass shooting every day this year in the United States. In Alabama, six people have been arrested on murder charges in connection with the recent mass shooting at a Sweet 16 birthday party in Dadeville, Alabama that left four people dead and 32 injured. Over the weekend, the National Rifle Association held its annual convention in Indianapolis, Indiana, less than two hours from Louisville, Kentucky, where a gunman armed with an AR-15-style semi-automatic assault rifle killed five people at a bank where he used to work April 10th. To talk more about the gun epidemic in the United States, we're joined now by Andrew McKevitt, associate professor of history at Louisiana Tech University, author of the forthcoming book Gun Country, Gun Capitalism, Culture and Control in Cold War America. Drew, welcome to Democracy Now! It's great to have you with us, though under horrible circumstances. Why don't we start off where I just left off? And that is, as you have one mass shooting after another, right, Louisville followed Nashville, where six people were killed, three of them nine-year-olds and three adults. The NRA holds its meeting. Republican presidential wannabes flock to that meeting. It is less than two hours from Louisville, where a mass shooting had just taken place. Can you put this all in context for us? Sure, Amy. Well, thanks so much for having me. And I do wish this were not the kind of conversation we were having, but it does seem inevitable and perennial at this point. I do think—I think to put this in some context, I think we talk about our gun problem all wrong. I think this—the way we talk about it and the precise language we use to talk about these problems is the kind of language that the NRA and the gun lobby wants us to use. We often think about our gun problem in the language of rights and the law and the Second Amendment. We adopt the language of good guys with guns and bad guys with guns and the so-called law-abiding citizen. And when we do that, we're using the very same language that they've crafted to understand these crises that we're seeing more and more. Instead, as I said at the beginning there, I think we ought to conceive of our gun problem as a problem of gun capitalism. That is a material problem. We are rapidly approaching the point at which we will be a country of a half-billion guns. That will happen before the end of this decade. And I don't think it's possible to conceive of solutions to our gun problems without that larger—without recognizing that larger materiality of guns in which we live, in which we are effectively swimming. So you're talking about more guns than people in the United States. I want to go to this issue of the NRA just a day after the five people were killed in a mass shooting in neighbor in Kentucky. Indiana Senate Republicans honored NRA Chief Wayne LaPierre ahead of the NRA's annual convention in Indianapolis. Moms Demand Action responded in a report by WTHR13. They have the audacity, the audacity to stand on the floor of our Senate in our statehouse and honor the organization that far and away is most responsible for the proliferation of guns in our country. It's really a painful reminder that the Republican Party of the State of Indiana doesn't care. 13 News asked LaPierre directly about the criticism. We think all these federal gun laws ought to be enforced and we could dramatically reduce crime in America. That last voice, Wayne LaPierre, well, at the NRA convention, Donald Trump gave the keynote address and called for firearms training for teachers. I will also create a new tax credit to reimburse any teacher for the full cost of a concealed carry firearm in training from highly qualified experts. Who's better? Who's better? Five percent of teachers, people that are skilled with arms, we want that. Five percent were voluntarily armed and trained to stop active shooters. We would achieve effective deterrence and the problem would cease to exist. Your response to President Trump? Yeah, well, I don't know where the evidence for that claim comes from. We don't have any evidence that arming teachers in schools prevents mass shootings, will be a deterrent in any way, particularly for mass shooters who are often motivated who see what they're doing as a sort of end game kind of action, that they intend their lives to end in those particular instances. And so arming teachers is in no way going to be a deterrent. But I think more broadly these comments speak to the extent to which guns are simply the material reality in which we live. Especially when it comes to things like handguns. This is a conversation we don't often have so much because we're so often focused on these fearsome assault weapons that have now become the target of even President Biden. But instead thinking of this problem more in terms of the sort of mundane and common place relationship we have with firearms, such that it makes perfectly sense to many people in this country, in certain parts of this country, to suggest that teachers go to school armed because those teachers already live in communities flooded with guns and they don't think it would violate any sort of moral or ethical norms for those teachers to go to school armed. I mean, Drew McKevitt, I mean, look, can you have a more gun-friendly state than Texas and look what happened in Uvalde as child after child was gunned down as SWAT teams, troopers, police, all of them, more than a hundred of them, waited for an hour, talked about fully armed. We're talking about military level arming and they wouldn't move forward. And yet you expect to have teachers. Right, teachers with essentially no or little training, the equivalent of perhaps the kind of training you might get in a concealed carry class or self-defense class or something like that. Not something like the kind of training you might expect. Police officers to go through. Many police officers, too, who've also had sort of military training. So the idea that we would arm teachers is simply absurd. When I think about my campus, I don't want any one of my campus armed, including any of the teachers, and I don't want myself armed. I think beyond the very obvious mechanics of potential violence that that creates, there's also that notion of intimidation. And the already the power relationships that already exist between students and faculty or students and faculty and administrators and introducing guns into that equation is just insane to my thinking. And of course, what it does for those that are promoting it, it's just buying more guns. And can you talk about the arming of Wayne LePair, the honoring of Wayne LePair? This is the NRA well known for its corruption near bankruptcy. How does it possibly maintain the power over state and federal public officials that do not represent even the NRA membership is for levels of gun control? I mean, for example, in Colorado now, the legislature just failed to pass an assault weapons ban, despite having a Democratic controlled House, Senate and governor, several House Democrats sided with Republicans to kill the bill and committee at 1 a.m. two nights ago. Yeah, so I think the NRA's power comes from three places. One is the one to which we usually point, which is money. The NRA can dump hundreds of millions of dollars into elections, and obviously has been doing that for a long time now. Though I think we tend to overestimate that a bit. The other two ways in which the NRA can wield this kind of power are a little more subtle. One is the way in which they're able to rally their base very quickly. They've been able to do this since the 1960s. They were one of the pioneers of direct mail campaigning and so forth that was able to rally a upwards of a million people already by 1968 to write their congresspeople, to lobby their local and state politicians, to vote against potential federal and state legislation. And the third way, which is the one we don't talk about and we don't really want to talk about, is that the NRA really wields a lot of intimidation and power in that sense. There are, I am confident, politicians who will not cross the NRA not because of the money issue and not because of the vote issue, but because they're afraid of violence, but because because they're afraid of the kind of violence, that social violence and political violence that the NRA could encourage if it wanted to. You talk about the connection between guns and gun capitalism. What does capitalism have to do with it? True. That's central to your forthcoming book. Yeah. So I and again here, my argument is that I think we focus a little too much on on questions of rights and abstract concepts like the interpretation of the Second Amendment and not quite enough on just how much gun capitalism exploded, expanded in the post war era, especially. This goes back to the end of the Second World War and in the 1950s in the 1960s, we see this incredible expansion of gun consumerism in the United States and 19 there's about 45 million. We're having a little trouble with with the Internet. A tree fell on Drew McKevitt's house, so there are some problems there. But I wanted to go to Tennessee as Tennessee is reeling. Legislators push this week to pass laws that shield gun manufacturers instead of children. There is this 2005 law, the Protection of Lawful Commerce and Arms Act, that protected gun manufacturers. We're going to go to break and then come back to Drew McKevitt. His forthcoming book is called Gun Country. Gun Capitalism, Culture and Control in Cold War America. Stay with us. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman as we continue our conversation with Drew McKevitt, author of the forthcoming book Gun Country, Gun Capitalism, Culture and Control in Cold War America. He's Associate Professor of History at Louisiana Tech University. We're talking to him in Shreveport. We only have a few more minutes, Drew. But if you got cut off right in the middle of you making that connection between this massive proliferation of guns in America, I mean, we don't see anything like this in any industrialized country in the world, the connection between that and capitalism. Yeah, that's right. And bringing the world in is a really important component there, too, because it's partly the world that helps arm Americans after World War Two. We often think of how the United States is responsible for the proliferation of weapons and violence after the Second World War, which is, of course, all true throughout the Cold War. But more so, arms come into the United States after the Second World War. And the American population is armed with the weapons that had been used in the Second World War and left over on battlefields in Europe and Asia. There's a whole cohort of widely entrepreneurs, gun entrepreneurs, who maximize the profits they can get by grabbing these guns from Europe, sometimes for as cheap as less than a dollar each, bringing them over to the United States and then selling them to an eager population now increasingly after the Second World War, with more leisure time, with more money, more income available for those kinds of activities. And, of course, the most famous of these war surplus imports, there are millions of them that come into the United States in the 1950s and the 1960s. The most famous of these is the Karkano rifle used by Lee Harvey Oswald to kill John F. Kennedy in 1963. But it's just one of millions that come into the country and truly remake the consumer market for guns in the United States. And they do that in two ways. They, one, they make it one centered around war and firearms that have been involved in war and firearms that can be used for war. And that's where we get that's where we see the trajectory leading to something like the popularity of the AR-15. And then the other aspect is that it simply emphasizes cheapness. American consumerism drives down the price of these guns and a ten dollar gun becomes just as accessible as a hundred and fifty dollar gun. And that's going to dramatically expand the gun market. As I said, the number of guns in the United States doubles every 25 years or so after the end of the Second World War, precisely because of that phenomenon. And then you have the other way, it going the other way. I mean, you've got the gun violence in the United States and the U.S. involvement in international small arms trade and trafficking and refusing to sign off on being an obstacle at the U.N. to sign off on treaties that would limit small guns in the world. Yeah, that's right. I mean, if we look back at the process in the United Nations, beginning in the mid 1990s and leading all the way up to finally the signing of a completely watered down tree in 2013, we saw the real powerful influence of the NRA there. And in particular, in particular, the NRA's kind of bulldog, John Bolton, who went to the U.N. in 2001 and tried to shut down every international effort that would have created any kind of substantive controls on international small arms sales. And then very quickly, two issues, Tennessee. I mean, perhaps the trying to get rid of the two youngest black lawmakers, the Republican House Speaker and his allies in the Tennessee legislature was about trying to prevent the push for gun control in Tennessee, which so many support, though you wouldn't know it within the legislature. And now, while they're not protecting the children, they want to protect the arms industry, a bill that's now going to Bill Lee's desk, the Tennessee governor who signed off on a gun deregulation bill in a Beretta gun factory. Yeah, so, you know, I heard you mentioned the 2005 law, the protection of protection of lawful commerce and arms act, which already shields law, which already shields gun makers from liability in a number of ways. And that law was written in the wake of a wave of lawsuits against gun makers by gun control organizations, by large municipalities that sought to force the gun makers to pay for the consequences of the seemingly uncontrolled proliferation of firearms that had ticked up dramatically in the early 1990s. In addition to the very obvious human trauma, there are, of course, economic costs to gun violence as well. And so the PCLAA or the PLCAA, the intention of that was to shield gun makers nationally. And of course, it's signed into law by the George W. Bush administration so that gun makers could not be sued for their guns working as they are designed to maim and kill human beings. What the Tennessee legislature is doing, I think, is essentially a kind of lip service to or it's essentially a moot point and that there are already those protections in place. But I also think the Tennessee legislature watched what happened last year when in the Remington case, when Remington, the rifle maker Remington was settled with the Sandy Hook families for seventy three million dollars. And that's what they're trying to prevent gun control organizations and activists from looking for loopholes in the 2005 law, like, for instance, in the case of Sandy Hook, targeting their advertising rather than the guns themselves. And Tennessee wants to cut that off because ultimately the sanctity of gun capitalism must remain secure. Drew McKevitt, I want to thank you so much for being with us, author of the forthcoming book, Gun Country, Gun Capitalism, Culture and Control in Cold War America, speaking to us from Shreveport, where he's an associate professor of history at Louisiana Tech University. As we turn now to South Texas, where Elon Musk's SpaceX is claiming success after the first launch of its massive new rocket, Dubb Starship. The two stage prototype lifted off Thursday morning from SpaceX's sprawling base on Texas's Gulf Coast near the U.S. border with Mexico, becoming the largest and heaviest machine ever to fly under its own power. At least six of the rocket's 33 engines failed during flight. The vehicle self-destructed over the Gulf of Mexico about four minutes after liftoff, residents of Port Isabel near the launch site reported particulates or ash rain down on their neighborhoods. The fiery end to the launch was the latest in a series of explosions around SpaceX's launch site near the lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge. This comes as three liquefied natural gas projects in the Rio Grande Valley. We're just approved by FERC. That's the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Indigenous environmental and community organizers responded Thursday to the SpaceX launch and explosion and denounced the new projects. This is Christopher Busseldew. Rio Bravo Pipeline and SpaceX, none of these companies consulted with the original people of this land, the Cariso Palma Crudo tribe of Texas. None of them consulted with the tribe. None of them have our consent. But yet they still want to destroy native homelands, ancestral homelands. We never gave our consent and they're moving forward. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. They never consulted with the tribe. They don't have our consent and they're moving forward anyway. That's not justice. They're enabling Musk to destroy our lands and destroy this beautiful area. It needs to stop. These are all the histories of colonial genocide against native people and native lands. For more, we're joined in Brownsville, Texas by Becca Inajosa, an environmental and community advocate with grassroots collaborative Another Gulf is possible. She's one of the many people who spoke out against SpaceX and faced repression and persecution. Last year, police broke into her home and arrested her after she was accused of spray painting the words gentrified and stop SpaceX under a mural in downtown Brownsville. She's still fighting these charges. Becca Inajosa, welcome to Democracy Now! It's great to have you with us. So yesterday, Elon Musk declared success when his SpaceX rocket exploded. Now, actually, though he was, of course, mocked by many, what does a failure mean if your rocket explodes out of control? Scientifically, it's a chance to test different ways of trying to shoot off this rocket. But you're on the ground. If you can talk about what SpaceX means for your communities. You know, we're tired of living under the constant threat of flammable rocket explosions because of SpaceX. You know, Elon Musk is on his quest to colonize his Mars. And it's beginning. He's beginning by colonizing, you know, our community that's on the front lines of the US-Mexico border. You know, that's on the front lines of the Gulf Coast, where we're dealing with layers and layers of injustices. You know, our community is opposed to SpaceX's operations. Yesterday, you know, 27 organizations from the Rio Grande Valley signed on to a letter officially opposing the rocket launch. So talk about how who controls where he does this work. And in fact, does he choose this area of Texas and the Mexico border because of the deregulation of Texas and the fact what kind of regulation does he face and what kind of consent is required, if any, of the local community? You know, it's very clear that Elon Musk moved into our border community to take over to colonize the region. We're clearly being exploited by a billionaire and his pet project. You know, we are a low income community of color and Texas has a long history of deregulation of just rubber stamping permits and approvals for any big industry and also give out numerous tax subsidies. You know, that's what we've seen with with SpaceX. You know, he's moved into our community and, you know, turned us into a testing ground. It's at the point now where, you know, I hear a noise. My family and I, and we wonder, you know, is is that SpaceX? And we come to find out that the rumble is because of a rocket launch or I, you know, hear a huge explosion or blast from from 10 miles away. And it turns out that SpaceX has done some kind of unannounced rocket testing. You know, we're constantly dealing with just the growth of SpaceX and their operations. So, Becca, last year, you were violently arrested after police broke into your home without showing you a warrant. You were detained for what, more than a day for 26 hours. Police took your glasses. They placed you in a cold cell after you were interrogated, charged with what, a misdemeanor, accused of spray painting. These words gentrified and stopped SpaceX under a mural in downtown Brownsville. The outgoing Brownsville mayor, Trey Mendes, posted a photo of you on his social media thanking the police for your arrest. He also wrote, quote, Ms. Inajosa has been quoted in several anti-SpaceX articles. Can you talk about the former mayor, Mendes, as ties to SpaceX and how local officials have come after environmental and community advocates like you over opposition to SpaceX? You are still fighting these charges? You know, I'm still I'm still dealing, fighting to have this charge dropped against me. You know, SpaceX is growing into our community. SpaceX is an Elon Musk are actively handing out, you know, money here and there. And it's becoming political hush money. You know, it's buying out politicians. We've seen when a SpaceX testing goes wrong, which it always goes wrong and burns down wildlife refuge, you know, political officials just turning the other way. And, you know, I've been personally impacted now by, you know, SpaceX buying out community member, buying out politicians when, you know, last year for police broke into my apartment when I asked for a warrant and tried to put on my shoes. They threatened me with resisting arrest. You know, they jailed me for 26 hours. And then I come to find out once I'm released that Mayor Tremendez, who's still in office, you know, for the next month, has doxxed me. You know, he posted my mug shot on his official Facebook page. He's the current mayor. He is the current mayor. His term ends in May. He's chosen not to run for reelection. And I've come to find that the mayor has has doxxed me. He published my mug shot on his official Facebook platform. He posted my job trying to get me fired. You know, he he singled me out and targeted me because I've been publicly I've been speaking up about the dangers of SpaceX for years. And what this means is that, you know, the city is signaling to us that, you know, community any community organizer speaking up could be next. They're targeting community activists. And we are actively rallying and pressuring the city to to to investigate Mayor Mendes for abuse of power. You know, we won't tolerate elected officials singling out and targeting and doxxing community members. You know, the city is signaling to us that they're selling out to a private space industry. Talk about how the environment has been impacted. For people who are watching TV to see the SpaceX launch, you see in the upper left Boca Chica. Talk about Boca Chica, where the fresh waters of the Rio Grande trickle into the Gulf of Mexico, the beaches and protected lands such as the Lower Rio Grand Valley National Wildlife Refuge near SpaceX. Yeah, I want to make it clear that Boca Chica Beach was was never for sale. You know, Elon Musk has come and colonized our region. You know, Boca Chica Beach is, you know, part of a state park. It's part of the lower near the Lower Rio Grande Valley Wildlife Refuge. It's part of an international wildlife corridor that's very important for, you know, species to migrate for genetic diversity. Boca Chica Beach and the entire region is also sacred lands of the Cariso Comocruido tribe. And, you know, families have been going there for generations to fish. Boca Chica Beach is considered the poor people's beach because it's for local people that go don't have to pay fees to enter and can go fish to feed their families. It's also where the Cariso Comocruido tribe hold their sacred ceremonies and Elon Musk's and SpaceX have been using their private police force and the local police to turn people away so he can host his press conferences and parties and test dangerous rocket equipment. You know, that's what we've been seeing, you know, some of the routine testing has caused, you know, over 60 acres of the Wildlife Refuge to burn down, has sparked grass fires. You know, we've seen threats and death of migratory birds and endangered species like the Ocelot. I also wanted to ask you about this point that we raised in the lead as well. And that is last year, the Federal Aviation Administration determined that SpaceX's plans for orbital launches would have no significant impact on the Gulf Coast region. The FAA's ruling came after SpaceX founder Elon Musk accused the agency of having a fundamentally broken regulatory structure after it didn't rapidly approve an early Starship test flight. The FAA has also reportedly faced pressure from major SpaceX contractors, including NASA, Pentagon and the National Reconnaissance Office, all of whom rely heavily on SpaceX to launch satellites and astronauts to orbit and beyond. NASA selected, for example, a version of SpaceX's Starship as a lander for its upcoming Artemis III mission, which aims to return astronauts to the moon for the first time in half a century. So they're using this private company for the Pentagon, for the FAA, for all of this NASA work. No, it's very clear that Elon Musk and SpaceX has become, you know, is becoming too big to hold accountable, you know, and is getting away with harming our community. And, you know, what we need are real solutions. We need investments, you know, in Earth, the problems we have here on the planet of climate change, and instead we see our tax subsidies go towards a billionaire's pet project for a billionaire to go, you know, to space as part of his sci-fi adventure. I wanted to finally ask you about the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approving the Rio Grande LNG, Texas LNG, you know, liquid natural gas, and the Rio Bravo Pipeline Thursday, just hours after the SpaceX explosion. These projects are within a few miles from SpaceX and have faced fierce opposition from groups like yours. Talk about what's at stake and with these projects, especially in the Rio Grande and the Gulf of Mexico's area of the country that are in the front lines of the climate crisis. Yeah, we're dealing with layers and layers of environmental disasters here in the Rio Grande Valley, you know, communities. We've been I've been fighting back to stop these LNG terminals for nearly a decade, Rio Grande LNG, Texas LNG and the Rio Bravo Pipeline plan to build, you know, next door to SpaceX within six miles, you know, and we're we're terrified of the very real threat that exploding rockets next to giant tanks of gas, next to giant tankers of gas, where we've already seen, you know, rocket shrapnel raining even further past six miles and we're being left in the in the dark. We haven't heard from regulatory agencies about the flammable risks. You know, and communities here have made it absolutely clear that we oppose these LNG export terminals. All of our communities have passed anti LNG resolutions. Port Isabel, South Padre Island, Laguna Vista, Long Island Village, you know, because of, you know, the threat of flammable explosion from SpaceX, because this would completely destroy our way of life. We are one of the last little pieces of the South Texas coastline that doesn't have refineries or flare stacks. And, you know, LNG would completely change our way of life for for the for the worse. Well, back in Hoso, I want to thank you for being with us environmental and community advocate with the grassroots collaborative. Another gulf is possible. Coming up, we go to Yemen, a leading human rights activist there where at least 79 people died this week in a stampede. He'll talk about his country being devastated by the U.S.-backed Saudi War. Stay with us. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. We end today showing Yemen, where at least 79 people were killed over 300 injured in a stampede Wednesday as residents of the capital, Sana'a, gathered at a school where local merchants were giving away charitable donations to mark the end of Ramadan. Hundreds of people gathered to receive what amounted to about $10. Witnesses told the Associated Press the crowdcrush began after armed Houthis fired into the air to control the crowd, striking electrical equipment and causing it to explode. The tragic deaths come as Yemen continues to face one of the world's largest humanitarian crises following years of fighting between U.S.-backed Saudi forces and Houthi rebels. While a ceasefire began a year ago, no agreement has been reached yet on making it permanent. Earlier this month, envoys from Saudi Arabia and Oman visited Sana'a for talks with the Houthis. This came weeks after China helped broker a deal to reestablish diplomatic ties between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Saudi Arabia also recently exchanged more than 800 prisoners of war with Houthis in the largest prisoner exchange since 2020. We're joined now by Ali Jamil, the Accountability and Redress Director of Montana for Human Rights, a group that's based in Yemen. He's visiting New York, where he's joining us from now. Ali, thanks so much for joining us. Can you talk about what happened this week, but then put it into the larger context of the devastation of Yemen? Thank you very much. What we are doing now currently is investigating into this incident in which at least 78 people died in a charity event. But this event shows us a snapshot that illustrates the situation of starvation in Yemen. Hundreds of people were going to death to get donations of nearly $10. Montana for Human Rights have worked on the use of starvation as a method of war and have made significant investigations for a year long into the conduct and the attacks of different warring parties that led to starvation. So our report, the starvation makers, looks into the attacks that has been done by the Saudi, a led coalition and also the conduct of the Houthi armed, non-governmental armed forces that that really impacted the food and water security of civilians in Yemen. Can you talk, Ali Jameel, about this rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran? What kind of effect this will have? There isn't enough information available about the deal, but we're not even sure if this will impact the war in Yemen and to what extent it will have an impact, but what is clear is that there is also talks between Saudis and Houthis and that the Saudi ambassador to Yemen was in Sana'a a couple of weeks ago and there have been also detainees swapped for over 800 detainees. We see this as good steps in terms of building trust among warring parties and could have a good potential of reaching a peace deal, but this is not all what civilians want. It is very important for this war to end, but it's also very important to have accountability, justice, transitional justice, reparations. Yemen has a long history of armed conflicts that happened in the 60s, 80s, 90s, 2003, seven wars in Sana'a. All of these were ended in a political agreement that didn't have any accountability aspect, and because there is no accountability, no transitional justice, each conflict was just basically a seed for another conflict and looking into the conflict today, it's clear how much it has an impact from prior conflict. So this violent cycle should be broken and it will never be broken without transitional justice, accountability, and redress and reparations. You know, there is a lot being made now, as it should be, of war crimes when it comes to what's happening in Ukraine, but Moatana, for Human Rights, your group, has said war crimes are and have been committed at the highest level in Yemen. Can you talk about the parties responsible and what these grave crimes are that you've investigated? Moatana for Human Rights has a very big team, over 100 team members all over Yemen. We have almost a researcher and a lawyer in each Yemeni government rate. We investigate cases of violations of international humanitarian law, international law of human rights. We have until now documented over 8000 cases of human rights abuses committed by all warring parties in Yemen. I can say that there is no warring party in Yemen better than the other one. All warring parties in Yemen has been committing horrific horrific violations of human rights that may amount to war crimes. We have documented over a thousand cases of airstrikes, also land-chilling, landmines, child recruitment, arbitrary detention, forced disappearance, torture, attacks on schools, on hospitals, and a very wide range of other violations that has been committed by all warring parties in Yemen. We used to have in Yemen an independent mechanism formed by the UN, specifically by the Human Rights Council called the Group of Eminent Express that it was the only independent mechanism that investigate in these violations. Unfortunately, in 2021, the Saudis just put all of the sticks and currants to terminate the mandate of this of this investigative body. And currently, Yemen doesn't have any UN or international investigative body to investigate on those crimes. And this didn't only stop the investigations and the reporting on the violations of Saudis, but it stops all the reporting and violations on Saudis, Houthis, STC and other warring parties in Yemen. And finally, how will a peace process move forward that you think could stick, that you think would hold all sides accountable, Ali? Yeah. Any peace that doesn't has accountability, transitional justice, reparations, truth-telling is just a political agreement that can fall at any time. If we're really looking into a long-lasting, durable peace, we should really take the issues of accountability, transitional justice, also reparations to victims and truth-telling into considerations. Ali Jameel, we want to thank you so much for being with us. Yemeni Human Rights Advocate and Accountability and Redress Director of Marhana for Human Rights, visiting New York City from Sana'a, Yemen. That does it for our show. I'm speaking at two events this weekend. On Saturday, on April 22nd in Troy, New York, at a celebration of the sanctuary for independent media, 7 p.m. And on Sunday, we'll be in Boston, giving the 10th annual Dorothy Day Lecture at Emmanuel College at 1 p.m. For all details, you can go to democracynow.org, Democracy Now Produced, with Rene Phelps, Mike Berkdina, Gessner, Messiah Rhodes, Nermeen Shea, Maratia Hussainah, Tammy Warren, Abterina Ndures, Sam Alcoff, Tim Moriastu-Judjim, Hamilton, Robbie Caron, Hannie Massoud, Sanji Lopez, Dennis Moynihan, our executive director, Julie Crosby. I'm Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.