Archives for September 2021

NAMBÉ, N.M. (AP) — Carmaker Tesla has opened a store and repair shop on Native American land for the first time, marking a new approach to its yearslong fight to sell cars directly to consumers and cut car dealerships out of the process.

The white-walled, silver-lettered Tesla store, which opened last week, sits in Nambé Pueblo, north of Santa Fe, on tribal land that’s not subject to state laws.

The electric car company can only sell and service its vehicles freely in about a dozen states, while it faces restrictions in others. Some, like New Mexico, ban Tesla from offering sales or repairs without going through a dealership. In January, the company struck a deal with Michigan to resolve a 2016 lawsuit, a symbolic victory that allowed it to sell in the backyard of the nation’s largest carmakers.

Supporters of Tesla say the shop in New Mexico marks the first time the company has partnered with a tribe to get around state laws, though the idea has been in the works for years.

From Oklahoma to Connecticut and other states, consumers can’t buy Teslas because the company won’t partner with dealerships and hasn’t been successful in winning over the courts or lawmakers to allow its direct sales model.

“These states have lots of sovereign Native American nations in them that could be interested in Tesla,” said Brian Dear, president of the Tesla Owners Club of New Mexico. “I don’t believe at all that this will be the last.”

Supporters say dealership laws protect middle-class jobs and force dealerships to compete, lowering prices. Critics say people can get information online and direct sales would lower costs.

New Mexico, Alabama, and Louisiana have the strictest bans, barring Tesla from both operating dealerships and repair shops. That makes repairing a Tesla more expensive and more of a hassle. Owners have to get their cars serviced in neighboring states or through traveling Tesla technicians who fix problems with what they have in a van.

The New Mexico Tesla shop, built on the site of a former casino, is nestled between two gas stations along a highway about an hour and a half north of Albuquerque, where most of the state’s Tesla owners live, Dear said.

While sales are prohibited in neighboring Texas — where the company plans to make its pickup trucks next year — repair shops are allowed. New Mexico Tesla owners have been traveling to El Paso, Texas, or other out-of-state cities to get repairs.

To buy a Tesla, they have to drive hours to pick them up or pay thousands of dollars to have them shipped.

“We drove a gas car — Volvo station wagon — to Denver and then I was the ‘lucky one’ who got to drive the gas-powered car back,” said Howard Coe, a filmmaker who works for a laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, about 30 minutes from Nambé and about five hours from the nearest Colorado Tesla store.

Coe drove his wife’s Tesla sedan to the new store in Nambé on Tuesday to ask if an SUV he ordered can be delivered there. The store told him it’s not accepting deliveries for the foreseeable future and won’t do repairs until later this month.

Tribal officials who brokered the deal over a two-year period say it lines up with business interests and cultural values like caring for the environment.

The tribe “has the responsibility to the land where we have resided for over 1,000 years,” said Carlos Vigil, president of the Nambé Pueblo Development Corporation, calling Tesla’s service center “a renewable business that lines up with our belief system.”

Car dealership advocates say they respect the tribe’s decision but that they hope customers will buy electric cars from companies that follow state rules, arguing dealerships compete to lower prices and can service vehicles in more parts of the state.

“We have competition, we have the expertise, we’re in your local communities,” said Ken Ortiz, president of the New Mexico Automotive Dealers Association. “We contribute to the taxes.”

New Mexico has tax treaties with the tribe for sales, gambling and gasoline taxes. But tribal and state officials say it’s unclear if Tesla will have to pay vehicle sales taxes or how the revenue would be split between them.

Tesla, which dissolved its public relations department and generally doesn’t answer media inquiries, did not respond to a request for comment.

In response to a Tweet complaining of wait times in the Northeast last month, CEO Elon Musk wrote, “Tesla will expedite service center openings.”

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Attanasio is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues. Follow him on Twitter: https://twitter.com/viaCedar

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SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) — Thousands of people gathered in El Salvador’s capital Wednesday for the first mass march against President Nayib Bukele, who protesters say has concentrated too much power, weakened the independence of the courts and may seek re-election.

Some marchers are also protesting the controversial decision by Bukele’s government to make the cryptocurrency Bitcoin legal tender in El Salvador, the first country to do so. Officials rolled out a digital wallet known as the “Chivo” one week ago, but the system has been down frequently for maintenance.

Some marchers wore T-shirts that read “NO To Bitcoin.” A few demonstrators vandalized the special ATM machines set up to handle Bitcoin transactions, but which have been inoperable anyway for much of the week. The cubicle housing one ATM machine was destroyed.

“They say the ‘vandalism’ was the work of ‘infiltrators,’ but there has been vandalism in ALL their demonstrations,” Bukele wrote in his Twitter account. “And why weren’t there any shouts of ‘stop,’ or ‘Don’t do that?’”

The populist president elected in 2019 has maintained high popularity with his vows to stamp out corruption that was rampant among the country’s traditional parties. But some Salvadorans say he is becoming “a dictator” and Wednesday’s march was the first large protest against his government.

“The time has come to defend democracy,” said one of the protesters, former Supreme Court justice Sidney Blanco. “This march is symbolic, it represents weariness with so many violations of the Constitution.”

Bukele’s New Ideas party won a congressional majority this year and immediately after taking its seats in the National Assembly in May, it replaced the five members of the Constitutional Chamber and the independent attorney general who had balked at several of Bukele’s earlier actions.

Soon after, the Constitutional Chamber tossed aside what had long been interpreted as a constitutional ban on consecutive presidential reelection, setting the stage for Bukele to potentially seek a second term in 2024. Bukele has not so far announced plans to seek reelection, but critics assume he will.

Milton Brizuela, leader of the country’s medical association, said “judicial independence is important to us.”

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued a statement congratulating Central American countries on their shared independence day Wednesday; the region won independence from Spain 200 years ago.

But Blinken warned that “anti-democratic developments pose a growing threat to Central America’s future,” adding “The United States stands with all those speaking truth to power.”

The digital wallet appears to have been overloaded by the sheer number of Salvadorans looking to take advantage of the $30 bonus that the government put in each account to incentivize adoption.

Bukele, the main promotor of using the cryptocurrency, acknowledged the government’s three-month rollout may have been too ambitious. He said technical glitches had prevented the app from working on some kinds of phones.

There has been skepticism about the government’s enthusiastic adoption of bitcoin as a legal tender along with the U.S. dollar since Bukele announced it in a video recorded in English and played at a bitcoin conference in Miami in June. Bitcoin is subject to wild swings in value in a matter of minutes.

Any business with the technological capacity to do so is required to accept payment in bitcoin, but no private citizen is required to use it.

Recent public opinion surveys in El Salvador have said a majority of Salvadorans oppose making it an official currency. Still Bukele says there are now a half million users of the digital payment system in the Central American nation.

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FALLS CHURCH, Va. (AP) — A divided federal appeals court has upheld the dismissal of an ACLU lawsuit challenging a portion of the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international email and phone communications.

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday that the lawsuit must be dismissed after the government invoked the “state secrets privilege,” meaning that a full exploration of the issue in a court of law would damage national security.

In the lawsuit the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, said that the National Security Agency’s “Upstream” surveillance program necessarily captures some of its international communications and is a violation of free-speech rights and its Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure.

Details of the Upstream program are classified, but it collects data from transmissions over high-speed cables that carry electronic communications into and out of the country.

In a majority opinion, Judge Albert Diaz, an Obama appointee, agreed with government assertions that a lawsuit over the program’s constituionality cannot be conducted without harming national security.

“There’s simply no conceivable defense to this assertion that wouldn’t also reveal the very information that the government is trying to protect: how Upstream surveillance works and where it’s conducted,” Diaz wrote.

In a dissent, Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote that the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on a case that could spell out the breadth of the state secrets privilege, and that allowing the government to invoke it ahead of that ruling is a mistake.

She said that the majority opinion “stands for a sweeping proposition: A suit may be dismissed under the state secrets doctrine, after minimal judicial review, even when the Government premises its only defenses on far-fetched hypotheticals.”

Patrick Toomey, an attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, which represented Wikimedia, said he is “extremely disappointed” witht the ruling and lawyers are considering their appeal options.

“Every day, the NSA is siphoning Americans’ communications off the internet backbone and into its spying machines, violating privacy and chilling free expression,” he said in a statement, “Congress has made clear that the courts can and should decide whether this warrantless digital dragnet complies with the Constitution.”

The lawsuit was filed in the aftermath of NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s disclosures about the scope of agency surveillance. The lawsuit was first tossed out in 2015 over the issue of whether plaintiffs had standing to sue. But the 4th Circuit revived the case and sent it back to the lower court, which again dismissed it in 2019 on the state secrets argument.

The Upstream program is just one part of the NSA’s surveillance. The “downstream” portion enlists internet service providers such as Google in collecting the communications of selected targets. The court ruling indicates that downstream collection provides a “vast majority” of what is collected by the NSA.

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BEIJING (AP) — Three astronauts who lived for 90 days on China’s space station departed Thursday in preparation for returning to Earth.

The national space agency said Nie Haisheng, Liu Boming and Tang Hongbo boarded the Shenzhou-12 spacecraft and undocked from the space station at 8:56 a.m. Thursday (0056 GMT).

State broadcaster CCTV aired footage of the astronauts securing packages inside their spacecraft, which is due to parachute to a location in the Gobi Desert near the Jiuquan launch center on Friday.

The astronauts have already set China’s record for the most time spent in space. After launching on June 17, mission commander Nie and astronauts Liu and Tang went on two spacewalks, deployed a 10-meter (33-foot) mechanical arm, and had a video call with Communist Party leader Xi Jinping.

Before the undocking, the astronauts downloaded data from their experiments and ensured the station would continue operating without a crew, CCTV reported.

The journey home is expected to take at least 30 hours, CCTV said. Before departing, Nie and his colleagues expressed their thanks for the “round-the-clock support and devotion from all the staff.”

Four drills have been conducted on the ground at the Dongfeng landing site in north China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region to ensure the safe return of the crew.

While few details have been made public by China’s military, which runs the space program, astronaut trios are expected to be brought on 90-day missions to the station over the next two years to make it fully functional.

The government has not announced the names of the next set of astronauts nor the launch date of Shenzhou-13.

China has sent 14 astronauts into space since 2003, when it became only the third country after the former Soviet Union and the United States to do so on its own.

When completed with the addition of two more modules, the station will weigh in at about 66 tons, a fraction of the size of the International Space Station, which launched its first module in 1998 and will weigh around 450 tons when completed.

In preparation for the permanent station, China launched two experimental modules over the past decade.Tiangong-1 was abandoned before it burned up during an uncontrolled loss of orbit. It’s successor, the Tiangong-2, was brought out of orbit in 2018 under full control.

China launched its bid to build such facilities in the early 1990s following successes in earlier missions and its exclusion from the International Space Station, largely due to U.S. objections over the Chinese program’s secretive nature and close military ties.

U.S. law requires congressional approval for contact between the American and Chinese space programs, but China is cooperating with space experts from other countries, including France, Sweden, Russia and Italy.

China has also pushed ahead with un-crewed missions, particularly in lunar exploration. It has placed a rover on the little-explored far side of the Moon and in December, the Chang’e 5 probe returned lunar rocks to Earth for the first time since the 1970s.

China this year also landed its Tianwen-1 space probe on Mars, with its accompanying Zhurong rover venturing out to look for evidence of life.

Another program calls for collecting soil from an asteroid, something that has been a particular focus of Japan’s rival space program.

China also plans to dispatch another mission in 2024 to bring back lunar samples and has expressed a desire to land people on the moon and possibly build a scientific base there, although no timeline has been proposed for such projects. A highly secretive space plane is also reportedly under development.

China’s space program has advanced in a steady, cautious manner and has largely avoided the failures that marked the U.S. and Russian programs that were locked in intense competition during the heady early days of spaceflight.

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BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union’s executive arm asked its member countries Thursday to better protect journalists amid a rise of physical attacks and online threats against media professionals.

According to the European Commission, 908 journalists and media workers were attacked across the 27-nation bloc in 2020. A total of 23 journalists have been killed in the EU since 1992, with the majority of the killings taking place over the past six years.

“No journalist should die or be harmed because of their job. We need to support and protect journalists; they are essential for democracy,” said Vera Jourova, the commission vice-president for values and transparency. “The pandemic has showed more than ever the key role of journalists to inform us. And the urgent need for public authorities to do more to protect them.”

Murders of reporters remain rare in Europe, but the killings of journalists in Slovakia and Malta in recent years have raised concerns about reporters’ safety in developed, democratic societies.

Earlier this year, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen expressed support to investigative journalism after the killing of Peter R. de Vries, a renowned Dutch journalist who reported on the violent underworld of the Netherlands.

The commission’s non-binding proposals include recommendations for EU countries to ensure fair and effective investigations and prosecutions, and to provide protection to those under threat, with a strong focus on female journalists.

According to the EU, 73% of female journalists have experienced online violence and the commission said EU countries should “support initiatives aimed at empowering women journalists and professionals belonging to minority groups and those reporting on equality issues.”

The bloc’s executive arm also proposed the creation of support services, including helplines, legal advice, and psychological support. It insisted on the need to ensure reporters’ safety during demonstrations, where most of the attacks take place.

“Member states should provide regular training for law enforcement authorities to ensure that journalists and other media professionals are able to work safely and without restrictions during such events,” the commission said.

Noting that digital and online safety has become a “major concern” because of online attacks but also the risks of illegal surveillance, the executive branch also encouraged EU countries to improve cooperation between media and cybersecurity bodies.

“Relevant national cybersecurity bodies should, upon request, assist journalists who seek to determine whether their devices or online accounts have been compromised, in obtaining the services of cybersecurity forensic investigators,” the commission said.

The proposals were unveiled just months after the commission’s annual report on adherence to the rule of law concluded that democratic standards were eroding in several member countries. That report notably singled out Slovenia, which currently holds the six-month rotating presidency of the European Council, for attacks against the Balkan nation’s media.

“This is not only Slovenia, we see the very aggressive rhetoric in some other member states,” Jourova said, adding that the EU will keep putting pressure on member countries where continuous issues are spotted.

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