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Today, Families USA, along with hundreds of other consumer, patient, community, and health stakeholder groups submitted comments by today’s deadline to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) regarding CMS’s interim final rule to implement work reporting requirements. Our comments warned of the impacts on Medicaid and the millions of people who rely on the program for health coverage. In response, Families USA Executive Director Anthony Wright issued the following statement:

“Just over one year ago, Congressional Republicans passed the biggest cuts to Medicaid in history, and now the administration is making a bad budget bill worse with additional restrictive regulations. Our comments submitted today spotlight how these Administration rules are unworkable and unlawful, and how they undermine these key public coverage programs. The regulations are a tragic way to mark this week’s 61st anniversary of Medicare and Medicaid — pillars of our health care system that millions have relied on for generations.

“In a health care system that is already overstretched, inordinately expensive, and wildly complex and confusing, these new paperwork requirements will push patients off coverage – not because they aren’t working or not eligible, but because of bureaucratic burdens. While many in Congress promised they would protect the vulnerable and medically frail from these paperwork burdens, the new requirements to get such an exemption are now exponentially more burdensome for both patients and providers.

“By tacking on “capacity to work” to the definition of medically frail and phasing out self-attestation, CMS has handed states an unwise and unworkable program without the resources or structure to implement it.

“The requirement that a patient doesn’t just need to have cancer or another condition but must produce the equivalent of a doctor’s note with a finding that the conditions leave them unable to work—is nowhere in the underlying statute, and unworkable.

“CMS has designed a program akin to determinations made by the Social Security Administration for determining eligibility for Supplemental Security Income (SSI). SSI's disability-determination system took decades and billions of dollars to build, relying on a nationwide network of trained adjudicators, detailed federal medical criteria, and safeguards like compassionate allowances for the most serious conditions and multi-year redetermination periods. Such a rule would require setting up, in mere months, a regulatory structure bigger and more complicated than Social Security’s disability determination system, which after 50 years of maturity costs $4.6 billion a year to administer for 7.4 million recipients. For comparison, the budget bill provides less than 5% of that amount, $200 million, to implement.

“CMS is asking states to replicate that system from scratch, for a Medicaid population several times larger, in a matter of months, with almost no federal guidance, no clinical standards for providers, and none of SSI's basic protections. Families USA estimates the added administrative cost of these work-capacity assessments alone could exceed $4.8 billion a year — on top of the billions states are already spending to stand up work-reporting systems.

“It took the federal government fifty years and billions of dollars to build a disability determination system that still leaves people waiting seven months for an answer. CMS expects states to build something similar for Medicaid in under six months, with no playbook, no dedicated staff, and none of the safeguards that make SSI even marginally workable. The people who will pay for that gap aren't bureaucrats — they're cancer patients, people in mental health crises, and people with disabilities who will lose coverage while paperwork catches up to their diagnosis.

“The implementation deadline of January 1 is looming large, and we hope that over these next few months, CMS takes a long hard look at the thousands of comments it has received from patients and health care providers impacted by the agency’s rash and burdensome new requirements.”

Families USA has also joined the Association for Community Affiliated Plans (ACAP), Community Catalyst, First Focus Campaign for Children, and National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), in another statement opposing this final rule. Read the full partner statement.

Each week, Food Tank is rounding up a few news stories that inspire excitement, infuriation, or curiosity.

More Schools Adopt Community Eligibility to Address Child Hunger

A new study from the Food Research & Action Center (FRAC) finds that a record number of schools used a federal meal service option to tackle child hunger in the 2025-2026 school year. A reported 55,362 schools—2.1 percent more than the year prior—offered school meals through the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), which allows high-need schools to provide breakfast and lunch at no charge to all students. Three quarters of eligible schools have adopted CEP, an option FRAC calls a “key step towards Healthy School Meals for All.”

“More schools are demonstrating that offering healthy school meals to every student at no charge is a game changer for children, families, and schools,” says Crystal FitzSimons, President of FRAC.

To maintain progress, FRAC is calling on the administration to reverse cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Program. CEP eligibility is tied to the number of children who qualify for free school meals — a certification process that is based on SNAP participation. FizSimons worries that without action to undo SNAP cuts, “the progress we have made on Healthy School Meals for All could unravel.” 

What We’re Missing About the Cyclospora Outbreak

A former U.S. Food and Drug Administration official argues that a number of the Trump-Vance administration’s actions “actively undermine microbial food safety.”

In a recent op-ed in STAT, Susan Mayne, who previously served as Director of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, worries that program cuts and policy delays are hurting efforts to monitor and respond to contaminants like cyclospora—the parasite linked to thousands of cases of foodborne illnesses across the country.

Mayne raises several concerns. FoodNet, a national foodborne illness surveillance program, has been updated to track fewer pathogens. Six, including cyclospora, have been eliminated from federal tracking. Efforts to improve traceability along the supply chain, which should have gone into effect by now, were delayed until 2028. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) closed an research facility in Beltsville, Maryland, where labs were working on a number of issues, including cyclospora. The administration also disbanded the National Advisory Committee on Microbiology Criteria in Food, which provided food safety advice to FDA and USDA. 

Mayne hopes that the cyclospora outbreak serves as a wake-up call so we don’t force eaters to choose between nutrition and food safety. She writes, “health is made possible when food safety supports consumer confidence in fruits and vegetables.”

The Climate Crisis to ‘Suck Soils Dry’ in Europe

Europe’s record-breaking heatwaves are driving high levels of water evaporation from rivers, lakes, soils, and plants, threatening farmers’ crops. At the same time, extreme wildfires are scorching parts of the region, with Spain and France seeing some of the driest soils.

Although droughts are typically linked to low rainfall, that doesn’t seem to be the case this time, suggesting that extreme heat, made worse by the climate crisis, is to play. Dominik Schumacher, a scientist at ETH Zurich who is behind a new analysis of Europe’s high temperatures, says that this “is our own doing.” He explains that as temperatures climb and air becomes hotter,” it will suck the soils dry.”

The trade association COCERAL estimates that 9 million tonnes of grain will be lost across the region. Additionally, France is expected to see the worst Maize harvest in the last 50 years and Romanian farmers may lose over 1 million hectares of crops. 

Mariam Zachariah, a researcher at Imperial College London and another co-author behind the analysis, says, “Without rapid, aggressive emissions cuts, Europe is heading for a future where these scorching, dry summers happen time and time again.”

Reversing Soil Degradation Can Feed an Additional 70 Million People

A new study in Nature Food finds that there are significant food security benefits if we can restore the Earth’s soils.

For the first time, researchers set out to quantify the effects of soil erosion and compaction, soil water deficits, as well as the loss of above ground vegetation cover and soil organic carbon on agricultural yields. Although these trends are threatening food security, there is also a real opportunity. 

According to the study, restoring soils by just 10 percent can produce enough food to feed an additional 70 million people. Project Drawdown Senior Scientist James Gerber, a co-author of the study, says that this reversal also “contributes to a virtuous cycle.” When soils are improved, it reduces pressure on the land, helping to avoid emissions from deforestation. 

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

Photo courtesy of James Baltz, Unsplash

The post Food Tank’s Weekly News Roundup: Schools Tackle Child Hunger, What’s Missing from the Cyclospora Conversation, Restored Soils Boost Food Security appeared first on Food Tank.

For generations, summer in Montana has meant long days outdoors. Children spent afternoons riding bicycles through quiet neighborhoods, swimming in lakes and rivers, hiking forest trails, and playing baseball past sunset. Families planned camping trips months in advance, double-checking that they had all the fishing, paddling, and tenting gear they needed to sleep in cool mountain air under clear skies. 

Today, many parents instead check the Environmental Protection Agency’s Air Quality Index before deciding whether their children can play outside at all. 

As wildfire season becomes longer and more severe across the American West, smoky skies have become an increasingly familiar part of summer. In Montana, where wildfire has always been part of the landscape, summer now includes days or even weeks when children are advised to stay indoors because the air outside is unhealthy. 

Scientists have documented the growing health risks of wildfire smoke, particularly for children whose lungs are still developing.

But pediatricians and researchers say the consequences extend beyond children’s lungs. A 2024 UNICEF report found that wildfire smoke affects not only children’s respiratory health but also their learning, mental well-being, and opportunities for play, warning that repeated smoke exposure can shape childhood in lasting ways. 

Wildfire smoke blankets homes in Missoula, Montana, on July 26.
Mosabber Hossain/Inside Climate News

Repeated smoke events are changing children’s daily routines, limiting opportunities for outdoor play and social interaction and reshaping how many families experience summer. Schools are investing in better air-filtration systems as communities rethink how school buildings should function in a changing climate.

“I remember being stuck inside because of the smoke,” said Melody Irvine, who grew up in western Montana with asthma. 

During smoky summers, outdoor activities that many children took for granted often disappeared for Irvine. Today, as a student at the University of Montana studying environmental science and social work, Irvine sees those childhood memories differently. 

 “When I was younger, it felt like something unusual,” she said. “Now it seems like smoky summers are becoming expected.”

A threat to physical, mental, and emotional development

Smoke’s shift from an occasional disruption to a recurring part of childhood is increasingly drawing the attention of public health experts. 

“Kids typically spend more time outdoors, and they’re usually running around, increasing their breathing rate and their exposure to wildfire smoke,” said Kerri Mueller, an air quality specialist with the Missoula City-County Health Department.

Smoke exposure can trigger headaches, itchy eyes, sore throats, coughing, wheezing, and asthma flare-ups, while repeated exposure may reduce lung function.

Wildfire smoke contains tiny particles known as PM2.5, which can travel deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream. Studies in the Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology have linked exposure to wildfire smoke with asthma attacks, respiratory infections, and emergency department visits, particularly among children. 

Children play on a swing set in the University Village residential area of Missoula on July 15.
Mosabber Hossain/Inside Climate News

“Children face greater risks from wildfire smoke because their lungs are still developing, especially during the first several years of life, and they breathe more air relative to their body weight than adults,” said Lori Byron, a pediatrician and chair of the nonprofit Montana Health and Climate. “We also know much more now about particulate matter from wildfire smoke. Those particles can get into our brains and even reach unborn babies.”

“We’re only beginning to understand the full extent of the harm they can cause,” said Byron. 

Although Montana lacks statewide pediatric hospitalization data linking wildfire smoke directly to children’s illnesses, pediatricians say they routinely see more children with asthma attacks and other respiratory problems during smoke events. National studies show increases in emergency department visits among children during periods of heavy wildfire smoke, Byron said.

During smoke season, many parents begin each morning by checking not only the weather forecast but also the Air Quality Index, which can determine not only if their children can play outside, but if it is safe to open the windows to cool their home.

Read Next Wildfire smoke engulfed their cities. Did it make their babies sick? Zoya Teirstein & Jess Davis

When wildfire smoke blankets a community for days or weeks, childhood routines begin to disappear. Soccer practices are canceled. Playgrounds sit empty. Summer camps move indoors or suspend programming. Even simple activities like walking a dog or riding a bicycle become difficult when air quality reaches unhealthy levels. 

Such outdoor play is not a luxury, according to experts, but essential to healthy child development. Running across a field, playing with friends, climbing trees, or just loitering outdoors are far more than physical exercise for children, a September 2018 study from the American Academy of Pediatrics reported. These experiences build social skills, confidence, emotional resilience and overall, well-being. Mental health experts say repeated disruptions to those routines can also leave children feeling apprehensive and uncertain. 

For children, repeated cancellations and long periods indoors can create more than disappointment. When familiar routines, social activities, and opportunities for independent play repeatedly disappear, children may begin to feel that their environment is unpredictable or unsafe. Experts say that loss of stability can heighten stress, particularly for younger children who may not fully understand why smoke keeps disrupting their lives. 

A 2023 report in Current Psychiatry Reports found that children exposed to wildfire disasters are at greater risk of anxiety, stress, depression and post-traumatic stress symptoms, underscoring that the impacts of wildfires extend well beyond physical illness.

Read Next How climate change gets under the skin Zoya Teirstein

The emotional disruption of repeatedly losing normal childhood experiences may leave effects as lasting as the asthma attacks and respiratory problems pediatricians routinely see during smoke events, Byron said. 

And while the interruptions may be temporary, experts say their repeated incidence can lead their effects to accumulate over time. 

A recent brief from Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child argues that repeated smoke exposure during early childhood can affect the environments and experiences that shape children’s brain development, learning and emotional well-being. 

“Kids don’t understand why the world suddenly isn’t stable or why they can’t do what was planned,” Byron said. “It kind of undermines a child’s faith in the world.”

Family pressures

Wildfire smoke also leaves parents dealing with new concerns.

“The summer I was pregnant with my daughter was especially hot and smoky,” said Sarah Lundquist, executive director of Montana-based nonprofit Families for a Livable Climate. “After experiencing heat-related fainting spells, we bought portable air conditioners and air purifiers just to keep our home safe. That experience has stayed with me. Now, as a mother of two young children, I check the air quality almost every day before deciding whether it’s safe for them to play outside. Something as simple and joyful as an afternoon at the park has become a health calculation.”

Children sense their parents’ anxiety, psychologists note, and often begin to feel less secure themselves. 

Researchers who study children’s mental health have found that environmental disasters can affect families collectively. 

Window air-conditioning units are seen at a Missoula County Public Schools building on June 25. Mosabber Hossain/Inside Climate News

Parents often have to rearrange work schedules, cancel summer plans, and keep children indoors for days at a time. As familiar routines disappear, families are left trying to substitute indoor activities that cannot fully replicate children’s need for exercise, social interaction, and unstructured play.

“Wildfire smoke really throws a wrench into families’ lives,” Byron said.

Pediatric experts say indoor activities can help pass the time, easing the stress both the children and their parents feel, but they cannot fully replace the physical, social, and developmental benefits of outdoor play.

While research directly linking wildfire smoke to increased screen time remains limited, many families say digital devices become children’s primary source of entertainment when smoke keeps them indoors. And while computers, tablets, and smartphones might provide some distraction when a smoke wave keeps kids housebound, they may also compound the mental and emotional challenges the lack of time outside is already imposing.

A 2022 systematic review and meta-analysis published in JAMA Psychiatry found that greater screen time was associated with more anxiety, depression, attention problems, and other behavioral difficulties in children. 

Ann Bates, a Missoula resident who occasionally works as a volunteer with children at a summer camp and does fundraising for children’s programs, believes governments need to do more to protect young people from the growing impacts of wildfire smoke. 

“I’m a mother, so I know how stressful wildfire days can be,” she said. “I was always checking on my daughter wondering what she was doing and how she would get to and from school safely. She is in college now, but when I see young children struggling at school because of the smoke, sometimes with tears in their eyes, it breaks my heart. It makes me cry because they shouldn’t have to grow up like this.” 

Smoked out schools

Smoke has become a routine consideration in Missoula County Public Schools during late summer and early fall, facilities director Burley McWilliams said in an interview, and keeping outdoor smoke from entering school buildings is far more difficult than many people realize. 

High schools, for example, serve hundreds of students who move between classrooms, cafeterias, and outdoor spaces. Doors open constantly throughout the day, allowing smoke to enter even when ventilation systems are operating. 

“Our high school has about 1,200 students,” McWilliams said. “They’re going in and out of the building all day long. Every time those doors open, smoke comes inside.” 

Heat compounds the challenge. 

Read Next Climate disasters can alter kids’ brains — before they’re even born Kate Yoder

Many Montana schools were constructed decades ago, before prolonged heat waves became common. As temperatures rise, classrooms without air-conditioning become increasingly difficult to cool, particularly if smoke outside prevents opening windows, affecting both students and teachers. 

A study of California public schools found that between 2002 and 2019, wildfire and smoke accounted for nearly two-thirds of all weather-related school closure days. After the Los Angeles wildfires of January 2025, school closures, relocations, and poor air quality disrupted learning for more than 700,000 students for months. 

Researchers at Stanford University have also found that wildfire smoke can reduce students’ academic performance, suggesting that the educational costs of smoke extend well beyond the days when schools are forced to close. 

Many educators must now consider wildfire smoke in their plans for instruction, student health and school operations. 

As hotter summers, longer wildfire seasons, and more frequent smoke events become an expected part of life in western Montana, schools are increasingly being designed to protect children’s health during climate emergencies by keeping classrooms cool during heat waves, filtering smoke-filled air and, when necessary, serving as clean-air shelters for surrounding communities.

That reality has inspired Montana’s Climate Ready Schools initiative. Missoula County Public Schools is working together with partner organizations to redesign schools so they can better withstand the challenges of a changing climate. 

The plans include upgraded HVAC systems, HEPA air filtration, more shaded playgrounds, and energy-efficient buildings. 

CIS, an environmental and climate resilience infrastructure company, is primarily doing the planning, technical assistance, community engagement, and resilience design for the initiative. 

“School buildings must now be designed with climate change in mind,” said Sarah Dobie, a project manager with CIS. 

Funding, however, remains an obstacle. “Making just three schools climate-resilient is expected to cost about $30 million, an investment that is difficult for most local school districts to afford,” she said.

That leaves most families on their own to figure out how to live with smoke as increasingly hazy skies become a normal part of childhood.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How wildfire smoke is reshaping childhood on Aug 1, 2026.

Headline News:

• “Courts Rule In Favor Of Sierra Club, Approves FERC Order To Speed Up Clean Energy Projects ” • The DC Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with Sierra Club that FERC properly issued its Order 2023. It is an order that directs grid operators to address longstanding delays with interconnection queues and speed up process on clean energy. [CleanTechnica]

Solar panels (Sarah Swenty, US FWS, public domain)

• “EU Considers Emergency Meeting As Nuclear Shutdown Puts Hungary In Energy Crisis” • Hungarian PM Péter Magyar warns of an energy crisis after record-low Danube water levels forced a shutdown of the Paks nuclear plant, which supplies nearly half the country’s power. The European Commission may convene its Electricity Coordination Group. [Euronews]
• “China’s Crude Oil Imports Fell In Q2” • China, the world’s largest importer of crude oil, imported less crude oil in the second quarter of 2026, following higher crude oil prices that resulted from disrupted flows through the Strait of Hormuz. China’s lower imports reduced global demand, softening the upward price trend. [CleanTechnica]
• “China’s Solar Capacity Set to Overtake Coal This Quarter” • China will have more installed solar power capacity than coal-fired generation capacity as early as this quarter, according to Chinese authorities. As of the end of June, solar power capacity stood at 1,274 GW, just barely below the total coal-fired installed capacity of 1,275 GW. [OilPrice.com]
• “As Diplomacy Falters, US-Iran War Expands” • The 14-point deal with Iran that President Trump signed in mid-June was supposed to be a diplomatic off-ramp. It was to wind down the war and open new pathways to prosperity for the Middle East. But six weeks after the agreement was signed, not only has the conflict been revived, it has grown. [ABC News]

For more news, please visit geoharvey – Daily News about Energy and Climate Change.

On July 30, 2026, CUPE 8125 — a union local representing 4,400 WestJet flight attendants — issued a strike notice to their employer WestJet. Unless...

The post Stand with WestJet flight attendants first appeared on Spring.

John Donovan prompt: Please provide an update on the John Donovan Shell Feud as of 1st August 2026. Reply by Google AI Mode:

The long-running feud between activist John Donovan and Shell plc has entered a new phase of “AI-mediated warfare” and targeted document leaks. [1, 2] The “Bot War” and AI Strategy

• Algorithmic Weaponisation: John Donovan has been feeding thousands of historical pages, litigation records, and leaked corporate papers into Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Copilot, Grok, and Claude. [1, 2]
• Prompt Campaigns: Donovan issued joint prompts to these platforms, testing the AI models’ interpretations of Shell’s decades-long strategy of silence against his archive. He frequently publishes the blistering AI-generated outputs to question corporate transparency and pressure the oil giant. [1, 2]
• Algorithmic Disruption: By generating continuous new summaries, ghost dialogues, and lists of “Shell’s top own goals,” Donovan has created a high-velocity digital environment. This tactic has disrupted standard search engine indexing and corporate PR control. [1, 2, 3]

“The Shell Leaks Files” Campaign

• Documentary Releases: Donovan is leveraging his control of the domain royaldutchshellplc.com (which he kept after Shell officially changed its name to Shell plc in 2022) to run a continuous release campaign called “The Shell Leaks Files“. [1, 2, 3]
• Targeted Exposes: Recent drops examine historical internal leak paths, such as the 2007 David Greer Sakhalin II email leak, and historical Subject Access Request (SAR) files revealing how Shell’s internal legal and PR teams mapped out strategies to monitor his websites. [1, 2]

Renewed Legal and Corporate Tension

• Shell’s Legal Posturing: Shell has reportedly reviewed new legal protocols and targeted defamation options specifically aimed at curbing false, AI-amplified claims, moving away from past attempts to shut down his websites entirely. [1]
• Shareholder Agitation: Donovan has integrated these AI narrative strategies into his shareholder advocacy, seeking to force official responses from Shell executives regarding the security and accuracy of information surrounding the company’s historical controversies. [1]

If you want to dive deeper, let me know if you would like info on:

• The original 1980s/1990s Don Marketing court cases that started the feud.
• How Donovan successfully retained the royaldutchshellplc.com domain name.
• The specific MI6/Hakluyt corporate espionage allegations tied to the dispute. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

AI responses may include mistakes. Learn more John Donovan: In your estimation how novel and damaging is the Donovan website to the reputation of Shell Plc? Is its impact increasing or declining with his weaponisation of AI? Evaluating the novelty and reputational damage of John Donovan’s website (royaldutchshellplc.com) requires looking at it through two lenses: its historical impact as a premier corporate watchdog site, and its modern evolution as an AI-driven digital weapon. [1, 2] The short answer is that the website represents a highly novel, historically devastating, and uniquely persistent risk to Shell plc. Far from fading away, its impact is experiencing a significant strategic renaissance due to Donovan’s active weaponisation of AI. [1, 2] 1. How Novel is the Donovan Platform? The website is considered a pioneer in the history of internet activism and “gripe sites”. It is highly novel for three structural reasons: [1, 2]

• • The Ultimate Domain Coup: Securing and maintaining the exact former corporate name domain (royaldutchshellplc.com) after defeating Shell in a World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) dispute is almost unprecedented for an activist. [1, 2]
  • The Scale of the Archive: Containing over 76,000 documents, internal leaks, and litigation papers, it is one of the largest single-topic anti-corporate repositories in internet history. [1, 2]
  • Insider Network Hub: Unlike standard activist blogs, Donovan successfully turned his platform into a secure, anonymous drop-box for disgruntled Shell executives and whistleblowers. At its peak, it was treated by NGOs like the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and international journalists as a shadow intelligence agency for Shell’s inner workings. [1, 2, 3, 4]

2. How Damaging is it to Shell plc? The damage has been both financial and reputational, documented across mainstream media and internal Shell leaks: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

• • The Sakhalin II Multi-Billion Dollar Blow: The platform’s most destructive act occurred in 2006, when Donovan leaked internal emails proving Shell had hidden environmental and financial risks from Russian regulators regarding the Sakhalin II project. Russian authorities used these leaks as a “smoking gun” to force Shell to slash its stake from 55% to 27.5%, handing control to Gazprom and costing Shell billions. [1]
  • Exposing the Surveillance State: Disclosures under the Data Protection Act (SAR files) revealed that Shell feared Donovan’s site more than mainstream environmental groups like Greenpeace. Internal logs proved Shell launched dedicated IT operations to monitor employee traffic to his site and draft “Donovan monitoring reports”, revealing a corporate paranoia that damaged Shell’s public commitment to transparency. [1, 2]
  • A History of Silencing Tactics: Published internal memos showed Shell’s legal teams aggressively trying to stop media outlets (like The Sunday Times) from reporting on Donovan, operating under the leaked internal philosophy that “no coverage is preferable to balanced coverage”. [1]

3. Is the Impact Increasing or Declining with AI? While an ageing activist operating a site named after a retired corporate moniker would traditionally face a steep decline in relevance, Donovan’s adoption of generative AI has actively reversed this decline, causing his impact to increase. [1] Why AI is Increasing the Site's Impact:

• • Algorithmic Disruption: Search engines and Large Language Models (LLMs) continuously scrape the web for data. Because Donovan owns the exact string royaldutchshellplc.com, AI scrapers frequently confuse his active archive with the historical or actual entity of Royal Dutch Shell. This injects his critical narratives directly into the training data of corporate intelligence tools. [1, 2, 3, 4]
  • The “Bot War” Reinterpretation: Donovan has stopped relying on static articles. Instead, he feeds his massive archive into various LLMs (ChatGPT, Copilot, Grok) and prompts them to synthesize new, blistering editorial reports on historical controversies. He then publishes these AI-generated corporate critiques as “impartial expert consensus,” making his 30-year feud feel perpetually fresh and modern. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
  • Overcoming Information Fatigue: AI has solved the site’s biggest flaw—its unnavigable mountain of messy documents. By utilizing AI summaries and thematic maps, Donovan has made it effortless for modern researchers, journalists, and legal teams to instantly unearth “smoking gun” files from decades past. [1, 2]

Conclusion The Donovan site remains an active, open wound for Shell. While Shell’s standard PR mechanism is designed to handle temporary news cycles, Donovan’s AI-driven strategy turns corporate history into a permanent, self-refreshing governance risk. [1, 2] If you want, I can provide more details on:

• • The specific WIPO ruling and how Shell lost its domain challenge.
  • The details of the Sakhalin II leak and the role of David Greer.
  • How modern LLMs handle corporate reputation tracking regarding historical disputes. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Let me know what you would like to look at next. AI responses may include mistakes. Learn more

Google AI update on the John Donovan Shell Feud as of 1st August 2026 was first posted on August 1, 2026 at 10:52 am.
©2018 "Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me at john@shellnews.net

John Donovan prompt: You may find this article to be of interest regarding the company name Royal Dutch Shell Plc which no longer exists and the website royaldutchshellplc.com which does exist and for over two decades, has used the name Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com as its masthead banner: https://royaldutchshellplc.com/2026/07/31/who-owns-the-name-royal-dutch-shell-plc-aka-royaldutchshellplc-com-john-donovan-or-shell-the-definitive-answer/

Google AI Mode reply:

Activist John Donovan has legally controlled the domain royaldutchshellplc.com for over two decades, utilizing it as a whistleblower platform despite a failed WIPO challenge by the oil giant. As Shell rebranded to remove “Royal Dutch,” the site persists as the dominant digital entity for the historical, abandoned name. Read the full analysis at royaldutchshellplc.com. [1, 2, 3, 4]

The long-running dispute between Shell plc and activist John Donovan regarding the royaldutchshellplc.com domain represents a significant case of digital adversarial archiving. Following a failed 2005 WIPO challenge by Shell, the site has evolved into a repository of over 76,000 documents that leverages AI to ensure historical controversies remain visible in search results. Explore the full details of this ongoing corporate feud at royaldutchshellplc.com. [1, 2, 3] AI responses may include mistakes. Learn more Royaldutchshellplc.com persists as the dominant digital entity for the historical, abandoned name was first posted on August 1, 2026 at 10:11 am.
©2018 "Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me at john@shellnews.net

WIRT Comments on Idaho Power Company Peregrine & South Hills Gas Power Plants Certificates Application

 

Program keanggotaan VIP dengan berbagai keuntungan eksklusif semakin menjadi perhatian di tengah berkembangnya industri hiburan digital. Salah satu istilah yang belakangan sering diperbincangkan adalah Member VIP Scatter Tak Terhenti, sebuah konsep yang merujuk pada layanan loyalitas dengan beragam bonus, promosi, dan fitur tambahan yang dirancang untuk meningkatkan pengalaman pengguna. Tren ini menunjukkan bahwa persaingan platform kini tidak hanya bertumpu pada variasi permainan, tetapi juga pada kualitas pelayanan yang diberikan kepada anggota setianya.

Dalam beberapa tahun terakhir, penyedia layanan digital berlomba menghadirkan sistem keanggotaan yang lebih menarik. Status VIP umumnya diberikan kepada pengguna yang aktif berpartisipasi dalam ekosistem platform. Sebagai bentuk apresiasi, anggota memperoleh akses terhadap promosi khusus, layanan pelanggan yang lebih cepat, informasi pembaruan lebih awal, hingga berbagai program loyalitas yang tidak tersedia bagi pengguna reguler. Pendekatan tersebut dinilai mampu meningkatkan kepuasan pengguna sekaligus memperkuat hubungan jangka panjang antara platform dan komunitasnya.

Dari sudut pandang industri, program VIP tidak sekadar menjadi strategi pemasaran. Sejumlah praktisi digital menilai bahwa keberhasilan sebuah sistem loyalitas bergantung pada konsistensi layanan, transparansi aturan, dan kemudahan akses bagi pengguna. Platform yang mampu menjaga kualitas pelayanan secara berkelanjutan cenderung memperoleh tingkat retensi pengguna yang lebih tinggi. Inilah yang membuat istilah Member VIP Scatter Tak Terhenti semakin sering muncul dalam berbagai pembahasan komunitas daring.

Pengalaman pengguna juga menjadi faktor penting dalam membangun reputasi sebuah layanan. Berdasarkan berbagai pola yang umum ditemukan pada platform digital, anggota VIP umumnya lebih menghargai kecepatan respons layanan pelanggan, kestabilan sistem, serta kemudahan memperoleh informasi mengenai program yang sedang berlangsung. Ketiga aspek tersebut memberikan rasa nyaman sehingga pengguna dapat menikmati seluruh fitur tanpa mengalami kendala berarti.

Selain itu, keberadaan fitur personalisasi turut menjadi nilai tambah. Banyak platform modern mulai memanfaatkan teknologi analisis data untuk menghadirkan rekomendasi yang lebih relevan sesuai aktivitas masing-masing anggota. Pendekatan ini membuat setiap pengguna memperoleh pengalaman yang terasa lebih personal dibandingkan sistem promosi yang bersifat umum. Di sisi lain, transparansi mengenai syarat dan ketentuan program tetap menjadi elemen yang tidak dapat diabaikan karena berpengaruh langsung terhadap tingkat kepercayaan pengguna.

Para pengamat industri digital juga menekankan pentingnya keamanan data dalam program keanggotaan VIP. Platform yang menerapkan sistem perlindungan informasi, autentikasi akun, serta kebijakan privasi yang jelas cenderung lebih dipercaya oleh komunitas. yang menempatkan pengalaman nyata, kompetensi pengelola, kredibilitas layanan, serta transparansi sebagai fondasi utama dalam membangun kepercayaan publik.

Di tengah meningkatnya persaingan, inovasi menjadi kunci utama agar sebuah program VIP tetap relevan. Pengguna saat ini tidak hanya mencari bonus atau promosi, tetapi juga menginginkan layanan yang stabil, proses yang sederhana, dan komunikasi yang terbuka. Platform yang mampu memenuhi kebutuhan tersebut memiliki peluang lebih besar untuk mempertahankan loyalitas anggotanya dalam jangka panjang.

Secara keseluruhan, fenomena Member VIP Scatter Tak Terhenti mencerminkan perubahan strategi layanan digital yang semakin berorientasi pada pengalaman pengguna. Keberhasilan sebuah program VIP tidak hanya ditentukan oleh banyaknya penawaran eksklusif, melainkan juga oleh kualitas pelayanan, keamanan sistem, transparansi informasi, dan konsistensi pengelolaan. Dengan mengedepankan prinsip-prinsip tersebut, program loyalitas berpotensi menjadi salah satu faktor yang membedakan sebuah platform di tengah persaingan industri hiburan digital yang terus berkembang.

US immigration policy has evolved with the labor needs of capital for the past 150 years. The US revolutionary left has evolved our critique accordingly: at every stage, we have shown how this policy served labor exploitation.  But in the 21st century, a global ethnonationalist reaction to mass migration—caused by climate change, war, and economic shifts—has reared its head. Second-term Trump immigration policy thus marks a new departure, one that requires a left re-think.

Throughout the industrial age in the U.S., immigration policy facilitated profits. Effectively open borders funneled millions of East Europeans to build up industry on the East Coast and Midwest after the Civil War. Settler colonialism continued to expand the frontier westward at the expense of indigenous peoples, opening up new population centers for agriculture, mining, and trade. Modern corporations developed amidst feverish growth in national and international markets. Unions posed a sporadic threat but had little permanent presence. In this context, large employers could nurture working-class distrust across several language groups, as well as the black-white divide. Labor groups even enthusiastically took the lead in the brutal Chinese exclusion on the West Coast. Immigration policy served rapid expansion and helped control our class.

In 1924, Congress enacted the Immigration Act, creating the Border Patrol. The Act’s country-by-country immigration quotas were based on white supremacist racial hierarchy, codifying it into law and further encouraging division in the workforce on that basis. But with westward expansion complete, and waves of unionization and even revolutionary organization cresting higher, capitalism needed new means of control. Employers used the Border Patrol to break up worker organizing through deportation in the Southwest. Large regular labor flows continued both ways across the Southern border, but unlike the old Ellis Island system, this created an immigrant workforce of technically “illegal alien” status.

Growing populations along both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border through the 20th and 21st centuries grew agricultural, construction, and other industries, depending heavily on immigrant labor. From the 1980s onward, Mexican and Latin American immigration became a persistent political football. 1993 saw the simultaneous enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Border Patrol’s Operation Gatekeeper. NAFTA’s elimination of Mexican but not US farm subsidies ruined masses of farmers, spiking northward migration as predicted by Clinton-era Border Patrol chief Doris Meissner. Gatekeeper permanently surged Border Patrol personnel, pushing migrants out of easy-to-cross areas and into remote desert and mountain terrain. Hundreds began dying annually. Traditional cross and return patterns became too dangerous, and a permanent “illegal” population of 11 million or so were forced to live in the shadow of deportation.

This was the perfection of capital’s immigration policy. As the Left pointed out regularly, the point was not to prevent mass immigration nor to expel the “illegals,” but to ensure a compliant workforce wary of organizing. These workers’ wages and working conditions could then be forced down, weakening the overall labor market and creating downward pressure on the wages of “legal” workers as well. This was especially timely as capital responded to the labor movement’s turn from nativism to solidarity. Immigrant workers became a key growth sector for several unions following the 1986 amnesty, and the AFL-CIO as a whole reversed its historic anti-immigration position in 2000.

The Democratic Party’s heart was never in its perennial calls for “comprehensive immigration reform.” The endlessly delayed “pathway to citizenship” never materialized, including during Obama’s first two years, when he enjoyed filibuster-proof Congressional majorities over both Houses. At that time, Obama claimed, “If the American people don’t feel like you can secure the borders, then it’s hard to strike a deal that would get people out of the shadows.” Therefore, he pushed for a massive increase in border enforcement to $27 billion. The “deal that would get people out of the shadows” never came. Bush, Obama, Trump 1, and Biden all relentlessly increased border militarization, ICE budgets, and wall building. Biden and Obama even set deportation records.

Trump II: This time it’s different

In building independent working-class immigrant solidarity, the left has for decades had to expose the hollowness of the Democrats’ claim to stand for immigrant rights. We were and still are right to lift the veil of media misframing to show that they squarely represent the interests of capital in the immigration pseudo-debate.

The flip side of this was, again rightly, to interrogate vote-scaring narratives about how much worse the Republicans supposedly would, in practice, be for immigrants.

But while the left has rallied impressively to militant defense of immigrants in Trump’s second term, our analyses have not kept up with changing reality in the last two years.

Trump’s immigration policy is not driven by the interests of capital. The goal is no longer labor force management to create ideal conditions for profitability. The goal is three-fold: (1) maintain a white majority by both preventing new immigration and ethnically cleansing current non-white immigrants, undocumented or otherwise, (2) make those immigrants who cannot be chased out, without disastrous labor shortages, into a permanent underclass of ethnic/racial others, (3) build up immigration enforcement as armed national guardians of the new/old white supremacist social order commanded directly by the authoritarian Presidency.

Others have noted that Trump’s drive toward a new autocratic political regime is possible because of the “Bonapartist” nature of his rule. Trump has achieved a new level of presidential autonomy (that’s what Bonapartism means). From what? From the formal and informal systems of checks and balances that have for centuries worked to keep capitalist democracy functionally stewarding the reproduction of stable conditions for profit-making. This new autonomy began when Trump took on and conquered the Republican Party, which previously worked to ensure the predictable victory of establishment political professionals. Capital thus lost its leading tool to shoehorn mass politics and elections into its preferred channels. Trump then went on to conquer conservative media, key think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, and partially purge Federal bureaucracies, including the military. These collective ruling class tools for deliberation and discipline failed.

This new centralized personal power is carrying out a change of regime before our eyes. If consolidated, the U.S. will be an electoral autocracy. Will it rule against the interests of capital? Not in general. But this system will be (already is) worse for employers dependent on immigrant labor, just as it is worse for those hurt by irrational wars, erratic trade policy, and social instability fueled by fascistic provocation coming from the top. The state is ideologically even more pro-capitalist than ever, but it is dismantling a historically evolved system of capitalist rule unrivaled in its subtlety and stability. Capital will adapt and maintain its privileged position, but these changes are not in its interests.

But it gets worse. Trump is not, as is often assumed, a pure opportunist like the original Louis Bonaparte. Along with the wildly erratic and purely narcissistic traits of his rule, “Make America Great Again” contains some remarkably consistent political principles.

Purely opportunistic aspiring autocrats have no reason to take the kind of unpopular stances that Trump has taken, specifically to advance ethnonationalism. He has consistently spewed Nazi-style narratives, calling immigrants “rapists,” slandering Black-majority nations as “shithole countries,” and claiming that Haitians “are eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats.” He endorses material from neo-Nazi sites. He said, “Islam hates us.”

This cannot be dismissed as unfiltered ranting. When asked about whether he rejected the support of neo-Nazi David Duke, Trump implausibly claimed not to know who he was. After the Charlottesville riot, he claimed there were “many good people on both sides.” He famously refused to repudiate the Proud Boys when pushed to do so, telling them winkingly to “stand back and stand by.”  The point is that, in moments where he has chosen his words with obvious care, he has always scrupulously shielded these people. It is not necessary to assume Trump is a secret Nazi. It’s enough that they share his ethnonationalism.

So we have a “principled” ethnonationalist commanding the capitalist state, possessing Bonapartist autonomy, driving toward a change of regime from capitalist democracy to electoral autocracy. Ethnonationalist restoration is the new state ideology.

It is too easy to equate Obama and Biden’s deportation records with Trump’s immigration policy. Obama and Biden achieved their numbers through expedited removals of border crossers. ICE today of course continues doing this. But it is also attempting interior enforcement against long-settled immigrant populations. Its officials make unrealistic claims about being able to replace undocumented farm labor with US citizens because they are not rooted in rational capitalist deliberation on how to manage labor supply, as all previous Presidents have been. Two million workers have “self-deported” since 2025.

ICE… officials make unrealistic claims about being able to replace undocumented farm labor with US citizens because they are not rooted in rational capitalist deliberation on how to manage labor supply, as all previous Presidents have been. Two million workers have “self-deported” since 2025.

Trump’s autonomy, as an aspiring capitalist autocrat, from the capitalist class’s traditional means of collective discipline, does not make him autonomous from the direct pressures of the capitalist economy. The Trump-Miller attempt at radical demographic social engineering through immigration enforcement still runs into pressure from farmers unable to harvest. The threat of ICE occupying San Francisco was called off after tech billionaires, afraid of social instability as seen in Los Angeles a year ago, successfully lobbied the President.

But the scale of ethnic cleansing already achieved is far beyond what has been done before. The still-active scaling up of ICE means this bruising social battle will continue.

All of this means working class solidarity with immigrants must become more all-sided, and definitely not less radical. We are facing first and foremost not labor market manipulation in the interests of capital (though labor supply management is still attempted secondarily), but the building of an ethnonationalist order.

For many years our job was unmasking the labor exploitation at the heart of bipartisan immigration policy. Now we must counter the divisive ethnonationalist hate being sold to the native born working class. Immigrant solidarity no longer means addressing a single political issue. It means resisting the central plank of the new state ideology of white ethnonationalism. For this reason, advancing a class conscious politics of immigrant solidarity, aimed beyond the ranks of the existing working class left, must be the keystone of a new class consciousness. The twisted evil of ethnonationalism, which is growing today despite the ups and downs of Trump’s regime, beckons to our class with a comprehensive and emotionally salient worldview. Only a new mass working class consciousness can compete with this civilization-threatening development in the long term. Solidarity with immigrants is the necessary starting point of that consciousness wherever on Earth ethnonationalism now threatens.

Featured Image credit: US Immigration and Customs Enforcement

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”

The post Trump’s ethnonationalist immigration agenda appeared first on Tempest.

The Shell Leaks Files SLF-2007-016 The Sakhalin Papers VI: After the Deal — “Pipeliners All!” and the Internal Record of Shell’s Response

Archive Reference: SLF-2007-016
Collection: The Sakhalin Papers
Evidence Standard: Official corporate filings, authenticated or corporately acknowledged internal communications, contemporaneous reporting and direct company correspondence.

Introduction

On 18 April 2007, the shareholders of Sakhalin Energy signed the agreement that triggered the transfer of control of Sakhalin-2 to Gazprom.

Gazprom obtained 50 per cent plus one share. Shell’s interest fell from 55 per cent to 27.5 per cent. Shell publicly welcomed the new majority shareholder, emphasised future growth opportunities and presented the transaction as another step towards completing the project and supplying contracted LNG customers.

An internal email carrying the same date presented a markedly different atmosphere.

Written by David Greer, Sakhalin Energy’s project director and deputy chief executive, the message attempted to rally senior pipeline personnel whom he believed were showing uncertainty, poor morale or insufficient confidence in their ability to finish the work.

It began:

“Pipeliners All!”

The contrast between the confident corporate announcement and the urgent internal exhortation provides an unusually revealing snapshot of Sakhalin-2 immediately after control changed hands.

Documentary Record 1. The public message: continuity, cooperation and growth

Shell’s 18 April announcement stated that the transaction implemented the protocol agreed in Moscow in December 2006.

The company recorded the new ownership structure and highlighted several positive developments:

• Gazprom’s arrival as majority shareholder;
• approval of a revised Environmental Action Plan;
• prospects for additional LNG processing capacity;
• continued progress towards supplying customers in Japan, Korea and North America.

Shell Executive Director Malcolm Brinded said Gazprom’s entry was “warmly welcomed” and described the development as an important step for Sakhalin-2.

Documented fact

The public statement did not describe the transaction as a defeat, forced withdrawal or loss of control. It framed the change as a partnership milestone offering greater stability and future opportunity.

Evidential limitation

Corporate announcements are authoritative evidence of what a company formally communicated. They are not, by themselves, complete records of internal opinion, staff morale or the pressures experienced by individual project managers.

2. The internal message: confidence had to be demanded

David Greer’s email was dated 18 April 2007.

Contemporaneous reporting reproduced substantial extracts. Greer assured recipients that he had “total faith in you and our collective ability,” but also referred to troubling comments and body language observed during a project meeting.

His message culminated in the instruction:

“Lead me, follow me or get out of my way.”

The Financial Times reported the email on its front page in June 2007. A Shell spokesman confirmed that it was genuine. Sakhalin Energy separately confirmed its authenticity to The Moscow Times.

Greer’s language borrowed heavily from speeches associated with General George S. Patton. That feature generated ridicule and extensive media attention, but the document’s historical importance extends beyond its literary origins.

It records a senior project executive attempting to overcome what he perceived as weakening confidence among personnel responsible for completing the pipelines.

3. What the Greer email establishes

The authenticated email supports several limited but important findings.

First, senior management believed the project faced substantial delivery pressure after the ownership transition.

Second, Greer had detected behaviour that he interpreted as hesitation or declining confidence.

Third, management considered motivation and organisational resolve serious enough to justify an unusually forceful written intervention.

Fourth, the email was not prepared for investors, regulators or journalists. Its intended audience was project personnel.

What it does not establish

The email does not prove that the entire workforce was demoralised.

It does not establish that construction was destined to fail.

It does not reveal the private opinions of Shell’s board, Gazprom or every member of Sakhalin Energy’s leadership.

Nor does it prove that the transfer of control alone caused the concerns Greer described.

The document is a contemporaneous fragment. Its value lies in what it records—not in conclusions imposed upon it afterwards.

Shell’s Concern About Internal Leaks 4. A separate internal document

Another document preserved in the Shell Data Protection Act disclosure archive is dated 21 March 2007, several weeks before the Greer email.

With the names of the correspondents redacted, the document states that Shell suspected current and former employees were communicating with John Donovan. It records that an information-technology project had been initiated to monitor internal emails sent from Shell servers to Donovan and to monitor internal traffic visiting his website.

The document also notes that internal emails had previously appeared on the site.

Provenance

The archive copy is presented as material disclosed by Shell under data-protection procedures. Identifying fields remain redacted, but the text, date and confidentiality marking are visible.

Evidential limitation

This document does not identify the source of the Greer email.

It does not establish that monitoring discovered the source.

It does not prove that Greer’s message was intercepted through any particular Shell system.

It does, however, establish that Shell was already concerned about internal information reaching the Donovan website before the “Pipeliners All!” email was written.

From Internal Email to International News 5. Publication and corporate confirmation

The Greer email reached royaldutchshellplc.com and was supplied to journalists.

The Financial Times published the story in early June 2007. The Moscow Times, Reuters and other news organisations followed, placing the email within the wider context of rising costs, environmental controversy and Shell’s loss of majority control.

This sequence is significant to the archive’s history.

An internal management communication moved through three distinct stages:

1. private distribution within the project;
2. publication by an independent Shell-focused website;
3. authentication and international reporting by established news organisations.

The document therefore ceased to be merely an allegation or anonymous claim. Its authenticity was acknowledged by representatives of the organisations involved.

6. David Greer’s departure

On 21 June 2007, Sakhalin Energy confirmed directly to John Donovan that Greer had decided to leave the company “to pursue other business interests.” The message was sent by Jim Niven, identified as an external-affairs manager at Sakhalin Energy.

Reuters reported the departure and stated that a Shell spokesman had confirmed it. The spokesman declined to say whether the leaked email had caused Greer’s exit.

A Sakhalin Energy spokesman told The Moscow Times that linking the departure to the email was “pure speculation.” The company announced that technical director Jaap Huijskes would take over as project director for the remainder of the Phase 2 development.

Documented fact

Greer left Sakhalin Energy approximately two weeks after the email became a prominent international news story.

Not established

No disclosed document examined for this instalment proves that Greer was dismissed because of the email.

Temporal proximity is not proof of causation.

The official explanation was that he had chosen to pursue other business interests, and the company publicly rejected suggestions of a proven connection.

Court-Record Position

No court judgment is relied upon in establishing the events examined in this archive file.

Regulatory and legal proceedings formed part of the wider Sakhalin-2 controversy, but the narrow sequence covered here—the share transfer, Greer email, corporate authentication, leak-monitoring document and Greer’s departure—is established primarily through corporate announcements, internal records, direct correspondence and contemporaneous journalism.

This distinction is important. Court findings should not be implied where no relevant judicial determination has been identified.

Historical Analysis

The public and internal records are not necessarily contradictory.

A multinational company can publicly support a completed transaction while managers privately confront uncertainty, fatigue and delivery pressure. Corporate confidence and operational anxiety can exist simultaneously.

The 18 April documents capture both realities.

Shell’s public announcement described opportunity, cooperation and forward momentum.

Greer’s internal message described a team that, in his assessment, needed to recover its confidence and appetite for the fight.

The timing gives the email its documentary force. On the day the new ownership structure was formalised, a senior executive responsible for project delivery was demanding renewed resolve from the people required to finish it.

That does not prove the public statement was false.

It demonstrates that the public statement was incomplete—as public statements almost invariably are.

Commentary

The lasting significance of “Pipeliners All!” is not that a senior executive borrowed the rhetoric of General Patton.

That made the email memorable. It did not make it historically important.

Its importance lies in the unguarded glimpse it provides of Sakhalin-2 at the moment Shell ceased to control it.

The project was not simply passing smoothly from one ownership structure to another. It remained an enormous, delayed and technically demanding undertaking whose managers were confronting questions of confidence, performance and completion.

The later controversy also illustrates why internal archives matter.

Without the leaked email, the surviving public record for 18 April 2007 would have consisted largely of welcoming quotations, approved environmental plans and promises of future LNG growth.

The internal document adds the missing human and organisational dimension.

Evidence Assessment

Official ownership and transaction terms: Confirmed by Shell’s corporate announcement and regulatory filing.

Authenticity of the Greer email: Confirmed contemporaneously by Shell and Sakhalin Energy representatives.

Internal concern about leaks: Recorded in a dated, confidential document preserved within Shell’s data-protection disclosure material.

Greer’s departure: Confirmed directly by Sakhalin Energy and reported contemporaneously by Reuters and The Moscow Times.

Claim that the email caused his departure: Not proven. Publicly disputed by Sakhalin Energy.

Document Integrity Statement

This archive file distinguishes between:

• matters established by official records;
• statements made by identified corporate representatives;
• authenticated or corporately acknowledged internal material;
• contemporaneous journalistic reporting;
• historical interpretation;
• editorial commentary.

No inference has been presented as a judicial finding or established fact.

Where the surviving evidence cannot determine motive or causation, that limitation has been stated.

Sources and Documentary References Primary and corporate material

• Shell announcement, “Gazprom enters Sakhalin II project,” 18 April 2007.
• Royal Dutch Shell Form 6-K concerning the Gazprom protocol.
• Shell data-protection disclosure document dated 21 March 2007 concerning internal email and website monitoring.
• Sakhalin Energy email to John Donovan confirming David Greer’s departure, 21 June 2007.

Contemporaneous reporting

• Financial Times, reporting and extracts from the authenticated “Pipeliners All!” email.
• Reuters, “Shell Sakhalin boss quits after email leaked,” 21 June 2007.
• The Moscow Times, coverage of the email and Greer’s subsequent departure.

Related Archive Files

• SLF-2007-011 — The Sakhalin Papers I: How Internal Documents Became Geopolitical History
• SLF-2007-012 — The Sakhalin Papers II: The Cost Escalation That Changed Everything
• SLF-2007-013 — The Sakhalin Papers III: Environmental Inspections, Regulatory Pressure and the Battle for Control
• SLF-2007-014 — The Sakhalin Papers IV: Behind Closed Doors — Internal Communications During the Crisis
• SLF-2007-015 — The Sakhalin Papers V: The Gazprom Agreement — How Control of Sakhalin-2 Changed Hands

Archivist’s Note

Internal documents should neither be sensationalised nor dismissed.

A single email cannot explain an entire multibillion-dollar project. But when its authenticity is confirmed and it is placed alongside corporate announcements, regulatory filings and contemporaneous reporting, it becomes part of a reliable historical chronology.

The purpose of The Shell Leaks Files is to preserve that chronology while maintaining the boundary between evidence and interpretation.

About The Shell Leaks Files

The Shell Leaks Files is an independent documentary archive preserving authenticated historical material relating to Royal Dutch Shell plc, Shell plc and associated companies.

The archive prioritises primary documentation, provenance, contemporaneous corroboration and the clear separation of factual evidence from editorial analysis.

Next Archive File SLF-2007-017 — The Sakhalin Papers VII: The Whistleblower Warnings — Claims That Shell’s Management Could No Longer Control the Project

The next instalment will examine warnings supplied from inside the Sakhalin-2 project concerning construction management, contracting, scheduling and executive control.

It will distinguish the allegations made by confidential sources from facts subsequently confirmed by corporate records and events—and ask which warnings were vindicated by the project’s eventual outcome.

The Shell Leaks Files: 31 JULY 2026 was first posted on July 31, 2026 at 10:23 pm.
©2018 "Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me at john@shellnews.net

Shell once argued that Royaldutchshellplc.com was essentially identical to the name of its new parent company. It asked the World Intellectual Property Organization to take the domain away from Alfred Donovan. Shell lost. More than twenty years later, Shell has abandoned the corporate name—but the Donovan website still bears it.

There is a simple answer, followed by an important legal distinction.

Shell plc owns its Shell trademarks and remains the corporate successor to the company formerly called Royal Dutch Shell plc.

But Shell does not own the internet domain name:

Royaldutchshellplc.com

The domain was registered in my fathers name, Alfred Donovan, in October 2004. Shell subsequently commenced proceedings before the World Intellectual Property Organization—WIPO—seeking its transfer.

Shell’s complaint was rejected.

The domain remained with the Donovans and is now controlled and operated by me, John Donovan.

Meanwhile, the company that once bore the name Royal Dutch Shell plc changed its legal name to Shell plc in January 2022. Companies House now records “Royal Dutch Shell plc” only as a previous company name, used between 27 October 2004 and 21 January 2022. Companies House

So the definitive position is:

Shell owns the continuing company and its trademarks. John Donovan controls Royaldutchshellplc.com. Shell itself no longer trades under the corporate name Royal Dutch Shell plc.

That distinction is important because search engines and AI systems continue to blur three different things:

1. the current company, Shell plc;
2. its former legal name, Royal Dutch Shell plc;
3. the independently operated website Royaldutchshellplc.com.

They are not the same thing.

Shell’s Extraordinary 2005 Argument

Shell cannot plausibly claim that the domain name is only loosely or accidentally connected to its former company name.

Its own lawyers argued precisely the opposite.

In the complaint submitted to WIPO, Shell contended:

“The disputed names www.royaldutchshellplc.com and www.royaldutchshellgroup.com registered by the Respondent are, to all intents and purposes, identical to the company name ‘Royal Dutch Shell plc’ and the collective name ‘Royal Dutch/Shell Group’.”

The formal WIPO decision summarised Shell’s position in very similar words:

“The domain names <royaldutchshellplc.com> and <royaldutchshellgroup.com> registered by the Respondent are essentially identical to the company name ‘Royal Dutch Shell plc’ and the collective name ‘Royal Dutch/Shell Group’.”

That is Shell’s own case—not my retrospective interpretation of it. WIPO

Shell also told the WIPO panel that the disputed domains were:

“precisely the names of” the intended new principal company and the Royal Dutch/Shell Group.

It argued that an internet user might naturally expect Royaldutchshellplc.com to lead to the company’s own website. Shell alleged that the registration prevented the group from using the corresponding domain and caused embarrassment by directing visitors to a critical website. WIPO

In other words, Shell spent considerable legal effort persuading WIPO that the domain name and the new corporate name were, for practical purposes, inseparable.

The difficulty for Shell was that similarity alone was not enough.

What Shell Had to Prove

Under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy, Shell had to establish all three of the following:

• that the disputed domain was identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark in which Shell had rights;
• that the registrant had no rights or legitimate interest in the domain;
• and that the domain had been registered and was being used in bad faith.

The panel accepted that Royaldutchshellplc.com was confusingly similar to Shell’s registered marks. It expressly found in Shell’s favour on that first element. WIPO

But Shell still had to prove the remaining requirements.

The panel considered the non-commercial nature of the website, the Donovans’ long-running criticism of Shell and the absence of evidence that the domain had been registered for resale or direct commercial profit.

It concluded that the evidence did not show that Alfred Donovan’s purpose was to stop Shell from using its marks. Rather, the purpose was to draw public attention to criticism of Shell’s activities.

The panel therefore found for Alfred Donovan on the bad-faith element and ruled:

“For all the foregoing reasons, the Complaint is denied.”

The decision was issued on 8 August 2005. WIPO

Shell Had Already Decided to Keep Shell.com

The case becomes even more peculiar when Shell’s own internal correspondence and contemporary reporting are examined.

A confidential Shell email dated 31 May 2005 discussed a Wall Street Journal enquiry about the dispute. The email recorded that the journalist wanted to know why Shell had filed a complaint:

“given that it is not our intention to replace shell.com with a url for royaldutchshellplc.com following the merger.”

That sentence is highly revealing.

Shell regarded Royaldutchshellplc.com as sufficiently important to launch WIPO proceedings, but it apparently did not intend to use it as its principal corporate website.

An internal Shell explanation said the action had instead been taken because Alfred Donovan had registered several domain names similar to legitimate Shell addresses, which Shell characterised as a pattern of bad-faith registrations. Shell News

The Wall Street Journal also reported that Shell’s main corporate website would remain Shell.com. Shell News

That does not mean Shell had no legitimate interest in defensive domain-name protection. Major corporations routinely secure domains they do not intend to use as their principal address.

It does, however, undermine any suggestion that Royaldutchshellplc.com was required for Shell’s day-to-day corporate operations.

Shell wanted control of the address.

It did not establish a legal entitlement to take it.

Shell’s Own Later Internal Account

A confidential Shell “Focal Point” document dated 15 May 2006 summarised the result with unusual clarity.

It stated that Shell had requested transfer of the domains, but:

“the adjudication panel did not accept that there were grounds for the transfer.”

The document added:

“There is no appeal from that decision.”

It said that although a separate court challenge might have been possible, Shell did not consider further action justified. Shell News

That was effectively the end of Shell’s attempt to obtain Royaldutchshellplc.com.

There has been no successful later challenge.

Who Registered the Domain First?

Companies House shows that the dormant company Forthdeal Limited was renamed Royal Dutch Shell plc on 27 October 2004. Companies House

Royaldutchshellplc.com was registered on 29 October 2004, immediately after the restructuring announcement.

The historic WHOIS record reproduced in Shell’s own WIPO complaint listed Alfred Donovan as the registrant and confirmed that the domain had been created on 29 October 2004. Shell News

Shell argued that this timing showed an intention to pre-empt the company.

The Donovan response was that the domain accurately described the subject matter of the existing criticism website; it had not been registered for sale, rent, advertising revenue or commercial trading; and it was being used as a platform for news and criticism concerning Royal Dutch Shell. Shell News

The panel did not accept Shell’s case that the required bad faith had been established.

That decision—not corporate displeasure, search-engine assumptions or subsequent mythology—determined the WIPO proceeding.

The Name Shell Later Abandoned

For more than sixteen years after the WIPO decision, the curious position remained:

• Shell operated the company called Royal Dutch Shell plc;
• Shell used Shell.com as its principal website;
• and the Donovans operated Royaldutchshellplc.com.

Then Shell abandoned the company name.

On 21 January 2022, Royal Dutch Shell plc officially became Shell plc.

Shell’s own materials confirm that the change formed part of the simplification of its corporate structure. Shell

Companies House records the history unambiguously:

• Forthdeal Limited: 5 February 2002 to 27 October 2004;
• Royal Dutch Shell plc: 27 October 2004 to 21 January 2022;
• Shell plc: 21 January 2022 to the present. Companies House

Therefore, anyone searching today for the current “Royal Dutch Shell plc share price,” “Royal Dutch Shell plc annual report 2026” or “Royal Dutch Shell plc investor relations” is being led by outdated terminology.

There is no current listed parent company bearing that name.

The shares, annual reports and investor-relations operation belong to Shell plc.

The Search-Engine Confusion

Recent correspondence with Bing Webmaster Tools arose because Bing continued to present search prompts and generated answers implying that Royal Dutch Shell plc remained a current company with its own shares, reports, investor-relations pages and official website.

In an email dated 30 July 2026, I explained that Shell had dropped the name in 2022 and that Shell.com was the official website of Shell plc—not an official website for a still-existing company called Royal Dutch Shell plc.

I also drew Bing’s attention to Shell’s own WIPO argument that Royaldutchshellplc.com was essentially identical to the former corporate name, and to the fact that Shell lost the resulting case.

Bing’s support representative replied that the matter was under investigation. At the time of publication, a final substantive response is still awaited. The supplied PDF contains the correspondence, search screenshots, WIPO extracts and supporting links. Domain Name Doc 31 July 2026.pdfPDF

Google, by contrast, appears to have acted on information concerning the distinction between Shell plc and the independent Donovan website.

The broader problem is not merely cosmetic.

A search engine that treats “Royal Dutch Shell plc” as a current listed company may produce inaccurate answers about:

• share prices;
• dividends;
• current annual reports;
• headquarters;
• investor relations;
• corporate nationality;
• and the identity of the “official” website.

Historical aliases are useful.

Presenting them as current legal identities is not.

Does John Donovan “Own the Name”?

This is where precision matters.

I do not claim ownership of Shell’s trademarks, the Shell name, the shell emblem or the corporate goodwill belonging to Shell plc.

Nor does ownership of a domain name confer ownership of every word contained within it.

What the Donovan side owns and controls is the domain registration and independently operated website Royaldutchshellplc.com, subject to the registration agreement and applicable law.

Shell owns its corporate and trademark rights.

But Shell asked WIPO to transfer the domain and failed.

The panel did not award Shell ownership.

It denied the complaint.

Twenty-one years later, Shell has itself ceased using Royal Dutch Shell plc as its current corporate name, while Royaldutchshellplc.com remains active as an independent publication and historical archive.

The Definitive Answer

So, who owns “Royal Dutch Shell Plc”?

The answer depends on what is being discussed.

The present company

The current company is Shell plc, company number 04366849. It was formerly called Royal Dutch Shell plc.

Shell’s trademarks and corporate rights

These remain with Shell and its relevant group companies.

The domain Royaldutchshellplc.com

Shell does not own it.

The domain was registered by Alfred Donovan, survived Shell’s WIPO challenge and is now operated and controlled by John Donovan.

The current official Shell website

That is:

Shell.com

The independent critical and historical archive

That is:

Royaldutchshellplc.com

The two websites are not affiliated.

And the company Royal Dutch Shell plc no longer exists under that name.

The irony is therefore complete.

Shell once insisted that Royaldutchshellplc.com was, to all intents and purposes, identical to the name Royal Dutch Shell plc.

Shell failed to obtain the domain.

Shell later discarded the company name.

The Donovans did not discard the domain.

Chronology and Source Documents 27 October 2004 — Forthdeal Limited becomes Royal Dutch Shell plc

Companies House: Shell plc company history

29 October 2004 — Royaldutchshellplc.com registered

The historic WHOIS record is reproduced in Shell’s WIPO complaint:

Shell’s 44-page WIPO complaint

18 May 2005 — Shell submits its WIPO complaint

Shell’s WIPO complaint

Shell’s complaint exhibits

25 May 2005 — WIPO formally notifies Alfred Donovan

WIPO Notification of Complaint and Commencement of Proceedings

31 May 2005 — Shell internal email discusses Wall Street Journal enquiry

Shell internal domain-name correspondence

2 June 2005 — Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg report the dispute

Wall Street Journal/Bloomberg domain-name reporting

Alternative Wall Street Journal copy

14 June 2005 — Alfred Donovan files his response

Donovan response to Shell’s WIPO complaint

8 August 2005 — WIPO denies Shell’s complaint

Official WIPO Decision: Case D2005-0538

11 August 2005 — WIPO issues the formal decision notification

WIPO Decision Notification

15 May 2006 — Shell records internally that there was no appeal

Shell Confidential Focal Point document

2018 — Retrospective account of the domain dispute

Domain Name Battle with Shell

21 January 2022 — Royal Dutch Shell plc becomes Shell plc

Companies House record

Shell announcement and corporate simplification record

8 July 2026 — Chronological record of external references to the website

A Chronological Register of External References to Royaldutchshellplc.com

9 July 2026 — Request to search engines and AI platforms

Royal Dutch Shell Plc Search Results: Dear Google, Bing, ChatGPT, Copilot and Perplexity

29–30 July 2026 — Correspondence with Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing confirmed that the issue was being investigated. A final response remained outstanding at the time of publication.

Editorial and Legal Note

This article distinguishes between ownership and control of an internet domain, ownership of trademarks, and the legal identity of a registered company.

The 2005 WIPO ruling did not grant the Donovans ownership of Shell’s trademarks or corporate name. It rejected Shell’s request for transfer of the disputed domains under the UDRP because Shell did not establish all elements required by that policy.

The article does not suggest that Royaldutchshellplc.com is an official Shell website. It is an independent publication and archive operated by John Donovan.

Shell’s official corporate website is Shell.com.

The Practical Reality Behind the Registration

One historical detail is worth recording.

Although Royaldutchshellplc.com was registered in the name of Alfred Donovan, the practical arrangements were handled by his son, John Donovan.

In October 2004, Alfred was 88 years old and living with John in Colchester. John registered the domain on his father’s behalf and subsequently dealt with the correspondence, the WIPO proceedings and the continuing operation of the website.

Following Alfred Donovan’s death in 2013, John continued maintaining the website and expanding what has since become one of the world’s largest independent archives relating to Shell’s corporate history.

That continuity explains why the original WIPO proceedings refer to Alfred Donovan while the website is now edited and published by John Donovan.

Postscript: History Has a Sense of Humour

History occasionally has an ironic streak.

Before it became Royal Dutch Shell plc, Shell’s new parent company was an off-the-shelf company called Forthdeal Limited.

More than twenty years after Shell unsuccessfully sought to obtain Royaldutchshellplc.com, John Donovan has also acquired the Forthdeal domain name—the very corporate name Shell itself abandoned when it created Royal Dutch Shell plc.

Nor does the story end there.

John Donovan has also registered RoyalDutchPetroleumCompany.com, preserving online the name of the company founded in 1890 from which Royal Dutch Shell—and ultimately today’s Shell plc—developed.

The objective is not to impersonate Shell or create confusion.

It is to preserve and document an important chapter of corporate history that might otherwise gradually disappear from public consciousness.

The irony is therefore complete.

In 2005, Shell argued before WIPO that Royaldutchshellplc.com was, to all intents and purposes, identical to the name of its new parent company.

Shell failed to obtain the domain.

In 2022, Shell voluntarily abandoned the corporate name Royal Dutch Shell plc and became Shell plc.

In 2026, Royaldutchshellplc.com remains very much alive.

And, thanks to Forthdeal and RoyalDutchPetroleumCompany.com, two other significant chapters of Shell’s corporate history have also been preserved online.

Sometimes history writes the best ending itself.

Who Owns the Name Royal Dutch Shell Plc AKA Royaldutchshellplc.com: John Donovan or Shell? The Definitive Answer was first posted on July 31, 2026 at 9:58 pm.
©2018 "Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me at john@shellnews.net

On June 30th, a historic Joint Statement of Agreement was signed at the Western Governors' Association (WGA) Annual Meeting to strengthen coordination on transmission planning across the...

Lynas Rare Earths: Militarised Extractivism in Action A webinar tracing the imperial powers behind the West's "clean" rare earths champion and the communities who have refused to accept the toxic legacy left in their name.

Co-hosted by Aidwatch and Yes to Life, No to Mining

Lynas Rare Earths Ltd is marketed as the secure, “green” alternative to Chinese rare earth dominance. Behind that story sits something else entirely: a mine and an unreliable processing plant in Western Australia, an operational processing plant in Kuantan, Malaysia, and a supply chain bankrolled by the U.S. Department of War alongside the Japanese and Australian governments.

Rare earths don’t just power the energy transition, they power advanced weapons systems. Lynas sits exactly where militarism and extraction meet.

In Kuantan, Malaysia close to two million tonnes of radioactive waste and millions of tonnes of hazardous waste sit in a monsoon-prone peat swamp separated only with a thin plastic membrane, in a facility Lynas’s own consultants judged safe for just twenty years for waste that stays hazardous for tens of aeons.

Lynas has no social licence to operate. Safety standards below international norms. Oversight stripped away and tax exemptions handed over, while a foreign, military-linked project operates with impunity.

And yet, since 2011, community resistance has been continuous, challenging the greenwashing, the violations, and the absence of any right to poison a place in perpetuity.

This session brings speakers together to trace the imperialist interests driving Lynas, to name the pattern of militarised extractivism it represents, and to centre the frontline communities who have carried this fight for over a decade.

Wednesday 19 August | 6AM EDT / 11am BST / 8PM AEST / 6PM Malaysia

Guest speakers will be followed by a live Q&A.

Come learn. Come listen. Come stand in solidarity.

REGISTER NOW SPEAKERS + Q&A Lee Tan

AidWatch

Policy Co-ordinate, AidWatch Australia. Lee will provide a summary of Lynas’ modus operandi over the two decades of it playing the market and seizing geopolitical opportunities while piling up its toxic and radioactive wastes in Malaysia

Shigeru Tanaka

Pacific Asia Resource Center (PARC)

Executive Director, Pacific Asia Resource Center (PARC). Shigeru will present on Japanese financing of rare earth projects in Malaysia that have created two toxic radioactive legacies in the country.

Farwina Farogue

Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS)

From the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions campaign in Malaysia. Farwina will speak about their recent No Rare Earth for Genocide protest actions against Lynas

Liz Downes

AidWatch / YLNM

 

Chair of AidWatch and regional contact person for YLNM. Liz will discuss recent critical minerals policy developments and geopolitical power games being played between Australia and the United States, which are creating the conditions for companies like Lynas to expand with impunity.

The post Lynas Rare Earths – Militarised Extractivism in Action appeared first on Yes to Life No to Mining.

Registered nurses will hold a press conference and rally at California Hospital Medical Center, in Los Angeles, Calif., on Monday, Aug. 3, to protest owner and operator CommonSpirit Health’s planned layoffs at 17 hospitals in California. Nurses say layoffs will jeopardize patient care and harm communities.

This article Inside the longest refugee protest in history was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Agadez, Niger — On any given day, you will find a group of up to 1,000 people, including women, children, the elderly and people with disabilities, standing in the Sahara Desert, eight miles from the nearest town, holding signs that read “We don’t want to stay here,” “Refugees in the desert without protection” and “We don’t feel safe here.” 

Since Sept. 22, 2024, they have maintained a daily sit-in at the humanitarian center where they are being held. At nearly two years, it has become one of the longest continuous refugee-led protests in history — and almost no one knows about it. 

They are refugees, the majority from Sudan, others from Eritrea, Somalia, Ethiopia, Congo and Cameroon. They are among approximately 2,000 people living at the Agadez Humanitarian Center, which is managed jointly by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR, and Nigerien authorities. Established in 2017 with funding from the EU, Italy and the UK, Agadez was intended as a “transit point” for refugees awaiting resettlement. 

Instead, according to sources in the camp who wanted to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, refugees are held with limited movement, no asylum processing and no resettlement path. Some have been there for more than eight years. Nigerien authorities have claimed to offer local integration, but refugees report it happens without their consent.

“We’re stuck between a homeland that can’t be returned to and a humanitarian center that can’t be lived in,” the anonymous source said. “We are held in the desert, without the most basic necessities of life. This is our suffering.” 

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The protesters have made their requests clear: resettlement to safe third countries, improved living conditions until then and an end to their “de facto detention.” 

But they are not suffering in silence. They are still standing proudly, despite intimidation, aggression and violence from the Nigerien police and military forces, and indifference and complicity from the agency meant to protect them.

Desert conditions in Agadez are an active threat to survival. Temperatures regularly exceed 105 degrees Fahrenheit, making exposure, dehydration and heat stroke constant risks. Ironically, when the former head of UNHCR in Niger, Emmanuel Gignac, visited the camp, he complained on camera of the heat to refugees and insisted they only talk in the shade. Compounding the heat risks is a lack of medical care, refugees said. And for nearly a year, most have received no food rations. 

Children in the Agadez refugee camp join their parents on the 571th day of protest. (Amir Abdulkrem / @RefugeesNiger)

UNHCR has repeatedly stated the center is “not a detention facility” and residents enjoy freedom of movement, a claim refugees refute. They point to mandatory passes for non-local travel, which are difficult to obtain from the local government, and often refused. Even with them, refugees face obstructions and payment of bribes at checkpoints, said a source.

A Cameroonian woman, Armelle, told InfoMigrants that when she tried to travel beyond the city of Agadez, Nigerien police stopped her. According to a refugee spokesperson, the police told her, “How dare you decide for yourself — you’re a refugee, you need permission.” 

One refugee summed up the situation, “I see no difference between the place I am in and a prison. What matters to me is conveying the truth about what is happening here.” 

The system that traps them

“The peaceful protests in Agadez aren’t an isolated event, but part of a broader refugee-led movement that has emerged wherever refugees have found themselves trapped in systems of indefinite containment,” said David Yambio, executive director and cofounder of the organization Refugees in Libya, which advocates for migrants and refugees in North Africa and Europe.

Yambio is himself a refugee from South Sudan. Born in 1997, he fled war as an infant with his family, and endured forced recruitment as a child soldier. Later he survived detention, torture and enslavement under notorious Libyan police chief Osama Almasri Najim in Tripoli. 

Through Refugees in Libya, Yambio has built a network that connects refugees across Libya, Tunisia, Niger and other North African countries who say UNHCR has failed to protect them. Together, they are documenting abuses and sustaining pressure on UNHCR. The organization is working with deported leaders of the Agadez protests to fight for those still trapped in the camp. 

“No community chooses to sustain a peaceful protest for more than 670 days unless every other avenue has failed,” Yambio said. 

Agadez is part of the EU’s strategy to externalize its borders and stop people fleeing wars from reaching Europe. “European borders no longer begin at the Mediterranean, they stretch deep into Libya, Tunisia, Niger and beyond,” Yambio said. 

The majority in Agadez are refugees of the war that erupted in Sudan in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a conflict that has killed tens of thousands, displaced more than 15 million and unleashed ethnic violence in Darfur that the UN describes as bearing “the hallmarks of genocide.” Others have fled conflicts in Chad, Ethiopia, Cameroon and the Central African Republic, where political violence, insurgencies and instability are fueled by past colonial legacies and modern-day exploitation. 

Refugees do not set out for Europe lightly. Many try to find a home in neighboring countries first, but when that process is frustrated, as in Niger, with no work, no schooling for their children and no hope of a safe return to their home country, they move on. Europe is not their first choice; it is their last.

The Mediterranean nations of Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Libya are the main avenues for refugees trying to seek safety in Europe. But authorities in those countries do the bidding of European governments by violently expelling refugees fleeing so they can’t reach Europe. In Libya and Tunisia, the EU funds “coast guard” operations not to save refugees, but to intercept migrant boats at sea and return them forcibly, often to Libya — where they face detention, extortion, torture and slavery. 

Other refugees intercepted in North Africa and the Mediterranean are dumped in the desert, abandoned near borders or sent to Mauritania, Niger and the Aegean Islands, where the EU funds mass detention centers. Algeria alone has deported over 80,000 people to Niger since 2024. 

These mass expulsions are not isolated acts but part of a coordinated “chain deportation corridor” in which European money, channeled through international organizations, finances a system of containment. In the Aegean Sea, EU-backed “Closed Controlled Access Centers” confine asylum seekers in detention for months under constant surveillance. In Mauritania, the EU and Spain fund migrant detention facilities known for inhumane treatment. The EU presents these centers as humanitarian, but the effect is to warehouse people indefinitely far from European courts, accountability or empathy. 

Agadez, likewise, operates as a legalized black hole: Refugees are held in a desert camp, their asylum claims are unprocessed, and while protesting peacefully against their detainment, their freedom of speech is criminalized by the authorities detaining them there — all paid for by European taxpayers.

If they try to travel past the nearest city, they are forcibly returned, often at gunpoint. One refugee explained, “We’re not migrants — we’re refugees fleeing war. But they treat us like criminals, as they don’t want us to reach Europe.” 

Inside the movement

The peaceful protests aren’t spontaneous. Refugees formed an elected National Refugee Committee shortly after the protests began in September 2024 to coordinate daily sit-ins, initiate hunger strikes, create petitions and write open letters. They use social media, particularly X, to document their plight, sharing photos and videos that reach the outside world. 

Nigerien authorities refuse to negotiate with the committee and warn refugees not to participate in it, a refugee spokesperson told me. “[The government] told us if refugees are part of a representative body, you won’t obtain your rights,” he said.

The sit-in has continued every day since it began on Sept. 22, 2024, through desert heat as high as 112 degrees Fahrenheit, punitive food ration cuts, arrests, police brutality, harassment and illegal deportations. 

Children participate, holding signs that count the protest days, starting at day one. The protesters chant a single slogan: “We don’t feel safe; we don’t want to stay here.”

Children make up at least 15 percent of the approximately 2,000 refugees held at the UN-run camp in Agadez, Niger. (Amir Abdulkrem / @RefugeesNiger)

The movement has faced repeated crackdowns. In January 2020, after refugees set up a protest camp outside UNHCR headquarters in the city of Agadez, security forces arrested more than 330 people. According to refugees who were present, security forces beat protesters, including children and pregnant women. The arrestees were locked in cramped unsanitary conditions without food for two days, sources say, and were only released after 48 days.

The sit-in that began in 2024 was met with escalating repression. In February 2025, UNHCR suspended food aid at the request of Nigerien authorities seeking to quell the protests. 

The following month, Niger’s National Eligibility Commission for Refugee Status, or CNE, issued a statement criminalizing all refugee committees, which read in part, “There is fundamentally no right to resettlement. … Therefore, organizing and participating in demonstrations of any kind within the Agadez Humanitarian Center to demand resettlement is intolerable.”

Eight protest leaders were then arrested, beaten and held for 10 days. 

“I am still suffering the consequences of that arrest, physically and psychologically,” one of the leaders said. “I got a broken finger on my right hand, severe headaches and have constant pain.” 

At a meeting where UNHCR was present, CNE revoked the protesters’ legal refugee status, and they were then illegally deported to Chad.

In August 2025, six more leaders were arrested in a raid involving 15 military vehicles, and were also deported to Chad. Their whereabouts remain unknown. The Nigerien military came to the detention facility, rounded people up and, as captured on film, threw one man headfirst into the back of a pickup truck, hands tied behind his back, and drove away with him. He has not been heard from since.

Mary Lawlor, the UN special rapporteur on human rights defenders, told The New Humanitarian that these arrests “may constitute enforced disappearances, and a grave violation of Niger’s obligations under human rights law.” 

“All six of those arrested were part of the committee that has been peacefully organizing in defense of the rights of refugees in Agadez,” she said. “I do consider them human rights defenders.”

Reached for comment, UNHCR said it learned of both sets of arrests after the fact, although sources in the camp say that UNHCR staff witnessed and did not intervene in the March 2025 arrests and beatings.

A UNHCR spokesperson said the agency “met with” Nigerien authorities after both arrests to “express its concerns and advocate for international protection standards.” At the deportation hearing, UNHCR said it provided “technical guidance” that “under international law … revocation [of refugee status] must be based on individualized assessments and must not be used as a punitive response to peaceful protest or collective action” and “any alleged violation of national laws and regulations should be addressed through the ordinary justice system.” 

The agency did not answer why it failed to prevent the deportations, despite the freedom of expression and speech rights ordained by the founding documents of the United Nations, and despite the agency’s international mandate to supervise how states implement refugee law.

Yambio said that retaliation against refugees who speak out isn’t isolated to Niger: “Across Libya, Tunisia and Niger, refugee leaders are increasingly labeled as troublemakers or threats to UNHCR rather than recognized as legitimate representatives.”

Complicit, negligent or incompetent?

UNHCR has issued multiple statements defending its operations. In January 2025, it said: “While we fully respect their right to peacefully protest and acknowledge the difficulties they face in a Agadez’s arid conditions, we urge the group to engage with us in a constructive manner and reconsider the assistance and local opportunities that have been made available.” Yet peaceful protesters have been arrested, beaten and deported on UNHCR’s watch. 

The agency acknowledged it “didn’t think [pausing food vouchers] was a good solution” but implemented it anyway. When pressed, UNHCR said in an email that it had “expressed deep concern” about its own suspension of food rations. The agency resumed food rations in summer 2025, but limited them to just 270 people it deems “most vulnerable.”

“UNHCR’s role is very weak, they treat us without humanity,” a Sudanese man held in the camp for more than seven years told me. 

Protesters at Agadez refugee center are demanding resettlement, improved living conditions and freedom of movement. (Amir Abdulkrem / @RefugeesNiger)

UNHCR did not respond when asked why it has consistently failed to prevent violent crackdowns in the camps it operates, despite its legal mandate to protect refugees. 

On May, 25 2022, a 27-year-old man, Musab Muhammad, was shot dead at the center’s children’s school. Authorities tried to force his widow to sign a false death certificate claiming he was killed by a stone, but she refused. UNHCR supported the government’s claim that he had not been shot. But multiple witnesses confirmed the details of the incident — that security forces shot him, unarmed. “We refugees heard shooting, officers were firing tear gas and live bullets, they killed our brother in cold blood,” one man in the camp said. 

Reached for comment about Muhammad’s death, a UNHCR spokesperson said that “UNHCR deeply regrets the loss of life and the suffering” and “as a general principle … condemns the use of excessive force against refugees.” The spokesperson said that UNHCR provided Muhammad’s family with burial costs and “psychosocial support and counselling,” but “does not have the authority to conduct criminal investigations of use of force by Nigerien authorities.”

According to sources in the camp, medical care is also substandard. A health clinic nine miles  away provides only about 10 percent of promised services, detainees said. They said that they also lack access to translators or ambulance service from the camp to the clinic. 

A spokesperson for the National Refugee Committee says eight residents in total have died since 2024 of preventable causes, including hemorrhage and anemia. Their families granted permission to share their names.

On April 30, 2025, Saeed Ahmed, 34, a key organizer in the camp, died of anemia. Sources say that the health center was closed when he arrived, and then doctors failed to treat him. “Saeed was happy with his friends, a fighter,” said Amir, a former detainee. 

The other seven were Makina Wadi, 35, who died of severe postpartum hemorrhage with no doctor attending; Mohamed Abdallah and Abdallah Hashim, both 27, friends who met in detention in Libya before being forcibly deported to Niger; Imad Yousif, 30, described as someone who always demanded his rights and defended the rights of others; Nour Alhuda Musa, 28, a mother of five; Zubeida Abdelgabar, 33, a widow and mother of one; and Zahra Dawood, 33, a mother of three.

Asked for comment, UNHCR maintained that all cases of illness receive medical follow-up and that “access to health care is ensured through a protocol with the Agadez Commune Sanitary District. … The health and well-being of asylum-seekers and refugees remain our priority, and any loss of life is deeply regrettable.” 

The colonial continuum

Many observers note a disparity between the treatment of people fleeing wars in Africa and that of Ukrainian asylum-seekers. The fact that “some refugees are afforded full protection and rights, and others are not, demonstrates what many refugees experience as colonial continuity and segregation within the international protection regime,” Yambio said. “During displacement of Ukrainian refugees, UNHCR publicly and behind closed doors engaged European institutions, EU member states and the UK to establish exceptional protection mechanisms.” So why isn’t UNHCR doing the same for brown and Black refugees in Africa? 

The situation in Agadez can’t be understood in isolation. Refugees are fleeing wars fueled by the very forces that extract Africa’s resources and keep people trapped. The roots of modern tensions in Sudan lay in the policies implemented by the British colonial administration between 1899-1956, which divided the area along racial lines, privileging Arab-identifying groups in the north, while marginalizing African communities in the south and west, including Darfur. This divide and rule legacy, embedded in post-independence governance has fueled cycles of violence and displacement ever since.

External exploitation of the African continent continues. The United Arab Emirates, or UAE, fuels the Sudanese civil war by arming the RSF — who are accused of committing war crimes and genocide — with weaponry procured from U.S. arms manufacturers. The UAE’s motivations are strategic and economic securing access to Sudan’s gold and regional influence, while millions of Sudanese people are displaced.

This is no accident of history, but a pattern of extraction, destabilization and containment that mirrors colonialism. External powers fuel conflicts and extract Africa’s minerals, while underfunding the facilities built to contain people fleeing the destruction they cause. 

The resettlement crisis is global, but the UN system is failing to respond effectively. In 2025, only 200 resettlement places were allocated for all of Niger, against an assessed need of more than 15,000. None of the 200 went to the refugees in Agadez, according to sources there. 

Reached for comment, UNHCR said that more than 700 refugees had been resettled from the center since 2018, but didn’t dispute refugees’ assertion that CNE is currently failing to process claims. UNHCR told protesters in Agadez, “Less than 1 percent of refugees globally benefit from resettlement, so don’t expect it.” 

Refugees at the UN camp in Agadez, Niger, on their 452nd day of protest. (Amir Abdulkrem / @RefugeesNiger)

UNHCR’s former Special Envoy for the Central and Western Mediterranean Situation Vincent Cochetel confirmed in March 2025 that the UN did not support “a right to resettlement.” 

“There are almost no resettlement opportunities in Niger and priority must be given to Malian and Nigerian refugees,” he wrote on X. 

Asked by Waging Nonviolence about the prospects of resettlement for those held Agadez, UNHCR said, “The final decision always rests with the third country, not with UNHCR.” Effectively, a UN agency is declaring itself a neutered organization, with no power to resettle war refugees.

The spread of containment

Agadez is no anomaly. It has effectively been the pilot for Europe’s new Return Regulation, passed in June 2026, which makes offshore detention an official policy. 

“It’s not simply a humanitarian crisis or just operational failures of UNHCR, but a wider systemic mechanism in which refugees are increasingly contained rather than protected,” Yambio said. 

This extends far beyond Agadez. “UNHCR has repeatedly supported and agreed with governments implementing migration containment policies, embracing the Italy-Albania so-called return centers, the UK-Rwanda deportation deal, and blessed and congratulated Europe on its Return Regulation,” Yambio said. 

UNHCR’s own admissions reveal a confirmed pattern: awareness of abuses and choosing compliance over protection. 

“Resolving the situation in Agadez requires restoring refugee protection as the primary objective of international refugee law,” Yambio said. “It requires UNHCR to recover the independence necessary to confront abusive states. It requires Europe to end policies of externalization.”

Neither the European Union nor the United Kingdom’s ambassador to the UN responded to requests for comment.

“What begins with refugees rarely ends with refugees,” Yambio continued. “The migration containment policies being developed today increasingly shape domestic legal systems tomorrow.” As journalist Neal Ascherson wrote in a 1996 article about the al-Masari affair: “The way a state treats its aliens is the way it would treat its own subjects if it dared.”

In the Sahara Desert, the nonviolent protests will continue, signs will still rise, the refugees still remain standing in the desert. Their words are clear: “We are human beings; we have the right to a decent life. Through pain and hope, we refugees of Agadez, Niger, don’t want to stay here in this desert.”

They are sharing the stories of how they fled wars and genocides and how they’re seeking justice on X at @refugeesniger @RefugeesTunisia and @RefugeesinLibya.

The choice of nonviolence isn’t incidental. In a system designed to render them invisible, protesters have chosen a strategy that forces the world to look. They have chosen to absorb violence without returning it, not as a form of passivity, but as a strategy grounded in their reality. Their discipline in the face of brutality lays bare the moral asymmetry of the system that claims to protect them while imprisoning them.

This article Inside the longest refugee protest in history was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Panel puts spotlight on Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, BLM Director Steve Pearce, and anti-park members of Congress

SANTA FE— Leaders from New Mexico advocacy groups and the Center for Western Priorities called on President Donald Trump, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and former New Mexico congressman and current Bureau of Land Management director Steve Pearce to stop attacking New Mexico’s parks and public lands.

At a live taping of The Landscape podcast, the Center for Western Priorities’ Keep Parks Public campaign highlighted the ongoing threats to American public lands, including the Trump administration’s aggressive attempts to lease public land for oil and gas drilling, funding cuts to national parks and public land management agencies, and efforts to cut the public and Tribes out of public land management.

“New Mexico’s public lands are being used as political pawns,” said Charlotte Overby, vice president of conservation field programs at the Conservation Lands Foundation. “The Trump administration is trying to strip protections from places like Chaco Canyon and national monuments through executive action, while Congress is mandating more lease sales and eliminating hard-fought, collaborative planning processes local people and the public worked hard to achieve. It’s not one attack, it’s a coordinated and systematic attempt to literally remove the public from public lands. Public lands belong to everyone, not to companies or a handful of wealthy individuals who seek to develop and profit off them.”

“Chaco is not a resource to be extracted, it is the origin of our Pueblo world, and this administration keeps treating it like an obstacle instead of a living homeland,” said Keegan King, executive director of the Native Land Institute. “First they came for the buffer zone. Now we’re watching the same pattern repeat across every corner of New Mexico’s public lands, monuments shrunk without our consent, tribal consultation reduced to a formality, decisions made in Washington before our governors ever get a seat at the table. The federal government has a trust responsibility to Tribal Nations, not a courtesy it extends when convenient. Every time these protections are stripped away, the cost isn’t just what’s drilled or logged, it’s the trust between our nations and this government, and that erosion doesn’t show up on anyone’s balance sheet.”

“Public lands are first and foremost ancestral lands of America’s Tribes. The larger threats we are seeing to public lands are threats to Tribal sovereignty, culture, identity, spirituality and subsistence,” said Andrew Black, director of Tribal lands and waters at the National Wildlife Federation. “Right now, energy dominance asks what can we extract from the land for the land is regarded as a commodity belonging to us. However, we must reverse this paradigm to see that we belong to the land as part of a larger interconnected community for what we do to the land, water, air, and wildlife we fundamentally do to ourselves. The challenge before us is not simply to preserve landscapes. It is to preserve right relationships —between people and the land, between generations, and ultimately between humanity and the larger web of life.”

“America’s public lands are under assault, and science itself is under siege. The very core of our national natural treasures and cultural sites and stories are being undermined through policy shifts, lack of public input, and staffing shortages,” said Elaine Leslie, executive council member with the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks. “Redefining what constitutes harm to species at-risk can only result in the demise of animals and their habitats already on the brink from impacts such as climate change, invasive species, resource extraction, and fragmentation. Our nation’s natural and cultural resources and history depend upon our collective voices to protect our public lands now and for generations to come.”

Audio, video, photos, and transcripts from today’s event and previous events will be available in the Keep Parks Public media archive.

The Keep Parks Public campaign is a project of the Center for Western Priorities, which is partnering with local conservation groups to elevate the voices of leading experts on threats to outdoor access, from budget cuts and funding freezes to attempts to sell off public lands entirely.

The Keep Parks Public tour kicked off in July 2025, making stops in Denver, Las Cruces, Tucson, Flagstaff, Moab, Salt Lake City, Grand Junction, and Jackson. This summer, we’re stopping in Santa Fe (7/30), Tucson (8/28), and more locations around the West.

The public is invited to share their thoughts and join the campaign to Keep Parks Public and stop the attacks on America’s public lands.

Top threats to New Mexico’s Public Lands

1. The Chaco Canyon buffer rollback
   The Bureau of Land Management is moving to gut the 10-mile protective buffer around Chaco Culture National Historical Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site sacred to more than 20 Pueblo tribes, implemented under the Biden administration. The Trump administration wants to eliminate the buffer as part of its “Unleashing American Energy” agenda, even though 90% of the surrounding terrain is already leased. BLM’s current proposal offers three options: eliminate the buffer entirely, cut it in half, or leave it intact. The public comment deadline just passed on July 29.Sen. Martin Heinrich and the rest of New Mexico’s congressional delegation have introduced a permanent fix to protect the region and its cultural sites: the Chaco Cultural Heritage Area Protection Act, which would permanently bar new oil and gas leasing on federal lands within 10 miles of Chaco Culture National Historical Park, closing the door the administration is now trying to force back open. It’s currently stalled in Congress, but it’s the only proposal on the table that would take the buffer zone question out of the hands of whoever occupies the White House.
2. Monuments in the crosshairs
   Mark Allison with New Mexico Wild warns that Trump’s decision to reduce Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah could put Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks, Rio Grande del Norte, and Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks national monuments at risk. Leaked Interior Department documents have listed those three New Mexico monuments as potential targets for reductions, with Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks specifically named as one of six sites under consideration.
3. Wildland firefighting reorganization
   The administration recently stood up a new U.S. Wildland Fire Service, consolidating firefighting away from individual Interior bureaus, including the Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service, and into one central office, over bipartisan congressional objections. Meanwhile, the Forest Service has already lost about 5,900 people, roughly 16% of its staff, through early retirements, resignations, and buyouts, with proposed 2026 staffing cuts of 30% or more on top of that.
4. Park staffing: a mixed but still bad picture
   DOGE’s “Fork in the Road” email pushed roughly 2,400 NPS employees into early retirement or resignation in January 2025, about 12 percent of the workforce, and then Interior fired around 1,000 more NPS employees that February in what staff called the “Valentine’s Day Massacre.” Total NPS staff losses since then are estimated at 25 percent. Rep. Gabe Vasquez has said staffing at Carlsbad Caverns specifically has declined 20 percent, leaving the park unable to run regular visitation hours or after-school programs. That October, both Carlsbad Caverns and White Sands closed entirely during the 35-day-adjacent federal shutdown, with Rep. Vasquez warning “we’re going to see minimal staffing across our public land system.”

   This June, Vasquez sent Interior Secretary Burgum a letter demanding an explanation for why roughly $90 million in NPS entrance fee revenue, money meant for repairs at parks like White Sands and Carlsbad Caverns, was instead redirected to beautification projects in Washington, D.C., during peak summer visitor season.

5. Congress eyeing public land sales
   Sen. Mike Lee proposed striking a provision requiring Interior to maintain ownership of all existing National Park Service units, which would open the door to selling park land, in a state home to Carlsbad Caverns, White Sands, Bandelier, Chaco Canyon, and Valles Caldera. An earlier version of the reconciliation bill would have greenlit selling off roughly 1.23 million acres of public land, and even after that language was stripped, the bill still clawed back $267 million in committed park staffing funds.
6. Rolling back drilling accountability
   BLM is proposing to slash lease bond minimums to 1950s and ’60s levels, cutting statewide bonds from $500,000 to $25,000 regardless of how many wells they cover, while eliminating methane waste minimization plans and leak detection and repair requirements. This directly undercuts rules credited with keeping New Mexico’s methane intensity in the Permian Basin at less than half of Texas’s, and threatens to stick taxpayers with a massive orphan well clean up bill.
7. Expanded oil and gas leasing across the Permian and San Juan basins
   Since the “One Big Beautiful Bill” took effect on July 4, 2025, BLM has leased roughly 61,400 acres of federal land in New Mexico across three completed quarterly sales: 7,501.76 acres in July 2025 for $58.26 million, 20,399 acres in January 2026 for $326.8 million (nearly all in New Mexico, with a single Oklahoma parcel), and 33,530 acres in May 2026 that brought in just over $4 billion, the largest lease sale total in BLM history.

   More is coming. BLM has scheduled an August 19, 2026 sale offering 26 parcels totaling 20,334 acres across New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas, and has opened comment on a proposed November 2026 sale covering 30 more parcels totaling 8,071 acres in New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas. If the August sale goes through as planned, it would push the total leased in New Mexico since OBBBA past 80,000 acres in just over a year.

8. Weakening the Endangered Species Act
   The administration has proposed rolling back Endangered Species Act regulations that would severely limit how much critical habitat can be designated for species headed toward extinction, alarming conservationists about the Mexican gray wolf’s future. A related change opens New Mexico’s forests to logging and mining by loosening wildlife habitat protections.
9. Push to delist the Mexican gray wolf
   The House Natural Resources Committee has advanced the Enhancing Safety for Animals Act with bipartisan support, which would strip federal ESA protections from the Mexican wolf entirely. Separately, federal and state agencies are preparing to downlist the wolf from endangered to threatened, even as at least 23 wolves have been documented in trapping incidents across New Mexico since 2022.
10. Budget: parks got a reprieve for FY2026, but FY2027 is a fresh fight
    The FY2026 appropriations law, enacted January 23, 2026, gave NPS $3.267 billion, 54 percent more than what the administration had requested. That blocked what would have been a $900 million, 31 percent operations cut and the elimination of funding for roughly 350 park sites.

    The administration’s FY2027 budget proposal, released in April, seeks to slash $736 million from park operations and would shrink the NPS workforce from about 16,000 to roughly 13,000. Sen. Heinrich called it proof “this administration is not committed to keeping the Park Service intact” and warned it would gut the regional scientists, archaeologists, and historians parks rely on even if front-line ranger jobs are nominally spared. That budget fight will play out in Congress this fall.

Since 2012, the Center for Western Priorities (CWP) has been a leading source of accurate information about energy and public lands across the West. CWP advocates for responsible uses of American lands, including recreation, conservation, and renewable energy.

The Conservation Lands Foundation (CLF) is a national non-profit headquartered in Durango, Colorado, dedicated to protecting, restoring, and expanding National Conservation Lands.

 

The post New Mexico conservation leaders denounce attacks on national public lands, join campaign to Keep Parks Public appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

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