Georgian PM alleges Ukrainian officials “openly campaigned” for “second front” of war in Georgia agenda.ge/en/news/2022/4…

Climate-change protesters threw flour on Friday over a sports car painted by the U.S. pop artist Andy Warhol that is on display in Italy’s financial capital.

It was at the third time this month that activists from the group Ultima Generazione (Last Generation) have targeted art exhibitions.

On Nov. 4, protesters hurled soup over a Van Gogh work in Rome and on Nov. 15, they threw a black liquid on a Gustav Klimt painting in Vienna. Both masterpieces were protected by glass screens and unharmed.

The BMW Art Car looked as if it had been covered by a dusting of snow after Friday’s attack.

Warhol painted it in 1979, the same year as it took part in the 24-hour race at Le Mans in France, before being taken off the road and placed in a museum.

Ultima Generazione’s high-profile stunts to push for tougher action to tackle global warming have coincided with climate talks in Egypt.

The COP27 climate change conference is scheduled to finish on Friday, but it is expected to run into overtime as delegates from nearly 200 countries struggle to agree on a way forward.

For daily comprehensive coverage on COP27 in your inbox, sign up for the Reuters Sustainable Switch newsletter here

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U.S. President Joe Biden’s pledges to slash emissions from farming and to end American hunger by 2030 may be harder to realize now that Republicans flipped the House of Representatives with a thin majority.

Biden’s Democrats, who retain control of the Senate, will start negotiating in the coming months with Republican House leaders over a massive farm spending bill passed every five years that funds U.S. public food benefits and farm commodity programs.

The current $428 billion bill expires on Sept. 30, 2023.

“We know the Republicans will be less excited about innovation and will probably want to protect the status quo,” said Vanessa García Polanco, policy campaigns co-director of the National Young Farmers Coalition, a nonprofit group.

The House and Senate agriculture committees draft the bill, and both parties typically make concessions in negotiations. Biden’s With Republicans about to control the House, policy advocates said anti-hunger and environment groups may have to scale back policy proposals they had hoped to get included in the bill such as rewarding farmers for climate-friendly practices and expanding food benefits.

The House agriculture committee will likely be led starting in January by Glenn “GT” Thompson of Pennsylvania. A staffer for Thompson said his main goal is to get the bill passed and he does not yet have clear policy priorities. In past remarks, he has criticized U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) spending on climate programs, and supported restrictions on hunger benefits.

The farm bill has a historical reputation of bipartisanship, so some advocates told Reuters they are warily optimistic. Still, growing polarization in Congress could hinder strong hunger and climate goals. Passage of the 2014 farm bill was held up more than a year as conservative House Republicans tried unsuccessfully to strip the bill of nutrition programs.

About 80% of Republicans on the House Agriculture Committee are members of the conservative Republican Study Committee, whose 2023 budget recommendations similarly proposed dramatic changes such as separating nutrition and farm programs.

Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow, chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, said she planned to lead a bipartisan negotiation process and that the bill would ultimately align with Biden’s priorities.

“Make no mistake: we cannot, and will not, go backwards,” she told Reuters in an email. “The climate crisis is real. Millions of Americans, including millions of children, are food insecure.”

‘HUNGER CLIFF’

About 75% of farm bill funds go toward anti-hunger programs including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also called food stamps. USDA data shows about 41 million people have received SNAP benefits this year.

In previous farm bills, Republicans on the House Agriculture Committee have sought tighter nutrition spending. The issue could be particularly contentious this time because emergency pandemic-era boosts to SNAP could expire as soon as January, said Ellen Vollinger of the Food Research & Action Center, an anti-hunger group.

“Whenever it does end, most SNAP recipients are going to lose about $82 a person a month,” she said, calling the looming expiration a “hunger cliff.” Surging food price inflation also has strained household budgets.

At an April agriculture committee hearing on the SNAP program, Thompson expressed support for tightening work requirements for benefit recipients. But Jim McGovern, a Democrat on the House farm committee, told Reuters any cuts to SNAP or changes to work requirements “will result in a farm bill not getting done, period.”

In September, at the first hunger conference of its kind in half a century, Biden pledged to end hunger by 2030. Many of the strategies he laid out would require Congressional action, but there was little Republican participation in the conference, which Thompson called a “political stunt”.

Republicans have also protested efforts by U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to reduce farming’s 10% contribution to U.S. emissions of climate-warming gases.

In September, USDA announced a $3 billion investment for “climate-smart” farm projects like planting cover crops and using sustainable grazing practices. Every Republican member of the House agriculture committee signed a letter calling the funding “abusive and troublesome.”

Thompson’s aide said he took issue with spending that money without Congressional input. At an August farm conference in Iowa, Thompson said if he led the agriculture committee, he would “ensure that the farm bill doesn’t become a climate bill.”

Vilsack told Reuters in an email that the agency was committed to its climate goals.

“At the request of farmers, ranchers and producers, we will find ways to increase their production and profits though climate-smart agriculture,” he said.

Hearings discussing the farm bill are underway, but negotiations are behind where they typically would be at this point in the farm bill cycle, in part because of Congressional priorities on other legislation, said Mike Lavender, interim policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, a farm policy group.

“It’s going to be a crunch,” he said.

Video clips showing the ancestral home in Iran of the late founder of the Islamic republic Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on fire have been widely shared on social media, with activists saying it was torched by protesters.

Reuters verified the location of two video clips using the distinctive arches and buildings that match file images.

The semi-official Tasnim news agency, however, denied Khomeini’s house was set on fire, saying a small number of people had gathered outside the house.

The social media videos show dozens of people cheering as a flash of fire is sparked in a building.

Reuters could not independently verify the dates when the videos were filmed. Activist network 1500Tasvir said the incident occurred on Thursday evening in Khomeini’s birth town of Khomein, south of the capital Tehran.

The house had been converted into a museum.

“The report is a lie,” said the Tasnim news agency, adding: “the doors of the house of the late founder of the great revolution are open to the public.”

Khomeini died in 1989.

His successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been under intense pressure from nationwide protests calling for his death since the Sept. 16 death of young Iranian Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini in the custody of Iran’s morality police.

On Friday, the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported pro-government demonstrators in the northeastern city of Mashhad, where two members of the pro-government Basij militia were killed on Thursday.

Two intelligence agents were killed in clashes with protesters on Thursday night, according to the Revolutionary Guards’ news site.

It also said that three other Revolutionary Guards and a Basij member were killed in Tehran, and one Basiji and one member of the police were killed in Kurdistan on Thursday.

Iranian media said two Revolutionary Guards members were killed during unrest in the northwestern city of Bukan and a police colonel died in Sanandaj, capital of Kurdistan province late on Thursday.

U.S. basketball star Brittney Griner has been taken to the Russian region of Mordovia, notorious since Soviet times for its penal colonies, to serve a 9-year sentence on drugs charges.

Here are extracts from a Reuters interview with Olga Romanova, a representative of the prison rights group Russia Behind Bars, on the conditions Griner can expect in the IK-2 colony in the town of Yavas. Russia’s prison service has not responded to questions from Reuters about living and working conditions in such institutions.

In the living quarters there are barracks, each with its own yard. The women live in barracks, around 80-100 people, up to 120 – Mordovia has big prisons. There’s a simple shower room, a bathroom with several toilets, a sink, a storage room to keep things and a small room with a kettle where a few people can drink tea together. From 6 a.m. till 9 p.m., you are prohibited from lying or sitting on your bed.

The yard is fenced off with barbed wire. It is an area where women who live in a barrack, which is usually one squad that has a number assigned, can step outside to get some air and smoke, look at the sunset, so to speak. This is where in the morning they have the daily inspection, rollcall and physical exercise, whatever the weather. Exercise is mandatory.

The women eat in a communal dining room. They go there in rows within their squad. They always wear uniform. The uniform is green. They sew it there for themselves. The uniform is low-quality, light fabric like they use for rainwear, and compulsory footwear. The footwear is those artificial black boots, very uncomfortable. You can’t wear any other footwear. I think that will be a problem for Brittney: she’s a tall woman with a non-standard figure and I think non-standard shoe size. It will be problematic to dress her and find shoes for her. You’re not allowed not to wear a uniform.

Mordovia’s women’s prisons, like penal colony IK-14 where (Pussy Riot activist Nadezhda) Tolokonnikova was serving, as well as IK-2, where Brittney has been sent, are very well known among human rights defenders, I would say, because of their horrible work conditions.

They sew clothes there – manufacturing clothes is the main thing. They sew uniforms for police; they sew children’s clothes there.

They work in a number of shifts. One salary – about 5,000 roubles ($83) a month – is divided between a number of women. Sometimes 10 women. So they each get about 500 roubles a month.

The women there get punished. They punish the unit that’s at fault, when they haven’t worked hard enough, for example; when they don’t take part properly in (prison) activities; when there’s some kind of incident where they don’t do some exercise the right way. Someone refuses to go to work. That kind of thing. And when they punish the unit, they don’t get any hot water. And not for an hour or two, but for a few days.

There’s a particular time when you can ask to go to the toilet. They accompany you to the toilet. You can’t just get up and drink some water, drink some tea, have a smoke, chat with someone, take a breather, or go to the toilet. Going to the toilet is a problem.

The budget for prisoners’ food is about 70 roubles ($1.16) per day. Breakfast is definitely going to be porridge – not with milk, and it’s porridge made from barley, that’s the most “popular”.

Lunch is some nondescript soup – hard to find any chunks of meat or fish in it. It’s a vegetable soup – cabbage, potato, carrot. Or it’ll be little patties of meat – but there’s more bread in there than any memories of meat.

And for dinner, it’s the same barley porridge or the same potato (soup). That’s it. There’s an acute lack of eggs – eggs are considered a luxury; eggs are for pregnant women, or prescribed by the doctor, and so on. And there’s an acute lack of dairy products.

The prison kiosk has condensed milk, tea, instant coffee, three or four types of candies, cigarettes, possibly some cheese, if you’re lucky, possibly some kind of dried sausage, mayonnaise, ketchup – that’s it.

The Gulag, created in 1933, and the current prison system (in Russia) are identical except for the name.

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