Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Members of the media set up outside 80 Centre Street, where Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg continues his investigation into former U.S. President Donald Trump, in New York City, March 20, 2023.

Prosecution of former President Donald Trump for alleged hush money payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels might be far from an open-and-shut case.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office has not yet brought charges against Mr. Trump, and the parameters of such a legal proceeding and facts involved are not yet clear. But Mr. Trump’s weekend social media claim that he expects to be arrested this week, and his appeal for supporters to “protest,” has reinforced a sense in Washington that the looming indictment of a former U.S. chief executive would mark a leap into an unprecedented and unpredictable national political future.

Some experts question whether the Manhattan case is strong enough to justify the first criminal indictment of a former U.S. president. It is relatively complex, and prosecutors may have to rely on an untested legal theory to raise the charges to the level of a felony.

The Georgia investigation into whether Mr. Trump tried to illegally influence the state’s presidential vote, and federal special counsel Jack Smith’s probe of the former president’s possible incitement of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and his handling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, are all potentially more serious than a hush money case.

But others say the Manhattan case represents serious legal trouble, with Mr. Trump potentially caught in a lie about paying Ms. Daniels to keep her mouth shut at a moment in history when her revelations could have swung the narrow outcome of the 2016 election.

Either way, prosecutors don’t coordinate indictments based on importance, says Paul Schiff Berman, a professor at the George Washington University School of Law.

Nor do they typically bring prosecutions they think they can’t win. Given that, the best course of action now may be for the legal proceedings in Manhattan to simply proceed.

“The bottom line is, we should not rush to judgment on whether this is a good or bad prosecution. That is what trials are for,” says Professor Berman.

Seth Wenig/AP

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg participates in a news conference in New York, Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2023. Bragg is standing firm against former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric, telling his staff that the office won’t be intimidated or deterred as it nears a decision on charging the former president.

Partisan tensions

If nothing else, Mr. Trump’s social media broadside against Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and his all-caps call for supporters to “PROTEST” and “TAKE OUR NATION BACK!” offered a preview of the heated political discourse likely to follow any Trump indictment.

Many of Mr. Trump’s political allies rallied to his side, saying the alleged impending arrest was an outrage that would only make it more likely he would return to the White House following the 2024 election. Three House Republican committee chairs, including Judiciary chair Jim Jordan, dispatched a joint letter to Mr. Bragg demanding he hand over documents, communications, and testimony bearing on his Trump investigations.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a potential rival to Mr. Trump for the 2024 GOP nomination, weighed in on Monday, broadly condemning Mr. Bragg for “pursuing a political agenda and weaponizing the office.”

At the same time, Governor DeSantis did repeat the allegations against Mr. Trump. “I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair,” he said at a state college appearance. “I can’t speak to that.”

On Monday Mr. Trump’s legal team was also active on another potential legal problem. His lawyers filed a motion in a Georgia court seeking to quash the final report of a special grand jury that investigated whether he and his allies interfered in the counting of the state’s 2020 election results. The motion also asked that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis be disqualified from the case.

There is very little chance that Mr. Trump’s attacks will sway district attorneys, including Mr. Bragg or Ms. Willis, to drop charges they would otherwise proceed with, says Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the Hubert Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota.

The former president has very little influence over whether he will be indicted or not, says Professor Jacobs. His strategy is ultimately a political one, in which he is trying to leverage his unprecedented situation as a former president in legal trouble to rally support for his 2024 presidential campaign.

“It is about turning lemons into lemonade,” says Professor Jacobs.

Specifics of the case

Mr. Trump and his allies have attacked the prosecutors who are investigating him and the processes they are using, but they have been quieter about the allegations involved.

The Manhattan case stems from an incident just prior to the 2016 election. Michael Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer, made a $130,000 payment to the pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels, who claimed she had an affair with Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen said the money was intended to buy Ms. Daniels’ silence.

Mr. Trump has denied the alleged affair.

Over the course of 2017, the Trump Organization reimbursed Mr. Cohen for his $130,000 expense, concealing the payments as money for a legal retainer that did not exist, according to court documents from a legal case against Mr. Cohen. In 2018, Mr. Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison for tax evasion, false statements, and campaign finance violations.

The Manhattan case against Mr. Trump is likely to charge him or his organization with falsifying business records of the $130,000 to Mr. Cohen. In order to boost this to the level of a felony, prosecutors would need to show that this falsification was done with the intention of committing a second crime – such as the concealment of a campaign finance violation. If the payment was made for political purposes, then it was a donation to the Trump for President campaign – but was never recorded as such.

This aspect of the case has given some legal analysts pause. This combination of charges to produce a possible felony is largely untested, tweeted David French, a New York Times columnist and former writer for the National Review, over the weekend.

“‘Untested’ legal theories should not be used to prosecute anyone, including former presidents,” tweeted Mr. French.

In addition, for Mr. Trump to be culpable, he would have had to be directly involved in a misrepresentation of the payment to Mr. Cohen, and he would have had to do so for the purpose of another crime, says David Shapiro, a former FBI agent, financial crimes specialist, and law professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

The former president could simply argue that he was unaware of what underlings were doing in his name.

“Mr. Trump is not a bookkeeper,” he says.

Based on what is currently known, Mr. Bragg’s decision to bring the case is difficult to understand, says Professor Shapiro, especially years after the fact. But Mr. Bragg has been under a lot of pressure to indict the former president. 

“You know how everyone is concerned that ‘Mr. Trump isn’t above the law?’ .... Mr. Trump is not beneath the law either,” says Professor Shapiro. “Treat him like you would any citizen.”  

An ‘unprecedented’ deflection

But to call the legal approach to the Manhattan hush money case “unprecedented” is an attempted deflection, says Caroline Fredrickson, a visiting professor at Georgetown Law and a former president of the progressive legal organization the American Constitution Society.

It is a way of not speaking to the merits of the case, or suggesting that the merits of the case are irrelevant, she says.

Candidates for public office are not supposed to engage in making payments and then concealing them. If prosecutors do not go forward with charges they will be signaling that other politicians can get away with this kind of illegality, according to Prof. Fredrickson.

“The fact [Mr. Trump] has been able to put this off for so long is a testament to how skilled he is at manipulating the legal regime rather than a testament of the strength of the charges against him,” she says.

Given the political wrangling over the hush money case it is easy to forget the simple story of its basic allegation: a presidential candidate had an affair, paid $130,000 to keep it from becoming public in the stretch run of the race, and then manipulated evidence to cover his tracks.

Furthermore, this outline is unlikely to have any effect on the 30% to 35% of Republicans who are his firm Trump supporters, says Prof. Jacobs at the Hubert Humphrey School. The allegation itself is insufficient to knock the former president out of the running. It is entirely possible he could win the White House again while under indictment, or even after a conviction.

“It is shocking. It’s not even possible to talk about precedent because it is so unheard of,” says Prof. Jacobs.

AP/File

People wade through floodwaters after heavy rainfall in Hadeja, Nigeria, in September 2022. The latest climate report from the United Nations, released Monday, makes a sobering case for immediate climate action.

The world can avoid the most dire impacts of climate change, but only if it quickly and dramatically reduces greenhouse gas emissions, according to a major United Nations report released today.

Without intentional and transformational steps to lower the amount of the heat-trapping gases humans send into the atmosphere – from ramping down fossil fuel production to significantly increasing the amount of funding for new climate technologies – the world’s temperature will continue to increase, with a host of ecological and economic consequences.  

“The climate time-bomb is ticking,” said U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres in a video message Monday. But the new report, he added, “is a survival guide for humanity.” 

The report, from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, marks the conclusion of an eight-year, international effort that catalogs and analyzes the best and most current scientific understanding about climate change. It synthesizes a voluminous amount of research on everything from the physical science of the world’s climate system to the vulnerabilities of economies and ecosystems to ways of reducing the impact of global warming and building resilience. 

Martin Meissner/AP

The industrial backdrop of a BP refinery, a Uniper coal-fired power plant, and wind turbines is seen in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, March 6, 2023. A major new United Nations report released March 20, 2023, says nations must cut greenhouse gas emissions dramatically to avoid passing a dangerous global warming threshold.

While the science behind this “synthesis report” is not new (the IPCC has released a series of reports over the past years that detail the various components), it does connect the dots and reflects an international consensus about the best path forward. 

“It’s bringing the whole narrative together in one place,” says Rachel Cleetus, policy director with the Climate and Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

And this narrative is clear: Humans are altering the world’s climate and related natural systems in unprecedented ways, scientists say. And without major policy and behavior changes, the average global temperature is likely to rise above the internationally determined benchmark of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, likely within the next decade. That’s the point, scientists have estimated, beyond which climate disasters may accelerate and risk irreversible damage to Earth’s ecosystems. 

No matter what people do now, temperatures are expected to continue to increase. That’s because greenhouse gas emissions are cumulative – what we put into the air 50 years ago is still there. (Indeed, carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas, lasts 300 to 1,000 years once it is released. Other heat-trapping gases, such as methane, have shorter lives but cause greater increases in temperature.) 

But it is also decidedly possible to minimize the damage, scientists say.

Michael Sohn/AP

People take part in a "Fridays For Future" protest rally in Berlin, Germany, on March 3, 2023. A new U.N. report makes an urgent case for climate action but also outlines numerous ways that nations can reduce emissions.

In today’s report, authors seemed to be attempting a fine line between conveying the desperate seriousness of the climate situation and also avoiding what has become known in climate circles as “doomerism” – the position that global warming is so bad and unfixable that there is nothing we can do about it. They recounted some of the key takeaways from earlier scientific reports, such as the potential biodiversity loss and extreme weather increases from every fraction of a degree of warming, but also reiterated the ways societies can make the situation better.

If the world dramatically reduces emissions, the future scenarios – for ecosystems, natural disasters, economic disruption, and a host of other factors – become far more positive. Every fraction of a degree makes a difference in the intertwined nature of climate impacts, scientists say – the 1.5 degree marker should not be viewed as a cliff, where if we make it we “win,” and if we don’t the game is over. As the multiple scientific reports over the past years show, there are myriad opportunities to both mitigate and adapt to the changing climate. 

SOURCE:

NOAA

|

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

“With each new report, we have a better understanding of how things go together,” says Jason Smerdon, a Columbia University professor who co-wrote the textbook “Climate Change: The Science of Global Warming and our Energy Future.”  

The challenge now is getting everyone, from governments to corporations to individuals, on board with the report’s recommendations. The report recommends an accelerated plan for decarbonizing the economy – which in practice means stopping, or not developing, fossil fuel projects, something few governments have proven they can or will do.

“This Synthesis Report underscores the urgency of taking more ambitious action,” said IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee in a press release. It “shows that, if we act now, we can still secure a livable sustainable future for all.” 

Sen. Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, is right in the thick of the news. As chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, he’s grappling with security concerns over the popular TikTok app and its China connection, ramifications of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow this week, and other issues around Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine.

As a member of the Senate Banking Committee, Senator Warner is also knee-deep in the failure of California’s Silicon Valley Bank and the future of banking regulation. In 2018, he voted for a measure that rolled back some regulations on midsize banks, like SVB, and he has stuck by that support. 

But the Virginia Democrat is also open to new banking reforms, he says, after an inquiry by the Federal Reserve is completed into what caused SVB to fail. 

“Let me be clear, we need to figure out what happened,” Senator Warner told reporters at a breakfast hosted Monday by The Christian Science Monitor. “And if there were things that happened in 2018 that helped create this crisis, I’m wide open to making changes.”

The senator added that he was “absolutely supportive” of President Joe Biden’s statement last Friday urging Congress to give the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. power to “claw back” executive pay at failed banks, among other punitive measures. The Fed’s first round of investigation into SVB’s failure is expected by May 1. 

At the Monitor Breakfast, Senator Warner also pledged to donate campaign money from SVB and its now-ex-CEO, Greg Becker, to charity if the Fed finds wrongdoing. 

“Listen, I have never been influenced by campaign contributions on any issue,” the senator said. “Secondly, if there was malfeasance, of course I’m going to turn it back. I’ll give it to charity.”

Members of Congress from both parties, including House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, have received donations from SVB, as did the Democratic National Committee and the Biden 2020 campaign. Some recipients, including the DNC and Biden campaign, have said they’ll donate the money to charity. 

Following are more excerpts from the breakfast with Senator Warner, lightly edited for clarity: 

On Thursday, the CEO of TikTok appears before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. He is expected to say that TikTok now has some 150 million users in the United States, the suggestion being that it’s so entrenched in our lives that it can’t be reined in. What’s your response to that?

I disagree. ... And there’s a twofold concern I have. One is that the data that is being collected, regardless of the assurances from the company, ... I don’t think [it’s] safe.

Let’s go back to China’s laws and 2016. The Communist Party put in place, by law, that every company at the end of the day owes its first obligation to the Communist Party, not to shareholders, not to customers. So this notional idea that the data can be made safe, under CCP [Communist Party of China] law just doesn’t pass the smell test. 

Secondly, and this is where I’m even more concerned, and that’s its ability to be a propaganda tool. That the TikTok that Chinese kids get operates under a different company, and is a site that advocates science and engineering and studying hard and being a good citizen. The stuff our kids get, not so much.

Bipartisan members of the Senate Intelligence Committee are unhappy with the Biden administration’s unwillingness to share key details on President Biden’s handling of classified documents. Where does that situation stand? 

The administration’s position is untenable. It doesn’t pass any kind of smell test. If there was a violation made by President Trump, President Biden, or Vice President Pence about the mishandling of documents, that ought to be pursued. 

I’m concerned not only about the documents, but what has been done, if anything, to mitigate [further mishandling].

How does the intelligence community, particularly the CIA, see Russia and China? 

China is much more difficult to penetrate. Remember, this is in the public domain: [FBI Director] Chris Wray indicated the FBI starts 10 new counterespionage cases against China every day. 

No. 2, I’m an age where we always viewed the Soviet Union/Russia as a potential adversary. We didn’t have that vis-à-vis China. And matter of fact, I was part of the absolute conventional wisdom theory of the case in the early parts of the 2000s. I remember going to China as a governor and encouraging all these deals and university collaboration, cross-collaboration with the premise that the closer we bring [China] into the international order, the more they’re going to operate like the balance of the world. 

With the rise of Xi, we were just wrong. I mean, I would sit in all of these Intel hearings, and every week hear another horror story about what was happening, from intellectual property theft to the kind of joint ventures where [there’s] this giant sucking sound of technology being exploited, the investments China was making. 

If I leave you with no other thought, it is that national security in 2023 is different than it was in 2003 and 1993. It is increasingly a technology competition. Who has the most tanks, guns, and planes is not going to be the determiner. It is going to be, who is the most successful in telecommunications, in advanced energy, in synthetic biology, in quantum computing, in artificial intelligence.

For Gino Costa, a past member of Peru’s Congress and a former United Nations’ human rights official, Peru’s recent history of corruption has been “terrible and horrible.”

But it has also been encouraging.

“We’ve had all this corruption that has been so pervasive,” Mr. Costa says. “But then there’s the encouraging part. ... We have had chief prosecutors do their work, pursuing cases all the way to the top; we have prosecuting teams that go on investigating when powerful politicians try to stop them.” And of critical importance, he says, the Peruvian public supports those fighting to root out corruption.

Both the “terrible” and “encouraging” of Peru’s history of corruption are getting fresh attention in the wake of the December arrest and detention of former President Pedro Castillo, who tried to carry out a “self-coup” and dissolve Congress. Mr. Castillo is now one of seven recent presidents who have either been imprisoned or investigated for graft.

Peru’s ability to pursue corruption cases and take down high officials has roots in everything from history and culture to the existence of an investigative press and the unintended use of past judicial reforms.

Now, many in and outside Peru are asking if its continuing ability to prosecute corruption cases, even when they implicate powers at the very top, has staying power.

“What Peru is attempting – the prosecution of several ex-presidents at once for corruption – no other Latin American country has achieved before,” says Will Freeman, a fellow for Latin American studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York.

And while he notes Peru’s judicial system “really has the legal teeth” to successfully pursue those cases, the question is whether prosecutors can “score a first big win” quickly enough to “renew the public’s faith” in the rule of law.

Martin Mejia/AP

Police fire tear gas to disperse anti-government protesters on the Pan-American North Highway blocked by demonstrators in Chao, Peru, Feb. 17, 2023. Peru is in the midst of a political crisis as protestors seek President Dina Boluarte's resignation and the dissolution of Congress after former President Pedro Castillo was ousted and arrested for trying to dissolve Congress in December. Peru's fight against corruption is described as both "terrible" and "encouraging."

A regional challenge

Many regional experts say Latin America is prone to above-average corruption, but they don’t think the number of high-profile corruption cases in Peru sets it significantly apart from its neighbors in terms of corruption levels. Indeed, several of the biggest corruption scandals of recent years, from Operation Car Wash to Odebrecht to the Panama Papers, reached across borders, implicating officials – including presidents – in numerous countries.

Revelations from the “Lava Jato” or Car Wash case, which originated in Brazil in 2014, ended up staining officials in more than a half-dozen countries, including Peru.

“Since the wind down of the Lava Jato investigations in Brazil, Peru [became] one among a tiny handful of countries in Latin America where top officeholders who embezzle and bribe still face a serious possibility of investigation,” says Mr. Freeman.

The chief prosecutor’s office gets some credit for successfully using strong laws, intended for attacking terrorism and organized crime, to pursue high-profile corruption cases.

“Peru has been modernizing and toughening criminal law to better fight organized crime,” Mr. Freeman says. “Prosecutors figured out that these same laws ... were useful for investigating politicians.”

But from the perspective of José Ugaz, a criminal lawyer who served as state’s attorney in the investigation into former President Alberto Fujimori, this ingenuity also underscores Peru’s corruption Achilles’ heel: While smart and courageous prosecutors and judges have been in the right place at the right time, the country’s institutions are not necessarily strong.

“Peru’s successes really have to do with strong individual actors much more than they are an expression of strong and healthy institutions,” Mr. Ugaz says.

In Peru during the Car Wash scandal, “you saw a number of young prosecutors and young judges who were determined to pursue the case – and were backed up by a good attorney general,” he says. “But it was not a sign of systemic strength. It was individual determination that could be squelched by a bad attorney general.”

“We don’t trust each other”

Yet in another, ironic way, weak institutions may have played a direct role in past corruption investigation successes, others say. Ineffective political parties, a constitutionally weak presidency, and a deeply divided Congress, have together paved the way for prosecutorial successes, Mr. Costa says.

Renato Pajuelo/AP/File

Peru's former President Pedro Castillo is escorted by police in Lima, Peru, on Dec. 7, 2022. Mr. Castillo was ousted by Congress and arrested on a charge of rebellion after he sought to dissolve the legislative body and take unilateral control of the government, triggering a constitutional crisis. He's now one of seven recent former presidents who have been either imprisoned or investigated for corruption.

“Why was Peru able to put an ex-president in jail for 15 years when many other countries couldn’t?” he asks, referring to Mr. Fujimori. “It’s really because of our weak political class and our weak political institutions,” he says, noting that in a number of neighboring countries, stronger political institutions have been more successful at controlling a nominally independent judiciary.

For example, in places like Colombia and Argentina, Mr. Costa says political leadership – including the executive branch, Congress, and political parties – is stronger and has maintained more control of the country’s institutions. “The downside of that,” he says, “is that they also have tighter control of the judicial institutions like the prosecutors.”

Trust – or a lack thereof – also plays into the hands of Peru’s prosecutors, Mr. Costa says.

“A trait of Peruvians is that we don’t trust each other, especially among the elites, and that, in a way, is a positive for the independence and functioning of the prosecutor’s office,” he says. Divided business and political elites are more likely to enjoy the prospect of seeing rivals prosecuted, he says, than to circle the wagons in common defense.

To underscore that point, Mr. Freeman of CFR points to Guatemala, where in recent years investigators pursued multiple high-profile corruption cases against important politicians.

“At one point the progress in Guatemala was even more surprising than what’s going on in Peru,” says Mr. Freeman, whose work focuses on corruption and the rule of law. But then, he says, unity among Guatemalan elites kicked in.

“They weren’t as distrustful of each other [as in Peru], and as soon as the [attorney general] started implicating the sons of the president, they banded together and said, ‘This has to stop,’” he says.

“And with that, the days of the independent judiciary were basically over.”

Are investigations enough?

Still, despite Peru’s successes, some corruption watchdogs and experts express growing concerns that slow-moving investigations and the evident failure of past corruption convictions to change political leaders’ behavior are causing the public to lose faith in the ability of institutions to stop corruption.

“The long line of accused and disgraced public officials, right up to presidents, has demonstrated that there are no ‘intocables’ [untouchables], and that has encouraged people,” says Mr. Freeman. “But then elected officials continue to rob – and the result is that faith in the impact [of corruption investigations] has worn thin,” he says.

But as frustrations among the populace grow, Gustavo Gorriti, head of the investigative news website IDL-Reporteros in Lima, says Peruvians are increasingly relying on independent, investigative media outlets to keep them informed. In some cases it’s inspiring public action.

“I don’t think anyone can say whether Peru will go forward or backward on corruption at this point,” says Mr. Gorriti, whose website has been a key source of information on a range of public officials in recent years.

“We published things proving the corruption of the current attorney general, and nothing happened,” Mr. Gorriti says, referring to a February report that revealed that the attorney general shuttered a drug-trafficking investigation into her sister, who is a judge.

But then recently when the website ran a video documenting the killings of protesters by police forces, the supportive public response was overwhelming. The video has been cited widely by political leaders and street protesters alike.

“It’s still a wait-and-see moment,” he says, but “the forces of democracy that I thought were comatose are waking up.”

When Nikki High quit her corporate communications job last year to open a bookstore in Octavia E. Butler’s Southern California hometown, it made perfect sense to name it after the prize-winning science fiction writer.

Ms. High was a kid growing up in Pasadena when Ms. Butler was a young adult. She likes to imagine they crossed paths in grocery stores or the large central library they both considered a haven. As a teen, Ms. High read “Kindred,” Ms. Butler’s 1979 classic novel about time travel and slavery. And she turned to it again and again as an adult. She recommended “Parable of the Sower” to book-loving friends long before it hit bestseller lists and was singled out for its prescient themes of climate change and racial and political tensions.

Octavia’s Bookshelf opened Feb. 18 in a former yoga studio not far from Ms. Butler’s childhood homes and in sight of the bus line the famously car-averse writer used to take around the city.

Ms. High has a five-year lease and a plan that has been percolating for years: create a safe space where all readers can access a wide selection of books by writers of color, from icons like Ms. Butler and James Baldwin to up-and-coming authors of children’s books, memoirs, and short stories. 

Writers of color deserve exposure year-round, Ms. High says, not only during February, when Black History Month displays turn up at larger bookstores, only to disappear the rest of the year: “Books aren’t just written for a specific type of person or group. These are important stories that we should all be reading.”

JENNA SCHOENEFELD/SPECIAL TO THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

Nikki High left her corporate career to open Octavia’s Bookshelf in Pasadena, California. Her dream is to create a safe space where all readers can access a wide selection of books by writers of color.

Octavia’s Bookshelf opens at a buoyant but uncertain time for independent bookstores. Many are thriving, thanks to a pandemic-driven surge in reading and support for local businesses. 

But, says Allison Hill, CEO of the American Booksellers Association, “we’re starting to see that slow down. The industry is definitely hunkering down with the understanding that we may be about to shift gears.”

During the Thanksgiving weekend between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, 42% of the ABA’s independent bookstore members reported increased sales over the same period in 2021; 34% reported sales down, and 24% saw flat sales.

Kristen McLean, a book industry analyst for the NPD Group, reported in a January webinar that print book sales in 2022 were the second-highest in 20 years, even though they were down 6% from 2021. 

Ms. High also must contend with two local challenges: sharing a ZIP code with Vroman’s, one of California’s largest and oldest independent bookstores, and last year’s closing of Eso Won Books, a venerable Black-owned bookstore in South Los Angeles that had hosted Ms. Butler, the late Toni Morrison, former President Barack Obama, and many other notable authors of color since opening in the late 1980s. (Eso Won now operates a modest online operation.)  

While “there’s a deep level of sadness” about Eso Won’s closure, says Ms. High, a patron of the store since she got her driver’s license at 16, she is grateful to the owners for paving the way for stores like hers. “The blueprint was already set. I was able to see them flourish and be a mainstay in the community.”

Diversity trending in store ownership

New bookstores owned by Indigenous people and people of color continue to open at a steady pace: Of 203 independent bookstores opened in 2022, 40 were owned by people of color. Of the ABA’s 2,023 members, 15% identify as such, Ms. Hill says. 

JENNA SCHOENEFELD/SPECIAL TO THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

A local Pasadena author is featured on opening day at Octavia’s Bookshelf.

“We are seeing more prioritizing around identity and community that is primarily focused on historically marginalized communities,” says Ms. Hill. “And we are definitely seeing a trend in membership: new stores by Black women, and they are trending young.”

Last year, Ymani Wince opened The Noir Bookshop on hip Cherokee Street in St. Louis as a community hub offering new and used books by people of color, gifts, and pop-up events. In 2021, twin sisters LaKecia and Le’Ecia Farmer and their cousin Deatria Williams launched Parable, a bookstore and community space in Tacoma, Washington. Named in honor of Ms. Butler’s “Earthseed” series, it specializes in books by, for, and about LGBTQ communities and those of color. In Los Angeles, two shops owned by women of color have opened since 2019: Reparations Club, selling gifts and books, and The Salt Eaters, featuring books by and about Black women and LGBTQ and nonbinary people. 

“Geography separates us, but I want and will continue to support their stores,” Ms. High says. “We’re only better together.”

Like many of her peers, Ms. High turned to crowdfunding for support. She has raised more than $22,000 on GoFundMe so far, with many of the donations coming in $25 or $50 increments from locals elated to support a Black-owned business in their neighborhood. Other donors were inspired by Ms. Butler and pride in sharing a hometown with her. Poet Gerda Govine donated $250, and recalls hearing Ms. Butler on local public radio shows and visiting her home, where books were as neatly arranged as “curtains.”

Ms. High, for her part, cites a 2021 visit to southern Africa as an inspiration for her store. While visiting Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), she spent time with weavers and batik printers, whose aim was to empower women through sustainable and fairly compensated work. “I was so impressed with the way they supported one another and how different yet similar their lives were. I thought, ‘Wow, I’d love to create that,’” she says.

Soon after her return, she gave notice to her longtime employer and set about making her bookstore dream a reality. She sought advice from other booksellers, built a financial model, and met with local authors and the librarian at the middle school Ms. Butler attended – renamed for the author in 2022. She plans to enlist young readers to write reviews of their favorite books to be featured like “staff picks” around the store.

“I want to connect with local schools and bookstores and really think about how readers can support each other and have a space for community,” she says.

JENNA SCHOENEFELD/SPECIAL TO THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

The February opening event of Octavia’s Bookshelf was so busy that the store had to close for a day to restock.

Opening day buzz

When Octavia’s Bookshelf officially opened last month, Ms. High saw the community she envisioned take shape in a way that exceeded her expectations. Students, local poets, curious neighbors, and entire book clubs waited patiently in a line that snaked down the block for most of the day – buying so much that the store had to close to restock a day later. Best-selling author Terri McMillan stopped by to lend her support. 

In the store, Jean Hubbard Boone, an actress whose gray curls unfurled beneath a yellow knit hat, rested on a chair with her purchases: a copy of Ms. Butler’s “Parable of the Sower” and “In Bibi’s Kitchen,” by Hawa Hassan, with recipes and stories from grandmothers in eight African countries. She learned about the store through Facebook and wanted to support it on opening day, despite the hourlong drive from her home in Encino: “I am an avid reader, and it warms my heart to see a bookstore that is Black owned and woman owned.” 

Ms. Butler died in 2006, but her work enjoys growing popularity – NASA named the landing site of its Perseverance rover after her; a TV series based on “Kindred” debuted on Hulu in December; and webinars and podcasts like “Octavia Tried to Tell Us” and “Octavia’s Parables” analyze her works.  

She’d probably be pleased by all the attention, notes Lynell George, the author of “A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky,” a book about Ms. Butler’s life. Less certain, she adds, would be the late writer’s reaction to the transformation of the once-sleepy Pasadena corner where the bookstore is located: A bustling intersection with double-espresso, Pilates, and açaí offerings, it’s a far distant scene than when Ms. Butler walked the neighborhood and accompanied her mother to work as a housemaid.

“She wasn’t very sentimental about places, but she did pay attention to who lived around whom and interacted with one another,” Ms. George says. 

In a moment when the neighborhood is shifting, Ms. Butler would likely see Octavia’s Bookshelf “as a strong sign,” she adds. “It’s a flag in the ground. We’re still here – our stories matter.”

AP

Children taken from an orphanage in a Russian-occupied part of Ukraine eat a meal in Zolotaya Kosa, Russia, where they will be raised as Russian.

On Friday, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and a key aide for their role in the taking of thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia since the start of the war a year ago. Mr. Putin does not deny that the children were taken, that they are being taught Russian, and that they will be adopted by Russians. Rather, the Kremlin claims the children were taken for safety from the fighting.

But, says ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan, Mr. Putin must be tried for the abduction of  children across borders – a war crime. “The evidence will tell a different story,” he told a conference in London on Monday. He asked Moscow to repatriate the children and let them learn their own language in their own schools and not be adopted “by strangers.”

“The quite important elements of the offense are accepted by the individuals concerned,” he said.

The arrest warrants are a direct challenge to Mr. Putin’s notion that Ukraine has long been united with Russia by “blood ties,” or, as one people forming a special civilization with its own values rising from factors like language, ethnicity, and race.

The ICC, as well as Ukraine’s government, insists that Mr. Putin abide by values in international law. “The world needs a real embodiment of the rule of law, which is guaranteed to protect humanity from the ‘right of force’ – from the source or all aggressions,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said earlier this month.

The Geneva Conventions prohibit the forced transfer of people from occupied territories like those in eastern Ukraine under Russian control. Children, Mr. Khan said, “can’t be treated as spoils of war.” 

The ICC is not the only body challenging Russia’s rejection of universal justice. In an emergency session of the U.N. General Assembly last month, 141 nations backed a resolution demanding that Mr. Putin withdraw his forces from Ukraine and international laws be observed.

“If we can’t show that international justice can play a role [in Ukraine] when the world seems on a precipice – and I don’t think that’s hyperbole – then there will be no confidence in international institutions,” Mr. Khan told The Times of London.

The warrants mark just the third time that the ICC has sought the arrest of a head of state. Mr. Putin is unlikely to face a trial at The Hague unless his own people hand him over or he travels to any of the 123 countries that are signatories to the statute establishing the ICC.

Yet the court’s action sends a signal to Russians that the world embraces a universal type of civilization, one with values defined not by ethnicity but by principles of law applicable to all, especially innocent children.