The head of Fiji’s prison service has been caught on camera involved in a fist fight that appears to have taken place at the popular O’Reilley’s Bar in the capital of Suva.

Sevuloni Naucukidi, the acting Commissioner of the Fiji Corrections Service (FCS), can be seen in the viral video throwing punches at another man as staff at the establishment scramble to contain the situation.

The 30-second clip of the incident, shared online by The Fiji Times today, had been viewed more than half a million times, with more than 8200 reactions and almost 2000 shares by 1pm (NZT).

• READ MORE: Fiji’s Minister for Justice investigates ‘altercation’ involving acting Corrections boss

Naucukidi was appointed to act as the Fiji prison chief at the end of March after the FCS Commissioner Dr Jalesi Nakarawa was stood down by the Constitutional Offices Commission following allegations of misbehaviour.

Police spokesperson Wame Boutolu told The Fiji Times that no complaint had been filed with police regarding the incident.

The newspaper reported that it was not clear whether the incident took place before or after Naucukidi’s appointment as FCS acting commissioner.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

The Fiji Times reported later that Justice Minister Siromi Turaga had said that a “certain level of decorum is expected at all times — particularly when in uniform, whether that be Bula Friday wear or your official work attire”.

He made the comments in relation to the controversial video.

Turaga said preliminary investigations indicated that the footage was from an earlier date.

“We have contacted the owners of the establishment, who have confirmed that the video likely dates back to early March 2025,” he said.

The Fiji Times video clip.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

The head of Fiji’s prison service has been caught on camera involved in a fist fight that appears to have taken place at the popular O’Reilley’s Bar in the capital of Suva.

Sevuloni Naucukidi, the acting Commissioner of the Fiji Corrections Service (FCS), can be seen in the viral video throwing punches at another man as staff at the establishment scramble to contain the situation.

The 30-second clip of the incident, shared online by The Fiji Times today, had been viewed more than half a million times, with more than 8200 reactions and almost 2000 shares by 1pm (NZT).

• READ MORE: Fiji’s Minister for Justice investigates ‘altercation’ involving acting Corrections boss

Naucukidi was appointed to act as the Fiji prison chief at the end of March after the FCS Commissioner Dr Jalesi Nakarawa was stood down by the Constitutional Offices Commission following allegations of misbehaviour.

Police spokesperson Wame Boutolu told The Fiji Times that no complaint had been filed with police regarding the incident.

The newspaper reported that it was not clear whether the incident took place before or after Naucukidi’s appointment as FCS acting commissioner.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

The Fiji Times reported later that Justice Minister Siromi Turaga had said that a “certain level of decorum is expected at all times — particularly when in uniform, whether that be Bula Friday wear or your official work attire”.

He made the comments in relation to the controversial video.

Turaga said preliminary investigations indicated that the footage was from an earlier date.

“We have contacted the owners of the establishment, who have confirmed that the video likely dates back to early March 2025,” he said.

The Fiji Times video clip.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Domestically, he has been conducting a bruising, even thuggish campaign against Israeli institutions and their representatives, an effort that is impossible to divorce from his ongoing trial for corruption. He has, for instance, busied himself with removing the attorney journal, Gali Baharav-Miara, a process that will be lengthy considering the necessary role of a special appointments committee. On May 23, the cabinet passed a no-confidence motion against her, prompting a sharp letter from the attorney general that the Netanyahu government had ventured to place itself “above the law, to act without checks and balances, and even at the most sensitive of times”.

High up on the Netanyahu hit list is the intelligence official Ronen Bar, the Shin Bet chief he explicitly accuses of having foreknowledge of the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. “This is a fact and not a conspiracy,” a statement from the prime minister’s office bluntly asserted. At 4.30am that morning “it was already clear to the outgoing Shin Bet head that an invasion of the State of Israel was likely.”

The PMO failed to mention Netanyahu’s self-interest in targeting Bar, given that Shin Bet is investigating the office for connections with the Qatari government allegedly involving cash disbursements to promote Doha’s interests.

While Bar has been formally sacked, a measure never undertaken by any government of the Israeli state, the Israeli High Court has extended a freeze on his removal while permitting Netanyahu to consider replacement candidates.

It is the judiciary, however, that has commanded much attention, pre-dating the October 7 attacks. Much of 2023 was given over to attempting to compromise the Supreme Court of its influence and independence. Some legislation to seek that process had been passed in July 2023 but the Supreme Court subsequently struck down that law in January 2024 in an 8-7 decision. The relevant law removed the Court’s means to check executive power through invalidating government decisions deemed “unreasonable”. In the view of former Chief Justice Esther Hayut, the law was “extreme and irregular”, marking a departure “from the foundational authorities of the Knesset, and therefore it must be struck down.”

Even in wartime, the Netanyahu government’s appetite to clip the wings of an active judiciary remained strong. In January 2025, it made a second attempt, with a new, modified proposal jointly authored by Israeli Justice Minister Yariv Levin and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar. The law, passed by the Knesset in its third and final reading on March 27, alters the committee responsible for appointing judges. The previous nine-member judicial selection committee had been composed of three judges, two independent lawyers and four politicians, equally divided between government and opposition. Now, the relevant lawyers will be government and opposition appointees, intended to take effect after the next elections.

The convulsions in Israeli politics have been evident from various efforts to stall, if not abandon the legislation altogether. The law changing the judicial appointments committee had received 71,023 filed objections. While it passed 67-1, it only did so with the opposition boycotting the vote. Benny Gantz, the chair of National Unity, wrote to Netanyahu ahead of the readings pleading for its abandonment. “I’m appealing to you as someone who bears responsibility for acting on behalf of all citizens of this country.” He reminded the PM that Israeli society was “wounded and bleeding, divided in a way we have not seen since October 6 [2023]. Fifty-nine of our brothers and sisters are still captive in Gaza, and our soldiers, from all political factions, are fighting on multiple fronts.”

The warning eventually came. To operate in such a manner, permitting a parliamentary majority to “unilaterally approve legislation opposed by the people, will harm the ability to create broad reform that appeals to the whole, will lead to polarization and will increase distrust in both the legislative and executive branches.”

Before lawmakers in a final effort to convince, Gantz, citing former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, issued a reminder that “democracies fall or die slowly when they suffer from a malignant disease called the disease of the majority”. Such a disease advanced gradually till “the curtain of darkness slowly [descended] on society.”

Gantz also tried to press Levin to abandon the legislation ahead of the two Knesset plenum readings. In a report from Channel 12, he called it a “mistake” to bring the legislation forward. The response from Levin was that the legislation was a suitable compromise that both he and Sa’ar had introduced as a dilution on the previous proposal that would have vested total control in the government over judicial appointments. The revision was “intended to heal the rift of the nation”.

Healing for Netanyahu is a hard concept to envisage. His authoritarian politics is that of the supreme survivalist with lashings of expedient populism. Sundering the social compact with damaging attacks on various sacred cows, from intelligence officials to judges, is the sacrifice he is willing to make. That this will result in a distrust in Israeli institutions seems to worry him less than any sparing from accountability and posterity’s questionable rewards.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

A series of violent incidents and confrontations over the weekend in New Caledonia’s capital Nouméa and its surroundings, causing clashes with law enforcement agencies and several injuries.

On Saturday night, in a bar and night-club in downtown Nouméa, a “Ladies Night” event dedicated to International Women’s Day degenerated into an all-out brawl, involving mostly young customers.

The event was scheduled to end at 2am, but bar owners decided to close at 1am, prompting violent reactions from the young patrons, who started to throw glasses at the DJ, then ransacked the bar.

• READ MORE: Other Kanaky New Caledonia reports

The incident was recorded and later broadcast on social networks.

“We should have closed at 2am, but shortly after midnight, we felt the pressure was mounting and most of the people were already quite inebriated”, the 1881 establishment owner told local media.

“So we decided to close earlier to avoid people getting more drunk. We stopped the music, that’s when they started to throw glasses to the bar”.

Public brawl outside
Outside, in a parking lot, an estimated “300 to 400 hundred” customers began a public brawl.

Law enforcement units were called and later described themselves as finding “a dangerous situation” — confronted with “hostile” individuals, and having to resort to teargas and stun-balls.

The French High Commission reported during a press conference yesterday that seven people had been injured, including one gendarme and a police officer, in the face of people throwing “bottles, stones and even concrete blocks”.

The situation came back under control at around 2:30 am, officials said.

The High Commission said that at this stage no one had been arrested, but an investigation was underway that could lead to the bar and night club being closed down.

“This is a serious incident . . .  but we are not back to the insurrection situation last year”, the French High Commission’s chief-of-staff, Anaïs Aït Mansour, told reporters.

She said a meeting had been called with all of Nouméa’s bar and nightclub owners and managers.

After months of prohibition on the sale of alcoholic beverages, following the violent unrest that started in May 2024, the restrictions were finally lifted only a few weeks ago.

A re-introduction of the restrictive measure was now “under consideration”, Aït Mansour said.

The incident has also prompted political reactions as parties were preparing for the return of French Minister for Overseas Manuel Valls in less than two weeks to try to bring political talks to another level on New Caledonia’s political future.

Politicians warned not to amalgamate
The incidents, widely condemned by the pro-France political groups, were also labelled as “unacceptable” by the major pro-independence Union Calédonienne (UC)-FLNKS party.

In a media statement, UC said these “acts of vandalism and violence committed by inebriated youths” had “nothing to do with the political claims from 13 May 2024, or with the Kanak people’s struggle”.

However, the pro-independence party warned against any attempt to “turn these youths into scapegoats for all of our society’s harms”.

UC said this behaviour could be explained by “a profound ill-being” among “a certain part” of the young Kanak population who felt disenfranchised.

Violent clashes on highway
The weekend was also marred by another violent confrontation with law enforcement services on the territorial road RT1 between the capital Nouméa and the La Tontouta International Airport where motorists were targeted by people throwing stones at them.

The incidents took place early Sunday morning near the Saint-Laurent village, in an area usually referred to as Col de La Pirogue, close to the small town of Païta.

The Gendarmerie Commander, General Nicolas Matthéos, said those actions were from a group of up to 30 individuals under the influence of alcohol.

He said his services were now attempting to talk to traditional chiefs in the area so they could persuade those responsible for these “very aggressive” acts to surrender and be “brought to justice”.

He said four gendarmes had been slightly injured after being hit by stones.

“We had to use stun grenades and during those operations we had to stop all traffic on the RT1″,” he said.

Traffic was interrupted for almost one hour and a squadron of gendarmes remained in place to secure the area.

A judicial inquiry is also underway.

Sandalwood oil factory goes up in flames
Also at the weekend, a sandalwood oil factory went up in flames late on Sunday evening on the island of Maré in the Loyalty Islands group.

Local firemen could not stop the destruction of the small factory’ production and refinery unit.

Another investigation is now underway from Nouméa-based gendarmerie investigators to determine the cause of the fire and whether it was accidental or criminal.

The locally-managed unit was created in 2010.

It is believed to be the world’s third largest producer of high-quality sandalwood essential oil, with international perfume and cosmetics clients such as Dior, Guerlain and Chanel.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

A series of violent incidents and confrontations over the weekend in New Caledonia’s capital Nouméa and its surroundings, causing clashes with law enforcement agencies and several injuries.

On Saturday night, in a bar and night-club in downtown Nouméa, a “Ladies Night” event dedicated to International Women’s Day degenerated into an all-out brawl, involving mostly young customers.

The event was scheduled to end at 2am, but bar owners decided to close at 1am, prompting violent reactions from the young patrons, who started to throw glasses at the DJ, then ransacked the bar.

• READ MORE: Other Kanaky New Caledonia reports

The incident was recorded and later broadcast on social networks.

“We should have closed at 2am, but shortly after midnight, we felt the pressure was mounting and most of the people were already quite inebriated”, the 1881 establishment owner told local media.

“So we decided to close earlier to avoid people getting more drunk. We stopped the music, that’s when they started to throw glasses to the bar”.

Public brawl outside
Outside, in a parking lot, an estimated “300 to 400 hundred” customers began a public brawl.

Law enforcement units were called and later described themselves as finding “a dangerous situation” — confronted with “hostile” individuals, and having to resort to teargas and stun-balls.

The French High Commission reported during a press conference yesterday that seven people had been injured, including one gendarme and a police officer, in the face of people throwing “bottles, stones and even concrete blocks”.

The situation came back under control at around 2:30 am, officials said.

The High Commission said that at this stage no one had been arrested, but an investigation was underway that could lead to the bar and night club being closed down.

“This is a serious incident . . .  but we are not back to the insurrection situation last year”, the French High Commission’s chief-of-staff, Anaïs Aït Mansour, told reporters.

She said a meeting had been called with all of Nouméa’s bar and nightclub owners and managers.

After months of prohibition on the sale of alcoholic beverages, following the violent unrest that started in May 2024, the restrictions were finally lifted only a few weeks ago.

A re-introduction of the restrictive measure was now “under consideration”, Aït Mansour said.

The incident has also prompted political reactions as parties were preparing for the return of French Minister for Overseas Manuel Valls in less than two weeks to try to bring political talks to another level on New Caledonia’s political future.

Politicians warned not to amalgamate
The incidents, widely condemned by the pro-France political groups, were also labelled as “unacceptable” by the major pro-independence Union Calédonienne (UC)-FLNKS party.

In a media statement, UC said these “acts of vandalism and violence committed by inebriated youths” had “nothing to do with the political claims from 13 May 2024, or with the Kanak people’s struggle”.

However, the pro-independence party warned against any attempt to “turn these youths into scapegoats for all of our society’s harms”.

UC said this behaviour could be explained by “a profound ill-being” among “a certain part” of the young Kanak population who felt disenfranchised.

Violent clashes on highway
The weekend was also marred by another violent confrontation with law enforcement services on the territorial road RT1 between the capital Nouméa and the La Tontouta International Airport where motorists were targeted by people throwing stones at them.

The incidents took place early Sunday morning near the Saint-Laurent village, in an area usually referred to as Col de La Pirogue, close to the small town of Païta.

The Gendarmerie Commander, General Nicolas Matthéos, said those actions were from a group of up to 30 individuals under the influence of alcohol.

He said his services were now attempting to talk to traditional chiefs in the area so they could persuade those responsible for these “very aggressive” acts to surrender and be “brought to justice”.

He said four gendarmes had been slightly injured after being hit by stones.

“We had to use stun grenades and during those operations we had to stop all traffic on the RT1″,” he said.

Traffic was interrupted for almost one hour and a squadron of gendarmes remained in place to secure the area.

A judicial inquiry is also underway.

Sandalwood oil factory goes up in flames
Also at the weekend, a sandalwood oil factory went up in flames late on Sunday evening on the island of Maré in the Loyalty Islands group.

Local firemen could not stop the destruction of the small factory’ production and refinery unit.

Another investigation is now underway from Nouméa-based gendarmerie investigators to determine the cause of the fire and whether it was accidental or criminal.

The locally-managed unit was created in 2010.

It is believed to be the world’s third largest producer of high-quality sandalwood essential oil, with international perfume and cosmetics clients such as Dior, Guerlain and Chanel.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

For decades, Republican lawmakers and industry lobbyists have tried to chip away at the small program in the Environmental Protection Agency that measures the threat of toxic chemicals.

Most people don’t know IRIS, as the program is called, but it is the scientific engine of the agency that protects human health and the environment. Its scientists assess the toxicity of chemicals, estimating the amount of each that triggers cancer and other health effects. And these values serve as the independent, nonpartisan basis for the rules, regulations and permits that limit our exposure to toxic chemicals.

Now IRIS faces the gravest threat to its existence since it was created under President Ronald Reagan four decades ago.

Legislation introduced in Congress would prohibit the EPA from using any of IRIS’ hundreds of chemical assessments in environmental rules, regulations, enforcement actions and permits that limit the amount of pollution allowed into air and water. The EPA would also be forbidden from using them to map the health risks from toxic chemicals. The bills, filed in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives earlier this year, are championed by companies that make and use chemicals, along with industry groups that have long opposed environmental rules. If it becomes law, the “No IRIS Act,” as it’s called, would essentially bar the agency from carrying out its mission, experts told ProPublica.

“They’re trying to undermine the foundations for doing any kind of regulation,” said William Boyd, a professor at UCLA School of Law who specializes in environmental law. Boyd noted that IRIS reports on chemicals’ toxicity are the first step in the long process of creating legal protections from toxic pollutants in air and water.

“If you get rid of step one, you’re totally in the dark,” he said.

If the act passes, companies could even use the law to fight the enforcement of environmental rules that have long been on the books or permits that limit their toxic emissions, environmental lawyers told ProPublica.

The attack on IRIS has a good chance of succeeding at a time when Republicans are eager to support President Donald Trump’s agenda, according to environmental advocates who monitor Congress. The bills dovetail with the anti-regulatory efforts that have marked the second Trump administration, which has begun to dismantle climate protections, nominated industry insiders to top positions in the EPA and announced plans for unprecedented cuts that could slash the agency’s budget by 65%.

Project 2025, the ultraconservative playbook that has guided much of Trump’s second presidency, calls for the elimination of IRIS on the grounds that it “often sets ‘safe levels’ based on questionable science” and that its reviews result in “billions in economic costs.” The policy blueprint echoes industry claims that IRIS does not adequately reflect all of the research on chemicals; there are sometimes significant differences between the program’s conclusions and those of corporate-funded scientists.

IRIS has long been a target of industry and has at times been criticized by independent scientific bodies. More than a decade ago, for example, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine took issue with the organization, length and clarity of IRIS reviews; a more recent report from the same group found that IRIS had made “significant progress” in addressing the problems.

IRIS’ work stands out in a world where much of the science on toxic chemicals is funded by corporations with a vested stake in them. Studies have shown that industry-funded science tends to be biased in favor of the sponsor’s products. But IRIS’ several dozen scientists do not have a financial interest in their findings. Their work has had a tangible impact on real people. The program’s calculations are the hard science that allow the agency to identify heightened disease risk due to chemicals in the air, water and land. And these revelations have, in some cases, led to stricter chemical regulations and grassroots efforts to curtail pollution.

IRIS, which stands for Integrated Risk Information System, was created in 1985. Until that point, different parts of the EPA had often assessed chemicals in isolation, and their methods and values were not always consistent.

At first, IRIS just collected assessments completed by various divisions of the EPA. Then, in 1996, it began conducting its own, independent reviews of chemicals. Its scientists analyze studies of a chemical and use them to calculate the amount of the substance that people can be exposed to without being harmed. IRIS sends drafts of its reports to multiple reviewers, who critique its methods and findings.

As the tranche of assessments grew, so did its value to the world. States began relying on IRIS’ numbers to set limits in air and water permits. Some also use them to prioritize their environmental efforts, acting first on the chemicals IRIS deems most harmful. Countries that don’t have the expertise to assess chemicals themselves often adopt IRIS values to guide their own regulations.

Today, IRIS’ collection of more than 500 assessments of chemicals, groups of related chemicals, and mixtures of chemicals is the largest database of authoritative toxicity values in the world, according to Vincent Cogliano, a recently retired scientist who worked on IRIS assessments for more than 25 years.

From the beginning, industry scientists challenged IRIS with calculations that showed their chemicals to be less dangerous.

“There were a lot of pretty bitter battles,” said Cogliano, who remembers particularly intense opposition to the assessments of diesel engine exhaust and formaldehyde during the 1990s. Critiques of IRIS assessments intensified over the years and began to slow the program’s work. “It took so long to get through that there were fewer and fewer assessments,” said Cogliano.

In 2017, opposition to IRIS escalated further. Trump’s budget proposal would have slashed funding for the program. Although Congress funded IRIS and the program survived, some of its work was halted during his first presidency. Trump appointed a chemical engineer named David Dunlap to head the division of the EPA that includes IRIS. Dunlap had challenged the EPA’s science on formaldehyde when he was working as the director of environmental regulatory affairs for Koch Industries. Koch’s subsidiary, Georgia-Pacific, made formaldehyde and many products that emit it. (Georgia-Pacific has since sold its chemicals business to Bakelite Synthetics.) While Dunlap was at the EPA, work on several IRIS assessments was suspended, including the report on formaldehyde. IRIS completed that report last year.

That assessment proved controversial, as ProPublica documented in its investigation of the chemical late last year. In calculating the risks that formaldehyde can cause cancer, IRIS decided not to include the chance that the chemical can cause myeloid leukemia, a potentially fatal blood cancer. The EPA said IRIS made this decision because it lacked confidence in its calculation; the agency admitted that the omission drastically underestimated formaldehyde’s cancer risk.

Still, some of IRIS’ assessments have made a huge difference in parts of the country.

In 2016, IRIS updated its assessment of a colorless gas called ethylene oxide. The evaluation changed the chemical’s status from a probable human carcinogen to plainly “carcinogenic to humans.” And IRIS calculated the uppermost amount of the chemical before it starts to cause cancer, finding that it was 30 times lower than previously believed.

The EPA used that information to create a map, which showed that people living near a sterilizing plant in Willowbrook, Illinois, had an elevated cancer risk because the facility was releasing ethylene oxide into the air. Once locals learned of their risk, they kicked into action.

“That knowledge led us to be able to really activate the groundswell of community members,” said Lauren Kaeseberg, who was part of a group that held protests outside the plant, met with state and local officials, and testified at hearings. Not long after the protests, Illinois passed legislation limiting the release of the pollutant, the local plant shut down and the cancer-causing pollution was gone from the air.

Around the country, the pattern has been repeated. After IRIS issues its estimate of the amount of a chemical that people can safely be exposed to without developing cancer and other diseases, the EPA uses that information to map the threats from chemicals in air. IRIS’ evidence showing that people have an elevated risk of cancer has sparked some hard-hit communities to fight back, suing polluters, shuttering plants and demanding the offending chemical be removed from their environment.

In St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana, residents had long felt as if they had more than their share of sickness. The small rectangle of land near the Mississippi River abuts a chemical plant that emits foul-smelling gases. For decades, as they breathed in the fumes, residents suffered from respiratory problems, autoimmune diseases, cancers and other ailments. In 2016, after IRIS assessed the toxicity of chloroprene, one of the chemicals coming out of the plant’s smokestacks, the people of St. John discovered the main source of their problems. The IRIS assessment showed that chloroprene was a likely carcinogen and caused damage to the immune system. With this information, the EPA concluded that St. John had the highest cancer risk from air pollution in the country.

“I didn’t realize the depth of the poisoning that was taking place until EPA came to our community in 2016 and brought us that IRIS report,” said Robert Taylor, who has lived his entire life in St. John. When the agency representatives arrived, Taylor’s wife had cancer and his daughter was bedridden with a rare autoimmune condition. A lifelong musician who was then 75, Taylor began organizing his neighbors to demand a stop to the deadly pollution. (His wife died in December.)

The assessments of chloroprene and ethylene oxide — and the activism they sparked around the country — eventually led the EPA to crack down. Last year, the agency announced several rules that aimed to reduce toxic emissions. The rules call for changes in how companies produce and release chemicals — the type of reforms that can be expensive to undertake.

The Biden administration sued Denka, the company that owns the chloroprene-releasing plant in St. John, in an effort to force it to curb the amount of the chemical it released. But the Trump administration intends to drop that suit, according to The New York Times.

For its part, Denka sued the EPA over one of the rules in July, asking the court for more time to implement the changes. The company argued that the agency was on a “politically motivated, unscientific crusade” to shut down the plant.

Critics of IRIS have used similarly barbed language in their recent attacks. In his press release introducing what he calls the “No Industrial Restrictions in Secret Act” in the House, Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wis., wrote that “Unelected bureaucrats in the Biden Administration have disrupted the work of Wisconsin’s chemical manufacturers and inhibited upon the success of the industry through the abuse of the EPA’s IRIS program.” The press release said the bill is supported by Hexion, which has a plant in his district. Hexion makes formaldehyde, a chemical that increases the cancer risk nationwide.

Neither Grothman nor Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., who introduced the Senate version of the bill, responded to questions from ProPublica, including how they think the EPA could regulate chemicals if the bill passes. The EPA did not answer questions for this story.

The American Chemistry Council, which represents more than 190 companies, sent a letter to Lee Zeldin in late January calling on the EPA administrator to disband IRIS and prohibit the use of its assessments in rules and regulations. IRIS “has been increasingly used to develop overly burdensome regulations on critical chemistries,” the letter states, going on to argue that the program lacks transparency and “has often fallen short of scientific standards.” (The letter was first reported by Inside EPA.) The American Petroleum Institute, the Extruded Polystyrene Foam Association, the Independent Lubricant Manufacturers Association, the Fertilizer Institute and the Plastics Industry Association were among the dozens of organizations representing industries financially impacted by IRIS’ chemical assessments that signed the letter.

Industry groups have also criticized IRIS for being slow and overstepping its authority. And they have noted that outside organizations have found fault with it.

In addition to the National Academies criticism in 2011 about the clarity and transparency of its reports, IRIS has responded to recommendations from the Government Accounting Office, according to a report the congressional watchdog issued last week. The GAO, which monitors how taxpayer dollars are spent, placed IRIS on its “high risk list” in 2009. But the GAO did so not because it was vulnerable to waste, fraud and abuse — the reasons some programs land on the list — but because the watchdog decided IRIS wasn’t doing enough assessments of dangerous chemicals. Since 2009, the GAO made 22 recommendations to IRIS, all of which have been implemented, according to the agency’s website. The new report acknowledged improvements but noted that the program’s current pace of finalizing assessments “likely cannot increase without more resources.” According to the GAO report, in 2023 and 2024, IRIS had reported needing 26 additional staff members to meet the demand for chemical assessments.

Defenders of the program say the criticisms mask a simple motive: protecting industry profits rather than public health.

“It’s blatant self-interest,” said Robert Sussman, a veteran attorney who worked at the EPA as well as for environmental groups and chemical companies. “What they’re really trying to do here is prevent the EPA from doing assessments of their chemicals.”

While he has witnessed many attempts to scale back the EPA’s power in his 40-year career, Sussman described the current effort to eliminate its use of IRIS’ chemical assessments as “completely off the deep end.”

Weaker bills targeting IRIS were introduced into both the House and Senate in February of last year but did not have the political support to advance. Now, after the election, the possibility of success is entirely different, according to Daniel Rosenberg, director of federal toxics policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental nonprofit.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that if it does pass Congress — and it now could — the president will sign it,” said Rosenberg. But Rosenberg added that he believes that if the public understood the consequences of doing away with the science at the core of the EPA’s work, people could potentially sway their lawmakers to stand up to the attack on IRIS.

“The current political alignment is clearly very favorable to the chemical lobby, but their actual agenda has never been popular,” said Rosenberg. “There’s never been a case where people are in favor of more carcinogens in their environment.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Sharon Lerner.

A broad coalition of civil society organisations in Aotearoa New Zealand have signed an open letter to Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters urging the coalition government to refuse to accept the credentials of a new Israeli ambassador while the state continues to disregard international law and to commit war crimes.

The term of Israel’s ambassador to New Zealand, Ran Yaakoby, has ended as the Israeli military continues its more than 14-month genocide in Gaza, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity and war crimes, and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has declared Israel’s occupation of Palestine illegal.

About 40 civil society organisations and prominent individuals at institutions have signed the open letter.

• READ MORE: ‘You are subhuman’ : Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza – Amnesty International report

The ICJ has made it clear that all states parties — including New Zealand — have obligations not to recognise, and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by measures that are illegal under international law.

The international community has failed to hold Israel to account for its actions.

Kate Stone from Justice for Palestine, one of the signatory organisations, said in a statement: “As we say in the letter, while ambassadors usually provide an important avenue for dialogue, it is clear that the Israeli regime is not prepared to respond to the concerns of the New Zealand government, or the international community more broadly, and intends to continue to disregard international law.

“This is about demonstrating that there are consequences for Israel’s actions in breach of international law, and at the expense of Palestinian human rights.”

Just this week, the Israeli government announced its decision to close its embassy in Dublin, citing Ireland’s decision to join the ICJ case considering whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

Clearly, Israel is not prepared to maintain diplomatic relations with states that seek to uphold international law.

Those who have signed the letter are urging the New Zealand government to not maintain diplomatic relations with Israel until it is prepared to comply with international law.

“New Zealand should stand with those seeking to uphold international law and human rights, not with those seeking to avoid accountability for their actions which have resulted in the deaths of over 40,000 Palestinians.” said Kate Stone.

Open letter

16 December 2024

Tēnā koe Minister,

We are aware that the term of the current Israeli ambassador is coming to an end. We, the undersigned organisations, urge you, on behalf of the New Zealand government, to refuse to accept the credentials of a replacement ambassador while Israel continues to disregard international law.

The Israeli regime is currently committing a genocide in Gaza and the International Criminal Court has issued warrants for the arrest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity and war crimes. The International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion from July 2024 declared Israel’s occupation of Palestine illegal and identified numerous international law obligations that Israel is violating, manifesting in systematic breaches of Palestinians’ fundamental human rights.

The current Israeli regime, and any representative of that regime, is flagrantly flouting international law and has ignored all calls for it to cease its illegal activities in Gaza and the wider Occupied Palestinian Territories. It is quite clear that Israel intends to continue expanding its illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and to re-settle Gaza — changing the facts on the ground to such an extent that a two-state solution, or any just solution, becomes an impossibility.

The ICJ makes it clear that all states parties — including New Zealand – have obligations not to recognize, and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by measures that are illegal under international law. The failure of the international community to hold Israel to account for its actions is undermining the integrity of the rules-based international order that New Zealand relies upon.

While ordinarily a diplomatic mission provides an avenue for dialogue, it is clear that the Israeli regime is not prepared to respond to the concerns of the New Zealand government.

Therefore, we urge you to announce that New Zealand will not maintain diplomatic relations with Israel until it demonstrates that it is prepared to comply with its international obligations. Please do not accept diplomatic credentials from a regime carrying out war crimes.

Nā mātou noa, nā

Justice for Palestine

ActionStation

Alternative Jewish Voices (NZ)

Aotearoa Christians for Peace in Palestine

Aotearoa Healthcare Workers for Palestine

Asians Supporting Tino Rangatiratanga

Auckland Action Against Poverty

Auckland Peace Action

The Basket Hauraki – Social and Environmental Justice

Ceasefire Now Hawkes Bay

Dayenu: New Zealand Jews Against Occupation

DECOL Collective Whanganui

Falastin Tea Collective

First Union – Dennis Maga, General Secretary, on behalf of First Union Kaiāwhina Tāmaki

Matika mō Paretinia

Mauri o te Moana

NZCTU – Te Kauae Kaimahi

Otago Staff for Palestine

Otago Students for Justice in Palestine

Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa

Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa Whanganui

Palestine Solidarity Network Whangārei

Palestine Solidarity Taranaki

Palestine Human Rights Campaign Waikato

Peace Action Wellington

Peace Movement Aotearoa

People Against Prisons Aotearoa

Professor Richard Jackson, Co-Director Te Ao O Rongomaraeroa – The National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Otago

Protect Pūtiki

Rainbow Youth

Reanga Taketake

Satellites

Stand with Palestine Waiheke

Student Justice for Palestine Pōneke

Students for Justice in Palestine Canterbury

Tauranga Moana for Palestine

Te Kuaka

Te Tau Ihu Palestine Solidarity

University of Auckland Student Justice for Palestine

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Asia Pacific Report

A West Papuan advocacy group for self-determination for the colonised Melanesians has appealed to the United Kingdom government to cancel its planned reception for new Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto.

“Prabowo is a blood-stained war criminal who is complicit in genocide in East Timor and West Papua,” claimed an exiled leader of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), Benny Wenda.

He said he hoped the government would stand up for human rights and a “habitable planet” by cancelling its reception for Prabowo.

• READ MORE: President Prabowo’s first foreign tour signals Indonesia’s return to global stage
• ‘If it’s not racism, what is it?’ — Human Rights Watch report
• Prabowo and the UK
• Other West Papua reports

Prabowo, who was inaugurated last month, is on a 12-day trip to China, the United States, Peru, Brazil, and the United Kingdom.

He is due in the UK on Monday, November 19.

The trip comes as Indonesian security forces brutally suppressed a protest against Indonesia’s new transmigration strategy in the Papuan region.

Wenda, an interim president of ULMWP, said Indonesia was sending thousands of industrial excavators to destroy 5 million hectares of Papuan forest along wiith thousands of troops to violently suppress any resistance.

“Prabowo has also restarted the transmigration settlement programme that has made us a minority in our own land. He wants to destroy West Papua,” the UK-based Wenda said in a statement.

‘Ghost of Suharto’ returns
“For West Papuans, the ghost of Suharto has returned — the New Order regime still exists, it has just changed its clothes.

“It is gravely disappointing that the UK government has signed a ‘critical minerals’ deal with Indonesia, which will likely cover West Papua’s nickel reserves in Tabi and Raja Ampat.

“The UK must understand that there can be no real ‘green deal’ with Indonesia while they are destroying the third largest rainforest on earth.”

Wenda said he was glad to see five members of the House of Lords — Lords Harries, Purvis, Gold, Lexden, and Baroness Bennett — hold the government to account on the issues of self-determination, ecocide, and a long-delayed UN fact-finding visit.

“We need this kind of scrutiny from our parliamentary supporters more than ever now,” he said.

Prabowo is due to visit Oxford Library as part of his diplomatic visit.

“Why Oxford? The answer is clearly because the peaceful Free West Papua Campaign is based here; because the Town Hall flies our national flag every December 1st; and because I have been given Freedom of the City, along with other independence leaders like Nelson Mandela,” Wenda said.

This visit was not an isolated incident, he said. A recent cultural promotion had been held in Oxford Town Centre, addressed by the Indonesian ambassador in an Oxford United scarf.

The people of West Papua have spoken.

Just today (15/11/24), rallies against Indonesia’s settler-colonial Transmigration plan were held in:

Jayapura, Nabire, Sorong, Manokwari, Yahukimo, Yalimo, Timika, Makassar. pic.twitter.com/u0ucw8RfUW

— Veronica Koman 許愛茜 (@VeronicaKoman) November 15, 2024

Takeover of Oxford United
“There was the takeover of Oxford United by Anindya Bakrie, one of Indonesia’s richest men, and Erick Thohir, an Indonesian government minister.

“This is not about business — it is a targeted campaign to undermine West Papua’s international connections. The Indonesian Embassy has sponsored the Cowley Road Carnival and attempted to ban displays of the Morning Star, our national flag.

“They have called a bomb threat in on our office and lobbied to have my Freedom of the City award revoked. Indonesia is using every dirty trick they have in order to destroy my connection with this city.”

Wenda said Indonesia was a poor country, and he blamed the fact that West Papua was its poorest province on six decades of colonialism.

“There are giant slums in Jakarta, with homeless people sleeping under bridges. So why are they pouring money into Oxford, one of the wealthiest cities in Europe?” Wenda said.

“The UK has been my home ever since I escaped an Indonesian prison in the early 2000s. My family and I have been welcomed here, and it will continue to be our home until my country is free and we can return to West Papua.”

15/11/24 Jayapura, West Papua

Another angle showing that the rally against Transmigration was peaceful, but the police forcibly dispersed it.

This violates domestic and international laws. pic.twitter.com/Tm5f4d0VrU

— Veronica Koman 許愛茜 (@VeronicaKoman) November 15, 2024

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

In the summer of 2021, President Joe Biden summoned the CEOs of the nation’s biggest tech companies to the White House.

A series of cyberattacks linked to Russia, China and Iran had left the government reeling, and the administration had asked the heads of Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Google and others to offer concrete commitments to help the U.S. bolster its defenses.

“You have the power, the capacity and the responsibility, I believe, to raise the bar on cybersecurity,” Biden told the executives gathered in the East Room.

Microsoft had more to prove than most. Its own security lapses had contributed to some of the incursions that had prompted the summit in the first place, such as the so-called SolarWinds attack, in which Russian state-sponsored hackers stole sensitive data from federal agencies, including the National Nuclear Security Administration. Following the discovery of that breach, some members of Congress said the company should provide better cybersecurity for its customers. Others went further. Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat who chairs the Senate’s finance committee, called on the government to “reevaluate its dependence on Microsoft” before awarding it any more contracts.

In response to the president’s call for help, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella pledged to give the government $150 million in technical services to help upgrade its digital security.

On the surface, it seemed a political win for the Biden administration and an instance of routine damage control from the world’s largest software company.

But Microsoft’s seemingly straightforward commitment belied a more complex, profit-driven agenda, a ProPublica investigation has found. The proposal was, in fact, a calculated business maneuver designed to bring in billions of dollars in new revenue, box competitors out of lucrative government contracts and tighten the company’s grip on federal business.

The White House Offer, as it was known inside Microsoft, would dispatch Microsoft consultants across the federal government to install the company’s cybersecurity products — which, as a part of the offer, were provided free of charge for a limited time.

But once the consultants installed the upgrades, federal customers would be effectively locked in, because shifting to a competitor after the free trial would be cumbersome and costly, according to former Microsoft employees involved in the effort, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared professional repercussions. At that point, the customer would have little choice but to pay for the higher subscription fees.

Two former sales leaders involved in the effort likened it to a drug dealer hooking a user with free samples. “If we give you the crack, and you take the crack, you’ll enjoy the crack,” one said. “And then when it comes time for us to take the crack away, your end users will say, ‘Don’t take it away from me.’ And you’ll be forced to pay me.”

If we give you the crack, and you take the crack, you’ll enjoy the crack. And then when it comes time for us to take the crack away, your end users will say, ‘Don’t take it away from me.’

The company, however, wanted more than those subscription fees, former salespeople said. The White House Offer would lead customers to buy other Microsoft products that ran on Azure, the company’s cloud platform, which carried additional charges based on how much storage space and computing power the customer used. The expectation was that the upgrades would ultimately “spin the meter” for Azure, helping Microsoft take market share from its main cloud rival, Amazon Web Services, the salespeople said.

In the years after Nadella made his commitment to Biden, Microsoft’s goals became reality. The Department of Defense, which had resisted the upgrades for years due to the steep cost, began paying for them once the free trial ended, laying the groundwork for future Azure consumption. So did many civilian agencies. The White House Offer got the government “hooked on Azure,” said Karan Sondhi, a former Microsoft salesperson with knowledge of the deals. “And it was successful beyond what any of us could have imagined.”

But while Microsoft’s gambit paid off handsomely for the company, legal experts told ProPublica the White House Offer deals never should have come to pass, as they sidestep or even possibly violate federal laws that regulate government procurement. Such laws generally bar gifts from contractors and require open competition for federal business.

Accepting free product upgrades and consulting services collectively worth hundreds of millions of dollars is “not like a free sample at Costco, where I can take a sample, say, ‘Thanks for the snack,’ and go on my merry way,” said Eve Lyon, an attorney who worked for four decades as a procurement specialist in the federal government. “Here, you have changed the IT culture, and it would cost a lot of money to go to another system.”

Microsoft defended its conduct. The company’s “sole goal during this period was to support an urgent request by the Administration to enhance the security posture of federal agencies who were continuously being targeted by sophisticated nation-state threat actors,” Steve Faehl, the security leader for Microsoft’s federal business, said in a statement. “There was no guarantee that agencies would purchase these licenses,” and they “were free to engage with other vendors to support their security needs,” Faehl said.

Pricing for Microsoft’s security suite was transparent, he said, and the company worked “closely with the Administration to ensure any service and support agreements were pursued ethically and in full compliance with federal laws and regulations.” Faehl said in the statement that Microsoft asked the White House to “review the deal for antitrust concerns and ensure everything was proper and they did so.”

The White House disputed that characterization, as did Tim Wu, a former presidential adviser who told ProPublica he discussed the offer with the company in a short, informal chat prior to the summit but provided no signoff. “If that’s what they’re saying, they’re misrepresenting what happened on that phone call,” he said.

A current White House official, in a statement to ProPublica, sought to distance the administration from Microsoft’s offer, which it had previously heralded as an “ambitious” cybersecurity initiative.

“This was a voluntary commitment made by Microsoft … and Microsoft alone was responsible for it,” the White House official said in the statement. Furthermore, they said the decisions to accept it were “handled solely by the respective agencies.”

“The White House is not involved in Agency decisions regarding cybersecurity and procurement,” the official said.

The official declined to comment on the legal and contracting concerns raised by experts but noted in the statement that the White House “is broadly concerned” about the risks of relying too much on any single technology vendor and “has been exploring potential policy steps to encourage Departments and Agencies to diversify where there is concentration.” Cybersecurity experts say that such concentration can leave users vulnerable to attack, outages or other disruption.

Yet the White House summit ushered in that very type of concentrated reliance, as well as the kind of anticompetitive behavior that the Biden administration has pledged to stamp out. Former Microsoft salespeople told ProPublica that during their White House Offer push, they advised federal departments to save money by dropping cybersecurity products they had purchased from competitors. Those products, they told them, were now “redundant.” Salespeople also fended off new competitors by explaining to federal customers that most of the cybersecurity tools they needed were included in the upgraded bundle.

Today, as a result of the deals, vast swaths of the federal government, including all of the military services in the Defense Department, are more reliant than ever on a single company to meet their IT needs. ProPublica’s investigation, supported by interviews with eight former Microsoft employees who were involved in the White House Offer, reveals for the first time how this sweeping transformation came to be — a change that critics say leaves Washington vulnerable, the very opposite of what Biden had set out to achieve with his summit.

“How did Microsoft become so pervasive of a player in the government?” said a former company sales leader. “Well, the government let themselves get coerced into Microsoft when Microsoft rolled the stuff out for free.”

The federal government is one of Microsoft’s largest customers and “the one that we’re most devoted to,” the company’s president, Brad Smith, has said. Each day, millions of federal employees use the Windows operating system and products like Word, Outlook, Excel and others to write reports, send emails, analyze data and log on to their devices. But in the months before Biden’s summit, the SolarWinds hack put that relationship to the test.

Discovered in late 2020, SolarWinds was one of the most damaging breaches in U.S. history and underscored the federal government’s vulnerability to a state-sponsored cyberattack.

Authorities established that Russian hackers exploited a flaw in a Microsoft product to steal sensitive government documents from the National Nuclear Security Administration and the National Institutes of Health, among other agencies. What they didn’t know, as ProPublica reported in June, was that one of the company’s own engineers had warned about the weakness for years, only to be dismissed by product leaders who were fearful that acknowledging it would undermine the company’s chances of winning a massive federal cloud computing contract.

But Microsoft’s known involvement was enough for Congress to summon Smith to testify in February 2021. Lawmakers focused on how Microsoft packaged its products into tiers of service — with advanced security tools attached to only the most expensive license, known to government customers as the G5.

At the time, many federal employees used a less expensive license known as the G3. As a result, they didn’t have access to the security features that might have alerted them to an intrusion and aided subsequent investigations.

Some lawmakers, like then-Rep. Jim Langevin of Rhode Island, accused the company of unfairly up-charging customers for what they considered to be basic security. “Is this a profit center for Microsoft?” he asked Smith during the hearing.

Smith replied: “We are a for-profit company. Everything that we do is designed to generate a return, other than our philanthropic work.”

Amid the criticism, Microsoft soon announced that it would provide federal customers with a “one-year free trial of Advanced Audit,” a tool that could help the government detect and investigate future attacks. Over the months that followed, Microsoft was “surprised there was not as aggressive of an uptake of Advanced Audit” as the company had wanted, Faehl, Microsoft’s federal security leader, told ProPublica. It would be a “lesson learned” going forward, he said.

That May, Biden signed an executive order requiring federal agencies to bolster their cyber defenses, declaring that “protecting our Nation from malicious cyber actors requires the Federal Government to partner with the private sector.” He added, “In the end, the trust we place in our digital infrastructure should be proportional to how trustworthy and transparent that infrastructure is, and to the consequences we will incur if that trust is misplaced.”

Around that time, Anne Neuberger, a White House deputy national security adviser, called Smith and requested that Microsoft develop an initiative to announce at Biden’s White House cybersecurity summit that August. Like Langevin, the administration believed that the company’s advanced suite of cybersecurity tools, including ones intended to counter threats on user devices, should be included in the government’s existing licenses and that products should be delivered to customers with the most secure settings enabled by default. (Neither Neuberger nor Smith granted interview requests.)

Giving away a bundle of advanced security features permanently was a nonstarter inside Microsoft, an executive told ProPublica. But Smith spearheaded a team to develop an offer that appeared to be a compromise.

Federal customers could have free, limited-time access to the upgraded G5 security capabilities and to consultants who would install them. “It was at the behest of the Administration that Microsoft provided enhanced security tools, at no cost, to agencies as soon as possible to level up their security baseline,” Faehl told ProPublica.

While the deal achieved the administration’s goal of better protection for the federal government, it also served Microsoft’s interests. Microsoft salespeople had been trying, unsuccessfully, for years to convince federal customers to upgrade to the G5. Department and agency officials balked at the higher price tag when they already had other vendors providing some of the same security capabilities. The G5’s retail price is nearly 60% more than the G3’s.

“We knew that this was a golden window that nobody could have foreseen opening up because we had been pushing” for the G5 upgrade “for years, and things were going very slow,” said a former Microsoft sales leader involved in the strategy. With the White House Offer, it was “like Moses leading us through the parting of the Red Sea, and we just rushed through it.”

We knew that this was a golden window that nobody could have foreseen opening up.

Faehl told ProPublica that sales of the G5 had been slow prior to SolarWinds because federal customers wrongly believed “that they had sufficient security capabilities already in place.” He said the attack was “a wakeup call showing the status quo perspective to be insufficient.”

Microsoft was well aware of the possible legal implications of its offer. More than two decades ago, the U.S. Department of Justice sued the company in a landmark antitrust case that nearly resulted in its breakup. Federal prosecutors alleged that Microsoft maintained an illegal monopoly in the operating system market through anticompetitive behaviors that prevented rivals from getting a foothold. Ultimately, the Justice Department settled with Microsoft, and a federal judge approved a consent decree that imposed restrictions on how the company could develop and license software. Although the decree had long since expired, it nonetheless continued to loom large in the corporate culture.

When it came to the White House Offer, company insiders were “mindful of the concerns about Microsoft making products free that smaller companies sell,” an executive told ProPublica. A spokesperson explained, “That was the impetus for asking the administration to review it.”

The “review” consisted of a phone call between Microsoft’s Smith and Wu, who was Biden’s special assistant for technology and competition policy.

“Brad was like, ‘We think security is important, and we want to give the federal government better security,’” Wu recalled.

But, according to Wu, Smith said Microsoft’s lawyers were “overly paranoid” about antitrust concerns, and he was looking to “calm his own lawyers down.”

“I made it clear there was no ability in the White House to sign off on antitrust,” which is in the purview of the Justice Department or the Federal Trade Commission, Wu said. “I’m smart enough not to say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s fine with me.’ I’m not crazy.”

I made it clear there was no ability in the White House to sign off on antitrust. I’m smart enough not to say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s fine with me.’ I’m not crazy.

After the news organization asked Microsoft about Wu’s account, a spokesperson walked back the company’s original written statement, saying that Faehl was misinformed. “The White House arranged a call and we described details of our security offer and how it was structured to avoid antitrust concerns,” the spokesperson said. “It was an informal conversation and at no time did we ask for formal antitrust approval.”

Wu also told ProPublica that he felt pressure from the National Security Council’s Neuberger, who “wanted to get this deal done” in the wake of SolarWinds and other cyberattacks. “She pushed me to get on the phone with Brad,” he said. “I feel in some ways in retrospect I should not have even spoken with him. But I felt that I should help the NSC for what they presented as a formalistic exercise to help the national security.”

After the White House summit, Microsoft’s sales teams quickly mobilized to sell the “WHO,” as it became known to insiders. The free consulting services were a crucial part of the strategy, former salespeople said. As Sondhi put it, “Just because you give the product away for free doesn’t mean they’re going to use it because it’s a pain in the ass to install new software and retrain staff.” The company wanted to avoid a repeat of the disappointing participation in the earlier Advanced Audit offer.

The consultants would work inside the agencies, where they would have government-provided desks, phones and internet, as well as access to federal computer networks, according to one proposal reviewed by ProPublica. From their perches in the bureaucracy, they would get the products up and running and train federal employees on how to use them. This would make the upgrades “sticky,” as they became ingrained in employees’ daily lives, former salespeople said.

Microsoft covered the free product upgrades for up to a year, the company told ProPublica. Faehl called the free upgrades “a short term option for protection while agencies put long term procurement plans in motion.” Or, as sales teams told customers, they “should not have to wait to be secure until they can procure.” The company also noted the offer came at a significant cost to Microsoft, “with no guarantee of renewal once the deal expired.”

But sales teams said they knew customers who accepted the White House Offer were unlikely to undo the intensive work of installing the upgrades when renewal time rolled around, locking them into the G5 for the long haul. Wes Anderson, a Microsoft vice president who oversaw teams working with the Defense Department, asked his staff to prepare forecasts showing which customers were expected to become paying G5 users at the end of the White House Offer, three people who worked in sales told ProPublica.

“It was explicit that this was the end game,” one former Microsoft sales leader who worked inside the Defense Department told ProPublica. “You will do whatever you need to do to get that software installed, operational and connected so the customer has their runway to renew.”

It was explicit that this was the end game. You will do whatever you need to do to get that software installed, operational and connected.

(On Oct. 30, two weeks after the news organization sent Microsoft questions for this story, the company announced in an email to employees that Anderson would be leaving Microsoft. Neither Anderson nor Microsoft commented on the departure. On the topic of Anderson’s request of his staff, the company said, “Forecasting is part of the rhythm of business for organizations in nearly every industry.”)

Salespeople pitched the White House Offer as “the easy button,” people familiar with the strategy told ProPublica. “Our argument was, ‘We have this whole suite of goodness,’” said a former Microsoft employee who worked with the Department of Defense. “‘You should upgrade because it will take care of everything rather than having a bunch of vendors that each do one of the 20 things that the G5 can do.’” Faehl told ProPublica the license bundles help federal customers “avoid the hassles of managing multiple contracts and licenses” and close security gaps by replacing a “patchwork of solutions” with “simplified, comprehensive protection.”

For the most part, as they predicted, the Microsoft sales teams found receptive audiences across the government. To help ingratiate themselves, they invoked their association with the White House in their pitches. In one example, from June 2022, a Microsoft representative wrote to Veterans Affairs officials to explain that, “working in conjunction with the White House,” it would provide “a no cost offer of professional services to provide hands-on assistance” to deploy the upgrades.

As consultants fanned out across the federal government to turn on the new features, there was a sense of unease among some employees about the nature of the deals. Typically, the government obtains products and services through a competitive bidding process, selecting from a variety of proposals from different vendors. The White House Offer was different.

“No matter how you wanted to polish the turd, there was the appearance of no-bid contracts,” said a former Microsoft consultant involved in the WHO.

The federal government may receive so-called gratuitous — or free — services from donors as long as both parties have a written agreement stating that the donor will not be paid for the goods or services provided. Such agreements were in place for the consulting services in the White House Offer, the company said.

No matter how you wanted to polish the turd, there was the appearance of no-bid contracts.

Those agreements may have helped Microsoft pass the “laugh test,” said Lyon, the former federal procurement attorney. “But just because something is technically legal does not make it right,” she said.

Other contracting experts said federal departments and agencies should have been more skeptical about accepting free products and consulting services from Microsoft, given the implications for competition and national security.

The cost and difficulty of switching from the Microsoft products presents a classic example of “vendor lock-in,” said Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law studies at George Washington University Law School. “The free services are allowing the government to bypass a competitive procurement process and locking them in for future procurements,” she said.

Tillipman said that, in the future, the government should consider restrictions on gratuitous services in IT in order “to ensure you’re not locked in with a vendor who gets their foot in the door with a frighteningly expensive” giveaway.

“This is all designed to undermine future competitions,” she said.

This is all designed to undermine future competitions.

James Nagle, a former Army contracting official and practicing attorney who specializes in the federal contracting process, went even further, saying that the White House Offer potentially violated existing law.

The Federal Acquisition Regulation, which governs government procurement, says that employees may not accept “gratuities,” or anything of value “from anyone who has or is seeking to obtain Government business.” And, as employees involved with the White House Offer told ProPublica, Microsoft was seeking future contract upgrades and new Azure revenue.

While “gratuities” are typically considered to be perks such as free meals, sports tickets or other gifts for personal use, Nagle argued that the rule could apply to the White House Offer, though he said he was not aware of any prior case using his interpretation. He compared it to a car manufacturer providing a government agency with a fleet of cars for a year for free because it wants the agency to procure that fleet for its staff. “Any contracting officer would say, ‘No, you can’t do that,’” Nagle said. Once employees get used to the cars, they’re reluctant to switch, he said, and the “impermissible gift” would create a built-in bias toward that manufacturer.

“That’s the problem here,” Nagle said. “This is not truly gratuitous. There’s another agenda in the works.”

Microsoft did not use the so-called gratuitous services agreements to give away the G5 upgrades, as it did for the consulting services. Instead, Faehl told ProPublica, the company considered them “a 100% discount” added to existing customer contracts. He said making this type of “strategic investment is … common practice among companies” and that contract teams on both sides reviewed the deals. Nagle viewed it differently, characterizing the free products as a “loss leader designed to lead to future sweetheart deals.”

Federal vendors may be banned from government contracting for violating the Federal Acquisition Regulation, though such an outcome would be highly unlikely for a vendor as large as Microsoft, Nagle said. Nonetheless, individual employees on both sides of improper deals in the past have been held accountable, he said.

Skirting fiscal law, however, may have set the stage for an even more serious legal concern, said Christopher Sagers, a professor of antitrust law at Cleveland State University in Ohio. Microsoft’s actions, Sagers said, might constitute what is known in antitrust law as “exclusionary conduct,” opening the door for illegal monopoly. “Microsoft, rather than competing on the merits, took steps to exclude competitors by making its product sticky in advance of opportunities for competition,” he said. The company used “an already dominant position to further cement their position.”

Microsoft disputed that point.

“We don’t believe our offer raised antitrust concerns, and we constructed it specifically to avoid any such issues,” a company spokesperson said. “We talked informally with a White House staffer about this.”

Wu, however, said the company did not make clear to him the financial and competitive implications of the offer.

“There is no way that was discussed,” Wu told ProPublica. “The only thing that Brad mentioned was upgrading federal agencies, offering them better stuff.” Upon hearing the news organization’s findings, he said: “That is a lot darker than it sounded. Once you’re in somewhere, it’s very hard to leave.

“Now I’m starting to feel guilty in some weird way about playing a role in a big deal that cost taxpayers money,” Wu said.

Former Microsoft salespeople said that all of the customers within the Defense Department who signed on to the White House Offer — including all the military branches — ultimately upgraded to the G5 and began paying for it when the time came to renew their agreements in 2022 and 2023.

A Defense Department spokesperson said in a written statement that the department followed federal acquisition law and “conducted internal tests and evaluations of multiple vendor capabilities.” The upgrade, the spokesperson said, was “crucial” to meeting the department’s cybersecurity objectives. The department declined to answer follow-up questions, including to specify which vendors it evaluated before deciding on the G5.

John Sherman, the department’s chief information officer at the time of the White House Offer dealmaking, defended both the government’s decision and Microsoft’s strategy. “I am sure Microsoft, like any company, would be trying to increase their business with any customer,” he told ProPublica.

He added, “We didn’t have any particular preference for Microsoft in terms of favoritism or anything like that, but we knew it worked, which is why we wanted to proceed with that.”

Many civilian agencies also upgraded to the G5 during this timeframe, said Sondhi, who now works at Microsoft competitor Trellix as chief technology officer for the company’s public-sector business.

For Microsoft, winning more government business was only half the picture. It also saw the White House Offer as an opportunity to knock out its competitors.

During and after their sales push, Microsoft salespeople advised government departments and agencies to remove competing products from their IT lineups to cut costs, saying the Microsoft bundle would render those other products redundant. Internally, employees called it the “take-out” strategy. “The play is: ‘You’re paying for it in the G5. It’s a waste of government money to have both,’” a former sales leader who worked with the Defense Department told ProPublica.

Sondhi said that in a typical scenario, an upgrade to the 5-level can displace the existing work of a half dozen vendors or more. Executives from cybersecurity companies Trellix and Proofpoint, for example, told ProPublica they lost federal business in the wake of the White House Offer deals.

The White House Offer also enhanced Microsoft’s competitive position by reducing the likelihood that the government would open bidding for cybersecurity products in the future, given the cornucopia of offerings in the G5. Within the company, this was known as “taking opportunities off the street,” former sales leaders said.

The fallout impacted companies that were in the midst of completing the authorization process the government requires of vendors providing cloud-based services. Several told ProPublica that cybersecurity contract opportunities are now scarce.

“We are chipping away, but it’s largely, by far, a Microsoft-owned landscape,” an executive at one competing vendor told ProPublica.

Faehl dismissed those complaints, saying that customers kept the upgrades because they performed well and that competitors “should look inward to see why their products do not meet or exceed Microsoft results.”

Microsoft has something few other companies possess: a panoply of products that span the IT ecosystem. Rivals say the company leveraged its existing dominance in certain products — like the Windows operating system and classic workplace applications — to gain dominance in others, namely cybersecurity and cloud computing.

“No one has the kind of capital that Microsoft does,” Sondhi said. “They can just absorb the cost of the giveaway until the customer’s first bill.”

A coalition backed by some of Microsoft’s major competitors, including Google and Amazon, has raised similar issues with the Federal Trade Commission, which in 2023 gathered public comments on the business practices of cloud computing providers. Among the FTC’s areas of ongoing interest: “Are there signs that cloud markets are functioning less than fully competitively, and that certain business practices are inhibiting competition?”

Competition is not the only issue at stake. As Washington has deepened its relationship with Microsoft, congressional leaders have raised concerns about what they call a cybersecurity “monoculture” in the federal government. Some, like Wyden and Sen. Eric Schmitt, a Republican from Missouri, have blasted the Defense Department in particular for “doubling down on a failed strategy of increasing its dependence on Microsoft.”

“Although we welcome the Department’s decision to invest in greater cybersecurity, we are deeply concerned that DoD is choosing not to pursue a multi-vendor approach that would result in greater competition, lower long-term costs, and better outcomes related to cybersecurity,” the two lawmakers wrote in a letter to Sherman, then the department’s chief information officer, in May.

Microsoft’s Faehl pushed back. “The suggestion that our customers are any more at risk because they use Windows, or Azure, or Office is wrong,” he said. “We partner closely with our security competitors because we see them as partners against threat actors we face in common.”

Still, just last year, Chinese hackers exploited Microsoft security lapses to breach the email accounts of senior U.S. officials. Investigating the attack, the federal Cyber Safety Review Board faulted the company for a “cascade of … avoidable errors” and pressed it to overhaul its security culture. Microsoft has since pledged to place security “above all else.” In June, Smith told Congress that Microsoft would strive to establish a “culture that encourages every employee to look for problems, find problems, report problems, help fix problems and then learn from the problems.”

It’s learning from the successes, too. The same week that Smith testified before Congress, and nearly three years after Nadella made his commitment at Biden’s summit, Microsoft made a new offer, this time to “support hospitals serving more than 60 million people living in rural America.”

The playbook was familiar. In its announcement, the company said that eligible hospitals could have the private-sector equivalent of the G5 “at no cost for one year.” As before, Faehl said Microsoft made the commitment “at the behest of the White House.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Renee Dudley, with research by Doris Burke.

An investigative journalist who was barred from attending New Zealand’s national apology to survivors of abuse in care has now been granted accreditation.

Parliament’s Speaker has now granted temporary Press Gallery accreditation to journalist Aaron Smale for tomorrow’s apology for abuse in care. He must, however, be accompanied by a Newsroom reporter at all times.

It follows a significant backlash from survivors and advocates to the initial decision.

• READ MORE:  Speaker lifts ban on Newsroom journalist ahead of Crown apology
• Sorry means you don’t do it again — Aaron Smale
  
• Royal Commission of Inquiry into abuse in state care – state response

Smale has covered abuse in care, and the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the abuse, for eight years. His work has appeared in multiple publications and websites, including Newsroom, Newshub, The Listener, The Spinoff and RNZ.

Last week, speaker Gerry Brownlee declined an application from Newsroom for Smale to report on the apology.

Parliament’s Press Gallery had asked for an explanation, as a refusal was quite rare, especially when a reporter met the gallery’s criteria for accreditation.

It was told the application was declined, with the Speaker citing Smale’s conduct on a prior occasion.

This afternoon, the Press Gallery wrote to the Speaker, requesting a more fulsome explanation.

Speaker’s about-turn
In an about-turn, the Speaker approved the application.

The initial decision to decline Smale’s application was met with backlash by survivor groups and advocates, as well as politicians and Newsroom itself.

At a media conference at Parliament in July, Smale and the Prime Minister had an exchange over the government’s law and order policies, and whether the Prime Minister would acknowledge the link between abuse and gang membership.

According to Newsroom, Smale had also attended a media event at a youth justice facility in Palmerston North, and pressed Children’s Minister Karen Chhour over whether it had been appropriate to associate the memory of the Māori Battalion with the new youth justice programme.

“The Beehive was in touch with us to say they believed he had been too forceful and too rude, in their view, in those two occasions,” Newsroom’s co-editor Tim Murphy told RNZ’s Nine to Noon programme.

Murphy said that Smale had conceded he had pushed the children’s minister “a bit far”.

“But the one in Parliament, he was asking specific questions and kept asking them of the Prime Minister and I think that became irritating to the Prime Minister,” Murphy said.

‘Most informed’ of journalists
Describing Smale as “the most informed, possibly, probably of all New Zealand journalists” on the issue of abuse in state care institutions, Murphy said political discomfort should not be a reason to exclude Smale, and the ban should not stand.

“He should be there, and he should be asking questions, because he’ll know more than virtually everybody else who could be,” he said.

Murphy said Smale’s intention for his coverage of the apology itself was to write an observational piece through the eyes of survivors, and he was not intending to “get into a grilling.”

The Royal Commission Forum, an advisory group to the commission, said denying Smale accreditation was “profoundly concerning” and a damaging decision in the lead-up to the apology.

The Green Party said it was alarmed by the move, and said it set a dangerous precedent.

“As a society that values the role of the Fourth Estate, we should value the work of journalists like Aaron, because it helps us take a critical look at where we have gone wrong and how we may move forward,” said the Green Party’s media and communications spokesperson Hūhana Lyndon.

“Barring a leading journalist from an important event like this speaks to this government’s lack of accountability. It is something we might expect in Putin’s Russia, not 21st century Aotearoa New Zealand.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

The two had not paid membership fees for many years, the paper said in its Wednesday edition, adding that the decision to suspend them came into effect on April 5.

Hinting at another reason for the Bar Association’s decision the paper added that the two lawyers had previously defended six members of the Peng Lei Buddhist House – or Tinh That Bong Lai – who were sentenced in 2022 to a combined 23 years and six months in prison on charges of “abusing democratic freedoms” under Article 331 of the Criminal Code.

Lawyer Nguyen Van Mieng told Radio Free Asia he was not surprised by the decision and noted that the Bar Association has had ongoing problems with members not paying union dues. However, he said he believed that was not the main reason for them canceling his membership.

“In Vietnam, practicing lawyers are required to participate in the bar associations of provinces and cities. Everyone must belong to a certain bar association. Therefore, when the bar association removes our names, it means we are no longer qualified to practice law in Vietnam even though we are still lawyers,” he said.

“The independence of bar associations is almost non-existent. The cases we work on related to politics and democratic freedoms are monitored and the Bar Association, as a professional organization, is supposed to protect us in our activities but they are an extended arm of the security agency, or of other legal agencies.”

He said it was clear that the real reason for removing his name from the Bar Association was to clear the way for his prosecution under Article 331 in connection with the Tinh That Bong Lai case.

Lawyer Dang Dinh Manh told RFA that, in early 2023, the Ministry of Public Security requested the Long An Provincial Security Investigation Agency to conduct a criminal investigation against him. 

He said that after receiving political asylum in the U.S. he wrote to the Bar Association asking for his name to be removed from their list of lawyers and also deleted any mention of the association from his social media.

“Currently, practicing law in Vietnam with professional qualifications is unthinkable, but I still try to practice according to the concept ‘there is nothing that prevents lawyers from practicing in accordance with their professional qualities’,” he said.

”Looking back on 28 years of practice, I have only one regret: having to stop defending activists, because being able to defend them is a privilege."

The Ho Chi Minh City Bar Association is under the direct control of the central government. One of its tasks is to represent and protect the legitimate rights and interests of practicing lawyers.

Lawyers Dang Dinh Manh and Nguyen Van Mieng are two of the five people representing the defendants in the Tinh That Bong Lai case. 

They have repeatedly received summonses from the Long An Police due to reports from the Department of Cyber Security & Crime Prevention which said the two distributed online video clips, images and articles that allegedly showed signs of abusing democratic freedoms, infringing on the interests of the State and the legitimate rights of organizations and individuals according to Article 331 of the Criminal Code.

Both lawyers ignored the summonses on the grounds that it was their right to remain silent as persons under investigation.

On June 11, 2023, the Long An Provincial Police website posted a search notice saying that the two lawyers had ignored requests to come forward to be interviewed and had ignored repeated summonses, while giving no reason for their absence. It said that the police did not know the whereabouts of the two lawyers.

The Long An Provincial Police Department said it intended to search for the lawyers to resolve crime reports.

Both lawyers affirmed that this search procedure is illegal, because according to the provisions of the Criminal Procedure Code there is no law regulating the procedure. 

The two lawyers are currently in the United States.

Translated by RFA Vietnamese. Edited by Mike Firn and Elaine Chan.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese.

A Nuku’alofa business has started to sell “sparkling kava” on tap for those interested in tasting the traditional brew.

Tricia Emberson and her family owned Pacific Brewing Tonga business launched the initiative at their Reload Bar in Nuku’alofa last week.

The project has been a two-year ongoing project that is blending tradition with innovation and plan to add flavoured kava drinks in the future.

• READ MORE: Other kava reports

Emberson said her team has kept the essence of kava while introducing a fresh, modern twist.

She believes turning kava into a drink available for everyone at a local bar is the way to go to meet demands.

She told RNZ Pacific that the lockdowns during the 2020 covid-19 pandemic and the 15 January 2022 Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcanic eruption and tsunami forced her and her team to look at options to keep their business operations afloat.

They had taken over Pacific Brewing in 2017 with the idea of creating beer in Tonga to tell the story of their Polynesian heritage.

Rebranded Pacific beer
They rebranded their beer using the names of Polynesian mythical gods, which she said “was sort of the trend and of the time”.

The “Sparkling Kava’ product is the result of two years of research and work, with the focus on making the drink available so they can also get the market’s feedback.

“During the covid pandemic it was a very tough time for everybody and we started looking at what other opportunities we could look into,” she said.

“Kava was one of the things that has gone through stages throughout the years where it’s been permitted in overseas countries, where it hasn’t been permitted in some countries.

“And because my background is in exports and knowing to make the business viable, I started looking at what we could do to export up from Tonga.”

Emberson owning Reload Bar provided a good opportunity for them to have the “sparkling kava” on tap for people to taste.

“It’s taken us a while because first of all we were researching the properties of kava and what can we do with kava,” she said.

“And now, through Reload Bar, we’re going to do the market research and we’re doing that because we want the opinions not only of the Tongans but also of foreigners to see if this is something they would drink.”

Longer-term plans
She said that is the first step as they had more plans long-term.

“Of course we have a longer-term plan, where we would look at the viability of exporting,” she said.

“We are looking at flavoring, different flavorings, and also putting it into a bottle or a can.”

Emberson was born in Fiji and returned to Tonga in 1990 to invest in the fisheries sector, setting up Alatini Fisheries.

She said the poplularity of kava now around the globe was a factor they considered.

“The fact that although many tourists had in the past wanted to taste kava but was not able to do so because it was not readily available was another factor in them going the way they have.

“So that was the other reason why we looked at kava because I’ve been doing a lot of traveling through Indonesia I noticed that it was very easy for you to drink coconut or drink this or drink that . . . all the locally available drinks,” she said.

“And I know in Tonga, when you visit, as a tourist you say I’d like to taste kava and it’s not available, so that was one of the things we wanted to meet, the need that is there.”

She added customer feedback and the result of their research on the product now available would form the basis of their next step.

“It’s been good so far,” she revealed when asked how people are responding.

Not enough support
Meanwhile, Emberson said small island countries in the Pacific, like Tonga, needed more support for the private sector.

She revealed this was something she had witnessed over the years since her family started their business operations in 1990.

They have had to shut down their fisheries business because of the high costs of operations and are working hard on keeping their Pacific Brewing and Reload Bar operations going by looking at product options like the sparkling kava and flavoured kava.

“There hasn’t been, as far as I’ve seen, the support of the private sector,” she said.

“I think Fiji is a little bit bit better. But in some of the smaller Pacific islands that support for the private sector is not there.

“That’s been my game since 1990 as an entrepreneur, private enterprise, looking and seeing what I can do to help the country, and it is just difficult.

“I’ve been in Australia and it’s amazing to see the difference in the support of small businesses.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

This month, the world watched South Africa initiate International Court of Justice (ICJ) hearings on the genocidal acts Israel committed in Gaza. In a two-day session on January 11 and 12, the court heard the extensive evidence the South African legal team had gathered to support their case against Israel, and the rebuttal by the Israeli team.

The hearings were historic for two reasons. First, this was the first time that Israel’s decades-long aggression against the Palestinians was articulated in detail for the world to hear, without having to pass through the distorting lens of Western media or politicians. Second, this was the first time that Israel was substantively held to account in public under international law, without being shielded from such accountability by its Western backers, as it has been for the past century.

The unprecedented nature of the hearings drew international attention. The media around the world covered the proceedings extensively, often with live feeds of both presentations. But in the West, once again an anti-Palestinian media bias became apparent.

Channels like the BBC were accused of not fully showing the South African presentation, while broadcasting more of the Israeli one. American, Canadian and British newspapers were chastised for not featuring the ICJ case on their front pages.

The bias was clearest in the glaring parallels between the main points in Israel’s presentations to the court – which reflected the longstanding main themes of Israeli propaganda – and the reporting of Western mainstream media, with some exceptions. Indeed, Western coverage of the war has been skewed since day one.

The US progressive publication The Intercept did its own analysis of three leading US newspapers – the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times – and found that their reporting “heavily favoured Israel”. It said that they “disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict; used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians; and offered lopsided coverage of antisemitic acts in the U.S., while largely ignoring anti-Muslim racism in the wake of October 7.”

According to the Intercept’s analysis, the word “slaughter” was used in reference to Israeli deaths vs Palestinian deaths in a ratio of 125 to 2; the word “massacre” in a ratio of 60 to 1. Anti-Semitism was mentioned 549 times, while Islamophobia just 79 times.

This anti-Palestinian bias in print media “tracks with a similar survey of US cable news that the authors conducted last month that found an even wider disparity,” it concluded.

Many other such studies and examples of Western media bias towards Israel are now available.

Tweeting the Intercept report, Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, asked a pertinent question: “After months of western media misrepresenting or not reporting the unfolding genocide in Gaza and all sort of int’l law violations against Palestinians: I have a question. Don’t journalists have codes of conducts and professional ethics to abide by and be held accountable to?”

To answer her question: They do, in principle. But in practice, journalists and their media managers and owners operate in the context of most Western media playing a central role in the continuing legacies of Western-Israeli settler-colonialism, apartheid, and genocide against the Palestinians.

Consequently, the majority of citizens and politicians are convinced that they must support Israeli policies, even if these include settler-colonial brutality and apartheid.

It is no surprise that American, and most other Western, public opinion in the last half-century or so heavily sided with Israel over the Palestinians – because citizens mainly heard Israeli perspectives that dominated the news media and the statements and policies of their governments.

Over the past three months, however, the war in Gaza has revealed just how much Israeli state propaganda shapes US policy and the media’s dominant narrative of events. As Norman Solomon, media critic and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, put it in a January 18 Common Dreams article:

What is most profoundly important about the war in Gaza – what actually happens to people being terrorized, massacred, maimed, and traumatized – has remained close to invisible for the U.S. public … With enormous help from US media and political power structures, the ongoing mass murder – by any other name  – has become normalized, mainly reduced to standard buzz phrases, weaselly diplomat-speak, and euphemistic rhetoric about the Gaza war. Which is exactly what the top leadership of Israel’s government wants.

This dual legacy of the US’s distorted reporting and dysfunctional state policies is no longer as potent as it used to be, as the global public reactions to the ICJ genocide hearing have shown.

The global protests in solidarity with Palestine revealed that Israel and its Western protectors and media parrots, who repeat largely discredited Israeli propaganda arguments, can no longer convince global audiences to the same extent they did in the past. This is due to Israel’s own brutal actions, but also the changed global information system.

The world now sees daily on social media and some alternative media Israel’s genocidal actions and apartheid policies. The ICJ presentations and thousands of associated articles, commentaries, webinars, public talks and other events across the world exposed these Israel-Palestine realities.

Changed information flows have caused serious concern in Washington, as well as Tel Aviv, because decent, justice-loving citizens reject the US’s fervent support for Israel’s military brutality – and many say they are likely to reject voting for “Genocide Joe” Biden in the presidential election this November. This is what happens when ordinary citizens see the full story of events in Palestine – for the first time in modern history.

A new US opinion poll confirms that likely voters are more inclined to vote for candidates who supported a ceasefire in Gaza, by a 2-to-1 margin (51-23 percent). Among young and non-white voters, who are crucial for a Democratic win, between 56 and 60 percent said they would back ceasefire supporters.

But the growing awareness of what is going on in Israel-Palestine has had an impact well beyond US politics. As South African journalist Tony Karon noted in an article in The Nation on January 11: “So Israel is waging a classic colonial war of pacification of a native population resisting colonization – at a moment when much of the global citizenry is producing the receipts of centuries of Western violence and enslavement, demanding justice and a reordering of global power relations. Standing up for Palestine has become shorthand for that global struggle to change how the world is ruled.”

Indeed, the intense global support for Palestine, which peaked during the ICJ hearing, represents the Global South challenging the political and economic hegemony of the North. People across the world are saying they support justice and will continue to resist Western colonial forces that have ravaged scores of societies for half a millennium.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Rami G Khouri.

“Authorities should swiftly investigate assaults on the five journalists attacked during a drug enforcement operation at a Nairobi bar and hold all perpetrators to account through a transparent process. This is the only way to send a message that attacks on the press will not be tolerated,” said CPJ Sub-Saharan Africa Representative Muthoki Mumo. “Police and other state authorities should also take steps to ensure that journalists who cover their operations are protected from harm.”

On January 5, agents with Kenya’s National Authority for the Campaign Against Drug Abuse (NACADA) and police officers raided the Kettle House Bar and Grill in Nairobi’s Lavington neighborhood as part of a broader crackdown against the smoking of shisha pipes, which may contain tobacco and are illegal in Kenya. Bouncers at the club resisted authorities and assaulted at least five journalists and several police officers, according to those news reports.

Jane Kibira, a camera operator with the state-owned Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC), was stabbed in the back, and Boniface Bogita, a photographer with the privately-owned Nation Media Group, was stabbed twice in the ribs, according to separate reports by the journalists’ media outlets.

Bonface Okendo, a photographer with privately owned media house The Standard Media Group, sustained injuries to his arms and legs during the attack and had his camera confiscated, according to a report by his outlet, which also said a Standard Media Group camera operator, Jackson Kibet, “managed to escape with few injuries but had his memory card confiscated.” The report did not clarify how the journalists were injured.

The Standard reported that Bogita and Okendo were treated in a hospital, and KBC reported on January 6 that Kibira had been treated and discharged from a hospital.

Lawrence Tikolo, a camera operator with the privately owned broadcaster Citizen TV, was punched in the ribs and had his camera “vandalized,” the media outlet reported.   

In a statement published on X, formerly known as Twitter, NACADA condemned the violence by security officers and said it led to the “hospitalization of some of the victims.”

Police officers said they arrested 21 people in connection with the incident, according to the news reports. On January 8, Nicholas Kosgei, the head of enforcement at NACADA, told CPJ that investigations were still ongoing and suspects would be arraigned this week.

KBC reported that police recovered a knife at the scene believed to have been used in the attack.

A person who answered the phone when CPJ called the Kettle House Bar and Grill on Monday night said a manager was not immediately available for comment.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Free Speech For People (FSFP), along with nationally recognized litigator Shannon Liss-Riordan of the Massachusetts-based civil rights firm Lichten & Liss-Riordan, P.C., filed a challenge today before the Massachusetts Ballot Law Commission on behalf of individual Massachusetts voters challenging Donald Trump’s eligibility to appear on the state’s presidential primary and general election ballot. The challengers are a mix of Republican, Independent, and Democratic voters and include former Boston Mayor Kim Janey and two leading law professors. The challenge asks the Massachusetts Ballot Law Commission to abide by Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment and bar Trump from appearing on the state ballot.

Enacted in the wake of the Civil War, Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment disqualifies from public office, regardless of a prior criminal conviction, any individual who has taken an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution and then engages in insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or gives aid or comfort to its enemies. Trump’s involvement in the violent attack on Congress to prevent the certification of democratic election results clearly disqualifies him from holding any future public office.

Under Massachusetts law, the Ballot Law Commission “shall have jurisdiction over and render a decision on any matter referred to it, pertaining to the … constitutional qualifications of any nominee for … national … office [and] the certificates of nomination or nomination papers filed in any presidential … primary.”

“Donald Trump violated his oath of office and incited a violent insurrection that attacked the U.S. Capitol, threatened the assassination of the Vice President and congressional leaders, and disrupted the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in our nation’s history,” said Ron Fein, Legal Director at Free Speech For People. “Our predecessors understood that oath-breaking insurrectionists will do it again, and worse, if allowed back into power, so they enacted the Insurrectionist Disqualification Clause to protect the republic from people like Trump. Trump is legally barred from the ballot and election officials must follow this constitutional mandate.”

“Today’s legal action is not about partisan politics but about upholding our Constitution, and that is why Massachusetts voters across the political spectrum have joined together to challenge Donald Trump’s wrongful placement on the Massachusetts ballot,” said Shannon Liss-Riordan. “As two other states have already recognized, Donald Trump’s instigation of and participation in the insurrection three years ago provide overwhelming cause for his disqualification from holding office in the United States.”

On behalf of voters, Free Speech For People has also filed legal challenges to Trump’s eligibility to appear on the ballot in Minnesota, Michigan, Oregon and Illinois. The state supreme courts of Minnesota and Michigan have ruled solely on state procedural grounds that Trump will not be barred from the presidential primary ballot but have left the door open for the challenges to be renewed for the general election. The Oregon challenge is currently pending review before the Oregon Supreme Court. The Illinois objection is pending before the state Board of Elections.

Both the Colorado Supreme Court and the Maine Secretary of State have recently issued rulings that Trump is disqualified from appearing on their state ballots under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Free Speech For People filed similar Section 3 challenges in 2022 against Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and former North Carolina Congressman Madison Cawthorn for their role in the January 6th insurrection. Although those challenges did not result in disqualification (Cawthorn’s because he lost his primary while the challenge was pending; Greene’s because the judge found insufficient factual evidence that she, personally, had engaged in the insurrection), they set important legal precedent that lays the groundwork for this challenge, including: that states have legal authority to adjudicate Section 3 challenges; that state processes for adjudicating Section 3 challenges do not violate a candidate’s constitutional rights; that no prior criminal conviction is required under Section 3 challenge; that words (including “marching orders or instructions to capture a particular objective, or to disrupt or obstruct a particular government proceeding”) can constitute engaging in insurrection; and that an 1872 congressional amnesty for ex-Confederates does not apply to January 6.

On September 6, 2022, Judge Francis J. Matthew of New Mexico’s First District permanently enjoined Otero County Commissioner and “Cowboys for Trump” founder Couy Griffin from holding office under the Insurrectionist Disqualification Clause.

Free Speech For People, a national nonpartisan legal advocacy group, has spearheaded the nationwide effort to “hold insurrectionists accountable for their role in the violent assault on American democracy” that took place on January 6th, 2021, starting with the issuance in June 2021 of letters to secretaries of state and chief election officials in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Along with Mi Familia Vota, the group launched TrumpIsDisqualified.org, a campaign calling on Secretaries of State and top election officials across the country to follow the mandate of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment and permanently bar Donald Trump–and all other elected officials who participated in the January 6th insurrection–from any future ballot.

Click here to read the Objection.

To learn more about the case, click here.

To learn more about Free Speech For People’s other actions under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, click here.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Enacted in the wake of the Civil War, Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment disqualifies from public office any individual who has taken an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution and then engages in insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or gives aid or comfort to its enemies–regardless of a prior criminal conviction. Trump’s involvement in the violent attack on Congress to prevent the certification of democratic election results disqualifies him from holding any future public office.

The State board has heard and decided other challenges to major party presidential candidates based on federal constitutional qualifications. Illinois Supreme Court precedent directs that Illinois electoral boards must evaluate objections that candidates have improperly attested that they meet candidacy qualifications, including those in the state and U.S. Constitution. The Illinois objectors call on the board to do so based on Section 3’s clear application to Trump’s candidacy.

“Donald Trump violated his oath of office and incited a violent insurrection that attacked the U.S. Capitol, threatened the assassination of the Vice President and congressional leaders, and disrupted the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in our nation’s history,” said Ron Fein, Legal Director at Free Speech For People. “Our predecessors understood that oath-breaking insurrectionists will do it again, and worse, if allowed back into power, so they enacted the Insurrectionist Disqualification Clause to protect the republic from people like Trump. Trump is legally barred from the ballot.”

“Our country faces a crisis in Trump’s bid for reelection. We cannot let a candidate who revels in undermining the rule of law continue his candidacy in clear violation of a constitutional mandate. In Illinois, the electoral board has a mandatory duty to keep disqualified candidates off the ballot. As the growing consensus of legal decisions show, Trump engaged in insurrection; he cannot run for president,” said attorney Caryn Lederer.

The Illinois objectors join voters across the country seeking to uphold constitutional candidacy requirements. Free Speech For People also represents voters in legal challenges to Trump’s eligibility to appear on the ballot in Minnesota, Michigan and Oregon. The state supreme courts of Minnesota and Michigan have ruled solely on state law procedural grounds that Trump will not be barred from the presidential primary ballot, but have left the door open for the challenges to be renewed for the general election. The Oregon challenge is currently pending review before the Oregon Supreme Court.

Both the Colorado Supreme Court and the Maine Secretary of State recently issued rulings that Trump is disqualified from appearing on their state ballots under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Illinois objection is poised to obtain the same result.

The presidential Section 3 cases build on key challenges against Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and former North Carolina Congressman Madison Cawthorn for their role in the January 6th insurrection that set important legal precedent on Section 3. Those cases established that states have legal authority to adjudicate Section 3 challenges; that state processes for adjudicating Section 3 challenges do not violate a candidate’s constitutional rights; that no prior criminal conviction is required for a Section 3 challenge; that words (including “marching orders or instructions to disrupt or obstruct a particular government proceeding”) can constitute engaging in insurrection; and that amnesty Congress granted in 1872 to ex-Confederates does not apply to January 6.

On September 6, 2022, Judge Francis J. Matthew of New Mexico’s First District permanently enjoined Otero County Commissioner and “Cowboys for Trump” founder Couy Griffin from holding office under the Insurrectionist Disqualification Clause.

Free Speech For People, a national nonpartisan legal advocacy group, has spearheaded the nationwide effort to “hold insurrectionists accountable for their role in the violent assault on American democracy” that took place on January 6th, 2021, starting with the issuance in June 2021 of letters to secretaries of state and chief election officials in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Along with Mi Familia Vota, the group launched TrumpIsDisqualified.org, a campaign calling on Secretaries of State and top election officials across the country to follow the mandate of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment and permanently bar Donald Trump–and all other elected officials who participated in the January 6th insurrection–from any future ballot.

Hughes Socol Piers Resnick & Dym is a Chicago-based law firm with a national practice dedicated to complex public interest litigation. HSPRD litigates individual and class action cases to secure voting rights and fair elections, to protect fundamental constitutional rights; to fight discrimination in the workplace, in housing, and in education; to battle police, law enforcement, and other governmental misconduct; to protect the rights of low-wage workers and immigrants; and to protect whistleblowers and expose fraud against the government. The firm has a long history of bringing cases in Illinois and across the country to safeguard fundamental constitutional and statutory rights.

Click here to read the Objection.

To learn more about the case, click here.

To learn more about Free Speech For People’s other actions under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, click here.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

• Heavily armed police surrounded a home as they searched for a U.S. Army reservist who authorities say killed 18 people and wounded 13 in a mass shooting at a bowling alley and a bar in Lewiston, Maine. State police later said they didn’t know if suspect Robert Card was inside any of several homes authorities intended to search. Hundreds of law enforcement agents have been hunting for Card, a 40-year-old reservist, since Wednesday night’s shootings.
• The death toll of Palestinians in Gaza stands at around 7,000 men, women and children; almost half of them are children. Life in the tiny coastal enclave has been getting increasingly difficult, without basic services and as Israeli air strikes have gone unabated over the past 48 hours. Pacifica’s Rami Almeghari has more.
• The suspect in the killing of a judge who presided over a divorce case has been found dead in rural Maryland.
• With only three weeks to avoid a government shutdown, newly minted GOP house speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana has very little time to pass a budget through the house.
• General Motors and Stellantis in talks with United Auto Workers to reach deals that mirror Ford’s.
• Today Democratic Senator Scott Wiener held a press conference, announcing new legislation to address the issue of car break-ins throughout San Francisco. He was joined by mayor London Breed, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, Supervisor Catherine Stefani, among other community leaders and representatives of San Francisco’s tourism industry.

Law enforcement officers, right, stand near armored and tactical vehicles, center, near a property on Meadow Road, in Bowdoin, Maine, Thursday, Oct. 26, 2023. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)

The post Heavily armed police surrounded a home as they searched for a U.S. Army reservist who authorities say killed 18 people and wounded 13 in a mass shooting at a bowling alley and a bar in Lewiston, Maine – Thursday, October 26, 2023 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

When former French President Nicolas Sarkozy suggested that a total Ukrainian military victory was unlikely, the New York Times‘ Roger Cohen (8/27/23) charged that “the obstinacy of the French right’s emotional bond with Russia owes much to a recurrent Gallic great-power itch.”

It doesn’t take much in our media system to be labeled a “Putin apologist” or “pro-Russia.” In this New Cold War, even suggesting that the official enemy is not Hitlerian or completely irrational could earn ridicule and attack.

After the largely stalled Ukrainian counteroffensive against the Russian occupation, conditions on the front have hardened into what many observers describe as a “stalemate.” Like virtually all wars, the Russo-Ukrainian War will end with a negotiated settlement, and the quicker it happens, the quicker the bodies will stop piling up.

Despite this, anyone who advocates actually pursuing negotiations is immediately attacked. The New York Times (8/27/23) did this in an article about former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, in an article that argued he “gives a voice to obstinate Russian sympathies.” The Times wrote:

In interviews coinciding with the publication of a memoir, Mr. Sarkozy, who was president from 2007 to 2012, said that reversing Russia’s annexation of Crimea was “illusory,” ruled out Ukraine joining the European Union or NATO because it must remain “neutral,” and insisted that Russia and France “need each other.”

“People tell me Vladimir Putin isn’t the same man that I met. I don’t find that convincing. I’ve had tens of conversations with him. He is not irrational,” he told Le Figaro. “European interests aren’t aligned with American interests this time,” he added.

To Times writer Roger Cohen, Sarkozy’s remarks “underscored the strength of the lingering pockets of pro-Putin sympathy that persist in Europe,” which persist despite Europe’s “unified stand against Russia.” Cohen didn’t challenge or rebut anything the former president said—he merely quoted the words, labeled them “pro-Putin,” and moved on.

The New Cold War mentality has encouraged a new wave of McCarthyite attacks against anyone who dissents against the establishment status quo. Merely pointing out that Putin is “not irrational” flies in the face of the accepted conventional wisdom that Putin is a Hitler-like madman hell bent on conquering Eastern Europe. That conventional wisdom is what allows calls for negotiation to be dismissed without any serious discussion, and challenging that wisdom elicits harsh reactions from establishment voices.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com (Twitter: @NYTimes). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

The post NYT’s Incredibly Low Bar for Labeling Someone ‘Pro-Putin’  appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Bryce Greene.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

Free Speech For People (FSFP) and Mi Familia Vota Education Fund (MFVEF) issued letters today to Secretaries of State and chief election officials in five states, urging them to abide by the US Constitution and bar former President Donald Trump from the ballot. According to Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, also known as the Insurrectionist Disqualification Clause, by swearing an oath to uphold the Constitution and subsequently inciting and facilitating the violent January 6th attack on the Capitol, Trump is ineligible to run for office again.

Free Speech For People and Mi Familia Vota Education Fund sent letters to New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan, New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, and members of the Wisconsin Elections Commission. The organizations delivered a similar letter to chief election officials in 10 other states between April and July 2023 including Nevada, Oregon, California, Massachusetts, Colorado, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.

Free Speech For People also forwarded to New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella its letter to New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan. Secretary Scanlan recently asked the New Hampshire Attorney General to review the applicability of Section Three against Trump in the upcoming 2024 presidential election.

Enacted in the wake of the Civil War, Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment disqualifies from public office, regardless of a prior criminal conviction, any individual who has taken an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution and then engages in insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or gives aid or comfort to its enemies. Trump’s involvement in the violent attack on Congress to prevent the certification of democratic election results disqualifies him from holding any future public office.

“[S]ince 1868, the qualifications for eligibility for the presidency—in addition to natural-born citizenship, age, and residency—have also included not having engaged in insurrection against the United States after having taken an oath to support the Constitution,” the letters read. “And Trump does not meet that qualification.”

FSFP and MFVEF also argue that state election officials have the power to enforce the Insurrectionist Disqualification Clause without express permission from Congress. They note that nothing in the text, original public meaning, or the Reconstruction-era history of Section 3’s implementation suggests that states need authorization from Congress to implement this part of the Constitution. During Reconstruction, states repeatedly enforced Section 3 in exactly that circumstance, and two different states (Georgia and New Mexico) heard Section 3 challenges against those involved in the January 6th insurrection in 2022. These challenges did not need any special federal legislation, relying on standard state legal procedures for challenging a politician’s constitutional eligibility for office.

“While the US Justice Department, along with state and local authorities, must hold Donald Trump accountable for all crimes that he has committed, secretaries of state and chief election officials across the country must carry out their responsibility to follow the mandate of the Constitution and the Insurrectionist Disqualification Clause and bar Trump from any future ballot,” said Free Speech For People President John Bonifaz. “Criminal prosecutions will establish Trump’s liability under the law. But the enforcement of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment against Trump will ensure that our republic is protected and that this insurrectionist-in-chief is forever disqualified from holding any future public office.”

“The evidence is overwhelming that Donald Trump incited and mobilized the insurrection on January 6, 2021 at our nation’s Capitol,” said Alexandra Flores-Quilty, Campaign Director for Free Speech For People. “The US Constitution is clear that anyone who takes an oath of office and then engages in insurrection is forever barred from holding public office again. Election officials must carry out their duty, follow this constitutional mandate, and bar Trump from the ballot.”

Irving Zavaleta, Mi Familia Vota National Programs Manager said: “Secretaries of State and state election officials are well within their authority to bar former President Donald Trump from the ballot. We all know that Donald Trump incited an insurrection to stop the certification of the 2020 election. Under Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment, anyone who has taken the oath of office to defend the Constitution and then engages in an insurrection is disqualified from holding future public office. Trump is disqualified, and we strongly urge election officials to bar him from the ballot.”

Free Speech For People has called for applying the Insurrectionist Disqualification Clause to Donald Trump since June 2021. The organization, in partnership with Mi Familia Vota Education Fund, launched the Trump is Disqualified campaign following Trump’s announcement of his 2024 presidential bid in November 2022. Click here for more information on the campaign.

Read the letters here.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

Samia Halaby (Palestine), Palestine, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, 2003.

On 24 June 2023, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) Herzl Halevi, Chief of Shin Bet (Intelligence) Ronen Bar, and Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai released a joint statement. They pointed to ‘violent attacks… by Israeli citizens against innocent Palestinians’, which they characterised as ‘nationalist terror in every sense’. Such a statement is rare, particularly the description of the violence as ‘nationalist terror’ and the rendering of Palestinian victims as ‘innocent’. Typically, high-ranking officials in the Israeli government portray such attacks as retaliation for terror attacks by Palestinians.

Three days before this statement, the US government said it had heard ‘troubling reports of extremist settler violence against Palestinian civilians’. Settler groups – or, more accurately named, Israeli nationalist terrorist groups – have been running rampages across the West Bank alongside the Israeli armed forces, killing Palestinians at will to sow fear in this part of Palestine and urging further ethnic cleansing, euphemistically referred to as ‘demographic engineering’.

Israeli violence against Palestinians is not new, but it has been escalating rapidly. From January to May of this year, the United Nations calculated that Israeli forces have killed 143 Palestinians (112 in the West Bank and 31 in Gaza) – more than twice the number of Palestinians killed in the same period last year. In 2022, 181 Palestinians were killed in total (151 in the West Bank and 30 in Gaza). Meanwhile, UN agencies found that 2022 was the sixth year of consecutive annual increases in settler attacks, which have been rising since 2006, after the Second Intifada was crushed by Israel. In 2009, the UN warned that 250,000 Palestinians in 83 communities in the West Bank ‘are at risk of heightened violence’ from Israeli settlers. They called these ‘price tag’ attacks because the settlers want to exact a high price from Palestinians for their existence in lands that Israelis call Judea and Samaria.

Tayseer Barakat (Palestine), Shoreless Sea #11, 2019.

At a cabinet meeting on 25 June, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his colleagues that he too found the ‘calls to grab land illegally and actions of grabbing land illegally’ to be ‘unacceptable’. A close reading of Netanyahu’s statement to the cabinet finds, however, that he did not differ with the policy of land grabs and demographic engineering. The violent actions of the settlers, he said, ‘do not strengthen settlement – on the contrary, they hurt it. I say this as someone who doubled settlement in Judea and Samaria despite great and unprecedented international pressure to carry out withdrawals that I have not carried out and will not carry out’. These settlements, which Netanyahu extols, are illegal according to international law. As recently as 2016, the UN Security Council voted for resolution 2334, which ‘condemn[s] all measures aimed at altering the demographic composition, character, and status of the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, including, inter alia, the construction and expansion of settlements, transfer of Israeli settlers, confiscation of land, demolition of homes, and displacement of Palestinian civilians’.

Over the past few years, a suite of policies and actions by the Israeli government has raised the spectre of apartheid, the Afrikaans word meaning ‘the state of being apart’. This term has increasingly been used to describe the institutionalised discrimination of Palestinians by Israel within the 1948 lines of Israel, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (the OPT, which is made up of East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank) from 1967, and exiled in the diaspora. In 2017, the UN’s Economic and Social Commission of West Asia (ESCWA) published a strong report, Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid. ESCWA’s then leader, Rima Khalaf, said that Israel’s apartheid regime works on two levels. First, it fragments the Palestinian people (inside Israel, the OPT, and the diaspora). Second, it oppresses Palestinians through ‘an array of laws, policies, and practices that ensure domination of them by a racial group and serve to maintain the regime’.

The use of the word apartheid to describe Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is now nearly ubiquitous. Amnesty International, for instance, published a 2022 report with a powerful title: Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity. In a blunt conclusion, Amnesty wrote:

Israel has perpetrated the international wrong of apartheid, as a human rights violation and a violation of public international law wherever it imposes this system. … [A]lmost all of Israel’s civilian administration and military authorities, as well as governmental and quasigovernmental institutions, are involved in the enforcement of the system of apartheid against Palestinians across Israel and the OPT and against Palestinian refugees and their descendants outside the territory.

Dina Mattar (Palestine), Untitled 1, 2019.

From 20 to 22 June, two former senior UN officials, Ban Ki-moon (former UN secretary-general) and Mary Robinson (former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and president of Ireland), visited Palestine and Israel. They went to the region on behalf of The Elders, a group formed by Nelson Mandela in 2007 to bring together former government staff and top officials from multilateral institutions to address the dilemmas of humanity. When they left Tel Aviv, the two Elders published a scathing report on their visit.

Based on their conversations with human rights organisations and their own investigations, Ban and Robinson pointed to the ‘ever-growing evidence that the situation meets the international legal definition of apartheid’. When they discussed this evidence with Israeli officials, they ‘heard no detailed rebuttal of the evidence of apartheid’. The Government Guidelines for Netanyahu’s cabinet, Ban and Robinson pointed out, clearly show an intent to pursue permanent annexation rather than temporary occupation, based on Jewish supremacy. Measures include the transfer of administrative powers over the occupied West Bank from military to civilian authorities, accelerating the approval processes for building settlements, and constructing new infrastructure that would render a future Palestinian state unviable.

These are powerful words from senior officials who held two of the highest offices of the United Nations.

On 25 March 1986, the Israeli authorities arrested Walid Daqqah, who is from the town of Baqa al-Gharbiyyeh. He was sentenced to 37 years in prison for being part of a group that killed the Israeli soldier Moshe Tamam. His imprisonment violates the Oslo Accords of 1993, which say that all Palestinian prisoners held before the signing of the agreement must be released. His 37-year prison term expired on 24 March 2023, but Daqqah, who since his imprisonment has become an accomplished novelist, remains incarcerated on a new charge from 2018 for smuggling cell phones into the prison. This extended his sentence by two more years. Now 61 and battling cancer (a diagnosis he received in 2022), Walid was scheduled for a parole hearing, but this has been postponed by the Israeli government.

Amidst increasing international outcry, the International Union of Left Publishers, of which Tricontinental: Institute of Social Research is a member, has released a statement calling upon the Israeli government to release Daqqah. Please read it below:

We, the International Union of Left Publishers (IULP), call on all publishers, writers, artists, intellectuals, and people of conscience to demand the immediate release of the revolutionary writer and thinker Walid Daqqah from the jails of the Israeli Occupation.

Walid Daqqah has been imprisoned since the age of 25 for his resistance to the Israeli Occupation and his defence of the Palestinian people. Now 61, he has endured this unjust imprisonment for 37 years. His medical condition is rapidly deteriorating, and it is critical that he receive a bone marrow transplant and other urgent medical care, but he has been denied medical treatment by the Israeli authorities.

As one of the most important thinkers and visionaries of the Palestinian resistance today, Walid Daqqah has been subjected to extra levels of the routine torture, abuse, and neglect that Palestinian prisoners face in the Occupation’s jails. He is a voice of the people, a voice that the Occupation fears and hopes to silence. But though his body is behind bars, his voice has broken free through his novels, essays, and letters, which have nourished and motivated the Palestinian prisoners’ movement, the resistance, and the international solidarity movement in all corners of the world. Walid Daqqah’s imprisonment is a violation of his most basic human rights, those of his family and of his people, and also a violation of the rights of all people in struggle who deserve to learn from, listen to, and exchange with him and his ideas.

The ongoing imprisonment of Walid Daqqah is a sentence to death, and the world is witness to the US-backed Israeli Occupation’s attempts to silence the Palestinian resistance by any means possible. We demand the immediate release of Walid Daqqah to his family and immediate access to medical care. We raise our voices in firm solidarity with Walid Daqqah, the almost 5,000 Palestinian prisoners who remain unjustly behind bars, and the imprisoned and repressed voices of reason who suffer from the attacks of imperialism across the world.

In 2018, Daqqah published his first novel for children, The Oil’s Secret Tale. It tells the story of 12-year-old Jood, who goes to see his father in prison for the first time but is denied access by the authorities. The boy travels around Palestine, meeting with Samour the rabbit, Abu Reesha the bird, Ghanfour the cat, Abu Nab the dog, and an ancient olive tree, Um Rami, and speaking about the Israeli apartheid regime. Um Rami, who was to be felled by the Israeli authorities to free up land for an illegal settlement, tells Jood that she has an oil he can rub on his body to make him invisible. He uses the oil, walks into his father’s cell, and says to his bewildered father, ‘I am your son Jood’.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/01/israel-cannot-rebut-apartheid/feed/ 0 408870 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/17/and-theyre-off-gop-sets-bar-so-low-and-weird-its-underground-and-babbling-about-mermaids/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/17/and-theyre-off-gop-sets-bar-so-low-and-weird-its-underground-and-babbling-about-mermaids/#respond Wed, 17 May 2023 04:26:36 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/further/and-they-re-off-gop-sets-bar-so-low-and-weird-it-s-underground-and-babbling-about-dark-mermaids Hoo boy. The GOP primary season got off to a bonkers start in first-in-the-nation Iowa, where smarmy Li'l Ron wowed by keeping his big-boy pants on and taking timid digs at he-who-shall-not-be-named, in absentia 'cause a non-tornado might've mussed his hair. They were joined by a ragtag band of bigots, felons, liars, crackpots, fascists and charlatans - Pastors For Trump! Missing Informants! Seductive Seducing Spirits! - who make Kesey's trippy Merry Pranksters look like Lutheran astrophysicists. Oh, democracy.

For anyone who continues to argue there's no difference between today's lunatic, deeply malevolent GOP and an admittedly flawed but largely lucid Democratic Party, look no further than the rancor, bombast, delusion and deceit on squalid display in Iowa and environs last weekend as the GOP's alleged presidential contenders and their supporters flaunted their White Christian Nationalist cred against demonic empathy. With multiple state and local elections starting - and yes, they matter - national Republican players are busy jockeying for position and issuing their positions on the most vital issues of the day. Mo Brooks is freaking out that new cars will no longer have AM radio, "one of few places you can find honest news and thought. As for me, I will not buy a new BMW, Tesla, Ford, Volkswagen, Mazda or any other AM radio-less car the rest of my life!" Matt Schlapp is ranting the scanners and credit card machines at Reagan National Airport are down and, "We need to make America work again." Gym Jordan is whining a much-touted immigration surge didn't arrive and yet Biden "vacations at his beach house while our border patrol works overtime to stop the chaos he caused at the southern border."

And poor House Oversight Chairman James Comer, hungry to uncover the nefarious wrongdoings of "the Biden crime family," has up and lost his "very credible" informants/whistleblowers - "It could happen to anyone" - though it's unclear if he's looked under his couch cushions. In a terrifyingly stupid exchange with Fox' Maria Bartiromo, she asked, "Where is that informant today?" and he said he can't find them. She, eyes wide: "Hold on a second, Congressman, did you just say the whistleblower or the informant is now missing?!" He: "Well, we're hopeful we can find the informant," helpfully adding they're "in the "spy business" and "they don't make a habit of being seen a lot." His 89-year-old cohort Chuck Grassley, trying not to panic, has demanded the DOJ hand over a 2020 document he's sure will nail Biden for his "criminal scheme"; a day later, he conceded of those "very serious allegations" that, "I wish I could say I knew it was true or untrue." Still, having "lost" most of their informants - "They're in court or in jail or we can't talk with them at this time" - Marjorie Taylor Greene remains confident "this is a very real situation (that) will bring down the president of the United States," and she'll throw in a bridge, too.

But the weekend's action focused on Iowa, where "manly pugilists" Trump and DeSantis were for the first time scheduled to face off in the same place. The expected confrontation evaporated after Trump cancelled his Des Moines rally due to tornado warnings - when a downpour quickly cleared, his campaign posted a video anyway to make him seem less wussy - so DeSantis' "War Room" getting the field and oxygen to himself prompted a frantic media presence. "And they're off!" declared Heather Digby Parton, who then observed, "We are in for some very silly coverage of this primary." Even apart from his loathsome bigotry, authoritarianism and fear-mongering, "Discount Donald" is famously unlikable: He's often portrayed as an arrogant, aloof, crude guy with a "humanoid problem" so serious he struggles to make small talk and eye contact. He's also short - reportedly a Napoleonic 5'9" - though he wears cowboy boots to camouflage it. Newly trim in jeans, hair slicked back, standing ram-rod straight, he looks more than ever like the Little Mussolini of his ugly dreams. Still, the bar keeps dropping lower: Despite the negatives - a rude puny fascist - he nonetheless got bizarrely fawning coverage. He walks! He talks! He chews gum!

Following their reprehensible, both-sides slide to the right, the New York Times proclaimed DeSantis "awkward but still winning the crowd" under a headline, "Impresses Voters, Trolls Trump." They called it "a big win" - he "essentially kicked sand in the former president's face" - when he made a brave, macho man, unscheduled stop in Des Moines, where Trump would have been if he'd shown up, except he didn't. In fact, DeSantis was so fearful of causing offense he literally didn't say Trump's name, resorting in a milquetoast speech to vague references to "a bold agenda" (aka fascism), the need to reject "focusing on the past" and "the culture of losing that has infected our party in recent years,” and the fact that, "at the end of the day, governing is not about entertaining, building a brand or talking on social media" (but, again, fascism). Politicocited his feeble achievements: "He did an adequate job at retail politics" - shook hands, talked up as "legit" a favorite local pizza, flipped burgers long enough for a photo - got "face time (with) GOP brass" and "drew a contrast with Trump, albeit implicitly." In the end, "His message seemed to resonate"; then again, people had paid to hear him, so duh.

DeSantis did well enough in a famously quixotic state that, on the op-ed page of the Des Moines Register, local GOP leaders endorsed his "record and resolve." Still, that endorsement could prove pretty wobbly. Long touted as a more reasonable, less toxic alternative to Trump, DeSantis has reportedly lost money and support with his totalitarian moves - forced birthing, war on Disney, no books or sex or history. Also, the whole "Trump without the baggage" claim gets pretty pathetic when you remember that Trump is a twice-impeached, criminally indicted sex offender, narcissist and loser who remains under multiple investigations, so he kinda is the baggage. Responses to DeSantis' less-than-electrifying claim he offers "a positive alternative for the future of this country" ran the gamut: From "this is what leadership looks like" and "the room was electric" to "sooo boring" to "Ron DeFailure is a very small man, not just in height" to "Nazi" to "So, just ignore the past Democrats' communist subversion?" Then again, over these last pained years it seems even some Republicans have learned it could always be worse. From one attendee, "I would vote for a shoe over Trump" - a bar even DeSantis clears.

Meanwhile, in Des Moines, a small crowd of MAGA diehards got caught in "a muddy, wet nightmare" waiting in vain for their sad savior. "But everyone is saying when he comes back, it’ll be bigger and better," chirped one GOP organizer. "You know Trump." Meanwhile, the lowest of the low was safely ensconced at Mar-A-Lago, where he was again violating trademark laws - also burning eyelids, and yes we're linking to TMZ - by "dancing" to a poolside Macho Man performance by a fake Village People. Don't ask. Still, he took time out to call fans at a ReAwaken America Tour, the traveling MAGA circus and theocratic roadshow featuring convicted felon and fascist crank Mike Flynn, "an unhinged band of shofar-bleaters, conspiracy theorists and zealots" like the demon sperm lady, and usually a few Nazis unless, as in this case, Rachel Maddow outs them - astonishingly, just one of two messianic events held last weekend at his Doral resort.To ecstatic scrams from the crowd, Trump called Flynn - "He's some general, he's some man" - to promise he'll return him to the White House. Also Stephen Miller for Homeland Security! Kid Rock as Secretary of State! "You just stay wealthy," he told Flynn, "and healthy and well and everything. We're bringing you back!"

Improbably, that was tame compared to the charismatic, bellicose Pastors For Trump, which views Trump 2024 as "a gift from the Lord" at a time when “Satan (has) an entire political party in this nation doing his bidding" - they may have a point there - in "the battle between good and evil." "The removal of The Biden is coming," declared Julie Green of our observant Catholic president. “That’s what the Lord is saying.” According to "prophet" Amanda Grace, the Lord is also saying, "There's wickedness attempting to completely cover this nation in perversion and seductive seducing spirits." Grace told the rapt crowd she's "never seen more images of mermaids and water people in my life," and they are "highly technologically advanced." "We have to understand the rules of engagement in spiritual warfare," she said. "We are meant for hand-to-hand combat...to bring our cries before the throne of God to bring judgment on the rulers of darkness." In other words, they really don't seem to like the new live-action The Little Mermaid, which features, scandalously, a black Ariel. It's scheduled to open in theaters in about a week, but we're sure Benito DeSantis can ban, belittle, censor, malign, overrule, lie about or find a positive alternative to it before then.

Ronald 'Little Mussolini' DeSantis. Twitter meme

\u201cI\u2019ve already started campaign strategizing for Ron DeSantis because that\u2019s what gay besties are for.\ud83d\ude18 #WelcomeToDeSantis #Parody #NewVideo\u201d

— Randy Rainbow (@Randy Rainbow) 1684156460

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Abby Zimet.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/17/and-theyre-off-gop-sets-bar-so-low-and-weird-its-underground-and-babbling-about-mermaids/feed/ 0 395305 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/02/video-shows-a-gunman-shooting-a-lao-social-media-activist-at-a-bar-in-vientiane-radio-free-asia/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/02/video-shows-a-gunman-shooting-a-lao-social-media-activist-at-a-bar-in-vientiane-radio-free-asia/#respond Tue, 02 May 2023 23:44:21 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=653c23b18c034b8876397f78dc621f34
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/02/video-shows-a-gunman-shooting-a-lao-social-media-activist-at-a-bar-in-vientiane-radio-free-asia/feed/ 0 392044 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/14/in-bid-to-be-first-in-the-nation-minnesota-house-votes-to-bar-multinational-corporations-from-interfering-in-state-elections/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/14/in-bid-to-be-first-in-the-nation-minnesota-house-votes-to-bar-multinational-corporations-from-interfering-in-state-elections/#respond Fri, 14 Apr 2023 12:54:54 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/in-bid-to-be-first-in-the-nation-minnesota-house-votes-to-bar-multinational-corporations-from-interfering-in-state-elections The Minnesota House of Representatives voted Thursday to pass a landmark campaign finance law that will prohibit the influence of foreign corporate spending in elections. With a pending vote anticipated in the state senate, the vote sets Minnesota on the path to be the first state in the nation to pass such legislation.

The Democracy for the People Act, an omnibus democracy bill designed to strengthen voting rights, protect voters and the elections system, and modernize the campaign finance system, includes a provision that will bar foreign-influenced corporations from spending money to influence state elections. It would also create automatic voter registration, authorize pre-registration for sixteen and seventeen-year-olds to vote, and establish a permanent absentee voting list, among other measures.

The new ban on foreign-influenced corporations spending money to influence elections stems from model legislation developed by Free Speech For People, a national nonpartisan non-profit organization that works to renew our democracy. Free Speech For People helped to pass similar legislation in Seattle, Washington in 2020. Five additional states (Hawaii, California, Washington, New York, and Massachusetts) and the federal government are considering similar bans.

Once enforced, Minnesota's new legislation will ensure that any company that is owned five percent by multiple foreign owners, or one percent by a single foreign owner, will be prohibited from spending money directly or giving it to a super PAC to spend in Minnesota state or local elections.

"Multinational corporations are corrupting representative democracy by drowning out the voices of the people." says Alexandra Flores-Quilty, Campaign Director at Free Speech For People. "The Democracy for the People Act will help put power back in the hands of citizens."

"Corporate executives know where their bread is buttered. This bill addresses the threat to Minnesota's democratic self-government posed by corporate political spending by foreign-influenced corporations," says Free Speech For People Legal Director Ron Fein.

"Minnesota has long been a leader in democracy and so it's no surprise that the House voted today to put Minnesota on the path to becoming the first state to prohibit foreign-influenced corporations from spending in our elections," says Lilly Sasse, Campaign Director of We Choose Us. "When we conducted polling in November, we found that over 80% of Minnesotans support this policy. It's clear to the people of Minnesota that prohibiting foreign-influenced corporations from spending in our elections is good for our democracy. And after today, it's clear that we're on the path to signing it into law."

For more information about the new legislation, visit.

To read the bill, visit.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/14/in-bid-to-be-first-in-the-nation-minnesota-house-votes-to-bar-multinational-corporations-from-interfering-in-state-elections/feed/ 0 388068 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/29/police-assault-at-least-9-bangladeshi-journalists-covering-supreme-court-bar-association-elections/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/29/police-assault-at-least-9-bangladeshi-journalists-covering-supreme-court-bar-association-elections/#respond Wed, 29 Mar 2023 20:47:18 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=272593 New York, March 29, 2023 – Bangladeshi authorities must conduct a thorough and impartial investigation into the police attacks on at least nine journalists covering recent elections held by the Supreme Court Bar Association and hold the perpetrators accountable, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Wednesday.

On March 15, police assaulted at least nine journalists on the court’s premises in the capital city of Dhaka after clashes broke out between lawyers supporting the ruling Awami League party and the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, and police charged into the crowd swinging their batons, according to multiple news reports and five of those journalists, who spoke with CPJ.

The deputy commissioner of the Dhaka police’s Ramna division told news website Bdnews24.com later on March 15 that “journalists got caught up in the turmoil” when officers attempted to break up the unrest, and police were investigating the attacks.

On March 16, Dhaka police officials expressed regret over the incident in a meeting with local journalists but, as of March 29, have not held any of the officers involved in the attacks to account, the journalists told CPJ. 

“The recent apology by the Dhaka police over officers’ attacks on at least nine Bangladeshi journalists is a welcome but insufficient response,” said Carlos Martinez de la Serna, CPJ’s program director. “Bangladeshi authorities must hold the officers who attacked journalists to account, return any equipment confiscated from reporters, and ensure that police are thoroughly trained so they can help, rather than imperil, members of the press covering newsworthy events.”

Two officers with the police Public Order Management Division slapped Zabed Akhter, a senior reporter for the privately owned broadcaster ATN News, shoved him to the ground, and kicked him as he repeatedly identified himself as a journalist and told them he suffered from a nerve condition, Akhter told CPJ by phone.

Police also pushed Jannatul Ferdous Tanvi, a senior reporter for the privately owned broadcaster Independent Television, as she tried to help him, Akhter said.

Later that day, Akhter received medical treatment for internal injuries to his waist and back at a hospital, where the two officers apologized to the journalist, Akhter said, adding that those officers had not been held to account for the incident as of March 29.

A group of 10 to 15 officers kicked and used a bamboo stick to beat Md. Humaun Kabir, a senior camera operator for the privately owned broadcaster ATN Bangla who was filming the unrest, knocking him to the ground, Kabir told CPJ by phone. Officers continued to slap him as he ran away, according to a video of the incident reviewed by CPJ. Kabir sustained a head injury for which he took painkillers. 

Five or six officers beat Maruf Hasan, a reporter for the privately owned newspaper Manab Zamin, in the head and back while he identified himself as a journalist, he told CPJ via messaging app.  Officers also insulted him with vulgar language and confiscated his microphone, which they had not returned as of March 29, Hasan said.

He told CPJ that he sustained painful injuries to the areas that were beaten.

About five police officers also beat Mohammad Fazlul Haque, a senior reporter for the privately owned news website Jago News, according to Haque, who told CPJ via messaging app that he had been beaten but then did not respond to additional questions seeking details.  

According to those news reports and the journalists who spoke with CPJ, police also attacked Nur Mohammad, a reporter for the privately owned newspaper Ajker Patrika; Ibrahim Hossain, a camera operator for the privately owned broadcaster Boishakhi Television; Kabir Hossain, a reporter for the privately owned newspaper Kalbela; and Mehedi Hassan Dalim, a reporter for the privately owned news website The Dhaka Post.

CPJ contacted those journalists via messaging app seeking additional details but did not receive any replies.

Suvra Kanti Das, a senior photojournalist for the privately owned newspaper Prothom Alo, told CPJ by phone that he was also covering the elections when an officer grabbed him by the shirt, demanded to see his media identification card, insulted him with vulgar language, and ordered him to leave the premises, which he did.

CPJ’s calls and messages to Roy Niyati, a spokesperson for the Dhaka Metropolitan Police, did not receive any replies.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/29/police-assault-at-least-9-bangladeshi-journalists-covering-supreme-court-bar-association-elections/feed/ 0 383212 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/28/corbyn-expected-to-run-as-independent-after-starmers-move-to-bar-him-from-labour/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/28/corbyn-expected-to-run-as-independent-after-starmers-move-to-bar-him-from-labour/#respond Tue, 28 Mar 2023 17:50:32 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/news/jeremy-corbyn-starmer-labour-independent

Former U.K. Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn is expected to seek reelection as an independent next year after current Leader Keir Starmer and his establishment allies on Tuesday made good on their pledge to formally block the leftist member of Parliament from running under the party's banner.

After Starmer publicly declared last month that "Jeremy Corbyn will not stand as a Labour candidate at the next general election," the party's National Executive Committee (NEC) voted 22-12 on Starmer's motion to not endorse Corbyn's candidacy.

The Timesreported that Corbyn's allies say the MP has already decided to run as an independent, with one source telling the London newspaper: "It's become personal. There will be an announcement by the end of the week."

Our message is clear: We are not going anywhere. Neither is our determination to stand up for a better world.

Corbyn has represented the Greater London constituency Islington North for four decades and served as an independent MP since he was suspended from Labour in 2020 due to a battle over allegations of antisemitism in the party.

After news broke of Starmer's motion on Monday, Corbyn charged that the party leader "has broken his commitment to respect the rights of Labour members and denigrated the democratic foundation of the party."

Noting that Islington North voters have elected him as a Labour MP 10 consecutive times since 1983, Corbyn said that "I am proud to represent a community that supports vulnerable people, joins workers on the picket line, and fights for transformative change."

Also calling out the ruling Conservative Party, Corbyn continued:

This latest move represents a leadership increasingly unwilling to offer solutions that meet the scale of the crises facing us all. As the government plunges millions into poverty and demonizes refugees, Keir Starmer has focused his opposition on those demanding a more progressive and humane alternative.

I joined the Labour Party when I was 16 years old because, like millions of others, I believed in a redistribution of wealth and power. Our message is clear: We are not going anywhere. Neither is our determination to stand up for a better world.

Some other MPs, constituents, journalists, and leftists from around the world have, since Monday, blasted Starmer's "disgraceful" move and expressed solidarity with Corbyn.

None

— (@)

Greek leftist MP Yanis Varoufakis warned that "Starmer's Labour Party is close to the point of no return. Blocking Jeremy Corbyn from standing as a Labour candidate is an affront to decency and a declaration of civil war within a party about to metamorphose from a broad church to a toxic sect."

Critics have highlighted that in February 2020, Starmer said: "The selections for Labour candidates needs to be more democratic and we should end NEC impositions of candidates. Local party members should select their candidates for every election."

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In a joint statement Tuesday, officers from the Islington North Constituency Labour Party (CLP) denounced the move by Starmer and the NEC.

"We believe in the democratic right of all constituency parties to choose their prospective parliamentary candidate," the CLP leaders from Corbyn's area said. "Therefore, we reject the NEC's undue interference in Islington North, which undermines our goal of defeating the Conservatives and working with our communities for social justice."

Noting the CLP's statement in a series of tweets Tuesday, Guardian columnist Owen Jones, who identifies as a socialist and a longtime Labour voter, also took aim at Starmer:

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While Starmer was seeking his leadership role, "I think he said a lot of things he didn't believe at all, because he thought that if he didn't, then he wouldn't be elected leader of the Labour Party. And he was absolutely right in that calculation," Jones asserted.

"A lot of Starmer's cheerleaders see themselves as upstanding liberals who believe in decency, honesty, and integrity in politics. They don't," he said. "They disregard the colossal deceit of Starmer because they hate the left, and they believe anything done to crush the left is a good thing."

"Anyway, I don't think it will end well for a Labour leadership which is founded on a load of lies, essentially believes in nothing, and is ahead in the polls solely because of Tory self-destruction," Jones added. "They'll win the election by default, then political reality will intrude."

The grassroots group Momentum, which has supported Corbyn since his successful 2015 campaign to lead the Labour Party, called Tuesday "a dark day for democracy."

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— (@)

While there was previously no appeals process for anyone blocked by the NEC, Sky Newsrevealed Tuesday as the party faces "accusations of fixing parliamentary selections for candidates who are preferred by the leadership," those "who wish to stand for Labour at the next election will be given the right to appeal if the party rejects their bid to become an MP."

According to the outlet, "Candidates will be provided with written feedback as to why they 'fell below the standards expected of a Westminster parliamentary candidate,' while an appeals panel will be convened to hear the claim."

None

— (@)

Welcoming the development on Twitter, Momentum said that "socialists and trade unionists have been wrongly excluded in favor of those favored by a narrow London clique. The result has been a cohort of prospective MPs dominated by the professional political classes, making Labour less representative of the communities we seek to serve."

"This new process should mark an end to the Labour right's factional abuses of selections process," the group added. "In Islington North as everywhere else—let local members decide."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/28/corbyn-expected-to-run-as-independent-after-starmers-move-to-bar-him-from-labour/feed/ 0 382733 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/laos/karaoke-bar-raid-03162023161153.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/laos/karaoke-bar-raid-03162023161153.html#respond Thu, 16 Mar 2023 20:15:07 +0000 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/laos/karaoke-bar-raid-03162023161153.html Police raided a karaoke bar in the notorious Golden Triangle area of northern Laos, finding that the majority of the club’s patrons – 198 people – were either high on drugs or tested positive for illegal narcotics.

Twenty-nine of the 198 people were Chinese, according to the Bokeo province public security website.

The 198KTV karaoke bar where the March 11 raid took place is known as a center of drug use and trafficking, according to a local resident, who like other sources in this report requested anonymity for safety reasons. 

There are several small entertainment venues in the town of Tonpheung, located in Bokeo province just outside of the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone, or SEZ, the resident told Radio Free Asia. 

“Most of them belong to the Chinese. The big night clubs are in the Golden Triangle SEZ – of course, they belong to the Chinese also,” the resident said. “Most bar patrons are also Chinese; only a few Laotians because they don’t have much money.”

Police talked to owners and operators of karaoke bars, coffee shops and restaurants in the town on March 2 and were told that an average of five people were being rushed to the hospital for drug overdoses each night.

“We also received complaints about street fights, loud noise and late closures,” a police officer told RFA.

Reeducated and released

On Monday, those arrested in the March 11 raid were released after police officers and Women’s Union and Lao Youth Federation officials reeducated them about the dangers of drugs, drug trafficking and smuggling.

Another resident of Tonpheung complained to RFA that the police didn’t do more to punish those arrested. They should have at least fined or jailed them – and the arrested Chinese should have been deported, the resident said.

The SEZ is a gambling and tourism hub catering to Chinese citizens that has been described as a de-facto Chinese colony. It has become a haven for criminal activities including prostitution, scamming and drug trafficking.

“Oh, drugs are everywhere, not only in that night club,” a retail store owner near the SEZ told RFA. “Most of the users or bar-goers are young. Many of them are workers at the casino in the Golden Triangle SEZ.”

Sex service is also available at all night clubs, the same retailer said. Most of the providers are Lao women and most of their clients are Chinese men, he said.

The SEZ was established in 2007. The zones are business areas that are exempt from most national-level economic regulations, and often receive tax breaks and are governed by different labor laws. 

The Golden Triangle – which the SEZ takes its name from – encompasses a larger area in northern Laos along the Mekong River that also includes parts of Thailand and Myanmar. It got its name five decades ago for its central role in heroin production and trafficking in Laos, Thailand and Myanmar.

Translated by Max Avary. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Lao.

]]> https://www.rfa.org/english/news/laos/karaoke-bar-raid-03162023161153.html/feed/ 0 379984 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/myanmar/law-01302023131751.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/myanmar/law-01302023131751.html#respond Mon, 30 Jan 2023 18:19:18 +0000 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/myanmar/law-01302023131751.html A new law, issued just days before the end of a two-year nationwide state of emergency imposed after Myanmar’s military coup, has placed a high bar on the registration of political parties ahead of a general election the junta has planned for 2023.

Approved by junta chief Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing last week, the law drew immediate condemnation from leaders of political parties that won the country’s 2020 election, annulled by the junta after the Feb. 1, 2021 coup. They said the restrictions would ensure the military faces no legitimate competition in the upcoming polls.

Under the new law, parties that hope to compete in national elections will be required to have at least 100,000 members and a war chest of at least 100 million kyats (U.S.$45,000). Those that plan to take part in state or regional elections will be required to have at least 1,000 members and 10 million kyats (U.S.$4,500) in funds.

All political parties that plan to participate in the 2023 election are also required to re-register within 60 days of the law’s enactment. Those that fail to do so will automatically lose their legal status.

The previous law, approved by former junta leader Senior Gen. Than Shwe in 2010, required parties taking part in national elections to have at least 1,000 members and those joining state and regional elections to have at least 500 members within three months of having registered.

Sai Laik, the general secretary of the Shan National League for Democracy said that under the new restrictions, the only party that will be able to compete in the general election will be the pro-military Union Solidarity and Development Party.

“All the other parties are so restricted that they won’t be able to compete on an equal footing,” he said.

“The new law is intentionally fabricated to allow only one party to be in place.”

He said his party will meet to discuss whether it will register as a political entity under the new law.

The junta’s new law also prohibits organizations that have been declared illegal or terrorist groups, as well as organizations accused of having committed terrorist acts against the state and the organizations that support them either directly or indirectly, from registering as political parties.

Sai Kyi Zin Soe, a political analyst, said that the new law is a deliberate attempt to restrict the deposed leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, the shadow National Unity Government and anti-junta People’s Defense Force paramilitary groups from taking part in the election.

“They are planning to exclude people who are rebelling against them from participating in the election,” he said.

“The new restrictions are their attempt to pave a political path for the dictator with only the people who either support him or do not oppose him.”

Ethnic parties ‘facing crisis’

Another requirement of the new law is that political parties must contest at least half of all constituencies, compared to at least three under the previous law.

Political analysts told RFA that the requirement is designed to prevent small parties from entering the election, as they must compete in at least 580 constituencies.

Saw Than Myint, chairman of the Federal Union Party, said the new requirements for party membership make it nearly impossible for small ethnic parties to take part in the election.

“It is very difficult for us to obtain 100,000 party members in the current political situation, given the lack of rule of law, peace and stability across the country,” he said.

“According to the new law, we must open offices in at least 165 townships – something that is nearly impossible for us.”

Thar Tun Hla, chairman of the Arakan National Party, a powerful ethnic party, said that most of the more than 90 registered political parties will face difficulties under the new requirements.

"Since this law was issued, ethnic parties in Myanmar, including ours, are facing a crisis and difficulty in organizing for the entire country,” he said.

Attempts by RFA to reach Union Solidarity Development Party spokesman Hla Thein went unanswered Friday.

Junta Deputy Information Minister Major Gen. Zaw Min Tun told RFA that the requirement that political parties entering the general election have 100,000 party members is “reasonable” and “in accordance with the 2008 [military-drafted] Constitution.”

He acknowledged that only a few of the more than 90 registered political parties will be able to take part in the general election, but said the new law was “designed to unite them politically.”

‘A sham election’

Kyaw Htwe, a member of the National League for Democracy’s Central Executive Committee, dismissed the new law as an attempt by the junta to gain political legitimacy and ensure the upcoming election results in a win for the military.

“They are worried that they would lose the election, as they know the people do not accept them,” he said.

“That’s why they carefully included restrictions in the new law to make it impossible for a new political party to participate … This will be a sham election designed to deceive the people and the international community for their own legitimacy and pre-planned result.”

The new law on political parties came into effect amid a cooling of tensions between the military and ethnic armies in northern Shan state, with fighting between the two sides having ended on Jan. 15.

Analysts told RFA the detente is likely because the junta is focusing on negotiating with ethnic groups ahead of the election.

“The fact that there is no fighting in northern Shan state suggests that the military council is trying to hold an election for the whole of Shan state,” said Aik Maung, an ethnic affairs analyst.

“We can see that the military is trying to reconcile with ethnic armed groups active in Shan state. In my opinion, the military is going to respond offensively to the organizations that deny their offer.”

Other analysts suggested that the ethnic armies in northern Shan state are willing to suspend hostilities because most of them are China-backed and observing the Jan. 22 Lunar New Year.

While the junta has yet to announce a date for this year’s election, a stipulation within the 2008 Constitution requires that they be held within six months of the second anniversary of the Feb. 1, 2021 coup.

Translated by Myo Min Aung. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

]]> https://www.rfa.org/english/news/myanmar/law-01302023131751.html/feed/ 0 368364 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/23/police-bar-zimbabwean-journalists-from-covering-opposition-activists-at-court/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/23/police-bar-zimbabwean-journalists-from-covering-opposition-activists-at-court/#respond Mon, 23 Jan 2023 20:34:23 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=256357 Lusaka, January 23, 2023—Zimbabwean authorities should immediately investigate the recent barring of journalists from covering a court appearance of an opposition politician and ensure that members of the press are not blocked from doing their jobs, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Monday.

Around noon on January 16, in Budiriro, southwest of the capital city of Harare, anti-riot police harassed about 20 journalists, barred them from covering a court hearing, and threatened to beat them, according to media reports, a statement by the Zimbabwean chapter of the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA), and five of the journalists, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app.

The journalists had gathered to cover the hearing of opposition party Citizens Coalition for Change Organizing Secretary Amos Chibaya and 24 others charged with holding an unlawful gathering with the intent to incite public violence, according to those sources.

Police only allowed journalists from the state-owned outlets Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation and The Herald newspaper to cover the hearing, according to the MISA statement and the journalists who spoke to CPJ.

“Zimbabwean authorities must facilitate open justice in the country’s courts and ensure that journalists’ access is not impeded by baton-wielding riot police favoring state media over privately owned media outlets,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator, in New York. “All journalists should be free to cover cases before the courts and not risk censorship, harassment, and beatings for simply trying to do their jobs to keep citizens informed.” 

The journalists who were barred included those working for the privately owned news outlets ZimLive, TechnoMag, NewsHawks, NewsDay Zimbabwe, NewZimbabwe, Nhau News Online, and Heart and Soul TV, among others, according to the five journalists who spoke with CPJ.

TechnoMag’s Audience Mutema told CPJ that, although the journalists produced press identification cards, police pushed them away with their batons, ordered them outside, and refused to allow them to stand near the court building.

Freelance journalist Frank Chikowore told CPJ that police threatened to beat the journalists if they continued trying to gain access to the court. 

“They asked us: ‘Who invited you here?’ And they then told us, ‘We don’t want any journalists here, go away,’” Chikowore said. “They told us, ‘We will beat you up; get out of here.’”  

The news outlet NewZimbabwe tweeted that some journalists “were even dragged and pushed out of the court,” and that one police officer told a journalist, “I’ll injure you.”

Ruvimbo Muchenje, a NewsHawk reporter, told CPJ that anti-riot police “pushed us around and told us to leave; they said the court was full.”

Later that afternoon, a few journalists were allowed in the courtroom after the intervention of Zimbabwe national police spokesperson Paul Nyathi and the Zimbabwe Union of Journalists, Mutema told CPJ.

CPJ called and texted Nyathi for comment but did not receive any responses.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/23/police-bar-zimbabwean-journalists-from-covering-opposition-activists-at-court/feed/ 0 366578 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/hongkong-jimmylai-12302022155053.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/hongkong-jimmylai-12302022155053.html#respond Fri, 30 Dec 2022 20:51:11 +0000 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/hongkong-jimmylai-12302022155053.html China on Friday issued a ruling giving top officials in the Hong Kong government the power to bar foreign lawyers from representing clients in "national security" cases, paving the way for officials to block the appointment of media mogul Jimmy Lai's British defense barrister.

The National People's Congress Standing Committee ruled that a national security committee chaired by Chief Executive John Lee has the right to decide whether to allow foreign lawyers to represent clients in cases deemed to involve matters of national security, and that its decisions are binding on the city's courts.

The ruling comes after Lee asked the Chinese government to rule on whether foreign attorneys could represent defendants in national security cases – and after three failed bids in the city's courts to get Lai's British lawyer disqualified.

Lai's trial on several charges of "collusion with a foreign power" -- under a draconian national security law imposed by the ruling Communist Party in the wake of the 2019 protest movement -- has been postponed until September 2023. He is currently serving a separate five-year, nine-month jail term for fraud over the subletting of office space at his Next Digital headquarters. 

The case, in which Lai had hired British Kings Counsel barrister Tim Owen to lead his defense team, has highlighted concerns that Hong Kong's promised judicial independence is already rapidly eroding in favor of top-down control by an executive that takes orders from Beijing.

No jury

Lai's trial, in which much of the evidence centers on opinion articles published in his now-defunct Apple Daily newspaper, will take place with no jury, before a panel of three national security judges handpicked by the government.

Australian lawyer and rights activist Kevin Yam said the move has left the city's courts with very little role.

"If the courts have to ask the chief executive's [permission] regarding anything to do with national security, then what is left for the courts to decide?" Yam said. "All they need to do is what the chief executive tells them to do."

"Now the national security committee gets to decide what is and isn't a matter of national security in all cases, not just national security cases, but in any other court cases and also in all matters of government policy, without being subject to judicial review," he said.

"They could claim that pandemic prevention was a matter of national security, or education," Yam said. "It's not just about the judicial system."

"It affects legislation and anything that takes place throughout the entire government system."

‘Doesn’t play the judge’

John Lee told journalists in Hong Kong that the decision "is of great significance in the further improvement of the legal system and enforcement mechanisms for safeguarding national security of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region."

He said the Hong Kong National Security Committee -- which he chairs -- would examine the issues and make a decision, adding that Beijing's interpretation hadn't been intended to address Jimmy Lai's case specifically.

Lee denied that the ruling had placed the chief executive "above all judges."

"The Chief Executive doesn't play the judge at all," he told reporters.

Hong Kong's judiciary said in a statement that it respects the "lawful exercise of power" by the National People's Congress Standing Committee, while Legislative Council president Andrew Leung said the council stood by to "examine in detail" any amendment to Hong Kong law regarding foreign lawyers practicing in the city.

Lee said his administration would likely pass further legislation to ban "a lot other activities that may endanger national security, which are not covered by the Hong Kong National Security Law," as required under Article 23 of the city's mini-constitution, the Basic Law.

Undermines the judiciary

Eric Lai, a fellow of Georgetown University's Center for Asian Law, said the ruling had undermined the judiciary.

"This has created a dual state, an exceptional criminal justice system in which court rulings could be overturned if they do not have the executive power's endorsement," Lai told Agence France-Presse.

He also warned that the decision could spill over into cases that aren't brought under the national security law, but are judged to touch on matters of national security.

He and other legal experts had warned such a decision would damage the independence and reliability of the city's judicial system, the agency reported.

The Global Times newspaper, which has close ties to Communist Party mouthpiece the People's Daily, quoted an official in Beijing as saying that the ruling would "set the tone" for similar cases in future.

It also quoted Hong Kong government legal expert Louis Chen as saying that Owen shouldn't be allowed to represent Lai.

"Lai's case involved colluding with external forces, engaging in anti-China activities and disrupting order in Hong Kong, which seriously threatens national security and allowing him to hire a foreign lawyer is very inappropriate," Chen told the paper.

Lee said foreign lawyers were still "most welcome" to represent clients in cases unrelated to national security, providing they obtained the correct permissions beforehand.

Two newspapers backed by the ruling Chinese Communist Party hit out at Lai's hiring of Owen in November, implying that Beijing could exercise special powers and hold the trial in mainland China. 

Lee sought the interpretation from Beijing after Hong Kong's Court of Appeal ruled on Nov. 21 that Lai should be allowed to hire Owen to defend him on charges relating to "seditious publications," as well as "collusion with foreign powers to endanger national security," upholding the decisions of two lower courts.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Ng Ting Hong, Chen Zifei and Chingman for RFA Cantonese.

]]> https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/hongkong-jimmylai-12302022155053.html/feed/ 0 361186 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/16/house-democrat-leads-charge-to-bar-trump-from-office-citing-14th-amendment/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/16/house-democrat-leads-charge-to-bar-trump-from-office-citing-14th-amendment/#respond Wed, 16 Nov 2022 19:03:13 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/node/341091
This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Julia Conley.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/16/house-democrat-leads-charge-to-bar-trump-from-office-citing-14th-amendment/feed/ 0 351391 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam/fire-09092022222446.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam/fire-09092022222446.html#respond Sat, 10 Sep 2022 02:29:55 +0000 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam/fire-09092022222446.html The death toll resulting from a fire at a karaoke parlor in southern Vietnam that claimed 33 lives earlier this week was likely made worse due to the owner’s disregard for safety standards and the failure of clientele to follow orders to flee the building, sources said Friday.

The blaze broke out on Tuesday evening at the An Phu karaoke parlor in Binh Duong province’s Thuan An city while as many as 70 people were inside the four-story building, according to state media reports, which said firefighters were able to bring the fire under control within an hour.

Several people jumped from the building to escape the flames, injuring themselves in the process, while others were able to descend rescue ladders, the reports said. Parts of the building collapsed during the fire, which killed 17 men, 15 women, and an unidentified person who sustained injuries during the incident and later died in the hospital, officials said at a news conference on Thursday.

VnExpress quoted Provincial Police Director Col. Trinh Ngoc Quyen as saying that customers had ignored employees who entered the rooms where they were singing and ordered them to flee. Most of the clientele had been drinking alcohol, he said, and most of the rooms were locked from the inside.

Officials said that the building had passed a safety inspection and that the cause of the fire had yet to be determined.

On Friday, a resident of the area told RFA Vietnamese that while intoxication likely contributed to the high number of deaths, the owners of karaoke parlors and other similar establishments often ignore safety codes.

“It’s frightening, everyone is scared of dying in case of a fire at the karaoke bars,” said the resident, who asked to be identified as “Mr. T.”

“All permits granted to the karaoke bars require that fire safety requirements be met. But in reality, the owners build as many rooms as they can in multi-storied buildings because space isn’t cheap in the city. If a fire starts higher up there’s a chance to get out, but if it starts on the ground floor and rises, there are no exits to escape.”

Mr. T said that the confusing layout at the An Phu karaoke parlor caused customers to panic.

“The lack of exits is why the number of deaths was so high,” he said.

“It is a natural reaction to run into a hiding place when you see fire, and that also led to some deaths. Some of them died because they locked the door to their room, while others ran up to a higher floor and jumped. I learned that some of those who jumped were hospitalized, but died in the hospital.”

Violations likely

Nguyen Van Hau, a Ho Chi Minh City-based attorney with the Vietnam Lawyers’ Association, agreed that safety violations were likely to blame for many of the deaths at An Phu.

“The central government has issued a number of decrees about fire issues,” he said, suggesting that local authorities have failed in implementing them.

He acknowledged that the customers at the karaoke parlor likely ignored warnings to flee, but said the establishment’s owner and city officials bear responsibility for the tragedy.

“The fire authority should regularly carry out inspections after granting permits, especially when any new construction is done,” he said.

“Furthermore, the management was not trained in how to react in case of a fire. The right to run a karaoke bar is contingent on making safety preparations.”

The manager of a store that sells fire equipment in Ho Chi Minh City, who spoke to RFA on condition of anonymity, said that fires at karaoke parlors and other venues that use significant amounts of power are typically caused by an electrical short.

He said that while officials had yet to conclude their investigation of the An Phu blaze, the chain of events suggests safety protocols had been skirted.

“The preliminary report about the fire by the Binh Duong Police said that the An Phu karaoke bar met all fire prevention requirements, but the guests continued to sing after the fire started,” he said.

“This suggests the building did not automatically cut off the electricity and there is a question of whether the fire alarm system even worked or not. There are a number of things to be examined, including whether there were lights at the exits and an emergency sprinkler system in the rooms and hallways.”

In 2016, a fire at an eight-story karaoke parlor in Vietnam’s capital Hanoi killed 13 people after spreading to several nearby buildings.

Translated by An Nguyen. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Trung Khang for RFA Vietnamese.

]]> https://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam/fire-09092022222446.html/feed/ 0 331672 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/01/gop-officials-vote-to-bar-popular-abortion-rights-initiative-from-michigan-ballot/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/01/gop-officials-vote-to-bar-popular-abortion-rights-initiative-from-michigan-ballot/#respond Thu, 01 Sep 2022 08:53:16 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/node/339421 Two Republican election board officials in Michigan voted Wednesday to bar an abortion rights initiative from the state's November ballot, threatening a proposal that garnered a record-shattering 753,759 signatures from residents this year as reproductive freedoms hang in the balance.

The initiative proposes adding to the state constitution an amendment that reads, in part, "Every individual has a fundamental right to reproductive freedom, which entails the right to make and effectuate decisions about all matters relating to pregnancy, including but not limited to prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, contraception, sterilization, abortion care, miscarriage management, and infertility care."

"The vast majority of people want to keep abortion legal in our state. We are not discouraged."

After heated debate on Wednesday, Michigan's four-member Board of State Canvassers—comprised of two Republicans and two Democrats—split along party lines on whether to approve the initiative for November's ballot. At least three votes were required to advance the measure.

Detroit News reported that "most of Wednesday's public comment and debate centered around the lack of spacing between words in the petition circulated by Reproductive Freedom for All."

Tony Daunt, the Republican chairman of the state election board, declared that if what was circulated had come to us for review, it would not have received approval because of the severe defect in the spacing and in the form of the language as it was laid out."

Richard Houskamp, the board's other Republican, agreed, joining Daunt in voting no.

Initiative organizers vowed to appeal the board's deadlocked decision to the Michigan Supreme Court, arguing that the Republican officials' objections really center on the content of the petition—which is beyond their power to adjudicate.

"The two Board of State Canvassers officials who voted against placing Reproductive Freedom for All on the November ballot are disenfranchising the more than 730,000 Michigan voters who signed a petition to put this measure to the people," tweeted the ACLU of Michigan, part of the coalition behind the initiative.

Loren Khogali, ACLU of Michigan's executive director, said in a statement that "we will not allow democracy to be undermined."

"The vast majority of people want to keep abortion legal in our state. We are not discouraged," added Khogali. "Voters, not politicians, have the final say when deciding something as personal as abortion access."

The GOP officials' vote came around two weeks after a Michigan judge temporarily blocked enforcement of a draconian abortion ban originally passed in 1931. For now, abortion is legal in the state with a number of restrictions.

Grecia Lima, national political director of Community Change Action, said in a statement Wednesday that "MAGA Republicans in Michigan are attempting to stand in the way of democracy and stop peoples' voices from being heard."

"More than 750,000 Michiganders—nearly double the number needed to qualify—signed a petition in support of this ballot initiative to protect their freedom to control their own bodies and their own healthcare," Lima continued. "These extremist Republicans know their policies for an abortion ban without exemptions for rape or incest are inhumane and wildly unpopular and they’d have to cheat to win."

Some observers voiced concern that, with Republicans attempting to take over key election posts across the country, anti-democratic votes similar to the one in Michigan on Wednesday could become commonplace.

Daniel Nichanian, editor-in-chief of Bolts, warned that "this is a preview of what could happen in 2022 and 2024 in this state as the Michigan GOP stacks election offices with election deniers."

"Even if the Michigan Supreme Court restores the initiative—a reminder that the majority on this court is on the line this fall," Nichanian observed. "And given that the state's GOP canvassers are willing to ignore basic rules, the court will loom large in 2024."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/01/gop-officials-vote-to-bar-popular-abortion-rights-initiative-from-michigan-ballot/feed/ 0 328407 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/04/three-tons-of-fascism-with-a-bull-bar/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/04/three-tons-of-fascism-with-a-bull-bar/#respond Thu, 04 Aug 2022 05:59:51 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=251215

Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

In the United States during 16 months in 2020 and 2021, vehicles rammed into groups of protesters at least 139 times, according to a Boston Globe analysis. Three victims died and at least 100 were injured. Consider that a new level of all-American barbarity, thanks to the growing toxicity of right-wing politics, empowered by its embrace of ever-larger, more menacing vehicles being cranked out by the auto industry.

And keep this in mind: attacks on street protests are just the most recent development in fossil-fuelized aggression. Especially in the red states of America, MAGA motorists have been driving our quality of life into the ground for years. My spouse Priti Gulati Cox and I live half a block south of Crawford Street, the central east-west artery in Salina, Kansas. Starting in the early Trump years, and ever more regularly during the pandemic, we’ve been plagued by the brain-rattling roar of diesel-powered pickup trucks as they peel out of side streets onto Crawford, spewing black exhaust and aiming to go from zero to sixty before reaching the traffic light at Broadway. By 2020, many of these drivers were regularly festooning their pickups, ISIS-style, with giant flags bearing slogans like “Trump 2020” and “Don’t Tread on Me,” as well as Confederate battle flags. Some still display them, often with “F*** Biden” flags as well.

If you live in flyover country as we do, you come to expect such performances. And don’t think that I’m just expressing my own personal annoyance about an aesthetic affront either. Fueled by diesel or gasoline, and supercharged by what political scientist Cara Daggett has labeled “petro-masculinity,” those men in big, loud vehicles serve as the shock troops for a white-right authoritarian movement that threatens to seize control of our political system. Recall the “Trump caravan” that tried to run a Biden campaign bus off the road in Texas just before Election Day 2020. Or the “Trump Trains” of pickups carrying men with paintball guns, one of which attacked Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland, Oregon.

Long forgotten now by most of us, those hapless North American truck convoys, some of which converged on Washington, D.C., last spring, might as well have been scripted by the writers of Seinfeld. To all appearances, they were protests about nothing — other than a vague sense of grievance personified (or truckified). Still, the drivers did manage to cause serious mayhem, assaulting the residents of two capitals, Ottawa and Washington, with diesel fumes, daylong horn blasting, and bellicose conduct. They paralyzed downtown Ottawa for almost a month (and cost the government there more than $36 million). Some drivers in the cross-country U.S. convoys physically assaulted counter-protesters, cyclists, and motorists. There was one bright spot, though: one day, a man on a cargo bike got in front of a line of semi-cabs and pickups and slow-pedaled through Washington’s narrow side streets, leaving the invaders no alternative but to creep along behind him for what seemed like forever and a day.

The convoy truckers, however, paid little price for the havoc they caused. Indeed, vehicular aggression and violence increasingly goes unpunished. On June 24th in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a man aimed his pickup truck at a group of women protesting that morning’s Supreme Court decision reversing Roe v. Wade. When his vehicle first came into contact with them, the women stood fast, and grabbed its bull bar — the steel armoring designed to protect the grille against livestock, but used more often these days to intimidate humans. With a yell, he plowed ahead, driving over one woman’s ankle and giving another a concussion. When the police arrived, they interviewed the driver, but they have yet to charge him or even identify him publicly. He was probably shielded by a law the Iowa legislature passed in 2020 immunizing drivers who run into or over protesters, if they simply claim to have been fleeing in fear. Ominously enough, Florida and Oklahoma have passed similar laws essentially encouraging such acts.

Are You What You Drive? 

Here in the heartland, white nationalism feeds on gas, gunpowder, oil, and testosterone. Ranchers, wheat-growers, oilfield roughnecks, firefighters, loggers, hunters — in short, the very kinds of guys who populate today’s ads for pickup trucks — are widely viewed as the real Americans. Most pickups today, however, are found not out on the range but on city streets and Interstate highways, sporting empty beds and clean tires, with their drivers settled into cushy captain’s seats. For many of them, big pickups are no more than a non-utilitarian cultural statement and, in today’s culture, that means a political statement, too. (With so many luxury options on offer, a new truck can also be an extravagant statement, since their average price now exceeds $60,000.)

When I was reading High and Mighty, Keith Bradsher’s classic book on SUVs, in the early 2000s, there was as yet no correlation between the supersizing of personal vehicles and political preferences. It was mostly about armoring up against crashes and crime. A few years later, when even more bloated trucks and SUVs with abundant creature comforts started being advertised as “living rooms on wheels,” they still had no strong political associations. Over the past few years, however, manufacturers have begun capitalizing on MAGA-world belligerence by pumping up the road-ruling mystique of those vehicles. On this topic, I won’t even try to match the bracing prose of Angie Schmitt, the author of Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America, who wrote for Bloomberg News last year:

“Pickup truck front ends have warped into scowling brick walls, billboards for outwardly directed hostility… [T]he height of the truck’s front end may reach a grown man’s shoulders or neck… That aesthetic can be detected not only in the raised ‘militarized’ grille height of pickup trucks, but also the popularity of aftermarket modifications like blacked-out windows and ‘bull bars’ affixed to the front end.”

Some pickups and full-size SUVs now approach the dimensions of World War II-era tanks and are advertised accordingly. Ford used the term “military-grade, aluminum-alloy” five times in a single press release for its F-150 pickup. This supersizing, as well as armoring, has had predictable results. For example, in another article, Schmitt observed that

“passenger and driver deaths have remained mostly stable over the past decade while pedestrian fatalities have risen by about 50 percent. From 2019 to 2020, pedestrian deaths per vehicle miles traveled increased a record 21 percent, for a total of 6,721 fatalities. This astonishing death toll has multiple causes, but the scale of the front end of many pickup trucks and SUVs is part of the problem, and that’s been obvious for quite a while.”

The politicization of big-box personal vehicles is now almost complete. By the 2020 election campaign season, few drivers, left or right, needed bumper stickers to tell the world which candidates they supported. A month before the election, Forbessummarized survey data illustrating the relationship between party affiliation and vehicle ownership. Of the models most disproportionately preferred by Democrats, liberals, and progressives, 14 were sedans or crossovers, three were trucks or full-size SUVs, and two were hybrid or electric vehicles. The Honda Civic sedan topped the list.

I’m sure at this point you won’t be surprised to learn that the vehicle preferences for Republicans and other conservatives were almost exactly the reverse of that. Of their top model preferences, 14 were trucks or full-size SUVs while only three were sedans or crossovers. None were hybrids or electric vehicles. Those with the strongest Republican/conservative associations were the Ford F-250 and Ram 2500 pickups, both weighing in at more than 6,000 pounds.

“Pollution Porn”

A couple of weeks before the 2020 election, Priti and I were cruising south along Santa Fe Avenue, the main street in downtown Salina. As we approached Crawford, we saw that a long, noisy Trump train was passing through the intersection, headed west. Decked out with flags, balloons, and other regalia, the parade of trucks stretched out of sight in both directions. When a temporary gap opened in the queue, we took a right turn toward home. In this way, our 2006 Civic hybrid (I know — too trite) involuntarily joined the procession. With a huge, flag-bedecked tailgate towering over our windshield, a five-foot-high bull bar looming in the rearview mirror, and a cacophony of horns drowning out our laughter, we crept home, where we bailed out of the parade. Though we faced no hostility ourselves, that was probably because the drivers on either side of us could barely see us.

Compared with many of the 2020 Trump trains, Salina’s version proved remarkably mild-mannered. But all such white-right parades, including the farcical “Boaters for Trump” regattas, also manage to do a remarkable job of making a relatively small number of Americans seem like a big crowd. There were far more people in Salina’s 2020 Black Lives Matter march than in that truck parade. But when you surround a modest number of people with tons of steel and aluminum propelled by loud internal-combustion engines, you’ve got an impressive spectacle in an ominous sort of way. The forests of flags only add to the fascist aura that surrounds the political use of such hulking vehicles.

Until James Alex Fields, Jr., drove his Dodge Challenger into a non-violent group of protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, killing Heather Heyer, the tactic of crashing into crowds was best known as a terror tool used by Islamic Statesympathizers, primarily in Europe. At the time, the means of aggression preferred by American pick-up drivers was something called “rollin’ coal.” It involved modifying a truck’s fuel system so that the driver could blast large clouds of thick, black diesel smoke from its tailpipes or smokestacks.

Often, coal-rollin’ was pure performance, a display of rebellion against anything in the culture that smacked of concern for climate change. It was, as Vocativ labeled it in 2014, “pollution porn.” But even then, under the surface was the potential for so much worse. In recent years, more aggressive drivers have taken that stunt to its logical conclusion by engulfing pedestrians, cyclists, electric vehicle or hybrid drivers, and other perceived enemies in toxic black clouds.

As Cara Daggett put it:

“A lot of things are attached to fossil fuel culture because they are symbolically a part of a certain way of life or an identity. It’s no longer possible to operate in the world and not understand that fossil fuels are violent. [Rollin’ coal is] a kind of spectacular performance of power.”

Psychology professor Joshua Nelson suggests that such an extravagant, showy combustion of fuel represents an attempt by white male drivers in particular to compensate for two new realities – that men like them can no longer feel they’re part of an all-powerful American clan and that what awaits us all, however hard it may be to express, however much they may want to repress the very idea, is impending doom from fossil fuels destroying this planet. As Nelson puts it: “There is nothing more possibly traumatizing (and requiring psychologically defensive operations) than potential global destruction and annihilation, especially when one is forced to consider [his] own role in this impending apocalyptic disaster.” Whether such “psychologically defensive operations” grow out of a sense of guilt, inadequacy, or something else entirely, they play out the same way — as aggression against the rest of us.

Standing Up to the Men in Trucks

One characteristic news photo from the violent conflicts of recent times — whether in Afghanistan, Libya, Nigeria, Syria, or elsewhere — has been of pickup trucks loaded with armed men. The U.S. hasn’t made it there — not yet anyway. But it’s hard to doubt that (thank you, Donald Trump!) ever since January 6, 2021, when so many right-wing militia members broke into the Capitol, some of them armed, we’ve been living through an attempted takeover of our country by members of one of the two major parties. And in 2022, it will hardly surprise you to know that its supporters own more guns and trucks than the rest of us.

This fits with trends pointed out by Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She’s studied the use of violence by a growing number of political parties in a wide range of countries and is now tracking America’s upsurge in militia activity, too. She recently wrote, “Even if Trump passes from the scene, the embrace of violence and intimidation as a political tactic by a faction of the GOP will cause violence of all types to rise — against all Americans.”

Ultra-MAGA elements in legislatures and the courts are already gutting our right to preserve a livable climate, ensure reproductive rights, and vote, even as they create new rights to own weapons of war and put them to deadly use. Usually, those weapons are AR-15s or other firearms, but they can also be tank-scale personal vehicles wrapped in military-grade alloy, with an armored front end.

Big trucks, aggressively driven, straddle the borderline between a democracy in crisis and a country (and world) facing a climate emergency of the first order. They guzzle fuel, spew pollution, and degrade our quality of life. With the paramilitary wing of the anti-democracy, anti-Earth GOP at the wheel, such vehicles portend even worse environmental harm to come. If the far right prevails, its politicos will choke off any state or federal efforts to phase out fossil fuels. If, using means legal or not, they consolidate their power over the Supreme Court, Congress in 2022, and the White House in 2024, they will be spewing the political version of rollin’ coal and are guaranteed to smother the possibility of climate action, probably long enough to make runaway global heating inevitable.

Keeping the anti-democracy party out of power will require massive get-out-the-vote efforts in 2022 and 2024, and record-breaking turnouts in the streets will undoubtedly be needed as well. In truth, there are many more of us than of the fascist wannabes in this country. Like the brave women in Cedar Rapids, we must neither surrender the public square to the extremists nor allow them to bestow rights on vehicles and fossil fuels while revoking rights that belong to us and to the rest of nature.

This column is distributed by TomDispatch.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Stan Cox.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/04/three-tons-of-fascism-with-a-bull-bar/feed/ 0 320569 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/27/us-lawmakers-want-to-bar-using-espionage-act-to-target-journalists/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/27/us-lawmakers-want-to-bar-using-espionage-act-to-target-journalists/#respond Wed, 27 Jul 2022 15:49:57 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/node/338605
This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/27/us-lawmakers-want-to-bar-using-espionage-act-to-target-journalists/feed/ 0 318724 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/08/amazon-union-slams-company-effort-to-bar-public-from-election-hearing/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/08/amazon-union-slams-company-effort-to-bar-public-from-election-hearing/#respond Wed, 08 Jun 2022 13:32:37 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/node/337444

Amazon's lawyers filed a motion on Tuesday urging the National Labor Relations Board to bar the public—and potentially members of the press—from tuning in to a hearing next week at which the company is set to lay out its case for why the historic union victory at the JFK8 warehouse in New York should be overturned.

According to the Washington Post, which is owned by Amazon executive chairman and former CEO Jeff Bezos, the company argues in its motion that "because the hearing is being held on Zoom, it makes it difficult to know if witnesses who aren't supposed to be able to observe the proceedings are in attendance, or if the hearing is being recorded and shared with those witnesses."

"This motion won't pass and hundreds of JFK8 workers are dying to see this trial."

"Amazon declined to comment and did not immediately respond to questions about whether members of the media would be permitted to attend the hearing if the company's motion is granted," the Post noted. "The motion, which requests that the general public be barred from attending, specifies the parties that Amazon says should be allowed to attend the full proceeding, including witnesses and legal teams, does not explicitly mention members of the media."

The Amazon Labor Union (ALU), the worker-led group that spearheaded the successful organizing drive at JFK8, characterized the company's motion as a cynical attempt to advance its slew of unfounded election objections behind closed doors. NLRB hearings are usually in person and open to the public.

"Maybe they're seeing that worker testimony is more credible than they thought," ALU tweeted late Tuesday. "This motion won't pass and hundreds of JFK8 workers are dying to see this trial."

ALU attorney Seth Goldstein said of Amazon's motion that he has "never heard of this happening before."

"This is fantasy," Goldstein told the Post. "It again shows that Amazon is out of touch with the importance of transparency so that everybody understands what is happening."

Amazon's motion came after the company succeeded in transferring the JFK8 case from the NLRB's Brooklyn office—which oversaw the election—to its Phoenix office.

Cornele Overstreet, the NLRB's regional director in Phoenix, said in a filing last month that Amazon's objections "could be grounds for overturning the election."

Amazon, which waged an aggressive union-busting campaign that has drawn legal action from the NLRB, has accused the union of "electioneering in the polling area" and distributing marijuana to workers in exchange for their support, among other objections.

The union has denied Amazon's allegations and voiced confidence that the NLRB will ultimately reject Amazon's case.

"We're disappointed that Amazon is attempting to overturn the democratic voice of over 2,600 of its own workers," Cassio Mendoza, a worker at the Staten Island warehouse and an ALU organizer, said after Amazon first outlined its objections in April.

"The entire world knows that the workers won our election,"  Mendoza added, "and we look forward to sitting down with Amazon... to negotiate a fair contract for the workers at JFK8."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

The mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas has placed gun violence in the news for the third time in a month. It has also placed gun regulation and debates over the Second Amendment on the political agenda, with some such as Senator Ted Cruz declaring that the Constitution is bar to limits on the right to bear arms.

The Constitution is not an impediment to reasonable gun regulation. The real problems are threefold: The Supreme Court, a lack of political will, and devising policies that will work to address gun violence given the reality of there nearly four hundred legally owned guns in the United States.

The Original Meaning of the Second Amendment (and why it may not matter)

What does the Second Amendment mean? There are really two issues here. The first is whether the Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms. The second question is if the Amendment does grant an individual right, is that right unlimited or absolute?

Unfortunately, the original text and intent of the Framers of the Amendment is not clear.

When in 1789 James Madison introduced seventeen amendments to the Constitution, one eventually became the Second Amendment. His original wording was: “A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, being the best security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Debates in Congress over the meaning and language of the Amendment are in determinative regarding whether it protected an individual right. The same can be said regarding debates in the states regarding ratification of the Second Amendment.

However, until 2008 the few Supreme Court cases that addressed the meaning of the Second Amendment declared that there was no individual right to own guns.

Five decisions are regularly cited regarding the interpretation of the meaning of the Second Amendment. In the earliest decisions, rendered in the aftermath of the Civil War and the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court ensured that state militias could support the government by maintaining public order. This interpretation meant that the “right to bear arms” was seen as a collective, not individual right, regulated by Congress and the states.

The first case which provided the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment, United States v. Cruikshank (92 U.S. 542, 1875), rose in that legal context.

A private militia of former Confederate soldiers and members of the Ku Klux Klan attacked a group of Black citizens, who had occupied a courthouse to protect Republican office holders, resulting in the Colfax Massacre of many African-Americans. The federal government prosecuted a small number of the almost one hundred accused perpetrators under the Fourteenth Amendment claim that these white individuals had denied basic constitutional rights (the right to vote, bear arms, assemble, etc.) to the Black citizens they had attacked and/or executed. The Supreme Court found these charges to be vague, and all of the charges were eventually dismissed. The majority opinion noted, “[t]his is one of the amendments that has no other effect than to restrict the powers of the national government.” The Court did not find the Second Amendment applicable to the states or to limiting the actions of other individuals. This decision was reinforced by the only two other decisions rendered by the Court on the Second Amendment in the 20th Century.

The 1886 case of Presser v. Illinois (116 U.S. 252), while arising under different circumstances, reinforced the Cruikshank interpretation of the Second Amendment. Brought by a private white militia in Illinois, which had been constrained by state law from publicly drilling with their weapons, the Court found the Amendment to be “a limitation only on the power of Congress and the national government, and not of the states.”

Similarly, United States v. Miller (307 U.S. 174, 1939), which upheld the constitutionality of the National Firearms Act of 1934, requiring the registering of certain weapons, reinforced the notion that the Second Amendment was a barrier against Congress passing laws that would preclude the state from maintaining an armed militia of its citizens. Because the Second Amendment was seen as a collective right, not an individual right, these decisions made it clear the Court understood the Second Amendment as allowing states to regulate firearm possession and ownership, not inherent to “the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia.” The standard of judicial decision making noted in Miller was the lowest test of “some reasonable relationship” between the regulation and the constitutional guarantee. While this was the status of the constitutional interpretation, the scope of the Second Amendment was not a closed debate post-1939.

Heller and the Individual Right to Bear Arms

Continuing controversies included the following: Does the text of the amendment protect an individual right to keep and bear arms, or is that a collective right maintained within the context of a militia? Until District of Columbia v. Heller (554 U.S. 570) in 2008, the Court had not explicitly addressed this question. The debate between Justices Scalia and Stevens highlights the contrasting ways the Court uses test, history, and precedent in seeking to understand how the language of the Bill of Rights applies in a society centuries removed from that of the Framers.

In Heller, the Court stated only that the Second Amendment protects an individual right. To reach that conclusion the Court engaged in both a tortured textual analysis of the Amendment and a weak amateurish or law office reading of the history of the text.

But in reaching that conclusion the Justice Scalia and the Court did not specify what that right is actually protecting, and he went out of his way to assert that the ruling would not invalidate many traditional restrictions on gun ownership. Moreover, the ruling affects the District of Columbia and the federal government only. The Heller decision did not incorporate the Second Amendment to apply to the states, but in 2010 in Chicago v. McDonald the Court did that, meaning that both the federal and state governments were limited by this Amendment.

Heller resolved the individual-collective right issue. The decision may or may not be correct, but unless a future Court reverses itself or the Constitution is amended, the current reading of the Second Amendment is the law of the land.

What does the Second Amendment Protect?

Does the Second Amendment grant an absolute right to bear arms? The answer is no. No Amendments are absolute. The First Amendment rights to free speech or assembly are not absolute, and there is no reason to think the Second is either. In Heller, the Court seemed to identify the core right of the Second Amendment is to possess guns for self-defense and maybe hunting. But such rights do not mean an unlimited right to possess and use any kind of gun or weapon, and it also does not mean that such rights apply to all equally.

By 2016, all states allowed individuals to carry a concealed weapon; only the District of Columbia prohibited it. Many states adopted “Stand Your Ground” laws that recognize an individual’s right to respond to an imminent threat, without a responsibility to retreat, as long as that individual has a right to be there. Other states passed “Duty to Retreat” laws, which prohibits people from resorting to deadly force in self-defense if they are able to avoid harm by running away or other means. There is also great variance in laws regarding the carrying of concealed weapons on college campuses across the country.

Since McDonald, a large number of cases have been litigated on these and other grounds, but because there is still no clear standard for constitutional analysis for these cases, there have been mixed results in the lower federal courts.

Some state regulations have been upheld as constitutional, while others have been struck down. Among the notable decisions have been that a State may ban firearms on college campuses, DiGiacinto v. Rector and Visitors of George Mason University, 281 Va. 127 (2011); juveniles had no right to carry a handgun, U.S. v. Rene E., 583 F.3d 8 (1st Cir. 2009); no constitutional right to possess machine guns, Hamblen v. U.S., 591 F. 3d 471 (6th Cir. 2009); states may ban felons from possessing firearms, U.S. v. Williams, 616 F. 3d 685 (7th Cir. 2010); and, states may ban persons convicted of domestic violence from possessing firearms, U.S. v. Skoien, 614 F. 3d 638 (7th Cir. 2010). These decisions speak to the dicta penned by Scalia in Heller that many long-standing gun laws may be constitutional and that the Second Amendment, as seems to be the case with other amendments, is not absolute. The point being that the regulation of guns to promote public safety is not absolutely barred by the Second Amendment.

So What is Stopping Regulation of Guns?

There are three issues that really limit the ability to regulate guns to promote public safety.

The first is simply a lack of political will. Specifically, the NRA is a potent lobbying and political force that worked hard for years to secure the Heller and McDonald decisions. They took a page out of the NAACP which did a remarkable job in the twentieth century to overturn segregation. The NRA mobilizes voters. Large percentages of the population support gun rights, as does the Republican Party. Gun advocates vote, those who wish to limit the regulation of guns are not as mobilized by the issue as the latter. This is simple politics.

The second problem is the Supreme Court. The current Court is among the most conservative in history. It supports gun rights and it might invalidate a current New York State law that regulates guns. That law would limit the ability to carry a loaded gun in public. The Court heard oral arguments in November 2021 and it looked like it would strike the law down. How the Court will be affected by the Uvalde is a good question. However, given the leaked opinion potentially striking down abortion rights despite public opposition to that, one doubts that Uvalde will change their mind.

Finally, and maybe most importantly, the problem is what do advocates of gun regulation want to do and what can realistically work to reduce gun violence?

Begin with a reality check. Like it or not, the best estimates are that 40% of US households have guns and there are perhaps 300 million+ guns privately owned in the country. Like it or not, guns are not going away and even if the Supreme Court were to reverse itself and declare there is no individual right to bear arms, all the existing guns are not going away. Like it or not, banning guns in a mass way will produce a firearms bootleg problem that will make alcohol smuggling during Prohibition look like child’s play.

But what are we trying to accomplish with the regulation of guns? Serious policy debate is marred in faulty logic and bad argument.

To start, the phrase “gun control” has simply become a politically charged phrase used by different political parties to mobilize their voters and base.

Second, the phrase or argument “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is equally misguided. Guns dramatically facilitate violence. One does not see mass killings take place with sticks and knives, and most robberies and other violent crimes involve guns and not other weapons.

What is the Policy Problem and What is the Policy Solution?

Third, our focus on guns is misguided. What are we trying to prevent, or as I ask my students, what is the problem we are trying to prevent?

Some argue that the problem is not guns but mental illness and that the solution to gun violence is to prevent the mentally ill from getting guns. This assumes all mentally ill people are violent and those who are sane are not. Our prisons are full of lots of people who use guns and commit crimes and the law has deemed them sane. There are millions of people in America with mental illness problems and few are violent. But even if preventing the mentally ill from obtaining guns were the solution, it is not clear that universal background checks would catch everyone.

Much of our focus also is on mass killings and the use of assault weapons. Since 1982 there have been 128 mass shootings with 1033 deaths.

In 2018 alone, according to the Center for Disease Control, there were 39,740 deaths due to firearms. Public mass shootings that year constituted only 0.2% (two-tenths of 1 percent) of all firearms deaths that year.

In 2018 13,958 individuals killed themselves that year with guns, constituting 61% of all firearms deaths that year. There are nearly fourteen times more gun suicides per year than there have been deaths by mass shootings in nearly 40 years. An American Journal of Public Health study showed a strong relationship between levels of gun ownership in a state and firearm suicides.

Additionally, among the weapons used in murders in the U.S., FBI information reveals that handguns were the choice in 64% of the crimes. Among suicides, handguns were used 69% of the time. Even in mass shootings, handguns were used 78% of the time. An American Journal of Preventive Medicine article pointed out that rates of gun ownership, especially of handguns, are more associated with homicide in the home than with homicide outside the home. According to a Social Science and Medicine article, handguns are far less likely to be used in self-defense and instead are more associated with domestic violence, especially against women. Despite the belief that mental illness is the underlying cause of mass shootings and gun violence, there is little evidence, according to an American Journal of Public Health Study, among others, that those with mental health problems are more likely to commit violence with a gun than those lacking such a diagnosis. Finally, more than 250,000 guns per year, according to The Trace, are stolen from the proverbial law-abiding owner because they have not been properly secured, and are used in crimes.

The point is that handguns are a potent problem when it comes to suicide, robberies, and domestic assaults. We largely do not discuss these issues. Addressing these problems, along with mass killings and perhaps now racially motivated killings is not a simple problem that can be easily solved. We probably need to have far less guns in our society. We need to make cultural changes that address the link between patriotism, Americanism, and guns. We need to find a way to develop alternative ways to resolve disputes or anger that are not facilitated by guns.

The problem thus is not the Second Amendment. It is the political will and desire to address violence in America with the development of effective public policies and not political slogans.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David Schultz.

Two right-wing Democrats, Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Mark Kelly of Arizona, crossed the aisle Wednesday to help Republicans approve a motion aimed at barring President Joe Biden from declaring a climate emergency, a step that green groups have been pressuring him to take since his first day in office.

The nonbinding motion, sponsored by Sen. Shelley Capito (R-W.Va.) and approved by a vote of 49-47, states that Biden "cannot use climate change as the basis to declare a national emergency." House and Senate lawmakers will consider the motion as part of their efforts to finalize legislation packed with subsidies to profitable microchip corporations.

"This is an outrageous betrayal... Shame on you."

It's unclear whether lawmakers will ultimately include the climate emergency language in the final bill, but environmentalists voiced outrage at the motion's passage as Manchin and Republicans continue to obstruct desperately needed congressional action to slash greenhouse gas emissions and bolster renewable energy production.

A separate motion instructing lawmakers to reject provisions that "prohibit development of an all-of-the-above energy portfolio"—which would include oil and gas production—also sailed through Wednesday by voice vote.

"Our political leadership is out to kill most of us," Basav Sen, director of the Climate Justice Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, said in response to the vote. "Every branch of [the federal government] (executive, Congress, courts) is rotten to the core."

"Manchin shouldn't be voting on climate/energy issues, based on his glaring and obvious conflict of interest," Sen added, alluding to the West Virginia Democrat's stake in his family's coal empire. "If we had a civilized system of government, he would be investigated for corruption, not heading the Senate energy committee."

Kai Newkirk, a progressive activist based in Arizona, focused his ire on Kelly, who was a NASA astronaut before entering politics.

"An astronaut who's seen the planet from outer space voting to remove one of the only tools we have to confront the climate crisis that isn't blocked by the filibuster and Manchin's corruption?" Newkirk wrote on Twitter. "This is an outrageous betrayal, Sen. Kelly. Shame on you."

As the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) noted in a February report, a climate emergency declaration would empower Biden to take a number of steps to combat the planetary crisis without needing the approval of Congress, including immediately halting crude oil exports and boosting green energy manufacturing.

"Congress enacted emergency powers to allow the executive branch greater flexibility to respond to extraordinary events," the report states. "The climate emergency is the pinnacle of extraordinary events faced in our lifetimes. Biden should lawfully use emergency powers to address this existential threat."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

A government watchdog group on Thursday urged U.S. Department of Justice officials to bar any state or federal official who participated in the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol from ever holding public office.

In a letter addressed to Attorney General Merrick Garland, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, and U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C. Matthew M. Graves, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) cites the 14th Amendment's Disqualification Clause, which says that those who took an oath to uphold the Constitution and who "engaged in insurrection or rebellion" or gave "aid or comfort to the enemies" of the U.S. or Constitution are barred from holding any federal or state office.

"This provision will not enforce itself," said letter signatory and CREW president Noah Bookbinder in a statement.

The letter points out that, in court filings, the DOJ has referred to the January attack as an "insurrection" and has also charged some of the key actors in the event with "seditious conspiracy."

Enforcement of the Disqualification Clause, CREW argues, would simply fall under the DOJ's own stated commitment "to holding all January 6th perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law."

"Specifically," the letter states, "during plea negotiations, DOJ should encourage appropriate defendants to voluntarily resign their office if they are currently [in] a state or federal office and agree not to seek future office."

"The DOJ must take action to stop, by all means available under the law, those who broke their oath to support our Constitution from being entrusted with public office again."

The department should additionally "be instructed to seek involuntary agreements that defendants will not hold or seek public office" as needed, the letter adds.

When change of plea hearings take place for those involved in the event, CREW's letter calls on the DOJ to "insist that these individuals admit at their change of plea hearing to having previously sworn an oath to support the Constitution and to having subsequently committed an act of insurrection (or giving aid or comfort to others who did)." Doing so, the group argues, "could prove important in case a defendant's disqualification needs to be enforced in ancillary federal proceedings or in a different forum."

A further tool at DOJ attorneys' disposal is to ask courts to "impose special conditions of probation or supervised release that prevent individuals who violated the Disqualification Clause from seeking or holding public office for the full term of their sentence," says CREW.

"It's time for us to get serious about protecting our democracy," said Bookbinder.

He added that "the DOJ must take action to stop, by all means available under the law, those who broke their oath to support our Constitution from being entrusted with public office again."

Among those who've recently been targeted under the Disqualification Clause is Republican Congressman Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina.

In a Wednesday filing with the North Carolina State Board of Elections seeking Cawthorn's disqualification, two voters in the state, represented by Free Speech for People, said they have "reasonable suspicion that Cawthorn was involved in either planning the attack on January 6, or alternatively the planning of the pre-attack demonstration and/or march on the Capitol with the advance knowledge that it was substantially likely to lead to the attack, and otherwise voluntarily aided the insurrection."

CREW's letter came as the House committee investigating the January 6 attack continues its probe, including by sending additional subpoenas this week to individuals who allegedly sought to "disrupt or delay the certification of electoral votes and any efforts to corruptly change the outcome of the 2020 election."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Andrea Germanos.

• California Governor Gavin Newsom says 2.5 million in the state will be vaccinated by years end.
• Covid-19 vaccines hit Bay Area, doctors at SF General Hospital first to be innoculated.
• Workers and consumer advocates denounce business liability shield in new COVID-19 relief bill.
• President-elect Democrat Joe Biden campaigns for Democrats in Georgia run off.
• Trump administration moves to bar asylum for persecuted LGBTQ and domestic violence survivors.

The post Governor Gavin Newsom says 2.5 million will be vaccinated by years end; Covid-19 vaccines hit Bay Area, doctors at SF General Hospital first to get vaccinated; Trump administration moves to bar asylum for persecuted LGBTQ and domestic violence survivors appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.