“Armed forces should not weaponize the judicial system to silence the press,” said Cristina Zahar, CPJ’s Latin America program coordinator, based in São Paulo. “Targeting journalists with defamation charges and coercing media to reveal sources threaten press freedom and undermine democracy. Honduran authorities must immediately end these intimidation tactics.”

Gen. Roosevelt Hernández ordered military lawyers to file criminal defamation complaints against the media outlets in November 2024, according to a report by Honduran newspaper La Prensa. 

Hondudiario’s editorial team told Reportar sin Medio, a Honduran news site, that the request came following its Oct. 30, 2024 report on internal divisions within the Honduran Armed Forces, including allegations that Hernández’s received government-funded medical treatment abroad for a heart condition.

The Honduras prosecutor’s office accepted the complaints, and law enforcement notified newsrooms that they were being investigated in late January 2025, La Prensa reported.

According to news reports, outlets under investigation include newspapers El Heraldo, La Prensa, La Tribuna, Hondudiario, Criterio HN, radio stations Radio Cadena Voces, Radio América, Abriendo Brecha, and TV outlets CHTV, Hable Como Habla, Q’Hubo TV, and Noticias 24/7.

Hernández confirmed that he had initiated the complaints but denied that they were meant to intimidate journalists, reported La Prensa.

Honduras’ penal code criminalizes defamation with prison terms up to one year and fines ranging from 200 to 1,000 days of salary for alleged false accusations in “reckless disregard for the truth.” The law imposes harsher penalties for statements made through print, television, radio, or digital platforms, a category referred to as “defamation with publicity.”

CPJ’s requests for comment from the Honduran Armed Forces, National Police, Public Ministry, and Security Ministry did not receive any reply.

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

CODEPINK has maintained from the start that Nour Jaghama, a Palestinian-American, never made physical contact with Rep. Van Orden. However, law enforcement insisted on taking action based on Van Orden's claims due to his position as a U.S. Congressman.

Following a thorough investigation, including the review of body cam footage, the Milwaukee District Attorney concluded that no crime had been committed and dropped the charges. Despite this, Rep. Van Orden continues to spread false claims of being assaulted and injured to his constituents, the media, and on social media.

The false accusations have sparked a wave of death threats and hate messages directed at CODEPINK, including one currently under investigation by the FBI. Here is an example of the threats received:

"Contact: (815) 284-4661 (m) jeffdkcjka@yahoo.com
Fuck you CUNT bitches. Hurt another Republican senator and it will be the LAST person you hurt CUNTS. Hamas should die and rot in Hell."

This situation underscores the unacceptable nature of a U.S. Congressman using his position to defame a private citizen and incite violence. The public must hold elected officials accountable for such abuses of power.

The ethics complaints are attached. For more information or to request further details, please contact Melissa at melissa@codepink.org.

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

They were among 82 containers of agricultural products from China’s state-owned Xinjiang Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Investment (Group) Co., Ltd. shipped by rail and sea from Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, to southern Italy in late April, according to the plaintiffs. 

The shipment also sparked outrage among Italian farmers who protested against the arrival of the cheaper processed tomato products from China in what they said were unfair imports.

Xinjiang, a major producer of tomato products, accounted for at least 80 percent of the total tomato products produced in China in 2023, according to Chinese figures.

Uyghurs and other Turkic groups in Xinjiang have been persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party for decades, including being forced to perform labor that benefits state-owned companies.

Amid much fanfare, the containers transported by rail as part of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative arrived in Salerno, Italy, at the end of May, according to Italy’s StraLi, a nonprofit group based in Turin that promotes the protection of rights through the judicial system.

On May 30, StraLi filed a criminal complaint demanding that the goods be seized as evidence and that a criminal investigation take place on behalf of the World Uyghur Congress and the U.K.-based Lawyers for Uyghur Rights.   

It also filed a submission to the U.N. Working Group on Business and Human Rights on June 3, requesting a communication to the Italian government to seize the goods and investigate the companies involved in the importation.

New EU law

The move comes less than two months after the European Parliament approved a new regulation banning products made with force labor from entering the European Union. Uyghur advocates have praised the law, saying it will help clamp down on China’s use of forced labor in far-western Xinjiang.

The EU’s 27 member countries must approve the Forced Labour Regulation for it to enter into force and will have three years to implement it. 

“This legal challenge addresses both violations of fundamental principles of human dignity and international law instruments, as well as calling for the seizure of these recently imported goods under national law,” said a statement issued by these groups on June 3. 

The groups have presented evidence from Adrian Zenz, senior fellow and director in China studies at the Washington-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, highlighting the prevalence of forced labor products from Xinjiang, the statement said.

StraLi lawyer Loide Cambisano, who’s in charge of the case, said this was not the first time that goods produced with Uyghur forced labor have been exported to Italy. 

“Agricultural products and tomatoes in particular have arrived in Italy from the same region in China,” she told Radio Free Asia on June 4. “It’s most likely that slavery and labor exploitation is occurring.”

StraLi is seeking an immediate halt of the unloading of the tomato paste at the port of Salerno and a ban on its distribution in Italy, she said. 

“We’re also asking for the end of the importation of any goods in the future which are made and transported from Xinjiang,” she said.

‘Conspiracy to support slavery’

Michael Polak, a London-based barrister who chairs Lawyers for Uyghur Rights, said the domestic criminal complaint argues that the goods violated Italian law and would hold accountable those responsible for slave labor in Xinjiang’s agricultural sector. 

“On the national level, we say this importation is in breach of Italian domestic law in relation to the encouragement or conspiracy to support slavery.”

As for the complaint filed with the U.N. Working Group, it alleges that China has violated international laws, specifically Articles 23 and 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Polak said. 

The transportation route combining rail and sea transportation services is a flagship project of the Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s signature debt and infrastructure program, according to Chinese media. 

The shipment occurred despite Italy’s pullout from the BRI in 2023.

Human rights advocates and members of the Italian agricultural NGO Coldiretti — Europe’s largest agricultural organization — protested the arrival of the shipment at the port of Salerno on May 29 to show their opposition to what they consider unfair imports and the exploitation of Uyghurs and other Turkic people in Xinjiang. 

A Coldiretti official told RFA on June 4 that it is very important that products imported to Italy be produced under the same working conditions as those in Italy. 

Coldiretti’s President Ettore Prandini previously testified in the Italian Senate against the exportation of Chinese workers or what he called unfair imports that did not comply with European standards.

Coldiretti and Filiera Italia indicated that the World Tomato Processing Council, an international nonprofit organization representing the tomato processing industry, estimated that China would produce 7.3 billion kilograms, or over 8 million tons, of processed tomato products in 2023, surpassing Italy’s production. 

Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Jilil Kashgary for RFA Uyghur.

Western politicians and journalists have hurried to dismiss the murder and maiming of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in the Nuseirat refugee camp on Saturday in a savage joint Israeli-US military operation to free four Israeli captives.

Not just that, they have suggested that the bloodshed was inevitable and justified given that the hostages were being held in a residential neighbourhood of Gaza.

For example, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, observed of the massacre that was actively assisted by the US: “The Palestinian people are going through sheer hell in this conflict because Hamas is operating in a way that puts them in the crossfire, that holds hostages right in the heart of crowded civilian areas.”

Apparently, Israel’s decades of belligerent military occupation of the Palestinian territories, its 17-year blockade of Gaza denying its population the essentials of life, its intermittent destruction of the enclave by “mowing the lawn”, and now its carrying out of what the International Court of Justice has called a “plausible genocide” have nothing to do with the “sheer hell” the people of Gaza are suffering.

Those trying to win our consent to mass murder and the planned starvation of the people of Gaza by arguing that Hamas is using Palestinians in Gaza as human shields are engaged in the worst kind of bad-faith argument.

Let’s put back the context they are so keen to obscure:

1. Israel has been besieging the enclave of Gaza for decades. The tiny strip of land’s population comprises mostly Palestinian refugees who were long ago ethnically cleansed from their homes in what is now Israel and confined to Gaza. Their numbers have grown hugely since, to more than 2.3 million, within tightly-delimited “borders” policed – and blockaded – by Israel. Gaza is, in a true sense of the term, a giant concentration camp.

2. Gaza doesn’t have woods, mountains, caves in which Hamas fighters can hide or in which they can conceal their captives. It is not Afghanistan or Russia.

3. Gaza is almost entirely built-up – or it was until Israel destroyed most of its buildings over the past eight months. Small areas are open agricultural land or scrubland Israel will not allow Palestinians to develop – much of that has now been destroyed too. Watching over this tiny space 24/7 are armed Israeli drones. Move outside a building and you are being surveilled. You become a potential target for an assassination by Israel.

4. Hamas has two non-suicidal options for hiding the captives it seized in Israel on October 7. Either in a building, or underground in its tunnels, which were built precisely so parts of Gaza would be out of view of a hostile Israeli military. They are the nearest Hamas has to military bases. (Let us note here another hypocrisy: Israel’s military bases are often embedded in civilian communities inside Israel. Its defence ministry’s headquarters, the Kirya, is in the middle of built-up Tel Aviv.)

5. Hiding the captives above ground is the obviously more humanitarian option, as is clear from the images of those freed at the weekend. Given many months of captivity, they are reported to be in reasonable health.

6. After Israel’s massacre of more than 270 Palestinians at the weekend in Nuseirat camp, Hamas will now take all the hostages underground. That will be far worse for them, and it will make no difference to Israel’s wanton destruction of the buildings above. The overwhelming majority of the 70% of Gaza’s housing stock destroyed by Israel did not contain Israeli captives or Hamas fighters. It was targeted nonetheless because Israel’s military rampage has never been about getting the hostages back, or even about defeating Hamas, an impossible goal. It is about eradicating Gaza.

7. If Israel was really serious about bringing the captives home, it would be negotiating their release, not inducing a famine through an aid blockade that is starving everyone in Gaza: Hamas, Palestinian civilians and Israeli hostages alike. The real human shields are the Israeli captives, pawns being sacrificed by Israel as it pursues its bigger war aims.

8. The truth is that Israel is waging a genocidal war on the Palestinian population to drive them out of Gaza. It needs to manufacture pretexts to avoid reaching a ceasefire deal that would bring the hostages home and bring the bloodshed to an end. The “rescue” of the Israeli captives by killing huge numbers of Palestinians provides ideal conditions for making negotiations impossible. That was the real success.

9. The jubilation – of Israelis, and western politicians and media – at the carnage of Palestinians in place of a ceasefire to end the bloodshed is the real problem. By continuing to treat Palestinians as sub-human, all are enabling the genocide to continue.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

On Thursday, the Taliban’s Ministry of Justice announced the closure of Tamadon TV, alleging that the broadcaster was affiliated with the Harakat-e-Islami political party, after the Taliban banned all such affiliations, and operating on “seized land,” according to Qari Baraktullah Rasuli, the spokesperson for the Taliban’s Ministry of Justice who posted the statement on X, formerly Twitter, and media reports. Tamadon TV denies the claims.

In a breaking news announcement earlier that day, Tamadon TV stated that a Taliban delegation was inside its station to shut down operations. However, later the TV station confirmed that the suspension of its operations was postponed until Saturday. The Taliban has not announced an exact date that it plans to close the station. 

“The Taliban must immediately and unconditionally reverse its decision to ban Tamadon TV and allow the channel to continue broadcasting,” said CPJ Asia Program Coordinator Beh Lih Yi. “The Taliban is expanding its relentless crackdown on Afghan media and suppressing any independent voices. This must end.”

On June 6, Mohammad Jawad Mohseni, director of Tamadon TV, rejected the Taliban’s claims about the broadcaster’s political affiliations, according to broadcaster Afghanistan International. Mohseni noted that the late founder of the TV station, Ayatullah Asif Mohseni, had resigned as the leader of Harakat-e-Islami in 2005, years before establishing Tamadon TV.

Mohseni said that “the land for Tamadon TV was purchased from a private owner and has a legitimate and legal title deed, and it is not and has never been government property.”

On February 18, 2023, about 10 armed Taliban members raided the headquarters of Tamadon TV in Kabul, beat several staff members, and held them for 30 minutes.

Tamadon TV is predominantly owned and operated by members of the Hazara-Shia ethnic minority and covers political and current affairs as well as Shiite religious programming. Hazara people have faced persecution and escalated violence since the Taliban’s takeover in August 2021.

The closure order of Tamadon TV follows a series of other restrictions imposed on Afghan media in recent months. In May, the Taliban’s Media Complaints and Rights Violations Commission banned journalists, analysts, and experts from participating in discussions or cooperating with London-based Afghanistan International’s television and radio stations. The Commission called on citizens to boycott Afghanistan International and banned anyone from providing facilities for broadcasting the channel in public places.

Earlier, in April, the Taliban shut down Noor and Barya TV broadcasters, which were affiliated with other Islamist political parties, citing violations of “national and Islamic values.”

The Taliban has shut down other broadcasters since it took over the country in 2021,  including Radio Nasim. in central Daikundi Province, Hamisha Bahar Radio and TV in eastern Nangarhar province, and Radio Sada e Banowan in northeastern Badakhshan province. In 2022, the group also banned international broadcasters such as the U.S. Congress-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Voice of America.

CPJ’s requests for comment sent to Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid did not receive a response.

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

Anna Solomon, a Papua New Guinean journalist and editor with 40 years experience, is now providing training for journalists at the Wantok Niuspepa.

Wantok is a weekly newspaper and the only Tok Pisin language newspaper in PNG.

Solomon, who spoke during last month’s public inquiry on Media in Papua New Guinea, asked if the Parliamentary Committee could work with the media industry to set up a Complaints Tribunal that could address issues affecting media in PNG.

Anna Solomon talks about the media role to “educate people” at the public media inquiry.  Video: Inside PNG

She also called for better Tok Pisin writers as it was one of two main languages that leaders, especially Parliamentarians, used in PNG to communicate with their voters.

At the start of the 3-day public inquiry (21-24 May 2024), media houses also called for parliamentarians and the public to understand how the industry functions.

The public inquiry focused on the “Role and Impact of Media in Papua New Guinea” and was led by the Permanent Parliamentary Committee on Communication with an aim to improve the standard of journalism within the country.

Republished from Inside PNG with permission.

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

Thoung Han says he was fired unfairly in 2022 without severance pay from a factory owned by Lotte MGS Beverages, which produces PepsiCo’s products in Myanmar. The lawsuit isn’t just about severance but is also for damages, including for more than 10 million kyat (US$4,770) for defamation, according to a court document seen by RFA.

Thoung Han alleges that he was verbally abused by a Lotte MGS boss and fired for taking a 10-minute lunch break, which he said he needed because he is diabetic. His dismissal letter said he was responsible for an accident that he says had nothing to do with his department. 

“He was swearing and told me, ‘You’re not allowed to have lunch … you don’t have respect,’” Thoung Han told Radio Free Asia, referring to his run-in with the Lotte manager. He was speaking shortly before he was due to make his 22nd trip to the court in Hmawbi, where Lotte operates a bottling plant.

The head of human resources for Lotte MGS, Hein Htet Aung, declined to go into details on any specific complaints, citing the legal case. He said the company was keen to address concerns and was confident the facts would be established in the proceedings.

“While we understand the importance of addressing concerns raised by individuals, it is essential to note that not all allegations may be founded on factual basis,” Hein Htet Aung said in a statement. “Rest assured, we are fully cooperating with the appropriate authorities and legal processes, trusting that the facts will be clarified through the due course of these proceedings.”

PepsiCo’s corporate office did not respond to a request for comment about the situation in Myanmar.

‘Many violations’

The Solidarity Trade Union Myanmar says dozens of people have been fired, often on baseless grounds, from Lotte’s plants. Employees complain of intimidation by management and a failure to make proper severance payments.

Over the past two years, 20 people have approached the union to complain about a lack of compensation after being fired from the factory, said the union’s director, Myo Myo Aye. The union helps workers handle complaints in Myanmar’s manufacturing sector. 

Myo Myo Aye said that all but one person, Thoung Han, had withdrawn their complaints.

“Before U Thoung Han’s case, there were many dismissal cases in that factory … but the workers didn’t dare complain,” she told RFA. 

In 2023, the Myanmar Labor Society, which monitors labor complaints and is not connected to the trade union, received seven reports of suspected labor violations at  the factory, which also produces 7Up, Sting, and Mirinda soft drinks. The society tracks complaints across Myanmar’s manufacturing sector and publishes an annual report.  

In 2023, nine dismissed employees, including Thoung Han, and a legal adviser were threatened by a group of unidentified men who told them they would “do anything to stop this case”, Myo Myo Aye and Thoung Han said.

“They told them, ‘You have to stop the negotiations and not continue the case, because it is attacking the brand name and company. If anything happens to you if you continue, we’re not responsible,’” Myo Myo Aye said.

Neither Myo Myo Aye nor Thoung Han knew the affiliation of the men. 

RFA could not independently verify their account. Asked about this complaint and others, Lotte MGS head of human resources Hein Htet Aung cited a company policy of refraining from discussing unsubstantiated claims, particularly given the legal proceedings. 

‘Watching’

Other employees have told Solidarity Trade Union Myanmar of verbal abuse, intimidation by management, and the replacement of fired employees by relatives of management, the union said. 

The union further alleges that in the factory’s Mandalay branch, a marketing group of over 30 people were fired at once for not reaching production targets. In the last two years, about 60 people have been dismissed from the company, both the union and Thoung Han said.

Thoung Han said a culture of bullying and harassment, and the pressure of unrealistic production targets, had forced some people to resign.

“The company is watching and taking notes and if they don't like anyone, they’ll come up with any reason to get them dismissed,” Thoung Han said. “If the company doesn't like someone, they do something to make them feel bad, uncomfortable, so they’ll resign, so there’s no need for compensation.”

Military rulers shunned international business for decades as they pursued an isolationist “Burmese way to socialism”. By the time the generals began opening the impoverished economy in the 1990s, international sanctions over the suppression of democracy stifled business.

PepsiCo’s left Myanmar in 1997 but returned in 2012, at the beginning of nearly a decade of tentative economic and political reforms. But hopes for democracy and growth fueled by record foreign investment were shattered by a 2021 military coup.

Edited by Taejun Kang.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Kiana Duncan for RFA.

Nearly 75% of factories accused of workplace violations are owned by Chinese nationals, according to the March 30 report in Myanmar Labour News. 

Reports increased from 164 to 438 in just one year, and factories committing these workers’ rights abuses jumped from 124 to 166, said Kyaw Gyi, founder of the Myanmar Labour Society. That trend in foreign investment surged by as many as 100 factories between 2022 and 2023.

“The workers have lost trust in the complaint mechanisms and it resulted in more abuses on the workers. Various forms of abuse in the workplaces have risen,” Kyaw Gyi told Radio Free Asia. “For example, before the coup, if apparel factory workers had to complete 100 orders, the workloads have been tripled now.”

The seizure of ministries and other government roles by Myanmar’s military during the 2021 coup d’etat has caused a lack of oversight for much of the manufacturing sector, union leaders told RFA. In addition to driving down wages and union-busting, junta-affiliated labor officers have created a lack of accountability for managers, who often rely on junta soldiers to intimidate workers attempting to negotiate or protest. 

In response to ongoing allegations of dismal working conditions and a public outcry, several large international brands have already vowed to begin withdrawing from the country in the three years following the coup due to deteriorating conditions. 

Despite vowing to withdraw from the country, factories supplying brands like H&M, Zara and Primark continued to be among the most frequently cited by workers for reducing wages, forcing employees to work overtime and endure verbal abuse by management. 

However, these brands are among the most affected by public pressure, providing an incentive to improve working conditions, union leaders and labor advocacy groups said. 

“To the extent that Western brands have pulled out unquestionably this has given carte blanche to factories to drive down labor conditions and increase violations of Burmese labor law and trade union rights,” said Dave Welsh, Myanmar country director of labor rights group Solidarity Center. 

“In a climate where the rule of law and industrial relations are absent, there is leverage in having Western brands that are vulnerable to pressure, present,” Welsh said. 

To stay or to go

Despite these challenges, workers are still concerned about the absence of the major manufacturers, who they say are more invested in finding a resolution than smaller local firms, where breaches of contract are rife.

“I understand, it’s a controversial issue, the brands staying in the country or leaving from Myanmar,” said Thurein Aung, a labor activist in Myanmar. “My concern is that when the multinational brands leave Myanmar, it is almost impossible to protect worker rights.”

Multinational brands that have chosen to stay in the country after the coup have similarly collected a laundry list of complaints from workers.

German sportswear company Adidas was cited in relation to four supplier factory violations in 2023, while other factories producing for European brands have been documented as repeat offenders. A factory for Denmark’s Bestseller was accused of eight different violations, including forcing pregnant women to resign and bribery between factory staff and labor officials. In spite of that, the factory will continue to supply Bestseller in 2024. 

Bestseller did not respond to RFA’s enquiries by the time of publication. 

Violations continue to rise

In the past, collecting and publishing evidence of abuses could result in positive action from brands and factories, even if it was only temporarily. But in 2023, many factories stopped responding to complaints at all, said Industrial Workers Federation of Myanmar president Khaing Zar Aung.

“The factories come to understand the brand will not leave the country because they are making a profit. So the factories now do not care about their violations in the media,” she said. “So we cannot have many changes and improvements in the factories after posting [about these issues].”

And while 2023’s numbers concern labor advocacy groups, reports in the first three months of 2024 look set to be on track to surpass them.

As of March, the Industrial Workers Federation of Myanmar had received 114 complaints of labor and human rights abuses involving 169 brands, the vast majority stemming from the country’s garment sector.

“Violations are the same, the verbal abuse, illegal dismissal, not paying overtime or not paying minimum wage, forced labor, sexual assault, giving pressure and intimidating and the violation of the employment contract,” Khaing Zar Aung said. “The data shows us that the situation is worse and worse, day by day.”

Edited by Mike Firn and Elaine Chan.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Kiana Duncan for RFA.

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The federal Department of Education has announced a historic $14 million fine against Liberty University for failing to properly handle reports of sexual assault and other campus safety isssues.

Universities are required by law to support victims of violence. The Education Department found that the Christian evangelical Liberty University had fundamentally failed to do so. Sexual assault victims were “punished for violating the student code of conduct,” the report concluded, “while their assailants were left unpunished.”

The government found that Liberty’s actions had created a “culture of silence.”

The findings, which the department announced Tuesday, echo a ProPublica investigation that detailed how officials had discouraged and dismissed women who tried to come forward with accounts of sexual assault. Women who went to school officials to report being raped recalled being threatened with punishment for breaking the university’s strict moral code, known as “The Liberty Way.”

The coverage prompted widespread outrage, including demands from senators for a Department of Education investigation.

That investigation culminated in Tuesday’s announcement. The fines against Liberty are more than double the amount of the next-largest fines in Department of Education history — against Michigan State University for its failures to protect hundreds of women and girls from sexual abuser Larry Nassar.

Liberty will also face two years of federal oversight.

Elizabeth Axley, a former Liberty University student who was threatened with punishment when she reported her rape to campus officials, said the government’s findings against Liberty feel “so validating and sort of surreal.”

“For an official report to say, ‘Yes, everything you said happened, everything you described was real,’ is more powerful than I can describe,” said Axley, who recalled that when she first wanted to report her rape, a resident adviser told her to pray instead. “After I first fought to stand up for myself at Liberty, I was silenced. I didn’t feel hopeful. It took everything for me to stand up to tell my story again and hope it turned out right. This reminds me it was completely worth it.”

In response to the government’s report, Liberty University said in a statement that it faced “unfair treatment.” But the school also admitted to mistakes and committed to spending $2 million to improve campus safety.

“We acknowledge and sincerely regret these errors and have since corrected them in a manner that allows us to maintain compliance in each of these areas,” the school said. “Today is a new day at Liberty University. We remain committed to prioritizing the safety and security of our students and staff without exception.”

Liberty University was co-founded in 1971 by the televangelist Jerry Falwell. His son, Jerry Falwell Jr., took over the university’s helm in 2007 but resigned in 2020 after a series of scandals. With more than 90,000 students enrolled on its Virginia campus and online, Liberty remains one of the most influential Christian universities in the county.

S. Daniel Carter, who helped craft the Clery Act, the federal law that requires schools to report sexual assault and other crimes, said the significance of the Department of Education’s actions go beyond the record fines. “It’s not about a bottom line number,” Carter said. “It’s about the fact that they are proactively investigating and leading efforts to bring schools into compliance.”

Hannah Dreyfus contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Eric Umansky.

Companies will be fined up to 2 billion kip (US$97,000) for not complying with contracts, rules and laws on excavating and processing minerals, according to a decree issued by Prime Minister Sonexay Siphandone on Wednesday.

Companies that illegally trade and transport minerals will be fined up to one billion kip (US$48,480), the prime minister said. The penalties will take effect on April 1.

Over the last 20 years, the Lao government has given the green light to 1,143 mining projects and 1,336 mineral processing projects covering more than 72,370 square km (27,942 square miles) – more than 3 percent of the country’s total surface area. 

Most of the recently approved projects were for Chinese investors, according to the Lao Ministry of Planning and Investment. 

Some of the larger operations have prompted complaints that not enough local workers are hired, and that local residents are often left without farmland or drinkable water.

In June, National Assembly lawmaker Hongkham Xayakhom urged the government to reconsider its policy of allowing so much mining.

“The economic and financial conditions of our country have not improved,” she said at an Assembly meeting. “Most people are still struggling and our debt is still high.”

‘Lost more than we gained’

A Lao Ministry of Industry and Trade official echoed that sentiment in an interview with Radio Free Asia in September.

“We lost more than we gained from these mining projects,” he said. “They’ve had a dire impact on the environment. The government wants to stop, but in practice that’s hard to do.”

Lao authorities conducted an inspection of all mining operations late last year and found that some companies began operations without doing proper feasibility studies or environmental impact assessments, according to the Ministry of Industry and Trade official.

Many companies intentionally reported a lower concentration of minerals to the government than the actual content because they wanted to pay less tax, he said.

Companies have been found to illegally release chemicals into waterways, have encroached on state land and have sent heavier than allowed trucks out on roads, an official of the Energy and Mines Department of Xaysomboun province, north of Vientiane, told RFA last week.

In Oudomxay province in northern Laos, officials in 2021 shut down seven mining projects and two mineral processing plants belonging to Chinese investors that didn’t comply with contracts and laws, according to a provincial Department of Energy and Mines official.

Minister of Planning and Investment Khamjane Vongphosy told lawmakers in June that the national government has suspended “many new mining projects that benefit less and are not worth the loss of our natural resources.”

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.

On a rugged stretch of the Gulf Coast in Texas, environmental groups called foul in 2020 when an oil company sought pollution permits to expand its export terminal beside Lavaca Bay. 

Led by a coalition of local shrimpers and oystermen, the groups produced an analysis alleging that the company, Max Midstream, underrepresented expected emissions in order to avoid a more rigorous permitting process and stricter pollution control requirements. 

In its response, Max Midstream did not respond to those allegations. Instead, it cited what it characterized as the “quintessential one-mile test” by Texas’ environmental regulator, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, to claim that the groups and citizens involved had no right to bring forth a challenge because they lived more than one mile from the Seahawk Oil Terminal. 

“The well-established Commission precedent has been repeated again and again,” the lawyers wrote. “Based on the quintessential one-mile test relied upon by the Commission for decades, none of the Hearing Requests can be granted.”

The TCEQ agreed, rejecting all hearing requests and issuing the permit as initially proposed. 

But the agency says the one-mile test cited by the company’s lawyers doesn’t exist.

“The Commission has never adopted a one-mile policy,” said TCEQ spokesperson Laura Lopez. “Instead, the Commission applies all factors set out in statute and rules.”

Indeed, the test is not codified in Texas law or TCEQ rules. Yet it appears consistently in TCEQ opinions going back at least 13 years as a means to restrict public challenges to air pollution permits. It has been cited repeatedly by industry lawyers and denounced by environmental advocates.

“This practice is arbitrary and unlawful,” said Erin Gaines, an Austin-based senior attorney with the nonprofit Earthjustice. “TCEQ’s practices prevent people from having a meaningful voice in the permitting process for polluting facilities in their community.” 

U.S. law requires that states provide citizens with the opportunity to challenge pollution permits in federal court. The rules regarding who may bring forth challenges are laid out in Article III of the U.S. Constitution, which doesn’t say anything about a distance limit. 

Dozens of Texas environmental groups have argued in petitions, now before the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, that TCEQ unlawfully restricts access to judicial review, including through the one-mile rule, and litigants in the Max Midstream case have now challenged the use of the one-mile rule in federal court and are awaiting a hearing set for this fall. 

The TCEQ, which is responsible for implementing federal pollution laws in Texas, issued its blanket denial that the rule exists despite a list of more than 15 cases compiled by Inside Climate News that centered on the one-mile standard. In some, it was explicitly cited by TCEQ itself, or by industry lawyers. In others, the one-mile standard is depicted on maps produced by the TCEQ. In each case, the distance standard is the main or the only justification offered for granting or denying citizens’ hearing requests.

Last year the nonprofit Earthjustice reviewed 460 requests for air permit hearings between 2016 and 2021. It found that while requests from citizens living within one mile of a facility comprised 12 percent of the requests, they comprised 83 percent of the requests the agency granted; almost all of the remaining 17 percent of granted requests came from people who lived only slightly farther than one mile away.  

“TCEQ’s actions speak for themselves,” Gaines said. “TCEQ routinely denies hearing requests from members of the public unless they own property within one mile of a facility.”

The one-mile standard 

Texans who wish to challenge TCEQ permit decisions must file a request with the agency. Its executive director reviews those requests and recommends whether or not the agency’s three commissioners, all appointed by the Republican governor of Texas, should grant them. 

To do that, the executive director assesses whether the challengers qualify as “affected persons” with legal standing to bring forth complaints. Texas’ administrative code considers an “affected person” anyone who will be “affected by the application” in a way that is not “common to members of the general public.”

When formulating recommendations, the TCEQ’s Lopez said, the executive director “considers many factors, only one of which relates to the location of the facility.”

However, a review of the agency’s recommendations shows that the distance standard is regularly the only factor used to recommend rejection of hearing requests.

It appears in writing as far back as 2010, when 36 people challenged a permit renewal for a gas processing plant in northeast Texas, mostly complaining about odorous hydrogen sulfide gas coming from the facility’s flares. 

“The Executive Director has generally determined that hearing requestors who reside greater than one mile from the facility are not likely to be impacted differently than any other member of the general public,” wrote the executive director at the time, Mark Vickery, who is now a lobbyist for the Texas Association of Manufacturers. “For this permit application, the Executive Director’s staff has determined that no requestors are located within one mile of the proposed facility.”

(The permit renewal in question was not eligible for a hearing anyway, Vikery wrote, because it posed no changes from its original form.)

His recommendation: none of the requestors should be recognized as affected persons. The TCEQ commissioners agreed.

“All requests for a contested case hearing are hereby DENIED,” wrote then-TCEQ Chair Bryan Shaw, who is now a lobbyist for the Texas Oil and Gas Association.  

“Rule of thumb“

By 2014, the rule was well known among lawyers for industrial developers. That year, 16 members of the Danevang Lutheran Church in rural Wharton County requested a hearing over plans to build a gas-fired power plant in their tiny town. 

In written arguments to the TCEQ, lawyers for the plant developer, Indeck Wharton, wrote, “A key factor the Commission frequently uses as guidance on the distance issue is the one-mile ‘rule of thumb.’”

“While it is not an immutable rule, the Commission frequently uses it as a guide,” the lawyers wrote. “It is not found in any statute, regulation or guidance document. Instead, it is founded in common sense and experience.”

TCEQ’s executive director at the time, Zak Covar, then invoked the one-mile limit.

“Although the church is within one mile of the proposed facility, the request does not claim that any person resides at the church,” Covar wrote before the commissioners denied the church members’ request for a hearing and issued the permit as proposed. 

In 2017, the TCEQ received 16 hearing requests — including from local residents, a Texas A&M University chemist and the Bryan Independent School District — over plans by Saint-Gobain Ceramics and Plastic Inc., to build a facility in Bryan.

“Because distance from the facility is key to the issue of whether there is a likely impact … the ED has identified an area of approximately one mile from the plant on the provided map,” wrote the executive director at the time, Richard Hyde. 

Only Jane Long Intermediate School sat within the one-mile radius. So TCEQ denied 15 hearing requests and granted the school district’s. Later, the school district withdrew its hearing request, citing a settlement agreement with Saint-Gobain, and TCEQ approved the permit application.

Two years later, when Annova LNG applied for permits to build a gas compressor and terminal on the Rio Grande delta, the nearby city of South Padre Island requested a hearing. 

“The City stated that it is located more than one mile from the proposed terminal,” wrote the executive director at the time, Toby Baker. “Given the distance of the City from the proposed terminal, the ED recommends that the Commission find that the City is not an affected person.”

The commission agreed. Hearings were denied and a permit was issued.

Also in 2019, 36 residents requested hearings over permits for a concrete plant in Midlothian. The nearest of them, Sarah Ingram, lived 1.2 miles away and expressed concern about the health of her children when protesting the pollution permit. 

“As none of the requestors reside within one mile of the plant’s emission point, they are not expected to experience any impacts different than those experienced by the general public,” Baker wrote. 

Commissioners denied all requests and granted the permit as proposed. 

In 2020, the nonprofit Lone Star Legal Aid filed a hearing request on behalf of Port Arthur resident John Beard over a developer’s plans to build an LNG export terminal. 

According to the request, Beard regularly spends time on Pleasure Island, an 18-mile long recreational area in Port Arthur that runs as close as 900 feet from the proposed terminal site, in his capacity as the chair of the Pleasure Island Advisory Board.

In evaluating the request, the TCEQ only considered Beard’s home address, four miles away. 

“Beard is not an affected person in his own right because he is located almost 4 miles from the facility,” wrote Baker, the executive director. 

Lone Star Legal Aid filed an 11-page response, claiming “sites like Port Arthur LNG require the commission to consider a larger impact area than merely a mile,” and that “there are no distance restrictions imposed by law on who may be considered an affected person.” 

TCEQ referred the question to the State Office of Administrative Hearings, where an administrative law judge agreed with Lone Star Legal Aid, writing, “the Applicant’s own data indicated that operation of the Proposed Facility will result in increased levels of [nitrogen oxides] and [fine particulate matter] at Mr. Beard’s residence.”

The administrative judge declared Beard an “affected person” and ordered a hearing over the pollution permit, which was held in February 2022. A second administrative judge also agreed with some of Lone Star Legal Aid’s complaints and recommended that the TCEQ require Port Arthur LNG to use better pollution control technology that would lower emissions of nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide from the facility’s eight gas compressor turbines.

But the commissioners rejected most of the judges’ recommendations, calling them “economically unreasonable,” and approved the permit.  

Meanwhile, TCEQ has granted hearing requests for requestors who live within a mile. In 2015, a group called Citizens Alliance for Fairness and Progress in Corpus Christi requested a hearing over air pollution permits for a planned modification at a Citgo Refinery, and identified group members living a few blocks from the refinery. 

Five years later, the executive director recommended granting the request “because the Alliance identifies as members residents (sic) that reside within one mile of the proposed facility.” Citgo withdrew its application before a hearing was held. 

Legal complaints 

The country’s landmark environmental laws, the Clean Air and Clean Water acts, require states to provide opportunities for citizens to challenge pollution permits in court, a process known as judicial review, so a judge may evaluate if permits are consistent with federal standards. 

Texas law provides such opportunities in its health and safety code, which says: “A person affected by a ruling, order, decision, or other act of the [TCEQ]… may appeal the action by filing a petition in a district court.” 

But multiple petitions to the EPA have alleged that Texas courts will only take up pollution permit complaints if the plaintiff has already been through a “contested case hearing” in administrative courts run by the state. Thus, by denying complainants’ requests for contested case hearings, often citing the one-mile standard, the TCEQ controls their access to the courts. 

“Participation in the contested case hearing process is a prerequisite to seeking judicial review of a TCEQ permitting decision,” reads one 38-page petition filed with the EPA in 2021 by 22 Texas environmental groups, focused on TCEQ’s water pollution management. “This empowers the TCEQ full discretion to deny any person the right of judicial review.”

Where federal law is concerned, requirements for access to judicial review are laid out in Article III of the U.S. Constitution. When states are charged with enforcing federal law, they may not impose limits beyond what the Constitution says, according to Gaines, the environmental attorney with Earthjustice in Texas.

In another 61-page petition filed last year with the EPA over TCEQ’s air pollution management, 11 Texas environmental groups said the contested case hearing process is absent from the sweeping pollution management plans that Texas, like all states, must submit to the EPA for approval. 

That process, the petition says, includes “an arbitrary presumption that only those who own property or live within one mile of a proposed new or modified source are affected persons entitled to participate in a contested case hearing.”

“While not codified anywhere, this ‘rule of thumb’ is used regardless (of) how large the source is, the character of the emissions, the size of a facility’s stacks, or local meteorological conditions,” the petition said. 

For that petition, an EarthJustice analysis showed that TCEQ granted only 12 percent of hearing requests between 2016 and 2021 — virtually all of them from people who lived within a mile or just slightly further from the applicant’s location. 

Early this year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency responded to the 2021 petition and said it was “informally investigating the allegations.” 

“If proven to be true, the allegations outlined in the Petition are concerning,” Charles Maguire, the EPA deputy regional administrator, wrote in January.  

The EPA can revoke a state’s authority to implement federal environmental law if the state regulator does not meet program requirements, Maguire wrote, including “failure to comply with the public participation requirements.”

A spokesperson for EPA Region 6, Jennah Durant, told Inside Climate News, “Because both petitions are still under review, EPA cannot provide further details at this time.”

Durant declined requests for interviews with Region 6 administrator Earthea Nance and did not respond to questions about why only informal investigations were launched. 

“If states start to deviate too much from national expectations about good implementation enforcement, which includes access to judicial review, the EPA can disapprove of the state’s plan,” said Cary Coglianese, director of the Penn Program on Regulation at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s not a threat that’s used often and it can’t be used lightly.”

The case of Max Midstream

Diane Wilson filed her first hearing request with the TCEQ in 1989. Since then she’s filed over a hundred more, she guesses. Only twice has she been recognized as an affected person, in 1998 and 2015. 

“You ask any activist out there, any grassroots person, and they will tell you the same thing about TCEQ,” she said. “They’re in a big love affair with industry.”

Wilson, who leads an organization called San Antonio Bay Estuarine Waterkeeper, filed a challenge with the TCEQ when Max Midstream sought its permit to discharge airborne toxins including “hazardous air pollutants” such as hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, volatile organic compounds and fine particulate matter, all known by the EPA to cause cancer and other serious health impacts.

Her organization, together with the Environmental Integrity Project and Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid, obtained data from Max Midstream’s permit application for the Seahawk Oil Terminal, analyzed it and concluded that the company underrepresented expected emissions in order to avoid a more rigorous review process for larger pollution sources. 

That was when lawyers for Max Midstream cited the one-mile rule.

“Based on consistent Commission precedent,” the lawyers wrote. “Only a property owner with an interest within one mile or slightly farther could possibly qualify for a contested case hearing.”

“It’s crazy they say that,” said Wilson, 75, as she sat in a bayside park in Port Lavaca. She pointed across the water to the sprawling Formosa Plastics Corp. plant that stood prominently on the horizon, some seven miles away (farther than Max Midstream). “I have been here and watched releases from that plant come clear across the bay. It’s like a fog come in.”

She submitted to the TCEQ analysis from Ranajit Sahu, a private environmental consultant in California who previously managed air quality programs and has a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology. He testified that harmful health impacts from the terminal could extend up to five miles away. 

She also pointed to a 2009 study, led by a researcher at Texas A&M University and published in the journal Ecotoxicology, which linked clusters of genetic damage among cows in Calhoun County to industrial emissions up to 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) away. The largest cluster identified was seven kilometers (4.3 miles) from the industrial facilities.

Nevertheless, in a 2022 opinion, Baker, the TCEQ executive director, sided with Max Midstream. Although Wilson had stated that she regularly spent time near the site of the proposed facility, her home was 16 miles away in the town of Seadrift. 

Baker wrote: “Given the distance of Ms. Wilson’s residence relative to the location of the terminal, her health and safety would not be impacted in a manner different from the general public. Therefore, the ED recommends that the commission find that Diane Wilson is not an affected person.”

The director used the same reasoning to recommend rejection of hearing requests from five residents in Port Lavaca, about 4 miles across the water from the Seahawk terminal — a complex of huge storage tanks, marine loading docks and a pump station to move oil through a 100-mile pipeline. 

They included Mauricio Blanco, a 51-year-old shrimper who said he spends nine hours per day on the water close to the proposed facility, even though he lives six miles away. 

Also included: Curtis Miller, 61, owner of Miller’s Seafood, a national wholesaler of shrimp, fish and oysters started by his uncle in the 1960s, with its headquarters on the bayside in Port Lavaca. 

In official comments, he told the TCEQ he would be harmed economically by increased air emissions because carbon dioxide from the terminal will contribute to acidification of bay waters, harming the oyster population he depends on. 

Baker acknowledged Miller’s economic concerns, but concluded that “based on his location relative to the terminal, Mr. Miller’s health and safety would not be impacted in a manner different from the general public.”

Miller, a stout seaman covered in sunspots, said, “I don’t know what they base that on. I think we could be strongly affected here 4 or 5 miles away.”

From the docks at Port Lavaca, he pointed across the water at the Seahawk Terminal, the tallest feature on the horizon, looming large to the northeast. 

“Does that look far away to you?” he said.

Then he pointed at a U.S. flag that was flapping to the southwest, directly from the plant to where he stood. 

“Look which way the wind is blowing,” he said. “That’s our prevailing summer wind.”

In April 2022, the TCEQ commissioners agreed with the executive director and denied all hearing requests. 

It issued Max Midstream a permit authorizing 61 different emissions points to release up to eight different air contaminants at a collective rate of hundreds of pounds per hour.

“Emissions from this facility must not cause or contribute to ‘air pollution’ as defined in Texas Health and Safety Code,” the permit said. 

In June 2022, Wilson sued the TCEQ in federal court, alleging that it “acted arbitrarily and unreasonably in determining that Plaintiffs did not qualify as affected persons” based solely on distance. 

“There are no distance restrictions imposed by law for this type of permit,” reads a legal brief Wilson filed for the case in July 2023.  

She claimed TCEQ issued a pollution permit that was not compliant with state and federal law and asked the court to overturn it. A first hearing in the case is set for November. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The one-mile rule: Texas’ unwritten and arbitrary policy protects big polluters from citizen complaints on Aug 12, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Dylan Baddour, Inside Climate News.

Rapper Byu Har, who is the son of prominent musician Naing Myanmar, posted the video on Facebook where he called out the “minister of electricity,” calling the holder of the office, which he could not name, “a fool.” The ministry’s proper name is the Ministry of Electric Power and the minister of electric power is Thaung Han.

“I want to tell the minister of electricity who is wearing that elegant uniform, and the employees under the ministry of electricity that you guys are all stupid fools,” he said in the video. “ Even under the old lady’s [Aung San Suu Kyi’s] government, not only did we have enough electricity without any power outage, her government even lowered the rate of electricity bills.”

The country is currently experiencing power shortages, and residents have told RFA’s Burmese Service that many areas of Yangon, where Byu Har lives, get power for only 10 hours per day – five in the morning and another five in the afternoon and evening. Some areas of the city, such as the area where retired military officers live, are supplied with full power, though.

“You can’t supply enough electricity to us. You can barely supply us every five hours. Even that is not certain,” Byu Har said. 

In addition to the criticism of Myanmar’s electric power ministry, Byu Har also had choice words for the junta’s leader, Sen. Gen. Min Aung Hlaing.

“The guy who is governing the country is also a stupid incompetent fool himself,” he said. “You guys have no [expletive deleted] skill at all. Even if a fool like me were to govern this country, I promise that we would have enough electricity with no power outages. … I am cursing at you because I don’t have the electricity. Got it? If you want to arrest me, just come.”

A source close to the family confirmed the arrest to RFA and said that Byu Har is being held in the North Dagon Police station in the eastern part of Yangon. His father Naing Myanmar was not available for comment. 

Byu Har and others like him are brave for telling the truth in a public forum like Facebook, human rights lawyer and legal analyst Kyee Myint told RFA.

“What they are saying is all true, but it’s a pain in the neck for people who don’t want to hear such criticisms,” said Kyee Myint. “They criticize neither to gain power nor to ruin the country. They criticize it to help the country get better.” 

He said that criticizing the junta over the electricity shortage was an example of strength and love for the country.

“But the junta arresting him for such criticisms indicates that the country is failing and that the rule of law is not working either,” Kyee Myint said.

Translated by Myo Min Aung. Edited by Eugene Whong and Matt Reed.

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

Anonymous individuals have created fake copies of the articles they seek to censor, with publication dates preexisting those of the original articles. These individuals then issue a copyright infringement claim under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to the servers that host the original articles. Under US law, “any online author saying that their content has been stolen can seek to have what they claim is the infringing material ‘taken down’ by triggering a formal legal process through web servers who host the material.” The process differs depending on the server, but the bogus complaints can keep content blocked for weeks while the original author proves their credentials.

As the OCCRP and the BBC reported, the digital news website Diario Rombe has been subject to such complaints for five articles it co-published with the OCCRP. Based in Spain, Diario Rombe is an investigative news outlet focused on Equatorial Guinea. The articles in question cover Gabriel Mbaga Obiang Lima, who is Equatorial Guinea’s new minister of planning and economic development and the son of the nation’s president, and the attorney NJ Ayuk. As the OCCRP reported, in 2019 South Africa’s Mail & Guardian was attacked using the DMCA for reporting that Ayuk had been previously convicted of fraud in the US and investigated for money laundering in Ghana. In that case, the Mail & Guardian website was taken down in what the respected newspaper called a “censorship attack.”

In 2022 Climate Home News published an article about Ayuk’s new partnership with two UN agencies, referring to Ayuk as a “convicted fraudster lobbying for African gas.” In a genuine show of the power of investigative journalism, the UN cancelled these initiatives following the article’s publication. Two weeks later, however, Climate Home’s editor, Megan Darby, was forced to remove the article for several weeks while she addressed the false claims. “These bogus allegations look like a devious tactic to suppress independent journalism,” Darby stated.

Weaknesses in the enforcement of DMCA takedowns have been a subject of discussion in various commercial fields including cryptocurrency, YouTube, and Google. However, reports of the attacks on journalism are not garnering the same outrage.

An article published by Glyn Moody of Tech Dirt reported on a 2022 research project by Lumen which found “nearly 34,000 takedown notices that ‘appear to be attempts to misuse the DMCA notice-and-takedown process.’” These claims targeted online articles, and largely employed the same fake backdating technique used against the Mail & Guadian and Climate Home News.

A separate report by Peter Guest of Rest of World discussed an entire sector of business known as “reputation management”—or, tellingly, “reputation laundering”—that regularly utilizes copyright complaints to protect clients’ reputations. These businesses use a flurry of false complaints to target information that reflects poorly on their powerful public-facing clients. Guest reported, “The industry has thrived, in part thanks to the effectiveness, ease, and low cost of making complaints using the DMCA. Hosting providers often lack the capacity or interest to investigate every complaint, and, under the law they can be held liable for contributing to the infringement of copyright, if it’s later proven, which can be very costly. Often, they simply comply with these requests.”

The threats posed by these phony copyright complaints are largely being raised and fought by independent investigative journalists. Without the legal capital to fight back on a large scale, disseminators of invaluable information are being stripped of their only means to expose and oppose corruption, their speech. Until copyright law is amended to acknowledge and protect legitimate authors, censorship at the hands the powerful will continue to prevail in the fight for narrative.

Sources:        

“Fake Copyright Complaints Seek to Remove Reports on Minister and Lawyer,” Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, March 1, 2023.

BBC Trending, “How Fake Copyright Complaints Are Muzzling Journalists,” BBC News, March 2, 2023.

Student Researcher: Zach McNanna (North Central College)

Faculty Evaluator: Steve Macek (North Central College)

The post Bogus Copyright Complaints Throttle Investigative Journalism appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.

Papua New Guinea’s The National newspaper has welcomed a statement by the Information and Communication Technology Department (DICT) that the government has no wish to control the media to limit freedom of expression.

Editor-in-chief Christine Pakakota said a free media provided oxygen to any country claiming to be democratic, and effectively promoting transparency and accountability.

She was responding to a government statement last week, saying that the proposed national media development policy had “no intention of giving powers to the government to control the media or infringe on the freedom of expression”.

• READ MORE: ‘Chilling effect on journalism’ – Fiji academic warns PNG against media law change
• Other PNG media policy reports

The National submitted its response to the draft policy last Tuesday.

Pakakota said it was obvious that the government’s intention and concern was “to ensure that the people get important and accurate information”.

“We are with any government that wishes to improve the standard of living of the people as well as to develop the country,” she said.

“And when the government says it aims to do so through the promotion of democracy, good governance, human rights and social and economic development, as stated in the covering statement to the draft policy, we will proudly stand beside it.”

‘Long journey’
She regretted that the government had given stakeholders only two weeks “to respond to a matter that would have serious and long-lasting impact on the country’s long journey to becoming a developed nation and take its rightful place in the world”.

“We also believe that the PNG Media Council must be fully independent and adequately funded by the state and/or donors, and run by highly-respected persons,” she said.

“It represents the interests of the media industry in PNG.”

She said the council should also have a complaints committee to judge complaints about press and broadcasting conduct as set out in a Media Code of Ethics and Practice.

“The council should have a chairman and executive secretary selected from the public,” she said.

“Members of the complaints committee (at least five) are also to be picked from the public.”

• Pacific Media Watch reports that the DICT has removed the draft media policy from its website.

Republished with permission.

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

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Adam Bychawski.

Serial liar and Republican U.S. Congressman George Santos was the subject of four complaints filed Monday by advocacy groups alleging campaign finance and ethics violations, including an alleged scheme to hide the true and unknown source of over $700,000 in campaign funds.

End Citizens United filed separate complaints with the Department of Justice (DOJ), Federal Election Commission (FEC), and Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) over Santos' (N.Y.) campaign spending, fundraising, and financial disclosures.

"All this takes place amid Santos' compulsive lying about his entire background—and a pattern of serious reporting problems the FEC already knows about, including excessive contributions."

The group said in a statement that its DOJ complaint "argues that Santos violated the Ethics in Government Act by not only filing a required financial disclosure almost a year late, but likely making several omissions related to various purported assets he holds."

The complaint with the OCE alleges Santos "violated federal law by soliciting campaign contributions in exchange for attending a swearing-in event on Capitol grounds," the statement added. The FEC filing "focuses on a purported $700,000 personal loan that he made to his campaign that the group says either came from a 'shell company' or was a prohibited corporate contribution."

The OCE complaint also alleges that nearly 40 payments of $199.99 made by the Santos campaign constitute an attempt to evade federal laws requiring receipts for campaign purchases over $200.

End Citizens United president Tiffany Muller toldInsider's Brian Metzger, who first reported the group's complaints, that "Congressman Santos has shown a blatant disregard for the law and has flagrantly brushed aside the transparency voters deserve from their elected officials."

"His actions are not only unethical, but illegal, and call into question his ability to serve," Muller added. "The FEC, the DOJ, and the OCE should immediately begin investigations and hold him accountable for his shady and unlawful actions."

Meanwhile, a similar complaint filed Monday by the Campaign Legal Center (CLC) alleges that Santos concealed the sources of his 2022 campaign's funding, that he lied about campaign spending, and that he illegally used campaign funds for personal spending.

According to the complaint, Santos, campaign treasurer Nancy Marks, and unknown accomplices hatched a straw donor scheme to conceal the source of $705,000 that the congressman claimed to loan to his campaign. They are also accused of lying on FEC disclosure forms and other reporting violations; and of unlawfully spending campaign funds on personal expenses like the house Santos rented during his 2022 run.

"All this takes place amid Santos' compulsive lying about his entire background—and a pattern of serious reporting problems the FEC already knows about, including excessive contributions. The FEC sent the Santos campaign 20 letters in the 2022 cycle about these," CLC senior researcher Roger G. Wieand tweeted Monday.

"We think that rather than Santos making overnight millions from a business he can't explain, he, and others unknown, engaged in a scheme to provide secret, illegal contributions to his campaign," Wieand continued.

"Santos has become a punchline in the national media, but these campaign finance violations are no joke," he added. "We think the people of New York's 3rd District deserve truth and transparency about where Santos' money came from and how it was spent. We're asking the FEC to investigate."

CLC senior vice president and legal director Adav Noti said in a statement:

George Santos has lied to voters about a lot of things, but while lying about your background might not be illegal, deceiving voters about your campaign's funding and spending is a serious violation of federal law. That is what we are asking the Federal Election Commission to investigate. As the agency responsible for enforcing America's campaign finance laws, the FEC owes it to the public to find out the truth about how George Santos raised and spent the money he used to run for public office, and to ensure accountability for Santos' illegal conduct.

The new complaints follow a January 3 OCE filing by the liberal super PAC American Bridge 21st Century requesting an investigation of Santos' alleged failure "to file timely, accurate, and complete financial disclosure reports," as well as the possibility "that he may have even falsified information on his disclosure report."

Monday's filings also came after a Republican New York prosecutor last month announced an investigation into Santos' "numerous fabrications and inconsistencies" involving his education, employment, and property ownership history as well as his racial and religious background.

As the complaint notes, "Santos is also wanted in Brazil for using stolen checks to make fraudulent purchases in 2008—a crime for which he was charged by Brazilian authorities and to which he reportedly confessed in 2010."

The barrage of ethics complaints against Santos comes as House Republicans—who now narrowly control the lower chamber under Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.)—plan to gut the nonpartisan Office of Congressional Ethics.

The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington tweeted Monday; "We cannot stress this enough: Kevin McCarthy's plan to gut the Office of Congressional Ethics in the rules vote tonight would be a disaster for everyone except corrupt politicians."

The consumer advocacy group Public Citizen also noted Monday that "McCarthy plans to gut the Office of Congressional Ethics TONIGHT."

"The same office that investigates any congressional wrongdoing," the group added. "The same office that would investigate George Santos and [former President Donald] Trump's cronies. Pay attention. This isn't a coincidence."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Seattle Times. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

For years, the complaints languished with Washington state education officials.

A therapist emailed about a teenage boy with severe autism, who had wailed for hours inside a locked room in her school, pleading to be let out. A local education official saw a teacher shove her foot in a student’s face as he lay on the ground and threaten to step on him. A special education director observed uncertified teachers struggling with no curriculum and urged the state to step in to protect “these extremely high-risk students.”

The alarming reports cataloged a failure to serve kids with disabilities at the Northwest School of Innovative Learning, a private school designed to cater to Washington’s most vulnerable students.

Despite the complaints, the state took no action to force changes at Northwest SOIL. Instead, it allowed the school to stay open and tap a pipeline of taxpayer money. In the five school years ending in 2021, Northwest SOIL collected at least $38 million and took in hundreds of public school students.

Northwest SOIL operated for years with few trained teachers, and its staff relied heavily on restraint and isolation. Some of the students made no academic progress and even regressed, as their parents were shut out of information that would be available at any public school.

The lack of state oversight has allowed Northwest SOIL to essentially warehouse kids with complex developmental and behavioral disabilities, according to a Seattle Times and ProPublica review of more than 17,000 pages of documents from 45 school districts, three police departments and the state education department.

“Northwest SOIL is an example of turning back the clock 50 years on kids” to an era when people with disabilities were denied access to education, said Vanessa Tucker, a Pacific Lutheran University professor who serves on the state’s Special Education Advisory Council. “It should not continue.”

While most of the roughly 140,000 students in special education in Washington attend classes within their public schools, Northwest SOIL is the biggest player in an obscure but vital corner of the state’s special education system. It’s one of a set of private schools, known as nonpublic agencies, that serve about 500 public school students with the most serious disabilities.

Since the 1980s, states across the country have reduced their reliance on separate schools for special education students and moved to integrate such students with their peers. Washington, which has the nation’s second-highest dropout rate for special education students, has recently made strides by increasing the amount of time students spend in regular classrooms.

But for those with the highest needs, the state has been heading in the opposite direction, sending more students out of traditional public schools.

That led to the state and school districts pouring at least $173 million into outsourcing special education to Northwest SOIL and other schools over the five school years ending in 2021. While a full accounting is not available, state spending on these programs more than doubled during that time.

The state knows little about the more than 60 campuses that serve the students. Some of these private schools have decent reputations, but the state doesn’t track how many kids in private schools successfully return to their community schools — a key goal for many of the programs. It doesn’t know how many are restrained or locked in isolation rooms. Until two years ago, it couldn’t even count how many public school students attended these schools.

Those gaps are the result of a fundamental flaw in Washington’s oversight system, which places responsibility for monitoring the private schools not on the state but on individual school districts. State education officials said districts are expected to spot and correct problems, as they’re the ones contracting with the schools to educate students.

But because more than 40 districts at a time send students to Northwest SOIL’s three campuses, and each district only receives information about its own students, no single school district or agency has a complete picture of what’s going on there.

So serious incidents — one district learned that a Northwest SOIL staffer kicked a fourth-grader, another heard that a teacher dragged a 9-year-old boy with autism by his thigh — might appear to be isolated rather than signs of systemic problems. Pieced together, reports from parents, teachers, visitors and police paint a troubling picture the state has failed to address.

“There is probably a sentiment that those kids are bad kids,” said Carrie Basas, the former director of the Washington State Governor’s Office of the Education Ombuds. “It’s just students that we have already written off, that teachers or school leaders may perceive as threatening, and we just send them somewhere.” She added, “There has to be somebody in charge.”

Even Northwest SOIL’s top administrator in 2021, Donna Green, complained to the school’s owner, Fairfax Hospital, that the company had crossed ethical boundaries. In a resignation letter, Green said she struggled to make changes as the hospital’s parent company, Universal Health Services, a Fortune 500 health care corporation, cut staff hours and skimped on basic resources to increase profits.

The state “needs to be more hands-on to ensure that these kids are getting a proper education and not just feeding a money horse for UHS,” Green said in an interview.

Leaders of Northwest SOIL and Fairfax, the largest private psychiatric facility in Washington, declined to be interviewed for this story. They defended the program in a statement to the Times and ProPublica, saying administrators take seriously the responsibility of addressing students’ complex needs. The school said it has recently purchased a new English and math curriculum, along with computers for teachers and students.

“We are proud of our overall academic and clinical performance and earned reputation for accepting the most difficult referrals in the area,” the school said. UHS said it had no comment beyond the school’s statement.

Chris Reykdal, who heads the state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, said in an interview that his office doesn’t have clear investigative authority or enough people to monitor private schools. But he said his staff looked into complaints about Northwest SOIL four years ago, and he stands by the agency’s decision to not crack down on the school.

“I do think that the response was there,” Reykdal said. “It’s just that people might disagree that we should have done more — which is a fair criticism.”

With no one responsible for scrutinizing the schools, even the most serious warning signs fell through the cracks, with devastating consequences.

Northwest SOIL’s website paints a serene picture, splashed with stock photos of smiling kids. The Tacoma campus advertises hiking trails, pet therapy and 11 separate staff specialties — from speech language pathologists to licensed mental health counselors.

In reality, the building sits in the vast asphalt parking lot of a megachurch. The closest thing to a hiking path is a 200-foot-long walkway that cuts through a patch of greenery between sections of pavement.

Former employees and records from the state and districts describe more of an institution than a school: A staffer wands students with a metal detector as they arrive. Kids bang on the locked doors from inside “quiet rooms,” whose walls are sometimes smeared with feces or blood. At times, children wander the school or aides sleep in chairs.

The Times interviewed 23 former staffers, many of whom described chronic shortages of classroom assistants, inadequate training, a lack of licensed therapists and high-school-educated aides running classes. Amid high turnover, some positions sat vacant for months.

"My role was to be the school therapist, but it rarely worked out that way because they were so understaffed,” said Kingsley Simpson, who worked at the Tumwater campus from 2016 until this March. “I covered as an educational assistant or a teacher or at the front desk. I rarely got the opportunity to do therapy."

Northwest SOIL said its hiring practices ensure that “only appropriate and qualified candidates are hired.” It added, “As in many areas of healthcare in Washington (and other states), staffing shortages are a challenge. Nonetheless, we meet appropriate staffing levels that satisfy our student needs.”

Former employees say — and documents back up — that Northwest SOIL staffers were stretched thin managing students and often resorted to restraint or isolation. But the state doesn’t track how often restraints are used.

Among the few reports state regulators do require are annual staffing lists. But even then, OSPI doesn’t consistently check them to see if staff are qualified to teach.

Jimmy Fioretti worked at Northwest SOIL for five years. The school repeatedly listed Fioretti as a special education teacher even though he lacked that certification and at times was only approved to be a substitute.

In 2017 and 2019, police investigated after two separate allegations that Fioretti had choked students at Northwest SOIL. Each time, he told the police he never violated school restraint policy. Prosecutors declined to pursue charges, citing insufficient evidence or a law that broadly permits student discipline.

Fioretti — who has been convicted of assault and felony drug possession — was also accused in July 2020 of choking a housemate while living at a drug and alcohol rehabilitation home, according to a police report. He pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault and served five days in jail.

Fioretti did not respond to phone calls or emailed questions.

State law requires nonpublic agencies to “promptly notify” the state and school districts of “any complaints it receives regarding services to students.” But the law doesn’t define what constitutes a complaint. There is no indication that Northwest SOIL notified state education officials of any police investigations.

Scott Raub, OSPI’s administrator for these private schools, said in an interview that abuse allegations would likely count as a complaint, but “just because you notified us, it doesn’t result in anything specific.”

While the law is unclear about who’s responsible for investigating problems, the state has powerful enforcement tools. Officials can force these private schools to comply with specific conditions or prohibit them from accepting public school students if they don't. That could have shut down Northwest SOIL. But the state never took those steps.

One day in late 2020, Fioretti wrapped his arm around a 13-year-old boy’s neck and hauled him across the classroom, as the teenager grasped at Fioretti’s forearm.

A school counselor reported the “chokehold” to Child Protective Services and the police, describing how Fioretti had instigated the confrontation and how the boy couldn’t breathe, his eyes bulging for half a minute until Fioretti released him. Almost immediately, the boy vomited in a trash can. The chokehold was caught on surveillance video reviewed by Tacoma police.

But, once again, neither the state nor the school district would know the severity.

In the more sanitized narrative that Northwest SOIL reported to the boy’s parents and his home district, Tacoma Public Schools, Fioretti wrote that staff “restrained” the student without injury and “attempted to deescalate” the situation, then “escorted him to the hallway.”

Shortly after the incident, the school director sat down at Fioretti’s desk. Fioretti said the boy was “running his lips,” according to an internal company email. Fioretti “then got teary eyed,” the director wrote, “and said, ‘I can’t do this. I love my job and you guys but I am not OK to be here.’”

Nine days later, Northwest SOIL fired him for misconduct.

Northwest SOIL administrators declined to comment on specific allegations of abuse but said “use of restraints and seclusion are always used as a last response when a student is at imminent risk of hurting themselves or others.” The school said any allegation is promptly investigated. “Since even one unintended outcome is one too many, we take the time to determine what lessons can be learned from the regrettable incident,” the statement said.

A review of more than 1,000 pages of restraint reports show that Northwest SOIL regularly sends districts vague summaries of events.

One teenage boy with autism couldn’t tell his parents what happened at Northwest SOIL. He only knows a few words and mostly doesn’t speak. So every day when he returned home, his parents would strip off his clothes and check his body for bruises. They found them often, said his father, who asked that neither he nor his son be named to protect the privacy of his family.

One summer afternoon in 2020, Northwest SOIL reported to the boy’s school district and his parents that he was shoving staff. They tried to “redirect” him to his desk, and he “tripped over a chair, falling backwards,” the report says, his arm smashing through a glass window. The boy, then 16, went to the hospital and received three stitches.

His father questioned how his son could fall backward, arm first, into a glass window. The report didn’t say where the window was or how the incident started.

Before the fall, the boy was marked as “safe, responsible & respectable - Holding a Book” at 9:38 a.m. Then he tried to “elope” — or wander away, a common occurrence among children with autism — 11 times, the report says. That was just 10 minutes later.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” his father said.

As far back as 2014, Northwest SOIL was already drawing scrutiny from the state’s biggest school district.

Two special education officials from Seattle Public Schools visited the Redmond campus and reported that what they saw left them “literally speechless.” They said kids roamed freely around campus without supervision, and education was virtually nonexistent. They implored the district to withdraw all its students immediately.

Records show the district continued to send students each year but monitored Northwest SOIL more closely. After conditions seemed to improve, the school board voted in 2016 to keep using the school.

Seattle was focused on its own students. But administrators from other districts were also fielding alarming reports about Northwest SOIL.

In October 2017, the head of special education at the Orting School District, Chris Willis, emailed the state about the Tacoma teacher who had threatened to step on a boy. The incident happened in front of an Orting official and parent who were touring the campus, and Willis said he worried problems at the school were “more systemic.” But OSPI had no record of investigating.

Then, in May 2018, Rochester School District’s special education director visited Northwest SOIL’s Tumwater campus to check on a student and wrote to Glenna Gallo, then OSPI’s assistant superintendent of special education, that “the elementary student did nothing during the time I was in the class and no one interacted with him.”

During one visit, the Rochester director observed the boy opening YouTube on a computer and watching a game of “a man going to different places with a large machine gun shooting at everything in front of him.” When Rochester pulled him out of Northwest SOIL and brought him back into a district school, it found “little to no growth academically in the two years’ time that he was at NW Soil,” the director wrote.

A month after Rochester schools’ visits, Cecilia McCormick, a McCleary School District director, reported to OSPI that her district’s student had no special education teacher supervising his instruction. “This is a violation of both federal and state law,” McCormick wrote. The fourth grade boy, who had a history of harming himself, was told by a staffer he’s a “bad boy,” she wrote.

In the summer of 2018, the Tumwater campus was up for its annual review by the state. By that point in the year, OSPI had received at least five serious complaints about Northwest SOIL from district administrators and a parent. Gallo and Raub scheduled a meeting with Northwest SOIL’s leaders.

“We said that this is not acceptable. You have to follow the expectations,” Raub said. “And we got all the assurances that we wanted to hear.”

After the meeting, more complaints poured into Raub’s inbox. The Tumwater School District reported its student did puzzles while his aide — whom the district paid for — slept in the classroom. The school also didn’t provide speech language services for months despite telling the district it had hired a specialist, Tumwater added.

Northwest SOIL didn’t respond to questions about the specific district complaints but said it “strongly refutes claims regarding the intentional billing of services not provided.”

Gallo approved the school’s 2018 annual renewal. She has since left the agency and has been nominated to be the U.S. Department of Education’s assistant secretary for special education.

Gallo did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but in a 2021 interview with The Times she said the state expects school districts to address problems at private schools.

Raub, who was new to the private schools role in 2018, said he would approach the complaints differently now that he has more experience. He pointed to a 2020 case in which OSPI received abuse allegations at another private school and conducted a detailed review of student restraint and isolation files, school policies and staff qualifications.

But the department continued to be hands-off when presented with concerns about Northwest SOIL, including an April 2021 allegation of emotional and physical abuse against an Everett student by a Northwest SOIL staffer.

Raub instructed the district to investigate and said he would be there for “continued support” if it “uncovers a broader, more systemic issue.” OSPI said the district and family never followed up. Everett said it investigated but “did not conclusively find evidence to report back” to OSPI.

This month, the agency said it was investigating a complaint about Northwest SOIL’s Redmond campus after a parent reported inadequate staffing and their student coming home with injuries — the same sort of allegation that has flowed to the state for years.

Because of the diffuse oversight system, many complaints never made it to OSPI. Less than four months after the Everett allegation, Green, Northwest SOIL’s top administrator across all campuses, detailed a series of complaints in her resignation letter, ranging from a lack of training to cutting assistants’ hours that school districts had already paid for. She also sent it to Tacoma Public Schools.

But with no requirement to forward Green’s letter to OSPI, Tacoma never did so, and neither did Northwest SOIL, leaving the state missing a critical piece of the puzzle.

In many ways, Washington’s special education funding system has exacerbated oversight problems at private schools like Northwest SOIL.

The state reformed its funding model in 1995, realizing that school districts needed more money to educate students with disabilities. It developed a safety net fund to help districts pay for special education services.

But the program prohibits those funds from being used to train teachers in public schools. And while a 2012 state Supreme Court ruling on school financing, known as the McCleary decision, resulted in the Legislature sending billions of state dollars to public schools, lawmakers sidestepped special education.

With limited options, the districts came to rely on the private schools.

The safety net model “made it easier for districts to say, ‘Let’s place the student at Northwest SOIL,’” said Tucker, the Pacific Lutheran professor.

But, unlike in other states, Washington lawmakers have not adopted key oversight and transparency regulations to protect students and taxpayers.

In Massachusetts, similar private schools are required to report all instances of restraint and isolation directly to the state, allowing central oversight.

This isn’t true in Washington. While the state tracks isolation and restraint incidents in public schools with a goal of reducing their use, it doesn’t at private schools that receive public money.

The only institution with the complete picture is the private school itself, but Northwest SOIL claims it doesn’t have to disclose the restraint and isolation reports because it’s a private company. The Times filed a public records lawsuit against Northwest SOIL’s parent company after the school denied a request for those reports and other records typically available from public schools. The lawsuit is pending.

Without information from either the state or the school, the Times and ProPublica requested copies of restraint and isolation records inside Northwest SOIL from 34 school districts. Only 27 districts provided reports, and many documents were missing.

The Bethel School District, for instance, destroyed a year's worth of reports “in error,” an official said, and had to retrieve paper copies of others from a warehouse. A district that sent dozens of students to Northwest SOIL turned over fewer restraint reports than a district that sent only one.

Raub said the department is working to improve data collection and acknowledged it “would be very useful” to track restraint and isolation.

Washington also doesn’t demand state inspections and has vague staffing obligations. It requires an unspecified number of certified teachers and only one special education teacher per school. A representative from a district has to visit every three years.

In contrast, California requires periodic state inspections, a teacher with special education credentials in every classroom and a specific ratio of students per teacher, typically 14-to-1.

Stricter standards allowed former students and staff in California to build a whistleblower case when similar problems cropped up at Universal Health Services schools there. The company shut down the last of those campuses in 2013 shortly after settling the case, without any admission of wrongdoing.

Reykdal, the Washington state superintendent, said stricter staff qualifications could improve the quality of education and reduce staff turnover at private schools.

“I think it's likely that our Legislature has to say, ‘When it comes to basic ed, we're not going to have different expectations for the private sector than we do for the public sector,’” he said. “And they should up their game on that.”

For parents like Sarah Snyder, the lax oversight of these specialty schools can turn finding the right education environment for their children into a terrifying ordeal.

Snyder knew her son Christopher needed a special school. He has autism and learning disabilities and finds it difficult at times to express his frustrations in words. Occasionally, he breaks furniture, hits his parents or punches walls.

Students like Christopher, now 16, can benefit from specialized care that private schools promise. But his mother said his stay at Northwest SOIL left him traumatized.

From his bedroom in Puyallup, his shelves brimming with Lego models, Christopher recounted his time at Northwest SOIL with extraordinary detail.

“They don’t treat you like people; they just grab you,” said Christopher, curled up on his Star Wars sheets, holding his knees to his chest. He spoke about being shoved into a seclusion room.

“It was hell —” Christopher said, glancing at his mom in the bedroom doorway. “Can I say that?” She nodded. “It was hell,” Christopher repeated.

In June 2017, a few days after starting at Northwest SOIL, Christopher came home with a disturbing story. He had watched as a boy was strapped to a chair by a belt around his stomach. Another boy erupted in an outburst, competing for attention.

Scared, Christopher, then 11 years old, wanted to call the police. “I don’t feel safe here,” he thought. “I don’t feel safe here.”

He darted across the classroom toward a phone on a filing cabinet and started to dial. A staff member grabbed his arm and twisted it behind his back, yanking him away from the phone. (The staffer later threatened to break his arm, Christopher said.)

For seven months, Snyder struggled to get information about what her son had reported. She sought help from Christopher’s home district, Bethel School District, and its school board, as well as the local PTA and nonprofit advocates. She even emailed talk show host Dr. Phil.

“I was desperate,” she said. “I was begging, ‘Please, someone, help my family.’”

Snyder got Christopher out of the school within a month. But she kept complaining to officials for months after. In one letter to OSPI she wrote that it appeared “no one is responsible” for the actions of private schools like Northwest SOIL. Bethel said it cooperated with the state’s investigation.

The state found that Northwest SOIL had violated state laws, including improperly restraining Christopher and withholding the staffer’s name.

It concluded with a reminder that the state has the power to revoke Northwest SOIL’s status.

Five months later, OSPI approved the school’s renewal without any conditions.

Taylor Blatchford and Manuel Villa of The Seattle Times contributed reporting, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica contributed research.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Mike Reicher and Lulu Ramadan, The Seattle Times.

On Sunday, October 9, officers from the Kurdistan Special Counter-Terrorism group arrested Qashqayi, the editor-in-chief of the privately owned agency Bwar News, and Ali, the senior editor of Bwar News, on the Sulaymaniyah-Erbil main road while the journalists were traveling to the capital Erbil from the eastern city of Sulaymaniyah after a reporting trip, according to news reports and statements from Bwar News and two local press freedom groups. The counter-terrorism group is affiliated with the ruling Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party. 

The journalists were arrested after two criminal complaints were made against them, according to those sources. One of the complaints was made by the counter-terrorism group against both journalists, however, CPJ could not confirm further details about the complaint.

The other, a lawsuit, was filed by Awat Sheikh Janab, minister of finance and economy of the Kurdistan region, against Qashqayi, according to those sources. The lawsuit, filed on June 8, alleges that Qashqayi violated Article 2 of the penal code for misuse of communication devices after Bwar News published a report on Janab, according to an official at the Ministry of Finance and Economy for the Kurdistan region, who spoke to CPJ by phone on the condition of anonymity, saying they’re not allowed to comment publicly.

If convicted, the journalist faces a sentence of up to five years imprisonment and a fine between 1 and 5 million Iraqi dinars (US$685 and $3,425). 

The Bwar News report, published on April 28, alleged that two senior officials of the Kurdistan Democratic Party visited Janab at his home and threatened to “publish his secrets” if he didn’t end his boycott of meetings of Iraqi Kurdistan’s council of ministers after being blamed for the region’s financial crisis. The ministry official who declined to give their name told CPJ that the allegations are “totally baseless.” CPJ called Janab several times but did not receive any response.

“Iraqi Kurdistan authorities are making a very alarming habit out of detaining journalists,” said Sherif Mansour, CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa program coordinator, in Washington, D.C. “Security forces must free Bwar News’ journalists immediately and stop arresting journalists for doing their jobs.”

The journalists stayed in solitary confinement for one night and were then transferred, on Monday, to Asayish security forces and moved to Asayish prison, according to a representative of Bwar News, who spoke to CPJ by phone but said they could not give their name because of company policy.

The journalists had not been informed of the complaints against them before their arrest, according to that source and Badriya Ismael, an Iraqi Kurdistan parliament member, who joined several others in visiting the journalists in prison on Monday and spoke to CPJ by phone. “Asayish authorities didn’t tell us anything about the nature of the complaints,” Ismael said, adding that the case is still under investigation and the journalists are in good health. 

CPJ emailed the office of the Kurdistan Special Counter-Terrorism group and called Yasin Sami, the spokesperson of Sulaymaniyah Asayish security forces, and Sarkawt Ahmed, the spokesperson of Sulaymaniyah police, but did not receive any responses.

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

“The joint exercise will be held in Nam Pong air base, Khon Khaen province, for the next two years,” an air force official, who wished to remain anonymous as they were not authorized to speak to foreign media, told BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service.

The government in Udon Thani, where the drills started on Sunday and last until next Wednesday, have received numerous complaints from local residents about noise pollution, the official said, adding that the exercise was also “paused for one day” on Thursday and will resume on Friday.

‘Falcon Strike’ joint exercises have been held regularly since 2015 but were suspended in 2020 because of the global COVID-19 pandemic.

This year, China sent six J-10C/S fighter jets, two JH-7A bombers and one Shaanxi KJ-500 airborne early warning and control (AEW&C) aircraft, said the source.

This is the first time that China’s air force has sent its JH-7A fighter-bombers to take part in a ‘Falcon Strike’.

For its part, Thailand deployed five Saab JAS 39 Gripen multi-role fighters, three Alpha Jet attack aircraft, and a Saab 340 AEW&C.

In total, 18 aircraft are taking part in the twice daily drills, and they’re “making a lot of noise,” said the unnamed air force official.

Analysts said the Royal Thai Air Force did not send U.S. made F-16 fighters to the drills as it seeks to buy advanced F-35 aircraft from the U.S.

The exercise includes “training courses such as air support, strikes on ground targets, and small and large-scale troop deployment,” according to China’s defense ministry.

Former U.S. air base

The Udorn Royal Thai Air Force Base, where the drills are being held, was a U.S. Air Force frontline facility from 1964 to 1976 at the peak of the U.S.-Thailand military alliance.

During the Vietnam War, up to 80% of all USAF air strikes over North Vietnam and Laos reportedly originated from air bases in Thailand, according to a U.S. Congressional Record from Nov. 1, 1967.

Since around 2001 Thailand “has tended to follow a foreign policy of hedging or creating balance between the U.S. and China,” said Paul Chambers, a Thailand-based military analyst.

“Especially since the 2006 coup, Thai governments have sought to offset military procurement, joint military exercises, and military training with the two countries,” Chambers told RFA.

“The U.S. will be watching the exercises but will view them understanding Thailand’s hedging policy,” he added.

Since the Thai military increased its power after coups in 2006 and 2014, Bangkok bought tanks, armored personnel carriers and entered into a controversial multi-billion-dollar contract to procure submarines from China. 

China’s arms exports to Thailand increased five-fold between 2014 and 2018 compared with the preceding five years, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute in Sweden.

The Thai air force expressed a strong interest in buying some F-35 stealth fighter jets to replace its aging fleet of F-16A/B Fighting Falcons, but Washington so far seems reluctant to consider the purchase, fearing the fighter’s sensitive technologies could be compromised by China, its biggest military and strategic rival.

Interest in U.S.-made F-35

The drills in Thailand follow the ending of a Chinese military week-long air-naval exercise around Taiwan in response to a visit to the island by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Responding to criticism that the ‘Falcon Strike’ exercise could make it harder for Thailand to get access to U.S. advanced military technology, AVM Prapas Sonjaidee, spokesman for the Royal Thai Air Force, said on Tuesday the drills are a regular practice, which is held publicly and not a secret mission.

“It is common for soldiers around the world to train together, to share experiences and learning from each other,” said Prapas, dismissing concerns about the possible F-35 procurement.

“The Air Force exercises actually will likely strengthen the arguments of those U.S. officials arguing that Washington should sell F-35s to Thailand,” said analyst Paul Chambers.

It was during the Trump administration that Washington “resurrected arms sales to Thailand,” said Chambers. 

He added that in his opinion, since the Biden administration has continued to prioritize geopolitical interests over other factors, such as human rights values, in its decision to continue sending arms to Thailand, “that sale will likely happen.”

Pimuk Rakkanam contributed to the story from Bangkok

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

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When an Army veteran was looking for somewhere to get an online aviation degree a couple of years ago in hopes of becoming a pilot, Liberty University advertised having the speed and flexibility she needed: accelerated eight-week courses with start times throughout the year and 52 affiliated flight schools around the country where she could get the required flight training. She signed up for the program, paying with the GI Bill benefits that have made military veterans such a reliable source of revenue for Liberty and other universities with large online programs.

But when her husband, who was still on active duty, learned he would be transferred from Georgia to Hawaii, she discovered that the lone Liberty flight affiliate on Oahu, George’s Aviation Services in Honolulu, did not offer the accelerated courses Liberty had touted. This meant that it would take her double the time to complete her program, two years rather than one, and would cost U.S. taxpayers more along the way, she stated in a complaint she filed with the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“There was not one time where it was clearly stated that some flight affiliates do not accept students in the accelerated program,” she wrote in her complaint. “I would not have enrolled knowing that I didn’t have the option at every flight affiliate and now I am stuck with having very few courses remaining and an inability to continue in the program.”

The complaint was one of more than a dozen provided in response to a public records request about Liberty that was filed with the Veterans Affairs department’s GI Bill Feedback Tool and shared with ProPublica. In 2018, ProPublica published an investigation of the highly lucrative online operation at Liberty, the evangelical college in Lynchburg, Virginia, founded in 1971 by the Rev. Jerry Falwell. The investigation showed how under the leadership of Falwell’s son, Jerry Falwell Jr., who took over after his father’s death in 2007, Liberty turned its online division into the financial engine of its burgeoning campus and political network, helping drive the university’s net assets from $150 million in 2007 to more than $2.5 billion in 2018.

The article revealed how much Liberty — the second-largest provider of online education after the University of Phoenix — relied on taxpayer funding for tuition revenue: Its students received more than $772 million in total aid from the Department of Education by 2017, plus more than $40 million from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Military veterans are such a big market for Liberty University Online that it has a whole division assigned to them.

And the article described a “steep drop-off in quality from the traditional college to the online courses” that was “openly acknowledged among Liberty faculty.” It showed how the university managed to keep its costs in delivering online courses exceedingly low by relying on low-paid instructors and course designers. This helped explain how Liberty, which is a nonprofit organization, managed to pocket $215 million of net income on nearly $1 billion in revenue in 2016, but it also helped explain why students were filing complaints with Virginia’s higher education oversight agency. It was a couple dozen such complaints, obtained via a public records request, that gave rise to the ProPublica investigation, revealing a much deeper iceberg of concerns about Liberty’s online operation. (In the 2018 article, Falwell Jr. described the university’s financial management as shrewd and defended the quality of its instruction.)

There have been dramatic changes at Liberty since then: In the summer of 2020, Falwell Jr. resigned as president after news reports of extramarital activities involving him and his wife. (He said that his wife had had an affair but that he had not.) Meanwhile, the university community has witnessed the realization of the goal that Falwell cited in championing Donald Trump for president in 2016: the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Throughout all the upheaval, though, complaints about online education have kept coming, as shown by the VA’s records, which were provided to Dahn Shaulis, a higher education blogger who filed a records request for complaints and then shared the agency’s response with ProPublica. Those records do not indicate whether the VA took any action in response to the complaints.

A spokesperson for Liberty said in a statement that the university is “not presently aware of any negative findings” by the VA for any such complaints. “In several circumstances,” the statement continued, “including one referenced, the VA independently determined the student’s complaint to be unfounded and did not request Liberty’s review.” (The spokesperson said the university is legally barred “from disclosing certain specific details about individual students.”) He added that Liberty “has trained hundreds-of-thousands of students and naturally not every student was fully satisfied with their experience, but we are ranked much lower with regard to VA complaints per capita compared to our online competitors.”

Asked about the complaints against Liberty, a VA spokesperson replied with a statement that noted: “VA continues to review and monitor all GI Bill schools’ compliance with applicable statutes and regulations, and when necessary, will take appropriate action and provide GI Bill students, the public, and state or federal partners with timely information and options.” The statement added, “Actions taken in response to a reported issue are not shared on the GI Bill Feedback Tool.”

The woman moving to Hawaii was not the only aggrieved aviation student. Another complaint, filed early this year, alleged a “bait and switch tactic” by Liberty to gain a student’s enrollment. The university offered a course meant to allow a helicopter pilot to transition their skills into an airplane certification, combining that training with prerequisite courses that would together result in a full-tuition load. The transition course required special approval, and the applicant applied for and received it, and then went through the requisite “financial check-in” portal to confirm his payment via the GI Bill.

Only after he’d done all that did it emerge that, according to the complaint, the transition course was in fact nonexistent. But he was signed up for the prerequisite courses, which he would never have bothered to take on his own. After he protested, the university unenrolled him completely from the university, which he took as “retribution.” He asked that the VA “place [Liberty] in a review status where they are forced to administer the program in a more circumspect manner.”

For another veteran, the problems started later in his time at Liberty, when he was just a few credits shy of getting his degree. In May 2021, he suddenly got notice that his financial aid had been suspended because he had supposedly fallen short of Satisfactory Academic Progress standards, even though his GPA was well above the 2.0 given as the minimum necessary on the financial aid website. The university then demanded he pay $2,934 to make up the difference, which he said made it impossible to complete his degree. He was unable to reach anyone to resolve the matter. “I have made several calls to the school and no one has been willing or able to help in getting the information needed to ensure that this issue gets resolved,” he wrote. “I have filed several appeals to this and all have been denied but they have refused to say why or ask for any additional information from me in any way.”

Lack of communication was a recurring theme in the complaints. Another student, entering her last semester in the school of education, had reached out to Liberty early this year to let the school know that due to health problems, she would be unable to act as a student teacher and would need to transfer into a nonlicensure track as a result. But she said she received incorrect information and was placed into the wrong class and from there fell into a morass of delays and unreturned emails, as emails are the only way that the school lets students communicate with the “gate coordinators” who oversee advancement through the education degree program.

“Advising has told me that they are required to answer in 48 hours, but that has never been the case for me,” she wrote. “At this point, I feel like they have taken my money and the money of the VA and are now leaving me high and dry. They do not seem to care that I am going to be unable to graduate and finish my degree after years of work. I have invested countless hours trying to meet their requirements and have faced nothing but misinformation, incorrect information [and] people passing the buck to someone else.” She concluded, “I feel like I have wasted my time and money as well as the money the VA has invested in my education.”

Yet another veteran offered a more systematic criticism this spring. Liberty, his complaint asserted, was failing GI Bill recipients on three levels: The university fails to certify their GI Bill benefits properly, which often creates a welter of unnecessary debts and offsets; it fails to provide proper academic advising, with the consequence that “veterans can get over their heads and fail classes or not be adequately informed about course loads”; and it fails to provide adequate academic support for the online programs, with communications limited mostly to emails. “They do not answer their phones besides the call centers that cannot provide detailed support no matter what,” he wrote.

For another veteran who was seeking a Ph.D. in health science and ended up in a billing dispute with the university, the most confounding part was his sense that Liberty was indifferent to the troubles he was experiencing. “Little do they know this causes undue stress in our lives,” he wrote in his complaint, “but I’m sure they do not care because they are only in it for the money.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Alec MacGillis.

“This dramatic escalation in the legal harassment of Maria Ressa and Rappler highlights the urgent need for the Philippines’ to decriminalize libel and do away with laws that are repeatedly abused to persecute journalists whose reporting exposes public wrongdoing. The State’s blatant attempts to suppress Rappler’s election-related fact-checking services is an unacceptable attempt to cheat the public of their right to accurate information, which is critical during elections,” said the Hold the Line Coalition Steering Committee.

Fourteen new cyber libel complaints have been made against Rappler in recent weeks, naming several journalists and their sources in connection with reporting on President Rodrigo Duterte’s pastor Apollo Quiboloy, who is on the FBI’s ‘most wanted’ list, and eight of his followers. Quiboloy and his associates were charged with conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion; sex trafficking of children; marriage fraud; fraud, and misuse of visas; and various money laundering offenses. Quiboloy’s company Sonshine Media Network International (SMNI), which has attacked independent journalists and news outlets reporting critically on the Duterte administration, was recently granted a TV license by the government.

In addition to these cases, Ressa has been named personally as one of 17 reporters, editors and executives, and seven news organizations in cyber libel complaints brought by Duterte government cabinet minister, Energy Secretary Alfonso Cusi. He alleges Ressa and the other named individuals and organizations “publicly accused [him] of graft” by reporting on a graft suit filed against him and a businessman. Cusi is demanding each of the accused pay him 200 million pesos (nearly US $4 million) in damages. Ressa did not write the article published by Rappler.

If the authorities choose to prosecute these cases, they will become criminal charges with potentially heavy jail sentences attached. Having already been convicted of one criminal cyber libel charge, which is under appeal, and facing multiple other pre-existing legal cases, Ressa testified before the U.S. Senate last week about the State-enabled legal harassment she experiences: “All told, I could go to jail for the rest of my life. Because I refuse to stop doing my job as a journalist. Because Rappler holds the line and continues to protect the public sphere,” she said. 

In parallel, Rappler is facing another legal challenge, with the Philippines’ Solicitor General petitioning the Supreme Court to void Rappler’s fact-checking agreement with the Commission of Elections (COMELEC). As a result, this collaboration between Rappler and COMELEC designed to counter disinformation associated with the presidential poll has been temporarily halted – just over a month from the election.

“This new wave of cases and complaints, which represents an egregious attack on press freedom, is designed to undermine the essential work of fact-checking and critical reporting during elections – acts which help uphold the integrity of democratic processes. Rappler must be allowed to perform the essential public service of exposing falsehoods, particularly during the election period, even when these prove politically damaging for those in power,” the Coalition said.

Julie Posetti (ICFJ), Gypsy Guillén Kaiser (CPJ), and Daniel Bastard (RSF) on behalf of the Hold the Line Coalition.

For further comment, contact: jposetti@icfj.org, gguillenkaiser@cpj.org, dbastard@rsf.org 

NOTE: The #HTL Coalition comprises more than 80 organizations around the world. This statement is issued by the #HoldTheLine Steering Committee, but it does not necessarily reflect the position of all or any individual Coalition members or organizations.

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

Ahead of national elections in the Philippines next month, the state has stepped up its attacks on Nobel Peave laureate Maria Ressa and the news outlet she leads, Rappler, reports the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders global media watchdog.

“This dramatic escalation in the legal harassment of Maria Ressa and Rappler highlights the urgent need for the Philippines’ to decriminalise libel and do away with laws that are repeatedly abused to persecute journalists whose reporting exposes public wrongdoing,” said the Hold the Line Coalition Steering Committee.

“The state’s blatant attempts to suppress Rappler’s election-related fact-checking services is an unacceptable attempt to cheat the public of their right to accurate information, which is critical during elections.”

• READ MORE: Other Maria Ressa and Rappler reports

The Philippines president election is on May 9.

Fourteen new cyber libel complaints have been made against Rappler in recent weeks, naming several journalists and their sources in connection with reporting on President Rodrigo Duterte’s pastor Apollo Quiboloy, who is on the FBI’s “most wanted” list, and eight of his followers.

Quiboloy and his associates were charged with conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion; sex trafficking of children; marriage fraud; fraud, and misuse of visas; and various money laundering offences.

Quiboloy’s company Sonshine Media Network International (SMNI), which has attacked independent journalists and news outlets reporting critically on the Duterte administration, was recently granted a TV licence by the government.

In addition to these cases, Ressa has been named personally as one of 17 reporters, editors and executives, and seven news organisations in cyber libel complaints brought by Duterte government cabinet minister Energy Secretary Alfonso Cusi.

Legal harassment
He alleges Ressa and the other named individuals and organisations “publicly accused [him] of graft” by reporting on a graft suit filed against him and a businessman.

Cusi is demanding each of the accused pay him 200 million pesos (nearly US$4 million) in damages.

Ressa did not write the article published by Rappler.

If the authorities choose to prosecute these cases, they will become criminal charges with potentially heavy jail sentences attached.

Having already been convicted of one criminal cyber libel charge, which is under appeal, and facing multiple other pre-existing legal cases, Ressa testified before the US Senate last week about the state-enabled legal harassment she experiences:

“All told, I could go to jail for the rest of my life. Because I refuse to stop doing my job as a journalist. Because Rappler holds the line and continues to protect the public sphere.”

In parallel, Rappler is facing another legal challenge, with the Philippines’ Solicitor-General petitioning the Supreme Court to void Rappler’s fact-checking agreement with the Commission of Elections (COMELEC).

Countering disinformation
As a result, this collaboration between Rappler and COMELEC designed to counter disinformation associated with the presidential poll has been temporarily halted — just over a month from the election.

“This new wave of cases and complaints, which represents an egregious attack on press freedom, is designed to undermine the essential work of fact-checking and critical reporting during elections — acts which help uphold the integrity of democratic processes.

“Rappler must be allowed to perform the essential public service of exposing falsehoods, particularly during the election period, even when these prove politically damaging for those in power,” the coalition said.

The Philippines is ranked 138th out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2021 World Press Freedom Index.

Statement by Julie Posetti (ICFJ), Gypsy Guillén Kaiser (CPJ), and Daniel Bastard (RSF) on behalf of the Hold the Line Coalition.

• The #HTL Coalition comprises more than 80 organisations around the world. This statement is issued by the #HoldTheLine Steering Committee, but it does not necessarily reflect the position of all or any individual coalition members or organisations.

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

The opposite of journalism

HKJA chairman Ronson Chan said NowTV's apology had complicated matters.

"Hong Kong has changed," he said. "It's not what it used to be."

"I can't speculate whether the TV station was put under huge pressure to make that statement ... or whether it genuine thought it was supporting medical assistance from mainland China, and really did believe its reporter behaved inappropriately."

"If the latter is true, that it's the opposite of what we think journalism should be," Chan said.

NowTV's apology came days after Hong Kong national security police threaten Hong Kong Watch, a London-based rights group, with prosecution for calling for sanctions against Chinese and Hong Kong officials, and tried to order it to take down its website.

The police said in a letter to Benedict Rogers that he should "immediately cease engaging in any acts and activities in contravention of the national security law or any other laws of Hong Kong."

The group has been highly critical of the CCP's rights record in Hong Kong, particularly following a city-wide crackdown on pro-democracy activists, opposition politicians and journalists under the national security law.

In January 2022, security chief Chris Tang said the law would clamp down on media outlets deemed to have played an "inflammatory" role, citing the now-shuttered pro-democracy Apple Daily newspaper, which is now subject to an investigation under the national security law, with several of its top journalists and founder Jimmy Lai awaiting trial for "collusion with a foreign power."

Tang said the paper's closure had made Hong Kong "more democratic," accusing it of fomenting a "color revolution" during the protest movement of 2019, which began as a mass popular protest against plans to allow extradition to mainland China, and broadened into demands for fully democratic elections and greater official accountability.

Tang and other officials have claimed that the protests meant that "targeted measures" are now needed to combat "fake news."

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Lee Yuk Yue.