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One summer day in 2017, a front-page story in the StarNews of Wilmington, North Carolina, shook up the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. The drinking water system, it said, was polluted with a contaminant commonly known as GenX, part of the family of “forever” PFAS chemicals.

It came from a Chemours plant in Fayetteville, near the winding Cape Fear River. Few knew about the contaminated water until the article described the discoveries of scientists from the Environmental Protection Agency and a state university. Given that certain types of PFAS have been linked to cancer, there was widespread anxiety over its potential danger.

In the onslaught of legal action and activism that followed, the EPA during President Donald Trump’s first term took an assertive stance, vowing to combat the spread of PFAS nationwide.

In its big-picture PFAS action plan from 2019, the agency said it would attack this complex problem on multiple fronts. It would, for example, consider limiting the presence of two of the best-known compounds — PFOA and PFOS — in drinking water. And, it said, it would find out more about the potential harm of GenX, which was virtually unregulated.

By the time Trump was sworn in for his second term, many of the plan’s suggestions had been put in place. After his first administration said PFOA and PFOS in drinking water should be regulated, standards were finalized under President Joe Biden. Four other types of PFAS, including GenX, were also tagged with limits.

But now, the second Trump administration is pulling back. The EPA said in May that it will delay enforcement on the drinking water limits for PFOA and PFOS until 2031, and it will rescind and reconsider the limits on the other four. Among those who challenged the standards in court is Chemours, which has argued that the EPA, under Biden, “used flawed science and didn’t follow proper rulemaking procedures” for GenX.

These EPA decisions under Trump are part of a slew of delays and course changes to PFAS policies that had been supported in his first term. Even though his earlier EPA pursued a measure that would help hold polluters accountable for cleaning up PFAS, the EPA of his second term has not yet committed to it. The agency also slowed down a process for finding out how industries have used the chemicals, a step prompted by a law signed by Trump in 2019.

At the same time, the EPA is hampering its ability to research pollutants — the kind of research that made it possible for its own scientists to investigate GenX. As the Trump administration seeks severe reductions in the EPA’s budget, the agency has terminated grants for PFAS studies and paralyzed its scientists with spending restrictions.

Pointing to earlier announcements on its approach to the chemicals, the EPA told ProPublica that it’s “committed to addressing PFAS in drinking water and ensuring that regulations issued under the Safe Drinking Water Act follow the law, follow the science, and can be implemented by water systems to strengthen public health protections.”

“If anything,” the agency added, “the Trump administration’s historic PFAS plan in 2019 laid the groundwork for the first steps to comprehensively address this contamination across media and we will continue to do so this term.”

In public appearances, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has pushed back on the suggestion that his agency weakened the drinking water limits on GenX and similar compounds. Future regulations imposed by his agency, he said, could be more or less stringent.

“What we want to do is follow the science, period,” he has said.

That sentiment perplexes scientists and environmental advocates, who say there is already persuasive evidence on the dangers of these chemicals that linger in the environment. The EPA reviewed GenX, for example, during both the first Trump and Biden administrations. In both 2018 and 2021, the agency pointed to animal studies linking it to cancer, as well as problems with kidneys, immune systems and, especially, livers. (Chemours has argued that certain animal studies have limited relevance to humans.)

Scientists and advocates also said it’s unclear what it means for the EPA to follow the science while diminishing its own ability to conduct research.

“I don’t understand why we would want to hamstring the agency that is designed to make sure we have clean air and clean water,” said Jamie DeWitt, a toxicologist in Oregon who worked with other scientists on Cape Fear River research. “I don’t understand it.”

Favored for their nonstick and liquid-resistant qualities, synthetic PFAS chemicals are widely used in products like raincoats, cookware and fast food wrappers. Manufacturers made the chemicals for decades without disclosing how certain types are toxic at extremely low levels, can accumulate in the body and will scarcely break down over time — hence the nickname “forever chemicals.”

The chemicals persist in soil and water too, making them complicated and costly to clean up, leading to a yearslong push to get such sites covered by the EPA’s Superfund program, which is designed to handle toxic swaths of land. During the first Trump administration, the EPA said it was taking steps toward designating the two legacy compounds, PFOA and PFOS, as “hazardous substances” under the Superfund program. Its liability provisions would help hold polluters responsible for the cost of cleaning up.

Moving forward with this designation process was a priority, according to the PFAS plan from Trump’s first term. Zeldin’s EPA describes that plan as “historic.” And, when he represented a Long Island district with PFAS problems in Congress, Zeldin voted for a bill that would have directed the EPA to take this step.

The designation became official under Biden. But business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and organizations representing the construction, recycling and chemical industries, sued. Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation’s playbook for the new administration, also questioned it.

Zeldin has said repeatedly that he wants to hold polluters accountable for PFAS, but his EPA requested three delays in the court case challenging the Superfund designation that helps make it possible.

The agency said in a recent motion it needed the latest pause because new leadership is still reviewing the issues and evaluating the designation in context of its “comprehensive strategy to address PFOA and PFOS.”

The EPA also delayed a rule requiring manufacturers and importers to report details about their PFAS use between 2011 and 2022. An annual bill that sets defense policy and spending, signed by Trump in his first term, had charged the EPA with developing such a process.

When Biden’s EPA finalized it, the agency said the rule would provide the largest-ever dataset of PFAS manufactured and used in the United States. It would help authorities understand their spread and determine what protections might be warranted.

Businesses were supposed to start reporting this month. But in a May 2 letter, a coalition of chemical companies petitioned the EPA to withdraw the deadline, reconsider the rule and issue a revised one with narrowed scope.

When the EPA delayed the rule less than two weeks later, it said it needed time to prepare for data collection and to consider changes to aspects of the rule.

In an email to ProPublica, the agency said it will address PFAS in many ways. Its approach, the agency said, is to give more time for compliance and to work with water systems to reduce PFAS exposure as quickly as feasible, “rather than issue violations and collect fees that don’t benefit public health.”

The court expects an update from the EPA in the Superfund designation case by Wednesday, and in the legal challenges to the drinking water standards by July 21. The EPA could continue defending the rules. It could ask the court for permission to reverse its position or to send the rules back to the agency for reconsideration. Or it could also ask for further pauses.

“It’s just a big unanswered question whether this administration and this EPA is going to be serious about enforcing anything,” said Robert Sussman, a former EPA official from the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. As a lawyer, he now represents environmental groups that filed an amicus brief in PFAS cases.

Back in North Carolina, problems caused by the chemicals continue to play out.

A consent order between the state and Chemours required the manufacturer to drastically reduce the release of GenX and other PFAS into the environment. (The chemicals commonly called GenX refer to HFPO-DA and its ammonium salt, which are involved in the GenX processing aid technology owned by Chemours.)

Chemours told ProPublica that it invested more than $400 million to remediate and reduce PFAS emissions. It also noted that there are hundreds of PFAS users in North Carolina, “as evidenced by PFAS seen upstream and hundreds of miles away” from its Fayetteville plant “that cannot be traced back to the site.”

PFAS-riddled sea foam continues to wash up on the coastal beaches. Chemours and water utilities, meanwhile, are battling in court about who should cover the cost of upgrades to remove the chemicals from drinking water.

Community forums about PFAS draw triple-digit crowds, even when they’re held on a weeknight, said Emily Donovan, co-founder of the volunteer group Clean Cape Fear, which has intervened in federal litigation. In the fast-growing region, new residents are just learning about the chemicals, she said, and they’re angry.

“I feel like we’re walking backwards,” Donovan said. Pulling back from the drinking water standards, in particular, is “disrespectful to this community.”

“It’s one thing to say you’re going to focus on PFAS,” she added. “It’s another thing to never let it cross the finish line and become any meaningful regulation.”

The EPA of Trump’s first term didn’t just call for more regulation of PFAS, it also stressed the importance of better understanding the forever chemicals through research and testing.

In a 2020 update to its PFAS action plan, the EPA highlighted its support for North Carolina’s investigation of GenX in the Cape Fear River. And it described its efforts to develop the science on PFAS issues affecting rural economies with “first-of-its-kind funding for the agriculture sector.”

Zeldin, too, has boasted about advancing PFAS research in an April news release. “This is just a start of the work we will do on PFAS to ensure Americans have the cleanest air, land, and water,” he said.

At about the same time, though, the agency terminated a host of congressionally appropriated grants for PFAS research, including over $15 million for projects focused on food and farmlands in places like Utah, Texas and Illinois.

Scientists at Michigan State University, for example, were investigating how PFAS interacts with water, soil, crops, livestock and biosolids, which are used for fertilizer. They timed their latest study to this year’s growing season, hired staff and partnered with a farm. Then the EPA canceled two grants.

In virtually identical letters, the agency said that each grant “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities. The objectives of the award are no longer consistent with EPA funding priorities.”

The contrast between the agency’s words and actions raises questions about the process behind its decisions, said Cheryl Murphy, head of Michigan State’s Center for PFAS Research and co-lead of one of the projects.

“If you halt it right now,” she said, “what we’re doing is we’re undermining our ability to translate the science that we’re developing into some policy and guidance to help people minimize their exposure to PFAS.”

At least some of the researchers are appealing the terminations.

About a month after PFAS grants to research teams in Maine and Virginia were terminated for not being aligned with agency priorities, the agency reinstated them. The EPA told ProPublica that “there will be more updates on research-related grants in the future.”

Even if the Michigan State grants are reinstated, there could be lasting consequences, said Hui Li, the soil scientist who led both projects. “We will miss the season for this year,” he said in an email, “and could lose the livestock on the farm for the research.”

Federal researchers are also in limbo. Uncertainty, lost capacity and spending restrictions have stunted the work at an EPA lab in Duluth, Minnesota, that investigates PFAS and other potential hazards, according to several sources connected to it. As one source who works at the lab put it, “We don’t know how much longer we will be operating as is.”

The EPA told ProPublica that it’s “continuing to invest in research and labs, including Duluth, to advance the mission of protecting human health and the environment.”

Meanwhile, the agency is asking Congress to eliminate more than half of its own budget. That includes massive staffing cuts, and it would slash nearly all the money for two major programs that help states fund water and wastewater infrastructure. One dates back to President Ronald Reagan’s administration. The other was spotlighted in a paper by Trump’s first-term EPA, which said communities could use these funds to protect public health from PFAS. It trumpeted examples from places like Michigan and New Jersey.

The EPA lost 727 employees in voluntary separations between Jan. 1 and late June, according to numbers the agency provided to ProPublica. It said it received more than 2,600 applications for the second round of deferred resignations and voluntary early retirements.

“These are really technical, difficult jobs,” said Melanie Benesh, vice president for government affairs at the nonprofit Environmental Working Group. “And the EPA, by encouraging so many employees to leave, is also losing a lot of institutional knowledge and a lot of technical expertise.”

The shake-up also worries DeWitt, who was one of the scientists who helped investigate the Cape Fear River contamination and who has served on an EPA science advisory board. Her voice shook as she reflected on the EPA’s workforce, “some of the finest scientists I know,” and what their loss means for public well-being.

“Taking away this talent from our federal sector,” she said, will have “profound effects on the agency’s ability to protect people in the United States from hazardous chemicals in air, in water, in soil and potentially in food.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Anna Clark.

After twenty months of horror in Gaza, political rhetoric in Western countries is finally starting to shift—but will words translate into action? And what exactly can other countries do when the United States still shields Israel from efforts to enforce international law, as it did at the UN Security Council on June 5?

On May 30, Tom Fletcher, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, accused Israel of committing a war crime by using starvation as a weapon against the people of Gaza. In a searing interview with the BBC, Fletcher explained how Israel’s policy of forced starvation fits into its larger strategy of ethnic cleansing.

“We’re seeing food set on the borders and not being allowed in, when there is a population on the other side of the border that is starving,” Fletcher said. “And we’re hearing Israeli ministers say that is to put pressure on the population of Gaza.”

He was referring to statements like the one from Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who openly admitted that the starvation policy is meant to leave Palestinians “totally despairing, understanding that there’s no hope and nothing to look for,” so that they will submit to ethnic cleansing from Gaza and a “new life in other places.”

Fletcher called on Prime Minister Netanyahu to stop this campaign of forced displacement, and insisted, “we would expect governments all over the world to stand for international humanitarian law. The international community is very, very clear on that.”

Palestinians might wish that were true. If the so-called international community were really “very, very clear on that,” the United States and Israel would not be able to wage a campaign of genocide for more than 600 days while the world looks on in horror.

Some Western governments have finally started using stronger language to condemn Israel’s actions. But the question is: Will they act? Or is this just more political theater to appease public outrage while the machinery of destruction grinds on?

This moment should force a reckoning: How is it possible that the U.S. and Israel can perpetrate such crimes with impunity? What would it take for U.S. allies to ignore pressure from Washington and enforce international law?

If impoverished, war-ravaged Yemen can single-handedly deny Israel access to the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, and drive the Israeli port of Eilat into bankruptcy, more powerful countries can surely isolate Israel diplomatically and economically, protect the Palestinians and end the genocide. But they haven’t even tried.

Some are now making tentative moves. On May 19, the U.K., France, and Canada jointly condemned Israel’s actions as “intolerable,” “unacceptable,” “abhorrent,” “wholly disproportionate” and “egregious.” The U.K. suspended trade talks with Israel, and they promised “further concrete actions,” including targeted sanctions, if Israel does not end its offensive in Gaza and lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid.

The three countries publicly committed to the Arab Plan for the reconstruction of Gaza, and to building an international consensus for it at the UN’s High-Level Two-State Solution Conference in New York on June 17-20, which is to be co-chaired by France and Saudi Arabia.

They also committed to recognizing Palestinian statehood. Of the UN’s 193 member states, 147 already recognize Palestine as a sovereign nation, including ten more since Israel launched its genocide in Gaza. President Macron, under pressure from the leftist La France Insoumise party, says France may officially recognize Palestine at the UN conference in June.

Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney, claimed during his election campaign that Canada already had an arms embargo against Israel, but was swiftly challenged on that. Canada has suspended a small number of export licenses, but it’s still supplying parts for Israel’s 39 F-35s, and for 36 more that Israel has ordered from Lockheed Martin.

A General Dynamics factory in Quebec is the sole supplier of artillery propellant for deadly 155 mm artillery shells used in Gaza, and it took an emergency campaign by human rights groups in August 2024 to force Canada to scrap a new contract for that same factory to supply Israel with 50,000 high-explosive mortar shells.

The U.K. is just as compromised. The new Labour government elected in July 2024 quickly restored funding to UNRWA, as Canada has. In September, it suspended 30 out of 350 arms export licenses to Israel, mostly for parts used in warplanes, helicopters, drones and targeting. But, like Canada, the U.K. still supplies many other parts that end up in Israeli F-35s bombing Gaza.

Declassified UK published a report on the F-35 program that revealed how it compromises the sovereignty of partner countries. While the U.K. produces 15% of the parts that go into every F-35, the U.S. military takes immediate ownership of the British-made parts, stores them on British air force bases, and then orders the U.K. to ship them to Texas for use in new planes or to Israel and other countries as spare parts for planes already in use.

Shipping these planes and parts to Israel is in clear violation of U.S., U.K. and other countries’ arms export laws. British campaigners argue that if the U.K. is serious about halting genocide, it must stop all shipments of F-35 parts sent to Israel–directly or indirectly. With huge marches in London drawing hundreds of thousands of people, and protests on June 17 at three factories that make F-35 parts, activists will keep applying more pressure until they result in the “concrete actions” the British government has promised.

Denmark is facing a similar conflict. Amnesty International, Oxfam, Action Aid and Al-Haq are in court suing the Danish government and largest weapons company, Terma, to stop them sending Israel critical bomb release mechanisms and other F-35 parts.

These disputes over Canadian artillery propellant, Danish bomb-release mechanisms and the multinational nature of the F-35 program highlight how any country that provides even small but critical parts or materials for deadly weapons systems must ensure they are not used to commit war crimes.

So all steps to cut off Israel’s weapons supplies can help to save Palestinian lives, and the full arms embargo that the UN General Assembly voted for in September 2024 can be instrumental in ending the genocide if more countries will join it. As Sam Perlo-Freeman of Campaign Against the Arms Trade said of the U.K.’s legal obligation to stop shipping F-35 parts,

“These spare parts are essential to keep Israel’s F-35s flying, and therefore stopping them will reduce the number of bombings and killings of civilians Israel can commit. It is as simple as that.”

Germany was responsible for 30% of Israel’s arms imports between 2019 and 2023, largely through two large warship deals. Four German-built Saar 6 corvettes, Israel’s largest warships, are already bombarding Gaza, while ThyssenKrupp is building three new submarines for Israel in Kiel.

But no country has provided a greater share of the tools of genocide in Gaza than the United States, including nearly all the warplanes, helicopters, bombs and air-to-ground missiles that are destroying Gaza and killing Palestinians. The U.S. government has a legal responsibility to stop sending all these weapons, which Israel uses mainly to commit industrial-scale war crimes, up to and including genocide, against the people of Palestine, as well as to attack its other neighbors.

Trump’s military and political support for Israel’s genocide stands in stark contradiction to the image he promotes of himself as a peacemaker—and which his most loyal followers believe in.

Yet there are signs that Trump is beginning to assert some independence from Netanyahu and from the war hawks in his own party and inner circle. He refused to visit Israel on his recent Middle East tour, he’s negotiating with Iran despite Israeli opposition, and he removed Mike Waltz as National Security Advisor for engaging in unauthorized warmongering against Iran with Netanyahu. His decisions to end the Yemen bombing campaign and lift sanctions on Syria suggest an unpredictable but real departure from the neocon playbook, as do his negotiations with Russia and Iran.

Has Netanyahu finally overplayed his hand? His campaign of ethnic cleansing, territorial expansion in pursuit of a biblical “Greater Israel,” the deliberate starvation of Gaza, and his efforts to entangle the U.S. in a war with Iran have pushed Israel’s longtime allies to the edge. The emerging rift between Trump and Netanyahu could mark the beginning of the end of the decades-long blanket of impunity the U.S. has wrapped around Israel. It could also give other governments the political space to respond to Israeli war crimes without fear of U.S. retaliation.

The huge and consistent protests throughout Europe are putting pressure on Western governments to take action. A new survey conducted in Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and Spain shows that very few Europeans–between 6% and 16% in each country–find Israel’s assault on Gaza proportionate or justified.

For now, however, the Western governments remain deeply complicit in Israel’s atrocities and violations of international law. The rhetoric is shifting—but history will judge this moment not by what governments say, but by what they do.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies.

A source in North Pyongan province, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons, said officers with the Ministry of State Security in Uiju County near the border with China were issued the new devices last week.

“These portable detectors are designed to track down North Koreans who use Chinese mobile phones to contact family members in South Korea,” the source said.

The brand labels of the devices have been removed and the country of origin is unclear, but the source described them as “high-performance tools with a wide detection range and fast signal capture.”

Although smartphones are available in North Korea, the government maintains strict domestic surveillance by operating a nationwide intranet and keeping the domestic and international phone networks completely separate. For ordinary citizens, making an international call is nearly impossible.

Legal international calls must go through government-monitored operators, allowing authorities to eavesdrop easily. Another exception is the Yanggakdo International Hotel in Pyongyang, where direct international dialing is permitted—but only for foreigners and elite officials.

Because of these restrictions, many North Koreans are unable to contact relatives who live abroad or have defected. In desperation, some residents in border regions pay steep fees to brokers to use Chinese mobile networks—usually while hiding in mountainous areas to avoid detection.

But such calls are risky. Those caught making unauthorized international calls face harsh punishment, including charges of treason and incarceration in labor camps.

Border security

Since supreme leader Kim Jong Un came to power, North Korea has ramped up border security, importing large, German-made radio signal detectors to block the inflow of outside information and prevent leaks of internal news, the source said.

Theoretically, radio signal detectors can identify the source of unauthorized communications by tracing the electromagnetic waves emitted during phone calls. Once a signal is detected, security agents can triangulate the location and track down the user.

In response to government surveillance, many residents have resorted to climbing hills or hiding in remote mountainous areas to make calls via Chinese mobile networks. The new detection devices could make such calls increasingly risky.

(Ed Jones/AFP)

The sources who spoke to RFA heard about the new handheld detectors from border guards and say the devices are a major upgrade in both speed and range.

“These are not the same detectors used in previous years,” said the source from North Pyongan. “They can pinpoint the origin of a call far more quickly and across a broader area.”

“The new handheld detectors can be used while moving, and that has people very worried,” the source added.

A second source in the province said that surveillance along the border has intensified, particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic, when North Korea shut down cross-border travel and commerce.

“Security cameras have been installed throughout the border zone. Locals say surveillance is tighter than ever before,” the source said.

The source added that authorities are especially targeting phone calls with relatives who have resettled in South Korea.

“Anyone caught talking about rice prices with family in the South is labeled a spy,” the source said. “The old detection systems couldn’t always pick up these calls because of their limited range.”

Anti-state crimes

Acts such as defection, smuggling, or leaking internal information to the outside world are classified as anti-state crimes in North Korea.

According to a 2024 report by the Korea Institute for National Unification, a think tank funded by the South Korean government, North Korean authorities strictly monitor and harshly punish the possession and use of Chinese mobile phones, typically sentencing offenders to reform through labor or detention in labor training camps. The report also notes that in some cases, individuals who used Chinese phones to contact South Korea were classified as political criminals and imprisoned in political prison camps.

The sources told RFA that the government has distributed the new portable detectors to State Security officials in major border areas, including the city of Sinuiju, which lies opposite the Chinese city of Dandong, the main conduit for China-North Korea commerce.

“Agents in plain clothes now patrol residential neighborhoods and wooded hillsides before dawn, carrying the devices in their pockets to scan for illegal phone signals,” the second source said.

Previously, authorities could only detect unauthorized calls that lasted more than five minutes. The new handheld detectors can identify calls as short as one minute, the source added.

Additional reporting by Jaewoo Park. Edited by Sungwon Yang and Mat Pennington.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Hyemin Son for RFA Korean.

As Israel unveils its final genocide push, and mass death from starvation looms in Gaza, western media and politicians are tentatively starting to speak up.

Who could have imagined 19 months ago that it would take more than a year and a half of Israel slaughtering and starving Gaza’s children for the first cracks to appear in what has been a rock-solid wall of support for Israel from western establishments.

Finally, something looks like it may be about to give.

The British establishment’s financial daily, the Financial Times, was first to break ranks last week to condemn “the West’s shameful silence” in the face of Israel’s murderous assault on the tiny enclave.

In an editorial – effectively the paper’s voice – the FT accused the United States and Europe of being increasingly “complicit” as Israel made Gaza “uninhabitable”, an allusion to genocide, and noted that the goal was to “drive Palestinians from their land”, an allusion to ethnic cleansing.

Of course, both of these grave crimes by Israel have been evidently true not only since Hamas’ violent, single-day breakout from Gaza on 7 October 2023, but for decades.

So parlous is the state of western reporting, from a media no less complicit than the governments berated by the FT, that we need to seize on any small signs of progress.

Next, the Economist chimed in, warning that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers were driven by a “dream of emptying Gaza and rebuilding Jewish settlements there”.

At the weekend, the Independent decided the “deafening silence on Gaza” had to end. It was “time for the world to wake up to what is happening and to demand an end to the suffering of the Palestinians trapped in the enclave.”

Actually much of the world woke up many, many months ago. It has been the western press corps and western politicians slumbering through the past 19 months of genocide.

Then on Monday, the supposedly liberal Guardian voiced in its own editorial a fear that Israel is committing “genocide”, though it only dared do so by framing the accusation as a question.

It wrote of Israel: “Now it plans a Gaza without Palestinians. What is this, if not genocidal? When will the US and its allies act to stop the horror, if not now?”

The paper could more properly have asked a different question: Why have Israel’s western allies – as well as media like the Guardian and FT – waited 19 months to speak up against the horror?

And, predictably bringing up the rear, was the BBC. On Wednesday, the BBC Radio’s PM programme chose to give top billing to testimony from Tom Fletcher, the United Nation’s humanitarian affairs chief, to the Security Council. Presenter Evan Davis said the BBC had decided to “do something a little unusual”.

Unusual indeed. It played Fletcher’s speech in full – all 12 and a half minutes of it. That included Fletcher’s comment: “For those killed and those whose voices are silenced: what more evidence do you need now? Will you act – decisively – to prevent genocide and to ensure respect for international humanitarian law?”

We had gone in less than a week from the word “genocide” being taboo in relation to Gaza to it becoming almost mainstream.

Growing cracks

Cracks are evident in the British parliament too. Mark Pritchard, a Conservative MP and life-long Israel supporter, stood up from the back benches to admit he had been wrong about Israel, and condemned it “for what it is doing to the Palestinian people”.

He was one of more than a dozen Tory MPs and peers in the House of Lords, all formerly staunch defenders of Israel, who urged British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to immediately recognise a Palestinian state.

Their move followed an open letter published by 36 members of the Board of Deputies, a 300-member body that claims to represent British Jews, dissenting from its continuing support for the slaughter. The letter warned: “Israel’s soul is being ripped out.”

Pritchard told fellow MPs it was time to “stand up for humanity, for us being on the right side of history, for having the moral courage to lead.”

Sadly, there is no sign of that yet. Research published last week, based on Israeli tax authority data, showed Starmer’s government has been lying even about the highly limited restrictions on arms sales to Israel it claimed to have imposed last year.

Despite an ostensible ban on shipments of weapons that could be used in Gaza, Britain has covertly exported more than 8,500 separate munitions to Israel since the ban.

This week more details emerged. According to figures published by The National, the current government exported more weapons to Israel in the final three months of last year, after the ban came into effect, than the previous Conservative government did through the whole of 2020 to 2023.

So shameful is the UK’s support for Israel in the midst of what the International Court of Justice – the World Court – has described as a “plausible genocide” that Starmer’s government needs to pretend it is doing something, even as it actually continues to arm that genocide.

More than 40 MPs wrote to Foreign Secretary David Lammy last week calling for him to respond to allegations that he had misled the public and parliament. “The public deserves to know the full scale of the UK’s complicity in crimes against humanity,” they wrote.

There are growing rumblings elsewhere. This week France’s President Emmanuel Macron called Israel’s complete blockade on aid into Gaza “shameful and unacceptable”. He added: “My job is to do everything I can to make it stop.”

“Everything” seemed to amount to nothing more than mooting possible economic sanctions.

Still, the rhetorical shift was striking. Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, similarly denounced the blockade, calling it “unjustifiable”. She added: “I have always recalled the urgency of finding a way to end the hostilities and respect international law and international humanitarian law.”

“International law”? Where has that been for the past 19 months?

There was a similar change of priorities across the Atlantic. Democratic Senator Chris van Hollen, for example, recently dared to call Israel’s actions in Gaza “ethnic cleansing”.

CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, a bellwether of the Beltway consensus, gave Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Sharren Haskel, an unusually tough grilling. Amanpour all but accused her of lying about Israel starving children.

Meanwhile, Josep Borrell, the recently departed head of European Union foreign policy, broke another taboo last week by directly accusing Israel of preparing a genocide in Gaza.

“Seldom have I heard the leader of a state so clearly outline a plan that fits the legal definition of genocide,” he said, adding: “We’re facing the largest ethnic cleansing operation since the end of the Second World War.”

Borrell, of course, has no influence over EU policy at this point.

A death camp

This is all painfully slow progress, but it does suggest that a tipping point may be near.

If so, there are several reasons. One – the most evident in the mix – is US President Donald Trump.

It was easier for the Guardian, the FT and old-school Tory MPs to watch the extermination of Gaza’s Palestinians in silence when it was kindly Uncle Joe Biden and the US military industrial complex behind it.

Unlike his predecessor, Trump too often forgets the bit where he is supposed to put a gloss on Israeli crimes, or distance the US from them, even as Washington ships the weapons to carry out those crimes.

But also, there are plenty of indications that Trump – with his constant craving to be seen as the top dog – is increasingly annoyed at being publicly outfoxed by Netanyahu.

This week, as Trump headed to the Middle East, his administration secured the release of Israeli soldier Edan Alexander, the last living US citizen in captivity in Gaza, by bypassing Israel and negotiating directly with Hamas.

In his comments on the release, Trump insisted it was time to “put an end to this very brutal war” – a remark he had very obviously not coordinated with Netanyahu.

Notably, Israel is not on Trump’s Middle East schedule.

Right now seems a relatively safe moment to adopt a more critical stance towards Israel, as presumably the FT and Guardian appreciate.

Then there is the fact that Israel’s genocide is reaching its endpoint. No food, water or medicines have entered Gaza for more than two months. Everyone is malnourished. It is unclear, given Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s health system, how many have already died from hunger.

But the pictures of skin-and-bones children emerging from Gaza are uncomfortably reminiscent of 80-year-old images of skeletal Jewish children imprisoned in Nazi camps.

It is a reminder that Gaza – strictly blockaded by Israel for 16 years before Hamas’ 7 October 2023 breakout – has been transformed over the past 19 months from a concentration camp into a death camp.

Parts of the media and political class know mass death in Gaza cannot be obscured for much longer, not even after Israel has barred foreign journalists from the enclave and murdered most of the Palestinian journalists trying to record the genocide.

Cynical political and media actors are trying to get in their excuses before it is too late to show remorse.

The ‘Gaza war’ myth

And finally there is the fact that Israel has declared its readiness to take hands-on responsibility for the extermination in Gaza by, in its words, “capturing” the tiny territory.

The long-anticipated “day after” looks like it is about to arrive.

For 20 years, Israel and western capitals have conspired in the lie that Gaza’s occupation ended in 2005, when Israel’s then prime minister, Ariel Sharon, pulled out a few thousand Jewish settlers and withdrew Israeli soldiers to a highly fortified perimeter encaging the enclave.

In a ruling last year, the World Court gave this claim short shrift, emphasising that Gaza, as well as the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, had never stopped being under Israeli occupation, and that the occupation must end immediately.

The truth is that, even before the 2023 Hamas attacks, Israel had been besieging Gaza by land, sea and air for many, many years. Nothing – people or trade – went in or out without the Israeli military’s say-so.

Israeli officials instituted a secret policy of putting the population there on a strict “diet” – a war crime then as now – one that ensured most of Gaza’s young became progressively more malnourished.

Drones whined constantly overhead, as they do now, watching the population from the skies 24 hours a day and occasionally raining down death. Fishermen were shot and their boats sunk for trying to fish their own waters. Farmers’ crops were destroyed by herbicides sprayed from Israeli planes.

And when the mood took it, Israel sent in fighter jets to bomb the enclave or sent soldiers in on military operations, killing hundreds of civilians at a time.

When Palestinians in Gaza went out week after week to stage protests close to the perimeter fence of their concentration camp, Israeli snipers shot them, killing some 200 and crippling many thousands more.

Yet, despite all this, Israel and western capitals insisted on the story that Hamas “ruled” Gaza, and that it alone was responsible for what went on there.

That fiction was very important to the western powers. It allowed Israel to evade accountability for the crimes against humanity committed in Gaza over the past two decades – and it allowed the West to avoid complicity charges for arming the criminals.

Instead, the political and media class perpetuated the myth that Israel was engaged in a “conflict” with Hamas – as well as intermittent “wars” in Gaza – even as Israel’s own military termed its operations to destroy whole neighbourhoods and kill their residents “mowing the lawn”.

Israel, of course, viewed Gaza as its lawn to mow. And that is precisely because it never stopped occupying the enclave.

Even today western media outlets collude in the fiction that Gaza is free from Israeli occupation by casting the slaughter there – and the starvation of the population – as a “war”.

Loss of cover story

But the “day after” – signalled by Israel’s promised “capture” and “reoccupation” of Gaza – brings a conundrum for Israel and its western sponsors.

Till now Israel’s every atrocity has been justified by Hamas’ violent breakout on 7 October 2023.

Israel and its supporters have insisted that Hamas must return the Israelis it took captive before there can be some undefined “peace”. At the same time, Israel has also maintained that Gaza must be destroyed at all costs to root out Hamas and eliminate it.

These two goals never looked consistent – not least because the more Palestinian civilians Israel killed “rooting out” Hamas, the more young men Hamas recruited seeking vengeance.

The constant stream of genocidal rhetoric from Israeli leaders made clear that they believed there were no civilians in Gaza – no “uninvolved” – and that the enclave should be levelled and the population treated like “human animals”, punished with “no food, water or fuel”.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich reiterated that approach last week, vowing that “Gaza will be entirely destroyed” and that its people would be ethnically cleansed – or, as he put it, forced to “leave in great numbers to third countries”.

Israeli officials have echoed him, threatening to “flatten” Gaza if the hostages are not released. But in truth, the captives held by Hamas are just a convenient pretext.

Smotrich was more honest in observing that the hostages’ release was “not the most important thing”. His view is apparently shared by the Israeli military, which has reportedly put that aim last in a list of six “war” objectives.

More important to the military are “operational control” of Gaza, “demilitarization of the territory” and “concentration and movement of the population”.

With Israel about to be indisputably, visibly in direct charge of Gaza again – with the cover stories stripped away of a “war”, of the need to eliminate of Hamas, of civilian casualties as “collateral damage” – Israel’s responsibility for the genocide will be incontestable too, as will the West’s active collusion.

That was why more than 250 former officials with Mossad, Israel’s spy agency – including three of its former heads – signed a letter this week decrying Israel’s breaking of the ceasefire in early March and its return to “war”.

The letter called Israel’s official objectives “unattainable”.

Similarly, the Israeli media reports large numbers of Israel’s military reservists are no longer showing up when called for a return to duty in Gaza.

Ethnic cleansing

Israel’s western patrons must now grapple with Israel’s “plan” for the ruined territory. Its outline has been coming more sharply into focus in recent days.

In January Israel formally outlawed the United Nations refugee agency UNRWA that feeds and cares for the large proportion of the Palestinian population driven off their historic lands by Israel in earlier phases of its decades-long colonisation of historic Palestine.

Gaza is packed with such refugees – the outcome of Israel’s biggest ethnic cleansing programme in 1948, at its creation as a “Jewish state”.

Removing UNRWA had been a long-held ambition, a move by Israel designed to help rid it of the yoke of aid agencies that have been caring for Palestinians – and thereby helping them to resist Israel’s efforts at ethnic cleansing – as well as monitoring Israel’s adherence, or rather lack of it, to international law.

For the ethnic cleansing and genocide programmes in Gaza to be completed, Israel has needed to produce an alternative system to UNRWA’s.

Last week, it approved a scheme in which it intends to use private contractors, not the UN, to deliver small quantities of food and water to Palestinians. Israel will allow in 60 trucks a day – barely a tenth of the absolute minimum required, according to the UN.

There are several catches. To stand any hope of qualifying for this very limited aid, Palestinians will need to collect it from military distribution points located in a small area at the southern tip of the Gaza strip.

In other words, some two million Palestinians will have to crowd into a location that has no chance of accommodating them all, and even then will have only a tenth of the aid they need.

They will have to relocate too without any guarantee from Israel that it won’t continue bombing the “humanitarian zones” they have been herded into.

These military distribution zones just so happen to be right next to Gaza’s sole, short border with Egypt – exactly where Israel has been seeking to drive the Palestinians over the past 19 months in the hope of forcing Egypt to open the border so the people of Gaza can be ethnically cleansed into Sinai.

Under Israel’s scheme, Palestinians will be screened in these military hubs using biometric data before they stand any hope of receiving minimum calorie-controlled handouts of food.

Once inside the hubs, they can be arrested and shipped off to one of Israel’s torture camps.

Just last week Israel’s Haaretz newspaper published testimony from an Israeli soldier turned whistleblower – confirming accounts from doctors and other guards – that torture and abuse are rife against Palestinians, including civilians, at Sde Teiman, the most notorious of the camps.

War on aid

Last Friday, shortly after Israel announced its “aid” plan, it fired a missile into an UNRWA centre in Jabaliya camp, destroying its food distribution centre and warehouse.

Then on Saturday, Israel bombed tents used for preparing food in Khan Younis and Gaza City. It has been targeting charity kitchens and bakeries to close them down, in an echo of its campaign of destruction against Gaza’s hospitals and health system.

In recent days, a third of UN-supported community kitchens – the population’s last life line – have closed because their stores of food are depleted, as is their access to fuel.

According to the UN agency OCHA, that number is rising “by the day”, leading to “widespread” hunger.

The UN reported this week that nearly half a million people in Gaza – a fifth of the population – faced “catastrophic hunger”.

Predictably, Israel and its ghoulish apologists are making light of this sea of immense suffering. Jonathan Turner, chief executive of UK Lawyers for Israel, argued that critics were unfairly condemning Israel for starving Gaza’s population, and ignoring the health benefits of reducing “obesity” among Palestinians.

In a joint statement last week, 15 UN agencies and more than 200 charities and humanitarian groups denounced Israel’s “aid” plan. The UN children’s fund UNICEF warned that Israel was forcing Palestinians to choose between “displacement and death”.

But worse, Israel is setting up its stall once again to turn reality on its head.

Those Palestinians who refuse to cooperate with its “aid” plan will be blamed for their own starvation. And international agencies who refuse to go along with Israeli criminality will be smeared both as “antisemitic” and as responsible for the mounting toll of starvation on Gaza’s population.

There is a way to stop these crimes degenerating further. But it will require western politicians and journalists to find far more courage than they have dared muster so far. It will need more than rhetorical flourishes. It will need more than public handwringing.

Are they capable of more? Don’t hold your breath.

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

As the Trump administration goes after universities, law firms and more, some argue that the free press will eventually become a target. Trump’s attacks on the press have already begun, with the president filing a number of baseless lawsuits against organizations like ABC and CBS, including a $20 billion lawsuit against CBS over how the network edited an interview with Kamala Harris last year on 60 Minutes. The White House has also banned the Associated Press from covering some presidential events over its refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. “I didn’t want to be an activist, but when it’s a battle for facts, journalism is activism,” warns Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa, whose new site Rappler faced attacks from former president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte. We also speak with The American Prospect editor Robert Kuttner, who has a new piece headlined “Is the Press Next?”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

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The first time I saw Andrew Rabinowitz, it was in April 2017 at Baltimore District Court, where he was representing a property management company owned by the family of Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law. That day, the company had three cases against tenants at Dutch Village, one of the many large apartment complexes the Kushner Companies owned in the Baltimore area.

One tenant was a Morgan State University student facing struggles typical of residents in the Kushner complexes. She had given notice that she was moving at the end of March, having tired of the perpetually clogged toilet and the ceiling leak in her closet. But when she paid March rent via the automated system tenants had to use, the money somehow ended up with an adjacent Kushner complex, and the company started eviction proceedings — even though she had already signaled her intent to leave a few weeks later.

A sheriff’s deputy changed the locks on her door when she was out of town, preventing her from moving her things out. She got her keys back, but by then she no longer had access to a moving truck. The company was also after her for April’s rent, despite the fact that it had physically barred her from being able to move before April.

In court, Rabinowitz, a 33-year-old in a jacket and tie, spoke to the judge in a polished, even-keeled tone, in contrast to the student, who grew more agitated as the hearing went on. The judge sided with Rabinowitz, ordering the student to pay $471.23 for part of April’s rent.

When I approached Rabinowitz as he was leaving the courthouse, to ask about the company’s aggressive approach, he looked startled. “What’s the article regarding?” he said. “I’m not inclined to give a statement.”

The next day, he was back in court to defend the company against the student’s criminal complaint over the unfounded eviction. This time, he offered a deal: He agreed to let her stay, rent-free, until the end of May to give her time to move out, as long as she paid for April. Afterward, she asked Rabinowitz if he could make sure that the hot water would be turned back on. “I’m just the attorney,” he demurred. (The hot water stayed off.)

The next time I saw Rabinowitz in court was in February, almost eight years later. Kushner’s father-in-law was back in the White House. But Rabinowitz’s situation had changed. He was no longer demanding payment from beleaguered tenants. Instead, he was defending them.

I had learned of his dramatic career shift when I ran into him once in downtown Baltimore. But I needed to see it to believe it. So I tracked him down one midday at the Landlord and Tenant Branch of the District of Columbia Courts, where he now spends his days. As I spotted him, he was in a hallway speaking to a fretful older man who was seeking assistance. “Give me four minutes. Let me just go check and see if I can serve you,” Rabinowitz said, before ducking into the office of his new employer, Rising for Justice, a nonprofit that provides free legal representation to low-income tenants facing eviction.

A moment later, after attending to the man, Rabinowitz came over to say hello. He still wore a tie, but now had long hair to go along with it. He was looking far less anxious than he had when I approached him back at the Baltimore courthouse. In fact, he was positively glowing.

So much has changed in this country and the world since 2017 — much of it, arguably, not for the better. I wanted to know: What had happened with Rabinowitz?

American culture is rife with glamorous depictions of high-stakes, high-paying Big Law firms, from “L.A. Law” to “Michael Clayton” to “Suits.” But there is a humbler realm more typically glimpsed via highway billboards and subway ads. This is the level at which millions of people encounter the justice system, for better or worse.

And this is the corner through which Rabinowitz entered the profession. He grew up in Ellicott City, Maryland, outside Baltimore. His mother was dean of admissions at the University of Maryland School of Nursing; his father was chief of social work at the Armed Forces Retirement Home in Washington. He attended Frostburg State University, in western Maryland. Interested in the law, he spent a couple years as a paralegal before heading to law school at Barry University in Orlando, Florida.

His aspiration was to become a criminal defense attorney, but the job he found after getting his degree was with Barry Glazer, a colorful Baltimore personal injury lawyer known for attention-getting ads. One script went like this: “I am sick and tired of these insurance companies telling you what good neighbors they are and how you’re in such good hands. If your car is totaled and you owe more than it’s worth, they give you the lesser amount and you continue to pay a finance company the difference. Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining.” Under pressure from the Bar Association, Glazer changed “pee” to “urinate.”

It was an eye-opening experience, the first time Rabinowitz had come into regular contact with people on the lower rungs of the social ladder — people with big problems but unable to afford big firms. He left after a couple years for a small defense practice because he wanted to pursue his original aspiration. This proved disappointing. Criminal law, he found, turned out to be less a stirring quest for justice and more an exercise in squeezing fees out of poor clients in desperate circumstances.

Rabinowitz started looking around again, in 2015, and joined Jeffrey Tapper, whose small firm in the Baltimore suburb of Owings Mills specialized in representing landlords large and small as they pursued tenants.

At first, Rabinowitz liked the work. Despite his natural introversion, he had come to enjoy being in court, in front of a judge. And in this new job, he was in court a lot — as many as 10 hearings per day.

He prided himself on being able to negotiate settlements, getting landlords to accept less than what they believed they were owed and working out payment plans with tenants. This was what he recalled of the case where I had first met him — that he had been able to work out a deal with the college student to give her an extra month to move out of the Kushner unit.

He even gave some tenants his phone number, urging them to call if they ended up falling behind again, so they could work something out before it landed them back in court. He wasn’t really sure what to think when, one day, he heard a judge say to a tenant, “Step into the hallway with Mr. Rabinowitz. He’s the fairest debt collector in town.”

To many people, “fairest debt collector” sounds about as noble as “kindest executioner.” But the label was apt. A couple of times, he appeared opposite Joe Mack, a tenant’s rights attorney whom he had gone to camp with as a kid. Mack recalled Rabinowitz persuading a judge that Mack’s client had failed to provide enough notice before breaking a lease and thus owed the landlord a sizable sum. Making the loss easier to take, Mack said, was that Rabinowitz had been respectful in the courtroom. “I can imagine,” Mack added, “that some other things he was doing might have been rougher.”

My eventual 2017 article laid bare the harsher reality of many of the cases involving the Kushner complexes. The company pursued one woman for several years for about $3,000, eventually having her wages garnished, even though she had received written permission to break her lease. A second woman ended up in court after moving out from a unit with maggots coming out of the living-room carpet and raw sewage flowing out of the kitchen sink. Yet another was pursued for about $4,000 even though she had written permission to move out of a unit with black mold.

After the article appeared, the Maryland attorney general filed suit against the Kushner company, which in 2022 settled with the state for $3.25 million, though the company did not acknowledge wrongdoing. In March, a group of former tenants won class-action status in their own lawsuit against the company. The company, which denied wrongdoing in the class-action case, did not respond to a request for an interview for this article. Over the years, the company has sold most of the properties ProPublica originally reported on.

Back in 2017, a company executive had responded to questions by saying that it had a “fiduciary obligation” to its investment partners to collect as much revenue as possible from tenants, and that its practices in doing so were “consistent with industry standards.”

Rabinowitz offers a similar defense. The Kushner approach was not noticeably different from other big landlords, he said: “They were all the same.” He had no particular feelings for the company itself, and he had never actually met Kushner or any other executives. “They’re so disconnected from the property,” Rabinowitz told me. “It’s just money for them.” But he was protective of his boss, Tapper, who he felt had treated him fairly. (Tapper died last year.)

Rabinowitz himself had not set foot inside the Kushner complexes. The sorts of poor upkeep described in the article did not figure much in the cases, he said. “I know most people wouldn’t want to live in housing like that,” he said, “but I remember driving past those communities and I don’t remember being like, ‘Those were horrible places.’”

He insists he did not regret his years working for the Kushners and other landlords. There was a system in place, and he had played a part in that system. “I honestly felt that if every attorney could have had the same philosophy and treated people fair and put people in the position to take control of their life,” he said, “then debt collectors wouldn’t be such bad people. They’d be assistants to people paying off their debts.”

Still, the article instilled an unease that only grew with time. He was almost always facing off against people who lacked their own attorney, in a state with laws that were unusually favorable to landlords. “It was like a heavyweight sparring featherweights over and over again,” he said. “That’s just not satisfying.”

His longtime partner started to notice that he was agitated on nights before trials; sometimes he’d even mutter things like “objection!” in his sleep. “She could tell my mind was in court, constantly,” he said. To try and escape the burden, he went whitewater kayaking on weekends.

Around this time, his parents were nearing retirement. Accolades poured in from people they had served over the years, at the nursing schools and the retirement home. One man was wheeled in on his hospital bed to thank Rabinowitz’s father. “When I saw all the people who came out, I realized they had so much impact on so many people’s lives,” Rabinowitz said. He paused. “And I’m just putting money into rich people’s pockets.”

Then came the coronavirus pandemic. Maryland suspended evictions in March 2020, and, when the moratorium ended in 2021, it passed a law establishing (and funding) the right to an attorney for any tenant facing eviction.

Rabinowitz saw his chance. He applied for an entry-level opening in the Baltimore County office of Maryland Legal Aid. The organization recognized his experience and urged him to apply to be the supervisor of a staff of 20 in its newly expanded Baltimore City housing office. The job came with a “fairly significant” drop in pay, but he took it.

It wasn’t easy telling Tapper, who had recently offered to make him a partner in the firm before he retired. But Tapper understood. “I went to the enemy, on the one hand,” Rabinowitz said. “On the other hand, he was proud.”

The transition was awkward at first. Rabinowitz and his new colleagues at Legal Aid were occasionally facing off against a former colleague. And he could tell that some of his new colleagues were initially wary. After all, while many lawyers move from public-service roles to private practice, precious few head in the other direction. “People wanted to know if I was for real,” he said.

A few years later, Rabinowitz made his way to Rising for Justice, as director of the organization’s Tenant Justice Program. He now oversees four staff attorneys and a paralegal while supervising about nine law students from Georgetown University and the University of the District of Columbia.

It means a near-daily rail commute from Baltimore. But he likes working in the Washington court, which has such a nonconfrontational vibe that it makes do without bailiffs. The organization’s clients are grateful for the assistance, and he likes that it includes a social-service branch to help people find nonlegal help.

The law students assigned to him were surprised when they learned that their supervisor had once been on the other side. But they said it came in handy, too. “We get very emotional. It’s easy to get frustrated for your clients and wrapped up and involved,” said Savannah Myers, a Georgetown student, “and Drew has the unique perspective to say, ‘OK, well, this is what’s happening on your end, here’s probably what’s happening on the other end and here’s how you can proceed in the best way to help your client within the legal system.’”

One recent day, I watched in court as an older Ethiopian woman faced off against a landlord who was demanding back rent that she owed after having lost her job. The woman, who was using a walker, had an interpreter to assist her but no attorney. She tried to argue that the debt should be lowered because of a broken air conditioner and a problem with vermin in the rental.

After the judge, Sherry Trafford, ordered her to make monthly payments of $2,989 to the landlord, she also gently suggested that she seek out help from Rising for Justice in advance of the next hearing on her case.

“Where are they?” said the woman.

“It’s at the end of this hallway,” said Trafford.

The woman made her way slowly down, and it so happened that the person manning the intake desk at that moment was Andrew Rabinowitz. He welcomed her. “Do you have some court paperwork?” he asked through the interpreter, and then came back with a law student to assist her.

Later, Rabinowitz told me that it was poor housing conditions like the ones the woman was dealing with that were his ultimate goad these days. “That’s what motivates me,” he said. “I want people to have clean housing like mine.” Why had those conditions not registered so much with him back when he was on the other side? “I guess that stuff didn’t really get to me,” he said.

I was struck again by Rabinowitz’s reluctance to judge his earlier self. But there was no obscuring one effect of his new role. “I sleep well,” he said.

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

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

Utah legislators this session took aim at life coaches who harm their clients’ mental health, but the law that the governor signed Wednesday stops short of prescribing minimum standards or ethical guidelines for the burgeoning profession.

Anyone can call themselves a life coach, which, unlike being a mental health therapist, does not require any kind of education, training or license.

In Utah, one state agency found that dozens of life coaches are advertising their ability to treat mental health issues even though the vast majority are not trained or permitted to work as therapists. State licensors say they field an average of one complaint each month about life coaches.

The new law strengthens existing regulations that forbid anyone who isn’t a licensed therapist from treating mental health conditions. By clearly defining what only therapists are allowed to do, licensors can more readily cite and fine life coaches who treat mental health, according to state Sen. Mike McKell, the bill’s sponsor.

But the new law does not designate any money to immediately hire more investigators to probe potential problems.

An investigation last year by The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica showed that about a third of the 43 Utah therapists whose licenses had been revoked or denied since 2010, or who allowed their suspended licenses to expire, appear to have continued to work in the mental health field. Some rebranded as “life coaches.”

McKell said the new law targets life coaches who had lost their therapist licenses because the state deemed them unsafe to work with patients.

Utahns have struggled to get mental health help, largely due to a shortage of available therapists, according to a recent report from the Utah Behavioral Health Coalition.

In that gap, life coaching has emerged as an unregulated alternative, according to the Utah Office of Professional Licensure Review. At the request of lawmakers, the state office studied life coaching and whether it should be licensed, and found that Utah life coaches advertise using more than 100 titles, including “executive coach,” “relationship specialist” and “soul-sourced consultant,” according to a November 2024 report.

State researchers looked at online advertisements for roughly 220 Utah life coaches and concluded that about 40% may be offering therapy. These coaches say they specialize in addressing mental health struggles, the state found, with some claiming the ability to “conquer” their client’s mental health conditions.

As part of the review, the state office also surveyed Utah’s therapists in an effort to better understand potential risks associated with life coaches. Of the more than 3,500 who responded, a third said they have had at least one client tell them that they were harmed by a life coach.

The state report quoted one unnamed therapist who described treating patients who had hired life coaches: “All 5 reported life coaches had them ‘deep dive’ into their trauma, which sent them into an emotional spiral and then did not provide them with any skills to cope with the emotional distress. 4 of them ended up being hospitalized with severe suicidal ideation.”

Sarah Stroup, a licensed therapist who is on the legislative committee for the Utah Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, said the new law is a starting point “in ensuring that Utahns are receiving ethical care.”

“Our goal from the beginning was to advocate for guardrails to be put in place so that life coaches weren’t providing mental health treatment,” she said, “and therapists who had lost their license couldn’t continue practicing under the guise of life coaching.”

Mental health professionals and some lawmakers have pushed for more stringent oversight of life coaches in Utah in the wake of the high-profile 2023 conviction of Jodi Hildebrandt, who is in prison for abusing the children of her life coaching business partner.

Hildebrandt was a licensed clinical mental health counselor, but she had removed references to being a therapist from her website and instead marketed herself as a life coach in the years prior to her conviction. One of her former clients previously told The Tribune and ProPublica that Hildebrandt had said she became a life coach as a way to get around the ethical rules therapists are required to follow. (Hildebrandt’s attorney did not respond to requests for comment.)

Kevin Franke, the father of the children abused by Hildebrandt and his ex-wife, has advocated for more oversight of life coaches since the two women were sent to prison. He said he thinks there should be a state registry where the public can see whether a life coach has had complaints made against them or whether they were ever disciplined, and he hopes the state will eventually mandate standards for life coaches, including a code of ethics.

“I’m particularly concerned with life coaches who effectively impersonate a therapist or present themselves as some cheaper alternative to a licensed mental health professional,” he said.

While Utah legislators last year floated the idea of requiring life coaches to be licensed— something no other state in the country has done — the new law does not take that step. Utah’s Office of Professional Licensure Review found that licensing life coaches would be challenging given the wide-ranging services they offer and the ambiguity of the titles they use.

The new law, however, clarifies that only licensed therapists can present themselves as having the skills, experience and training to address mental illness and “emotional disorders.”

McKell, the Republican who sponsored the legislation, said that by better defining in state law what a therapist can do, he hopes that licensors can more easily penalize life coaches who harm their clients.

“Instead of trying to create regulation for life coaching, I am drawing this fence around mental health and what mental health professionals do at the exclusion of everyone else,” McKell said.

But some have questioned how effective the new law can be, given the small amount of money that is likely to be allocated to the effort.

The law creates an enforcement fund that will be collected from fines that the state’s licensing division issues to anyone who practices mental health therapy without a license. McKell said the fund signals to licensors that the Legislature wants them to take this issue seriously.

But previous reporting from The Tribune and ProPublica shows these types of citations are rare and unlikely to generate significant revenue: Over the last decade, the licensing department has cited just 25 people for “unauthorized practice” in the mental health field, according to a review of citations and other records. Those citations amounted to just over $10,000.

And last year, while licensors cited nearly 1,000 people, not a single new citation was given to anyone identified as working in the mental health field, according to a review of citations published monthly.

Melanie Hall, spokesperson for the Division of Professional Licensing, acknowledged that the law does not guarantee an influx of resources but said even a small amount of money could help fund social media campaigns to encourage the public to report bad behavior. If the fund grows larger, she said, that money could be used to conduct more investigations or pay for experts to weigh in on complex cases with high public harm.

At the same time, some Utah life coaches say the bill has already gone too far and could restrict their ability to help clients.

Heather Frazier, who advertises her expertise as a “parent-teen connection life coach,” said in a public hearing that restricting the treatment of “interpersonal dysfunction” to just therapists risks putting life coaches out of business. Life coaches can help struggling clients who don’t have a diagnosed mental illness learn how to better communicate with family members, she said.

“Without coaching, they will have to go to a therapist, which is already an overburdened, overworked part of our state,” Frazier said.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jessica Schreifels, The Salt Lake Tribune.

Asia Pacific Report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The people of West Papua have spoken.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

15/11/24 Jayapura, West Papua

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

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

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

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

As the climate crisis continues to accelerate, wealthy governments in the West are clamping down on climate protest. According to a new report from Climate Rights International, demonstrators around the world are being arrested, charged, prosecuted and silenced, simply for using their rights to free expression. One of those prosecuted is activist Joanna Smith, who last year applied washable school finger paint on the exterior glass case enclosing Edgar Degas’s renowned wax sculpture, Little Dancer, at the National Gallery of Art to draw attention to the urgency of the climate crisis. She was charged and later sentenced to two months in federal prison for her civil disobedience. We speak to Smith just a week after her release, and to Linda Lakhdir, the legal director of Climate Rights International. “Countries who have held themselves up as beacons of rule of law are essentially repressing peaceful protest,” says Lakhdir. Smith says the nonviolent action she took was intended to highlight the disparity between a sculpture of a child protected from the elements with a strong plexiglass case and the billions of children around the world left unsafe and vulnerable by climate change’s effects. “The crisis is here now, it’s unfolding in front of us, and our governments are failing us,” she explains.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The tourism ministry said 767,210 Russians arrived in Thailand in the first four months of the year, a 12.43% increase over last year when 1.61 million Russians visited. 

Many of those Russians head to Phuket for its beaches and nightlife and police say nearly 60,000 Russians are living on the island on Thailand's Indian Ocean coast. Some parts of Phuket feel like a Black Sea resort with Russians soaking up the sun on the beach while nearby signboards in Cyrillic advertise Russian restaurants, bars and other businesses including real estate agencies and tour companies.

But that’s a problem for some Thais, angry with what they see as Russians taking jobs and opportunities without proper work visas and business permits.

Police said that in response to complaints the government called for a crackdown, and they launched their raids last month on nearly 100 companies and property realtors, and came up with a list of 135 people and 100 companies suspected of breaking the law.

"Phuket residents complained to the prime minister about a land and residential grab by foreigners causing hardship, so we ordered the operation,” Police Lt. Gen. Jirapob Puridej, chief of the Central Investigation Bureau, told a press conference at the bureau's Bangkok headquarters on Friday.

None of the suspects had been detained but they had been summoned to appear in Bangkok to hear charges of breaking business laws, police said.  

Police declined to identify most of the suspects, citing privacy protection. Radio Free Asia was not able to track down any of them for comment.

Col. Krit Woratat, a senior officer at the Economic Crime Suppression Division, who organized the raids, told RFA that the investigation had revealed a Thai accountant in league with a Russian to set up joint ventures without legal requirements, and getting work permits through those bogus companies. Jobs in services sectors are almost exclusively reserved for Thais.

Thailand’s Foreign Business Act 1999 sets out jail of up to three years and a fine of 2 million baht (US$54,500) for those convicted of violations.  

Property and business laws are restrictive in Thailand and any foreigner hoping to start a business or find a job usually has to go through a tortuous application process.

Foreigners can buy flats but can not own land. They can set up a joint venture with a Thai partner but are not allowed to hold more than a 49% stake.

In 2023, more than 1,600 Russian-linked companies were registered in Phuket compared with an average of 30 in each of the previous seven years, police said.  

Scaring off investment?

According to the Real Estate Information Center, land prices in Phuket have risen up to 40% this year, much higher than the national average, and house and condominium sales to the tune of 31.5 billion baht (US$859 million) are expected.

Police seized deeds for land and condominiums worth 1.2 billion baht (US$33 million) in their raids, along with 318 million baht (US$8.7 million) in cash deposits and 108 work permits, which were being checked. Bank accounts suspected of being used to defraud Thai customers with investment scams were frozen, police said.

One disgruntled Phuket native, who asked that he be identified as Chai, welcomed the police action.

"It's as if they own the country," Chai said of Phuket's Russian visitors.

"They've bought up so much land, pushed up property prices, and some unruly Russians cause social disorder," said Chai, who owns a small retail business. "The government has to purge all illegal activities."

But some Thais are worried that the raids could scare off foreign investment.

Maetapong Upatising, president of the Phuket Real Estate Association, said Russians were the top investors in Phuket’s real estate this year, followed by Chinese and French, and the authorities should not ruin the “investment sentiment”.

“Amid competition, land prices rise and so do shady businessmen,” Maetapong told RFA. “Actually, our association has called for a government investigation into fraud but it should not put off foreign investment.”

Maetapong said some rich Russians had been investing at the top end of the market, buying luxury villas that range in price from around 25 million baht ($730,000) and up. The well-off can secure long-term resident visas that let them stay for years through an “elite visas” scheme, he said.

Before COVID-19, Thailand welcomed a record 40 million tourists, with Chinese accounting for more than a  quarter. The sector has been recovering - there were more than 28 million visitors last year - but not as quickly as many would hope with Chinese tourists yet to flock back.

Since November, Thailand has included Russians tourists in a visa exemption scheme in a bid to boost arrivals. The scheme has been extended to July.

Edited by Mike Firn.

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

They say they want local authorities to do more to crack down on foreign fishing boats – particularly from Vietnam – that have been encroaching into Malaysia’s territorial waters for years to trawl for squid. 

Malaysia has laws with stiff penalties to guard against illegal fishing. It also signed an MoU with Vietnam three years ago to deal with this issue.

But that hasn’t deterred foreign fishermen from trawling in Malaysian waters without permits or paying off local skippers to lend them their fishing licenses, Malaysian fishermen allege. 

The local squid stock is becoming depleted because the Vietnamese boats use big nets that can damage the sea floor, Syed said. 

“Fishermen on the east coast of Malaysia really don’t want this,” he told BenarNews.

Syed is based in Kuala Terengganu, a port on the eastern shores of Peninsular Malaysia.  

“They use ‘pukat gading’ [large fishing nets] … equipment that can damage the ecosystem. [W]hatever is under the sea is depleted because they use rollers,” he said of the Vietnamese boats, adding that when the nets come upon reefs “they’ll kill all the coral and everything.”

As a result of illegal fishing by foreigners, Malaysia lost US$172 million (823 million ringgit) in fisheries through 428 incursions by non-Malaysian boats between 2020 and 2023, according to Mohamad Sabu, Malaysia’s minister of Agriculture and Food Security.

Of the 19 foreign boats intercepted and seized by Malaysian authorities during that period, 18 were from Vietnam, officials said.   

Persistent problem

Vietnamese fishing boats have been encroaching in Malaysian waters in the South China Sea for almost two decades, residents, officials and experts say. But despite a memorandum of understanding signed between the two countries’ maritime agencies in 2021, the problem persists.

“In 2022, there was an oil spill in the Gulf of Thailand and this led to a decline in fish species in nearby areas. Indirectly, this has caused many foreign fishermen from Vietnam and Thailand to trawl in Malaysian waters,” said one expert, Syuhaida Ismail.

“Most Vietnamese fishing vessels would fish in their own area, but then came to Malaysian waters after their sonar technology detected more catches in Malaysia. The catches are known to be more rewarding compared to catches in Vietnam,” Syuhaida, research director at the Maritime Institute of Malaysia, told BenarNews. 

Under Malaysia’s fisheries law, foreign fishing boats and foreign nationals are subject to a fine not exceeding 6 million ringgit ($1.25 million) each in the case of the owner or master, and 600,000 ringgit (US$125,000) in the case of every member of the crew, if found guilty of fishing illegally in Malaysian waters. 

During intercepts at sea by Malaysia’s coast guard, some tense and violent standoffs with Vietnamese fishermen have occurred.

In 2020, a Vietnamese sailor was shot dead by members of the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency, after crews of Vietnam-flagged vessels rammed and attacked an MMEA boat with Molotov cocktails and hard objects during a patrol 81 nautical miles (150 km) off Tok Bali in Kelantan state, coast guard officials said at the time.

And last July, one MMEA member was attacked and seriously injured to the head while inspecting a Vietnamese fishing boat off the coast of Kuala Terengganu.

According to one Vietnamese fisherman, desperation drove him to fish in Malaysian waters. For safety reasons, he requested that he remain anonymous.

“There are difficulties. For example, at that time, in Vietnam, our fishing grounds did not have enough squid. But in their waters, they have more. So we have to enter their waters,” the fisherman said during an interview with RFA Vietnamese at Radio Free Asia.

BenarNews is an online news agency affiliated with Radio Free Asia.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Ahmad Mustakim Zulkifli and Syahrin Abdul Aziz for BenarNews.

Police have now arrested more than 2,500 students at pro-Palestine protests across the U.S., yet students continue to call for an end to the war on Gaza and universities’ investment in companies that support Israel’s occupation of Palestine. We speak to three student organizers from around the country: Salma Hamamy of the University of Michigan, president of the school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, about the commencement ceremony protest she helped organize, and Cady de la Cruz of the University of Virginia and Rae Ferrara of the State University of New York at New Paltz about police crackdowns on their schools’ encampments. De la Cruz was arrested in the UVA raid and banned from campus without an opportunity to collect any of her belongings. She says repression has strengthened the resolve of many protesters, who are willing to risk their academic futures to push for divestment. “All of us there felt like we have more time on our hands … than the people of Gaza,” she explains, “We would hold it down for anything.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

A limitless supply of heat exists beneath our feet within the Earth’s crust, but harnessing it at scale has proved challenging. Now, a combination of new techniques, government support, and the pressing need to secure continuous clean power in an era of climate crisis means that geothermal energy is finally having its moment in the U.S.

Until recently, geothermal has only been viable where the Earth’s inner heat simmers near the surface, such as at hot springs or geysers where hot water or steam can be easily drawn to drive turbines and generate electricity.

While this has allowed a limited number of places, like Iceland, to use geothermal as a main source of heating and electricity, it has only been a niche presence in the U.S, providing less than 1 percent of its electricity. But this could change dramatically, offering the promise of endless, 24/7 clean energy that can fill in the gaps of intermittent solar and wind generation in the electricity grid.

“Geothermal has been used for over 100 years, limited to certain geographic locations — but that is now changing,” said Amanda Kolker, the geothermal laboratory program manager at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, or NREL.

“As we penetrate the grid with renewables that are not available all the time, we need to find a base load, which is currently taken up by gas. There aren’t really many options for zero-emissions base load power, which is why geothermal is entering the picture.”

Geothermal capacity could increase twentyfold by 2050, generating 10 percent of the country’s electricity, according to a recent road map released by the U.S. Department of Energy. President Joe Biden’s administration has also funded new projects aimed at pushing forward the next generation of geothermal that aim to make the energy source available anywhere on America’s landmass, not just easy-to-reach hot springs.

“The U.S. can lead the clean energy future with continued innovation on next-generation technologies, from harnessing the power of the sun to the heat beneath our feet, and cracking the code to deploy them at scale,” said Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, who added that she saw “enormous potential” in geothermal.

Expanding the geothermal footprint to the entire U.S. will take time, as well as plenty of money — the Department of Energy estimates as much as $250 billion will be needed for projects to become widespread across the country, providing a major source of clean power.

But advocates of geothermal say that such growth is within reach, because of a wave of geothermal technologies as well as government support. In February, the Biden administration announced $74 million for up to seven pilot projects to develop enhanced geothermal systems that, the government said, hold the potential for powering 65 million American homes.

Ironically, enhanced geothermal uses similar fracking techniques currently used to extract oil and gas, which must be phased out if the world is to avoid climate disaster. In the geothermal version of fracking, fluid is injected deep underground, causing fractures to open up, with the liquid becoming hot as it circulates. The hot water is then pumped to the surface, where it can generate electricity for the grid.

This, and other new techniques that involve deeper and horizontal drilling, in some cases 8 miles deep, allows geothermal energy to be drawn from hot rocks found anywhere underground, rather than select spots that have hot water near the surface. This vastly expands the potential of the technology.

“Anywhere in the country, if you drill, it gets hotter and hotter with each mile you go deeper,” said Koenraad Beckers, an NREL thermal sciences researcher.

“In the western United States, that temperature increases fast. If you drill just 1 to 2 miles deep, you have temperatures hot enough for electricity. To get those temperatures in eastern states, you might need to drill miles and miles down, but you can use lower temperatures to directly heat or cool campuses, neighborhoods, and even towns.”

Dozens of new companies are looking to push ahead with geothermal plans, buoyed by incentives offered by recent legislation, although only a few have so far managed to complete full projects in the country, such as Eavor, a Canadian firm that successfully drilled a 3-mile hole in New Mexico to prove it could access heat deep in granite rock.

At play for these companies is an inexhaustible energy supply. Just one type of next generation geothermal — called superhot rock energy, where deep drilling reaches temperatures 400 degrees Celsius (752 degrees Fahrenheit) or hotter — is abundant enough to theoretically fulfill the world’s power requirements. In fact, just 1 percent of the world’s superhot rock potential could provide 63 terawatts of clean firm power, which would meet global electricity demand nearly eight times over.

“While this modeling is preliminary, our findings suggest an enormous opportunity to unlock vast amounts of clean energy beneath our feet,” said Terra Rogers, the director for superhot rock energy at Clean Air Task Force, which produced the modellng tool to measure the potential of this approach.

“Energy security backed by always available zero-carbon energy isn’t a far-off dream.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The US aims to ‘crack the code’ on scaling up geothermal energy production on Apr 7, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Oliver Milman, The Guardian.

The Papua New Guinea government plans to introduce laws to curb free speech and freedom of the press, former prime minister Peter O’Neill says.

In a statement, O’Neill said the same law would jail any journalist or person who published anything the government deemed to be “misreporting”.

O’Neill described the government’s proposal as “deeply concerning and needs to be vehemently opposed every way possible”.

• READ MORE: Other reports on PNG media freedom

He said: “Today we learn government is preparing to crack down on journalists with new media laws being urgently prepared and to be presented to Parliament very soon.

“They plan to curb free speech and freedom of the press to report by being able to jail any journalist or person who publishes anything they deem is misreporting.”

Information and Communication Technology Minister (ICT) Timothy Masiu said yesterday that the Department of Information and Communication Technology (DICT) was currently working on the media policy to include holding persons accountable for misreporting.

Masiu said the policy to be presented to Cabinet would still hold its original content but would emphasise that media quality, accessibility and responsibility in information dissemination would be based on facts.

‘We don’t want to tighten up’
“We don’t want to tighten up on media so much but we want to make sure that reporters are responsible for what they report and it’s about time this should be implemented,” Masiu said.

Prime Minister James Marape said he supported the move.

“This is our country where you all have the power in your pen but take some responsibility and write correctly and based on facts,” he said.

“You have a responsibility to our county.

“Do not write your own opinion, or if you have an opinion, then find facts to support that opinion.

“Those who are not writing based on fact, I will be holding you accountable,” he said.

O’Neill questioned whether journalists and their editors will be subject to arrest and punishment.

“I am both saddened and alarmed at the proposed way the Marape government is dismantling democracy.

“I am utterly convinced that if we uphold all the principles of a healthy democracy, we as a people will overcome any challenge whether it be economic, social or environmental,” he said.

“We are a strong people with the courage of our convictions and centuries old traditions and customs.”

Republished with permission.

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

Photograph Source: Fars Media Corporation – CC BY 4.0

1948 was a year of tragic irony.

That year saw the adoption of both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, together promising a world in which human rights would be protected by the rule of law. That same year, South Africa adopted apartheid and Israeli forces carried out the Nakba, the violent mass dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Both systems relied on western colonial support.

In short, the modern international human rights movement was born into a world of racialized colonial contradictions. Seventy-five years later, the world is watching in horror as Israel has continued the Nakba through its months-long, systematic ethnic purge of Gaza — again with the complicity of powerful western governments led by the United States.

The horrors of the original Nakba were met with decades of absolute impunity for Israel, feeding further violence. But this time, three decades since the overthrow of apartheid in South Africa, the post-apartheid “Rainbow Nation” is taking the lead in challenging Israel’s genocidal assault.

On December 29, South Africa became the first country to file an application to the UN’s high judicial arm, the International Court of Justice, instituting genocide proceedings against Israel for “acts threatened, adopted, condoned, taken, and being taken by the Government and military of the State of Israel against the Palestinian people.”

In wrenching and horrifying detail, South Africa’s 84-page document describes a litany of Israeli actions as “genocidal in character, as they are committed with the requisite specific intent… to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a part of the broader Palestinian national, racial, and ethnical group.”

A Horrifying Civilian Toll in Gaza and the West Bank

2023 was the bloodiest year in the Palestinian territories since the destruction of historic Palestine and the founding of the state of Israel.

In the first half of the year, Israeli assaults on Palestinians in the West Bank had already reached a fever pitch, with successive waves of mass arrests, settler pogroms, and military attacks against Palestinian towns and refugee camps, including the ethnic cleansing of entire villages. At the same time, millions of civilians in Gaza were suffering unbearable hardship under a 17-year-long Israel-imposed siege.

On October 7, Gaza-based militants launched a devastating attack on Israeli military and civilian targets and seized more than 200 military personnel and civilian hostages. In an appalling act of mass collective punishment, Israel immediately cut off all food, water, medicine, fuel, and electricity to the 2.3 million Palestinian civilians trapped in Gaza. Then it began a relentless campaign of annihilation through massive bombing and missile strikes followed by a ground-level invasion that brought shocking reports of massacres, extrajudicial executions, torture, beatings, and mass civilian detentions.

More than 22,000 civilians and counting have since been killed in Gaza, the overwhelming majority children and women — along with record numbers of journalists and more UN aid workers than in any other conflict situation. Thousands more are still trapped under the rubble, dead or dying from untreated injuries, and now more are dying from rampant diseases caused by Israel’s denial of clean water and medical care, even as the Israeli military assault continues. Eighty-five percent of all Gazans have been forced from their homes. And now Israeli-imposed starvation is taking hold.

The Legal Standard for Genocide

Genocide analysts and human rights lawyers, activists, specialists around the globe — no strangers to human cruelty — have been shocked by both the savagery of Israel’s acts and by the brazen public declarations of genocidal intent by Israeli leaders. Hundreds of these experts have sounded the genocide alarm in Gaza, noting the point-by-point alignment between Israel’s actions and its officials’ stated intent on the one hand, and the prohibitions enumerated in UN Genocide Convention on the other.

The South African application “unequivocally condemns all violations of international law by all parties, including the direct targeting of Israeli civilians and other nationals and hostage-taking by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups.” But it reminds the Court: “No armed attack on a State’s territory, no matter how serious — even an attack involving atrocity crimes — can, however, provide any possible justification for, or defense to, breaches of the [Genocide Convention] whether as a matter of law or morality.”

Unlike many aspects of international law, the definition of genocide is quite straightforward. To qualify as genocide or attempted genocide, two things are required. First, the specific intent of the perpetrator to destroy all or part of an identified national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. Second, commission of at least one of five specified acts designed to make that happen.

South Africa’s petition to the ICJ is filled with clear and horrifically compelling examples, identifying Israeli actions that match at least three of the five acts that constitute genocide when linked to specific intent. Those include killing members of the group, causing serious physical or mental harm to members of the group, and, perhaps most indicative of genocidal purpose, creating “conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction.” As South Africa documents, Israel has shown the world, at levels unprecedented in the 21^st century, what those conditions look like.

For specific intent, South Africa points to dozens of statements made by Israeli leaders, including the President, Prime Minister, and other cabinet officials, and as well as Knesset members, military commanders, and more.

Accustomed to decades of U.S.-backed impunity, Israeli officials have been emboldened, describing openly their intent to carry out “another Nakba,” to wipe out all of Gaza, to deny any distinction between civilians and combatants, to raze Gaza to the ground, to reduce it to rubble, and to bury Palestinians alive, among many other similar statements.

Their deliberately dehumanizing language includes descriptions of Palestinians as animals, sub-human, Nazis, a cancer, insects, vermin — all language designed to justify wiping out all or part of the group. Prime Minister Netanyahu went so far as to invoke a Biblical verse on the Amalek, commanding that the “entire population be wiped out, that none be spared, men, women, children, suckling babies, and livestock.”

The U.S. May Also Be Complicit in Israel’s Genocide

The petition to the ICJ is sharply focused on Israel’s violations of the Genocide Convention. It does not deal with the complicity of other governments, most significantly of course the role of the United States in funding, arming, and shielding Israel as it carries out its genocidal acts.

But the active role of the United States in the Israeli onslaught, while hardly surprising, has been especially shocking. As a State Party to the Genocide Convention, the U.S. is obliged to act to prevent or stop genocide. Instead, we have seen the United States not only failing in its obligations of prevention, but instead actively providing economic, military, intelligence, and diplomatic support to Israel while it is engaged in its mass atrocities in Gaza.

As such, this is not merely a case of U.S. inaction in the face of genocide (itself a breach of its legal obligations) but also a case of direct complicity — which is a distinct crime under the Genocide Convention. The Center for Constitutional Rights, on behalf of Palestinian human rights organizations and individual Palestinians and Palestinian-Americans, has filed a suit in U.S. federal court in California focused on U.S. complicity in Israel’s acts of genocide.

South Africa’s Genocide Complaint is a Rallying Cry for Civil Society

In a situation such as this, framed by shocking Western complicity on one side and a massive failure of international institutions fed by U.S. pressure on the other, South Africa’s initiative at the ICJ may hold significance beyond the Court’s ultimate decision.

This case comes in the context of the extraordinary mobilization of protests, petitions, sit-ins, occupations, civil disobedience, boycotts, and so much more by human rights defenders, Jewish activists, faith-based organizations, labor unions, and broad-based movements across the United States and around the world.

As such, this move puts South Africa, and potentially the ICJ itself, on the side of the global mobilization for a ceasefire, for human rights, and for accountability. One of the most important values of this ICJ petition may therefore be in its use as an instrument for escalating global civil society mobilizations demanding their governments abide by the obligations imposed on all parties to the Genocide Convention.

Predictably, Israel has already rejected the legitimacy of the case before the Court. Confident that the U.S. and its allies will not allow Israel to be held accountable, the Israeli government is defiantly continuing its bloody assault on Gaza (as well as the West Bank). If Israel and its Western collaborators are once again successful in blocking justice, the first victims will be the Palestinian people. Then the credibility of international law itself may be lost as collateral damage.

But South Africa’s ICJ action has opened a crack in a 75-year-old wall of impunity through which a light of hope has begun to shine. If global protests can seize the moment to turn that crack into a wider portal towards justice, we may just see the beginnings of real accountability for perpetrators, redress for victims, and attention to the long-neglected root causes of violence: settler-colonialism, occupation, inequality, and apartheid.

The post A Crack in the 75-Year-Old Wall of Impunity: South Africa’s Court Challenge of Israeli Genocide appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Craig Mokhiber – Phyllis Bennis.

The rule, proposed by the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the executive body in charge of implementing NEPA, is the latest push by the Biden administration to address regulatory obstacles to developing clean energy. Experts lauded the latest NEPA rule as a small but meaningful step toward much-needed permitting reform in the U.S. 

Max Sarinsky, senior attorney at New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, described the rule as “fairly modest and incremental” to E&E News. “We’re in an era where preserving the environment often means building new things,” he said. “I think these regulations are trying to be sensitive to that.”

The new rule would codify the permitting compromise reached in the Fiscal Responsibility Act, the legislation that Congress passed to prevent the U.S. from defaulting on its debts earlier this summer. The changes required under that law included designating a lead agency for each project review and setting stricter deadlines and page limits for assessments. The rule would also grant federal agencies discretion to adopt other agencies’ “categorical exclusions,” which classify certain types of projects as exempt from environmental impact assessments if they’re seen as having minimal impacts. 

Environmental justice and advocacy groups have decried the permitting changes in the debt ceiling deal, saying they could help expedite the buildout of polluting infrastructure without adequate review or input. Some law and policy experts have said that the exact impacts may only be revealed later as agencies revise their processes and courts begin to interpret the new language. 

The rule also marks the second in a series of regulations to reverse NEPA rollbacks made under the Trump administration. A rule finalized last year reinstated a requirement for federal agencies to consider direct, indirect, and cumulative impacts of a proposed federal action. The new rule would reverse changes made in 2020 that limited public input and judicial challenges under NEPA, including a provision stating that concerns raised in litigation must have been first submitted during the official public comment period. 

The council’s proposal last Friday would also direct agencies to consider climate change and environmental justice impacts in their reviews. And for the first time, the rule would encourage agencies to identify strategies to avoid or mitigate cumulative impacts on communities, which could spare overburdened communities from further sources of pollution. The Southern Environmental Law Center, an advocacy group, hailed these actions as “overwhelmingly positive.” 

The proposal also attempts to strengthen public engagement by requiring agencies to appoint a chief public engagement officer to lead community engagement during NEPA reviews. Experts say the changes could help make lengthy and technical review processes more accessible and transparent to the general public. “They make clear that the purpose of NEPA is not to promote paperwork, even excellent paperwork, but rather to encourage better decisions,” said Mark Squillace, a natural resources law professor at the University of Colorado Law School. 

The Council on Environmental Quality’s proposal arrives one day after the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission finalized a rule to speed up the process of connecting wind, solar, and battery projects to the power grid. The commission’s rule prioritizes connecting energy projects that are closest to installation in a “first-ready, first-served” process, among other changes. 

Environmental experts and groups lauded the Council on Environmental Quality’s rule as a long-awaited reversal of Trump-era NEPA regulations, even as other permitting challenges for renewable energy loom ahead, including a shortage of transmission lines to move clean electricity to consumers.

“As we face the worsening impacts of the climate crisis, entrenched environmental injustice, and accelerating biodiversity loss, we must invest in NEPA as an essential framework to build the infrastructure and drive the solutions that we urgently need in this decade,” said Abigail Dillen, president of the nonprofit Earthjustice, in a statement. 

Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline White House takes a crack at much-needed permitting reform on Aug 1, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Akielly Hu.

These credits, bought and sold on unregulated markets that are expected to be worth up to $100 billion by 2030, have long drawn criticism for failing to deliver on their promised emission reductions. Some credits come from projects that claim to protect forests that were never in danger of being cut down. Others pull carbon out of the air, but only temporarily, or are susceptible to “double-counting,” in which the same credits are claimed by two separate organizations. Experts have described offsets as a “climate scam” and the voluntary market for them a “Wild West.”

Now, federal regulatory agencies are beginning to take note. One of these is the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC, an independent government body charged with ensuring the stability of the country’s derivatives markets. This week, the commission held its second roundtable discussion on promoting “integrity for high quality carbon credit derivatives,” and other recent actions suggest that it’s gearing up for a more proactive regulatory role in this space. 

Last month, for example, the CFTC released a whistleblower alert asking the public for tips about fraud and manipulation in voluntary carbon markets — a “precursor” to bringing enforcement actions against market manipulators, according to Todd Phillips, a fellow at the think tank the Roosevelt Institute. Just a few days later, the CFTC announced a new Environmental Fraud Task Force within its enforcement division, to help investigate cases of “fraud and misconduct” in offset-related markets.

“The CFTC is uniquely situated to address this issue,” Phillips said. “There really is no one else.”

Exactly how they’ll do it, however, is uncertain. 

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, created by Congress in 1974, regulates the U.S. markets for derivatives, contracts between parties in which prices are derived from the value of an underlying asset or benchmark. Such contracts can help hedge against risk; a futures contract, for example, guarantees the price for which a given asset will be sold at some point in the future. Farmers often use these kinds of contracts to guarantee their crops will sell for an agreed-upon price at the end of the harvest, protecting them from a downward swing in the market. Meanwhile, the CFTC’s job is to ensure that the crops actually get delivered, as per the contract. 

This is all relatively straightforward when it comes to derivatives involving tangible commodities like wheat, which the CFTC has long regulated. But it’s more complicated when it comes to carbon offsets. Offset credits are usually approved by unregulated standard-setters, sold to brokers, and then purchased by a company or organization to count toward their decarbonization pledges — often via a futures contract, if the emissions offset has yet to happen and is promised to occur at some point in the future. Compared to wheat, it’s much less obvious what counts as the legitimate delivery of a carbon credit. Many market participants are concerned that if the underlying commodity — the offset — is based on fraudulent assumptions and does not actually cancel out climate pollution, then derivatives based on those commodities are also fraudulent.

This is already a huge problem; experts have noted “widespread perverse incentives” among market participants to inflate the climate benefits of their carbon credits. Buyers are motivated by low prices, for instance, and unregulated standard-setters run carbon credit registries that charge fees based on the volume of credits bought and sold, incentivizing them to set looser standards to enable more sales. Already, millions of rainforest-related credits approved by Verra, the world’s largest standard-setter for the voluntary carbon markets, have been shown to be “nonadditional,” meaning they didn’t yield additional emission reductions on top of what would have been expected if the credits didn’t exist.

Robin Rix, Verra’s chief legal, policy, and markets officer, acknowledged at the CFTC roundtable on Wednesday that voluntary carbon markets have characteristics that make them “vulnerable to abuse by malicious actors.” But he said it’s a “misconception” that voluntary carbon markets lack transparency and said his organization would support “a more muscular approach to fraud and market manipulation” from the CFTC.  

Verra controls two-thirds of the world’s voluntary carbon markets. The rest are largely dominated by just three other private registries: the Climate Action Reserve, Gold Standard, and the American Carbon Registry.

The CFTC has so far not waded into this morass, although many experts, advocacy groups, and even private businesses would like it to. Following the commission’s first public convening on voluntary carbon markets last year, dozens of organizations responded to a request for information by saying that the CFTC should develop standards for carbon offsets that “effectively reduce greenhouse gas emissions and can serve as underlying commodities for approved derivatives.” 

Freya Chay, program lead for the climate data nonprofit CarbonPlan, said such standards should require voluntary carbon markets to clearly distinguish between offsets that prevent carbon emissions — like if a project developer builds a wind farm rather than a coal plant — and those that remove carbon from the atmosphere. She also called for greater transparency around the “permanence” of removal-based offsets, i.e., how long they will keep carbon locked up. CO2 lasts around 1,000 years in the atmosphere. Meanwhile, carbon credits derived from offset projects like tree-planting — which might only keep carbon sequestered for a dozen years, since forests are susceptible to wildfires and illegal logging — are often treated the same as those derived from geological sequestration, in which carbon is injected into rock formations and is more likely to stay put.

It’s not clear, however, whether a definition of what constitutes a high-quality carbon offset will come from the CFTC. Many speakers at Wednesday’s roundtable said that, in order to allow the voluntary carbon markets to “reach their full potential,” the commission should leave definitional work to the private sector, perhaps in the hands of an independent body called the Integrity Council for Voluntary Carbon Markets. One speaker, representing an advocacy group for forest owners, called for the CFTC to only regulate with “a light touch” that allows standard-setters like Verra to continue to “innovate.” 

Phillips, with the Roosevelt Institute, said the CFTC should simply hold standard-setters responsible for the claims they make. During the roundtable, he emphasized three words: “enforcement, enforcement, enforcement.”

Groups like Verra or the American Carbon Registry “have standards that say if you meet these standards, your offsets will count as one ton of carbon emissions reduced,” Phillips said in an interview with Grist. “If they make these assertions while knowing that they’re not true, that’s fraud.” In such a case, the CFTC could impose civil monetary penalties, freeze assets, or restrict an organization’s trading privileges. The commission could also refer the case to the Justice Department for prosecution.

As carbon markets grow, it’s likely that the CFTC’s efforts will complement or even overlap with work from other federal agencies to prevent offsets-related greenwashing. The Securities and Exchange Commission, for example — an independent regulatory agency in charge of protecting investors — has proposed rules that would require companies to disclose “certain information” about offsets they use, although it’s not yet clear what kind of information this would include. Some experts say another agency, the Federal Trade Commission — tasked with enforcing the United States’ consumer protection laws — could step in by including a more concrete (albeit nonbinding) definition of a high-quality carbon offset in its soon-to-be-updated guidelines for environmental marketing claims.

Phillips, however, is pinning his hopes on the CFTC, which he said has shown the most interest in bringing enforcement actions. Indeed, commissioners on Wednesday spoke forcefully about the need to clean up the voluntary carbon markets.

“The rapid growth of these markets requires the commission’s careful attention,” Commissioner Kristin Johnson told attendees. “Our common goal must be to adopt a transparent path that effectively prevents double-counting, ensures additionality, and prevents fraud.” 

The CFTC has issued another request for information from the public and is accepting submissions until August 18.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This little-known federal regulator could crack down on fraudulent carbon offsets on Jul 21, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Joseph Winters.

Broadcast offices in the Tibet Autonomous Region, including in Lhasa, along with police investigated every household on June 8-9 for illegal satellite broadcasts, according to an announcement on the website of the Lhasa police. So far, authorities have confiscated about 50 satellite dishes.

In 2009, the Chinese government provided every household in Lhasa with a government-approved satellite dish, which gave residents access to only a limited number of state-controlled programs.

It is illegal for Tibetans who have access to or watch broadcasting other than state-sanctioned programs via satellite. 

“The satellite dishes in these households were installed by the Chinese government, and the satellite has only access to state-controlled programs, which are very limited,” said a Tibetan living in Lhasa who declined to be identified so as to speak freely.

“Tibetans cannot buy other satellite dishes or pay to watch other channels that have access to other news and information,” the source said. “It is deemed illegal.” 

Authorities say they have taken the measure to ensure harmony and stability in Tibet, and that the investigations will continue.  

But Tibetans see the move as another way that the Chinese government is preventing them from accessing outside information and restricting their communication. 

“This operation is part of a government clampdown on satellite equipment used by Tibetans to tune in to foreign news and programs, and the tracking of Tibetans’ cell phones to monitor their communication with the outside world,” said Pema Gyal, a Tibetan researcher at Tibet Watch, a London-based advocacy and monitoring group.

Before checking private households, authorities in Lhasa clamped down on the use of satellite dishes in hotels and guesthouses, said another Tibetan who declined to be identified for the same reason.

Though the satellite dishes installed by the government show only state-run programs, foreign programs can sometimes be picked up, the source said.

“However, it’s up to the person’s maneuvering skills to do that and to not get caught,” the Tibetan added.  

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi for RFA Tibetan. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Sangyal Kunchok for RFA Tibetan.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren joined healthcare campaigner Ady Barkan and others on Monday in sounding alarm over a recent investigation showing that Medicare Advantage insurers are using unregulated artificial intelligence systems to determine when to end payments for patients' treatments, a practice that has prematurely terminated coverage for vulnerable seniors.

STATreported earlier this month that while "health insurance companies have rejected medical claims for as long as they've been around," AI is "driving their denials to new heights in Medicare Advantage," a privately run program funded by the federal government.

"Behind the scenes, insurers are using unregulated predictive algorithms, under the guise of scientific rigor, to pinpoint the precise moment when they can plausibly cut off payment for an older patient's treatment," the outlet found. "The denials that follow are setting off heated disputes between doctors and insurers, often delaying treatment of seriously ill patients who are neither aware of the algorithms, nor able to question their calculations."

"Older people who spent their lives paying into Medicare, and are now facing amputation, fast-spreading cancers, and other devastating diagnoses, are left to either pay for their care themselves or get by without it," STAT continued. "If they disagree, they can file an appeal, and spend months trying to recover their costs, even if they don't recover from their illnesses."

Barkan, co-executive director of Be a Hero and an ALS patient who is acutely aware of the injustices at the heart of the United States' for-profit healthcare system, tweeted Monday that STAT's reporting is "outrageous and terrifying" and circulated a petition imploring the Biden administration to crack down on the Medicare Advantage industry's use of AI.

"This barbaric practice must end," the petition states. "We're calling on President Biden and the [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] to stop this practice immediately."

Warren (D-Mass.), who blasted the huge profits of top Medicare Advantage insurers last week, echoed Barkan in a tweet of her own.

"Medicare Advantage insurers make patients look as sick as possible to overcharge taxpayers billions," Warren wrote, referring to a common industry practice known as upcoding.

"At the same time, they deny seniors and people with disabilities care—with the help of AI algorithms," the senator continued. "We must crack down on these abuses. No more #DeathByAI."

An analysis published last year in the Journal of Medical Internet Research found that "despite the plethora of claims for the benefits of AI in enhancing clinical outcomes, there is a paucity of robust evidence."

But that lack of evidence hasn't stopped hugely profitable private healthcare companies from increasingly using AI tools to "help make life-altering decisions with little independent oversight," STAT determined after reviewing secret corporate documents and hundreds of pages of federal records and court filings.

"Over the last decade, a new industry has formed around these plans to predict how many hours of therapy patients will need, which types of doctors they might see, and exactly when they will be able to leave a hospital or nursing home," STAT reported. "The predictions have become so integral to Medicare Advantage that insurers themselves have started acquiring the makers of the most widely used tools."

"Elevance, Cigna, and CVS Health, which owns insurance giant Aetna, have all purchased these capabilities in recent years," the outlet continued. "One of the biggest and most controversial companies behind these models, NaviHealth, is now owned by UnitedHealth Group."

"President Biden has the power to stop this. We're meeting with White House staff this week to discuss this outrage."

In 2020, a UnitedHealthcare algorithm determined that 89-year-old Dolores Millam—who broke her leg in a fall that year—would only need to stay in a nursing home for 15 days following surgery, STAT reported.

After the 15 days were up, Millam "received notice that payment for her care had been terminated." Millam's daughter, Holly Hennessy, told STAT that "she couldn't fathom UnitedHealthcare's conclusion that her mother unable to move or even go to the bathroom on her own—no longer met Medicare coverage requirements."

"Hennessy said she had no choice but to keep her mother in the nursing home, Evansville Manor, and hope the payment denial would get overturned," STAT reported. "By then, the bills were quickly piling up."

UnitedHealthcare rejected Millam and Hennessy's appeal, forcing them to pursue relief in federal court—an arduous process.

A federal judge finally ruled months later that UnitedHealthcare improperly denied Millam that she was entitled to full coverage.

The total bill for her nursing home stay was $40,000, according to STAT.

Barkan warned Monday that "insurance behemoths using AI to squeeze every cent out of us." Just seven healthcare companies control more than 70% of the Medicare Advantage market.

"President Biden has the power to stop this," Barkan wrote of Medicare Advantage plans' use of AI. "We're meeting with White House staff this week to discuss this outrage."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by John Nicolson.

Four U.S senators this week called on Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to use her existing authority to go after American billionaires and multimillionaires who "use trusts to shift wealth to their heirs tax-free, dodging federal estate and gift taxes."

"They are doing this in the open: Their wealth managers are bragging about how their tax dodging tricks will be more effective in the current economy," stressed Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.).

"While we look forward to continuing to partner with you on legislative solutions," the senators wrote to Yellen, "the Treasury Department can and should exercise the full extent of its regulatory authority to limit this blatant abuse of our tax system by the ultrawealthy."

Their letter to the Treasury leader, dated Monday and first reported by CBS MoneyWatch Tuesday, highlights that "only the wealthiest American families" are asked to pay transfer taxes such as the estate tax, gift tax, and generation-skipping transfer (GST) tax.

As the letter lays out:

Tax avoidance through grantor trusts starts with the ultrawealthy putting assets into a trust with the intention of transferring them to heirs. Grantor trusts are trusts where the grantor retains control over the assets, and the structures of some of these grantor trusts allow the transfer of massive sums tax-free. Tax planning via grantor trusts, including grantor retained annuity trusts (GRATs), is a kind of shell game, with a wealthy person and their wealth managers able to pass assets back and forth in ways that effectively pass wealth to heirs while minimizing tax liability.

Some of the wealthiest families further compound this tax avoidance with perpetual dynasty trusts, which can be used to shield assets from transfer tax liability indefinitely. For example, aggressive valuation discounts can artificially reduce the value of assets transferred into a trust below the GST tax exemption threshold, after which the assets can grow in perpetuity within a trust exempt from transfer tax.

"The ultrawealthy at the top of the socioeconomic ladder live by different rules than the rest of America, especially when it comes to our tax system," the letter charges. "As the richest Americans celebrate and take advantage of these favorable tax opportunities, middle-class families struggle with inflation and Republicans threaten austerity measures and the end of Social Security and Medicare."

To help force the richest Americans to "pay their fair share" in taxes, the senators are calling on Treasury to revoke a pair of tax code rulings from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS); require GRATs to have a minimum remainder value; reissue family limited partnership regulations; clarify that intentionally defective grantor trusts (IDGTs) are not entitled to stepped-up basis; and put out clarifying regulations on certain valuation rules for estate and gift taxes.

The senators also sent a series of questions—about potential administrative action, how much is estimated to be held in grantor trusts, and how much could be raised from cracking down on abuse—and requested a response from Treasury by April 3.

Their letter comes after President Joe Biden earlier this month introduced a budget blueprint for fiscal year 2024 that would hike taxes on the rich—proposed policies praised by progressive experts and advocates as "fair, popular, and long overdue."

Yellen last week appeared before the Senate Finance Committee—of which Warren and Whitehouse are members—to testify about the administration's proposal. She said in part that "our proposed budget builds on our economic progress by making smart, fiscally responsible investments. These investments would be more than fully paid for by requiring corporations and the wealthiest to pay their fair share."

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

We speak with Dipti Bhatnagar, climate justice activist based in Mozambique, about the recent death on March 9 of the popular rapper and cultural icon Azagaia. He was just 38 years old. He inspired many with his music and sang about injustice, including mistreatment of people by the authorities, as well as about poverty and social injustice. Azagaia’s death has sparked protests in Mozambique which authorities have violently suppressed.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The move comes amid a social media storm about the 15-year-old Hu amid an apparent spike in missing teens in recent months. His body was found hanging from a tree earlier this week close to his boarding school after going missing for more than three months.

Police on Thursday said an investigation had ruled out homicide in his death and that an analysis of a digital voice recorder found with the body had yielded recordings made by Hu contemplating whether or not to jump from the fifth floor of his dormitory.

But the findings sparked widespread public skepticism, with social media brimming with armchair theories and speculation about how Hu died.

In response to the uproar, the ruling Chinese Communist Party's official newspaper said in an editorial on Thursday that "the relevant departments gave candid explanations and responded to public concerns" about the slow police response to Hu's disappearance, and called for the investigation to proceed "along professional and legal lines."

"We absolutely must stay away from emotional thinking, and resolutely crack down on those who spread rumors ... to win public trust," the paper said.

Editorial mouthpiece

People's Daily editorials are approved at the highest levels of government in Beijing, and the article suggests a broader crackdown on social media commenting on Hu's death may be on the way.

Administrators for the social media platform Sina Weibo said they are already in the process of identifying "illegal content" relating to the case, and "resolutely dealing with violations like rumor-mongering and fake news to ... generate traffic."

"[Weibo has] cleaned up more than 3,500 pieces of illegal content that spread rumors about this," the platform said on its official Weibo account, adding that it had "punished" dozens of accounts with bans and deletions.

"We are deeply saddened and sorry about what happened to Hu Xinyu," the statement said. "This site will continue to investigate and clean up relevant illegal content, and at the same time we appeal to the majority of users to respect the deceased and the facts, and not to believe rumors or spread rumors."

Commentators have told RFA that a lack of official transparency in sensitive political cases and widespread censorship creates an information vacuum in mainland China into which all manner of conspiracy theories take hold. 

However, they also point to a number of unsolved missing persons cases and the prevalence of human trafficking and illegal organ-harvesting in China.

Cyber watchdog

Meanwhile, China's powerful Cyberspace Administration said it had flagged up more than 250,000 rumors on social media platforms including Weibo, Douyin, Baidu, Tencent and Bilibili since August 2022.

"Major platforms actively shoulder the main responsibility, conducting in-depth analysis of the data on their platforms based on authoritative releases of information," the agency said in a Jan. 25 statement.

"The work of tagging online rumors is an important measure to rectify the chaos of online rumors and to clean up cyberspace," it said. "In 2023, we will ... organize more major platforms to step up efforts to eliminate and expose online rumors."

Police have also warned that anyone gossiping about the case or "maliciously spreading false information" could face a police investigation and criminal charges.

"Some police departments have already cracked down on a small number of people who were intentionally fabricating reports and spreading rumors,” Jiangxi police department steering group chief Hu Mansong told a news conference on Feb. 2.

Censorship machinery?

Former Sina Weibo censor Liu Lipeng said it looks as if widespread censorship of the Hu Xinyu case is just getting underway.

"The official investigation results have been released, which is a bit like setting the tone," Liu told Radio Free Asia. "There will be much stronger efforts to delete going forward. There wasn't really very much censorship before that point."

Censors working for internet companies are typically told to work from official narratives to judge whether content breaks rules on rumor-mongering, so the Feb. 2 news conference which announced Hu's death was suicide will give them something to work from.

"Naturally, censorship orders have to be linked to unified [government] narratives and tone-setting, so anything that is different from what the government is saying will be deleted," he said.

Liu said the rumor-mongering is itself caused by tight controls on information and general lack of transparency in China.

"Nobody trusts the government any more, especially when it comes to minors and vulnerable members of society," he said. "They just pretend to support them, while all of its support has collapsed in private."

‘Crisis of public trust’

The Hu Xinyu case has once more highlighted a  "crisis of public trust" in China, Liu said on his Twitter account. "In the absence of credible news, [the public] can only resort to conspiracy theories.”

He said a similar phenomenon was seen in the wake of the discovery of a woman chained by the neck in an outhouse in Jiangxi in early 2022, and after the beating of several women at a barbecue restaurant in the northern city of Tangshan.

Zhang Jing, founder of the rights group Women's Rights in China, said the government appears to have lost all sense of its image in the public eye.

"The Chinese government at least used to have some sense of saving face, of presenting a more acceptable side, or some fear of losing public credibility," Zhang said. 

"But it doesn't need those things now, because it knows it will end in a hard crackdown, and so it no longer cares about losing public trust," she said.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Mia Ping-chieh Chen and Gu Ting for RFA Mandarin.

As U.S. egg producers rake in record profits amid soaring prices, a farmer-led advocacy group focused on building a just and sustainable food system on Thursday implored the Federal Trade Commission to "promptly open an investigation into the egg industry, prosecute any violations of the antitrust laws it finds within, and ultimately, get the American people their money back."

Just before testifying at an open meeting of the FTC, Farm Action sent a letter to agency chair Lina Khan detailing its "concerns over apparent price gouging, price coordination, and other unfair or deceptive acts or practices by dominant producers of eggs such as Cal-Maine Foods, Rose Acre Farms, Versova Holdings, and Hillandale Farms, among others."

As Farm Action explained, "Egg prices more than doubled for consumers last year—going from $1.79 in December 2021 to $4.25 in December 2022 for a dozen large Grade A eggs."

Major egg producers and their allies have blamed surging prices on a "supply disruption" triggered by the deadliest outbreak of avian influenza in U.S. history, calling it "'act of God' type stuff," the letter notes.

Based on its analysis of publicly available industry data, however, Farm Action determined that while the avian flu outbreak killed roughly 43 million egg-laying hens nationwide in 2022, "its actual impact on the egg supply was minimal."

According to the letter:

After accounting for chicks hatched during the year, the average size of the egg-laying flock in any given month of 2022 was never more than 7-8% lower than it was a year prior—and in all but two months was never more than 6% lower. Moreover, the effect of the loss of egg-laying hens on production was itself blunted by "record-high" lay rates observed among remaining hens throughout the year. With total flock size substantially unaffected by the avian flu and lay rates between 1-4% higher than the average rate observed between 2017 and 2021, the industry's quarterly egg production experienced no substantial decline in 2022 compared to 2021.

Nevertheless, the "weekly wholesale price for shell eggs climbed from 173.5 cents per dozen at the end of February to 194.2 cents in the middle of March," the letter continues. "By the first week of April, it had reached 298 cents per dozen. For two months after this point, the wholesale price of eggs appeared to stabilize at elevated levels slightly below this peak—but then it started increasing again. In July, it broke previous records and reached over 300 cents per dozen. After dipping briefly in August, the rally in wholesale egg prices continued, hitting 400 cents per dozen in October and almost 450 cents per dozen in the first weeks of December."

According to Farm Action, major egg producers' massive price hikes are unjustifiable. In addition to the avian flu outbreak, some have attributed skyrocketing egg prices to higher feed and fuel costs, but "the dominant producers' course-of-business documents suggest these claims have little merit," the letter states. "For example, in a presentation to investors just this month, Cal-Maine noted that total farm production and feed costs in 2022 were only 22% higher than they were in 2021."

"What Cal-Maine Foods and the other large egg producers did last year—and seem to be intent on doing again this year—is extort billions of dollars from the pockets of ordinary Americans."

"The real culprit behind this 138% hike in the price of a carton of eggs," says the letter, "appears to be a collusive scheme among industry leaders to turn inflationary conditions and an avian flu outbreak into an opportunity to extract egregious profits reaching as high as 40%."

Max Bowman, the chief financial officer of Cal-Maine—the nation's largest producer and distributor of eggs—has admitted as much, saying in a recent statement that "significantly higher selling prices, our enduring focus on cost control, and our ability to adapt to inflationary market pressures led to improved profitability overall."

CNNreported last week that "there have been no positive tests" of avian flu at any of Cal-Maine's facilities, and yet the company's net average selling price per dozen conventional eggs more than doubled last year. The corporate giant, which controls roughly 20% of the egg market, is behind several popular brands, including Farmhouse Eggs, Sunups, Sunny Meadow, Egg-Land's Best, and Land O' Lakes eggs.

"Contrary to industry narratives, the increase in the price of eggs has not been an 'act of God'—it has been simple profiteering," Farm Action's letter argues. "For the 26-week period ending on November 26, 2022, Cal-Maine reported a 10-fold year-over-year increase in gross profits—from $50.392 million to $535.339 million—and a five-fold increase in its gross margins."

"Cal-Maine's willingness to increase its prices—and profit margins—to such unprecedented levels suggests foul play. That Cal-Maine—the leader in a mostly commoditized industry with, presumably, the most efficient operations and the greatest financial power—will quintuple its profit margin in one year without any compelling business reason is plainly an indication of market power," the letter continues. "It is also an invitation for rival egg producers to tacitly collude with Cal-Maine, forego price competition themselves, and maintain high prices for the entire industry. Fundamentally, Cal-Maine seems to be engaging in price leadership—using the avian flu outbreak and the inflationary conditions of the past year as cover to establish a new 'focal point' for egg prices."

"This pattern of behavior by the dominant firms in the egg industry raises significant concerns about monopoly power and potential antitrust violations in this sector," the letter adds. "It also presents exactly the kind of monopoly or oligopoly power that is entrenched in a market 'with highly inelastic demand' and that 'imposes substantial costs on the public,' which Chair Khan has previously argued enforcers should seek to challenge. We urge the FTC to exercise the full scope of its authorities—under the Sherman, Clayton, and FTC Acts—to identify, challenge, and uproot anti-competitive arrangements that suppress competition among egg producers and enable dominant firms like Cal-Maine to extort consumers for the eggs they need every day."

In November, "antitrust trailblazer" Khan led the agency in issuing a new policy statement restoring its commitment to "rigorously enforcing" the FTC Act's prohibition on "unfair methods of competition," including what critics have called "predatory pricing."

According to Farm Action: "What Cal-Maine Foods and the other large egg producers did last year—and seem to be intent on doing again this year—is extort billions of dollars from the pockets of ordinary Americans through what amounts to a tax on a staple we all need: eggs. They did so without any legitimate business justification. They did so because there is no 'reasonable substitute' for a carton of eggs. They did so because they had power and weren't afraid to use it."

"This kind of organized theft is exactly what Congress—and the public it represents—'empowered and directed' the FTC to prevent," the group concluded. "The FTC should do nothing less."

In addition to regulatory action, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) argued last weekend that Cal-Maine's "corporate greed" exemplifies why "we need a windfall profits tax."

Last March, Sanders introduced the Ending Corporate Greed Act, which seeks to stamp out price gouging by imposing a 95% tax on the windfall profits of major companies.

Progressive economists have long urged Congress and the Biden administration to enact a windfall profits tax, strengthen antitrust enforcement, and impose temporary price controls, arguing that only these measures—and not the Federal Reserve's unemployment-inducing interest rate hikes—can address the corporate profiteering underlying the cost-of-living crisis.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

We go to Peru for an update after Peruvian authorities declared an overnight curfew in parts of southern Peru as mass protests continue following the ouster and arrest of leftist former President Pedro Castillo. At least 17 people were killed Monday after security forces opened fire at anti-government protesters in the city of Juliaca, and over 40 people have been killed across Peru over the last month, with human rights groups accusing the authorities of using indiscriminate force against protesters. The country’s crisis started in early December when then-President Castillo attempted to dissolve Congress and rule by decree, resulting in his arrest and replacement by his vice president. We are joined from Desaguadero, Peru, near the Bolivian border, by Ollie Vargas, a journalist with Kawsachun News, who says protesters are demanding new elections, the resignation of Castillo’s successor Dina Boluarte and the formation of a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution. A major contributor to the current crisis is “the extreme weakness of the political system in Peru” in which many politicians lack any real connection to their constituents, adds Peruvian sociologist Eduardo González Cueva.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The longest sentence was handed down by Yangon’s Insein Prison Court on Tuesday to Kaung Sat, from the city’s Myanmar Maritime University, according to his students’ union.

He was arrested in November 2021 and charged with four counts of sedition, possessing arms, possessing explosives with intent to attack junta forces and buildings, and attempted murder. The court found him guilty of all the charges and sentenced him to a total of 25 years in prison with hard labor.

Also Tuesday, Myo Thura Aung from Mawlamyine University in Mon State was sentenced to 13 years in prison by Hpa-An District Prison Court, according to the president of his students’ union, who did not specify the charges.

A total of 78 students from Mawlamyine University and eight students from Myanmar Maritime University have received prison sentences from junta courts since the military seized power in a February 2021 coup, according to their students’ unions.

“The fascist army is building a system of repression to maintain its power,” an official of the All Burma Federation of Students’ Unions (ABFSU) told RFA, speaking on condition of anonymity for safety reasons.

“We believe that there will be no justice under unjust laws. These are the actions of the fascist army to arrest and imprison the people and students unjustly and violently.”

Federation members have also been targeted by the junta. Hpa-An District Prison Court sentenced its finance officer, Kaung Htet Oo, to 15 years in prison under the Counter Terrorism Act on Dec. 23. Aung Kyaw Khant a Federation member from Mandalay region also received a 15-year prison term. Obo Prison Court handed down the sentence for alleged terrorism on Tuesday.

The other students’ union members sentenced over the past week were Nyan Win Htet from Mandalay region who received a 15-year prison term; Win Htet Mar from Yangon’s University of Information Technology, who was sentenced to 10 years; and Yangon Eastern University Students’ Union President Su Yi Lin, who was sentenced to two years in prison on fraud charges.

Su Yi Lin was arrested on the way to an anti-regime protest on Dec. 19, 2021, and has already received a three-year sentence for alleged incitement.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Written in English by Mike Firn.

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

Progressives cheered Thursday after the Federal Trade Commission voted 3-1 to issue a new policy statement restoring the agency's commitment to "rigorously enforcing the federal ban on unfair methods of competition."

While Section 5 of the FTC Act—passed in the early 20th century by congressional lawmakers unsatisfied with the Sherman Act, the original antitrust statute—prohibits "unfair methods of competition" and instructs the commission to identify and rein in such practices, the agency has refused for decades to exercise its full legal authority to do so.

The statement approved Thursday by FTC Chair Lina Khan and Commissioners Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya revives the agency's policy of doing everything in its power to prevent corporations from using anti-competitive tactics to gain advantages.

"When Congress created the FTC, it clearly commanded us to crack down on unfair methods of competition," said Khan. "Enforcers have to use discretion, but that doesn't give us the right to ignore a central part of our mandate. Today's policy statement reactivates Section 5 and puts us on track to faithfully enforce the law as Congress designed."

As the Americal Economic Liberties Project (AELP) explained:

Section 5 of the FTC Act of 1914 originally charged the Federal Trade Commission with using its expertise to distinguish between "unfair" and "fair" methods of competition. As opposed to the Department of Justice Antitrust Division's role, which is focused on enforcement of the law, the FTC was tasked by Congress to clarify and interpret the rules of the road for anti-competitive behavior.

However, beginning in the 1980s, antitrust enforcers strayed from this original mission, culminating in a 2015 policy statement where the commission announced it would not bring cases under Section 5 unless they met a much narrower framework. One of Chair Khan's first actions as head of the FTC was to overturn this 2015 policy statement, with promises for additional policy statements in the future.

Sandeep Vaheesan, legal director of the Open Markets Institute, applauded the FTC for announcing "a clean break with 40 years of blatant disregard for the rule of law."

"Since the early days of the Reagan administration, the FTC minimized or neglected its statutory obligation to identify and challenge unfair methods of competition by large corporations, no matter how damaging to our democracy and society," said Vaheesan.

"Instead, commissioners warped the law to fit the framework of their preferred economic theories—theories never adopted in law by Congress," Vaheesan noted. "Today, the three Democratic commissioners demonstrated that they understand that it was the American people—acting through Congress—who created the commission and vested it with broad competition powers, not a few Chicago School academics and advocates."

AELP executive director Sarah Miller called the blueprint approved Thursday "an important policy change that will empower the agency to better combat anti-competitive behavior across all markets."

"As a result, the FTC will have renewed authority to outlaw predatory pricing, unfair supplier rebates, and other abusive monopolistic tactics with sharp focus," said Miller. "Chair Khan isn't just realigning the agency with its congressional mandate after years of retreat, but charting a path toward a new era of refined antitrust enforcement that prioritizes working families and small businesses."

According to Demand Progress Education Fund legal director Ginger Quintero-McCall, the need for rigorous antitrust enforcement is increasingly important given the growing influence of Big Tech on the nation's economy and politics.

"Aggressive enforcement is necessary to meet the challenges of today's economy, especially in the online space, where monopolistic companies like Amazon and Google have too long abused their market dominance harming small businesses, consumers, and the economy at large," said Quintero-McCall.

Echoing others, Matt Kent, competition policy advocate for Public Citizen, offered additional praise.

"The FTC's policy statement lays out, in detail, the robust power of [the] federal government to limit anti-competitive corporate behavior," said Kent. "For too long, the FTC has adhered to self-imposed limits on the substantial authority granted by Congress to address unfair methods of competition."

"The crucial set of policy principles put forth in the document highlight neglected U.S. Supreme Court precedents that were previously ignored by business-friendly commissions," Kent added. "It's a credit to Chairwoman Khan, Commissioners Slaughter and Bedoya, and staff for working to issue such an incisive and important legal interpretation."

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

Lawlessness by armed Rohingya groups has increased in the sprawling camps amid recent unrest across the border in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, law enforcers and refugee community leaders said, with one police official even saying that Rohingya militants were using the camps as a safe haven.

At least five dozen suspects – all of them Rohingya – have been arrested since authorities began “Operation Root Out” on Friday, an official with the Armed Police Battalion (APBn) confirmed to BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service.

The police launched the operation in response to killings of Rohingya that have struck fear among many in the refugee community of about 1 million, claiming at least 40 Rohingya lives since the start of 2022, according to police records.

“Fights have been going on between the junta army and a group for about 2½ months in Myanmar near the border with Bangladesh. For this reason, some Rohingya terrorists from the neighboring country have entered into Bangladesh and taken refuge in the refugee camps where they created unrest,” Md. Faruk Ahmed, a battalion assistant superintendent, told BenarNews.

“A total of 60 criminals have been arrested in two rounds of the drive,” he said.

Ahmed said 41 suspects were arrested on Saturday and 19 more Sunday night into Monday, adding that police would continue to arrest suspects.

“Out of the 19 people arrested in the operation, 12 are accused of robbery and seven are accused in other cases,” Faruk said.

Alleged members of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), a Rohingya insurgent group, have been observed targeting night watch security volunteers and community leaders in recent attacks at the camps.

Nine Rohingya, including a child, have been killed in suspected ARSA attacks this month alone, according to police and camp leaders.

Panic in camps

Rohingya, especially the camp leaders who have been pushing for repatriation to their home villages in Myanmar, said the recent attacks have terrorized the refugee population.

“I can’t explain to you what kind of fear I am in right now. There are three to four Majhis (Rohingya community leaders) here who enter the police camp every day after Asr prayers and leave in the morning. This is how our days are going,” said a Majhis in camp No. 9 in Balukhali who asked to remain anonymous over security concerns.

“Now not only ARSA, but some other groups including the Nabi Hossain Group, Munna Group and RSO [the Rohingya Solidarity Organization] are active in the camps. They are the ones who are causing the killings,” he said.

Another Rohingya leader blamed ARSA for killings and other crime in the camps.

“Although there are several groups in the Rohingya camps, ARSA is responsible for these crimes aimed at establishing absolute dominance in the camps,” Master Shafi Ullah, 50, a leader of the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights in the Balukhali Camp, told BenarNews.

He said the ARSA members oppose Rohingya returning to Myanmar, so they are attacking and, in some cases, killing those who are pushing for repatriation.

“Everybody is afraid of what danger could befall them,” he said.

Myanmar apologizes

Meanwhile on Sunday, Myanmar Border Guard Police (BGP) officials expressed regret about recent firing along the border of Bangladesh, a Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) official said after a five-hour meeting in Teknaf, a sub-district of Cox’s Bazar.

BGB regional commanding officer Lt. Col. Sheikh Khalid Muhammad Iftekhar said the Myanmar officials promised that the shelling would stop. Col. Cao Na Yan Show led the seven-member Myanmar delegation.

“We agreed to help each other in any need. We have also decided to work together to protect the bordering people on both sides,” he said.

Massive gunfire and shelling erupted along the border between Myanmar troops and members of the Arakan Army, another insurgent group in Rakhine state.

On Aug. 28, two shells fired by Myanmar landed in Bangladesh territory, leading officials in Dhaka to file a strong protest and summon the Myanmar ambassador.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news service.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Ahammad Foyez and Sunil Barua for BenarNews.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Ruby Lott-Lavigna.

This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader Radio Hour and was authored by Ralph Nader Radio Hour.

But there’s one significant source of pollution that the agency has so far ignored: all of the consumer appliances that burn natural gas or fuel oil in homes and businesses. The direct combustion of fossil fuels like these within the country’s buildings is responsible for roughly 10 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. On Tuesday, the Sierra Club and 25 other environmental and public health groups filed a petition asking the EPA to use its authority to crack down on fuel-burning appliances.

“Emissions from buildings have a harmful, and frankly scary, impact on human health and contribute significantly to the climate crisis,” Amneh Minkara, the deputy director of the Sierra Club’s building electrification campaign, said in a written statement accompanying the announcement. “It is the duty of the EPA to keep the American public safe from breathing in these pollutants.”

While the Department of Energy regulates many home appliances in order to promote the most energy-efficient models, there are no regulations that aim to mitigate the health effects of pollutants from these devices, like nitrogen oxides, or NOx — a precursor to smog. The petition asks the EPA to phase in NOx performance standards for furnaces and water heaters, eventually landing on a zero-emissions standard by 2030. This would effectively ban the manufacture of these appliances altogether, forcing building owners to purchase alternative heating devices powered solely by electricity, like heat pumps. 

Unlike the plumes of smoke seen over power plants or the black exhaust spewing out of a diesel truck, emissions from consumer appliances are largely invisible. But over the past several years, a growing body of research has shown that these sneaky releases cannot be ignored. 

One study published last year found that pollution from residential buildings in the U.S. now harms more people than that of power plants; it caused nearly 6,000 premature deaths in 2017 alone. A separate study published in the journal Science last year found that appliance-related pollution disproportionately affects people of color. (In an interview with Bloomberg, the lead author hypothesized that this may be related to the population density of urban areas, which are disproportionately inhabited by people of color.)

The Sierra Club’s petition notes that the EPA’s own data shows that fossil fuel-fired heating appliances have higher cumulative NOx emissions than several of the pollution sources that the agency already regulates for NOx, including natural gas-fired power plants, oil refineries, and cement plants. 

Though the environmental groups are only requesting that the agency set performance standards for space heating and hot water appliances for now, the petition also asks the EPA to formally “list” all fossil fuel-fired heating appliances, including stoves and clothes dryers, as a new stationary source category of air pollution. Recent research has highlighted the dangerous effects of natural gas stoves on indoor air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

“We are asking for regulations for those two types of appliances specifically because they are the biggest emitters and have already been regulated at the state level, so EPA has a model to emulate,” the Sierra Club’s Minkara told Grist in an email. Several air quality management districts in California have standards for NOx emissions from gas-fired furnaces, for example, and Texas and Utah regulate NOx from gas-fired water heaters.

“Our petition leaves open the door for EPA to set performance standards for gas stoves in the future,” Minkara added.

More recently, cities in California, Washington, and New York have moved to ban gas appliances in new construction in order to meet their climate goals, and each of those states is also working on state-wide policies to restrict gas in new buildings. If the EPA takes up regulations for building appliances, the agency is certain to face legal challenges from the natural gas industry, which has already launched attacks on policies that prohibit gas at the local level. 

But the petition maintains that the EPA has the authority to do this — and that even the recent Supreme Court decision limiting the agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions doesn’t stand in the way. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Will the EPA crack down on pollution from buildings? on Aug 23, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Emily Pontecorvo.

Calling on the Biden administration to use its authority to protect U.S. travelers from "rampant unfair practices" by commercial airliners, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Alex Padilla wrote to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Tuesday to condemn the exorbitant costs, frequent flight cancellations and delays, and lack of transparency in the industry.

It is well within the Transportation Department's power to rein in airline companies, the two Democrats emphasized.

"The Department of Transportation has the authority to take meaningful actions to hold airlines accountable for avoidable delays and cancellations and stem the tide of airline consolidation," wrote Padilla (Calif.) and Warren (Mass.). "By utilizing its existing licensing and rulemaking authority, the department can improve experiences for travelers and help bring down exorbitant ticket prices driven in part by anti-competitive mergers."

"There is both a political and moral case to make that aggressively targeting airlines is necessary."

The lawmakers noted that 1 in 5 flights have been delayed this year, while nearly 122,000 flights have been canceled in the first half of 2022—more than the total number of cancellations for all of the previous year.

As Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants, told the Los Angeles Times last week, airline executives have scheduled far more flights this summer than they can actually accommodate in an effort to profit off rising travel demand following the first two years of the coronavirus pandemic.

"A major contributor is that demand has been coming back so quickly and airlines are jumping to try to meet it and overpromising and putting in too much capacity," Nelson told the newspaper.

Overbooking flights has been a practice used by airlines for decades, Warren and Padilla acknowledged in their letter, but "with passengers being booted off flights more and more frequently," they said, "the department could use its authority to end this practice altogether."

Currently, the Transportation Department requires only that "the smallest practicable number of persons" are denied boarding, but new rules and the threat of significant fines for frequently overbooking flights could incentivize airlines to end the practice, said Warren and Padilla.

Last week, Buttigieg appeared on "PBS Newshour" to defend the department's approach to the airline industry, noting that it "issued the stiffest fine in the history of our consumer protection program"—although, as the American Economic Liberties Project pointed out, the $25 million penalty was issued to Air Canada and was sharply reduced.

Under federal law, the department has the authority to stop airlines from engaging in "unfair or deceptive practices" and Buttigieg "may order airlines and ticket agents to stop such practices and may issue fines of up to $37,377 per violation," said Warren and Padilla.

The senators also addressed a root cause of airlines' exorbitant ticket costs, with prices skyrocketing by 47% since January: "increasing consolidation and dwindling competition."

Forty-four years after the deregulation of the industry, just four airlines—American, Delta, United, and Southwest—control 80% of the market.

"The secretary of transportation must grant these airlines the 'economic authority' to operate and must approve any transfer of operating certificates to another carrier, authority that gives the secretary de facto merger-blocking power," said Warren and Padilla. "Certificate transfers are only permitted when the secretary determines that a transfer would be 'consistent with the public interest.'"

"By using its statutory authority to block transfers that are inconsistent with the public interest and that would harm domestic competition," they added, "the department could stop anti-competitive airline mergers altogether."

The letter comes a month after Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, called on Buttigieg to impose hefty fines against airlines that routinely schedule flights that they cannot adequately staff.

As Ross Barkan wrote at New York magazine last week, a concerted effort by Buttigieg to hold airlines accountable for their unfair practices would not only help millions of people, but could "potentially buoy the president's standing headed into a very tough reelection fight in 2024":

The federal government wields extraordinary leverage over airlines and could, at any time, crack down severely on their behavior. Unlike other large corporations, private airlines are not particularly popular with Americans. Amazon or Disney arouse warm feelings; Delta and American Airlines conjure hellish waits in overstuffed terminals and seats with hardly enough legroom for toddlers. There is both a political and moral case to make that aggressively targeting airlines is necessary.

Alex Sammon of The American Prospect expressed disbelief that the Biden administration has so far resisted calls from progressives to reform the industry.

Buttigieg's "commitment to the mainstream Democrat school of never angering one single person in power supersedes his own impulse for self-promotion," he tweeted.

As the head of the Transportation Department, said Warren and Padilla, Buttigieg can and should "put an end to these harmful consumer practices and safeguard competition in the industry."

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

Calling on the Biden administration to use its authority to protect U.S. travelers from "rampant unfair practices" by commercial airliners, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Alex Padilla wrote to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Tuesday to condemn the exorbitant costs, frequent flight cancellations and delays, and lack of transparency in the industry.

It is well within the Transportation Department's power to rein in airline companies, the two Democrats emphasized.

"The Department of Transportation has the authority to take meaningful actions to hold airlines accountable for avoidable delays and cancellations and stem the tide of airline consolidation," wrote Padilla (Calif.) and Warren (Mass.). "By utilizing its existing licensing and rulemaking authority, the department can improve experiences for travelers and help bring down exorbitant ticket prices driven in part by anti-competitive mergers."

"There is both a political and moral case to make that aggressively targeting airlines is necessary."

The lawmakers noted that 1 in 5 flights have been delayed this year, while nearly 122,000 flights have been canceled in the first half of 2022—more than the total number of cancellations for all of the previous year.

As Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants, told the Los Angeles Times last week, airline executives have scheduled far more flights this summer than they can actually accommodate in an effort to profit off rising travel demand following the first two years of the coronavirus pandemic.

"A major contributor is that demand has been coming back so quickly and airlines are jumping to try to meet it and overpromising and putting in too much capacity," Nelson told the newspaper.

Overbooking flights has been a practice used by airlines for decades, Warren and Padilla acknowledged in their letter, but "with passengers being booted off flights more and more frequently," they said, "the department could use its authority to end this practice altogether."

Currently, the Transportation Department requires only that "the smallest practicable number of persons" are denied boarding, but new rules and the threat of significant fines for frequently overbooking flights could incentivize airlines to end the practice, said Warren and Padilla.

Last week, Buttigieg appeared on "PBS Newshour" to defend the department's approach to the airline industry, noting that it "issued the stiffest fine in the history of our consumer protection program"—although, as the American Economic Liberties Project pointed out, the $25 million penalty was issued to Air Canada and was sharply reduced.

Under federal law, the department has the authority to stop airlines from engaging in "unfair or deceptive practices" and Buttigieg "may order airlines and ticket agents to stop such practices and may issue fines of up to $37,377 per violation," said Warren and Padilla.

The senators also addressed a root cause of airlines' exorbitant ticket costs, with prices skyrocketing by 47% since January: "increasing consolidation and dwindling competition."

Forty-four years after the deregulation of the industry, just four airlines—American, Delta, United, and Southwest—control 80% of the market.

"The secretary of transportation must grant these airlines the 'economic authority' to operate and must approve any transfer of operating certificates to another carrier, authority that gives the secretary de facto merger-blocking power," said Warren and Padilla. "Certificate transfers are only permitted when the secretary determines that a transfer would be 'consistent with the public interest.'"

"By using its statutory authority to block transfers that are inconsistent with the public interest and that would harm domestic competition," they added, "the department could stop anti-competitive airline mergers altogether."

The letter comes a month after Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, called on Buttigieg to impose hefty fines against airlines that routinely schedule flights that they cannot adequately staff.

As Ross Barkan wrote at New York magazine last week, a concerted effort by Buttigieg to hold airlines accountable for their unfair practices would not only help millions of people, but could "potentially buoy the president's standing headed into a very tough reelection fight in 2024":

The federal government wields extraordinary leverage over airlines and could, at any time, crack down severely on their behavior. Unlike other large corporations, private airlines are not particularly popular with Americans. Amazon or Disney arouse warm feelings; Delta and American Airlines conjure hellish waits in overstuffed terminals and seats with hardly enough legroom for toddlers. There is both a political and moral case to make that aggressively targeting airlines is necessary.

Alex Sammon of The American Prospect expressed disbelief that the Biden administration has so far resisted calls from progressives to reform the industry.

Buttigieg's "commitment to the mainstream Democrat school of never angering one single person in power supersedes his own impulse for self-promotion," he tweeted.

As the head of the Transportation Department, said Warren and Padilla, Buttigieg can and should "put an end to these harmful consumer practices and safeguard competition in the industry."

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

It is no secret that the United States and NATO are engaged in a proxy war with Russia, perhaps to be fought to the last Ukrainian. In June, as heads of state gathered in Madrid for the Alliance's annual summit, I joined more than 10,000 activists from across Spain and around the world for mega anti-NATO peace conferences and a massive No to NATO rally. Their focus was not only NATO's roles in the Ukraine War but also its transformation into the world's dominant GLOBAL alliance whose new strategic concept also prioritizes containing China. Highlighting this transformation, the Prime Ministers of Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and the Republic of Korea joined the summit for the first time in the Alliance's history.

LESSONS FROM THE EUROPEAN LEFT

Before turning to NATO's history and decisions taken at the summit, there were a number of lessons I took from the European Left while  in Madrid and elsewhere during my recent travels in Asia and Europe.

• There are divisions in Europe over the Ukraine War that mirror those in the United States, but there is unanimity that NATO's expansion to Russia's borders was a provocation that contributed to Vladimir Putin's decision to launch his invasion. There is also near unanimity that the invasion must be condemned as a gross violation of the U.N. charter and other international laws. European peace movements call for an immediate ceasefire and negotiations leading to guarantees that Ukraine will endure as a sovereign and neutral nation. Some urge that the future status of Crimea and the Donbass remain in limbo, to be resolved in negotiations over the course of years. There are also calls for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE, see more below) to convene a summit in 2025 to begin the negotiations for a new security architecture for Europe.
• Contrary to the image of NATO being more unified than ever, there are fault lines. The Baltic and Eastern European nations demand a harder line, including Russia's defeat in Ukraine, while the core nations of France, Germany and Italy press for a negotiated end to the war. There are also deep concerns that the severe reduction of imported Russian oil and gas will leave people's homes freezing and factories without power in the coming winter. This, it is expected, will lead to protests and openings for the far right to gain influence and power in Europe.
• Among Germans who value ties built with Russia beginning with Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik, there is a belief that German economic success was built less by German expertise than by cheap Russian energy which will no longer be available.
• With U.S. gun violence, near-daily mass shootings, and the rash of horrendous Supreme Court decisions, Americans are increasingly seen as barbarians at the gate.
• For Europeans, especially Spaniards, there is horror and outrage at the death toll of immigrants—most recently in Spain's Melilla enclave—as European and NATO forces enforce bans on desperate non-white immigrants
• There is a deepening critique of European and NATO military spending, including the addition of 100 billion euros to Germany's military budget  which will make Berlin the world's third greatest military spender, and which will transform the European military and political landscapes.
• When Donald Trump  questioned the future of the NATO alliance, France and Germany placed greater emphasis on building an independent European military. That dynamic is moving forward, now fueled by multiple interests and uncertainties about who will be in the White House following the 2024 presidential election and by fears of Russian imperial ambitions. There is debate over whether this will result in a division of NATO and EU military labor—especially in North Africa and the Middle East—or whether the EU military will emerge as a rival to NATO over the longer term.
• I began my odyssey in Mongolia where a conference led by the country's former president and national security advisor celebrated and reinforced the country's 30-year old unique single nation nuclear weapons-free zone. In addition to the Zone's contribution to creating a nuclear weapons-free world, it was initiated to help guarantee Mongolia's independence from both China and Russia. I also learned that Mongolia's  first national security priority is keeping China's investments to less than 30% of the nation's total, again to preserve Mongolian independence. This was a lesson about China's Belt and Road Initiative and the enduring tradition of China's tributary approach to empire.

HISTORY & NATO's NEW STRATEGIC CONCEPT

In the United States, public perceptions of NATO remain rooted in the Cold War misconception that NATO is an exclusively defensive alliance. In Europe there are  recent memories of NATO's aggressions in Afghanistan, Serbia, Libya, and Iraq. There is also memory of NATO's first General Secretary's, Lord Hastings Ismay, who stated that the purpose of NATO was to "keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down."  

Hasting's observation helps us understand why NATO was not retired when the public rationale for its existence, defense of Western Europe from possible Soviet invasion, evaporated with the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. But Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security advisor. provided a more detailed  explanation in his seminally important primer about how to maintain the United States' "imperial project," The Grand Chessboard. Reaffirming the geopolitical theory that whoever controls the core of Eurasia will be the world's dominant power, and noting that the United States, like Britain before it, is an "island power," he explained that NATO is critical to U.S. global dominance. It provides the "toehold" on Eurasia's western periphery, reinforced by its other toeholds in the Middle East and Central Asia, and by  its Asia-Pacific allies. Even before Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. had 100,000 troops and hundreds of military bases and installations deployed across a still functionally militarily occupied Europe.

While Russia's invasion of Ukraine is an unacceptable and deadly violation of the U.N. Charter and other international laws, it also appears to have been driven by two primary forces: Moscow's perceptions of Russia's strategic vulnerability given NATO's expansion to its borders( including deepening integration of Ukraine into NATO's systems) and by the desire to restore much of the Russian imperium that was lost with the collapse of the Soviet empire.

Few in the United States are aware of Europe's 1990s Common Security commitments and the vision of a "Common European Home," which included Russia. In 1990 the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe), inclusive of both the United States and Russia adopted the Paris Charter. This commitment was reiterated in the NATO-Russia Founding Act, and again in the 1999 OSCE Charter for European Security. And, despite it never have been committed in writing, in the U.S.-Russian negotiations leading to German reunification on West German terms, the GHW Bush Administration committed not to move NATO a centimeter closer to Russia's border.

Why was this  important to Russia? Just as deep as our national memories of Washington crossing the Delaware, of our deadly Civil War, and of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, are Russian memories of catastrophic invasions from the West, first by Napoleon and later by the German Kaiser and Hitler.

Yet as Russia's political and economic systems imploded during Boris Yeltsin's rule, and in the tradition of the arrogance of power, despite George Kennan, the architect of the Cold War containment doctrine's  warning that it would lead to disastrous conflict, in 1999 President Clinton initiated the campaign to enlarge NATO. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic became alliance members. Bush II added seven Central and Eastern European nations in 2004. In 2007, despite his senior advisor Fiona Hill's warning that inviting Ukraine and Georgia would lead to war, and against the opposition of Germany and France, Bush the Lesser forced the invitation to Ukraine and Georgia through NATO's 2007 summit. In its immediate aftermath, the Georgia-Russian war followed. It has been reported the Putin began his planning for the Ukraine invasion in response to the welcome mat put out by NATO for Kiyv. Baltic and other Eastern and Central European nations were also welcomed to NATO.

Even before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, U.S. and German military forces were deployed and conducted military exercises along Russia's borders, and U.S. and Russian warships and warplanes conducted provocative and extremely dangerous military "exercises" in the Baltic and Black Seas.

Yet, even as NATO was expanding eastward toward Russia, it also became a global alliance. Today German, Dutch, English, French, Japanese and even Indian warships join provocative U.S. naval "exercises"in the South China Sea. "Partners"including Columbia, Australia, Iraq, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, Mongolia and even Pakistan were added to the alliance. NATO's webpage tells us that these partners "are part of many of NATO's core activities, from shaping policy to building defense capacity, developing interoperability and managing crises."The Alliance also has formal partnership frameworks including the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council, Partnership for Peace, the Mediterranean Dialogue, and the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative, each of which serve similar purposes to the formal partnerships. 

SUMMIT DECISIONS & NATO'S NEW STRATEGIC CONCEPT

As our movements recalibrate in order to address the growing threat to what remains of constitutional democracy, human and political rights and existential nuclear and climate threats, we need to bear in mind NATO's impacts on the new era of great power confrontation and what Michael Klare terms "blockification." In addition to NATO becoming global, Russia is increasingly dependent on China, and a new movement of non-aligned nations is trying to be born.

At the Madrid Summit, NATO Leaders took what they described as "transformative decisions"with the "biggest overhaul"of the "allied collective defense"since the Cold War and set the Alliance's strategic direction for the near and long-term future. Contrary to earlier expectations that the Alliance's focus on Russia would be downgraded, with China being named as NATO's #1 priority. But with the Ukraine War NATO's Strategic Concept named Russia as the "most significant and direct threat." It was followed by China being  named for the first time as a threat to the rules based order, followed by the  challenges of  terrorism, cyber and hybrid warfare. (It is important to remember that the post-war Bretton Woods "order" was imposed without meaningful Chinese input when the Middle Kingdom was impoverished and weak. Like any other major power, it seeks to advance what its elite identifies as the country's national interests.)

Commitments to continuing arming and supporting Ukraine were reiterated at the summit, as well as deepening Ukraine's integration with the Alliance by supporting its transition from Soviet-era military equipment to modern NATO equipment. More troops and more pre-positioned equipment and weapon stockpiles will go to Eastern Europe and the Baltics, with NATO's eight multinational battlegroups growing exponentially from 40,000 to 300,000 troops. NATO was reaffirmed as a nuclear alliance. The alliance doubled down on Ukraine and Georgia, reaffirming the commitment to NATO's "Open Door" policy for aspiring members. As part of the "Open Door," Sweden and Finland were invited to join the alliance, doubling the length of NATO's border with Russia. Member states committed to spending at least 2 per cent of their national GDPs by 2024 for their militaries. And new support commitments were made for "other partners at risk", including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, and the Republic of Moldova. 

With no apparent sense of shame or acknowledgment  of what George Orwell termed "double speak,"the allies reiterated their "strong commitment to the rules-based international order and Allies' shared values of individual liberty, human rights, democracy, and the rule of law." Missing from photographs of the assembled national leaders must have been the smirks on the faces of Turkey's, Hungary's, and Poland's leaders, not to mention President Biden and Secretary Blinken as they contemplated planned summits in Israel and Saudi Arabia. 

BY WAY OF CONCLUSION

There is no denying that we are moving into an increasingly dangerous period. NATO, Russia and Ukraine are committed to fighting a long war which could escalate geographically or to the possible use of weapons of mass destruction. The Democratic Party is unquestioningly supporting an endless proxy war and has been reluctant to press President Biden to prioritize a negotiated settlement to the war. The illegitimate U.S. Supreme Court majority and those associated with the January 6 insurrection are plotting to secure white supremacist, medieval Christian, and corporate power for the long term.. And the war, the contest for primacy with China, and the recent Supreme Court EPA decision are sentencing future generations to climate catastrophes. 

Noam Chomsky reminds us that these crises were created by humans and that we know their solutions: Impose a cease fire and negotiate a just settlement of the war. Abolish nuclear weapons. Invest in clean energy and protect our coastal cities against surging tides instead of funding the Pentagon with more the military spending than the world's next 10 biggest military spenders COMBINED!  Expand and defend an inclusive if imperfect democracy. Restore a progressive graduated income tax to weaken the oligarchs and provide economic security.

Where then are sources of hope and inspiration? There are no easy answers in this dark time. On the one hand, I wish that I could transmit the commitments and surging energy of the thousands who rallied in Madrid. The Poor People's Campaign here in the United States provides a model and foundation for intersectional organizing and advocacy. There is inspiration to be taken from the centuries of African-Americans daily struggle for liberation and freedom against oppressive political and social systems stacked against them. Having had the extraordinary privilege of working with women and men who resisted Nazi rule in Hitler's Europe, nonviolently and otherwise, I take inspiration from their quiet courage. There is also the reality that within the oppressive rule of Soviet commissars in Eastern Europe and U.S.-backed oligarchs across Latin America people built culture and foundations for greater freedom. 

And there is Leonard Cohen's poetic insight that "There is a crack in everything/that's how the light gets in."

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

The calls came following news this week of the arrest in Sihanoukville of seven Chinese nationals who set up a factory in the coastal province to make the drugs from smuggled ingredients.

Authorities also seized 14 tonnes (15.4 tons) of drug precursors and production equipment during the arrests, according to a report on the National Police Facebook page on Tuesday. The 7 arrested suspects will next be sent for processing in Cambodian courts, police authorities said.

Drug use has now spread from Sihanoukville city to the suburbs and will eventually spread even farther into the country, leading to kidnapping and violence by criminal gangs, Cheap Sotheary — provincial coordinator for the rights group Adhoc — told RFA this week.

All drugs confiscated by authorities should be immediately destroyed, she added.

“We are concerned that many of these confiscated drugs are being stored and that some may be taken out and removed, as some authorities in the past turned out to be drug traffickers themselves.

“Authorities should be taking strong action in every case,” she said.

Also speaking to RFA, Transparency International Cambodia Executive Director Pech Pisey said that Chinese drug lords began to come to Cambodia after they saw that the country lacked a strong rule of law.

“International criminals think they can produce and distribute drugs as much as they like,” Pech Pisey said. Cambodia must strictly enforce its laws if it wants to be kept off the Grey List of countries corrupted by money laundering released by the Paris-based watchdog Financial Action Task Force, he added.

Cambodian Minister of the Interior Sar Kheng said during a National Day for Combating Drugs on June 26 that Cambodian police had seized a combined total of more than 100 tonnes of finished drugs and drug ingredients from 2020 to 2021.

However, of the nearly 10,000 tonnes of the finished drugs that were seized, only 6,000 tonnes were then destroyed, he said.

Translated by Samean Yun for RFA Khmer. Written in English by Richard Finney.

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

Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Thursday led the introduction of new legislation that would enable federal regulators to forcefully crack down on corporate price gouging, a practice that progressive lawmakers and economists say has played a major role in driving U.S. inflation to a 40-year high.

According to a one-page summary released by Warren's office, the Price Gouging Prevention Act of 2022 would "prohibit the practice of price gouging during all abnormal market disruptions—including the current pandemic—by authorizing the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and state attorneys general to enforce a federal ban against unconscionably excessive price increases, regardless of a seller's position in a supply chain."

The summary notes that the bill would also "create a rebuttable presumption of price gouging against firms that exercise unfair leverage and companies that brag about increasing prices during periods of inflation" and require "public companies to transparently disclose and explain changes in their cost of goods sold, gross margins, and pricing strategies in their quarterly [Securities and Exchange Commission] filings."

"Corporations have price gouged consumers for extra profits—and gotten away with it—for too long," Warren (D-Mass.) wrote in a Twitter post on Thursday.

Warren introduced the new bill alongside Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), who said in a statement that the measure would "shine a light on price hikes and help prevent big corporations from exploiting a period of inflation to gouge consumers with higher costs."

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) introduced companion legislation in the House.

Rakeen Mabud, chief economist at the Groundwork Collaborative, applauded the new bill as an "important" step toward reining in corporate profiteering and argued that "a federal price gouging statute would help curtail this exploitative behavior."

The legislation comes a day after federal data showed that while inflation eased slightly in April, consumer prices were up 8.3% last month compared to a year earlier.

In a recent analysis, Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute argued that "the rise in inflation has not been driven by anything that looks like an overheating labor market—instead it has been driven by higher corporate profit margins and supply-chain bottlenecks."

Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, similarly argued in a New York Times op-ed last week that "plain old corporate profiteering" is a key culprit behind price hikes nationwide.

"Companies that historically might have kept prices low to pick up profit by gaining additional market share are instead using the cover of inflation to raise prices and increase profits," Owens wrote. "Consumers are now expecting higher prices at the checkout line, and companies are taking advantage. The poor and those on fixed incomes are hit the hardest."

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

National Nurses United, the largest union of registered nurses in the U.S., is calling on the White House to bolster federal antitrust probes and rules to reduce the detrimental impacts of healthcare industry mergers and acquisitions on patients, workers, and communities.

"Consider any merger or acquisition in the healthcare sector, particularly hospital acquisitions, to be anti-competitive."

President Joe Biden recently ordered the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to update their horizontal and vertical merger guidelines, which influence how regulators analyze potentially anti-competitive deals. As part of the revision process, the agencies have been listening to and accepting public testimony and comments through Thursday.

In comments submitted earlier this week, NNU's lead regulatory policy specialist, Carmen Comsti, wrote that "anti-competitive behavior in the healthcare sector through market consolidation is a threat to the health and safety of nurses and other healthcare workers and is making our patients sicker."

The "monopoly power of employers," said Comsti, "exacerbates problems with healthcare access and affordability" for the public. For nurses and other healthcare workers, she added, it "depresses wages and dilutes the power of workers to advocate for better working conditions and patient safety."

The FTC and DOJ, Comsti wrote, should "presumptively consider any merger or acquisition in the healthcare sector, particularly hospital acquisitions, to be anti-competitive."

In her hearing testimony, Kelley Tyler, an NNU member and RN at Mission Healthcare in Asheville, North Carolina, described how conditions at her community hospital deteriorated after corporate giant HCA Healthcare acquired it.

"Services like rural cancer care and wheelchair and seating clinics have been cut completely," said Tyler. "HCA has shuttered primary care clinics and driven out hundreds of doctors and nurses. Our more vulnerable populations have suffered, especially seniors, who are often forced to drive over an hour for needed care."

HCA, Tyler continued, has "taken its hatchet to charity care, geriatric services, security, and even hospital chaplains."

"We believe HCA uses its market domination over Western North Carolina to gut our healthcare system, then send the profits back to executives and Wall Street shareholders," she added, imploring the FTC and DOJ to "modify... procedures around mergers and acquisitions to protect communities like Asheville from companies like HCA."

NNU, drawing from Comsti's detailed comments, elaborated on its concerns in a statement released Thursday.

According to the union: "Traditional distinctions between vertical and horizontal mergers have largely evaporated due to the abuse of market power by large healthcare systems. Corporate financial interests' integration into and control of different types of healthcare facilities can incentivize interference with the professional judgment of practitioners and reduce practitioner autonomy."

Citing Comsti, NNU said that "the role of private equity ownership and its 'strong tendency... to focus on short-term profits, maximizing returns paid to investors, and minimizing liability by financing acquisitions through debt' has adversely affected patient outcomes and safety."

NNU urged the FTC and DOJ to pay particularly close attention to "the deleterious effects of private equity ownership in healthcare," which Comsti wrote "is particularly damaging and even deadly." She pointed out that healthcare facilities owned or operated by private equity firms tend to have "lower staffing levels, higher prices for care, and higher medical debt for patients."

A report published last month shed light on the private equity industry's growing foothold in the home healthcare and hospice sector.

"Healthcare market concentration is strongly associated with huge increases in predatory pricing practices by insurance companies and other payers and hospital charges," NNU noted. This has contributed to "a national scandal over medical debt and... forcing up to 40% of Americans skip needed care due to escalating costs."

According to NNU, two-thirds of hospitals now belong to multi-facility systems, up from 37% in 1994. An NNU report published in 2020 found that U.S. hospitals charge patients more than four times the cost of care, on average. The highest charge-to-cost ratios were found at hospitals owned by multi-facility systems, the vast majority of which are run by for-profit corporations.

"Healthcare market concentration is strongly associated with huge increases in predatory pricing practices."

NNU explained Thursday that "conglomeration is increasingly seen when an acute-care hospital system acquires or merges with physician practices, home health agencies, telehealth service providers, outpatient clinics, nursing homes, skilled nursing facilities, or other post-acute care facilities."

The union stressed that this "frequently results in cuts in-patient services as well as higher prices for care," leading to "the increased shift of needed care work to unpaid family caregivers or unlicensed aides, rather than RNs and other professional caregivers."

Following public testimony last week, FTC Chair Lina Kahn said that "as we've heard from several of you, sometimes that cost-cutting can come at the expense of quality of care."

On Wednesday, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released data on mergers, acquisitions, consolidations, and changes of ownership at hospitals and nursing homes enrolled in Medicare from 2016 to 2022—the first time such information has been made public.

Echoing NNU's analysis of the harmful effects of mergers and acquisitions, CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure said in a statement that "hospital and nursing facility consolidation leaves many underserved areas with inadequate or more expensive healthcare options."

Comsti, for her part, also emphasized that market consolidation weakens RNs and other healthcare workers' bargaining power over terms and conditions of employment, lowering wages and leading to unsafe staffing levels.

In addition to hurting patient safety, she said, "intentional understaffing, lack of health and safety precautions, and other poor working conditions have driven nurses away from bedside nursing."

To limit the damages associated with healthcare industry mergers and acquisitions, NNU is urging the FTC and DOJ "to expand antitrust scrutiny and other guidelines in reviewing past practices of the buyers, such as higher charges to payers and patients, hospital closures and patient service cuts, adverse impacts on independent safety-net hospitals and public healthcare facilities, past anti-union behavior, and degradation of patient privacy and information sharing with technology firms."

"These measures and additional remedies in merger and acquisition guidelines," the union said, "can protect patients, workers, and communities."

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