experts – Radio Free

US strikes on Iran may strengthen North Korea’s nuclear resolve, experts warn

Han Do-hyung for RFA Korean — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 20:12:16 +0000

The U.S. air strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities will have reinforced North Korea’s perception that possessing nuclear weapons is essential for its survival and may even prompt Pyongyang to accelerate the development of its nuclear capabilities, warned South Korean experts.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Saturday announced that the U.S. had conducted “massive precision strikes” on three Iranian nuclear sites – Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan – that has “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities.

The attack on Iran’s nuclear sites marks the first offensive U.S. military action in Israel’s war with Iran – a major escalation in tensions in the Middle East – which South Korean analysts warn will make North Korea increasingly resistant to any diplomatic efforts or talks aimed at convincing Pyongyang to give up its nuclear program.

“North Korea must have thought it was a good idea to have nuclear weapons after seeing the U.S. airstrike on Iran’s nuclear facilities,” Jeong Seong-jang, deputy director of the Sejong Institute, told Radio Free Asia on Monday.

In a statement Monday, a spokesperson for the North Korean Foreign Ministry criticized the U.S. airstrike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, saying it “violated the U.N. Charter and international law, which have as their basic principles respect for sovereignty and non-interference in internal affairs,” North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency reported.

This image distributed by the North Korean government on March 24, 2022, and not independently verifiable shows leader Kim Jong Un walking away from what state media reports as a "new type" of intercontinental ballistic missile.

(KCNA via Reuters)

Despite calls by the U.S. and its allies for denuclearization, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has pushed for his country to bolster its nuclear capabilities to defend itself, warning earlier this year that “confrontation with the most vicious hostile countries is inevitable.” While the “hostile countries” were not named, North Korea regards the U.S. and its ally, South Korea, as its main enemies.

In 2003, North Korea withdrew after acceding to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), shortly after the U.S. invaded Iraq. It cited concerns, at the time, that the U.S. was planning a preemptive strike against Pyongyang.

“North Korea is (likely to be) concerned that if it gives up its nuclear weapons, it will end up in a situation similar to Iran, and will not accept future proposals for denuclearization discussions.”

He warned the strikes may even prompt North Korea – which conducted its first underground nuclear test in 2006 – to accelerate the development of nuclear submarines in an effort to secure so-called ‘second-strike’ capabilities – or the ability to launch retaliatory nuclear strikes after a preemptive one.

Other South Korean experts echoed similar concerns.

“Kim Jong Un will probably order the relocation, hiding, and concealment of nuclear facilities, as well as the expansion of air defense systems,” Professor Nam Seong-wook of Sookmyung Women’s University told RFA.

(KCNA via Reuters)

In a social media post, Kim Dong-yeop, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies, argued that the U.S. strikes would cause North Korea to further solidify its perception that “only possession of nuclear weapons can lead to survival” and provide much-needed validation for Pyongyang to hold on to its nuclear arsenal.

Since 2006, North Korea has tested nuclear devices six times and has developed missiles believed to be capable of reaching the U.S. mainland.

During his first term, Trump held historic summits with Kim Jong Un, hoping to get North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons in exchange for sanctions relief, but his high-level diplomacy ultimately failed to achieve a breakthrough. The North has continued to build its nuclear and missile programs.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates that North Korea has assembled around 50 warheads and possesses enough fissile material to produce up to 40 more warheads and is accelerating the production of further fissile material.

Earlier this year, Pyongyang reiterated that it has no intention of giving up its nuclear program.

North Korea would now view diplomatic engagement with the United States as “foolish” and any future negotiations of denuclearization as futile, Kim Dong-yeop wrote in a social media post on Sunday.

“North Korea will use the Iran situation as an excuse to strengthen its criticism of the South Korea-U.S. alliance and South Korea-U.S.-Japan security cooperation,” he added.

Written by Tenzin Pema. Edited by Mat Pennington.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Han Do-hyung for RFA Korean.

Trump Budget Bill Would Lead to 51,000 More Deaths Per Year, as Health Experts Urge Medicare for All

Democracy Now! — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 15:22:08 +0000

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

Trump Budget Bill Would Lead to 51,000 More Deaths Each Year, as Health Experts Urge Medicare for All

Democracy Now! — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 12:27:22 +0000

President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” now before the Senate could result in over 51,000 preventable deaths each year in the United States. That’s according to public health experts at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, who sent a letter warning about the bill’s impact to the Senate Finance Committee. An estimated 16 million people stand to lose their health coverage as a result of the changes in the bill, which “imposes onerous paperwork and fails to safeguard healthcare tax credits,” says Alison Galvani, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Modeling at Yale and one of the signatories to the letter. She also notes universal healthcare would have the opposite effect and save tens of thousands of lives each year. “There are a lot of ways we can improve how expensive our healthcare is, but taking healthcare away from people is not how to do it,” says Galvani.

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

A Tennessee School Expelled a 12-Year-Old for a Social Post. Experts Say It Didn’t Properly Assess If He Made a Threat.

by Aliyya Swaby — Tue, 27 May 2025 09:00:00 +0000

by Aliyya Swaby

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

The day after a teenager opened fire in a Nashville high school cafeteria early this year, officials in the district scrambled to investigate potential threats across their schools. Rumors flew that the shooter, who killed a student before turning the gun on himself, had accomplices at large.

At DuPont Tyler Middle School, the assistant principal’s most urgent concern was a 12-year-old boy. James, a seventh grader with a small voice and mop of brown hair, had posted a concerning screenshot on Instagram that morning, Jan. 23. He was arrested at school hours later and charged with making a threat of mass violence.

The assistant principal had to complete a detailed investigation called a threat assessment, as required by Tennessee law. First, she and other school employees had to figure out whether James’ threat was valid. Then, they had to determine what actions to take to help a potentially troubled child and protect other students.

Threat assessments are not public, but the district gave ProPublica a copy of James’ with his father’s permission. School officials did not carry out the threat assessment properly, according to experts who reviewed it at ProPublica’s request. Instead, the school expelled James without investigating further and skipped crucial steps that would help him or protect others. (We are using the child’s middle name to protect his privacy.)

The way school officials handled James’ case also exposes glaring contradictions in two recent Tennessee laws that aim to criminalize school threats and require schools to expel students who make them — with minimal recourse, transparency or accountability.

One obvious issue in the threat assessment, according to the experts, appeared on Page 20. That page features a checklist of options for how the school could address its concerns about James, including advising his parents to secure guns in their home and ensuring he has access to counseling.

Schools should take steps like these even when a student is expelled, according to John Van Dreal, a former school administrator who has spent decades helping schools improve their violence prevention strategies. Officials at James’ school opted for none of the options they could have taken. Instead, the assistant principal wrote under the list in blue pen, “student was expelled.”

“That’s actually about the most dangerous thing you can do for the student,” Van Dreal said, “and honestly for the community.”

Van Dreal’s name appears in tiny print at the bottom of each page of James’ threat assessment, because he helped the school district set up its current process. After ProPublica shared details about James’ case, Van Dreal said, “What I’m hearing is probably more training and more examples are needed.”

One page of the threat assessment form, created by John Van Dreal, used in James’ case (Obtained by ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

Nashville’s school district does not collect data on how many threat assessments it does or how many result in expulsions, according to spokesperson Sean Braisted. “The goal is always to ensure the safety and well-being of all students while addressing incidents appropriately,” Braisted wrote. He later declined to answer questions ProPublica asked about James’ case, although James’ father signed a privacy waiver allowing the school to do so.

Tennessee schools must submit data to the state on how effective their threat assessments are — but the state does not release that information to the public. School districts are required to get training on threat assessments, but lawyers and parents say they often carry them out inconsistently and use varying definitions for what makes a threat valid.

Two recent contradictory Tennessee laws make it even harder to handle student threats. One mandates a felony charge for anyone who makes a “threat of mass violence” at school, without requiring police to investigate intent or credibility. The other requires schools to determine that a threat of mass violence is “valid” before expelling a student for at least a year.

James’ alleged threat was a screenshot of a text exchange. One person said they would “shoot up” a Nashville school and asked if the other would attack a different school. “Yea,” the other person replied. “I got some other people for other schools.” The FBI flagged the post for school officials and police. James told school officials that he reposted the screenshot from the Instagram page of a Spanish-language news site.

The Tennessean published a story in April detailing James’ arrest and overnight stay in juvenile detention. The story, and the ones ProPublica and WPLN published last year on other arrests, shows how quickly police move to take youth into custody.

Schools in Tennessee are supposed to follow a higher standard than police when it comes to investigating threats of mass violence: They’re supposed to determine whether a threat is valid. For instance, in Hamilton County, a few hours southeast of Nashville, school officials chose not to expel two students even after police arrested them for threats of mass violence, ProPublica and WPLN previously reported.

Yet when James’ father appealed his son’s expulsion at a March school district hearing, the assistant principal said repeatedly that James had to be expelled simply because he’d been arrested. “We did not investigate further,” she said. James’ father shared an audio recording of the hearing with ProPublica.

James, who turned 13 in February, is small for his age, still awaiting the teenage growth spurt of his three older brothers. At the hearing, his voice was soft but assured as he explained what happened. He said he understands why he shouldn’t have posted the screenshot. But he said he wanted to warn others and feel “heroic.”

Melissa Nelson, a national school safety consultant based in Pennsylvania who trains school employees on managing threats, reviewed James’ threat assessment at ProPublica’s request and concluded that “this is gross mismanagement of a case.”

“This tool has not been used as intended,” she said. “They didn’t do a behavior threat assessment. They filled out some paperwork.”

After the police took James away, assistant principal Angela Post convened a team of school employees to decide whether to expel him. They used a threat assessment form that Van Dreal had developed, one of the most commonly used across the country, to guide them on how to respond.

According to Van Dreal, Metro Nashville Public Schools is in an early phase of using the form, and its staff have flown to Oregon at least once to learn from his consulting group.

Van Dreal tells school officials to use the threat assessment to collect information about a student in trouble and address behavior that could signal future violence. If school officials worried that James was planning an act of violence, they should have pursued some of the many options outlined in the threat assessment to get him help and protect the school from harm.

Instead, they chose none of those options.

Experts said that is one of the biggest mistakes school officials make. “Even if a child is expelled, what I always train is: Out of sight, out of mind doesn’t help,” Nelson said. “Expelling a child doesn’t deescalate the situation or move them off the pathway of violence. A lot of times, it makes it worse.”

School officials also failed to seek out more information that could have helped them figure out whether the threat was valid. Post checked a box acknowledging that she hadn’t notified James’ parents of the threat assessment. She wrote beside it, as an explanation, “student was arrested and expelled.” On a line asking whether James had access to weapons, Post wrote that the threat assessment team did not know.

Interviewing parents is a crucial part of the process, said Rob Moore, a Tennessee psychologist who has helped schools conduct threat assessments for more than two decades. “When you sit in that room with those parents and you collect data from them, you really get a sense of things that teachers would never know, that the administrators would never know.”

Although school officials did not opt to investigate further or to monitor James, the threat assessment indicated they had concerns he may pose a threat. In response to a question about whether James’ caregivers, peers or staff were concerned about his potential for acting out aggressively, Post checked yes and wrote, “He has little to no supervision in discipline structures at home but might think he could get away with it.”

And although James told school administrators he was not a participant in the text thread he shared on Instagram, Post wrote that he had indicated a plan and intention to harm others. “See attached image. Shows location, intent to harm, targets and date,” she wrote, referencing a screenshot of James’ Instagram post. She also wrote that he had a motive: “The post indicated that he was being made fun of. See attached image.”

The threat assessment included questionnaires from James’ teachers; three out of four said they did not have concerns about potential aggression. One teacher, who taught James social studies, cited his disciplinary history: using racial slurs, fighting another student and “researching racially motivated things” on the school computer. “Dad seemed disengaged in conference & somewhat unaware of the child’s school or social or personal issues,” she wrote.

James’ dad and stepmom did not know that the threat assessment accused them of lax supervision at home. That’s because they didn’t even know the threat assessment existed until ProPublica told them about it, more than a week after it took place.

Upon reading the document, their first emotion, after shock, was anger. They said they hadn’t known about the incident with the racial slur, and it was not directly referenced in a copy of James’ disciplinary history. But they felt upset at the insinuation that they had not been involved in James’ life. “We’ve been asking for help, for grades, tutoring,” his dad, Kyle Caldwell, said. “And we really didn’t get any.”

James relaxes at home with his dad, Kyle Caldwell, and the family dog. James was put on court supervision following his arrest. (Andrea Morales for ProPublica)

James said that in early September, his social studies teacher taught the class about World War II. He said the teacher didn’t answer enough of his questions, so he started searching online. The school flagged that he had looked up swastikas. “I didn’t know much about it,” he said. “That’s why I searched it.”

As part of his discipline, the school prohibited him from using its computers. His stepmother, Breanne Metz, shared emails she sent to James’ teachers explaining she and Caldwell were worried about his grades and wanted to help him catch up.

James had been struggling with his parents’ contentious divorce; after his mom lost custody of him, he hadn’t been able to see her in months. Worried, his dad and stepmom arranged for him to see a school counselor. James said the counselor tried to connect with him through their mutual love of video games over about five sessions, which was nice, though “it didn’t really help.” Post wrote in the threat assessment that James had “disclosed confidential information to the school counselor that would support a feeling of being overwhelmed or distraught.”

Then James lost his best friend: Lieutenant Dan, a three-legged pitbull-lab mix named after a character from the movie “Forrest Gump.” Dan joined the family when he and James were both 1, and he died of cancer last November. As James describes it, he was at capacity with the emotions he was dealing with, and his dog’s death was the tipping point. “When someone you love or something you love for your whole life passes away, you can’t hold it,” he said. He sat in class feeling sad and exhausted.

Records show school staff talked with James’ parents about his attendance at school and he was disciplined for not complying with an unspecified request. Then in mid-December, he began a fight with another student, who had been “horseplaying” with him “off and on” and went too far, according to the school report. The following month, he was arrested and expelled.

In the days after the arrest, Caldwell considered hiring a lawyer. Reading the threat assessment “added the urgency” for him to finally make the call. “The puzzle pieces weren’t coming together in their story,” he said. “It really looked like they were going to try to be sweeping their stuff under the rug.”

In mid-March, James sat at the oval table in the district conference room next to his father and across from assistant principal Post. He wore a gray vest over his T-shirt in preparation for an appeal hearing that would determine whether he would be allowed back in school. It had been nearly two months since he had set foot on district property.

Caldwell brought his private lawyer, a rare resource for a school hearing. He showed up that morning nervous but eager to make his case directly to school administrators. The public rarely gets insight into what happens at a school appeal hearing, but Caldwell shared an audio recording with ProPublica.

Post started by reading aloud the social media post that landed James in trouble, stumbling over the shorthand and unfamiliar internet slang. Then, it was James’ turn to speak for himself.

Lisa Currie, the school district’s director of discipline, asked him to explain why he had reposted the screenshot of the texts. “You do understand that once you reposted them from somewhere else, it gave the appearance that this was a conversation that you were having?” she said.

“I just wanted to let people know, feel heroic,” James said. “I didn’t want more people to get hurt.”

James enjoys building and painting the model F-15E fighter jet his dad bought him. (Andrea Morales for ProPublica)

Over the next 40 minutes, Caldwell’s lawyer questioned Post about the process the school used to determine whether James should be expelled. When he pressed her for direct responses, Post repeatedly said that law enforcement and not the school held the primary responsibility for investigating the threat. Although the law requires schools to use a threat assessment to determine if the threat is “valid,” Post and her team based the expulsion entirely on the police’s arrest.

Once local police take over a case, she said, “then it’s not really our investigation anymore.”

“Was it your assessment at the time that he wrote this statement, like physically typed it out on a computer and posted it?” the lawyer asked.

“We did not make that determination,” Post said.

She said school staff did not look deeply through James’ disciplinary history as part of the threat assessment. “That’s not necessarily the purpose of the threat assessment,” she told the lawyer. Because James had been expelled and arrested, “there would not be a reason to be concerned about the return of a student.”

Currie indicated that Post’s approach was supported by district leaders. “The purpose of the threat assessment is to determine appropriate supports and interventions around the students while they’re in the building,” she said. Post and Currie did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment or to written questions.

Post told the lawyer she couldn’t remember whether school staff investigated the origin of the original threat.

“So if there was an actual threat made and somebody else authored this threat, then we don’t know who that is. Would that be a fair statement?” the lawyer asked.

“That is possible,” Post responded. She said James didn’t initially say that he had shared the post to warn others and it wasn’t her place to decide whether he intended to make a threat. “I don’t want to think, ‘Oh, he’s not going to do that.’ And then something just like the previous day happened,” she said, referring to the Antioch High School shooting. Once James was arrested, “it’s in MNPD’s hands,” Post said, referring to the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department.

The lawyer asked Post to explain whether the threat assessment could ever have changed school officials’ decision to expel James: What if school officials found out that the threat was not valid? “Had y’all come on information that he had not written these texts,” he asked, “would it have changed the punishment?”

“We would have had to let our [school resource officer] know and they would have had to go through the MNPD channels,” she said.

“You did not at that time know whether he wrote those text messages or not?” the lawyer asked again.

“Correct,” Post said.

Then, it was Caldwell’s turn to speak. He criticized the school’s decision to leave him out of the initial disciplinary process. He would have explained to James why he should go through “appropriate channels” to report a threat instead of posting it on Instagram. “As a dad,” he said, “there was a teachable parent moment that I didn’t get to have.”

As the hearing came to a close, Currie told Caldwell to expect a decision soon.

The arrest and expulsion cleaved James’ life in two. He now begins many sentences with the phrase “before everything happened.” Before everything happened, he would ride his bike with his brothers and friends to explore the forested land and abandoned houses in the surrounding neighborhoods. They found all sorts of strange garbage: a fire engine’s license plate, wooden pictures of “demonic rituals,” a dentist chair adorned with rusty handcuffs.

James looks for four-leaf clovers in his backyard. (Andrea Morales for ProPublica)

He was able to come home from his night in detention in exchange for agreeing to pretrial diversion with six months of court supervision, a common outcome for students charged with threats of mass violence. While under supervision, he wasn’t allowed to use the computer or phone unsupervised by an adult and was mostly restricted to the streets around his house. “It’s a big neighborhood, but once you get used to it, it’s small,” he said.

The court recently lifted his supervision, earlier than expected. Because he had completed the terms of pretrial diversion, his case was dismissed.

His parents declined Metro Nashville Public Schools’ offer to enroll him in the local alternative school, which primarily serves kids with disciplinary issues who were suspended or expelled from their original schools. Instead, they enrolled him at an online public charter school; he starts in the fall.

As James waited to hear the result of the expulsion hearing, he followed the schedule his dad and stepmom created for him — less a rigorous academic curriculum than a routine to keep him occupied while his stepmom takes calls in her home office. He gets most excited about the hands-on activities, like building and painting the model F-15E fighter jet his dad bought him online.

One night in early April, tornadoes touched down just outside Nashville. James, his five siblings, and two dogs huddled with Caldwell and Metz in the windowless laundry room; the kids wore helmets in case of falling debris. When they got up the next morning, groggy but unharmed, Caldwell checked the mailbox: A letter from the school district was inside.

District officials had reviewed the information from the hearing and determined that “there was not a due process violation of MNPS’ expulsion process.” James was still expelled. Caldwell had prepared his son for this outcome so that he wouldn’t be devastated. James would later joke that the storm had delivered the bad news.

The letter gave the family the option to escalate the appeal through the district process. But the odds of winning and the costs of retaining the lawyer made the effort feel futile. The more the family fought back, the more anxious the 13-year-old felt about his future. Would he feel even worse if they lost again? Would people start to think of him as a bad kid?

That afternoon, talking with his dad about the letter, James quietly considered these questions. Then he went outside to watch the storm clouds.

Paige Pfleger of WPLN contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Aliyya Swaby.

South Africa downgrades Taiwan status, signaling more China influence, say experts

Chen Meihua and Tenzin Pema for RFA — Tue, 20 May 2025 22:03:32 +0000

In a sign of China’s expanding international influence, South Africa has downgraded the status of Taiwan’s liaison office in the country, further diminishing the democratic island’s diplomatic footprint, experts say.

South Africa severed formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan in 1997 and recognized Beijing as the government of China. But in the nearly three decades since, it has retained unofficial ties with Taipei and a trading relationship.

However, it’s recently moved to diminish Taiwan’s unofficial status in the country. South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation now categorizes the Taiwan Liaison Office – which functions as a de facto embassy but without official diplomatic status – as a “Taipei Commercial Office” on its official website, and has removed the name of the Taiwanese Representative Oliver Liao under the listing.

On Friday, Taiwanese Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung accused China of putting pressure on South Africa to make the changes. He said the liaison office had requested negotiations with the South African government about it.

Analysts told Radio Free Asia that the changes highlight China’s continued efforts to use its influence in Africa and the Global South – a diverse set of countries across Africa, Latin America, Asia and Middle East – to prevent Taiwan from gaining international recognition and to hurt its ability to pursue its diplomatic interests abroad.

“Taiwan’s representative offices are its way to make its voice heard diplomatically, in the face of declining official recognition. But China’s deep pockets and military aggression have left quite a mark on smaller, developing nations,” Anushka Saxena, China analyst at Bengaluru, India-based think tank Takshashila Institution, said.

China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and maintains that the self-ruling island has no right to independent diplomatic relations.

As it is, Taiwan retains formal ties with only a dozen countries, mostly smaller and less developed nations. In that context, even nominal changes in recognition by foreign governments send a strong signal to Taipei.

The Taipei Liaison Office in South Africa which is Taiwan's representative office in South Africa's administrative capital, Pretoria, Oct. 22, 2024.

(Alet Pretorius/Reuters)

Last October, the South African government announced that Taiwan’s liaison office would be “rebranded” as a trade office and said the same change would be effected for the South African liaison office in Taipei.

Under its foreign representation listing section on the website, the South African government now shows the address of the Taiwan liaison office as being in the nation’s economic hub Johannesburg, not the administrative capital Pretoria, although Taiwanese Foreign Minister Lin told reporters Friday that it continues to operate normally in Pretoria.

South Africa last October described the relocation of the office from the capital as “a true reflection of the non-political and non-diplomatic nature of the relationship between the Republic of South Africa and Taiwan.”

The email address for the office is also changed in the South African government listing from the official domain name of @mofa.gov.tw to one under a South African telco provider, @telkomsa.net.

Analysts viewed the steps taken by South Africa as predictable despite Taiwan’s attempts to engage in dialogue to address the issue.

“This has been part of China’s ongoing mission to shrink Taiwan’s international space, so it’s not surprising that talks have fallen through despite Taiwan’s persistence,” Sana Hashmi, Fellow at Taipei-based Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation, told RFA.

South Africa is a significant diplomatic player and the largest economy in Africa - a continent where China has built economic and security ties over the past two decades or more. South Africa is also set to host this year’s summit of Group of 20, or G-20, nations.

Ties between China and South Africa have strengthened significantly since the two established formal relations in 1998. China is now South Africa’s largest trading partner. In 2024, their bilateral trade was $52.4 billion, compared with Taiwan-South Africa trade which averages around $2 billion annually.

As a member of the BRICS, an intergovernmental organization consisting of 10 countries, South Africa also collaborates with China on economic, political, and developmental initiatives, aligning with Beijing on global governance reforms.

Song Guocheng, a researcher at the Center for International Relations Research at National Chengchi University, said China uses both inducement and pressure tactics to strong-arm South Africa into taking a slew of measures against Taiwan that may eventually culminate in more drastic ones, including closure of office or expulsion.

“It is possible that under the pressure of the CCP, it will take a more overbearing approach to Taiwan,” Song told RFA, referring to the Chinese Communist Party.

While Taiwan is seeking negotiations with South Africa, analysts say it has little leverage. Taiwan’s government should focus instead on expanding its economic interdependence with its partners in South and Southeast Asian economies and on building ties with countries that can contribute to deterrence and its defense, they said.

On Tuesday, President Lai Ching-te, who has been dubbed a “separatist” by Beijing, marked the completion of his first year in office, which has been marked by growing military pressure against the island.

He said Taiwan wants peace and is ready to engage in talks with China, as long as there is “reciprocal dignity,” with dialogue replacing confrontation.

Edited by Mat Pennington.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Chen Meihua and Tenzin Pema for RFA.

Texas Lawmakers Are Again Pushing to Spend Millions on Kits to Find Missing Kids. Experts Say They Don’t Work.

by Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune — Fri, 09 May 2025 10:00:00 +0000

by Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

Two years ago, Texas lawmakers quietly cut millions of dollars in funding for kits intended to help track down missing kids, after ProPublica and The Texas Tribune revealed there was no evidence they had aided law enforcement in finding lost children.

The company that made the kits had used outdated and exaggerated statistics on missing children to bolster their sales and charged for the materials when similar products were available for less or for free.

Now, some Texas legislators are again pushing to spend millions more in taxpayer dollars to purchase such kits, slipping the funding into a 1,000-page budget proposal.

Although the proposal does not designate which company would supply them, a 2021 bill introduced by Republican state Sen. Donna Campbell all but guarantees Texas will contract with the same vendor, the National Child Identification Program. Back then, Campbell made clear that her intent was to enshrine into law a long-standing partnership between the state and NCIDP that goes back more than two decades. Her legislation, signed into law that June, also specified that whenever the state allocated funding for such materials, the Texas Education Agency must purchase identification kits that are “inkless,” a technology that NCIDP has patented.

The Waco-based company is led by former NFL player Kenny Hansmire, who ProPublica and the Tribune found had a history of failed businesses and financial troubles, including millions of dollars in federal tax liens and a ban from conducting certain finance-related business in Connecticut due to his role in an alleged scheme to defraud investors.

Hansmire cultivated relationships with powerful Texas legislators who went on to support his initiatives. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who oversees the Senate, championed Campbell’s legislation funding the kits and later told the news organizations that the state should prioritize anything that can speed up the return of a missing child. Campbell told lawmakers in a hearing that the bipartisan measure, which was brought to her by Hansmire and Patrick, was important to “protect our children.”

Patrick, Campbell and Hansmire did not respond to interview requests for this story. Hansmire previously told the newsrooms that his debts and other financial issues had been resolved. He also defended his company’s kits, saying they have helped find multiple missing children, and instructed reporters to ask “any policeman” about the kits’ usefulness. However, none of the dozen Texas law enforcement agencies that the news organizations reached — including three that Hansmire specifically named — could recall any examples.

Stacey Pearson, a child safety consultant and former Louisiana State Police sergeant who oversaw that state’s Clearinghouse for Missing and Exploited Children, said she has never seen any cases demonstrating that these kits work, including in the last two years since lawmakers discontinued the funding.

“I don’t understand why we’re going back to this,” said Pearson, who spoke with the newsrooms recently and for their previous investigation. “It wasn’t a good idea in 2023 and it’s not a good idea now.”

Despite the lack of evidence, Pearson said companies like NCIDP are able to profit off the kits by marketing them as part of a larger child safety program, a strategy that makes opposing lawmakers look as if they are against protecting children. Texas allocated nearly $6 million for the kits between 2021 and 2023.

Lawmakers did not explain their reasoning when they decided to stop paying for the kits in 2023. Republican state Sen. Joan Huffman, who chairs the high chamber’s Finance Committee, told the newsrooms at the time that both the House and the Senate had agreed to remove the funding “after review and consideration.”

During this year’s budgeting process, Democratic state Rep. Armando Martinez proposed adding $2 million to the House’s budget to provide kits to families with children in kindergarten through second grade.

Martinez did not respond to an interview request.

State Rep. Greg Bonnen, who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, did not respond to interview requests or written questions.

Bonnen was among the 33 lawmakers who voted against Campbell’s bill that established the child identification kit funding four years ago. The newsrooms attempted to reach a handful of those legislators, but none responded.

Huffman and the Senate have so far chosen not to restore the program’s funding. Huffman declined the newsrooms’ interview requests.

“The entire budget process is ongoing,” she wrote in an emailed statement. “No final decisions have been made on most issues.”

Legislators from the two chambers will continue hashing out the differences between their budget proposals in a joint committee that operates behind closed doors. There’s no guarantee that the funding will make it into the final budget, which lawmakers must pass before the legislative session ends in early June.

Pearson cautioned legislators to question whether the kits are the best use of state funding, given the absence of documented success.

“My advice would be for lawmakers to ask themselves, ‘If this was your personal money and not the taxpayers’, would you spend it on this program?’” Pearson said. “And the answer is going to be no.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.

Experts split on Australia’s Papua New Guinea military recruitment plan

APR editor — Thu, 08 May 2025 23:20:34 +0000

By Caleb Fotheringham, RNZ Pacific journalist

Australia’s plan to recruit from Papua New Guinea for its Defence Force raises “major ethical concerns”, according to the Australia Defence Association, while another expert thinks it is broadly a good idea.

The two nations are set to begin negotiating a new defence treaty that is expected to see Papua New Guineans join the Australian Defence Force (ADF).

Australia Defence Association executive director Neil James believes “it’s an idiot idea” if there is no pathway to citizenship for Papua New Guineans who serve in the ADF

READ MORE: Other defence pact reports

“You can’t expect other people to defend your country if you’re not willing to do it and until this scheme actually addresses this in any detail, we’re not going to know whether it’s an idiot idea or it’s something that might be workable in the long run.”

However, an expert associate at the Australian National University’s National Security College, Jennifer Parker, believes it is a good idea.

“Australia having a closer relationship with Papua New Guinea through that cross pollination of people going and working in each other’s defence forces, that’s incredibly positive.”

Parker said recruiting from the Pacific has been an ongoing conversation, but the exact nature of what the recruitment might look like is unknown, including whether there is a pathway to citizenship or if there would be a separate PNG unit within the ADF.

Extreme scenario
When asked whether it was ethical for people from PNG to fight Australia’s wars, Parker said that would be an extreme scenario.

“We’re not talking about conscripting people from other countries or anything like that. We’re talking about offering the opportunity for people, if they choose to join,” she said.

“There are many defence forces around the world where people choose, people who are born in other countries, choose to join.”

However, James disagrees.

“Whether they’re volunteers or whether they’re conscripted, you’re still expecting foreigners to defend your society and with no link to that society.”

Both Parker and James brought up concerns surrounding brain drain.

James said in Timor-Leste, in the early 2000s, many New Zealanders in the army infantry who were serving alongside Australia joined the Australian Army, attracted by the higher pay, which was not in the interest of New Zealand or Australia in the long run.

Care needed
“You’ve got to be real careful that you don’t ruin the Papua New Guinea Defence Force by making it too easy for Papua New Guineans to serve in the Australian Defence Force.”

Parker said the policy needed to be crafted very clearly in conjunction with Papua New Guinea to make sure it strengthened the two nations relationship, not undermined it.

Australia aims to grow the number of ADF uniformed personnel to 80,000 by 2040. However, it is not on track to meet that target.

Parker said she did not think Australia was trying to fill the shortfall.

“There are a couple of challenges in the recruitment issues for the Australian Defence Force.

“But I don’t think the scoping of recruiting people from Papua New Guinea and the Pacific Islands, if it indeed goes ahead, is about addressing recruitment for the Australian Defence Force.

“I think it’s about increasing closer security ties between Papua New Guinea, the Pacific Islands, and Australia.”

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

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

US, China in for protracted trade talks, warn experts ahead of crucial Geneva meet

Qian Lang and Chen Meihua for RFA Mandarin — Wed, 07 May 2025 22:40:14 +0000

U.S. and Chinese officials will hold high-level talks in Switzerland this weekend, a first step toward easing trade tensions between the world’s two largest economies over tariffs but experts did not expect immediate breakthroughs.

Analysts said Wednesday the talks were a necessary step towards de-escalating tensions amid the ongoing trade war, but negotiations to resolve differences between the two countries may be protracted.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Trade Representative Jamieson Greer will meet Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in Geneva, the first official engagement between the two countries since U.S. President Donald Trump increased tariffs on imports from China to as much as 145%.

“De-escalating won’t be simple. It’s much easier to ratchet up restrictions versus lifting them,” said Wendy Cutler, vice president of the Asia Society Policy Institute.

“Expectations should be modest for this meeting. It is a first step in a potentially longer process, which is complicated by a lack of trust and diametrically opposing views on how trade is conducted between the two largest economies,” Cutler told Radio Free Asia.

Chinese scholar Zhang Li agreed. He expects China and the U.S. to engage in protracted negotiations on a range of issues, including tariffs imposed by both nations, smuggling of the deadly synthetic opioid fentanyl into the U.S., and other trade imbalances.

“Such protracted negotiations may last throughout the entire term of the Trump administration, resulting in a continuous trade war between China and the U.S., which is also a feature of the new Cold War between China and the U.S.,” Zhang told RFA.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent speaks in the Oval Office of the White House, Feb. 3, 2025, in Washington.

(Evan Vucci/AP)

In 2024, China’s total manufacturing output reached 40.5 trillion yuan (US$5.65 trillion). Foreign trade volume - exports and imports - was 43.85 trillion yuan (US$6.1 trillion), of which exports accounted for 25.45 trillion yuan (US$3.49 trillion).

In March, Chinese imports to the U.S. were the lowest in five years, according to data released by the U.S. Commerce Department. U.S. trade deficit widened to a record $140.5 billion in the month, with imports from at least 10 countries, including Vietnam and Mexico, at record levels.

Trump – who on Wednesday held a swearing-in ceremony at the Oval Office for the new U.S. ambassador to China, David Perdue – said he was not open to lowering the 145% import duties on Chinese goods.

His comments came a day after Bessent, in an interview on Fox News, said the current tariffs imposed are unsustainable and that both sides had a “shared interest” in talks.

“We don’t want to decouple. What we want is fair trade,” Bessent said. He stressed that “de-escalation” will be the focus, instead of a “big trade deal.”

Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng speaks at the 11th China-UK Economic and Financial Dialogue in Beijing, Jan. 11, 2025.

(Aaron Favila/AP)

China on Wednesday said the U.S. has repeatedly indicated in the recent past that it wants to negotiate and that the upcoming meeting had been requested by the U.S.

“China firmly opposes the U.S.’s tariff hikes. This position remains unchanged,” Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Lin Jian said at a media briefing.

“Meanwhile, as we’ve stressed many times before, China is open to dialogue, but any dialogue must be based on equality, respect and mutual benefit,” Lin said.

Washington and Beijing have been engaged in a tit-for-tat increase in tariffs ever since Trump imposed a 10% tariff on China on Feb. 4, citing its role in the trade in fentanyl, a deadly opioid that has become a major cause of death in America.

China, in turn, hit back with a 15% tariff on U.S. coal and liquefied natural gas, and a 10% on crude oil, large cars, and agricultural machinery, prompting Trump to raise China tariffs further by 10% to a total 20%, followed by several more increases until eventually settling at 145%.

In China, the steep U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods have triggered a wave of factory closures in major export hubs in the country, with sources telling RFA that there is a prevailing sense of helplessness among the general public, given little consumer activity and a rise in protests by unpaid workers.

Edited by Tenzin Pema and Mat Pennington.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Qian Lang and Chen Meihua for RFA Mandarin.

Texas Senate Approves Legislation to Clarify Exceptions to Abortion Ban. But Experts Fear Confusion Would Persist.

by Cassandra Jaramillo and Lizzie Presser — Thu, 01 May 2025 15:55:00 +0000

by Cassandra Jaramillo and Lizzie Presser

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

The Texas Senate has unanimously passed legislation that aims to prevent maternal deaths under the state’s strict abortion ban.

Written in response to a ProPublica investigation last year, Senate Bill 31, called The Life of the Mother Act, represents a remarkable turn among the Republican lawmakers who were the original supporters of the ban. For the first time in four years, they acknowledged that women were being denied care because of confusion about the law and took action to clarify its terms.

“We don’t want to have any reason for hesitation,” said Republican state Sen. Bryan Hughes, who authored the state’s original abortion ban and sponsored this reform with bipartisan input and support. Just last fall, he had said the law he wrote was “plenty clear.”

The bill stops short of removing what doctors say are the ban’s biggest impediments to care, including its major criminal penalties, and doesn’t expand abortion access to cases of fetal anomalies, rape or incest. Sen. Carol Alvarado, the Democratic lawmaker who co-authored the bill, said that its limits were a “real hard pill to swallow” but that it could still make a difference. “I believe this bill will save lives,” she said.

ProPublica’s reporting showed how doctors in states that ban abortion have waited to intervene in cases where women ultimately died of high-risk complications.

To address that problem, Senate Bill 31 states that a life-threatening medical emergency doesn’t need to be “imminent.” It also says doctors can terminate ectopic pregnancies, which occur when the fertilized egg implants outside of the uterine cavity. It would allow for a pregnant patient to receive cancer treatment, Hughes said, even if doing so threatened the viability of a fetus.

The bill also clarifies that medical staff or hospital officials can discuss termination with patients without violating a provision of the law that criminalizes “aiding and abetting” an abortion. It had been unclear to doctors whether simply discussing the option could lead to steep criminal penalties; patients have reported not being able to get straight answers from their providers about their prognosis and options for treatment.

It remains to be seen how the bill, if made law, would be interpreted by doctors and hospitals, and whether risk-averse institutions would still delay care during pregnancy complications.

Many reproductive rights advocates are skeptical given that the bill does not explicitly address many high-risk pregnancy complications. The most common one in the second trimester, previable premature rupture of membranes, or PPROM, occurs when someone’s water breaks early. In these cases, the chance of the fetus surviving is low, but delaying a pregnancy termination leaves the patient at risk of infection, which can lead to sepsis, a potentially deadly condition. Since the state banned abortion, lawyers at many hospitals across Texas have advised physicians not to empty the uterus until they can document signs of infection — an indication of a life-threatening emergency.

The death of Josseli Barnica, which ProPublica reported last year, reveals the dangers of forcing miscarrying patients to wait for care. Diagnosed with an “inevitable” miscarriage at 17 weeks, she showed symptoms similar to PPROM without an official diagnosis — her water had not yet broken. While stable, she was made to wait 40 hours until the fetal heartbeat ended before doctors induced delivery. She later died of sepsis, which medical experts say she likely developed because of the wait.

In addition to documenting cases in which women died of sepsis, ProPublica has shown how rates of the potentially deadly complication spiked by more than 50% statewide in second-trimester pregnancy-loss hospitalizations after Texas banned abortion.

Officials with the Texas Medical Association, the Texas Hospital Association and major anti-abortion groups — Texas Right to Life, Texas Alliance for Life and the American Association of Pro-Life OB-GYNs — told ProPublica they believed that this bill would now allow doctors to offer a termination at the point of a PPROM diagnosis, before infection set in.

Dr. Zeke Silva, chair of the Texas Medical Association’s Council on Legislation, included PPROM on a list of potentially life-threatening conditions he believed may fall under the bill’s clarified exception. The list, which is not exhaustive, includes preeclampsia, renal failure, liver failure, cardiac disease, pulmonary hypertension and neurological conditions. He added that decisions to intervene because a medical condition could be life-threatening “are, by definition, subjective, based on multiple clinical considerations” and must be based on “sound medical judgment.”

However, ProPublica spoke with six legal experts who said they were unsure whether hospitals, wary of litigation or penalties, would interpret the bill to mean that doctors can offer a termination to patients with PPROM.

Some PPROM patients can remain pregnant for weeks and not develop infections, while others can contract an infection and deteriorate very quickly, noted Molly Duane, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights. “I could see some doctors saying this means, ‘I have more leeway to intervene in all PPROM cases,’ and others saying, ‘I still don’t know, so I’ll wait until signs of infection.’”

The largest association of OB-GYNs, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said in an emailed statement that it did not support the bill: “This bill would keep Texas’ abortion ban in place and we strongly oppose the abortion ban and will continue to do so.”

Yesterday, the Texas Senate also passed Bill 2880, which would authorize civil lawsuits against anyone in or outside of Texas who distributes or provides abortion medication to someone in the state. It is expected to face pushback in the state House.

The Life of the Mother Act now goes to the House, where it must be voted out of committee before it heads to the House floor. Both chambers would need to agree on a final version before the governor could sign it into law.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Cassandra Jaramillo and Lizzie Presser.

The Trump administration just dismissed all 400 experts working on America’s official climate report

Joseph Winters — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 00:05:12 +0000

Every several years for the past 25 years, the federal government has published a comprehensive look at the way climate change is affecting the country. States, local governments, businesses, farmers, and many others use this National Climate Assessment to prepare for rising temperatures, more bouts of extreme weather, and worsening disasters such as wildfires.

On Monday, however, the Trump administration told all of the more than 400 volunteer scientists and experts working on the next assessment that it was releasing them from their roles. A brief memo said the scope of the report was being “reevaluated” within the context of the Congressional legislation that mandates it.

The move throws the National Climate Assessment, whose sixth iteration is supposed to be released in late 2027 or early 2028, into even deeper uncertainty. Earlier this month, the Trump administration canceled funding for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the White House office that produces the report and helps coordinate research across more than a dozen federal agencies.

Rachel Cleetus, a senior policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, was among the authors who were dismissed on Monday. She and her colleagues had just submitted a draft outline for a chapter about coastlines, with information on how sea level rise could affect communities and urban infrastructure.

“It was an honor and I was looking forward to contributing,” Cleetus said. “This is the kind of actionable science that people need to help prepare for climate change and address the challenges that climate change is already bringing our way.”

Cleetus said it was “irresponsible” that the administration would dismiss hundreds of experts working on the assessment, seemingly without a plan for creating an alternative. Although the memo says participants may still have “opportunities to contribute or engage,” it doesn’t elaborate and the White House did not respond to a list of questions from Grist.

The Trump administration is required by the Global Change Research Act of 1990 to, among other things, commission a scientific report every four years on “global change, both human-induced and natural.” The report is supposed to cover the latest science on a wide range of climate and environmental trends and how they might affect agriculture, energy production, human health, and other areas for the next 25 to 100 years.

Since 2000, this report has taken the form of the National Climate Assessment. The last one, released in 2023, broke down climate impacts by topic and geography, with individual chapters on the Northeast, Midwest, Southwest, and so on. It also laid out the state of the science on mitigating and adapting to climate change, including examples of what many cities and states are already doing. The fourth assessment was published in 2018, during Trump’s first term in the White House.

Smoke billows from the Airport Fire in Rancho Santa Margarita, California, in September 2024. Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images

All of the science that informs the national assessments must be peer-reviewed, and the reports themselves don’t endorse specific policies. “They’re not telling anyone what to do,” said Melissa Finucane, the Union of Concerned Scientists’ vice president of science and innovation and an author of the fifth assessment. “They’re just providing information on how to best address problems with effective solutions.”

What’s next for the National Climate Assessment is unclear. Legally, only Congress can scrap it altogether, but experts say the Trump administration could decide to publish a dramatically scaled-back version or use it as a tool for misinformation — by, for instance, downplaying the link between global warming and the use of fossil fuels.

“One might be concerned that the administration will replace it with something much less robust, replacing it potentially with junk science,” Finucane said.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a list of policy recommendations that the Trump administration seems to have drawn from during its first 100 days, only mentions the National Climate Assessment in a short section about the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Russell Vought, now director of the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget, recommended that the program be scaled back to a limited advisory role. He wrote that the program typified “climate fanaticism” and “the woke agenda.”

Another possibility is that the experts involved in the assessment will continue their work, even without federal support. That’s what happened earlier this year with what was supposed to be the country’s first National Nature Assessment. When the Trump administration canceled work on it in February, its authors vowed to carry on and publish their results anyway.

Finucane said the Nature Assessment had been farther along than the sixth climate report, and that it wouldn’t be possible for a small group of volunteers to take on the massive amount of work and coordination required to put together the sixth assessment “I absolutely hope that the work that has been done can continue in some way, but we have to have our eyes wide open,” Finucane said.

Dave White, director of the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation at Arizona State University, said there are some international and state-level climate reports that could fill in the gaps left by a scaled-back or canceled National Climate Assessment. The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for example, synthesizes climate science on a global level every few years (although the Trump administration recently blocked federal scientists from participating in it).

“I’m disappointed, upset, frustrated on behalf of not only myself and my colleagues, but also on behalf of the American communities that benefit from the knowledge and tools developed by the assessment,” White said. “Those will be taken away from American communities now.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Trump administration just dismissed all 400 experts working on America’s official climate report on Apr 29, 2025.

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

Brazil: Experts Alarmed by Landgrabbers and Settlers as Uncontacted Man Emerges from the Forest

Survival International — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 15:22:26 +0000

An uncontacted man from the Mamoriá Grande area of Brazil who appeared at a settlement in an extractivist reserve in February 2025. © Anon

Experts working in the area where an uncontacted Indigenous man appeared last week say it reveals the acute pressures from landgrabbers and the extraction of forest produce in that part of Brazil’s Amazon.

The young man, from a group known as “Uncontacted people of Mamoriá Grande,” emerged last week at a settlement occupied by locals harvesting Brazil nuts and other forest produce in the southern part of Amazonas state. He returned to the forest the following day.

Brazil’s Indigenous Affairs Agency FUNAI finally issued a Land Protection Order (a temporary protection) over the area last December, decades after local Indigenous people reported the group’s presence. The area is, however, still not officially demarcated (mapped out and protected), and some local politicians are challenging the Order.

There is mounting pressure on the forest from illegal hunting, fishing and land grabbers in the region.

Video of an uncontacted man in the Mamoriá Grande area of Brazil has circulated widely online.

Zé Bajaga Apurinã, the Coordinator of local Indigenous organization FOCIMP (Federação das Organizações das Comunidades do Médio Rio Purus) says: “We’ve been asking for that territory to be protected for a long time. They did the temporary protection, but that doesn’t solve it. What really solves it is demarcation. Those people have nowhere else to go. People are invading, taking the wealth that’s inside the land, cutting down wood, fishing, hunting, everything in there. And they’re suffocating, they’re under threat. We need to set up a health cordon immediately and demarcate the land urgently.”

Public prosecutor Daniel Luis Dalberto works on uncontacted peoples’ issues. He was in the area last week and told Brazilian news site A Publica: “I have seen with my own eyes the risks [to] which these peoples are subjected. The risk of genocide or extermination is very high.”

Carlos Travassos is the former head of FUNAI’s uncontacted and recently-contacted peoples unit, and was also previously chief of the FUNAI base in the area. He told A Publica: “[Some parts of this region] are not legally protected and have been the target of land speculation, such as land grabbing. Funai’s Land Protection Order was very important. This is the end of the ‘arc of deforestation’, the most deforested region of the Amazon. It’s a region with a lot of land pressure.”

Survival previously publicized the vulnerable nature of the territory and the people in it, which until recently lacked even the most basic protection.

Survival International Director Caroline Pearce said today: “This alarming development shows how vital it is that this territory, like all uncontacted Indigenous peoples’ territories, is properly demarcated and protected as a matter of urgency. The government has taken years just to issue a temporary Land Protection Order, but the Indigenous people’s presence in this area has been known for decades, and land grabbing is now rampant.”

Note: Survival Brasil’s researcher Priscilla Oliveira was in the area with FUNAI shortly before the young man appeared, and is available to interview.

The post Brazil: Experts Alarmed by Landgrabbers and Settlers as Uncontacted Man Emerges from the Forest first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

Brazil: Experts Alarmed by Landgrabbers and Settlers as Uncontacted Man Emerges from the Forest

Survival International — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 15:22:26 +0000

An uncontacted man from the Mamoriá Grande area of Brazil who appeared at a settlement in an extractivist reserve in February 2025. © Anon

There is mounting pressure on the forest from illegal hunting, fishing and land grabbers in the region.

Video of an uncontacted man in the Mamoriá Grande area of Brazil has circulated widely online.

Survival previously publicized the vulnerable nature of the territory and the people in it, which until recently lacked even the most basic protection.

Note: Survival Brasil’s researcher Priscilla Oliveira was in the area with FUNAI shortly before the young man appeared, and is available to interview.

The post Brazil: Experts Alarmed by Landgrabbers and Settlers as Uncontacted Man Emerges from the Forest first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

Nuclear Experts React To Chernobyl Damage By Russian Drone Strike

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 16:26:22 +0000

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Nuclear Experts React To Chernobyl Damage By Russian Drone Strike

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 16:26:22 +0000

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

China’s special-purpose barges could overrun Taiwan shores: experts

Alan Lu for RFA — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 04:27:53 +0000

TAIPEI, Taiwan – China’s construction of “special-purpose barges” has raised concerns about its plans to invade Taiwan, with analysts warning that the vessels could enable Beijing’s rapid troop deployment onto Taiwanese soil, addressing challenges posed by the self-ruled island’s often rough, difficult-to-navigate waters.

At least five of the huge barges have been spotted under construction at Guangzhou Shipyard International, or GSI, on China’s Longxue Island, a facility known for producing unconventional vessels, according to the Naval News defense and technology publication.

A barge is a long flat-bottomed boat for carrying freight on canals and rivers, either under its own power or towed by another.

“I would interpret these barges as another signal that Xi Jinping and the CCP are indeed serious about annexing Taiwan and that the use of force to do so very much remains on the table,” Michael Hunzeker, associate director of the Center for Security Policy Studies at George Mason University, told Radio Free Asia, referring to the Chinese Communist Party.

The barges feature unusually long road bridges – spanning more than 120 meters (393 feet) – that extend from their bows, Naval News reported.

This design allows them to reach coastal roads or hard surfaces beyond beaches, enabling efficient offloading of trucks and tanks from ships.

Some barges are equipped with “jack-up” pillars, which can be lowered to provide a stable platform in adverse weather.

Chieh Chung, a research fellow at the Association of Strategic Foresight in Taiwan, told RFA that China had spent more than 20 years enhancing its capability of “pier-free unloading.”

“China intends to develop a comprehensive set of technologies that allow forces to quickly unload onto Taiwanese soil, whether at heavily damaged ports or standard beachheads,” he said.

Chieh said that previously, China’s pier-free unloading, primarily featuring floating bridges and artificial piers, had faced problems in exercises since its operations are heavily restricted in rough seas.

“The waters around Taiwan are often rough and difficult to navigate,” he said.

“However, the ships being constructed in Guangzhou are flat-bottomed, which allows them to operate closer to shore. Additionally, the road bridges are supported by pillars, which help mitigate issues caused by rough sea conditions,” he said.

Beijing regards Taiwan as its territory and has never ruled out the use of force to take it.

Moving heavy equipment quickly

Naval News said that it was possible though unlikely that the barges were being built for civilian or commercial purposes.

“The construction of so many, much larger than similar civilian vessels seen before, makes this implausible,” it said.

“These vessels are only suited to moving large amounts of heavy equipment ashore in a short period of time. They appear greatly over-spec for civilian uses,” the publication reported.

The Association of Strategic Foresight’s Chieh said China has been practicing a concept of “military-civil fusion” meaning they would be used by the military if needed.

“You can see in their recent exercises that they’ve mobilized roll-on/roll-off cargo ships, which are commercial vessels only during peacetime. So regardless of whether these ships were ordered by the military, they will inevitably be requisitioned for military use in times of war,” he said.

“Through civil-military fusion, China primarily aims to address the military’s limited capacity for transporting large amounts of cargo in a single operation, so it mobilizes a significant number of civilian maritime vessels to increase tonnage,” Chieh explained.

Hunzeker said Taiwan should not underestimate China’s ability to employ its military and civilian assets as part of a broader coercive strategy that includes so-called gray-zone tactics to achieve its objectives without triggering open conflict.

Taiwan gets first batch of ‘world’s most advanced’ tanks from US

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But such tactics were not the most critical threat facing Taiwan.

“The CCP cannot realize its overarching objective like achieving political control over Taiwan via gray zone provocations alone,” he said. “Thus, Taipei and Washington need to prioritize the real threat: a large-scale military attack on Taiwan.”

Chieh also noted the barges did not signal an imminent invasion.

In the event of an invasion, the barges would only be deployed after the People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, was able to successfully land and secure a beachhead, he said.

“Deploying civilian ships depends largely on the success of the PLA’s successful landing,” he said, meaning Taiwan’s key focus would be on repelling an initial assault.

Hunzeker shares a similar view.

“I would not interpret these barges as a signal that an invasion is imminent, if for no other reason than the fact that five barges will neither fundamentally change the military balance nor give the PLA a decisive military advantage,” Hunzeker said.

The U.S. Department of Defense maintains that China lacks sufficient amphibious shipping to invade the island of 23 million people, he added.

Edited by Taejun Kang.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Alan Lu for RFA.

Billy Long, Trump’s Nominee to Lead the IRS, Touts a Credential That Tax Experts Say Is Dubious

by Jeremy Kohler and Alex Mierjeski — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 17:30:00 +0000

by Jeremy Kohler and Alex Mierjeski

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

Former U.S. Rep. Billy Long of Missouri, whom President-elect Donald Trump has named his nominee to head the IRS, touts his expertise in tax matters.

He advertises his credential as a certified tax and business advisor, and he adds CTBA to his name on his X profile. That profile encourages people to message him to “save 40% on your taxes.”

Long identifies himself as a certified tax and business advisor, a designation created by a small firm that only requires attendance at a three-day seminar. (X)

But tax experts told ProPublica that they have never heard of CTBA as a credential in the tax profession. The designation is offered by a small Florida firm, Excel Empire, which was established just two years ago and only requires attendance at a three-day seminar. That is in stark contrast to the 150 credit hours and the rigorous exams required to become a certified public accountant, a standard certification for tax accountants.

In most tax cases, only lawyers, CPAs and enrolled agents — federally authorized tax practitioners — can represent taxpayers at the IRS.

“The cost of relying on tax advice from somebody that is solely focused on minimizing the tax liabilities that you have — as opposed to somebody that’s focused on both minimizing the tax liabilities and complying with the tax law — can be extraordinarily high if you are found to be in violation of the standards,” said Nathan Goldman, an associate professor of accounting at North Carolina State University.

Excel Empire’s three-day certification course has been advertised for as much as $30,000; its upcoming session is advertised at $4,997. Matthew Pearson, one of its founders, said this summer in a podcast that about 135 people have earned the CTBA designation, which the firm designed to help people without tax backgrounds to become advisors.

Nina Olson, a prominent taxpayer advocate, said that the modern tax industry has seen “a proliferation of different groups and entities that are providing tax advice” and that consumers have no way of knowing who is competent.

“It could just be that you’ve taken a very short course, and paid a large fee for that course, and that gives you the ability to put some initials after your name,” said Olson, who served as the IRS’ national taxpayer advocate from 2001 to 2019. She is now executive director of the Center for Taxpayer Rights, a Washington-based nonprofit that promotes fairness and access to justice in tax systems.

Tax experts said that Long’s years of experience as a real estate agent and as an auctioneer — before spending a dozen years in Congress — pales next to the deep experience in tax policy or management of the people who have held the job. For instance, the current IRS commissioner, Danny Werfel, previously served as acting IRS commissioner and held leadership roles at the Office of Management and Budget. He also worked in the private sector as a managing director at Boston Consulting Group.

Long’s experience in the tax world has been more narrowly focused. In the two years since he left Congress, he worked to bring in customers for at least two firms that marketed the employee retention credit — a pandemic-era benefit designed to support businesses that kept workers despite revenue losses or disruptions caused by COVID-19.

The credit also attracted fraud, eventually landing on the IRS’ “worst of the worst” list for tax scams. Two Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday announced an investigation into the firms, noting Long had neither a “background in tax preparation nor any credential as a licensed accountant, attorney or enrolled agent.”

Worth up to $28,000 per employee, the credit was available for the 2020 and 2021 tax years and has been widely used by both for-profit companies and nonprofit organizations across the country. However, the IRS raised significant concerns about aggressive promoters pushing ineligible businesses to file questionable claims. Red flags included inflated payroll numbers, claims for all quarters without proper eligibility or citing minor government orders that did not directly impact business operations.

The IRS says it has recovered over $1 billion from businesses that voluntarily reported improper claims. And it has launched hundreds of criminal investigations to try to recoup what it says could be billions of dollars more.

In a prepared statement in November, Werfel said businesses should review their claims and see if they were misled by firms marketing the tax credit.

“They should listen to trusted tax professionals, not promoters,” he said.

In a 2023 podcast discussing his work for the two firms, Long joked that he had a hat bearing the name of the credit glued to his head. He said his work marketing the tax credit had caused some clients to question their CPAs’ advice.

“Hey, this auctioneer, real estate broker, former congressman told me I’m going to get $1.2 million back,” he said. “Uh, you’re my CPA. Why didn’t you tell me that?” And he said the response of CPAs would be: “That’s a joke. That’s a fake deal. That’s not true. You’re going to have to pay all that money back. You’ll get audited.”

But he said the firms he worked for had never seen the IRS turn down one of their claims.

There is no evidence that either Excel Empire, Long or the firms that he worked for — Lifetime Advisors of Hudson, Wisconsin, and Commerce Terrace Consulting of Springfield, Missouri — engaged in wrongdoing. In the same 2023 podcast, Long emphasized he and his colleagues had helped only taxpayers who were entitled to the benefit.

Neither Long, Lifetime Advisors nor Commerce Terrace Consulting responded to requests for comment.

If Long is confirmed and succeeds Werfel, he’ll have the power to influence how Americans pay their taxes and how the federal government collects revenue. Trump has promised to end IRS “overstepping,” while Republicans have said that they would slash billions of dollars in funding passed under the Biden administration to modernize the IRS and enhance tax enforcement.

The IRS and the Trump transition team did not respond to requests for comment.

During his time representing Southwest Missouri in Congress, Long pursued legislation to abolish the IRS and establish a national sales tax. Billionaire Elon Musk, a Trump advisor, recently asked on X if the agency’s budget should be “deleted.”

Like Long, members of Excel Empire suggest that accountants don’t feel it is their role to save their clients money because they prioritize compliance over planning and are too busy during tax season to discuss strategies. The company’s website claims the firm has saved taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

Edward Lyon, who is listed on Excel Empire’s website as chief tax planner and tax attorney, writes on his personal website that the seven most expensive words in the English language are “My CPA takes care of my taxes.”

Lyon elaborated on a podcast last year, noting that accountants “generally are rule followers,” but when it comes to lawyers, “we are trained to understand the rules but we’re trained to stretch the rules and bend the rules and poke at the rules and do an end run around the rules. It's a much more proactive focus.” Still, he has consistently emphasized that his company acts “legally, ethically and morally.”

On its website, Excel Empire claims that certified public accountants are not focused on saving their clients money and says their advisers are better equipped to identify tax breaks. (Excel Empire)

The company’s co-founder, Pearson, once described Lyon on a podcast as the “preeminent proactive tax attorney in the country.” Lyon and Pearson declined to comment.

The Ohio Supreme Court suspended Lyon’s law license in 2005 for failing to meet registration and fee requirements on time, and he hasn’t regained it. He also does not appear to be registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission as an investment advisor.

Despite this, Lyon says he has trained tens of thousands of tax and finance professionals. As the author of several books and a column, he claims to be one of the country’s most widely read tax strategists and commands speaking fees of $15,000 and first-class travel arrangements.

Lyon has also developed several tax certification programs. On the Excel Empire website, some officers, including Pearson, use a title created by Lyon: tax master.

Appearing on another podcast, Lyon discussed how small businesses can be used as tax shelters. As an example, he asked the host, Heather Wagenhals — who also carries the CTBA title — if she had a swimming pool at her home, where she records her show.

“I do,” Wagenhals said. “That’s why I picked this one.”

Lyon responded: “All right, so I’m gonna rock your world in five words, ready? On-premises employee athletic facility.”

“Oh my God!” Wagenhals said.

Lyon added: “It’s really there in the tax code, and nobody’s told you that.”

In another podcast, Pearson brags about firing an accountant who balked at his request for advice about how to use a new Corvette “to keep from paying taxes.”

Olson said that attitude was disturbing and that simplistic answers can create problems for taxpayers in IRS audits and in the courts. “A swimming pool in someone’s home, even if employees are working in the home and using it, still would require the court to look at the percentage of employee use versus personal use — and they would look really closely at that,” she said.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jeremy Kohler and Alex Mierjeski.

Election Security Experts: Harris Must Call for Recounts

Andrea Chalupa — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 23:48:00 +0000

Civil litigation in Georgia revealed that operatives hired by allies of Donald Trump illegally accessed and copied critical election software following the 2020 election. This wasn't just an isolated incident but a multi-state effort that spread to places like Pennsylvania, Colorado, and beyond. The stolen software, which is responsible for recording and counting votes, was shared across states, compromising election systems in key swing states.

Despite the severity of these actions, which posed significant threats to the integrity of future elections, federal authorities—specifically the DOJ and FBI—failed to act. Even after being alerted about these breaches for years, both agencies took no meaningful steps to investigate or halt the illicit activity. This inaction mirrors their failure to prevent the events of January 6, 2021, raising serious concerns about their commitment to protecting the electoral process and our very democracy.

Election security experts, including Susan Greenhalgh from Free Speech for People, have been sounding the alarm for years, urging the government to take action. They argue that this breach, coupled with the failure of federal authorities to intervene, poses a real threat to the future of U.S. democracy. Without accountability and a thorough investigation into the stolen software, it’s impossible to ensure the integrity of upcoming elections. The lack of response from federal agencies raises questions about their willingness to protect election systems from both internal and external threats.

This breach should not be ignored. It’s time for a full investigation and immediate action to safeguard our elections. Greenhalgh joins Gaslit Nation in this urgent interview, before a live-audience of listeners, to discuss a skeptic's guide to why Vice President Kamala Harris must call for a recount in key states in the 2024 election, before it's too late.

To amplify this urgent call-to-action:

SHARE THIS SOCIAL MEDIA POST: Listen to @gaslitnation’s urgent interview w/Susan Greenhalgh of Free Speech for People. They warned Congress, FBI, DOJ for years about election system breaches by MAGA as part of the Big Lie. Join their call for Harris to demand a recount https://gaslitnation.libsyn.com/election-security-experts-harris-must-call-for-recounts
CONTACT YOUR REPS IN CONGRESS AND ALSO AOC, BECAUSE SHE IS A FIGHTER: Listen to @gaslitnation’s urgent interview with Susan Greenhalgh of Free Speech for People. They warned members of Congress, the FBI, and the DOJ for years about election system breaches by MAGA as part of their Big Lie efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Given the confirmed facts, many documented in court cases, that they stole and distributed election data used to count our votes, our elections are vulnerable and may easily be compromised by threats foreign and domestic. Join their call for Harris to demand a recount and publicly call for investigations by the FBI and DOJ: https://gaslitnation.libsyn.com/election-security-experts-harris-must-call-for-recounts
SHARE THIS INTERVIEW ON SOCIAL MEDIA WITH JOURNALISTS YOU TRUST: Listen to @gaslitnation’s urgent interview w/Susan Greenhalgh of Free Speech for People. They warned Congress, FBI, DOJ for years about election system breaches by MAGA as part of the Big Lie. Join their call for Harris to demand a recount https://gaslitnation.libsyn.com/election-security-experts-harris-must-call-for-recounts

Show Notes:

The Georgia Voting Machine Theft Poses a Direct Threat to the 2024 Election https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/10/georgia-trump-vote-theft-2024-election.html

Computer Scientists: Breaches of Voting System Software Warrant Recounts to Ensure Election Verification https://freespeechforpeople.org/computer-scientists-breaches-of-voting-system-software-warrant-recounts-to-ensure-election-verification/

Merrick Garland Lets MAGA Steal the Election https://sites.libsyn.com/124622/merrick-garland-lets-maga-steal-the-election-teaser

MAGA Openly Tries to Steal Georgia https://gaslitnation.libsyn.com/brian-kemp-is-a-klansman

Want to enjoy Gaslit Nation ad-free? Join our community of listeners for bonus shows, ad-free episodes, exclusive Q&A sessions, our group chat, invites to live events, and more! Sign up at Patreon.com/Gaslit!

This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation and was authored by Andrea Chalupa.

Ukrainian Experts React To Biden Allowing Kyiv To Strike Inside Russia With U.S. Weapons

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 11:40:37 +0000

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Security experts: NATO-type Southeast Asian defense alliance not feasible at present

Jason Gutierrez for BenarNews — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 03:53:22 +0000

MANILA - A Southeast Asian defense alliance modeled after NATO and aimed at countering China may not be set up any time soon because the region’s nations would want to maintain good relations with the superpower, regional security analysts said.

The creation of more minilateral agreements, though, rather than multilateral ones like the 32-member North Atlantic Treaty Organization, are not only likely but may be more effective, they added.

A minilateral agreement is an accord between a small group of nations that have come together to achieve mutual goals or tackle shared problems, according to international relations experts.

For instance, a good example is a minilateral agreement renewed last year by the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia for joint patrols on their seas, said geopolitics expert Don McLain Gill.

“The most we can expect [in the form of a defense alliance] for now is an area- specific and time-dependent security cooperation between particular states in the region in a way that would also reflect individual varying sensitivities,” he told RFA affiliate BenarNews.

Another lecturer from the university concurred.

“I think that [creating] minilaterals is more plausible,” political science lecturer Sherwin Ona told BenarNews.

“I also think that armed enforcement has its limitations and has a tendency for escalation.”

Established in 1949, NATO commits its 32-member countries to each other’s defense in the event any are attacked. Aside from the United States, other NATO members include the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, France, and Canada.

(From left) U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin; U.S. State Secretary Antony Blinken; Philippine Foreign Secretary Enrique Manalo and Philippine Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. pose for the cameras after holding a meeting in Manila, July 30, 2024.

Conversation about a regional NATO, Asian or Southeast Asian, revived after now-Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba wrote a paper late September for think-tank Hudson Institute about his proposal for such a defense alliance.

“[T]he absence of a collective self-defense system like NATO in Asia means that wars are likely to break out because there is no obligation for mutual defense,” Ichiba wrote late September.

“Under these circumstances, the creation of an Asian version of NATO is essential to deter China by its Western allies,” added the then-candidate for prime minister added.

The proposal was rejected by the United States and India said it doesn’t share Ishiba’s vision.

Similar ideas have irritated Beijing, which sees itself as the main focus of these proposals, in the same way that Moscow has accused NATO of concentrating its defense efforts against Russia.

U.S. troops leave a hill on a beach in Laoag city, northern Philippines, during U.S.-Philippine exercises, May 6, 2024.

In Southeast Asia specifically as well, the idea of a NATO-like grouping has been talked about in response to some countries claiming harassment by Beijing’s vessels in the South China Sea, where they have overlapping claims.

Beijing claims most of the South China Sea, but its claims overlap those of Taiwan, which isn’t a member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam, all of which are.

Philippine Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. trod carefully when asked on Tuesday about a grouping similar to NATO consisting of the 10 members of ASEAN.

“I don’t think it is possible at this time because of the dichotomies and divergence between country interests,” Teodoro answered at the venue of a private conference in Manila.

Still, he acknowledged the need to boost multilateral security alliances.

Teodoro noted that Manila has a bilateral defense alliance with Washington since 1951, even before it became one of the Southeast Asian countries to set up the ASEAN in 1967.

Vietnam, Philippines to sign defense cooperation agreement

US election: Trump II to affect trade, security in SE Asia, experts say

Sherwin Ona, a political science lecturer at Manila’s De La Salle University, told BenarNews that ASEAN nations would stick to the bloc’s “non-interference policy.”

Besides, some Southeast Asian countries are very pro-Beijing because their economies are heavily dependent on China, indicated Ona.

“I agree [with Teodoro] about the beneficial relationship between countries that are pro-Beijing.”

Another reason Southeast Asian countries may be cool to the idea of an “Asian NATO” is because they have different security interests, noted a researcher at the New Delhi-based think-tank Observer Research Foundation.

“This is because most countries are convinced that a multilateral security architecture will only elevate regional insecurities, and make them subservient to great power contestations,” Abhishek Sharma wrote in the Deccan Herald.

‘Loose, flexible’ minilaterals

Minilaterals are “loose and flexible,” believes Gill.

“This is not NATO’s established collective security structure,” he said.

Minilaterals are “only as good as they last.”

Gill explained that if one country in a three-nation minilateral agreement felt it did not any longer share the same interest with the other two, “it can walk out anytime.”

Geopolitical analyst Julio Amador III believes a network of “minilateral ties” might be able to offset this shortcoming and would be more effective.

Additionally, he said there was a way ASEAN as a bloc could become “a formidable diplomatic counterweight.”

If the group’s members, particularly those that drift towards China, agree that there are some issues “that go beyond national interests, that there are issues that do matter to the collective interests of the group,” ASEAN could be powerful, Amador said.

However, De La Salle University’s Gill said that the character of Southeast Asian cooperation tended to be based mostly on mutual interest.

“An ASEAN version of NATO is unlikely going to happen given the nature of ASEAN,” he said.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Jason Gutierrez for BenarNews.

US election: Trump II to affect trade, security in SE Asia, experts say

Shailaja Neelakantan for BenarNews — Fri, 08 Nov 2024 18:36:31 +0000

Donald Trump’s return to the White House may cause trade to slow down in Southeast Asia and raise regional tensions amid an expected worsening of Washington-Beijing ties, analysts said.

The Philippines stands to lose the most, potentially, if the United States, under the president-elect’s expected inward turn, reduces or questions the current deep bilateral ties as increasingly dangerous Manila-Beijing standoffs play out in the South China Sea, security experts noted.

Southeast Asian countries that claim not to take sides in the superpower rivalry would now need to perform a diplomatic dance to exhibit their neutrality, especially because three of them recently joined BRICS, the economic grouping spearheaded by Washington rivals Beijing and Moscow.

Unlike the current Democratic administration’s more measured approach to mitigating China’s oversized influence in Southeast Asia, a Republican government under Trump may not fancy such a strategy if it sees itself as being slighted, analysts said.

Then-U.S. President Donald Trump (back row, 2nd from R) attends a photo session with Russian President Vladimir Putin (back row, 2nd from L), Chinese President Xi Jinping (front row, L), and other Asian leaders at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit in Danang, Vietnam, Nov. 11, 2017.

Still, the biggest impact of a second Trump administration on Southeast Asia will be trade-related because the election-winner has made no secret of his economic nationalism, said Ahmad Mohsein Azman, an analyst at the Malaysia office of BowerGroup Asia, a political risk consultancy.

Ahmad forecast “a general slowdown in trade with the U.S.,” with Trump’s return as president.

“A recurring theme from Trump’s political campaign is the emphasis on localizing the U.S. economy through the ‘America First’ platform,” Ahmad told BenarNews.

“This includes the enactment of industry and trade policies to encourage the return of key industries and job opportunities to American soil. New import tariffs would also be introduced.”

‘Tariff Man’

Trump said during his campaign to return to the White House that he planned to tax all imports by 10-20%, except goods from China that would get a special 60% tariff — all in an effort to spur U.S. manufacturing.

Over the past months he has called tariffs the “the greatest thing ever invented,” “the most beautiful word in the dictionary,” and his “favorite word.” And he has called himself “Tariff Man.”

U.S. import tariffs will accelerate the shift to a more contested and chaotic world, said Ben Bland, director Asia-Pacific at Chatham House, a London-based international affairs think tank.

“We know that, in foreign policy, Trump likes trade wars, is not keen on real wars, and has a zero-sum worldview,” Bland said in a short analysis on X (formerly Twitter).

“[T]rump’s deep protectionist instincts, and the possible turbulence in U.S.-China relations, could make life difficult for many states in Asia.”

An ‘inward-looking approach’

With Southeast Asia being the site of one of the world’s top geopolitical theaters due to the contested South China Sea, a potentially heated U.S. trade war with China could also be a regional security risk, analysts said.

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris tours a Philippine Coast Guard ship docked in Puerto Princesa, the Philippines , Nov. 22, 2022.

Syed Hamid Albar, a former Malaysian foreign minister, said the incoming American president would likely “adopt an inward-looking approach,” focused on Washington’s interests to the exclusion of all else.

“Any actions by other countries that he perceives as against U.S. national interests would likely prompt retaliation,” Albar told BenarNews.

An Indonesian international affairs expert, Poltak Partogi Nainggolan, concurred, adding that Washington’s traditionally multilateral approach would weaken under Trump, likely destabilizing key regions.

“In the Asia-Pacific, particularly in the South China Sea, tensions would likely rise due to Trump’s inward-focused policies,” the expert from Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) told BenarNews.

This isolationist approach is what may be of concern to the Philippines, according to Susannah Patton, director of the Southeast Asia Program at The Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank.

“The Philippines, which has staked the most on the U.S. alliance under the [current Joe] Biden administration, has the most to lose,” Patton said.

“A failure to back up Manila if it is tested further by Beijing in the South China Sea would put great pressure on the alliance,” she said as part of a collection of opinions from the institute’s experts published online.

Beijing claims most of the South China Sea, but its claims overlap those of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam, all members of ASEAN, as well as Taiwan.

The countries with overlapping claims often allege Chinese incursions in their exclusive economic zones in the waterway.

Manila ‘nervous’

But of all the claimants, it is Philippine waters and vessels that the Chinese ships allegedly threaten the most.

The United States under Trump would continue to back the Philippines to counter China, said Derek Grossman, a senior defense analyst at Rand Corp., an American think tank.

Protesters wave Palestinian and Indonesian flags during a rally to condemn then-US President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, at Monas, the national monument, in Jakarta, Dec. 17, 2017.

If Vice President Kamala Harris had defeated Trump in the polls, then the alliance would have further expanded and deepened to counter China in the South China Sea, Grossman wrote on X.

“If Trump, then probably the same, though more questioning around [the] utility of the alliance, especially continued spending on it. That will make Manila nervous,” he added.

Trump’s ‘unpredictability’

Southeast Asian nations may also need to reassess their foreign policy strategy with a new Trump administration, diplomacy experts said.

Albar, the former Malaysian foreign minister, said he believed Trump would be easily offended so it was important to proceed with care.

“Malaysia must exercise caution in its foreign policy approach, especially regarding Israel and Palestine,” he said.

“Trump is not warm or refined.”

Additionally, Malaysia’s involvement with BRICS “will require Anwar to carefully maneuver diplomatically, which could further complicate the country’s position,” Asrul Hadi Abdullah Sani, a partner at a strategic advisory firm ADA Southeast Asia, told BenarNews.

Indonesian analyst Muradi believes that Jakarta should advocate for a “forum of medium-power nations” to address what he said would be rising tensions under another Trump presidency.

“Without such an initiative, we risk being drawn into the U.S.-China rivalry. Our recent entry into BRICS already places us between these superpowers,” he said.

A study of Trump’s personality would help a great deal and Thailand should do that, said Dulyapak Preecharush, a Southeast Asia expert from Thammasat University in Bangkok.

“[T]he team must understand [his] analytical principles and his psychology towards various stances,” Dulyapak told BenarNews.

“Trump’s special characteristic is his unpredictability.”

Muzliza Mustafa, Minderjeet Kaur and Iman Muttaqin Yusof in Kuala Lumpur; Pizaro Gozali Idris in Jakarta; and Nontarat Phaicharoen and Ruj Chuenban in Bangkok contributed to this article.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Shailaja Neelakantan for BenarNews.

ICBM test ‘proves’ North Korea’s missile tech helped by Russia alliance, experts say

Eugene Whong for RFA — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 19:38:04 +0000

Thursday‘s record-long ICBM test indicated that Pyongyang’s missile program is being helped along by its closer ties to Russia, North Korea observers in the United States told Radio Free Asia.

Pyongyang fired what it called a new intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, which flew for about 87 minutes, the longest-ever flight of a North Korean ICBM, and landed in waters off northwest Japan, the South Korean and Japanese militaries said.

It was the first ICBM test since December, and the seventh in as many years.

“North Korea is getting ever more dangerous missile technology thanks to its new alliance with Russia, and I think yesterday’s test goes a long way to proving that,” Harry Kazianis, of the Washington-based Center for the National Interest thinktank, told RFA Korean.

Kazianis said it seemed like Pyongyang was gaining billions of U.S. dollars in economic aid and missile technology, or even nuclear weapons technology from Moscow.

He said that it appeared that neither Washington nor Seoul could do very much to address the threat posed by the Russia-North Korea alliance.

North Korea completes preparations for ICBM and nuclear tests: Yonhap

North Korea may conduct nuclear test after US election: South’s spy agency

“With Russia now bankrolling the Kim [Jong Un] family and China looking the other way when it comes to sanctions there is little that can be done—North Korea is in the drivers seat," said Kazianis, adding that Russia’s interest in North Korea would wane if war in Ukraine were to end.

“The longer the Ukraine war goes the more powerful Kim Jong Un’s missile will become,” he said.

South Korea, Japan and the United States condemned the test, North Korea’s latest violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions aimed at curbing its development of nuclear weapons and the missiles to carry them around the world.

ICBM test timeline

North Korea first tested an ICBM in July 2017. It would test two more that year, including one in November that traveled for 50 minutes and reached an altitude of 4,500 kilometers (2,800 miles).

Over the next five years, Pyongyang would not test any more ICBMs, but in March 2022, it launched another ICBM that blew up shortly after takeoff.

North Korea tested four more ICBMs in 2022 and 2023, and Thursday’s test was the first of 2024.

The launch came less than a week before the U.S. presidential election.

But regardless of who wins the election, Washington’s North Korea strategy will not be heavily influenced by missile tests, David Maxwell, vice president of the Washington-based Center for Asia Pacific Strategy, told RFA.

“It is doubtful that either Harris or Trump will be influenced to change policy in a way that will benefit [North Korean leader] Kim [Jong Un],” said Maxwell. “But does KJU think that Trump would serve him better? I think he would be mistaken and disappointed. I do not believe either he or Harris will provide the concessions he desires.”

Maxwell said that South Korea and the U.S. should recognize and counter Kim’s political warfare strategies and attempts to drive a wedge between them.

Reporting by Kim Soyoung for RFA Korean.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Eugene Whong for RFA.

UN experts ‘alarmed’ by Kanaky New Caledonia deaths as Pacific fact-finding mission readies

APR editor — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 08:40:29 +0000

By Stefan Armbruster of BenarNews

France has been criticised for the “alarming” death toll in New Caledonia during recent protests and its “cold shower” approach to decolonisation by experts of the UN Human Rights Committee.

The UN committee met this week in Geneva for France’s five-yearly human rights review with a focus on its Pacific territory, after peaceful protests over electoral changes turned violent leaving 13 people dead since May.

French delegates at the hearing defended the country’s actions and rejected the jurisdiction of the UN decolonisation process, saying the country “no longer has any international obligations”.

A delayed fact-finding mission of Pacific Islands Forum leaders is due to arrive in New Caledonia this weekend to assess the situation on behalf of the region’s peak regional inter-governmental body.

Almost 7000 security personnel with armoured vehicles have been deployed from France to New Caledonia to quell further unrest.

“The means used and the intensity of their response and the gravity of the violence reported, as well as the amount of dead and wounded, are particularly alarming,” said committee member Jose Santo Pais, assistant Prosecutor-General of the Portuguese Constitutional Court.

“There have been numerous allegations regarding an excessive use of force and that would have led to numerous deaths among the Kanak people and law enforcement,” the committee’s vice-chair said on Wednesday.

Months of protests
Violence erupted after months of protests over a unilateral attempt by President Emmanuel Macron to “unfreeze” the territory’s electoral roll. Indigenous Kanaks feared the move would dilute their voting power and any chance of success at another independence referendum.

Eleven Kanaks and two French police have died. The committee heard 169 people were wounded and 2658 arrested in the past five months.

New Caledonia’s economy is in ruins with hundreds of businesses destroyed, tens-of-thousands left jobless and the local government seeking 4 billion euros (US$4.33 billion) in recovery funds from France.

France’s reputation has been left battered as an out-of-touch colonial power since the deadly violence erupted.

Santos Pais questioned France’s commitment to the UN Declaration on Indigenous People and the “sufficient dialogue” required under the Nouméa Accord, a peace agreement signed in 1998 to politically empower Kanak people, that enabled the decolonisation process.

“It would seem that current violence in the territory is linked to the lack of progress in decolonisation,” said Santos Pais.

Last week, the new French Prime Minister announced controversial electoral changes that sparked the protests had been abandoned. Local elections, due to be held this year, will now take place at the end of 2025.

Pacific mission
Tomorrow, Tonga’s prime minister Hu’akavameiliku Siaosi Sovaleni will lead a Pacific “observational” mission to New Caledonia of fellow leaders from Cook Islands, Fiji and Solomon Islands Minister for Foreign Affairs, together known as the “Troika-Plus”.

The PIF leaders’ three-day visit to the capital Nouméa will see them meet with local political parties, youth and community groups, private sector and public service providers.

“Our thoughts have always been with the people of New Caledonia since the unrest earlier this year, and we continue to offer our support,” Sovaleni said in a statement on Friday.

The UN committee is a treaty body composed of 18 experts that regularly reviews compliance by 173 member states with their human rights obligations and is separate from the Human Rights Council, a political body composed of states.

Serbian committee member Tijana Surlan asked France for an update on investigations into injuries and fatalities “related to alleged excessive use of force” in New Caledonia. She asked if police firearms use would be reviewed “to strike a better balance with the principles of absolute necessity and strict proportionality.”

France’s delegation responded saying it was “committed to renewing dialogue” in New Caledonia and to striking a balance between the right to demonstrate and protecting people and property with the “principle of proportionality.”

Alleged intimidation by French authorities of at least five journalists covering the unrest in New Caledonia was highlighted by committee member Kobauyah Tchamdja Kapatcha from Togo. France responded saying it guarantees freedom of the press.

French Ambassador for Human Rights Isabelle Rome addresses the UN Human Rights Committee meeting in Geneva, pictured on 23 October 2024. Image: UNTV

France rejects ‘obligations’
The French delegation led by Ambassador for Human Rights Isabelle Rome added it “no longer administers a non-self-governing territory.”

France “no longer has any international obligations in this regard linked to its membership in the United Nations”, she told the committee on Thursday.

New Caledonia voted by modest majorities to remain part of France in referendums held in 2018 and 2020 under a UN-mandated decolonisation process. Three referendums were part of the Nouméa Accord to increase Kanaks’ political power following deadly violence in the 1980s.

A contentious final referendum in 2021 was overwhelmingly in favor of continuing with the status quo. Supporters of independence rejected its legitimacy due to a very low turnout — it was boycotted by Kanak political parties — and because it was held during a serious phase of the covid-19 pandemic, which restricted campaigning.

“France, through the referendum of September [2021], has therefore completed the process of decolonisation of its former colonies,” ambassador Rome said. She added that New Caledonia was one of the most advanced examples of the French government recognising indigenous rights, with a shared governance framework.

Another of its Pacific territories — French Polynesia — was re-inscribed on the UN decolonisation list in 2013 but France refuses to recognise its jurisdiction.

No change in policy
After a decade, France began attending General Assembly Decolonisation Committee meetings in 2023 to “promote dialogue” and that it was not a “change in [policy] direction”, Rome said.

“There is no process between the French state and the Polynesian territory that reserves a role for the United Nations,” she added.

Santos Pais responded saying, “what a cold shower”.

“The General Assembly will certainly have a completely different view from the one that was presented to us,” he said.

Earlier this month pro-independence French Polynesian President Moetai Brotherson told the UN Decolonisation Committee’s annual meeting in New York that “after a decade of silence” France must be “guided” to participate in “dialogue.”

The Human Rights Committee is due to meet again next month to adopt its findings on France.

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

Experts say a proposed revamp to the recycling symbol is still deceptive — and probably illegal

Joseph Winters — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 08:30:00 +0000

Walk into the grocery store and check the back of a container of food. Chances are, you’ll see a small box with instructions on how to dispose of the packaging when you’re finished with it: “empty & replace lid,” for example, or “recycle if clean and dry.”

These labels are made by How2Recycle, a program operated by the nonprofit GreenBlue, which sells them to more than 700 big food and consumer goods companies to put on their products. The idea behind creating them was to mitigate confusion among consumers about what to do with all the boxes, jars, jugs, and bottles that their purchases are packed in.

In recent years, however, companies have come under scrutiny for being too liberal with their use of the iconic “chasing arrows” recycling symbol: It makes plastic bags and other products seem more recyclable than they really are. Regulators have taken notice. At the national level, the Federal Trade Commission is preparing an update to its “Green Guides” for the use of sustainability labels, including the recycling symbol. And in California, state law is expected to restrict the chasing arrows for most packaging made of plastic, unless there’s evidence that the plastic is widely collected and turned into new products within the state. How2Recycle’s program, created to help clear up this mess, is coming under fire now, too

Earlier this month, GreenBlue announced it was revamping its more-than-a-decade-old How2Recycle labels. During a presentation at SPC Advance, a conference organized by one of GreenBlue’s subsidiaries, Paul Nowak, GreenBlue’s executive director, said the labels need to “evolve with the world around us,” taking into account factors like “policy” and “recycling rates.”

Based on a sample image of the new labels, however, it’s not clear whether GreenBlue’s updates will address concerns that they’re tools for so-called greenwashing, or that they comply with state law. Because there’s no evidence that some of the products set to feature the new designs are actually recycled most of the time, the labels might violate California’s rules against deceptive advertising and put GreenBlue at risk of lawsuits from state regulators and consumer advocacy organizations.

The proposed labels are “an obvious and transparent attempt by industry to circumvent California law,” said Howie Hirsch, a retired lawyer in California who has worked on several recycling-related deceptive advertising lawsuits.

Hirsch specifically objects to GreenBlue’s label for “store drop-off,” which instructs customers to deposit plastic bags in grocery store take-back bins so they can be collected for recycling. Currently, this label features the words “store drop-off” inside a triangular chasing arrows symbol — giving the inaccurate impression that this plastic is likely to be recycled. A revised version of that label, shared in Nowak’s presentation, simply changes the arrows’ path: Instead of chasing each other around a triangle, they now chase each other around a circle.

A store drop-off receptacle for plastic bags and wraps (left), and a packaging label with an older version of How2Recycle’s “store drop-off” label. Courtesy of Jan Dell

According to Hirsch, that small change isn’t enough to comply with California law. First, one section of the California Business and Professions Code says that the chasing arrows triangle is functionally equivalent to — and subject to the same truth-in-labeling restrictions as — the circular version proposed by GreenBlue. The law applies to any variant of the symbol that is “likely to be interpreted by a consumer as an implication of recyclability” — including “one or more arrows arranged in a circular pattern or around a globe.”

Another part of California’s law referring to the FTC’s Green Guides requires the corroboration of recyclability claims: Companies that label their products with the chasing arrows have to provide evidence that they are, in fact, widely collected for recycling and turned into new products within California. Plastic bag manufacturers have not provided such evidence, and they are under investigation from the California attorney general’s office after failing to do so.

The circular chasing arrows “seems to be just the kind of thing that we were hoping to push back against,” said California State Senator Ben Allen, a Democrat who sponsored a landmark bill to reign in the misleading use of the recycling symbol that became law in 2022. A separate law passed last month will phase out plastic grocery bags offered to California shoppers at checkout. But many other types of plastic bags and thin-film plastic will still be allowed.

Jan Dell, an independent chemical engineer and founder of the nonprofit The Last Beach Cleanup, would like to see How2Recycle’s store drop-off labels disappear altogether. Store drop-off is “a hoax,” she told Grist via email. “All credible data, independent experts, and many tracker studies prove that it is impossible to collect, sort, and recycle post-household consumer flexible plastic waste” on a meaningful scale.

According to an analysis Dell conducted in 2020, California only has the capacity to sort and recycle about 1 percent of its waste generated from plastic bags and film. Nationwide tracker studies from Bloomberg and ABC News — using Apple AirTags or similar devices — have shown that plastic bags deposited in store drop-off receptacles are more likely to end up in a landfill or incinerator than at a recycling facility.

Allen’s truth-in-labeling law will soon add even more specific requirements for the chasing arrows and other symbols like it. Starting 18 months after the state’s recycling agency publishes a report on the recyclability of various materials, companies will have to show that products labeled as recyclable through a non-curbside program — like at a grocery store — are collected at a rate of 60 percent or higher, and then sorted and recycled within the state. That threshold will bump up to 75 percent in 2030.

A drop-off receptacle inside a Target in Aliso Viejo, California. Courtesy of Jan Dell

Recent analyses suggest it’s unlikely that any types of plastic bags or film will meet those high standards. In 2020, the Flexible Packaging Association said the U.S. recycling rate for post-consumer film and flexible plastic packaging was just 2 percent. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for a circular economy, estimates that “near 0 percent” of flexible plastics sold to consumers around the world is recycled; what little recycling that does happen involves turning polyethylene film into “applications of lower material quality” like plastic decking and trash bags.

“As soon as flexible packaging waste is generated it is incredibly hard to deal with,” the foundation’s report says. As a first order of business, it recommends eliminating “unnecessary” plastic products.

In response to Grist’s request for comment, a spokesperson for GreenBlue said the organization is reviewing its proposal for new labels with government agencies, including the FTC and state attorneys general, “to ensure that pairing the label’s symbol with additional clarifying information would constitute a thoroughly substantiated claim.”

“If regulators deem the label not in compliance with California’s SB 343,” the spokesperson added, “How2Recycle will pursue a different label design.”

A spokesperson for the California Attorney General’s office declined to comment on the How2Recycle labels and would not confirm whether the office had spoken with GreenBlue. The FTC did not respond to Grist’s request for comment.

Allen, the California state senator, said the plastics industry’s time would be better spent redesigning products and eliminating unnecessary packaging to comply with recent laws, instead of fiddling with labels. In addition to the truth-in-labeling regulation, as of 2022, California has an extended producer responsibility law requiring companies to meet elevated recycling targets for certain types of products.

“If they’ve got a real plan to fundamentally revamp recycling in this space, then I’m interested in hearing about it,” Allen said. “But claiming recyclability or encouraging people to do something that they know they’re never going to do in a meaningful way” — like dropping off bags at a store — “it’s greenwashing and it’s a joke, and I just don’t want us to allow for it.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Experts say a proposed revamp to the recycling symbol is still deceptive — and probably illegal on Oct 23, 2024.

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

JD Vance Campaign Event With Christian Right Leaders May Have Violated Tax and Election Laws, Experts Say

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 10:00:00 +0000

by Andy Kroll, ProPublica; Phoebe Petrovic, Wisconsin Watch; and Nick Surgey, Documented

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

Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance’s appearance at a far-right Christian revival tour last month may have broken tax and election laws, experts say.

On Sept. 28, Vance held an official campaign event in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, in partnership with the Courage Tour, a series of swing-state rallies hosted by a pro-Trump Christian influencer that combine prayer, public speakers, tutorials on how to become a poll worker and get-out-the-vote programming.

Ziklag, a secretive organization of wealthy Christians, funds the Courage Tour, according to previously unreported documents obtained by ProPublica and Documented. A private donor video produced by Ziklag said the group intended to spend $700,000 in 2024 to mobilize Christian voters by funding “targeted rallies in swing states” led by Lance Wallnau, the pro-Trump influencer.

Even before the Vance event, ProPublica previously reported that tax experts believed Ziklag’s 2024 election-related efforts could be in violation of tax law. The Vance event, they said, raised even more red flags about whether a tax-exempt charity had improperly benefited the Trump-Vance campaign.

According to Texas corporation records, the Courage Tour is a project of Lance Wallnau Ministries Inc., a 501(c)(3) charity led by Wallnau. There have been five Courage Tour events this year, and Vance is the only top-of-the-ticket candidate to appear at any of them.

Wallnau has said that Vice President Kamala Harris is possessed by “the spirit of Jezebel” and practices “witchcraft.” As ProPublica reported, Wallnau is also an adviser to Ziklag, whose long-term goal is to help conservative Christians “take dominion” over the most important areas of American society, such as education, government and entertainment.

The Vance campaign portion was tucked in between Courage Tour events, and organizers took pains to say that Wallnau’s podcast hosted the hourlong segment, not the Courage Tour. Two signs near the stage said Wallnau’s podcast was hosting Vance. And during Vance’s conversation with a local pastor, the Courage Tour’s logo was replaced by the Trump-Vance logo on the screen.

An email sent by the Courage Tour to prospective attendees promoted the rally and Vance’s appearance as distinct events but advertised them side by side:

An email promoted the Courage Tour and the town hall with Vance side by side. (Obtained and redacted by ProPublica)

But the lines between those events blurred in a way that tax-law experts said could create legal problems for Wallnau, the Courage Tour and Ziklag. The appearance took place at the same venue, on the same stage and with the same audience as the rest of the Courage Tour. That email to people who might attend assured them that they could remain in their same seats to watch Vance and that afterward, “We will seamlessly return to the Courage Tour programming.”

The Trump-Vance campaign promoted the event as “part of the Courage Tour” and said Vance’s remarks would take place “during the Courage Tour.” And although the appearance included a discussion of addiction and homelessness, Vance criticized President Joe Biden in his remarks and urged audience members to vote and get others to vote as well in November.

Later in the day, Wallnau took the stage and asked for donations from the crowd. As he did, he spoke of Vance’s appearance as if it were part of the Courage Tour. “People have been coming up to us, my staff, and saying we want to help you out, what can we do, how do we do this? I want you to know when we do a Courage Tour, which will be back in the area, when we’re in different parts of the country,” he said. Asking for a show of hands, Wallnau added: “How many of you would like to at least be knowing when we’re there? Who’s with us on the team? If we have another JD Vance or Donald Trump or somebody?”

An employee of Wallnau’s, Mercedes Sparks, peeked out from behind a curtain. “I just wanted to clarify: You said they came to the Courage Tour,” Sparks said. “They didn’t. For legal reasons, the podcast hosted that. It was very separate. I don’t need the IRS coming my way.”

Despite the disclaimers, Vance’s campaign appearance at the Courage Tour raises legal red flags for several reasons, according to experts in tax and election law.

Both Lance Wallnau Ministries and Ziklag are 501(c)(3) charities, the same legal designation as the Boys & Girls Club or the United Way. People who donate to charities like these can deduct their gift on their annual taxes. But under the law, such charities are “absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office,” according to the IRS.

Internal Ziklag records lay out how the Courage Tour could influence the 2024 election. “Our plan,” one private video states, “is to mobilize grassroots support in seven key swing states through large-scale rallies, each anticipated to attract between 5,000 and 15,000 participants. These ‘Fire and Glory’ rallies will primarily target counties critical to the 2024 election outcome.” Wallnau said he later changed the name of his swing-state tour from Fire and Glory to the Courage Tour, saying the original name “sounds like a Pentecostal rally.”

Four nonpartisan tax experts told ProPublica and Documented that a political campaign event hosted by one charitable group, which is in turn funded by another charitable group, could run afoul of the ban on direct or indirect campaign intervention by a charitable organization. They added that Wallnau’s attempt to carve out Vance’s appearance may not, in the eyes of the IRS, be sufficient to avoid creating tax-law problems.

“Here, the [Trump] campaign is getting the people in their seats, who have come to the c-3’s event,” Ellen Aprill, an expert on political activities by charitable groups and a retired law professor at Loyola Law School, wrote in an email. “I would say this is over the line into campaign intervention but that it is a close call — and that exempt organization lawyers generally advise clients NOT to get too close to the line!”

Roger Colinvaux, a professor at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law, said that regulators consider whether a consumer would be able to distinguish the charitable event from the political activity. Does the public know these are clearly separate entities, or is it difficult to distinguish whether it’s a charity or a for-profit company that’s hosting a political event?

“If it looks like the (c)(3) is creating the audience, then that again is potentially an issue,” he said.

Ziklag, Wallnau and the Vance campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

First image: Vance talks with Howard. Second image: Lance Wallnau gives a presentation. The Vance discussion was tucked in between Courage Tour events, and organizers took pains to say that Wallnau’s podcast, which is owned by his for-profit company, hosted the hourlong segment, not the Courage Tour. (Stephanie Strasburg for ProPublica)

Marcus Owens, a tax lawyer at Loeb and Loeb and a former director of the IRS’ exempt organizations division, said there were past examples of the agency cracking down on religious associations for political activity similar in nature to Vance’s Courage Tour appearance.

In the 1980s, the Pentecostal televangelist Jimmy Swaggart used his personal column in his ministry’s magazine to endorse evangelist Pat Robertson’s campaign for president. Even though the regular column, titled “From Me to You,” was billed as Swaggart’s personal opinion, the IRS said that it still crossed the line into illegal political campaign intervention. Swaggart had also endorsed Robertson’s campaign for president during a religious service.

In that case, the IRS audited Swaggart’s organization and, as a result, the organization publicly admitted that it had violated tax law.

Phil Hackney, a professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh who spent five years in the IRS’ Office of Chief Counsel, said the fundamental question with Vance’s Courage Tour event is whether the 501(c)(3) charity that hosted the event covered the cost of Vance’s appearance.

“If the (c)(3) bore the cost, they’re in trouble,” Hackney said. “If they didn’t, they should be fine.” The whole arrangement, he added, has “got its problems. It’s really dicey.”

And even though Ziklag did not directly host the Vance event, tax experts say that its funding of the Courage Tour — as described in the group’s internal documents — could be seen as indirect campaign intervention, which federal tax law prohibits.

“The regulations make it clear that 501(c)(3) organizations cannot intervene in campaigns directly or indirectly,” Samuel Brunson, a law professor at Loyola University Chicago, said. “So the fact that it’s not Ziklag putting on the event doesn’t insulate Ziklag.”

Potential tax-law violations aren’t the only legal issue raised by Vance’s appearance.

Federal election law prohibits corporations from donating directly to political campaigns. For example, General Motors, as a company, cannot give money to a presidential campaign. That ban also applies to nonprofits that are legally organized as corporations.

Election experts said that if the funding for the Vance appearance did come from a corporation, whether for-profit or nonprofit, that could be viewed as an in-kind contribution to the Trump-Vance campaign.

Do you have any information about Ziklag or the Christian right’s plans for 2024 that we should know? Andy Kroll can be reached by email at andy.kroll@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 202-215-6203.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by .

A federal attempt to foster ‘high-integrity voluntary carbon markets’ falls short, experts say

Joseph Winters — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

After two years of meetings and consultation with the public, a little-known federal regulator this month issued its final guidance on the trading of derivatives based on carbon credits, the certificates companies buy and sell on a voluntary basis to say they’ve offset their greenhouse gas emissions.

Experts had hoped that the guidance from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC, would address widespread concerns about carbon credit-related fraud — essentially, the fear that credits are not delivering their promised emissions reductions. Scientific articles and media investigations over the past several years have revealed that many credits are based on forest conservation projects in areas that were never in danger of being chopped down, or that they sequester carbon in ways that are unlikely to last more than a few years.

In a statement, CFTC Chair Rostin Behnam called the guidance “a critical step in support of the development of high-integrity voluntary carbon markets.” But experts and environmental groups aren’t so enthused. Some don’t think it’ll make much of a difference, due to its limited reach, while others worry the guidance will lend undue legitimacy to the idea of carbon credits — the majority of which they believe shouldn’t be traded in the first place.

“It’s giving this imprimatur to a system that doesn’t have credibility to begin with,” said Clara Vondrich, senior policy counsel for the nonprofit Public Citizen.

To understand what’s going on, it’s important to understand the purpose of the CFTC. The agency was created by Congress in 1974 to regulate the U.S. market for derivatives, contracts in which prices are derived from the value of an underlying asset or benchmark. One easy-to-understand derivative is called a futures contract, a promise to sell an asset at a particular price at some point in the future. Farmers might sell futures contracts to lock in a selling price for wheat, protecting themselves from a future price collapse. In that case, the CFTC’s job is to ensure that the wheat actually gets delivered.

Since 1974, however, the CFTC has sought to regulate increasingly complicated derivatives products. Carbon credit-based futures contracts are a prime example: In this case, a company buys a contract for credits based on emissions reductions that have not yet happened, but are promised to occur at some point in the future. Compared to the wheat example, it’s much less clear what counts as legitimate delivery of the carbon credit. It depends in large part on whether the credits really will cause the emissions reductions that buyers expect them to.

As the CFTC was drafting its guidance, experts urged the agency to take a proactive role in regulating not only carbon credit-based derivatives, but also the credits themselves. No other federal agency has taken on that task, and there were hopes that the CFTC could do so — potentially by invoking its anti-fraud authority over markets for products whose derivatives are listed on CFTC-regulated exchanges. “If there is a commodity and if that commodity has a derivative on a regulated exchange,” said Todd Phillips, an assistant professor of law in the Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University, “the CFTC has authority over the underlying” commodity.

Last year, there were indications that the CFTC could be gearing up to regulate carbon credits. In June 2023, the agency put out a whistleblower alert asking the public to report manipulation in the voluntary carbon market, and not long after, it announced a new Environmental Fraud Task Force to help investigate cases of “fraud and misconduct” in offset-related markets. One of the CFTC’s five commissioners, Christy Goldsmith Romero, explicitly said in December that the agency’s anti-fraud authority should extend to the underlying market for carbon credits — “given the potential for impact to the derivatives markets.”

Several high-profile carbon credit projects have claimed to protect parcels of rainforest that were never in danger of being chopped down. Jody Amiet / AFP via Getty Images

But the final guidance — which is not legally binding, but rather intended to help clarify exchanges’ obligations under existing CFTC regulations — came up short of what many experts were hoping for. The 99-page document mostly asks futures exchanges to conform to an existing set of best practices for carbon accounting, as defined by a nonprofit governance body called the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market, or ICVCM. These best practices involve transparent calculations of greenhouse gas emissions, third-party verification, and reporting on whether credits represent emissions reductions that would not have otherwise taken place.

There are two potential problems with this approach. First, according to Phillips, the CFTC’s deference to the ICVCM essentially restricted its purview.

“What the CFTC has done with this guidance is they have said that only offsets that meet the ICVCM standards can be listed on exchanges,” he said. “Which means there are no low-quality offsets that will be listed on exchanges, which means the CFTC does not have anti-fraud authority there.”

In other words, the CFTC designed its guidance in such a way that it cannot do anything about the underlying voluntary markets’ low-quality carbon credits, which are the most likely to be fraudulent. The guidance is “extremely limited in reach,” as Erin Shortell, a legal fellow at the nonprofit Institute for Policy Integrity, put it in a blog post.

The second issue is that not everyone trusts the ICVCM standards to insure against issues like reversal, where credit projects prematurely release their stored carbon — such as when a forest tied to carbon credits is destroyed by a wildfire — or double-counting, where the same emissions reductions are counted by two separate entities. Rebecca Sanders-DeMott, director of ecosystem carbon management for the pro-carbon market nonprofit Clean Air Task Force, said in a statement that the CFTC was “continuing to rely on crediting protocols that are in need of a major overhaul.”

In response to Grist’s request for comment, the ICVCM referred Grist to Nat Keohane, one of the organization’s senior advisers and president of the nonprofit Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. Keohane said the ICVCM’s standards for carbon credits were developed in a “transparent and rigorous” fashion meant to model a regulatory process, and that they adequately address concerns about credits’ legitimacy.

“These are expert issues,” he added. “They take a lot of specialized expertise … and I don’t think anybody would say that the CFTC has the kind of requisite understanding of the real issues and the details involved” not to defer to the knowledge of other groups such as the ICVCM.

While Sanders-DeMott’s organization believes better regulation is needed to help the voluntary carbon market grow — and “play a meaningful role in addressing climate change” — other advocacy groups think the market has been too plagued with problems to be redeemed.

According to Phillips, the root of the problem is that the CFTC was never designed to be a climate watchdog for the federal government. To the extent that markets for carbon credits and their derivatives should exist, he said, Congress needs to create a new agency — or designate an existing one — to be their overseer.

As an example, he pointed to the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, a nonprofit corporation created by the federal government in 2002 to oversee audits of U.S.-listed public companies. Previously, corporate auditors had been entirely self-regulated — much like the voluntary carbon market is today.

At present, “everyone has an incentive to just cut corners and allow low-quality offsets to exist,” Phillips said. “There is no government entity whose job it is to ensure that low-quality offsets are taken off the market, and someone needs to have that responsibility.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A federal attempt to foster ‘high-integrity voluntary carbon markets’ falls short, experts say on Sep 30, 2024.

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

Climate Experts Show Rich Countries Can and Must Raise Trillions for Climate Action

Newswire Editor — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 14:20:59 +0000

Today, Oil Change International released a briefing showing rich countries can mobilize well over $5 trillion a year for climate action at home and abroad by ending fossil fuel handouts, making big polluters pay, and changing unfair global financial rules. The briefing is published as global leaders meet at Climate Week NYC and the United Nations General Assembly and ahead of COP29, where leaders must agree on a new global climate finance target (NCQG). Climate experts say this target must be $1 trillion annually in grants and grant-equivalent finance and that an ambitious target is essential for countries to deliver last year’s commitment to transition away from fossil fuels. Only strong finance targets will unlock strong national climate plans (NDCs) due in 2025 that phase out fossil fuels.

Following global protests demanding rich countries #PayUp their share of climate damages and mitigations, the briefing, titled “Road to COP29: Shifting and Unlocking Public Finance for a Fair Fossil Fuel Phase-out,” outlines critical steps for negotiators to ensure adequate funding for global climate action. The briefing emphasizes the need for a fair and funded fossil fuel phase-out, highlighting the importance of grant-based financing for countries in the Global South facing record-breaking debt and cost-of-living crises.

Key Points:

The success of COP29 depends on the adoption of an ambitious new climate finance target (NCQG) of at least $1 trillion annually in grants and grant-equivalent finance.
Rich countries have the means to mobilize well over $5 trillion a year for climate action at home and for the NCQG, including by ending fossil fuel handouts, making big polluters pay, and changing unfair global financial rules.
Grant-based and highly concessional financing, not more harmful loans, is an urgent need to fulfill the landmark COP28 decision to phase-out fossil fuels, especially for adaptation, loss and damage, and key mitigation projects in the Global South.
Countries must not get distracted by voluntary energy finance proposals or oil money funds that do little more than greenwash. Instead they should focus on delivering a strong and accountable NCQG and making polluters pay through well-designed and legislated fossil fuel levies.
Last year at COP28, governments committed to transition away from fossil fuels. The next key step to make good on this landmark energy agreement is rich countries agreeing to a new climate finance goal (NCQG) to make this possible. This will allow countries to deliver national climate plans (NDCs) due in 2025 that phase out fossil fuels.

Laurie van der Burg, Oil Change International Public Finance lead, said: “Last year countries agreed to phase out fossil fuels. Now it’s time for rich countries to pay up to turn this promise into action. There is no shortage of public money available for rich countries to pay their fair share for climate action at home and abroad. They can unlock trillions in grants and grant-equivalent climate finance by ending fossil fuel handouts, making polluters pay and changing unfair financial rules. They owe this money to Global South countries that have not caused this crisis and need fair finance to deliver strong climate plans next year that phase out fossil fuels. This is essential to avoid climate breakdown and save lives.”

Tasneem Essop, Executive Director of Climate Action Network International, said: “In the countdown to COP29, we are witnessing developed nations clinging to the remnants of a colonial past, dragging their feet in the crucial negotiations for a new climate finance goal. Let’s be clear: the Global North owes an immense climate debt to the Global South, a debt born from decades of greenhouse gas emissions for their industrialisation and that continues today at the expense of vulnerable communities in the Global South. The solutions are within reach and the resources exist – but the political will remains shamefully absent. While trillions are funnelled into militarisation and fossil fuel subsidies, these funds could be redirected to build a just, sustainable future. It’s time to stop stalling. It’s time to make polluters and the wealthy pay for the harm they have caused. The world can no longer afford excuses. We need bold, transformative action—now.”

Andreas Sieber, Associate Director of Policy and Campaigns , 350.org said: “It is a bitter irony that rich nations hide behind claims of fiscal restraint, yet trillions are still spent on fossil fuel subsidies and militarization. The truth is simple: the money exists, but the political will does not. By treating climate finance as a zero-sum game, wealthy countries not only deepen global inequality but also undermine their own futures. The energy transition isn’t charity—it’s an investment in global stability and security. Ignoring the need for support only worsens the climate crisis, which knows no borders. The real question isn’t whether we can afford to act, but whether we can afford not to.”

Alejandra López Carbajal, Transforma Climate Diplomacy Director said: “There is an attempt from developed countries to frame the new climate finance negotiations in a context of public finance scarcity when in reality, there are enough resources to address the climate crisis, for example, in fossil fuel subsidies which are socially regressive and only deepening the climate crisis. We are calling for a true leadership package from developed nations to agree on an ambitious NCQG that enables to possibility to keep 1.5°C in reach and drives necessary transitions and investments throughout the developing world”

Erika Lennon, Senior Attorney, Centre for International Environmental Law said: “No more excuses, no more pretending carbon markets are climate finance, no more subsidizing fossil fuels. It is long past time for Global North polluters to step up and put the money they owe on the table for real, effective, rights compatible climate action—or face legal consequences. The money is not missing, it’s being misused. Continuing to fund fossil fuels and fossil foolery — dangerous distractions and techno-fixes that only prolong the fossil economy and perpetuate fossil fueled-climate destruction — is not just inexcusable; it’s incompatible with human rights and environmental law. At COP29 we need a climate finance goal in the trillions and follow through to deliver it.”

The briefing is endorsed by 36 organizations calling on negotiators and world leaders to prioritize these demands in the lead-up to COP29, ensuring that climate finance commitments match the scale and urgency of the climate crisis.

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

U.N. Experts Accuse Israel of “Starvation Campaign” in Gaza & Demand End to Western Complicity

Democracy Now! — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 12:11:33 +0000

Top United Nations human rights experts have condemned Western nations for supporting Israel’s devastating war on Gaza, urging the world to stop an unfolding genocide in Palestine. This comes as the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, is accusing Israel in a new report of carrying out a deliberate starvation campaign in Gaza. “What we are witnessing in Gaza is the starvation of 2.3 million Palestinians. We’ve never seen a civilian population made to go hungry so quickly and so completely,” says Fakhri, who joins us from Brazil. We also speak with Francesca Albanese, the special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, who says Israel’s assault on Gaza is part of a larger plan of “getting as much control as possible over maximum land with minimum Palestinian people.”

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

Abortion Bans Have Delayed Emergency Medical Care. In Georgia, Experts Say This Mother’s Death Was Preventable.

by Kavitha Surana — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 09:00:00 +0000

by Kavitha Surana

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

In her final hours, Amber Nicole Thurman suffered from a grave infection that her suburban Atlanta hospital was well-equipped to treat.

She’d taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body. She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C.

But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.

Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.

It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.

Why should I trust your reporting? I (Kavitha Surana) am a reporter that has been covering reproductive health care access since Roe v. Wade was overturned. I’ve spoken with doctors, community workers and patients across the country about how abortion bans have made pregnancy more dangerous in America, and I’ve written about the Republican lawmakers who refused to listen.

If you want to get in touch and learn more about how I work, email me. I take your privacy very seriously.

The otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant, who had her sights set on nursing school, should not have died, an official state committee recently concluded.

Tasked with examining pregnancy-related deaths to improve maternal health, the experts, including 10 doctors, deemed hers “preventable” and said the hospital’s delay in performing the critical procedure had a “large” impact on her fatal outcome.

Their reviews of individual patient cases are not made public. But ProPublica obtained reports that confirm that at least two women have already died after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care in their state.

There are almost certainly others.

Committees like the one in Georgia, set up in each state, often operate with a two-year lag behind the cases they examine, meaning that experts are only now beginning to delve into deaths that took place after the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion.

Thurman’s case marks the first time an abortion-related death, officially deemed “preventable,” is coming to public light. ProPublica will share the story of the second in the coming days. We are also exploring other deaths that have not yet been reviewed but appear to be connected to abortion bans.

Doctors warned state legislators women would die if medical procedures sometimes needed to save lives became illegal.

Though Republican lawmakers who voted for state bans on abortion say the laws have exceptions to protect the “life of the mother,” medical experts cautioned that the language is not rooted in science and ignores the fast-moving realities of medicine.

The most restrictive state laws, experts predicted, would pit doctors’ fears of prosecution against their patients’ health needs, requiring providers to make sure their patient was inarguably on the brink of death or facing “irreversible” harm when they intervened with procedures like a D&C.

“They would feel the need to wait for a higher blood pressure, wait for a higher fever — really got to justify this one — bleed a little bit more,” Dr. Melissa Kottke, an OB-GYN at Emory, warned lawmakers in 2019 during one of the hearings over Georgia’s ban.

Doctors and a nurse involved in Thurman’s care declined to explain their thinking and did not respond to questions from ProPublica. Communications staff from the hospital did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Georgia’s Department of Public Health, which oversees the state maternal mortality review committee, said it cannot comment on ProPublica’s reporting because the committee’s cases are confidential and protected by federal law.

The availability of D&Cs for both abortions and routine miscarriage care helped save lives after the 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade, studies show, reducing the rate of maternal deaths for women of color by up to 40% the first year after abortion became legal.

But since abortion was banned or restricted in 22 states over the past two years, women in serious danger have been turned away from emergency rooms and told that they needed to be in more peril before doctors could help. Some have been forced to continue high-risk pregnancies that threatened their lives. Those whose pregnancies weren’t even viable have been told they could return when they were “crashing.”

Such stories have been at the center of the upcoming presidential election, during which the right to abortion is on the ballot in 10 states.

But Republican legislators have rejected small efforts to expand and clarify health exceptions — even in Georgia, which has one of the nation’s highest rates of maternal mortality and where Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white women.

When its law went into effect in July 2022, Gov. Brian Kemp said he was “overjoyed” and believed the state had found an approach that would keep women “safe, healthy and informed.”

After advocates tried to block the ban in court, arguing the law put women in danger, attorneys for the state of Georgia accused them of “hyperbolic fear mongering.”

Two weeks later, Thurman was dead.

Thurman and her son in a photo she posted on social media the year before her death (via Facebook)

Thurman, who carried the full load of a single parent, loved being a mother. Every chance she got, she took her son to petting zoos, to pop-up museums and on planned trips, like one to a Florida beach. “The talks I have with my son are everything,” she posted on social media.

But when she learned she was pregnant with twins in the summer of 2022, she quickly decided she needed to preserve her newfound stability, her best friend, Ricaria Baker, told ProPublica. Thurman and her son had recently moved out of her family’s home and into a gated apartment complex with a pool, and she was planning to enroll in nursing school.

The timing could not have been worse. On July 20, the day Georgia’s law banning abortion at six weeks went into effect, her pregnancy had just passed that mark, according to records her family shared with ProPublica.

Thurman wanted a surgical abortion close to home and held out hope as advocates tried to get the ban paused in court, Baker said. But as her pregnancy progressed to its ninth week, she couldn’t wait any longer. She scheduled a D&C in North Carolina, where abortion at that stage was still legal, and on Aug. 13 woke up at 4 a.m. to make the journey with her best friend.

On their drive, they hit standstill traffic, Baker said. The clinic couldn’t hold Thurman’s spot longer than 15 minutes — it was inundated with women from other states where bans had taken effect. Instead, a clinic employee offered Thurman a two-pill abortion regimen approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, mifepristone and misoprostol. Her pregnancy was well within the standard of care for that treatment.

Getting to the clinic had required scheduling a day off from work, finding a babysitter, making up an excuse to borrow a relative’s car and walking through a crowd of anti-abortion protesters. Thurman didn’t want to reschedule, Baker said.

At the clinic, Thurman sat through a counseling session in which she was told how to safely take the pills and instructed to go to the emergency room if complications developed. She signed a release saying she understood. She took the first pill there and insisted on driving home before any symptoms started, Baker said. She took the second pill the next day, as directed.

Deaths due to complications from abortion pills are extremely rare. Out of nearly 6 million women who’ve taken mifepristone in the U.S. since 2000, 32 deaths were reported to the FDA through 2022, regardless of whether the drug played a role. Of those, 11 patients developed sepsis. Most of the remaining cases involved intentional and accidental drug overdoses, suicide, homicide and ruptured ectopic pregnancies.

Baker and Thurman spoke every day that week. At first, there was only cramping, which Thurman expected. But days after she took the second pill, the pain increased and blood was soaking through more than one pad per hour. If she had lived nearby, the clinic in North Carolina would have performed a D&C for free as soon as she followed up, the executive director told ProPublica. But Thurman was four hours away.

Thurman, left, and her best friend, Ricaria Baker, in 2020 (Courtesy of Ricaria Baker)

On the evening of Aug. 18, Thurman vomited blood and passed out at home, according to 911 call logs. Her boyfriend called for an ambulance. Thurman arrived at Piedmont Henry Hospital in Stockbridge at 6:51 p.m.

ProPublica obtained the summary narrative of Thurman’s hospital stay provided to the maternal mortality review committee, as well as the group’s findings. The narrative is based on Thurman’s medical records, with identifying information removed. The committee does not interview doctors involved with the case or ask hospitals to respond to its findings. ProPublica also consulted with medical experts, including members of the committee, about the timeline of events.

Within Thurman’s first hours at the hospital, which says it is staffed at all hours with an OB who specializes in hospital care, it should have been clear that she was in danger, medical experts told ProPublica.

Her lower abdomen was tender, according to the summary. Her white blood cell count was critically high and her blood pressure perilously low — at one point, as Thurman got up to go to the bathroom, she fainted again and hit her head. Doctors noted a foul odor during a pelvic exam, and an ultrasound showed possible tissue in her uterus.

The standard treatment of sepsis is to start antibiotics and immediately seek and remove the source of the infection. For a septic abortion, that would include removing any remaining tissue from the uterus. One of the hospital network’s own practices describes a D&C as a “fairly common, minor surgical procedure” to be used after a miscarriage to remove fetal tissue.

After assessing her at 9:38 p.m., doctors started Thurman on antibiotics and an IV drip, the summary said. The OB-GYN noted the possibility of doing a D&C the next day.

But that didn’t happen the following morning, even when an OB diagnosed “acute severe sepsis.” By 5:14 a.m., Thurman was breathing rapidly and at risk of bleeding out, according to her vital signs. Even five liters of IV fluid had not moved her blood pressure out of the danger zone. Doctors escalated the antibiotics.

Instead of performing the newly criminalized procedure, they continued to gather information and dispense medicine, the summary shows.

Doctors had Thurman tested for sexually transmitted diseases and pneumonia.

They placed her on Levophed, a powerful blood pressure support that could do nothing to treat the infection and posed a new threat: The medication can constrict blood flow so much that patients could need an amputation once stabilized.

At 6:45 a.m., Thurman’s blood pressure continued to dip, and she was taken to the intensive care unit.

At 7:14 a.m., doctors discussed initiating a D&C. But it still didn’t happen. Two hours later, lab work indicated her organs were failing, according to experts who read her vital signs.

At 12:05 p.m., more than 17 hours after Thurman had arrived, a doctor who specializes in intensive care notified the OB-GYN that her condition was deteriorating.

Thurman was finally taken to an operating room at 2 p.m.

By then, the situation was so dire that doctors started with open abdominal surgery. They found that her bowel needed to be removed, but it was too risky to operate because not enough blood was flowing to the area — a possible complication from the blood pressure medication, an expert explained to ProPublica. The OB performed the D&C but immediately continued with a hysterectomy.

During surgery, Thurman’s heart stopped.

Her mother was praying in the waiting room when one of the doctors approached. “Come walk with me,” she said.

Until she got the call from the hospital, her mother had no idea Thurman had been pregnant. She recalled her daughter’s last words before she was wheeled into surgery — they had made no sense coming from a vibrant young woman who seemed to have her whole life ahead of her:

“Promise me you’ll take care of my son.”

Thurman and her son in a selfie she posted online in 2020, two years before her death (via Facebook)

There is a “good chance” providing a D&C earlier could have prevented Amber Thurman’s death, the maternal mortality review committee concluded.

Every state has a committee of experts who meet regularly to examine deaths that occurred during or within a year after a pregnancy. Their goal is to collect accurate data and identify the root causes of America’s increasing maternal mortality rate, then translate those lessons into policy changes. Their findings and recommendations are sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and their states publish an annual report, but their reviews of individual cases are never public.

Georgia’s committee has 32 regular members from a variety of backgrounds, including OB-GYNs, cardiologists, mental health care providers, a medical examiner, health policy experts, community advocates and others. This summer, the committee reviewed deaths through Fall 2022, but most states have not gotten that far.

After reviewing Thurman’s case, the committee highlighted Piedmont’s “lack of policies/procedures in place to evacuate uterus immediately” and recommended all hospitals implement policies “to treat a septic abortion on an ongoing basis.”

It is not clear from the records available why doctors waited to provide a D&C to Thurman, though the summary report shows they discussed the procedure at least twice in the hours before they finally did.

Piedmont did not have a policy to guide doctors on how to interpret the state abortion ban when Thurman arrived for care, according to two people with knowledge of internal conversations who were not authorized to speak publicly. In the months after she died, an internal task force of providers there created policies to educate staff on how to navigate the law, though they are not able to give legal advice, the sources said.

In interviews with more than three dozen OB-GYNs in states that outlawed abortion, ProPublica learned how difficult it is to interpret the vague and conflicting language in bans’ medical exceptions — especially, the doctors said, when their judgment could be called into question under the threat of prison time.

Take the language in Georgia’s supposed lifesaving exceptions.

It prohibits doctors from using any instrument “with the purpose of terminating a pregnancy.” While removing fetal tissue is not terminating a pregnancy, medically speaking, the law only specifies it’s not considered an abortion to remove “a dead unborn child” that resulted from a “spontaneous abortion” defined as “naturally occurring” from a miscarriage or a stillbirth.

Thurman had told doctors her miscarriage was not spontaneous — it was the result of taking pills to terminate her pregnancy.

There is also an exception, included in most bans, to allow abortions “necessary in order to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or the substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.” There is no standard protocol for how providers should interpret such language, doctors said. How can they be sure a jury with no medical experience would agree that intervening was “necessary”?

ProPublica asked the governor’s office on Friday to respond to cases of denied care, including the two abortion-related deaths, and whether its exceptions were adequate. Spokesperson Garrison Douglas said they were clear and gave doctors the power to act in medical emergencies. He returned to the state’s previous argument, describing ProPublica’s reporting as a “fear-mongering campaign.”

Republican officials across the country have largely rejected calls to provide guidance.

When legislators have tried, anti-abortion groups have blocked them.

In 2023, a group of Tennessee Republicans was unable to push through a small change to the state’s abortion ban, intended to give doctors greater leeway when intervening for patients facing health complications.

“No one wants to tell their spouse, child or loved one that their life is not important in a medical emergency as you watch them die when they could have been saved,” said Republican Rep. Esther Helton-Haynes, a nurse who sponsored the bill.

The state’s main anti-abortion lobbyist, Will Brewer, vigorously opposed the change. Some pregnancy complications “work themselves out,” he told a panel of lawmakers. Doctors should be required to “pause and wait this out and see how it goes.”

At some hospitals, doctors are doing just that. Doctors told ProPublica they have seen colleagues disregard the standard of care when their patients are at risk of infection and wait to see if a miscarriage completes naturally before offering a D&C.

Although no doctor has been prosecuted for violating abortion bans, the possibility looms over every case, they said, particularly outside of well-funded academic institutions that have lawyers promising criminal defense.

Doctors in public hospitals and those outside of major metro areas told ProPublica that they are often left scrambling to figure out on a case-by-case basis when they are allowed to provide D&Cs and other abortion procedures. Many fear they are taking on all of the risk alone and would not be backed up by their hospitals if a prosecutor charged them with a crime. At Catholic hospitals, they typically have to transfer patients elsewhere for care.

When they do try to provide care, it can be a challenge to find other medical staff to participate. A D&C requires an anesthesiologist, nurses, attending physicians and others. Doctors said peers have refused to participate because of their personal views or their fear of being exposed to criminal charges. Georgia law allows medical staff to refuse to participate in abortions.

Thurman’s family members may never learn the exact variables that went into doctors’ calculations. The hospital has not fulfilled their request for her full medical record. There was no autopsy.

For years, all Thurman’s family had was a death certificate that said she died of “septic shock” and “retained products of conception” — a rare description that had previously only appeared once in Georgia death records over the last 15 years, ProPublica found. The family learned Thurman’s case had been reviewed and deemed preventable from ProPublica’s reporting.

The sting of Thurman’s death remains extremely raw to her loved ones, who feel her absence most deeply as they watch her son grow taller and lose teeth and start school years without her.

They focus on surrounding him with love but know nothing can replace his mother.

On Monday, she would have turned 31.

A photo of Thurman that she posted online in 2020 (via Facebook) How We Reported the Story

ProPublica reporter Kavitha Surana reviewed death records and medical examiner and coroner reports to identify cases that may be related to abortion access. She first reached out to Amber Thurman’s family and friends a year ago. The family shared her personal documents and signed a release for ProPublica to access her medical information. The maternal mortality review committee reviewed Thurman’s case at the end of July 2024.

Do you have any information about how abortion bans have affected medical care? Reach out to ProPublica reporters covering reproductive health care including Kavitha Surana at kavitha.surana@propublica.org or Cassandra Jaramillo at cassandra.jaramillo@propublica.org.

Cassandra Jaramillo and Mariam Elba contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Kavitha Surana.

Experts: North Korea’s Chinese-made soccer uniforms might violate sanctions

By Park Jaewoo for RFA Korean — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 22:47:54 +0000

Read a version of this story in Korean.

North Korea’s national soccer team will kick off the third round of Asian qualifiers for the 2026 World Cup on Thursday, but their Chinese-made uniforms might be part of a sanctions violation, experts told Radio Free Asia.

Chinese sportswear maker Inlang Sports posted on social media last week that the North Korean team would be wearing uniforms bearing Inlang’s logo for the first time in Thursday’s match vs Uzbekistan in Tashkent.

The company in January held a ceremony to announce that they had agreed to sponsor North Korean men’s and women’s soccer, and supply uniforms, but this arrangement could be in violation of sanctions intended to deprive Pyongyang of cash and resources that could be used in its nuclear and missile programs.

“Money transfers and joint ventures would likely be a sanctions violation,” Aaron Arnold, a Senior Associate Fellow at the U.K.-based Royal United Services Institute’s Centre for Finance and Security, told RFA Korean.

“You could also feasibly argue that the uniforms are prohibited under the luxury goods ban, but that could be a stretch.”

UN Security Council Resolution 2270 defines sports equipment as “luxury goods,” but Alastair Morgan, the former ambassador of the United Kingdom to North Korea, explained to RFA how the uniforms might not count.

A friendly football match between the national teams of North Korea and Jordan. (Jordan Football Association)

“The PRC … might argue that a sponsorship arrangement does not necessarily involve the supply of goods though it might do so, and/or that items of clothing are not ‘recreational sporting equipment,’” he said, using an acronym for the People’s Republic of China.

“Depending on the nature of the financial transactions involved, and whether the DPRK recipient was a designated entity, there might conceivably be other violations.”

Inlang’s sponsorship of the team also could mean that the North Korean uniforms could be sold to the outside world.

Inlang did not respond to RFA queries regarding possible sanctions violations.

This is not the first time that North Korean soccer has caused sanctions concerns.

In the 2022 Qatar World Cup Asian qualifier match between South Korea and North Korea held in Pyongyang in 2019, the South Korean national team instructed its players not to exchange uniforms after the match due to the possibility of violating sanctions against North Korea.

Should the North Korean team qualify for the World Cup, it would be Inlang’s debut at the tournament.

In the 2022 Qatar World Cup, 13 teams wore Nike kits, seven went with Adidas, and 6 wore Puma. Six different makers outfitted the remaining six teams. Nike is also the current sponsor of the Chinese national team.

In 2010, the last time North Korea qualified for the World Cup, the team wore uniforms made by Italian firm Legea.

Translated by Claire S. Lee. Edited by Eugene Whong.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Park Jaewoo for RFA Korean.

This College’s 38-Acre Land Donation to a Christian School Drew Little Attention. Experts Say It Appears to Violate the Law.

by Jessica Priest — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 10:00:00 +0000

by Jessica Priest

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

In 2004, a public junior college in North Texas abandoned plans to lease some of its land to a religious organization for $1 month after the state attorney general warned that the effort could violate the law.

Nearly two decades later, the college went further. After publicly posting only that Weatherford College’s board would meet to discuss property, members emerged from behind closed doors in November 2022 and voted unanimously to give a 38-acre property to Community Christian School. The property was valued at more than $2 million, according to the county’s appraisal district.

“Faith and patience is the path,” Dan Curlee, then the college’s attorney, wrote in an email after the vote to Doug Jefferson, the administrator of the private religious school.

Jefferson, who had asked the college to donate its workforce development center in Mineral Wells, about 50 miles west of Fort Worth, replied: “Praise God. He has walked with me every step of the way on this miracle for our school. So appreciate you,” according to records obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.

About two years later, the property sits empty as Community Christian School raises the funds needed to make repairs that Jefferson estimates will cost $1.2 million. The donation also raises questions about government oversight at a time when state and local officials are increasingly blurring the lines between church and state, experts said.

Legal experts say the donation appears to have violated multiple state and federal laws, including a provision in the Texas Constitution that prohibits political subdivisions, including public junior colleges, from granting anything of value to aid an individual, association or corporation without return benefit. They also pointed to another provision in state law that prohibits public junior colleges from conveying, selling or exchanging their land for less than fair market value unless the land goes to an abutting property owner.

In 2004, then-state Attorney General Greg Abbott, now the governor, cited that provision when Weatherford College had planned to lease half an acre of land to the Wesley Foundation, a United Methodist campus ministry that planned to build a student center with a nondenominational chapel and church administrative offices. Abbott’s opinion said Texas law required the college to charge fair market value when selling or leasing land and to maintain control over the property, which the public school system had not done.

Retired Baylor University law professor Ron Beal said the same tenets apply to the more recent transaction. Had the college simply looked back on Abbott’s 2004 opinion, it would have known better, he said. “The junior college is absolutely prohibited from doing what they did,” he said. “It was a pure gratuitous transfer of public monies to solely benefit private persons at the expense of state taxpayers.”

Texas provides little oversight in such cases. Community college land transactions are not under the purview of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, which oversees public junior colleges, according to an agency spokesperson. The spokesperson said complaints about such transactions can be filed with the attorney general, who can choose whether to investigate. The Texas attorney general’s office, which did not respond to requests for comment, didn’t receive complaints related to the donation, according to records obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune.

College board members who voted in favor of the donation either did not reply to requests for comment or declined to speak with the news organizations.

The donation generally went under the radar even in the small, rural community. The local paper covered a ribbon-cutting ceremony but did not address the legality of the donation. John Kuhn, who served as superintendent for the Mineral Wells Independent School District at the time, said he had no idea the college was donating the land. Had Kuhn known, he said he would have asked that his district be considered. It is running out of space in its elementary schools and might have even contemplated buying the property, Kuhn said.

Community Christian School has yet to occupy the facility in Mineral Wells, Texas, as it raises the funds needed to make repairs that its leader estimates will cost $1.2 million. (Shelby Tauber for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

Aside from the legal questions, the donation raises concerns in a state that increasingly blurs the line between church and state, said University of Houston political scientist Brandon Rottinghaus. He pointed to examples including a new law that allows schools to hire unlicensed chaplains to work in mental health roles, Abbott’s hard push for a school voucher-like program that would allow taxpayer funding to support private and religious education, and the State Board of Education’s consideration of a measure that would require schools to teach the Bible.

“Over time, you’ve had so many of these issues that have battered the guardrails to the point now where it’s hard to have the guardrails be the divider of church and state as designed in some of these laws,” Rottinghaus said.

Curlee, the college’s attorney who has since retired, said the potential liability of owning the aging property outweighed its usefulness and that the college had already started moving classes to other buildings prior to the donation. He and the college’s current attorney, Jay Rutherford, maintain the donation did not violate any laws. Neither explained their reasoning or responded to questions about what legal experts told ProPublica and the Tribune.

Those experts also said the donation appears to violate the U.S. Constitution because, by Curlee’s own acknowledgment, the college never listed the property for sale and did not offer to donate it to any other organizations.

“If there’s evidence here that the college was not neutral, and that it was favoring this Christian school and left everyone else out of the process, that would violate the principle of Carson v. Makin,” said Steven Collis, a law professor and director of the Law and Religion Clinic at the University of Texas at Austin, referring to a case in which the Supreme Court ruled that Maine’s school voucher program could not exclude religious schools.

Jefferson, the administrator of Community Christian School, said he did not believe the donation violated any laws and that God gave him the property as a reward for taking care of it in the past. The private Christian school would at times use the property at no cost for one-act play competitions. When it did so, Jefferson said he cleaned, paid for utilities and provided liability insurance.

“And I did that because I believe God said that building belongs to us. I believed for years and years that was going to happen and then it did,” he said.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jessica Priest.

UN experts challenge Vietnam’s treatment of Montagnard minority

By RFA Vietnamese — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 05:05:33 +0000

United Nations experts are calling on Vietnam to answer their concerns over the trial of 100 Montagnards in January, in connection with a 2023 attack on government offices in which nine people were killed.

The special rapporteurs wrote to the government on June 14, and released the letter after a customary 60 days.

They said there were indications the Jan. 20 trial in Dak Lak did not meet fair trial standards under international human rights law.

They addressed allegations of illegal arrest and detention in connection with the case, torture and ill-treatment of Montagnard suspects, unexplained deaths in custody, allegations of terrorism, restrictions on freedom of expression and media participation, discrimination against indigenous peoples and repression of Montagnards’ religion and beliefs.

Montagnard is a term coined by French colonialists to describe a grouping of about 30 ethnic minorities in Vietnam’s Central Highlands. Since 1975, after the Vietnam War, the government has implemented a migration policy, bringing more than three million people to the region.

According to government statistics in 2019, indigenous Montagnards accounted for 39% of Dak Lak province’s total population of 5.8 million.

The January trial followed attacks on June 11, 2023 when dozens of Montagnards, divided into two groups, attacked the headquarters of the People’s Committee and the police of Ea Tieu and Ea Ktur communes in Dak Lak province. Four police officers, two commune officials, and three civilians died in the attacks.

The trial was attended by 94 defendants with19 lawyers, while six defendants were tried in absentia. U.N. experts noted that the six had no legal representation in court.

At the end of the trial, 10 people were sentenced to life in prison on charges of terrorism against the government.

Forty-three people received prison sentences ranging from six to 20 years on terrorism charges. A further 45, including the six tried in absentia, received prison sentences ranging from three-and-a-half to 11 years on terrorism charges. Two others were sentenced to prison terms ranging from nine months to two years on charges of concealing criminals and helping others illegally enter and exit Vietnam.

The rapporteurs said most coverage by Vietnamese media relied on information provided by the Ministry of Public Security under the direction of the Central Propaganda Department, leading to censorship and self-censorship.

“Senior Vietnamese government officials made highly prejudicial pretrial public comments about the defendants’ perceived responsibility for terrorist crimes, and state-controlled media (including television) both reported on the defendants as ‘terrorists’ and published images of some of the recently captured defendants,” the experts said in their letter.

The rapporteurs also questioned the use of a “mobile court” for the Dak Lak trial.

“Vietnamese law has never sought to regulate the use of mobile court procedures, such that they lack an adequate legal basis and are necessarily arbitrary in operation,” they said, noting that the court didn’t follow procedures prescribed by international law, which requires similar cases to be treated the same way.

“An apparent purpose of ‘mobile trials’ is to ‘educate’ the public about the law,” the rapporteurs said.

“However, we are concerned that the proceedings did not perform a legitimate educative function but resulted in publicly embarrassing, shaming, humiliating or degrading the defendants and their families before other members of their community.”

On Aug. 15, Vietnam’s Permanent Mission to the U.N. requested a two-month extension to respond to the questions in the letter. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not answer RFA’s calls seeking comment.

Vietnam labels 2 foreign-based groups ‘terrorist organizations’

10 defendants given life sentences for Dak Lak attacks

‘Ethnic divisions’

The U.N. experts said they were also concerned the defendants didn’t have adequate access to lawyers during their long detention and when the trial took place, only 19 lawyers were assigned to 100 defendants who didn’t have the right to choose their own lawyers.

They also said there were indications that some arrests weren’t based on reasonable grounds backed with evidence.

“We are concerned that the heavy security response after the 11 June 2023 attacks, including the state’s co-option of civilian vigilantes (of majority Kinh ethnicity), may have resulted in the arrest of innocent people,” they said.

“These risks were accentuated by ethnic divisions, with Montagnards being publicly blamed by state officials and media, encouraging potential profiling and arrests on the basis of minority ethnic status. We note that arrests of detention on discriminatory grounds are arbitrary and unlawful.”

Vietnam accused all those involved of having links with U.S. and Thai-based Montagnard organizations who they say helped plan the 2023 attack..

On March 6, 2024, the Ministry of Public Security designated the group Montagnards Stand for Justice, or MSFJ, a terrorist organization. It was established in Thailand in 2019 with a representative in the U.S.

Vietnamese authorities said the group operates by spreading propaganda to recruit members, providing training and funding attacks with the aim of establishing an autonomous state in the Central Highlands.

The government said MSFJ organized the 2023 attack with the aim of establishing Montagnard state.

MSFJ rejected the charges saying they are aimed at preventing the group from documenting rights abuses against Montagnards.

Founding member Y Quynh Bdap, who has been living in Thailand since 2018, is on remand in Bangkok, facing possible extradition at Vietnam’s request, to serve a 10-year sentence for “terrorism” in connection with the attack. Vietnam sent public security officers to attend his trial.

The rapporteurs said they were worried for the safety of Montagnards in Thailand given reports of illegal abductions by Vietnamese security agencies of activists such as blogger Truong Duy Nhat and freelance journalist Duong Van Thai.

They said international human rights law prohibits forcing people back to places when there are grounds for believing they would be at risk of “irreparable harm on account of torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, or other serious human rights violations.”

They concluded by noting signs of continued discrimination against Montagnards in the Central Highlands.

“The excessive response to the 11 June 2023 attack, the unfair mass trial of January 2024, the listing MSFJ as terrorist in March 2024, and the alleged intimidation of Vietnamese refugees in Thailand in March 2024 seem to be part of a larger and intensifying pattern of discriminatory and repressive surveillance, security controls, harassment and intimidation against the Montagnard indigenous minority peoples.”

Translated by RFA Vietnamese. Edited by Mike Firn.

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

Hurricane Beryl: Environment Texas’ Luke Metzger, other experts available for interviews

Newswire Editor — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 20:49:20 +0000

Gov. Greg Abbott issued a statement Wednesday afternoon urging Texans to take precautions as Hurricane Beryl approaches the state. At the time, the National Hurricane Center showed a significant portion of Texas’ Gulf Coast in the “forecast cone” projecting where Hurricane Beryl could go over the next few days. While we’re hoping the storm weakens quickly, and NHC meteorologists predict Beryl will only be a tropical storm by the time it reaches the region on Monday, currently Beryl is tearing through the Caribbean Sea as an unprecedented major (111+ m.p.h.) early-season hurricane that at one point rated a Category 5 (157+ m.p.h.).

Environment Texas Executive Director Luke Metzger has experienced and spoken to the media about innumerable severe weather events over his 18 years running Environment America’s Lone Star State group.

Metzger has been a trusted, articulate source for print, web and broadcast journalists alike on everything from 2017’s devastating Hurricane Harvey and its impacts on public health to the 2021 ice storm that shut down much of Texas -- and its electric grid -- and another paralyzing winter storm this past January.

In advance of this tropical cyclone, Metzger can discuss a variety of environmental concerns, from the possible damage to oil and gas infrastructure in the Gulf to the ways that renewable energy sources and battery storage can make life easier during a storm. During the storm, Metzger’s extensive network of in-state contacts could prove useful. And after the storm, he can provide context for any number of situations Beryl may cause.

Please don’t hesitate to reach out to Luke directly or email communications@publicinteretnetwork.org and we’ll get Luke or one of our national experts to help you. Our national experts, detailed in our 2024 Hurricane Season Coverage guide, also can discuss a variety of potential environmental, health and consumer problems. As with all hurricanes in our modern age, wind and storm surge pose physical threats -- and price gougers, scammers and unethical contractors pose financial threats.

Here is our most recent data and graphics on potential environmental, health and consumer dangers created by hurricanes -- and the flooding that follows:
Report about Superfund sites.
Information about coal ash.
Information about toxic waste facilities.
Information about portable generator safety
Information on dealing with storm debris
Consumer tip sheet on how to protect yourself from storms and con artists

One more recommendation:

Discard hazardous products: Many common household products including cleaners, batteries, paint and pesticides contain hazardous chemicals. These things can leak into groundwater during major flooding events such as hurricanes, harming people and the environment. If a bottle, can or other packaging has a warning label on it, make sure that it is secured high above the possible flood level. And if the product is used up, make sure to take it to your local hazardous waste disposal center.

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

Blinken Says Israeli Units Accused of Serious Violations Have Done Enough to Avoid Sanctions. Experts and Insiders Disagree.

by Brett Murphy — Wed, 08 May 2024 23:15:00 +0000

by Brett Murphy

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Years before Oct. 7, soldiers and officers in four Israeli security force units committed what the U.S. State Department would later determine to be serious human rights violations against Palestinians.

In one incident in 2019, an Israel Defense Forces soldier shot and killed an unarmed Palestinian man on the side of a road in the West Bank. That soldier was given no jail time — only three months of community service.

Under the U.S. Leahy Laws, the government must disqualify any military or law enforcement unit from receiving assistance if there’s credible information that the group had committed violations like rape or extrajudicial killings, unless the offending entity has taken adequate steps to punish the perpetrator.

On Friday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Congress he had determined the punishments for the soldiers and officers in all four cases — including the community service sentence — to be adequate, according to a State Department memo to Congress. The units won’t be disqualified from receiving American military assistance. The names of the units were previously reported by Al-Monitor. ProPublica obtained the memo with Blinken’s justifications.

Some experts disagreed with that decision, saying that the punishment Israel meted out in the 2019 case was not adequate. They said the decision to continue the support was another example of special treatment for Israel.

Community service is “not what would be considered appropriate punishment,” said Tim Rieser, a longtime aide to former Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the chief author of 1997 laws that the State Department is meant to enforce.

Rieser said Blinken’s justification was “not consistent with how the law was written and how it was intended to be applied.” A former State Department official said it was a “mockery.” Both officials, along with another congressional aid, were especially troubled that during the years it had taken to assess whether Israel had sufficiently punished the perpetrators, the State Department had apparently not disqualified the units from U.S. support.

A State Department spokesperson did not answer questions about Blinken’s memo but told ProPublica the agency has taken “extensive steps to implement the Leahy law for all countries that receive applicable U.S. assistance, including Israel.” The spokesperson said the agency is continuing to review reports of violations. “Israel has a moral obligation and a strategic imperative to protect civilians,” the spokesperson added.

ProPublica previously reported that a panel of internal State Department experts, known as the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum, had sent Blinken multiple cases of violations, along with recommendations to cut units off from assistance, months ago. The recommendations were an unusual escalation after years of deferential treatment of Israel, according to people close to the forum’s activities.

Following the report three weeks ago, Blinken promised to announce his determinations “in the coming days.” At the time, several media outlets reported that the State Department was poised to sanction one of the units, Netzah Yehuda, the ultra-Orthodox military battalion that has operated in the West Bank and been accused of multiple human rights violations.

The vetting forum reviewed the unit for an incident in which commanders gagged, handcuffed and left an elderly Palestinian American man for dead. (The commanders were reprimanded and demoted but did not face prison time, according to the vetting forum’s meeting minutes.) Israel’s leaders responded by fiercely pushing back against U.S. plans to withhold American assistance from the battalion. Blinken has since delayed his decision on it, Axios reported.

Netzah Yehuda is not mentioned in Blinken’s Friday memo. In the meantime, the unit has apparently remained eligible for U.S. military assistance despite the finding that there was a violation.

“That’s an outrage and another example of special treatment for Israel,” said Charles Blaha, the former director of the State Department’s Office of Security and Human Rights and a former participant in the forum. The larger issue, he added, is that “there are literally dozens of Israeli security force units that have committed gross violations of human rights and remain eligible for assistance because of the State Department’s failure to apply the law.”

Blinken’s letter to Congress comes at a time of increasing tension between the U.S. and Israel. Last week, President Joe Biden withheld a shipment of 3,500 bombs to Israel after the country pledged to ignore international outcry and go forward with its incursion into the southern Gazan city of Rafah. It was the first known time since Hamas’ terrorist attack that the administration has halted an arms shipment. Then, on Wednesday, Biden told CNN he would not supply bombs and shells to Israel that it can use to attack Rafah, where there are 1 million civilians sheltering.

Blinken is required to inform Congress about any State Department findings of gross human rights violations that he considered to be remediated. His memo on Friday detailed four cases he apparently decided met that standard.

In one case, a senior officer in the Israeli National Police’s Ma’avarim unit deceived and coerced six women, including some in the Israeli military, to have sex with him. Another officer serving in the West Bank’s COGAT unit forced at least two Palestinian women who were seeking permits to work in Israel to have sex with him between 2013 and 2016. Both of those officers are currently serving significant prison sentences, punishments that experts said are an adequate response from the Israeli government.

In March 2016, Elor Azaria, a medic in the Israel Defense Forces’ 92nd Shimshon Battalion, killed a 20-year-old Palestinian, Abed al-Fatah al Sharif. Al Sharif was disarmed and handcuffed on the ground after stabbing an Israeli soldier when Azaria shot and killed him. Azaria was charged and convicted with manslaughter and appealed before serving nine months in prison.

The case received enormous attention in the Israeli media, spurring debate in Israel about whether the punishment was adequate.

However, experts, including some State Department officials, say the handling of the fourth case is egregious.

In that case in 2019, an unnamed officer from the Shahar Search and Rescue Battalion, which looks for Hamas weaponry and intelligence, shot and killed an unarmed Palestinian man named Ahmed Manasra. Manasra had pulled over on his way home from a wedding to help a woman on the side of the road. The soldier also shot and wounded another driver, who the soldier assumed had been throwing stones at Israeli motorists.

The soldier reached a plea deal with military judges, who acknowledged he had “made a mistake of fact when he shot the victim,” before sentencing him to three months of community service and a three-month suspended sentence. He was also removed from the military.

The Israeli military said during court proceedings that the soldier had “wrongly assumed” that Manasra was the stone thrower and that there was a report of a possible terror attack in the area before the incident, according to The Associated Press.

The Israeli Embassy declined to comment.

“To the best of the Department of State’s knowledge, the investigation and judicial processes were credible,” Blinken noted in his memo to Congress. He determined that the Israelis “are taking effective steps to bring to justice the responsible member of the Shahar Battalion.”

Blaha, one of the former forum members, said if any other country offered such a paltry punishment, his office never would have accepted it as adequate remediation. “The whole process has been such a disappointment to me,” he said.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Brett Murphy.

Hong Kong’s tech city will destroy key wetland for birds: experts

By Matthew Leung for RFA Cantonese — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 04:39:46 +0000

Environmental groups have slammed a Hong Kong government plan for a high-tech urban development despite warnings it will destroy a crucial wetland habitat for migratory birds, including the endangered black-faced spoonbill.

The city's Advisory Council on the Environment approved a controversial environmental impact assessment for a high-tech development known as the San Tin Technopole on Monday, despite warnings from 10 environmental groups that it would cause the worst damage to the city's coastal wetland and fishpond habitat in 30 years.

"San Tin Technopole ... will cause the most extensive damage to wetlands in 30 years, and affect nearly 247 hectares of wetland conservation area and buffer zone land," the groups said in a joint statement on April 17.

It hit out at the government for massively extending the planned area covered by the project at the last minute, but not including the extended plans in the existing assessment.

"The authorities refused to comply with the legal requirements of the environmental impact assessment, which may seriously underestimate the damage caused by this development to the wetland and fishpond ecosystem," the statement said.

Officials had "omitted species and habitats" from their survey, and made dozens of "serious technical assessment and data errors,” it said.

Flyway for millions of birds

Hong Kong's coastal wetland forms part of the East-Asian Australasian Flyway, a route taken by tens of millions of migratory waterbirds including a large number of threatened and endangered species, according to the Worldwide Fund for Nature.

The birds rely on these habitats as a stopping off point to rest, feed and replenish their energy reserves while undertaking an arduous journey of more than 13,000 kilometers (8,000 miles) from breeding grounds as far north as the Arctic Circle to overwintering grounds as far south as Australia, according to the group's website.

Endangered black-faced spoonbills feed in fishponds at San Tin, where the government plans to build a high-tech urban development. (Hong Kong Conservancy Association)

Environmental groups say the development will also affect local populations of wading birds, including the Chinese pond heron and the little egret.

"The pond reclamation project at San Tin Technopole will cause irreversible damage to fish ponds and wetlands," the 10 environmental groups, which including Greenpeace, the Hong Kong Birdwatching Society and the Worldwide Fund for Nature, said, calling for a full public debate and review of the assessment, taking into account errors and omissions.

Meanwhile, the Liber Research campaign group said via its Facebook page on April 22 that the development was a "bulldozer-style development that has been questioned by environmental experts, who called it the biggest threat to coastal wetlands."

It said the ecological value of the existing agricultural lands, which include dozens of fishponds, had been ignored.

‘Invaluable assets’

The Hong Kong Birdwatching Society said in a statement on its website that the project wasn't even in line with mainland China's environmental policy.

"The ... wetland is a precious and unique coastal wetland resource in the Greater Bay Area, which should be protected to align with national policies," the group said, citing the Chinese government's 14th Five-Year Plan, which describes "clear waters and lush mountains" as "invaluable assets" to be preserved alongside human development.

This map shows the extent of the government’s last-minute expansion of the area covered by the San Tin Technopole development. (Hong Kong Birdwatching Society)

It said authorities in the neighboring province of Guangdong had recognized the importance of ecological corridors for migratory waterbirds in its territorial and spatial plan for 2020-2035, while the Outline Development Plan for the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area pledged to "comprehensively protect key wetlands of international and national importance in the region and join hands to introduce measures to protect cross-boundary coastal wetlands."

"The current development proposal of San Tin Technopole underplays the uniqueness of the [San Tin] wetlands in the Greater Bay Area and its importance in the International Flyway," the group said. "It does not align with [China's] national policy of Ecological Civilization."

Conflict of interest?

The Liber Research Group meanwhile noted that the current chairman of the Advisory Council on the Environment, John Chai, is also involved in the developing the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Innovation Park, of which the San Tin Metropole will form part. Chai is listed on the Park's official website as Alternate Chairperson.

Current affairs commentator Chung Kim-wah said the conflict of interest around John Chai alone would have raised tough questions in Hong Kong's Legislative Council, back in the day when opposition candidates were still allowed to stand in elections, before Beijing tightened its political grip.

Public scrutiny of such projects would have been far more detailed and taken much longer, and once had the power to force the government to take public opinion into account, Chung told RFA Cantonese.

"However, the current government allows members with obvious conflicts of interest to chair Advisory Council on the Environment meetings, so this final decision isn't surprising," Chung said.

"It seems the international convention on wetland conservation is no longer taken into consideration by the government," he said.

Environmental leaders Hui Chung-kang, left, World Wildlife Fund Hong Kong conservation manager, Chen Kochun, Greenpeace senior project director, Zhou Aiquan, Changchou Society Public Affairs Director, and Huang Xuemei, Hong Kong Bird Watching Society conservation officer join together to protest a development near a sensitive waterfowl and migratory bird habitat, April 17, 2024 in Hong Kong. (Hong Kong Conservancy Association)

A neighboring area of wetland at Mai Po Marshes and Inner Deep Bay was designated a protected site under the Ramsar Convention in 1995.

The Ramsar website describes the area, which lies around 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) to the west of the proposed San Tin Technopole, as an area of tidal mudflats and tidal shrimp ponds that is home to 13 globally threatened species of birds and 17 species of invertebrates new to science.

The site regularly held over 20% of the global population of Black-faced Spoonbill between 2007-2012, while 26 other species of waterbirds are found in numbers amounting to more than 1% of their regional population at Mai Po, it said.

A spokesman for Hong Kong's Environmental Protection Department said on April 22 that the environmental impact assessment process in Hong Kong was carried out according to "objective and clear principles, procedures, guidelines, requirements and criteria."

The department will now "review in detail" the assessment and comments "raised by the public," before making a final decision, he said.

However, Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee appeared pretty confident that the San Tin project is going ahead.

"In Hong Kong, the [Shenzhen-Hong Kong] Park is within the San Tin Technopole area, which will emerge as our city's largest I&T center by far - with some 300 hectares supporting Hong Kong's rise as an international I&T hub," Lee told the Park's launch ceremony in Shenzhen on April 18.

"After years of planning and the hard, smart work of many parties, the Park is fast approaching the operational phase," Lee said, adding: "More will follow."

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Matthew Leung for RFA Cantonese.

Vietnam should ask Cambodia to delay canal project: experts

By RFA Staff — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 10:24:38 +0000

Participants at a Vietnamese-sponsored consultation have suggested that Hanoi should ask Phnom Penh to delay a proposed canal project for further discussions, amid Vietnamese worries about the project’s environmental and economic impact.

Construction of the 180 km (112 mile) Funan Techo canal, connecting the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, with the Gulf of Thailand, is planned to begin later this year and to be completed within four years.

The proposed canal will include a section of the Mekong River, raising concern in Vietnam about the impact downstream, especially in Vietnam's rice-growing Mekong Delta. The canal could “reduce the flow of the river by up to 50% by the time it comes to Vietnam,” said Le Anh Tuan, a prominent Vietnamese scientist.

Vietnam needs more time for consultation in order to protect the river’s delta, home to 17.4 million people, Tuan told the meeting in the town delta of Can Tho.

Another expert, Dang Thanh Lam from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, said Vietnam must ask for an environment impact report from Cambodia.

The U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh also called for more information, saying that the Cambodian people as well as people in neighboring countries “would benefit from transparency on any major undertaking with potential implications for regional water and agricultural sustainability.”

“We urge authorities to coordinate closely with the Mekong River Commission (MRC) to provide additional project details and to participate fully in any appropriate environmental impact studies to help the MRC and member countries fully understand, assess, and prepare for any possible impacts of the project,” an embassy spokesperson said.

Ly Van Bon, the owner of the Bay Bon fish pond located on the Mekong river which was affected by sediment, shows redtail catfish inside his fish pond in Mekong's regional capital Can Tho, Vietnam, May 25, 2022. (Reuters/Athit Perawongmetha)

For its part, Cambodia said it had secured endorsement for the project from the MRC chairman – Lao President Thongloun Sisoulith.

Sisoulith has just visited Phnom Penh and, during a meeting with Cambodian Senate leader and former prime minister Hun Sen, he was asked to show his support for the canal.

“In response, the Laotian president, without hesitation, announced his support,” Cambodia’s Fresh News media outlet, which is supportive of the government, reported.

No obligation

Laos and Cambodia are both long-term allies of Vietnam but both have in recent years leaned more towards China.

Vietnam has repeatedly expressed concerns about the possible environmental and economic impacts of the project.

This month, a Vietnamese foreign ministry spokesperson urged Cambodia to provide information and an impact assessment on the water resources and ecological balance of the delta region.

In response, a senior Cambodian official said that Phnom Penh was not obliged to do so.

Cambodia’s Minister Delegate attached to the Prime Minister in charge of ASEAN affairs, So Naro, told the Khmer Times that Cambodia was not legally required to submit any document to Vietnam regarding the studies and construction of the Funan Techo canal.

Cambodia had submitted “all documents of the studies on the canal related to the impacts on the environment and the water resources” to the MRC, So Naro said. The MRC is an intergovernmental organisation in charge of the sustainable management of the Mekong basin.

“The Vietnamese authorities can request access to those files,” So Naro said.

Cambodia has insisted that the canal would not disrupt the flow of the Mekong.

The projected Funan Techo canal (in blue). (Google Maps/ RFA)

Officially known as the Tonle Bassac Navigation Road and Logistics System Project, the Funan Techo canal will be developed by a Chinese company at a cost of US$1.7 billion.

It will mean that more trade can flow directly to Cambodian ports, bypassing Vietnam. The Cambodian government said it would cut the transport costs and reduce dependence on Vietnamese ports.

It also said that the project will bring great social and economic benefits to 1.6 million Cambodians living along the canal.

Security questions

Besides the environment and economic impacts, analysts say Vietnam is also worried about the security implications of the canal.

There have been suggestions that the canal could allow Chinese navy ships to travel upstream from the Gulf of Thailand and the Chinese-developed Ream naval base on the Cambodian coast close to the border with Vietnam.

Cambodia has rejected such speculation with Hun Sen insisting that Cambodia and Vietnam “are good neighbors and have good cooperation in all fields.”

But Vietnam has been in dispute with China over some island chains in the South China Sea and it eyes China’s involvement in the region with suspicion.

Vietnam shares a long land border with Cambodia. Between 1977-1978 there was fighting between Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese troops during the so-called southwest border war, which led to a Vietnamese invasion and the establishment of a pro-Hanoi government in Cambodia.

The situation on Vietnam’s western border should get more attention because of “threats of untraditional security challenges, mostly over the Mekong delta,” said Nguyen The Phuong, a Vietnamese political scientist at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

“A loss of the Mekong's ability to sustain large scale food production will have tremendous impact on Vietnam's security in the south,” Phuong said.

“From my point of view, the western front is becoming more critical day by day but Vietnam is too distracted by maritime issues at the eastern front, or the South China Sea.”

Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang.

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

UN Human Rights Council again supports US regime change plans for Nicaragua

Alfred de Zayas and John Perry — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 05:16:47 +0000

When the United Nations sets up a “commission of inquiry,” it can result in a powerful analysis of violations of human rights law, such as the one appointed in 2021 to examine Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories and its Apartheid practices. But other commissions can become political platforms aimed at demonizing a particular government by crafting narratives that give the semblance of objectivity, while suppressing all evidence that contradicts the prevailing geopolitical consensus. The ultimate aim of such commissions is not to investigate or to provide advice or technical assistance, but to support a campaign of destabilization. They make it plausible to the world at large that the human rights of the population of the targeted country are being grossly violated and that the doctrine of “responsibility to protect” (known as R2P) should be activated. In other words, regime change, even by force, would be preferable to inaction. This vulgar weaponization of human rights is a favorite device in the tool kit of some hegemonial states. It is aided and abetted by non-governmental organizations financed by the hegemons and disseminated by the echo chambers of the mainstream media.

A case in point is the work of the UN’s “group of human rights experts on Nicaragua” (GHREN), appointed to investigate alleged violations in the country in the period since April 2018. The date is chosen because it marked the start of violent protests, which quickly turned into an attempted coup d’état. The violence lasted for three months and left over 250 people dead, including opponents of the government, government officials and sympathizers, and 22 police officers.

The group’s first report, in February of 2024, ran to 300 pages. It appeared to be very detailed: for example, it included a 9-page case study of events in one Nicaraguan city, Masaya, during the period April-July 2018. Yet despite this detail, the GHREN ignored the assignment which had been set for its work, which explicitly required it to investigate “all” relevant events. The report either omitted completely, or mentioned only very briefly, the many extreme acts of violence by those involved in the coup attempt. Instead, it focused only on alleged human rights violations by government officials and, in collecting evidence, the group gave preferential access to a number of NGOs which are highly critical of the Nicaraguan government.

The Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition, a group made up of organizations and individuals in the United States and Canada, Europe and Latin America, including Nicaragua itself, responded in detail to the GHREN’s work. Its letter calling for the report to be withdrawn was signed by prominent human rights experts, 85 different organizations and over 450 individuals. Despite the number of people who were in support, the letter and detailed evidence submitted received no response whatever.

Indeed, the GHREN continued its work, and in February of 2024 published a further report, this time without even passing mention of opposition violence. It made no reference to the Coalition’s submissions: it was as if the criticisms of the first report and the evidence substantiating them never existed.

As one of the human rights experts who was critical of the first report by the GHREN, and as one of the organizers of the Coalition response, we have worked together to produce a second letter, which has been sent to the GHREN and to the President and senior officials of the UN Human Rights Council. This new letter says that the latest report is “methodologically flawed, biased and should never have been published.” It contends that “excluding pertinent information submitted to the study group is a breach of responsible methodology, a violation of the ethos of every judicial or quasi-judicial investigation.” The letter is signed by ten prominent human rights experts and activists, 47 organizations and over 250 individuals in Nicaragua, USA and Europe, many with long experience in Nicaragua. (The Coalition is continuing to collect signatures, which will be sent in follow-up at a later date.)

What is wrong with the GHREN’s latest report? Many examples of bias and omissions can be found within its 19 pages. One is its reference to the amnesty announced by the Nicaraguan government in 2019 for those detained and found guilty of crimes, including even homicide, during the coup attempt. The amnesty was an outcome of negotiations with the Catholic Church and others, aimed at achieving reconciliation in the aftermath of the coup attempt. However, the GHREN portrays the amnesty as benefiting only the state itself, when, in fact, its main beneficiaries were more than 400 opposition figures, including coup organizers, who had been convicted of violent offences. One of the most prominent beneficiaries, Medardo Mairena, had organized several murderous attacks on police stations: the worst, in the small town of Morrito, led to five deaths and nine police officers being kidnapped and beaten. Despite his crimes, Mairena was portrayed as a victim by the GHREN: he was even one of the opposition figures invited to address the UN Human Rights Council in July of 2023.

A second example is the report’s treatment of migration. Initially, the report claimed that 935,065 people had left Nicaragua; i.e., that one in eight of the population had “fled the country since 2018.” This was the figure that received publicity, even though it was absurdly high. Within a few days the GHREN realized their mistake and revised their report, so that the version currently on the website says instead that 271,740 Nicaraguans have become asylum seekers and 18,545 Nicaraguans are recognized as refugees worldwide (fewer than 1 in 20 of the population). But the report still gives no attention to the evidence that most migration from Nicaragua in the past five years has been economic in motivation, given the effects of US coercive measures on the country, and the economic downturns which resulted from the coup attempt itself and from the subsequent Covid-19 pandemic. It also takes no account of the fact that many migrants return to Nicaragua after periods of working abroad. In other words, even the lower figure likely exaggerates the numbers of Nicaraguans who (in the report’s original words) “fled the country.”

The most egregious bias in the report is its treatment of opposition figures as victims. Yes, it is true that there have been arrests, imprisonments and the expulsion from the country (with US agreement and facilitation) of many of those arrested. But the GHREN’s report assumes that those affected are innocent of any crime and are merely being persecuted as opponents of the government. It feeds the narrative of Washington, its allies and corporate media that what happened in 2018 was peaceful protest, when in practice the violent coup attempt affected millions of Nicaraguans, with lives lost, public buildings destroyed, homes set on fire and scores of government officials and sympathizers kidnapped, tortured, wounded or killed. The GHREN ignored the plentiful, detailed evidence from the Coalition which presented a more accurate narrative of what happened.

It is vital that the UN Human Rights Council pay attention to these criticisms and thoroughly review its dealings with Nicaragua. It is clear that the current expert group has totally failed in its assignment to consider “all” relevant events since April 2018 and is behaving in a completely unprofessional manner. Its work should be stopped, and a genuine attempt should be made to work with the Nicaraguan government based on a proper understanding of the needs of its people and of their experience of the 2018 coup attempt. Above all, it should urge the removal of the unilateral coercive measures (wrongly referred to as “sanctions”, implying that they are legitiamte), which are worsening conditions for Nicaraguans, not improving them.

Coda by Alfred de Zayas

The dysfunctional situation described above is not without precedent. During my six years as Independent Expert on International Order (2012-18), I myself observed manipulations and double standards, and duly informed the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) that in my considered opinion some of my colleague rapporteurs were not rigorously observing their independent status and our code of conduct, particularly Article 6, which requires all rapporteurs to give due weight to all available information and to pro-actively seek explanations from all stakeholders, including the government of the state in questions, respecting the over-arching rule of audiatur et altera pars (“let the other side be heard as well”).

When in the summer of 2017 I sought an invitation to visit Venezuela on official mission, I encountered opposition within OHCHR, which attempted to dissuade me. When I did receive an invitation, thus breaking a 21-year absence of UN rapporteurs from Venezuela, I was surprised to receive letters from three major NGOs who actually asked me not to go, because I was not the “pertinent” rapporteur. Evidently these NGOs and some officials at OHCHR were “concerned” with my independence, as already demonstrated in 12 reports to the General Assembly and Human Rights Council, and feared accordingly, that I would write my own report on Venezuela, which would not necessarily support the ubiquitous US narrative.

It became clear to me that some officials at OHCHR were nervous that I would actually conduct a fair investigation, speak to all stakeholders on the ground and then make my own judgment. Indeed, I read and digested all the relevant reports of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. When I was on the ground in Venezuela I fact-checked these and other reports, which I found to be seriously deficient. I also consulted the reports of local non-governmental organizations in Venezuela, including those of Fundalatin, Grupo Sures and Red Nacional de Derechos Humanos, and read the economic analysis by the Venezuelan Professor Pasqualina Curcio.

When in November/December 2017 I became the first UN rapporteur to visit Venezuela in 21 years, I was subjected to pre-mission, during-mission, and post-mission mobbing. I endured a barrage of insults and even death threats. Notwithstanding an atmosphere of intimidation, my mission resulted in positive results, including the immediate release of opposition politician Roberto Picon (his wife and son appealed to me, I then submitted the case to the then Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza), the release of 80 other detainees, enhanced cooperation between UN agencies and the government, and new memoranda of understanding. The mission opened the door to the visits of several other rapporteurs including Professors Alena Douhan and Michael Fakhri, as well as by High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet. My report to the Human Rights Council in September 2018 addressed the root causes of problems, formulated proposals for solutions, incorporating the information received from all stakeholders, including the opposition parliamentarians, Chamber of Commerce, the press, diplomatic corps, church leaders, university professors, students and more than 40 NGOs of all colors. The report was criticized by mainstream NGOs in the US and Europe, for whom only those rapporteurs are praiseworthy who engage in “naming and shaming” and promote regime change.

Chapters 2 and 3 of my book The Human Rights Industry document the endemic problems in the functioning of OHCHR and the Human Rights Council that continue to cater to the priorities of the major donors. However, the general perception of OHCHR and the Human Rights Council promoted by the mainstream media gratuitously grants both institutions authority and credibility, without addressing the problems already exposed by a number of rapporteurss, including myself.

This dependence of OHCHR and the Human Rights Council on Washington and Brussels explains some of the abstruse decisions and resolutions adopted by the Council. Part of the problem lies in the ways in which staff members are recruited and in the procedures by which experts, including rapporteurs, independent experts and commission members, are appointed.

For example, it does not advance “geographical representation” simply by hiring someone from Mauritius or Indonesia, if that person has been trained and indoctrinated in US and UK universities. “Geographical diversity” does not necessarily ensure the representation of a spectrum of opinions and approaches to problems. It does not mean much when there are so and so many persons who are ticked off against a particular nationality; e.g., US, French, Russian, Chinese, South African. What is crucial is to ensure that all schools of legal thinking and philosophy are represented. What is important is that when a candidate from State X is recruited or appointed, that he/she have first and foremost the interests of the United Nations at heart, and that he/she is not a priori committed to support the interests of the US or one of the European powers. I do not challenge the competence or expertise of staff members and rapporteurs – I challenge their ethos and independence — their commitment to the values of the UN Charter and their commitment to impartiality.

There are other obstacles to impartiality. Indeed, some OHCHR staff members are penalized if they do their work properly and do NOT follow the orders coming from above, which are mostly US-Brussels friendly. It is a regrettable reality that the donors weigh heavily in setting the agenda. There is no mechanism to ensure that the code of conduct of rapporteurs is respected, in particular Article 6. The impunity for openly siding with the US and Brussels and ignoring the rest of the world is notorious. In other words, OHCHR and the Human Rights Council have been largely “hijacked” – as indeed the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Inter-American Court of Human Rights, European Court of Human Rights have been. This raises the issue that Juvenalis formulated in his sixth Satire (verses 346-7): Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? – “who will guard over the guardians?”

Experience shows that being a solid professional does NOT facilitate getting a promotion. One is likely to be penalized. Abiding by the “unwritten law” of “groupthink” and supporting the Western narratives does contribute to career development. And, alas, most staffers are first and foremost interested in their careers, and not necessarily in promoting human rights. As elsewhere, it is a job.

Some outside observers have understood what game is being played and what the rules are. Reality at OHCHR and the Human Rights Council is closer to Machiavellianism and Orwellianism than to the spirituality of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the ideals of Eleanor Roosevelt, René Cassin, Charles Malik, P.C. Chang and others. Notwithstanding these problems, we are optimistic that the system can be reformed, and we encourage all non-governmental people of good will and good faith to insist on reforming these institutions so that they serve all of humanity and not only the interests of a handful of powerful states. Among the NGOs that are making concrete proposals for reform are the International Human Rights Association of American Minorities and the Geneva International Peace Research Institute, both in consultative status with the United Nations.

The post UN Human Rights Council again supports US regime change plans for Nicaragua first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Alfred de Zayas and John Perry.

‘Engineered Elections’: Iran To Vote On Assembly Of Experts That May Elect Next Supreme Leader

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 09:59:01 +0000

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Experts demand safe routes to UK after 400 people die at the border

Cameron Thibos, Melissa Pawson — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 14:49:52 +0000

Revealed: Average of one death a month for past 25 years despite government spending £800m to stop Channel crossings

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Cameron Thibos, Melissa Pawson.

China, ASEAN unlikely to achieve Code of Conduct in 2024: experts

By RFA Staff — Wed, 07 Feb 2024 06:48:00 +0000

Recent developments in the South China Sea have highlighted the need for a legally-binding Code of Conduct for all competing parties in the disputed waters. Yet maritime analysts express doubt that such rules can be agreed any time soon.

China and countries from the Southeast Asian grouping ASEAN have been negotiating a Code of Conduct (COC) after reaching an initial Declaration of Conduct (DOC) of Parties in the South China Sea in 2002.

In 2018, ASEAN and Beijing managed to release the Single Draft Negotiating Text – or a draft agreement – and in July 2023 the two sides announced that they’d completed its second reading.

The third reading of the draft negotiating text is believed to have commenced in October 2023 and, according to a Chinese spokesperson, “the consultations on the COC are going smoothly.”

“Parties have adopted guidelines to accelerate consultations on the COC,” said Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning at a recent news briefing. “The issue of the South China Sea is highly complex and faces external interference.”

“We hope ASEAN countries will work with us toward the set target and speed up consultations for the early adoption of the COC.”

Members of the Philippine Coast Guard on board of BRP Melchora Aquino participate in a simulation exercise to improve search and rescue collaboration, and enforcement during the first trilateral coast guard exercise between the Philippines, Japan, and the U.S., at the coast of Bataan, Philippines in the South China Sea, June 6, 2023. (Reuters)

Chinese officials, and state-sanctioned academics, regularly point at the so-called “external interference” – a thinly-veiled reference to the United States and allies - as the main source of discord between Beijing and ASEAN.

“The biggest trouble in the South China Sea does not come from countries within the region but from external forces’ disturbances, which attempt to turn the South China Sea into a sea of conflict and a sea of war,” Song Zhongping, a Chinese military expert and TV commentator, was quoted by the tabloid Global Times as saying recently.

Major obstacles

China has submitted a number of provisions of the COC negotiating text that are clearly designed to stem any ‘external interference’, explained Carlyle Thayer, an emeritus professor of politics at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales Canberra.

One of China’s provisions says parties in the South China Sea “shall establish a notification mechanism on military activities, and to notify each other of major military activities if deemed necessary,” according to Thayer.

“The parties shall not hold joint military exercises with countries from outside the region, unless the parties concerned are notified beforehand and express no objection,” the provision reads.

This provision would block any joint military exercises, bilateral or multilateral, between ASEAN countries and the U.S., as well as Japan and other regional powers, unless Beijing agrees to them.

ASEAN member Vietnam disagreed with this provision and submitted its own, asking for only a notification of any impending joint or combined military exercise to take place within the South China Sea. It said such notifications should be made 60 days before the commencement of such a military exercise, Thayer told Radio Free Asia.

Nguyen Hung Son, vice president of the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam, said ASEAN “would never agree to such terms.”

“For instance, the Philippines and Singapore will voice protest,” Son said.

Another stumbling block is the exploration of natural resources in the South China Sea.

“China proposed that oil and gas exploration and development in disputed waters shall be carried out through coordination and cooperation among the littoral states to the South China Sea, and shall not be conducted in cooperation with companies from countries outside the region,” said Thayer.

“To that, Malaysia counter-proposed a provision saying that nothing in the COC shall affect the rights or obligations of Parties under international law, including the rights or ability to conduct activities with foreign countries or private entities of their choosing,” he added.

These two contentious issues alone could prove difficult, even impossible, to resolve.

“China seems to have inserted this provision [on oil exploration] in an attempt to coerce other countries into signing joint development agreements with Chinese companies,” regional analyst Ian Storey wrote in a publication by Singapore’s ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute.

“The Southeast Asian claimants view this gambit as an egregious violation of their sovereign rights under UNCLOS,” he said, referring to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

“But it is hard to see how China would agree to drop this provision because to do so would fundamentally undermine its own jurisdictional claims.”

Blame game

In light of recent tensions in the South China Sea, especially between China and the Philippines over a couple of atolls that lie within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone, Beijing seems to put the blame on Manila.

A protester holds a slogan during a rally outside the Chinese consulate in Makati, Philippines on Tuesday, Feb. 6, 2024. (AP)

The Chinese Communist Party’s publication China Daily this week published an opinion article which slammed Manila’s efforts to resupply its military outpost on the Second Thomas Shoal, calling it a “dishonest approach” and a violation of international law.

“The Philippines’ choice is not only crucial to the comprehensive, effective and faithful implementation of the DOC, but will also have a long-term impact on the ongoing consultations on the Code of Conduct in the South China Sea and the effective application of the COC in the future,” reads the article.

The hawkish mouthpiece Global Times, for its part, alleged that “the Philippines has been calculating something new – it now believes that standing absolutely in line with ASEAN no longer brings itself maximum interest.”

“The Philippines wishes to strive for more interests for its own in the third reading of the COC text, by continuing to coordinate with the U.S. in its Indo-Pacific Strategy,” the paper said.

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos indicated on several occasions that his country may seek to form bilateral codes of conduct with neighboring countries to prevent incidents at sea. Marcos recently visited Hanoi, where he and Vietnamese leaders agreed in principle on maritime cooperation.

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., right, and Vietnamese President Vo Van Thuong inspect honor guards during a welcome ceremony in Hanoi, Vietnam Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2024. (VNA via AP)

Although Hanoi, due to its so-called “bamboo diplomacy,” would not want to be seen as taking sides in any dispute, the agreement will no doubt be deemed by Beijing as an attempt by Manila “to forge its own clique in the South China Sea,” the paper said.

With stark differences remaining on the most critical issues, it’s hard to see how the China-ASEAN COC negotiations are “going on the right track with its own pace” and “the conclusion of the COC is not far away,” as claimed by Chinese officials.

“Back in July last year, ASEAN and China committed to concluding a COC within three years but I'm still skeptical,” said Bill Hayton, associate fellow in the Asia-Pacific Program at the think tank Chatham House in the United Kingdom.

“I think this is one of those efforts from China to try to talk up the COC and make it seem like it’s inevitable so as to roll over any opposition to the Chinese side's preferred version of the text,” Hayton added.

Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang.

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

Why Are Our Regional Experts Expecting More War in Every Corner?

Melvin Goodman — Fri, 02 Feb 2024 07:00:10 +0000

Photograph Source: pushypenguin – CC BY 2.0 Deed

“Kim Jong-un has made a strategic decision to go to war. The danger is already far beyond the routine warnings in Washington, Seoul and Tokyo about Pyongyang’s ‘provocations’.”

– Robert Carlin (former State Department analyst) and Siegfried S. Hecker (nuclear scientist and former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory), Stimson Center website 38 North, Discussion of North Korea attack against South Korea, January 11, 2024.

“It’s reached a very, very high level of tension. War could essentially happen anytime.”

– Lyle Goldstein, Director of Asia engagement at Defense Priorities, Discussion of Chinese attack against Taiwan.

“The implications of Putin’s victory in Ukraine…will only encourage more threats and more war, first in Europe and then in Asia.”

– Michael McFaul, professor at Stanford University and former ambassador to Russia, Substack, January 26, 2024.

“The world war potential is really, really significant.”

– Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen, New York Times, January 30. 2024.

Nicholas Kristof, opinion columnist for the New York Times, asked last week if American anxiety about war can become self-fulfilling. I don’t believe so, but I do believe that the various experts, cited above, are irresponsibly anticipating an outbreak of war without any evidence to support such assertions. It must be emphasized that there is no hard evidence available for any of these lines of dangerous speculation that is available to those outside the intelligence community. Furthermore, they neglect the larger geopolitical picture that suggests various deterrents to the wars they are anticipating.

These “expert” opinions receive enormous attention in the mainstream media, however, particularly in the New York Times and the Washington Post. This certainly contributes to the anxiety of the American people. The irresponsible debate that is currently taking place regarding going to war against Iran adds to that anxiety, and puts a great deal of pressure on the Biden administration, already facing uncertain reelection prospects.

McFaul’s expectation of an expanded war with Russia is particularly unworthy. McFaul, an academic who was an ambassador to Russia for the Obama administration, confessed that he believed that Russian President Vladimir Putin “surely will be satiated if, God forbid, he succeeds in annexing more of Ukrainian territory.” But after a trip to Lithuania last week and meetings with government officials and regional experts, he shares their fears that “Putin is only getting started.” McFaul believes that Putin has “transformed Russia into a wartime economy,” and that there is a possibility of a “direct, conventional war between NATO and Russia.”

McFaul’s arguments would make some sense if it were not for the fact that Russia has done so poorly against the inadequately trained and supplied Ukrainian forces on its border. Putin’s military has failed in key conventional situations and, as a result, has been forced to withdraw from attacks on Kyiv, Kharkov, and Kherson. The long-term prospects for Russia’s economy are very weak, and Russia has gone hat in hand with Third World states such as Iran and North Korea for military weaponry.

Moscow’s western border is studded with NATO members as well as a NATO organization that has significantly increased its military prowess. Over the past year, NATO has increased its military spending by nearly $200 billion, which nearly equals Russia’s annual defense budget. This argues strongly against Russia undertaking military action in the West against any of the 31 members of NATO.

The argument from Carlin and Hecker is particularly irresponsible because they have no way of knowing if North Korea’s Kim Jong-un has reached a drop-dead decision to go to war, which would be suicidal in any event. Since Kim came to power in 2011, he has used his nuclear weapons program to attract attention from the West in order to engage in diplomatic negotiations. There is no reason to believe that the current test of his strategic inventory is any different at this stage. It is unlikely that Kim would make a decision to go to war without the approval of China, just as his grandfather sought the approval of Stalin and Mao before invading the South in 1950. The last thing that China’s Xi Jinping would want right now would be a regional war between North and South Korea that would bring the United States and Japan into the war.

Germany’s former ambassador to North Korea, Thomas Schafer, makes far more sense in arguing that Kim is resorting to a buildup of tensions in order to drive a hard bargain should Donald Trump return to the White House. This would, of course, be consistent with Pyongyang’s past efforts to begin negotiations, which have involved cycles of threat and engagement. The United States has contributed to the tension by maintaining a policy of non-recognition of North Korea, which leaves little room for diplomacy and far too much room for reliance on military maneuvering. Many of North Korea’s weapons tests have followed military exercises between the United States and South Korea.

Goldstein’s anticipation of an imminent Chinese attack against Taiwan is also puzzling in view of the improved relations between President Joe Biden and Xi Jinping as well as the overall improvement of relations between Washington and Beijing. Ian Bremmer, founder of Eurasia Group, believes that the “biggest upside surprise of recent months has got to be the stabilization of U.S.-China relations.” Military-to-military talks have resumed, and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has held private talks with China’s top diplomat.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media is predictably advocating the use of greater military force by the United States. In recent days, for example, the Washington Post has run lead editorials that were titled “North Korea goes from bad to much, much worse” and “The U.S. needs to strike Iran, and make it smart.” The New York Times ran a long article (“A Worried NATO Prepares for a Russian Invasion”) that gives credibility to the idea that Putin “could invade a NATO nation over the coming decade” and that NATO “might have to face his forces without U.S. support.”

Have we forgotten so soon that it was the Bush administration’s misuse of military power against Iraq in 2003 that led to the chaos that now dominates the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. If ever there were a time for official Washington to take a deep breath and to consider the diplomatic options for dealing with Iran and North Korea as well as Russia and China, this is it.

The post Why Are Our Regional Experts Expecting More War in Every Corner? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Melvin Goodman.

If Senators want to protect kids, they need to listen to human rights experts and fix their legislation. Otherwise they’re helping Big Tech.

Newswire Editor — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 19:29:12 +0000

"There are people that are still digging through the rubble, for their loved ones, for their babies."

"Why is it urgent that we pass this resolution? Over 26,000 Palestinians now have been killed. The majority of them are women and children," said resolution sponsor Ald. Rossana Rodríguez Sanchez of the 33rd Ward, according to the Chicago Tribune. "There are people that are still digging through the rubble, for their loved ones, for their babies. Weeks of digging through the rubble."

Also sponsored by Ald. Daniel La Spata of the 1st Ward, the resolution calls for "a permanent cease-fire to end the ongoing violence in Gaza" as well as "humanitarian assistance including medicine, food, and water to be sent into the impacted region, and the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages.

The measure—which will be sent to the Illinois congressional delegation and White House—also advocates for "plans to protect civilian population in the region in particular to support the needs of women, children, persons with disabilities, and the elderly."

Wednesday's 24-23 vote came after Johnson cleared the chambers due to disruptions during the debate over the symbolic resolution. The council previously planned to vote last week but was delayed after a request led by Ald. Debra Silverstein of the 50th Ward, the only Jewish member, related to an International Holocaust Remembrance Day resolution.

Observers interrupted Silverstein on Wednesday when she attempted to express her "disappointment and frustration" that the council was voting on what she called a "one-sided, lopsided resolution" rather than crafting one that "could have gained unanimous support."

As the Chicago Sun-Times reported:

As Silverstein spoke about the October 7 attack, a man in the audience yelled "Wadea was murdered because of your lies." The man then exited the council chambers on his own to applause and high-fives.
He was referring to Wadea Al-Fayoume, a 6-year-old boy who was stabbed to death in Plainfield a week after the Hamas attack. The boy's mother, who was wounded, had called 911 to say her landlord was attacking her. Police said they were targeted because of their Muslim faith.

The Tribune noted that "the final push to pass the resolution included an endorsement Monday from powerful unions like the Chicago Teachers Union and a widespread school walkout Tuesday that included cease-fire calls from hundreds of high school students. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who attended the start of the meeting, also threw his support behind the resolution."

The city's progressive mayor personally lobbied for the resolution and called for a cease-fire at a press conference last week.

In These Timesshared some remarks from the public comment period preceding the vote in Chicago on Wednesday:

Cease-fire advocate Marty Levine, a member of Jewish Voice for Peace, said, "I do this because I believe it is what I, as a Jew, must do." He continued: "The lessons we are required to learn from the Holocaust are that it can never happen again and we can never allow it to happen again. 'Never again' is not for some people, it is for all. We are taught that to save one life is to save all of humanity."
40th Ward resident Jennifer Husbands said, "We have bore witness to the mass murder of Palestinians." Noting that a majority of likely voters and three-quarters of Democrats support a cease-fire, she argued that "our tax dollars are being used to carpet bomb Palestinians" rather than fund services like housing, education, and gun violence prevention. "As Tupac said, 'They got money for war but they can't feed the poor.'"

The United States gives Israel $3.8 billion in annual military aid and since the war started, U.S. President Joe Biden has sought a new $14.3 billion package for the country while also bypassing congressional oversight to arm Israeli forces who have been accused of genocide in a South African-led case now before the International Court of Justice.

Reutersreported Wednesday that when asked for comment on Chicago's resolution, "the White House, which has said it is pressing Israel to avoid civilian casualties in Gaza, referred to previous statements that a cease-fire would only benefit Hamas." Still, peace advocates welcomed the vote in the county with the country's largest Palestinian population.

"Today was a test for our city and we passed," declared CodePink co-director Danaka Katovich. "Our city took a stance firmly against genocide and in support of a cease-fire... This is just the start of what the movement for Palestine can accomplish together."

The Chicago arms of IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace said in a statement: "We are proud that Chicago City Council heeded the calls of Palestinians and over a thousand Chicago Jews to support the growing movement demanding an end to the genocide in Palestine. In the wake of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we affirm that never again means never again for anyone and will continue to organize until there is a cease-fire and the liberation of Palestinians."

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

What Does the ICJ’s Provisional Ruling Mean for Gaza? Experts Preview Political Pressure on Israel

Democracy Now! — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 15:34:21 +0000

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

Can Israel Ignore World Court’s Order? Experts Weigh in on ICJ Genocide Case

Democracy Now! — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 15:33:35 +0000

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

Climate change in South China Sea will have global weather impact: experts

By Subel Rai Bhandari for RFA — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 10:35:11 +0000

The impact of climate change in the South China Sea and its surrounding areas on the local and global weather system could be “profound,” new scientific research has found.

The “unique characteristics” of climate change in the South China Sea and surrounding area (SCSSA) – such as the Indo-Pacific region, Southeast Asia, and the Tibetan Plateau – include rapid warming in key regions, leading to increased precipitation during the Asian summer monsoon and notable shifts in the frequency and origin of tropical cyclones, the researchers said in a study published in the Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Research journal on Tuesday.

The alterations in weather patterns within this region have a ripple effect on a global scale, influencing atmospheric circulation, oceanic currents, and the overall climate system, the researchers said.

The South China Sea, located in the eastern part of Southeast Asia, is a partially enclosed sea surrounded by various nations such as China, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia. Renowned for its diverse biological richness, it plays a crucial role in the worldwide climate system.

“Climate change in the South China Sea and its surrounding areas is very complex. It has a significant impact on shaping not only regional climates but also exerting far-reaching impacts on weather and climate patterns across the globe,” said Song Yang, a professor at Sun Yat-sen University in Zhuhai, China.

The South China Sea is experiencing a significant rise in sea surface temperatures due to global warming, leading to more powerful typhoons and hurricanes with increased frequency and severity, resulting in catastrophic consequences, substantial loss of life and property damage in coastal areas.

Climate change has also disrupted rainfall patterns in the area, leading to extreme weather events like droughts or heavy rains, which significantly impact agriculture, water resources, and ecosystems.

This week’s study highlighted the Hadley circulation’s expansion, a key atmospheric pattern between the equator and subtropics, and a broader influence on the Madden-Julian Oscillation, an essential tropical atmospheric disturbance.

The researchers said that increased atmospheric convection over the SCSSA can result in abnormal descending air movements, leading to drought conditions and increased humidity in southern China, South Asia, and northern Africa during the boreal – or northern region – spring and summer.

The paper forecasts increased precipitation across South Asia, East Asia, and northern Australia, attributed to warmer sea surface temperatures, a heightened water vapor supply, and intensified circulations over the South China Sea.

The research also indicates that under various projected future scenarios, the impacts of climate change in the SCSSA on both local and distant weather and climate extremes are likely to intensify.

Global impacts of climate change in the SCSSA. (Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Research)

Last week, the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said the global temperature reached a record high in 2023, fast approaching the critical 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold above pre-industrial levels, a key upward limit in the 2015 Paris climate agreement to save the earth from devastating impacts.

Utilizing six leading international datasets, the WMO reported Friday a new annual average temperature of 1.45 C compared to the pre-industrial era (1850-1900), with every month from June to December setting new records.

Notably, July and August were the hottest months ever recorded. Regional temperature breakdown was not provided.

Midway through last year, the Pacific Ocean region transitioned from the cooling effects of La Niña to the warming influence of El Niño. Since El Niño typically significantly impacts global temperatures after it peaks, 2024 is expected to be even warmer, according to scientists.

“While El Niño events are naturally occurring and come and go from one year to the next, longer-term climate change is escalating, and this is unequivocal because of human activities,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo.

Long-term monitoring of global temperatures, alongside other indicators like atmospheric greenhouse gas levels, ocean heat and acidification, sea level, sea ice extent, and glacier mass balance, provide insights into the changing climate, blamed primarily on fossil fuel usage.

Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Subel Rai Bhandari for RFA.

Experts denounce trips to Xinjiang as ‘genocide tourism’

By Gulchehra Hoja for RFA Uyghur — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 21:32:04 +0000

The Chinese government has thrown open the door for tourists to Xinjiang. Or at least those it deems worthy of an invite.

While officials previously let in diplomats, journalists and those considered “friends of China,” they are now presenting the restive far-western region as a tourist destination of sorts in a bid to remove some of the tarnish from China’s image as a human rights violator in the far-western region in the eyes of the international community.

Nearly 400 delegations and groups consisting of more than 4,300 people from various countries and international organizations visited the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in 2023, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said at a press conference on Jan. 5.

Visitors included government officials, diplomats, religious figures, experts, scholars, and journalists as well as ordinary travelers, he said. Unlike travel in the rest of China, however, visits remain by invitation only and visitors are led on government-sponsored tours.

These include trips to mosques and heritage sites “to see how Xinjiang’s traditional culture is protected,” Wang said. “They went to local factories, businesses and farms to learn about Xinjiang’s production and development, and visited ordinary households where they saw the happy life of people of various ethnic groups.”

“Seeing is believing,” he said. “People are not blind to the truth. For certain countries, they are comfortable telling lies about genocide and forced labor in Xinjiang…. Xinjiang will keep its door open to the world.”

Foreign envoys visit an exhibition on Xinjiang's anti-terrorism and de-radicalization work in Urumqi, capital of northwestern China's Xinjiang region, Aug. 4, 2023. (Zhao Chenjie/Xinhua via Getty Images)

The move comes as China gets ready for its fourth Universal Periodic Review, or UPR — a Human Rights Council mechanism that calls for each U.N. member state to undergo a peer review of its human rights records every 4.5 years. The review is scheduled to be held in Geneva, Switzerland, on Jan. 23.

Authorities have tightly controlled who enters Xinjiang, where harsh repression of Uyghurs and other Muslims in recent years has amounted to genocide and crimes against humanity, according to the United States, the United Nations, the parliaments of other Western countries and human rights groups.

Authorities in Xinjiang have detained an estimated 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims, destroyed thousands of mosques and banned the Uyghur language in schools and government offices. China has said that the “re-education camps” have been closed and has denied any policy to erase Uyghur culture.

A recent CBS documentary on China’s “rebranding” effort shows surveillance cameras and facial recognition devices monitoring Uyghurs. The name of the ancient town of Kashgar appears in Chinese as “Kashi” on signs and billboards, while the 15th-century Id Kah Mosque — closed to local Muslims since 2016 — has been transformed into a tourist attraction.

Through the scripted travel junkets, the Chinese government is spreading a narrative that Uyghurs live happy lives to cover up Beijing's severe human rights violations in Xinjiang, experts on the region said. Foreign visitors, in turn, have perpetuated the narrative through photos and posts on their social media accounts.

Criticism from rights groups

The dissemination of propaganda and China’s efforts to enhance the image of Xinjiang have sparked criticism from human rights groups.

Claudia Bennett, a legal and program officer at Human Rights Foundation, said the orchestrated visits conceal the harsh realities of forced family separations, arbitrary detentions of millions in concentration or forced labor camps, and thousands of Uyghurs living in exile and forcibly rendered stateless.

“In a strategic effort to legitimize its colonization of the Uyghur region, the Chinese Communist Party carefully organizes propagandist visits for diplomats, journalists and religious scholars,” she told Radio Free Asia. “These tours are designed to whitewash the CCP’s gross human rights violations.”

The U.S.-based Uyghur Human Rights Foundation, or UHRP, called the visits “genocide tourism” in a report issued last Aug. 30, saying that they help China conceal genocide and crimes against humanity occurring in Xinjiang.

Dolkun Isa, president of the World Uyghur Congress, took the criticism of the junkets a step further.

“Collaborating with China’s propaganda equates to complicity in genocide – a grave crime,” he said. “Humanity will not forget, and the Uyghur nation will not forget. Those involved will be held accountable before history."

Hector Dorbecker, counselor for economic-commercial and financial affairs at the Embassy of Mexico in Beijing, tries to play dutar, a long-necked two-stringed lute, in Jiayi village of Xinhe county in northwestern China's Xinjiang region, Aug. 2, 2023. (Zhao Chenjie/Xinhua via Getty Images)

Travel and excursion propaganda to portray life in Xinjiang as normal is part of “Beijing’s current strategy," explained Adrian Zenz, an expert on China’s policies in Xinjiang.

“They are showing Uyghurs and Uyghur culture, but not real and free people or culture, but a hollowed out version, a mummified version, like a CCP museum,” said Zenz, director of China studies at the U.S.-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

With the U.N.’s UPR session on the horizon, there can be little doubt that Beijing is touting the visits as a way to counter criticism of its policies in Xinjiang, said Sophie Richardson, former China director at Human Rights Watch.

The main problem with the UPR, however, is that there are no penalties for failing to comply or to correct abuses, Richardson added.

“Beijing has proven just how easy it is to manipulate the process to keep independent civil society, both inside and outside China, out of the process … and to submit a national report that is breathtakingly dishonest in its claims to upholding human rights.”

Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Abby Seiff.

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

Retracted study was based on unethically collected Uyghur DNA samples, experts contend

By Irade for RFA Uyghur — Fri, 05 Jan 2024 22:57:59 +0000

The recent retraction of an academic journal article that discussed the genetic information of Uyghurs and Kazakhs in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region has raised questions and concerns about ethical standards in scientific research, as people familiar with the study believe that genetic samples were obtained under duress.

In June, Elsevier, a Dutch publisher, announced the retraction of a scientific article published in 2019 in its journal “Forensic Science International: Genetics.” The retraction was attributed to the failure to meet necessary ethical approvals in scientific research, The Guardian reported.

The deleted study, entitled “Analysis of Uyghur and Kazakh populations using the Precision ID Ancestry Panel,” was authored by Chinese and Danish researchers in Ürümqi.

It involved the collection of blood and saliva samples from 203 Uyghurs and Kazakhs, which were then tested using genetic sequencing technology developed by the American biotech company Thermo Fisher Scientific.

The article's authors claimed that their findings could help police in using genetic sequencing techniques to identify suspects in cases.

"A clear knowledge of the genetic variation is important for understanding the origin and demographic history of the ethnicity of the populations in Xinjiang… [which] may offer an investigative lead for the police," the article said.

In the redaction notice, the journal said that an investigation revealed that those who collected the samples did not obtain the necessary ethical approval.

Forced collection

Yves Moreau, a professor at the University of Leuven in Belgium, has raised the concern that the Chinese government forcibly collects and arbitrarily uses genetic information from Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities. He told Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur Service that he had been critical of the 2019 study for a considerable period of time before it was finally deleted.

“The article that was retracted … That's a case that has been open for a very, very long time,” said Moreau, who added that he is working toward getting journals to reevaluate numerous articles, many on the same subject.

Moreau had also taken issue with a similar study published in the June 2022 issue of “Forensic Science Research,” a journal acquired by the Oxford University Press in 2023. That article detailed a study sponsored by China’s Ministry of Justice that analyzed the genetic information of Uyghurs based on blood samples collected from them.

The retracted 2019 article and the 2022 article was written by the same authors, Claus Børsting, Niels Morling, and Xalmurat Ismailjan (Halimureti Simayijiang) from the forensic genetics department at the University of Copenhagen.

Qelbinur Sidiq, shown speaking at the "Uyghur Tribunal" in 2021, says she saw samples collected from blood, as well as collections of fingerprints and retina scans. She said she herself was made to give all three in 2016. (Tolga Akmen/AFP)

Ismailjan is known to have ties to China's public security agencies and is listed as being jointly affiliated with Xinjiang Police College, The Guardian report said.

Experts like Moreau contend that the blood samples utilized in both studies were obtained from people who had no choice but to participate.

Moreau was reluctant to take on the 2022 article, he said, because one of editors-in-chief of the journal was from the Institute of Forensic Science of the Chinese Ministry of Justice.

“So I thought, well, if I'm going to write a letter asking for ethical re-evaluation of an article in that journal, I'm not going to get much of an answer,” he said.

But when the journal was acquired by Oxford University Press, he was able to raise the issue with that institution, he said.

“Now I can write to Oxford University and tell them, … you know, you were actually publishing this journal for the Institute of Forensic Science of the [Chinese] Ministry of Justice,” said Moreau.

In an email sent to Irene Treacy, vice chancellor of the University of Oxford, Moreau noted that "such consent should be given voluntarily, and he does not believe that the Uyghurs consented to [biometric data collection] voluntarily."

After Mr. Moreau raised the issue, the editorial departments of the University of Copenhagen and the editor departments of the aforementioned journals replied via email that they would investigate the matter, he explained.

Coerced samples

Witnesses have observed coerced genetic data collection both inside China’s secretive “reeducation camps” in Xinjiang and also outside of the camps.

Qelbinur Sidiq, who currently lives in the Netherlands, said she saw samples collected from blood, as well as collections of fingerprints and retina scans. She said she herself was made to give all three in 2016.

"Blood samples and DNA sequencing are mandatory, whether you are inside the camp or outside. There is an order where authorities instruct you on when to go to which hospital for the collection of your blood sample and DNA,” she said. “There is no freedom or choice to refuse.”

Sidiq said that the police inform residents through the chat platform WhatsApp as to when they must appear at a specific hospital for collection.

“Participants are given one week, and the notice explicitly states that failing to participate will result in severe consequences,” she said. “As a result, there is no freedom or choice in the matter, and individuals are unable to inquire about their results. Asking for the result of the blood sample is not an option."

Duarte Nuno Vieira, the co-editor-in-chief of “Forensic Science Research,” denied the journal had received financial support from China’s Ministry of Justice, according to the Guardian report.

Journals have a responsibility to evaluate the ethics of the studies that appear in articles they publish, Maya Wang, associate Asia director for New York-based Human Rights Watch, told RFA.

"Given the brutality of the collection process, I believe it is important for such journals to check and review research articles on samples taken from Uyghurs and Tibetans by Chinese police agencies,” she said. “It is unlikely these journals not know the background of such articles."

In 2021, Professor Yves Moreau initially uncovered similar articles published by Chinese researchers about Uyghurs in the American journal Molecular Genetics and Genome Medicine. Following his investigation into the matter, eight members of the editorial board of the journal resigned.

Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

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

Atomic Watchdog Says Experts Blocked From Some Reactor Halls At Zaporizhzhya Plant

News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty — Wed, 03 Jan 2024 18:17:50 +0000

Kazakh President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev has given a lengthy interview in which he discusses what he sees as the origins of the "Bloody January" protests of 2022 as well as the threat of dual power systems.

Speaking to the state-run Egemen Qazaqstan newspaper, which published the interview on January 3, Toqaev said the protests that began in the southwestern town Zhanaozen on January 2, 2022, following a sharp rise in fuel prices and which quickly spread to other cities, including Almaty, were instigated by an unidentified "rogue group."

Toqaev's shoot-to-kill order to quell the unrest led to the deaths of more than 230 protesters, and the Kazakh president has been criticized for not living up to his promise to the public to answer questions about the incident.

The Kazakh authorities have prosecuted several high-ranking officials on charges that they attempted to seize power during the protests, with some removed from office or sentenced to prison, and others acquitted.

Many were seen to be allies of Toqaev's predecessor, long-serving Kazakh leader Nursultan Nazarbaev.

When asked what caused the unrest, Toqaev initially cited "socio-economic problems accumulated over the years," which had led to stagnation and undermined faith in the government.

However, Toqaev then suggested that "some influential people" did not like the changes to the country's political scene after he was appointed as acting president by Nazarbaev in 2019 and later that year elected as president.

Toqaev said the unknown people perceived the change "as a threat" to the power structure after decades of rule by Nazarbaev, and then "decided to turn back the face of reform and destroy everything in order to return to the old situation that was convenient for them."

"This group of high-ranking officials had a huge influence on the power structures and the criminal world," Toqaev alleged. "That's why they decided to seize power by force."

Toqaev, citing investigations by the Prosecutor-General's Office, said the unidentified group began "preparations" about six months before the nationwide demonstrations in January 2022, when the government made what he called "an ill-conceived, illegal decision to sharply increase the price of liquefied gas."

From there, Toqaev alleged, "extremists, criminal groups, and religious extremists" worked together to stage a coup. When the protests broke out in January 2022, Toqaev claimed that 20,000 "terrorists" had entered the country.

Experts have widely dismissed suggestions of foreign involvement in the mass protests.

Aside from about 10 members of the fundamentalist Islamic group Yakyn Inkar -- which is considered a banned extremist group in Kazakhstan -- who were arrested in connection with the protests, no religious groups have been singled out for alleged involvement in the protests.

The goal of the alleged coup plotters, Toqaev said, was to set up a dual power structure that would compete with the government.

"I openly told Nazarbaev that the political arrogance of his close associates almost destroyed the country," Toqaev said, without expounding on who the associates might be.

Toqaev had not previously mentioned speaking with Nazarbaev about the mass protests.

Toqaev also suggested that Kazakhstan, which has come under criticism for its imprisonment of journalists and civil and political activists, does not have any political prisoners.

When asked about political prisoners, Toqaev said only that "our legislation does not contain a single decree, a single law, a single regulatory document that provides a basis for prosecuting citizens for their political views."

For there to be political persecution, according to Toqaev, there would need to be "censorship, special laws, and punitive bodies" in place.

Toqaev also appeared to subtly criticize Nazarbaev, who became head of Soviet Kazakhstan in 1990 and became Kazakhstan's first president after the country became independent in 1991.

Nazarbaev served as president until he resigned in 2019, although he held the title of "Leader of the Nation" from 2010 to 2020 and also served as chairman of the Security Council from 1991 to 2022. Nazarbaev has since been stripped of those roles and titles.

While discussing Nazarbaev, Toqaev said that "everyone knows his contribution to the formation of an independent state of Kazakhstan. He is a person who deserves a fair historical evaluation."

But the current Kazakh president also said that "there should be no senior or junior president in the country."

"Go away, don't beg!" Toqaev said. "Citizens who will be in charge of the country in the future should learn from this situation and stay away from such things and think only about the interests of the state and the prosperity of society."

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

New rules targeting illegal organ trade unenforceable: experts

By Kai Di for RFA Mandarin — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 19:18:31 +0000

China has issued rules targeting the illegal trade in transplant organs, but analysts told Radio Free Asia that members of the political and financial elite procure replacement organs in secret via military hospitals, making the crackdown hard to enforce in practice.

The new rules published Dec. 14 and signed by Premier Li Qiang are intended "to meet the demands of the changing situation," state news agency Xinhua reported, adding that they strengthen penalties for "malpractice" and tighten requirements for medical institutions performing transplants.

They define organ donation as "the voluntary and free provision" of human organs for transplant.

Yet the rules are the latest in a series of moves in recent years claiming to clamp down on the secretive organ trade, including a monitoring system announced in 2014 that was supposed to track organs to prevent "private" allocations of donor organs or the use of executed prisoners' organs without their consent.

Since Jan. 1, 2015, only voluntary public donations or organs from living relatives have been legally permitted for transplant, but demand for transplant organs continues to outstrip supply.

The new rules, once again, ban the trade in human organs, saying organs should be provided free of charge.

Military involvement?

But analysts said the rules, which take effect from May 1, 2024, would do little to stop the rich and powerful in China from procuring organs in secret.

A doctor from mainland China who is currently practicing in North America and gave only the pseudonym Yang for fear of reprisals said that, unlike most countries, half of organ transplants in China are performed in military hospitals.

"We know that anyone supervising [transplants] at provincial or municipal level, or from the Red Cross, will stand aside once the military intervenes," Yang said. "So where do the military get their organs from? Just how transparent can this be?"

Protesters simulate a surgery to remove an organ from a Falun Gong member during a demonstration in front of the European Council in Brussels, 2006. (Francois Lenoir/Reuters)

He said the military is closely tied up with the provision of transplant organs to the most powerful people in China.

"Organ transplantation in China is not for ordinary people," Yang said. "It is a service specially provided to the [party elite]."

He said he had witnessed the processes through which the highest-ranking people in China and paying customers from overseas come by organs for donation.

"A senior official from Kazakhstan wanted a kidney transplant at the People's Liberation Army General Hospital," he said, adding that the organ transplant ward of the "301" army hospital was known as the "Senior Cadre Ward."

"Within a month, a kidney transplant had been successfully performed, then he went back to Kazakhstan," Yang said.

‘Smokescreen’

Canadian human rights lawyer David Matas described the rules as "a big smokescreen."

"If you look at the principles and the regulations, they look terrific," Matas told Radio Free Asia. "But if you try to see whether or not it's being implemented, you see nothing."

"It's all cover-up: obfuscation, denial of accusations, counter narratives."

Vice Minister of Health Huang Jiefu once publicly admitted that China’s transplant organs mostly come from death row prisoners, although this practice was banned following the setting up of the Human Organ Donation Management Center in 2012.

Yet the center still has very few active donors, and researchers say their data is suspect.

A banner against organ harvesting hung in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris during a protest in 2013. (Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP)

"First of all, it's unverifiable," Matas said. "The number looks as if it was made up using a mathematical calculation formula."

Another issue is that China has no precise definition of what constitutes brain death, meaning that organs harvested when a person is still technically alive could be counted as "donated" organs.

"They used to say that all organs were coming from death penalty prisoners, but they never gave death penalty statistics," Matas said. "

"We've had investigators investigating, and the donation centers are often closed or if they're open, the statistics they have are insignificant," he said.

Investigators have also spoken to families of traffic accident victims who have been paid for their loved ones' organs, Matas said, adding that the global sale of Chinese transplant organs continues "at high prices."

Torsten Trey, founder and executive director of the international organization Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting, said the latest rules were unlikely to scratch the surface of the illegal organ trade in China.

“It is a combination of large transplant numbers, implausible, unprecedented short wait times for donor organs, organ donation programs that are too small to yield the amount of organ that are reflected in the annual transplant numbers, and a plethora of witness testimonies that suggest that living prisoners of conscience are killed in operation rooms without any court convictions," he said.

"The new regulations do not address the issue of transparent access to organ donors," Trey said.

Executions

China’s former organ transplant chief Huang Jiefu and colleagues reported in the U.K.-based medical journal The Lancet in 2011 that about 65% of transplants in China use organs from deceased donors, more than 90% of whom were executed prisoners.

And a 2022 study in the American Journal of Transplantation found evidence in 71 cases of “executions by organ removal” from prisoners, concluding that “the removal of the heart during organ procurement must have been the proximate cause of the donor’s death.”

China is believed to be one of the world’s top executioners, but the exact number of executions is regarded as a state secret by the ruling Chinese Communist Party.

Matas agreed that the new rules would do little to prevent any of that from happening.

"Simply enacting new regulations without a system of verifiability for its enforcement ... really doesn't amount to a whole lot," he said, calling for a system along World Health Organization guidelines that insist on traceability of individual organs through a transparent donation process that is open to scrutiny, including instant access for inspection teams to carry out spot checks.

"We can't look at what they say and see if it's true," he said.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Kai Di for RFA Mandarin.

Here’s how experts graded US climate progress in 2023

Tik Root — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 09:45:00 +0000

‘Tis the season to be merry … and get graded. As students across the country anxiously await their report cards, we thought it would be a good time to ask climate experts to grade the United States’ efforts to address the issue over the last year.

They were more than happy to play along.

“As a professor of sustainability, grading is very much in our working dialog,” one respondent told us. Another chimed in: “I’m finishing up my fall semester class right now, so grades are on my mind.”

The stakes, however, are much greater for the planet than for their students. This almost certainly will go down as the hottest year in recorded history, and the time for meaningful action is drawing short. Although the U.S. showed great effort as the Inflation Reduction Act started to roll out, it fell short of its potential with incomplete work on issues such as permitting reform, not to mention the approval of a massive drilling project in Alaska.

While experts varied in the grade they assigned, everyone agreed the country has a lot of homework to do if it hopes to pass the planet’s hardest test.

Ari Matusiak
CEO, Rewiring America

Let’s start with the highest grade, from Ari Matusaik, who leads the electrification nonprofit Rewriting America. In awarding an A-, he hailed the billions of dollars the Department of Energy and other agencies have started allocating under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA. The landmark law ushered in a record level of investment in clean energy projects, from solar to battery manufacturing. But even as that money begins flowing, he noted, “we’re already headed in the right direction.”

“Sales of heat pumps are outpacing oil and gas furnaces for the second year in a row and by the end of 2023 electric vehicles representing nearly 9 percent of total light-duty car sales,” he told Grist. And that, he said, is “far past what experts say is the tipping point to wide-scale adoption.”

Bob Inglis
Former U.S. Representative, founder of RepublicEn.org

Bob Inglis is an avowed conservative, a former congressman who represented South Carolina, and a devoted proponent of climate action. He awarded the country a “high B+,” in large part because he sees momentum to address climate change building on the political right.

“Young conservatives want action,” he said, adding that Republican legislators have been introducing bills to advance sustainability. He cited bipartisan efforts around low-emissions cement and holding countries with dirty production accountable as examples.

That focus on foreign pollution is of particular interest to Inglis, who would like to see the United States move toward what he called “a carbon border adjustment mechanism” that taxes emissions-intensive imports. The European Union is in the process of implementing such a system, and will initially target sectors such as cement, iron and steel, aluminum, fertilizers.

“It uses the prize of access to the American market to basically muscle the rest of the world into accountability for negative externalities,” said Inglis, who also founded RepublicEn.org to promote market-driven solutions to the climate crisis. But enacting that may take time, especially with a party beholden to the politics of former President Donald Trump, who Inglis referred to as the “death angel in Republican primaries.”

Jean Su
Director of the Energy Justice Program at the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund

One grade landed squarely in the middle of the spectrum: a C from Jean Su, the energy justice program director at the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund.

Su praised the Biden administration’s announcement that it is ramping up efforts to curb emissions from methane, a greenhouse gas with 80 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide in the 20 years after its release into the atmosphere. She also heaped plaudits on the IRA’s funding for renewable energy and community solar, as well as more stringent fuel efficiency requirements for cars and light trucks.

“However,” she said, “the Biden administration’s fossil fuel record undermines those strides.”

Like others, she was disappointed by the administration’s approval of the Willow oil drilling project on Alaska’s North Slope. That project is expected to release more than 249 million tons of CO2 over 30 years once the 600 million barrels it produces are drilled and burned. That’s the equivalent of adding some 2 million cars to the road annually. She also condemned its green-lighting of liquefied natural gas exports, as well as its support for a controversial natural gas pipeline in Appalachia.

A recent Center for Biological Diversity analysis, she noted, found that fossil fuel projects approved by the Biden administration “threaten to erase the climate emissions progress from the Inflation Reduction Act and other climate policies.”

More 2023 year in review:

Ramanan Krishnamoorti
Vice president of energy and innovation at the University of Houston

The only thing that spared the nation from earning an F from Ramanan Krishnamoorti, a chemistry and petroleum engineering professor, was the generous curve he used. His litany of laments was long.

For starters, the United States still hasn’t made meaningful progress on reforming the permitting process for new electricity transmission. “No projects at scale are likely to move forward without this,” he warned. Although the White House made an attempt at this sorely needed step, that effort has been bogged down in congressional politics..

Interest rates have been another drag, he added. Higher rates have made it a lot more challenging for investors to support new clean energy projects such as offshore wind. And even if there was more momentum to break ground, he fears there aren’t adequate plans to supply the workers needed to construct them. “We have not truly developed at scale programs that will deliver the right workforces at the right time for the projects,” he wrote.

Even the year’s bright spot — EV sales — is dimming in what Krishnamoorti dubs a cooling of “the best story of climate progress.” Some hurdles he sees impeding wider adoption include supply chain issues, the cost of EVs, and inadequate infrastructure. Cutting charging times further would help, too.

The rise of NIMBYism is another concern for Krishnamoorti. He attributes opposition to things like wind and solar farms to a “sugarcoating of the bottlenecks and the tradeoffs that are necessary for the energy transition — there is a narrative that energy transition technologies do not require tradeoffs and there are no bottlenecks.”

“NIMBYism is dictating every project,” he remarked. “Unless there is clarity on the true cost of U.S. climate programs and the impacts it will have — we will not move forward.”

Anna Liljedahl
Associate scientist, Woodwell Climate Research Center

Anna Liljedahl, a hydrologist with focus on the Arctic, had no qualms about failing the U.S. Her reasoning was straightforward: Many patents, including climate technologies that would help mitigate the problem are locked away from public view. Although patents are a matter of public record, they grant those holding them exclusive rights to the technology and prevent others from developing or commercially exploiting it for years.

“I bet many are on alternative and low-cost energy solutions,” she said. “Until that confidentiality is lifted, I am giving our country the lowest grade possible — no matter what else happened during the year.”

Daniel Kammen
Physicist and professor of energy at the University of California, Berkeley

Daniel Kammen, a professor of energy at the University of California, said it’s unclear exactly what the U.S. grade should be, given its mixed performance. For that reason, he’s awarding an incomplete.

He echoed the near universal praise others had for the Inflation Reduction Act, but said the impact of that landmark climate legislation remains unrealized. Any gains that might have come from the Biden administration’s signature bill were at least somewhat offset by its approval of the Willow project.

Still, Kammen saw the potential for real progress in the climate agreement the United States and China signed last month. In finding rare common ground on the issue, the two superpowers agreed to “sufficiently accelerate” the deployment of clean energy in a bid to begin displacing fossil fuels and address the climate crisis.

“The U.S.-China Sunnylands Agreement could reset the international climate investment and progress effort,” Kammen said.

Bill McKibben
Climate activist, author, and, yes, an emeritus member of the Grist board

Kammen wasn’t only one doling out incompletes. Although environmentalist Bill McKibben lauded the investments already made under the IRA, he called such efforts just “half the assignment.”

“[They] completely punted on the other half — the dirty energy side,” said McKibben, the founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for action on climate and justice. But, he added, there are ways to make up for it — particularly by reining in recent efforts to build out the domestic production capacity of liquified natural gas.

“A decision to block new export licenses for LNG permits would be the biggest single move possible on our planet right now to slow the fossil fuel juggernaut,” he wrote. “And give them lots and lots of extra credit.”

Kate Marvel
Senior climate scientist, Project Drawdown

Climate scientist Kate Marvel wasn’t terribly impressed with the country’s efforts and also gave the U.S. an incomplete. Although the general trendline is headed in the right direction, the nation’s efforts lack urgency. “Total emissions in the U.S. are falling (mostly due to declines in coal) but nowhere near fast enough to meet Paris Agreement targets,” she said.

Although she noted that federal legislation such as the IRA, bipartisan infrastructure act and the CHIPs Act have all helped to accelerate the deployment of clean energy, the need for faster action became abundantly clear in 2023. “The toll of climate disasters this year was heavy: deadly wildfires, devastating floods, brutal heat waves, and smoky skies,” Marvel said. “Climate change has come to the U.S., and the warming is accelerating. Let’s hope climate action accelerates, too.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Here’s how experts graded US climate progress in 2023 on Dec 19, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Tik Root.

Revealed: COP28 president linked to spyware experts via ‘AI university’

Lucas Amin, Ben Webster — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 15:45:53 +0000

There are fears that guests and journalists could be spied on at the international climate conference in Dubai

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Lucas Amin, Ben Webster.

Experts to Examine a Controversial Forensic Test That Has Helped Convict Women of Murder

by Duaa Eldeib — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 13:30:00 +0000

by Duaa Eldeib

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

Legal experts from two universities will convene a group to study a dubious forensic test that has helped send some women to prison for murder though the women insisted they had stillbirths.

Last month, ProPublica reported on what’s known as the lung float test, which some medical examiners use to help determine whether a child was stillborn or was born alive and took a breath.

In response to the investigation, Aziza Ahmed, a professor at Boston University School of Law, and Daniel Medwed, professor of law and criminal justice at Northeastern University, announced they will lead the Floating Lung Test Research Study Group. The group, which will consist of lawyers and medical professionals, will be sponsored by the Boston University Program on Reproductive Justice and the Center for Public Interest Advocacy and Collaboration at Northeastern University School of Law.

“This is entirely due to the ProPublica report,” Ahmed said last week. “We realized it was time to take action.”

The aim of the group is to study the medical underpinnings of the lung float test, also referred to as the floating lung test, and determine whether it should be used in court. ProPublica’s reporting found that although several medical examiners said the test is unreliable, it had been used in at least 11 cases since 2013 in which women were charged criminally, and it has helped to put nine of those women behind bars. Some later had their charges dropped and were released.

The test, which has been around for centuries and remains essentially unchanged in spite of medical advances, is typically used in cases when births occurred outside of a hospital. Critics have likened the test to witch trials, when women were deemed to be witches based on whether they floated or sank.

When told about the study group, Dr. Joyce deJong, president of the National Association of Medical Examiners, said the organization “supports initiatives that aim to enhance forensic tests’ scientific rigor and reliability.” It doesn’t have an official stance on the test, but deJong said a primary role is to “promote best practices and standards in forensic pathology and death investigation.”

If the study group asks for board-certified forensic pathologists to participate, the organization could share the request with its members, deJong said.

The group leaders plan to spend the next several weeks assembling a team and hope to have their first meeting early next year.

“The process will be robust and comprehensive,” Medwed said. “We will explore and interrogate any argument, pro and con.”

Many medical experts say that air can enter the lungs of a stillborn child even without breathing. Air can enter when the baby’s chest compresses as it squeezes through the birth canal, through CPR or during the ordinary handling of the body. If the body is decomposed, gases may cause the lungs to float.

Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the constitutional right to abortion, experts fear the test may play a larger role in cases when police and prosecutors raise questions about the circumstances of a birth.

“There’s a concern that more women would be vulnerable to prosecution, especially if they tried to self-induce later in pregnancy,” Ahmed said. “In this environment, the floating lung test is something that prosecutors would rely on.”

Medical and legal experts have pointed to wide variations in how the test is conducted, including the fact that some medical examiners use a whole lung while others use pieces. Experts have said the lack of standardization required by other forensic disciplines, such as DNA testing, has led to the lung float test producing inaccurate results.

Medwed, who also is a founding member of the board of directors of the Innocence Network, a coalition of organizations dedicated to fighting wrongful convictions, said that nearly 25% of wrongful conviction cases since 1989 involved some type of flawed science.

Because the lung float test is conducted by medical examiners, Medwed said, he worries the “mystique of the white coat” leads judges and jurors alike to overvalue the test. Similar concerns have been raised about shaken baby syndrome, which has faced increased scrutiny in recent years. There’s a natural deference to the expert, he said, and specifically the expert best at persuading a jury.

“The downstream consequence,” he said, “could be a wrongful conviction.”

Even supporters of the test acknowledge its drawbacks, conceding there are many ways to perform it and that they shouldn’t rely solely on the test when investigating a death. Despite those shortcomings, judges have allowed prosecutors to use it as evidence in court.

ProPublica wrote about the case of Moira Akers, a Maryland mother who insisted she had a stillbirth but last year was sentenced to 30 years in prison after a jury found her guilty of child abuse and murder. The medical examiner in the case relied on the lung float test. The state’s attorney’s office declined to comment while the case was on appeal.

The Appellate Court of Maryland is set to hear Akers’ appeal in early January.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Duaa Eldeib.

Why some experts say COPs are ‘distracting’ and need fixing

Tik Root — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 09:30:00 +0000

Diplomats, academics, and activists from around the globe will gather yet again this week to try to find common ground on a plan for combating climate change. This year’s COP, as the event is known, marks the 28th annual meeting of the conference of the parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. More than 70,000 people are expected to descend on Dubai for the occasion.

In addition to marathon negotiations and heated discussions, the fortnight-long assembly will see all manner of marches, rallies, speakers, advocacy, and lobbying. But, aside from fanfare, it remains unclear how much COP28 will, or can, achieve. While there have been signs that the United States and China could deepen their decarbonization commitments, countries have struggled to decide how to compensate developing countries for climate-related losses. Meanwhile, global emissions and temperatures continue climbing at an alarming rate.

That has left some to wonder: Have these annual gatherings outlived their usefulness?

To some, the yearly get-togethers continue to be a critical centerpiece for international climate action, and any tweaks they might need lie mostly around the edges. “They aren’t perfect,” said Tom Evans, a policy analyst for the nonprofit climate change think tank E3G. “[But] they are still important and useful.” While he sees room for improvements — such as greater continuity between COP summits and ensuring ministerial meetings are more substantive — he supports the overall format. “We need to try and find a way to kind of invigorate and revitalize without distracting from the negotiations, which are key.”

Others say the summits no longer sufficiently meet the moment. “The job in hand has changed over the years,” said Rachel Kyte, a climate diplomacy expert and dean emerita of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. She is among those who believe the annual COP needs to evolve. “Form should follow function,” she said. “And we are using an old form.”

Durwood Zaelke, co-founder and president of the Center for International Environmental Law, was more blunt. “You can’t say that an agreement that lets a problem grow into an emergency is doing a good job,” he said. “It’s not.”

Established in 1992, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is an international treaty that aims to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions and avoid the worst effects of climate change. Some 198 countries have ratified the Convention, which has seen some significant wins.

Get caught up on COP28

What is COP28? Every year, climate negotiators from around the world gather under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to assess countries’ progress toward reducing carbon emissions and limiting global temperature rise.

The 28th Conference of Parties, or COP28, is taking place in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, between November 30 and December 12 this year.

What happens at COP? Part trade show, part high-stakes negotiations, COPs are annual convenings where world leaders attempt to move the needle on climate change. While activists up the ante with disruptive protests and industry leaders hash out deals on the sidelines, the most consequential outcomes of the conference will largely be negotiated behind closed doors. Over two weeks, delegates will pore over language describing countries’ commitments to reduce carbon emissions, jostling over the precise wording that all 194 countries can agree to.

What are the key issues at COP28 this year?

Global Stocktake: The 2016 landmark Paris Agreement marked the first time countries united behind a goal to limit global temperature increase. The international treaty consists of 29 articles with numerous targets, including reducing greenhouse gas emissions, increasing financial flows to developing countries, and setting up a carbon market. For the first time since then, countries will conduct a “global stocktake” to measure how much progress they’ve made toward those goals at COP28 and where they’re lagging.

Fossil fuel phase out or phase down: Countries have agreed to reduce carbon emissions at previous COPs, but have not explicitly acknowledged the role of fossil fuels in causing the climate crisis until recently. This year negotiators will be haggling over the exact phrasing that signals that the world needs to transition away from fossil fuels. They may decide that countries need to phase down or phase out fossil fuels or come up with entirely new wording that conveys the need to ramp down fossil fuel use.

Read more: How fossil fuel phrasing played out at COP27

Loss and Damage: Last year, countries agreed to set up a historic fund to help developing nations deal with the so-called loss and damage that they are currently facing as a result of climate change. At COP28, countries will agree on a number of nitty-gritty details about the fund’s operations, including which country will host the fund, who will pay into it and withdraw from it, as well as the makeup of the fund’s board.

Read more: The difficult negotiations over a loss and damage fund

Dive deeper:
The decade-old broken climate promise that looms over COP28

The world is careening toward 3 degrees of warming, UN says ahead of climate conference

Developing countries need at least $215 billion a year for climate adaptation

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol marked the first major breakthrough, and helped propel international action toward reducing emissions — though only some of the commitments are binding, and the United States is notably absent from the list signatories. The 2015 Paris Agreement laid out an even more robust roadmap for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, with a target of holding global temperature rise to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, and “pursuing efforts” to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F).

Although the path to that future is narrowing, it is still within reach, according to the International Energy Agency. But, some experts say, relying primarily on once-a-year COP meetings to get there may no longer be the best approach.

“Multilateral engagement is not the issue anymore,” Christiana Figueres said at a conference earlier this year. She was the executive secretary of the Convention when the Paris agreement was reached, and said that while important issues that need to be ironed out on the international level — especially for developing countries — the hardest work must now be done domestically.

“We have to redesign the COPs…. Multilateral attention, frankly, is distracting governments from doing their homework at home,” she said. At another conference a month later, she added, “Honestly, I would prefer 90,000 people stay at home and do their job.”

Kyte agrees and thinks it’s time to take at least a step back from festival-like gatherings and toward more focused, year-round, work on the crisis at hand. “The UN has to find a way to break us into working groups to get things done,” she said. “And then work us back together into less of a jamboree and more of a somber working event.”

Experts: Americans are eating fish processed by slaves

By Alex Willemyns for RFA — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 20:57:26 +0000

North Korean and Uyghur slaves are processing seafood for Chinese companies that export to the United States, experts and lawmakers told Congress on Tuesday, with customs officials struggling to identify and keep the tainted fish off Americans’ plates.

The experts told the Congressional-Executive Commission on China that even U.S. military caterers were buying fish caught or processed by laborers trapped in jobs from which they cannot escape – and who are seldom paid a living wage.

Such seafood is hard to differentiate from legally caught and processed fish, they said.

Chris Smith, a Republican from New Jersey and the chair of the committee, said there was ample evidence China-based companies are “exploiting the forced labor of Uyghurs and North Koreans” to undercut international competitors, including in the United States.

“From fish sticks to calamari, these products infiltrate the supply chains of major restaurants, wholesalers, and even find their way into the meals served in American schools and military bases,” he said, adding that it violated laws like the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.

Smith said he and Sen. Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon who is the co-chair of the commission, had written a joint letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas calling for an investigation into “the weakness of our system” in allowing fish to pass customs.

Tough to trace

Ian Urbina, director of The Outlaw Ocean Project, said that seafood, as “the world's last major source of wild protein,” was “a distinct global commodity” where labor exploitation could be particularly profitable.

Workers process tilapia fish at a factory in Wenchang, Hainan province, China, June 20, 2018. (Reuters)

Despite being the world’s biggest food commodity by value, he explained, wild seafood is “harder to track than many other products” because it is by definition caught far away from the prying eyes of authorities, making it easy to mask slave labor in supply chains.

“Between bait and plate there are an inordinate number of handoffs of this product,” Urbina said. “It goes from fishing ship to refrigeration ship, to port, to processor, to cold storage, to exporter, to U.S. importer, to distributor or food service company, and then finally to a restaurant, to grocery store or public food pantry, military base or public school.”

“These many handoffs make it tougher to trace the true origin of the catch, and to ensure there is no forced labor or other environmental crimes in the supply chain,” he said. He added the few auditing services that exist “do a very poor job” at identifying slavery.

Forced labor in fisheries took place “in two distinct realms,” he said.

At sea, he said, it is “endemic” and enforced by debt bondage, human trafficking and beatings, with Indonesians often the victims. But it also occurs at processing plants on China’s coast, using North Koreans as well as Uyghurs transferred from Xinjiang province against their will.

“More than 1,000 workers from Xinjiang have been forcibly relocated to at least 10 seafood processing plants in Shandong that supply dozens of major U.S. food brands,” Urbina said. “The ethnic minorities pressed into service do not have an option to say no to these jobs.”

North Koreans

The use of North Koreans to process seafood destined for the United States is a long-running issue, according to Greg Scarlatoiu, executive director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.

The North Koreans transferred to China face “inhumane working conditions” and are not allowed to contact the outside world, he said, and were only paid a small sum after returning home after years of work, often forced to moonlight for cash while in China.

“The Chinese companies pay the North Korean regime mostly based on production volume,” Scarlatoiu told the commission .

“Men mainly carry frozen fish blocks and women sit down and peel fish or squid or sort clams and crabs by size. Most of the North Koreans work the whole day in cold storage,” he said.

“The pungent smell inside is unbearable,” he said. “North Korean workers at the Chinese seafood processing plants usually work about 10 hours a day, but if production targets are not met, the workday can extend to over 12 hours.”

Scarlatoiu added the true origin of the products of their labor was then often obfuscated to aid its passage to Europe or the United States.

“There are reported instances of processed seafood marked ‘Made in China’ being shipped out of Vladivostok, where labels are switched to ‘Made in Russia,’ and exported to third countries,” he said.

Difficult solutions

Each of the experts said a solution to the problem would be hard to find, given how difficult it can be at a port-of-entry to differentiate illegally caught or processed seafood from legitimate catches.

But Robert Stumberg, a law professor at Georgetown University and expert in trade law, said there was an easy fix to at least part of the problem: “implement the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act” by blacklisting more companies known to use forced labor.

Stumberg said the Entity List of Chinese companies banned from exports to the United States due to the use of forced Uyghur labor had grown from 20 to just 27 companies since 2021, despite “thousands of pieces of evidence about other entities” being submitted.

Thea Lee, deputy undersecretary for international labor affairs at the Department of Labor and a member of the commission, responded that administration officials were trying to “use those tools that Congress gave us as effectively as we can” without cutting any corners.

“It's been very slow going; it's been frustrating, I think, to all of us,” Lee said, adding the department was focussed on figuring out “what can withstand legal challenge, [and] what can be as robust as possible.”

Edited by Malcolm Foster

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

Hamas fighters may be using North Korean weapons, experts say

By Park Jaewoo for RFA Korean — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 21:20:00 +0000

Experts say that Hamas militants may be using North Korean weapons after footage emerged of a fighter from the Palestinian group carrying a rocket-launcher suspected to originate from the communist nation.

The video, recorded shortly after deadly attacks on Israel started last weekend and shared widely on social media, shows several men sitting in the back of a pickup truck brandishing weapons above a face-down, partially clothed woman.

A rocket-launcher held by one of the fighters was identified as North Korean in origin by a military and weapons blogger with the handle War Noir in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

“A recent video recorded today shows members of the Al-Qassam Brigades (#HAMAS) in #Gaza Strip,” War Noir wrote on Oct. 7. “One of the members can be seen with an uncommon F-7 HE-Frag rocket, originally produced in #NorthKorea (#DPRK).”

RFA was not able to conclusively determine if the weapon was North Korean, but its shape closely resembles the F-7 as depicted in the North Korean Small Arms and Light Weapons Recognition Guide published in May by the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey research project.

Experts said that Palestinians have historically used North Korean weapons, which may have been first purchased by Iran or Syria, and then smuggled to the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, circumventing an Israeli-Egyptian embargo that has been in place since 2005.

“The Syrians deal with Hezbollah a lot and Hezbollah deals with Hamas a lot,” said Bruce E. Bechtol Jr., a former intelligence officer for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency.

“A lot of the trade that North Korea does with both Hamas and Hezbollah is deals that they make through the IRGC, the Iranian Republican Guard Corps,” he said.

Used in the region

In its recent attacks on Israelis, Hamas used weapons originating in a wide range of current and former states, including the United States, the Soviet Union, and North Korea, said N.R. Jenzen-Jones, director of the Armament Research Services intelligence consultancy, or ARES.

A preliminary analysis of images reviewed by this consultancy shows “a militant armed with an RPG-7 type shoulder-fired recoilless gun, loaded with an F-7 series high explosive fragmentation (HE-FRAG) munition, produced in North Korea,” Jenzen-Jones said. “These have previously been documented in the region, including in Syria, Iraq, and in the Gaza Strip."

Other images showed militants using what appeared to be a North Korean Type 58 self-loading rifle, a derivative of the well-known AK series, he said.

"North Korean arms have previously been documented amongst interdicted supplies provided by Iran to militant groups, and this is believed to be the primary way in which DPRK weapons have come into the possession of Palestinian militants,” he said.

“North Korean arms have previously been identified in the hands of the militant factions of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, amongst other groups,” he added.

Bechtol said that a North Korean arms shipment was intercepted in Thailand in 2009. A U.N. panel of experts determined the 35 tons of conventional arms and munitions was headed to Iran, and Israeli intelligence believed it was ultimately bound for Hamas and Lebanon-based Hezbollah.

Bechtol said the shipment contained rocket propelled grenades, larger rockets, and the F-7.

“The North Koreans have also sold the 'BULSAE' antitank system to Hamas. It's a very good antitank system and they could be firing that at Israeli tanks when they're entering the Gaza Strip here within the next day or two,” said Bechtol. “So North Korea has given them some capabilities that are interesting.”

The woman whose body was seen in the video was identified by her family as 22-year old German-Israeli citizen Shani Louk, who was abducted by Hamas militants when they attacked a music festival in Israel close to the Gaza border.

She is believed to be alive, but in critical condition at a hospital in Gaza, according to Palestinian sources her mother told German outlet Bild on Tuesday.

But Israeli, German or Palestinian officials have not yet confirmed her status or whereabouts.

North Korea blames Israel

North Korean media, meanwhile, blamed the recent violence on Israel’s “ceaseless criminal acts” against the Palestinian people.

According to a report in the state-run Rodong Sinmun newspaper on Tuesday, “a large-scale armed conflict broke out between Palestine’s Islamic resistance movement and Israel.”

“The international community called the conflict the result of Israel’s ceaseless criminal acts against the Palestinian people,” and said that the “fundamental” way to end the bloody conflict is to create an independent Palestinian state.

That Hamas is using North Korean weapons is not surprising, Bruce Bennett, a defense researcher at the RAND Corporation think tank, told RFA.

“North Korea is selling things wherever it can to make hard currency,” said Bennett. “Whether North Korea directly provided it to Hamas or provided it through a third party, I don't know. But the fact that there is North Korean equipment there does not surprise me at all.”

‘Commercial relationship’

Bennett said the F-7 rocket is an anti-personnel weapon and causes maximum casualties.

“It's not intended to, like, penetrate a tank,” he said. “It's intended to cause fragmentation, like a terrorist bomb, and maximize the effect against people.”

Even though Hamas appears to be using North Korean weapons, it would be inaccurate to describe them as allies, he said.

“It's a commercial relationship which is fed by the politics as well by North Korea being anxious to hurt the United States and anything associated with the United States,” said Bennett.

“The scary part of this though is as you think about the future, does North Korea have people on the ground with Hamas watching them do what they're doing?” he said.

“Is North Korea thinking about doing this kind of thing to South Korea? We clearly don't know at this stage, but I don't think we can ignore that possibility.”

Translated by Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee. Additional reporting by Eugene Whong. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Park Jaewoo for RFA Korean.

A Lab Test That Experts Liken to a Witch Trial Is Helping Send Women to Prison for Murder

by Duaa Eldeib — Sat, 07 Oct 2023 09:00:00 +0000

by Duaa Eldeib

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

Inside the medical examiner’s office, two pathologists removed a baby’s lungs from his chest, clamped them together and placed them in a container of water. Then they watched.

They were examining the suspicious death of the baby whose body was found in a Maryland home; his mother said he was stillborn.

If the lungs floated, the theory behind the test holds, the baby likely was born alive. If they sank, the baby likely was stillborn.

“A very simple premise,” the assistant medical examiner later testified.

The lungs floated — and the mother was charged with murder.

In investigations across the country, the lung float test has emerged as a barometer of sorts to help determine if a mother suffered the devastating loss of a stillbirth or if she murdered her baby who was born alive. The test has been used in at least 11 cases where women were charged criminally since 2013 and has helped put nine of them behind bars, a ProPublica review of court records and news reports found. Some of those women remain in prison. Some had their charges dropped and were released.

But the test is so deeply flawed that many medical examiners say it cannot be trusted. They put it in the same company as the discredited analysis of bite marks and bloodstain patterns, 911 calls and hair comparisons, all of which lack solid scientific foundations and have contributed to wrongful convictions.

It is pseudoscience masquerading as sound forensics, they say. Some even liken the test to witch trials, where courts decided if a woman was a witch based on whether she floated or sank.

“Basing something so enormous on a test that should not be used, that has been completely discredited, is absolutely wrong,” said Dr. Ranit Mishori, the senior medical adviser for the nonprofit Physicians for Human Rights, which has been studying the test, and a professor of family medicine at Georgetown University School of Medicine. “You can send a person who is innocent to prison for many years.”

Medical examiners who rely on the lung float test typically do so in cases where someone gives birth outside of a hospital, often at home and far from the watchful eyes of medical professionals. Absent those witnesses, doubt can overshadow the insistence that the baby was stillborn.

Since the Supreme Court struck down the constitutional right to abortion, legal experts and reproductive justice advocates have voiced fears that an increased reliance on the lung float test will lead to more prosecutions in a landscape where any pregnancy that doesn’t end with a living, breathing baby can be viewed with suspicion. In several cases, the fact that a woman had considered abortion was used against her. Black, brown and poor women, research shows, already disproportionately face pregnancy-related prosecutions. Black women also are more than two times as likely to have a stillbirth as white women.

Even medical examiners who perform the test as part of an autopsy acknowledge its shortcomings. They concede that there are several ways to perform it, undermining the standardization that many forensic disciplines demand. Yet judges have allowed prosecutors to use it as evidence in court.

“Basing something so enormous on a test that should not be used, that has been completely discredited, is absolutely wrong.”

—Dr. Ranit Mishori, senior medical adviser for Physicians for Human Rights

ProPublica contacted the nation’s largest medical examiners’ offices to ask if they use the lung float test and discovered a patchwork of practices. Many offices said they just don’t trust it. The County of Los Angeles Department of Medical Examiner called its results “inaccurate.” The Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences in Houston said it found the test to be “very unreliable” and “not supported by empirical evidence.”

In Cook County, home to Chicago, pathologists use it, but give more weight to “more reliable methods” including X-rays, microscopic examinations and autopsy findings to determine whether a birth was live or still. Others, like the Virginia Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, said the test may be useful only if a baby was not born into a toilet, CPR was not performed and decomposition was not present. None of the 12 largest offices by jurisdiction expressed full-throated support for the test.

And while the national organization that represents medical examiners said that it doesn’t have an official stance on the lung float test, it said it “strongly advocates using scientifically validated and evidence-based practices in forensic pathology.” The National Association of Medical Examiners called the lung float test “a single, dated test” that has not been subjected to the organization’s rigorous evaluation process.

Dr. Gregory Davis, a forensic pathologist at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine and a consultant to the office of the medical examiner in Kentucky, called the test “an outrageous breach of science.” He said he has personally observed the lungs of stillborn babies float and those of live-born babies sink.

The fundamental problem with the test, he said, is that there are many ways that air can enter the lungs of a stillborn child.

“There’s no way,” Davis said, “you can determine live birth versus stillbirth with this test.”

Moira Akers, the Maryland woman whose baby died, didn’t intend to get pregnant. She and her husband, Ian, already had two young children and the couple worried they wouldn’t be able to handle another child.

They struggled financially — she was a stay-at-home mom and he worked only a few days a week as a first mate on a dinner cruise. Her previous pregnancies — both ending in cesarean sections — were difficult, and challenges with her youngest child demanded much of her attention.

Due to Akers’ age, 37, and weight, her pregnancy was considered high risk. The couple decided to terminate, but they didn’t tell her family, who are Catholic and who she worried may not have approved. When Akers was a little girl, her mother said, she dreamed of being a mother, and as an adult she doted on her children.

After her appointment with a gynecologist around 15 weeks into her pregnancy, court records show that Akers thought that it was too late for her to have an abortion in Maryland. She decided she would carry the baby to term without letting anyone know she was still pregnant and give it up at a firehouse.

“I wanted the baby to have a good life,” Akers later told police. “I just knew we weren’t going to be able to provide that.”

Moira Akers (Courtesy of Debra Saltz)

She didn’t gain much weight and she told her husband early on that the pregnancy had been terminated. She also didn’t divulge the fact that she was pregnant to other family members, who were going through their own hardships, court records and interviews show. Her sister was being treated for cancer and feared she’d never be able to have children of her own. Her brother was recovering from an accident that had left him temporarily using a wheelchair. And the family had recently buried her grandmother and aunt.

Akers declined comment through her attorney. But the description of the case is based on police and court records, including a trial transcript, as well as interviews with her family and her lawyer.

On Nov. 1, 2018, in the family’s three-bedroom duplex in suburban Baltimore, Akers had been having contractions when she felt a strong urge to use the bathroom. She delivered her son into the toilet. She said he was not breathing. She grabbed her older son’s Star Wars towel to wrap the baby in, then carried him into the bedroom to get scissors and cut the umbilical cord.

“I didn’t hear anything,” Akers later told a detective. The baby, she said, didn’t move.

She didn’t know what to do next. Akers scanned the room and spotted a large Ziploc bag meant to store her daughter’s clothes. She placed her baby in the blue bag, and she put the bag in the closet.

Akers was bleeding heavily from the delivery. Blood soaked the carpet and smeared the bathroom floor. It stained the bathtub, closet door and hallway.

Her husband came upstairs. Alarmed by all the blood, he called the paramedics. When they arrived, they asked Akers questions as she sat on the couch with her husband and two children. She denied being pregnant.

It wasn’t until later, after Akers arrived at the hospital, that she told a nurse that she had “delivered a stillborn child” at home, police records show.

The doctors, who came in next, saw a protruding umbilical cord still attached and asked if the baby was alive. Akers said she had delivered a stillborn baby and told them about the bag and the closet.

Police launched an investigation. Akers described being in denial about the pregnancy and sad about the baby’s death.

The two Maryland doctors conducted an autopsy. The baby, they wrote in their report, appeared to be “well-developed” and “well-nourished” and had been delivered after about 41-42 weeks of pregnancy. He had blue eyes and straight brown hair.

Neither the external exam of the baby nor his bloodwork nor an X-ray revealed signs of foul play. But the narrative from police described a woman who hid her pregnancy from her family and paramedics, considered an abortion and placed the baby’s body in a closet. A microscopic view of the lungs, which were soft and pink in some areas, also appeared to show that some parts had air in them and others did not.

They also had the results of the lung float test.

“A flotation test and microscopic examination of the lungs was consistent with a live birth,” the autopsy read. The baby, the medical examiners concluded, died of asphyxia and exposure from being left in the closet.

Prosecutors charged Akers with child abuse and murder.

The lung float test’s simplicity — essentially unchanged over centuries — is both a feature and a flaw.

Some medical examiners take out one lung at a time. Some cut the lungs up and test pieces, and may even go so far as to squeeze them. Others clamp them together or put the heart and lungs in a jar. Some drop in the liver as a control. Others submerge the lungs in liquid formaldehyde instead of water.

As the assistant medical examiner in Akers’ case testified, “there’s a million ways” to conduct the test.

In theory, the test is meant to determine whether air has reached the microscopic air sacs inside the lungs. If it has, the sacs open and spread out. If it hasn’t, the sacs remain collapsed.

“It is not always possible to reach a definitive conclusion, but that may be preferable to [a case] that is based on a problematic test.”

—Capt. Kyle Kennedy, Oregon State Police

But the problem with using aeration as a proxy for proof of life, many medical experts argue, is that babies don’t have to take a breath for air to enter their lungs. Air can be introduced when the baby’s chest is compressed as it squeezes through the birth canal. If there is an attempt to resuscitate a stillborn baby, that pressure can inflate the lungs. And if a body has started to decompose, gases from that process can cause the lungs to float in water. Even the ordinary handling of a stillborn baby can allow air to enter the lungs.

Doctors have long struggled with the best way to determine whether a baby was born alive in unattended births. Many experts agree that it’s nearly impossible without incontrovertible evidence such as milk in the baby’s stomach or signs of the umbilical cord stump beginning to heal where it was cut.

The uncertainty can be difficult for juries to accept, especially when prosecutors present what appears to be a scientific test that proves a baby was born alive and, as a result, was murdered.

“It is not always possible to reach a definitive conclusion, but that may be preferable to one that is based on a problematic test,” said Capt. Kyle Kennedy of the Oregon State Police department, of which the Oregon State Medical Examiner is a part.

The Oregon State Medical Examiner, he said, does not use the lung float test.

The test can produce correct results, said Dr. Christopher Milroy, a forensic pathologist with the Eastern Ontario Regional Forensic Pathology Unit and a professor at the University of Ottawa in Canada. But given that it also produces inaccurate results, he said it should not be used in criminal cases.

“It’s not like some of the things we do,” he said, “where we are going, ‘Well, did they die of diabetes or did they die of something else natural?’”

Milroy has studied the test and its history and has found references to its use in the 17th century, when witch trials were still occurring. But by the late 1700s, its reliability was questioned by doctors and lawyers. More than 200 years later, in 2016, the authors of a forensic medicine textbook wrote that there were too many recorded instances of stillborn lungs floating and live-born lungs sinking for the test to be used in a criminal trial.

No agency currently tracks how often the lung float test is used in criminal cases. But the 11 cases ProPublica identified are likely an undercount because some cases weren’t covered in news reports, and plea deals and acquittals often create less of a public record.

Still, the test has been cited in medical textbooks and is often included in forensic pathology training. Its defenders say that there aren’t any better alternatives, and they may be criticized for not doing their job if they don’t use it. Some also say they don’t rely solely on the test; they acknowledge its weaknesses but say it complements other exams. In addition, some people do, in fact, kill their babies.

Prosecutors have often turned to a 2013 academic study from Germany to support admitting the lung float test as evidence. “The study proves that for contemporary medicine, the lung floating test is still a reliable indicator of a newborn’s breathing,” the authors wrote.

But some experts have questioned that study, saying its results have not been reproduced, its 98% accuracy rate is misleading and it didn’t actually answer whether a baby was born alive because the births in the study had been attended by medical professionals, so there was never any real question about what happened.

The hospital affiliated with the study’s authors declined to comment.

The dearth of research around the test raises critical questions about whether it should be allowed as evidence, said Marvin Schechter, a New York criminal defense lawyer who served on the committee that wrote a groundbreaking National Academy of Sciences report in 2009 on strengthening forensic science in the United States. Schechter said the lung float test wasn’t included because the commission reviewed only the most frequently cited forensic tests.

His concerns with the test mirror many of the ones flagged in the report. For example, he said, the lack of standardization is evident in the fact that some medical examiners squeeze the lungs as part of the test.

“What is that? Your squeeze is different than my squeeze,” he said. “That’s not science.”

Schechter called for a national conference to evaluate the test and its admissibility in court.

“If you apply the rules and regulations that follow science to the lung float test, how does it pass muster?” Schechter said. “The research doesn’t exist, and if the research doesn’t exist, then you shouldn’t be doing it.”

Every so often, after the lung float test has been used to help put a woman behind bars, the questions around it set her free.

In 2006, Bridget Lee had hid her pregnancy after having an affair. She didn’t want anyone in the small Alabama community where she played piano at her church to know.

Bridget Lee at her home in Carrollton, Alabama, in 2009 (Jay Reeves/AP)

When she went into labor at home, she said her son was stillborn. She placed his body in a plastic container and put it in her SUV, where it sat for days.

The medical examiner used the lung float test and concluded that Lee’s son had been born alive. Lee was charged with murder, which in Alabama carried the possibility of the death penalty.

Lee’s lawyer called on Davis to review the autopsy report, which was the first time he saw the lung float test being used to support criminal charges against a mother. He concluded that the autopsy was filled with errors. It missed an infection in the umbilical cord and erroneously described decomposition as signs of injury.

Davis’ review led to the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences to examine the case, and the agency ruled that not only had the medical examiner botched the autopsy, but the baby was stillborn. Neither the medical examiner nor the prosecutors responded to requests for comment.

Lee spent nine months in jail before prosecutors dropped the charges against her.

She later told reporters that she knows it’s hard for people to understand how she could put her baby’s body in a container and leave it in her car. But, she said, the best way to describe it was like having “an out-of-body experience.”

While individual reactions are hard to comprehend, mental health specialists say the shock and pain of delivering a stillborn baby at home can be so traumatic that people may detach or disassociate from reality, said Dr. Miriam Schultz, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry who specializes in reproductive psychiatry at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health.

“Sometimes a survival instinct will kick in to try to normalize what’s an absolutely incomprehensibly shocking and devastating reality,” Schultz said. “One could imagine possibly trying to make evidence of what just happened less visible and wanting to completely compartmentalize this traumatic event that just has occurred.”

Late one April night in 2017, Latice Fisher said she felt the urge to defecate. About three hours later, she delivered her son into the toilet at her home.

The medical examiner in Fisher’s case performed the lung float test, which revealed that parts of the lungs floated and parts didn’t. He ruled that the baby was born alive and died from asphyxiation. Police also found that Fisher had searched for abortion pills on her phone.

Yveka Pierre, senior litigation counsel with the reproductive justice nonprofit If/When/How, said the people who are prosecuted for their pregnancy outcomes are typically from marginalized communities. They’re Black, like Fisher; or they’re brown, like Purvi Patel, an Indiana woman who was sent to prison for feticide after self-inducing an abortion, a charge that was later vacated; or they face financial hurdles, like Akers.

“Some losses are tragedies, depending on your identity, and some losses are crimes, depending on your identity.” Pierre said. “That is not how we say the law should work.”

Pierre, who also worked on Akers’ case, said Fisher and her husband did what prosecutors say to do by calling 911, but Fisher was still arrested. Once the medical examiner’s investigation starts, she said, the office typically works in tandem with the police.

A grand jury indicted Fisher on second-degree murder charges in January 2018. But a few months later, a local group raised money to get her released on bond. The group also contacted a national nonprofit, now known as Pregnancy Justice, which helped connect Fisher with longtime criminal defense attorney Dan Arshack. He began researching the lung float test and came to an unmistakable conclusion.

“It should be permitted to the same extent that dunking a woman in water is permitted to determine if she’s a witch,” he said in an interview.

“Some losses are tragedies, depending on your identity, and some losses are crimes, depending on your identity. That is not how we say the law should work.”

—Yveka Pierre, senior litigation counsel with If/When/How

Arshack asked Davis to review the autopsy, which he found troubling. Arshack also asked Aziza Ahmed, then a professor at Northeastern University School of Law, to focus specifically on the forensics of the lung float test.

By not requiring rigorous testing or proof of its accuracy, Ahmed wrote, the “courts themselves have played a key role in sustaining the inaccurate belief” that the test could reliably determine whether a child was born alive.

Arshack wrote letters to District Attorney Scott Colom explaining Davis and Ahmed’s findings, saying there was no “reasonable legal or scientific basis” to conclude that a crime occurred. He also explained that it wasn’t “good public policy to prosecute women for bad pregnancy outcomes, especially Black women in Mississippi,” who suffer higher rates of maternal mortality and stillbirth.

In May 2019, Colom announced that he had learned of concerns surrounding the reliability of the lung float test. Once the question of whether the child was born alive was scientifically in dispute, he said, he dismissed the charges against Fisher and sent the case to another grand jury armed with the details about the test.

“When you’re talking about a murder charge for a mother,” Colom said in an interview, “I felt that was crucial information because I certainly didn’t want to be prosecuting somebody for a stillborn death that could not be her fault.”

This time, the grand jury chose not to indict Fisher.

As Akers’ case made its way through court, Davis was asked to review the autopsy. He noted that Akers had classic risk factors for stillbirth: hypertension during pregnancy, obesity, advanced maternal age and previous pregnancies. She also was past her due date and reported not feeling the baby kick in the days leading up to the birth.

Dr. Gregory Davis at University of Kentucky College of Medicine (Natosha Via for ProPublica)

Davis agreed with the medical examiner, Dr. Nikki Mourtzinos, and the associate pathologist who conducted parts of the autopsy, that there were infections in the pancreas, placenta — the vital organ that provides the fetus with nutrients and oxygen — and the umbilical cord, which serves as the baby’s lifeline in the womb.

But what he found “perplexing,” he wrote, is that they did “not seem to take these critical findings into account regarding such findings being associated with stillbirth.” When it was his time to take the witness stand at trial, he said the infections in the placenta, umbilical cord and membranes were “a smoking gun association” with stillbirth.

An OB-GYN also testified that he believed Akers suffered from a placental abruption — a complication where the placenta separates from the wall of the uterus — which also can lead to a stillbirth and cause heavy bleeding.

Prosecutors said the case hinged on whether the baby was born alive. Among the evidence they pointed to were the results of the lung float test, the pinkish appearance of the lungs and lack of decomposition, malformation of the baby’s head or slippage of the skin.

“These lungs floated,” the prosecutor said during closing. “They floated because this child had breathed and was alive after he was delivered at home that day.”

The prosecution homed in on the fact that Akers had wanted an abortion, which was underscored by her cellphone search history. They said she never intended to have her baby live and breathe. When she didn’t get an abortion, they said, she chose to give birth at home and kill her son. They pointed out that she hadn’t received prenatal care and that she didn’t attempt to resuscitate the baby.

Akers told police she thought it was too late.

During closing arguments, prosecutors displayed an oversized photo of the baby on the screen and repeated that Akers put his body in a bag, using the word “bag” 26 times.

In April 2022, the jury found Akers guilty of second-degree murder and first-degree child abuse.

In response to questions from ProPublica, the state’s attorney declined to comment. Mourtzinos, the assistant medical examiner who testified in Akers’ case, did not respond to requests for comment. She’s no longer with the Maryland medical examiner’s office. The agency’s interim chief medical examiner said the office is accredited by the National Association of Medical Examiners and follows the organization’s autopsy performance standards. Any and all ancillary tests, she said, “are done on a case by case basis, at the discretion of the attending medical examiner” and interpreted in the context of the entire case.

When the verdict was read, Akers collapsed in her chair, dropped her head to the table and sobbed. Her family, who was seated behind her, filled the courtroom with their own cries.

Last summer, as much of the country awaited the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which eliminated a constitutional right to abortion, the New York-based nonprofit Pregnancy Justice released a guide for medical, legal and child welfare professionals on confronting pregnancy criminalization.

The organization advised defense attorneys and medical examiners to challenge the lung float test. In many cases, the authors wrote, criminal charges are based on “the erroneous assumption that a woman engaged in acts or omissions that harmed the fetus.”

The backdrop to the lung float test is the deeper issue of criminalizing pregnancy loss. That was already on the rise before the Dobbs decision, with data from Pregnancy Justice showing that nearly 1,400 pregnant women were arrested, prosecuted or sentenced between 2006 and the 2022 Dobbs decision, more than three times the total for the previous 33 years. Many of the charges were connected to drug use while pregnant.

Society often wants to hold someone responsible, said Dana Sussman, deputy executive director of Pregnancy Justice. Mothers are usually the easiest to blame.

One of the first things Pregnancy Justice lawyers now ask in a pregnancy loss case is whether the prosecutor is attempting to use the lung float test.

“It’s almost like an intake question,” Sussman said. “We will fight every attempt that we learn of to use that test because that is a life sentence based on unreliable information and unreliable science.”

The lack of understanding, research and education around stillbirth also contributes to the urge to assign blame. Every year in the U.S., more than 20,000 pregnancies end in stillbirth, defined as the death of an expected child at 20 weeks or more. But the public is often shocked to hear that number or learn that only a fraction of stillbirths are attributed to congenital abnormalities. Some babies died just minutes before they were born and were placed in their parents’ arms while they were warm to the touch and their cheeks were still rosy.

Davis, an affable man with a snow-white beard, has started to spread the word about the lung float test. At a post-Dobbs legal seminar in Tennessee over the summer, he told a room of lawyers about the test, one that many of them had not heard of but may soon encounter.

A lawyer sitting in the back told the crowd that the lung float test seemed to have the same validity as bite mark analysis, which for decades was accepted as evidence and now is considered junk science.

“What do you do when they say this test has been accepted in the past?” she asked.

Davis pointed her to a letter where he gathered signatures from more than two dozen forensic pathologists and medical examiners from around the world who declared that the lung float test is not a scientifically reliable test or indicator of live birth and “is not generally accepted within the forensic pathology community.”

He had submitted the letter in Akers’ case.

In July of last year, three months after the Akers verdict, prosecutors asked the judge to sentence her to 40 years. They said it was the “the most heinous of crimes that can be committed” and it was carried out by a woman who hid her pregnancy and took her baby’s life in a “detached and calculated manner.”

Akers’ family came to her defense. Her husband said that in their nearly 20 years together, Akers’ “devotion to her family defies description.” One of his greatest joys in life, he said, was seeing the way their kids light up anytime she enters a room.

Her lawyer, Debra Saltz, said Akers made “lapses in judgment” by not telling anyone she was pregnant, having the baby alone and then putting his body in the closet. But, she said, “There is in this life no way anybody will get me to believe that Moira Akers killed her baby. I believe Moira, and I believe the science, that this baby was stillborn.”

Before the judge imposed his sentence, Akers addressed him.

“My children are my entire world,” she said, “and I fell in love with my son as soon as I saw him.”

The judge, who acknowledged what an “extraordinarily difficult case” it was, said the charges against Akers were “particularly egregious because they were perpetrated against an innocent, helpless, newborn child.”

He sentenced her to 30 years in prison.

Akers’ appeal, now pending, focuses on the shortcomings of the lung float test.

As she waits for a ruling, she stays connected to her family from prison. Her mom, Mary Linehan, said most of their conversations revolve around the ordinary details of her children’s lives, their first day of school and their favorite new toys.

Akers’ mom, who retired from her job as an accountant at a Catholic church and school, helps watch her grandchildren. When they ask about their mom, she said, their dad tells them that she “got blamed for something she didn’t do, and we’re fighting to get her out.”

Mariam Elba contributed research.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Duaa Eldeib.

Digital Verification of Human Rights Abuses by Students with Amnesty Experts

Amnesty International — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 08:35:28 +0000

This content originally appeared on Amnesty International and was authored by Amnesty International.

UN experts: Xinjiang expanding forced separation of Uyghur children

By RFA Uyghur — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 00:48:59 +0000

Experts from the United Nations have expressed “grave concern” over allegations that Chinese officials in Xinjiang have expanded a government-run boarding school system that forcibly separates Uyghur and other minority Muslim children from their families and communities.

The experts were also concerned that the boarding schools teach almost exclusively in China’s official language of Mandarin “with little or no use of Uyghur as medium of instruction,” according to a statement released by the U.N.’s human rights office on Tuesday.

“The separation of mainly Uyghur and other minority children from their families could lead to their forced assimilation into the majority Mandarin language and the adoption of Han cultural practices,” the U.N. experts said.

Scholars as well as previous RFA reporting have found that thousands of Uyghur children whose parents have been detained have been sent to camps, boarding schools and orphanages.

Efforts to assimilate Uyghurs at younger ages gathered steam after the Chinese government undertook a mass detention and internment campaign in 2017 that saw up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities incarcerated in a network of detention camps.

The U.N. experts said on Tuesday that they were recently informed of an “exponential increase” in recent years in the number of boarding schools for other Muslim and minority children in Xinjiang, the statement said. They’ve also learned that local schools where Uyghur and other minority languages were used for instruction have been closed.

The Chinese government’s actions are a violation of minorities’ right to education “without discrimination, family life and cultural rights,” the experts said.

“The massive scale of the allegations raises extremely serious concerns of violations of basic human rights,” they said.

‘Deserves more attention’

In response to the statement, the Uyghur Human Rights Project called on U.N. member states to vote against China’s upcoming bid for re-election to the U.N. Human Rights Council.

“Uyghur children are torn from their parents as state policy,” the organization’s executive director, Omer Kanat, said. “It’s past time for U.N. member states to recognize this is a genocide.”

Also on Tuesday, the United States government said it had determined that “genocide and crimes against humanity continued to occur” in China’s Xinjiang region in 2022.

That announcement came as Washington blacklisted three more companies located in Xinjiang because of their use of forced Uyghur labor – a move that bans American companies from importing their goods.

Xinjiang region expert Adrian Zenz, who first reported on the boarding schools in 2019, said he was “grateful” for the U.N. experts’ statement.

“But I’m also wondering why it took so long – and why did it take the U.N. so long?” he told Radio Free Asia.

The U.N. should write its own report summarizing existing research on the issue, and the U.N. Human Rights Council could follow up with a resolution condemning China, he said.

“It just deserves more attention,” he said. “The international community has really paid no attention to this.”

The U.N. experts are Fernand de Varennes, a special rapporteur on minority issues, Alexandra Xanthaki, a special rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, and Farida Shaheed, a special rapporteur on education.

Edited by Matt Reed.

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

UN experts: Xinjiang expanding forced separation of Uyghur children

By RFA Uyghur — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 00:48:59 +0000

Scholars as well as previous RFA reporting have found that thousands of Uyghur children whose parents have been detained have been sent to camps, boarding schools and orphanages.

The Chinese government’s actions are a violation of minorities’ right to education “without discrimination, family life and cultural rights,” the experts said.

“The massive scale of the allegations raises extremely serious concerns of violations of basic human rights,” they said.

‘Deserves more attention’

In response to the statement, the Uyghur Human Rights Project called on U.N. member states to vote against China’s upcoming bid for re-election to the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Also on Tuesday, the United States government said it had determined that “genocide and crimes against humanity continued to occur” in China’s Xinjiang region in 2022.

Xinjiang region expert Adrian Zenz, who first reported on the boarding schools in 2019, said he was “grateful” for the U.N. experts’ statement.

“But I’m also wondering why it took so long – and why did it take the U.N. so long?” he told Radio Free Asia.

The U.N. should write its own report summarizing existing research on the issue, and the U.N. Human Rights Council could follow up with a resolution condemning China, he said.

“It just deserves more attention,” he said. “The international community has really paid no attention to this.”

Edited by Matt Reed.

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

Myanmar reshuffle of generals suggests ‘instability,’ experts say

By RFA Burmese — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 20:35:12 +0000

Myanmar’s junta has officially sacked two high-ranking generals for alleged bribery and corruption as part of a reshuffle experts said indicates growing instability and disunity within military ranks.

Lt. Gen. Moe Myint Tun and Lt. Gen. Soe Htut, dismissed on Monday, were the seventh- and eighth-highest leaders in the State Administration Council, the governing junta.

Earlier this month, authorities arrested Moe Myint Tun, said to have accepted millions of dollars in bribes from businesspeople during the past two years, but it wasn’t clear if he would be tried.

He is under house arrest and being interrogated in the capital Naypyitaw, according to businesspeople who declined to be named for safety reasons.

Soe Htut was removed as interior minister last month and given a less influential post after serving in the position since 2020.

The junta has ordered four reshuffles since seizing power in a Feb. 1, 2021, coup d’etat, but observers say that stripping the two of their positions and expelling them from the military council was the most severe action yet taken against the regime’s generals since the takeover.

Than Soe Naing, a political commentator, told RFA Burmese that the move suggests the junta is “unstable” and beginning to “disintegrate.”

“Corruption within the military council will not cease, even if these generals are removed and replaced,” he said. “A serious conflict of interest has emerged among the leading generals of the military council. I think this instability shows that the military council is spiraling out of control.”

Crackdown on business dealings

On Tuesday, the official Global New Light of Myanmar announced that Gen. Maung Maung Aye, chief of general staff for the armed forces, and Lt. Gen. Nyo Saw, an adviser to junta chief Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, had been appointed as new members of the military council.

Moe Myint Tun and Soe Htut were both absent from the new list of council members and the report mentioned nothing about their removal or where they had been reassigned.

The removal of the two officers is part of a crackdown on trade and finance officials, businesspeople and exporters amid economic turmoil and sanctions as the junta struggles to accumulate foreign revenue and rein in soaring commodity prices, sources say.

Attempts by RFA to contact Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun, the junta’s deputy information minister, for comment on the shakeup went unanswered Tuesday.

Lt. Gen. Nyo Saw [left], an adviser to Myanmar junta chief Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, and Gen. Maung Maung Aye, chief of general staff for the armed forces, have been appointed as new members of the state military council. Credit: Myanmar military [left], AFP

Thein Tun Oo, the executive director of the Thayninga Institute for Strategic Studies, which is made up of former military officers, told RFA that the changes were “necessary” as it was “time for a change.”

“We have to view [the dismissals] in the context of what the next step [of the military] will be,” he said.

Thein Tun Oo said that the real reason for the dismissals will remain a matter of speculation until the junta makes an official statement.

“For now, I have only one simple comment: I must say that these changes were made because they were necessary," he added.

Exploiting exchange rate

The junta arrested another high-ranking military official — Gen. Yan Naung Soe, joint secretary of the Central Committee on Ensuring the Smooth Flow of Trade and Goods — this month amid the crackdown and an investigation of Commerce Ministry officials, the online news outlet Myanmar Now reported.

The committee is responsible for procuring U.S. dollars for trade licensing purposes and other commercial transactions.

The generals have allegedly made millions of dollars from their dealings with traders and by benefiting from the disparity between Myanmar’s official exchange rate of 2,100 kyats to the U.S. dollar and the market rate amid a steep decline in the kyat’s value, Myanmar now reported last week.

‘They know that they won’t last’

Nay Phone Latt, spokesman for the shadow National Unity Government, or NUG, Prime Minister's Office told RFA that corruption and military generals in Myanmar “are inseparable.”

He said that this junta’s generals may even be more corrupt than those of past juntas “because they know that they won’t last [in power] long.”

“Those who understand that there is not much time left for them think that they will self-serve as much as they can in the remaining time,” he said. “This can be seen not just among high-ranking generals, but middle-ranking and low level service members as well.”

Nay Phone Latt suggested that the dismissals may not only have been punishment for corruption, but also the result of “political issues,” although he did not elaborate.

There were only two or three changes in the positions of top military leaders under the State Law and Order Restoration Council (1988-97) or the State Peace and Development Council (1997-2011), two previous military juntas that ruled Myanmar, according to the Thayninga Institute’s Thein Tun Oo.

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

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

Stopping bogus legal action against reporters requires new laws, say experts

Anita Mureithi — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 15:18:59 +0000

Experts welcome new task force set up to stop rich and powerful from silencing journalists, but say it’s not enough

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Anita Mureithi.

Home Office wrong to let police ‘call the shots’ on rogue cops, experts say

Adam Bychawski — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 09:11:10 +0000

Exclusive: Critics say Braverman is returning to a police disciplinary system that let officers ‘mark own work’

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

Led by US, Rohingya aid nosedives as donors focus on Ukraine, experts say

By Nazmul Ahasan for BenarNews — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 19:21:33 +0000

Global aid for Rohingya, the displaced and oppressed stateless minority from Myanmar, has declined sharply this year as donor nations have shifted their priority to the war in Ukraine, humanitarian and human rights groups say.

From being “among the best funded humanitarian responses” until last year, an annual fundraising plan by international agencies for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh may record its lowest contributions in 2023 since it was set up in 2017, data indicates.

The Joint Response Plan (JRP) for the Rohingya Humanitarian Crisis has so far received less than half the contributions this year than in 2022, data from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) shows. And the U.S. $268 million the plan has got so far is a third of the $876 million it sought for the year.

This drop comes at a time when the World Food Program earlier this year reduced food assistance to the Rohingya 33% – to $8 a month per person – citing a funds shortage, even as it acknowledged that that 45% of refugee families were not eating a sufficient diet and malnutrition was widespread in the refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar.

“Aid [for the Rohingya] has been dwindling in the last few years, and the JRP is still underfunded. Donors are stretched thin responding to the situation in Ukraine, Sudan, and Afghanistan,” John Quinley III, director of advocacy group Fortify Rights, told BenarNews.

“The decline in food aid has had significant health consequences for Rohingya refugees – both their physical and mental health. Donor governments should ensure Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh have access to adequate food.”

The United States, the largest donor to the JRP since it was set up in 2017, has contributed $100 million this year so far, down from $336.7 million in total last year. By contrast, U.S. non-defense assistance to Ukraine spiked to $22 billion in 2022-2023 compared to an annual average of $500 million in earlier years, according to foreignassistance.gov, a United States government database.

About 1 million Rohingya, including about 740,000 who fled Myanmar following a brutal military offensive in their home state of Rakhine in August 2017, live mostly in crowded and sprawling refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar in southeastern Bangladesh.

The international agencies’ fundraising plan will continue to receive funds through the end of the year, but it likely won’t match past amounts, said Romain Desclous, a spokesperson at the U.N refugee agency UNHCR in Bangladesh.

That’s not because of “fatigue” or “disinterest” from donors, he told BenarNews.

“[The Rohingya crisis] was up until last year among the best funded humanitarian responses,” Desclous said.

He said the crisis was no longer considered an emergency situation but a protracted one, which means the emergency has lasted so long that it has become a normal situation.

“That means humanitarian emergency funds get directed towards other emergencies, and the world is not lacking in emergencies,” he said.

Rohingya refugees collect boxes of food aid at a distribution point in the Kutupalong camp near Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, Aug. 14, 2018. [Ed Jones/AFP]

When Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, the situation in the former Soviet republic became one such emergency situation, noted Sultan Mohammed Zakaria, a Bangladesh country specialist in the U.S. with rights watchdog Amnesty International.

“The Russia-Ukraine war has shifted global diplomatic priorities as the conflict has deeply unsettled the global security architecture while the world is still grappling with the economic fallout of COVID-19,” he told BenarNews.

“Yet we live and thrive on the strength of our collective consciousness. There must never be any excuse to forget a million refugees.”

Need ‘continuation, not reduction, of life-saving aid’

The huge decline in funds for the Rohingya this year stems from a drastic drop in U.S. contributions, which mostly ramped up its funding over 2018-2022, even as contributions from other sources waned. The JRP was able to make up what it lost from other donors through the U.S. funds increases.

The United States has provided at least 40% of total global funds contributed toward the Rohingya refugees to the JRP so far since 2017, according to OCHA’s data.

In 2022, the U.S. contributed the most it had ever done – $336 million – to the JRP. By comparison, the UK, the second-highest donor, contributed only a tenth of that amount last year.

Therefore, the U.S. contribution of $100 million so far this year represents a drastic reduction. But, it turns out, American assistance globally has dropped in 2023, according to a government database.

U.S. global assistance fell to $27 billion so far this year from $58 billion last year, according to data from ForeignAssistance.gov.

This decline in U.S. humanitarian assistance over the last year has occurred “even as needs reach record levels,” is negatively affecting refugees around the world, acknowledged Daniel Sullivan, a regional director for Refugees International.

“In March 2021, [U.S.] Secretary of State Antony Blinken made an official genocide determination and committed to helping the Rohingya build a path out of genocide, Sullivan told BenarNews.

“That path must begin with continuation, not reduction, of life-saving aid.”

Rohingya refugees scramble for aid at a camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, Sept. 24, 2017. [Cathal McNaughton/Reuters]

The more than 1 million Rohingya in the makeshift camps are fully dependent on international aid because Bangladesh does not allow them to work in the country. Some enterprising refugees who set up shops within the camps had to see the authorities shut down their establishments or even demolish them.

Washington, for its part, has not publicly discussed the steep drop in its global assistance and a State Department official who BenarNews contacted suggested, like the U.S. had done before, that the Rohingya be allowed to work.

“[We] continue to meet with and encourage the government of Bangladesh to re-examine its restrictions on allowing refugees to earn a living, which would allow our humanitarian partners to focus on assisting the most vulnerable,” the department spokesperson said in a statement.

Bangladesh Foreign Minister A.K. Abdul Momen ruled out allowing the refugees to work inside or outside the camps.

“The West advises us to employ the Rohingya through training. It is not possible,” he told BenarNews.

“We are struggling to give work to our own people.”

Ahammad Foyez in Dhaka contributed to this report. BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news service.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Nazmul Ahasan for BenarNews.