This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

As the Trump administration ramps up its violent immigration raids around the country, increasingly targeting immigrants with no criminal record, and racially profiling Latinos to meet arrest quotas, immigrant communities in Baltimore and beyond are living in terror. In this urgent episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with two immigrant justice organizers in Baltimore—whose identities are being protected to ensure their safety—about the horrifying reality that immigrant families, particularly Latino families, are experiencing right now. “If you don’t look Latino, do you tell your child to carry around their passport or their birth certificate?… US citizens are being detained only because they look Latino, because they are Latino.”

Additional resources:

• Maanvi Singh, Will Craft, & Andrew Witherspoon, The Guardian, “How Trump has supercharged the immigration crackdown – in data”
• Jaisal Noor, Baltimore Beat, “Baltimore residents are mobilizing to protect their immigrant neighbors from ICE”
• Tara Lynch, CBS Baltimore, “Community demands release of Maryland pastor who was arrested by ICE”

Credits:

• Producer: Rosette Sewali
• Studio Production: David Hebden
• Audio Post-Production: Stephen Frank

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Marc Steiner.

• Trump’s Big Bill to be signed Friday after marathon vote and marathon speech by Dem leader Hakeem Jeffries;
• Democratic and labor leaders say Big Budget Bill will hurt workers and destroy the middle class;
• SF sues Trump over EPA termination of Environment Climate Justice grants;
• Advocates fear state cannabis tax proposals could unravel and hurt programs for children
• MALDEF planning million dollar lawsuit over US citizen arrested for filming ICE raid

The post Trump’s Big Bill to be signed Friday after marathon vote; Advocates fear state cannabis tax bills could unravel funding and hurt programs for children – July 3, 2025 appeared first on KPFA.

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

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.

Upheaval at the nation’s top disaster agency is raising anxiety among state and local emergency managers — and leaving major questions about the whereabouts of billions of federal dollars it pays out to them.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency still has not opened applications for an enormous suite of grants, including ones that many states rely on to pay for basic emergency management operations. Some states pass on much of that money to their most rural, low-income counties to ensure they have an emergency manager on the payroll.

FEMA has blown through the mid-May statutory deadline to start the grants’ application process, according to the National Emergency Management Association, with no word about why or what that might indicate. The delay appears to have little precedent.

“There’s no transparency on why it’s not happening,” said Michael A. Coen Jr., who served as FEMA’s chief of staff under former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

FEMA’s system of grants is complex and multifaceted and helps communities prepare for and respond to everything from terrorist attacks to natural disasters.

In April, the agency abruptly rescinded a different grant program that county and local governments were expecting to help them reduce natural hazard risks moving forward. The clawback of money included hundreds of millions already pledged. FEMA also quietly withdrew a notice for states to apply for $600 million in flood mitigation grants.

On top of that, on June 11, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem began requiring that she review all FEMA grants above $100,000. That could slow its vast multibillion grants apparatus to a crawl, current and former FEMA employees said.

FEMA did not answer ProPublica’s questions about the missed application deadline or the impact of funding cuts and delays, instead responding with a statement from DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin that Noem is focused on bringing accountability to FEMA’s spending by “rooting out waste, fraud, abuse, and working to ensure only grants that really help Americans in time of need are approved.”

The memo announcing the change arrived the day after President Donald Trump said he wants to begin dismantling FEMA at the close of hurricane season this fall.

All of this has left states — some of which rely on the federal government for the vast majority of their emergency management funding — in a difficult position. While Trump has sharply criticized FEMA’s performance delivering aid after disasters strike, he has said almost nothing about the future of its grant programs.

“It’s a huge concern,” said Lynn Budd, president of the National Emergency Management Association and director of the Wyoming Office of Homeland Security, which houses emergency management. The state agency gets more than 90% of its operating budget from federal funds, especially FEMA grants. “The uncertainty makes it very difficult,” she said.

In North Carolina, a state hit hard by a recent natural disaster, federal grants make up 82% of its emergency management agency’s budget. North Carolina Emergency Management leaders are pressing state lawmakers to provide it with “funding that will sustain the agency and its core functions” and cut its reliance on federal grant funding, an agency spokesperson said.

A forced weaning off of federal dollars could have an outsize impact in North Carolina and the other states that pass on much of their FEMA grants to county and local agencies. Many rural counties have modest tax bases and are already stretched thin.

In May, ProPublica published a story detailing the horrors of Hurricane Helene’s impact on one of those counties, Yancey. Home to 19,000 people, it suffered the largest per capita loss of life and damage to property in the storm. Jeff Howell, its emergency manager, was operating with only a part-time employee and said that for years he had been asking the county commission for more help. It wasn’t until after the storm that county commissioners agreed with the need.

“They realized how big a job it is,” said Howell, who has since retired.

But even large metropolitan counties rely on the grants. The hold upin opening the grant applications concerns Robert Wike Graham, deputy director of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Emergency Management, which serves an area of 1.2 million people and is home to a nuclear power plant. The training and preparation FEMA grants help the agency pay for are critical to keeping the community safe in the face of a nuclear catastrophe.

Yet Graham said he has resorted to scouring social media posts and news reports for bits of clues about the grants — and the future of FEMA itself.

“We’re all having to be like, hey, what have you heard? What do you know? What’s going on? Nobody knows,” Graham said.

Trump is on his second acting FEMA administrator in five months, and the director who coordinates national disaster response turned in his resignation letter June 11. More than a dozen senior leaders, including the agency’s chief counsel, have left or been fired, along with an unknown mass of its full-time workers.

“Every emergency manager I know is screaming, ‘You’re screwing the system up.’ We’ve all been calling for reform,” Graham said. “But it’s too much, too fast.

Shortly after President Jimmy Carter created FEMA in 1979 to centralize federal disaster management, the agency began to dole out grants to help communities grappling with large-scale destruction. Over the years, its grants ballooned, especially after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, when huge new programs helped states harden security against this alarming new threat.

Today, FEMA operates roughly a dozen preparedness grant programs. Among other things, the money serves as a financial carrot to ensure that even spending-averse and tax-strapped states and counties employ emergency managers who help communities prepare for and respond to terrorist attacks and natural disasters.

Former FEMA leaders said states have been largely content to sit back and let the feds pay up. As a result, they said, the grants have created a system of dependence that leaves emergency managers vulnerable to ever-shifting national priorities and, at the moment, a president set on dismantling the agency.

Across the country, the percentage of state emergency management agencies’ budgets paid by federal funding ranges from zero to 99.4%, a 2024 National Emergency Management Association report says. A spokesperson declined to provide a state-by-state breakdown, so ProPublica canvassed a few.

Wyoming tops 90%. Texas’ agency gets about three-quarters of its operational budget from federal funding. Virginia gets roughly 70%. South Carolina comes in around 61% federal funding for day-to-day operations.

Most state emergency managers agree that their states need to depend less on the federal government for their funding, “but there’s got to be some glide path or timeline where we can all work toward the goal,” Budd said.

Some states would need upwards of a decade to prepare for such a seismic shift, especially those like Wyoming that budget every other year, she added. Its Legislature is in the middle of budget negotiations for fiscal year 2027-28.

ProPublica is continuing to report on the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in North Carolina. If you are an emergency manager who would like to tell us about your needs or share your experience with recovery efforts, please email helenetips@propublica.org.

If emergency managers instead are scrambling, “the effects that we’re going to see down the line is a lack of preparedness, a lack of coordination, training and partnerships being built,” Budd said. “We’re not going to be able to respond as well.”

A key reason states have become so dependent on FEMA grants despite the risk of national political upheaval is that state legislatures and local elected leaders haven’t always prioritized paying for emergency management themselves despite its critical role. With FEMA’s grants, they haven’t had to.

W. Craig Fugate has seen reluctance to wean off FEMA grants from all levels of government. He served as FEMA administrator under Obama and, before that, as head of Florida’s emergency management division under then-Govs. Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist.

“My experience tells me locals will not step up unless they are dealing with a catastrophe,” Fugate said.

Because most of the preparedness grants require no match from state or local governments, he said, it strips away any motivation for them to do so — especially with other pressing needs vying for those dollars.

“The real question is how much of this is actually critical and should be the responsibility of local governments to fund?” Fugate said. “Neither local governments nor states have been very forward in funding beyond the minimums to match federal dollars.”

After Hurricane Helene, North Carolina’s Emergency Management agency commissioned a report that pointedly criticized the state’s “over-reliance on federal grants to fund basic operations.” Only about 16.5% of the state agency’s budget comes from state appropriations.

The report noted that this reliance had led to an inadequate investment by the state in its emergency management staffing and infrastructure. A staff shortage at the agency “severely compromised the state’s response to Hurricane Helene.” Among other things, a lack of staff hampered the State Emergency Response Team’s ability to maintain a 24-hour operation that was supposed to support local and county officials who were overwhelmed by the massive storm.

North Carolina state Rep. Mark Pless, the Republican co-chair of the House Emergency Management and Disaster Recovery Committee, said the state’s conservative spending and $3.6 billion in reserves have “afforded us the ability to fund ourselves for preparedness” if FEMA suddenly yanks its grants.

But Democratic Rep. Robert Reives, the House minority leader, worried that any financial flexibility would dry up if planned and potential tax cuts in the years ahead create a budget shortfall, as some have predicted.

In mostly rural Washington County, along North Carolina’s hurricane-prone coast, Lance Swindell is a one-man emergency management office. His county, home to 11,000 people, lacks a big tax base.

Like other emergency managers across the state, Swindell said he supports cutting FEMA red tape and waste, but “grant funding is a major funding source just to keep the lights on.”

One of the grants in the FEMA program that blew past its deadline for opening applications pays half of his salary. That grant can fund core local operations such as staffing, training and equipment. It is critical to local emergency management offices: Almost 82% of counties across the country report tapping into it.

Cuts to this particular grant under the Biden administration already reduced what North Carolina gets — and therefore what gets passed down the governmental food chain to people like Swindell. North Carolina was allocated $8.5 million in fiscal year 2024, down from $10.6 million two years earlier.

Looking ahead, Swindell is still waiting for the applications to open while wondering if FEMA will more drastically slash the grants — and, if so, whether his county could find the money to continue paying his full-time salary.

Mollie Simon contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jennifer Berry Hawes.

Decree 121, issued on June 11, shifts the authority to grant, revoke, and renew law practice licenses from the Minister of Justice to provincial chairpersons — a move seen as part of a broader agenda to restructure Vietnam’s state apparatus. Government officials have not offered a direct explanation for the decree.

However, law professionals have raised alarms over the change, warning that it not only violates existing law but also hands sweeping powers to local leaders, raising concerns the authority could be abused to intimidate lawyers involved in cases against provincial governments.

Writing on his Facebook page, Ho Chi Minh City-based attorney Trinh Dinh Dung argued that Decree 121 violates existing legislation, specifically the 2006 Law on Lawyers, which stipulates that only the Minister of Justice has the authority to issue, revoke, and renew law practicing licenses. “As a matter of principle, a legal document issued by the National Assembly can only be amended by the National Assembly itself,” he wrote.

The ongoing session of the National Assembly is scheduled to conclude on June 30, but its agenda does not include any discussion on the Law on Lawyers.

With no indication that the existing law will be amended, attorney Trinh Dinh Dung concluded that the executive branch is showing “signs of power abuse.”

The most troubling aspect of the new rule, critics say, is that it grants the power to strip lawyers of their right to practice law to provincial leaders, who frequently face public opposition over local policies.

Dang Dinh Manh, a former attorney from Ho Chi Minh City who has given up practicing law in Vietnam due to government harassment, told RFA that local governments are frequently the target of legal challenges.

“Often, when the authorities issue documents related to land or housing confiscation, even a single affected area can prompt hundreds of households to file lawsuits,” he said.

Local communities typically hire lawyers from within the same province to represent their cases. With local leaders now holding the power to end legal careers, lawyers will be “intimidated into submission,” the former attorney warned.

This concern is echoed by lawyers in other parts of the country as well.

Speaking to RFA on condition of anonymity, a Hanoi-based lawyer cited a hypothetical case involving a city chairperson. “It will be easy for favoritism and fear to take hold, as the chairperson has the power to revoke lawyers’ practicing licenses at any time,” he warned.

The new rule is set to add an additional layer of deterrence for lawyers, supplementing existing regulations. Under current law, all practicing lawyers must be registered with a bar association, which operates under the oversight of government authorities.

In 2024, authorities in the southern province of Long An launched an investigation into three lawyers over their online commentary on a local legal case. The move prompted all three to flee the country, marking a turning point in the government’s approach to legal professionals involved in sensitive matters.

Speaking to RFA, Dang Dinh Manh, one of the three lawyers who fled Vietnam fearing government retribution, said the regime’s decision to grant provincial leaders the authority to revoke lawyers’ practicing licenses shows that it views legal professionals as a “target” to be “struggled against,” rather than as partners in upholding the rule of law.

Edited by Greg Barber

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

The Trump administration is escalating its campaign against international students at U.S. colleges and universities, announcing that it will begin “aggressively” revoking the visas of Chinese students, in addition to freezing visa processing for all foreign-born students as it prepares to require additional social media vetting for every applicant. “It’s really just difficult for me to think of any conceivable theory on which this is going to help the United States,” says Jameel Jaffer, noting that international students pay a disproportionate share of tuition costs on U.S. campuses. Jaffer is the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, which has previously sued the government over its social media vetting policy for visa applications. The policy, which began as a pilot program during the Obama administration, “is ineffective at identifying national security threats, but it is very effective at chilling free speech,” says Jaffer.

Jaffer also comments on the high-profile immigration detention of former Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil and Harvard graduate researcher Kseniia Petrova, as well as a case brought by the Knight Institute challenging the constitutionality of the Trump administration’s crackdown on campus pro-Palestine protest.

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

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.

What could possibly go wrong with Ameri-snitchers running around their communities?

Don’t like your neighbor’s dog running through your yard? Call ICE. Don’t want to pay for work an immigrant just performed for you? Call ICE. Co-worker not religious or patriotic enough? Call the government’s anti-Christian bias hotline!

Calling ICE on Your Neighbors

In January, Tom Homan, appointed by Trump to oversee deportation efforts, announced plans for a government hotline where individuals can report undocumented immigrants in their communities. Homan stated, “I’m hoping people start calling ICE and reporting because we have millions of people in this country that can be force multipliers for us if they just call us with information.”

“Experts warn government-inspired informing can devolve into corrupt acts and score-settling,” Forbes’ Stuart Anderson reported. “Businesses are likely to become targets during the Trump administration’s immigration raids. Given the nature of bureaucracies, officials will assign a top priority to generating large numbers of arrests without concern for collateral impacts.”

Trump’s Anti-Christian Grievance Hotline

For decades, prominent Religious Right leaders have complained about anti-Christian bias. In early February, President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias.

Politico’s Robbie Gramer and Nahal Toosi recently reported that “The [State Department] … will work with an administration-wide task force to collect information ‘involving anti-religious bias during the last presidential administration’ and will collect examples of anti-Christian bias through anonymous employee report forms. … Some State Department officials reacted to the cable with shock and alarm, saying that even if well-intentioned, it is based on the flawed premise that the department harbors anti-Christian bias to begin with, and warning it could create a culture of fear.”

“The instructions are clear,” Daily Kos’ Alex Samuels recently pointed out. “Give names, dates, and locations of the alleged bias, with a task force set to meet on April 22 to review the ‘evidence.’ The goal? To collect examples of religious discrimination under the Biden administration, because nothing says “freedom of religion” quite like your coworkers quietly documenting your every move for a federal task force.”

According to the Guardian:

One example of the ‘bias’ the department wants reported includes ‘mistreatment for opposing displays of flags, banners or other paraphernalia’ – a thinly veiled reference to Pride flags displayed at US embassies under the previous administration. The cable also specifically points to ‘policies related to preferred personal pronouns’ as potentially discriminatory against religious employees.

George W. Bush’s Operation TIPS

In early March  2002, professional sidekick Ed McMahon (look up Johnny Carson) introduced Attorney General John Ashcroft to an enthusiastic audience of representatives from more than 300 Neighborhood Watch groups meeting in Washington, D.C. Ashcroft unveiled an expanded mission for the Neighborhood Watch Program, announcing a grant of $1.9 million in federal funds to help the National Sheriffs’ Association double the number of participant groups to 15,000 nationwide.

According to the government’s web page at citizencorps.gov/watch.html, “Community residents will be provided with information which will enable them to recognize signs of potential terrorist activity, and to know how to report that activity, making these residents a critical element in the detection, prevention, and disruption of terrorism.” Under the supervision of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), “Terrorism prevention” was intended to become the “routine mission” of the Neighborhood Watch Program, the web site pointed out.

The new thrust of Neighborhood Watch is just part of the Bush Administration’s plan to set up a whole network of citizen snitches. In August, for instance, it will unveil a new Justice Department initiative called Operation TIPS, which stands for Terrorist Information and Prevention System.

Operation TIPS “will be a nationwide program giving millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and others a formal way to report suspicious terrorist activity,” says the citizencorps.gov web site. Involving one million workers in ten cities during the pilot stage, Operation TIPS will be “a national reporting system…. Every participant in this new program will be given an Operation TIPS information sticker to be affixed to the cab of their vehicle or placed in some other public location so that the toll-free number is readily available.”

Encouraging people to skulk around their neighborhoods in search of immigrants, and at government workplaces hunting anti-Christian bias is a totally anti-American undertaking. Trump’s policies could easily lead to abuse and misuse, including racial profiling, false reports and personal vendettas. It could also foster fear and mistrust within communities.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bill Berkowitz.

What could possibly go wrong with Ameri-snitchers running around their communities?

Don’t like your neighbor’s dog running through your yard? Call ICE. Don’t want to pay for work an immigrant just performed for you? Call ICE. Co-worker not religious or patriotic enough? Call the government’s anti-Christian bias hotline!

Calling ICE on Your Neighbors

In January, Tom Homan, appointed by Trump to oversee deportation efforts, announced plans for a government hotline where individuals can report undocumented immigrants in their communities. Homan stated, “I’m hoping people start calling ICE and reporting because we have millions of people in this country that can be force multipliers for us if they just call us with information.”

“Experts warn government-inspired informing can devolve into corrupt acts and score-settling,” Forbes’ Stuart Anderson reported. “Businesses are likely to become targets during the Trump administration’s immigration raids. Given the nature of bureaucracies, officials will assign a top priority to generating large numbers of arrests without concern for collateral impacts.”

Trump’s Anti-Christian Grievance Hotline

For decades, prominent Religious Right leaders have complained about anti-Christian bias. In early February, President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias.

Politico’s Robbie Gramer and Nahal Toosi recently reported that “The [State Department] … will work with an administration-wide task force to collect information ‘involving anti-religious bias during the last presidential administration’ and will collect examples of anti-Christian bias through anonymous employee report forms. … Some State Department officials reacted to the cable with shock and alarm, saying that even if well-intentioned, it is based on the flawed premise that the department harbors anti-Christian bias to begin with, and warning it could create a culture of fear.”

“The instructions are clear,” Daily Kos’ Alex Samuels recently pointed out. “Give names, dates, and locations of the alleged bias, with a task force set to meet on April 22 to review the ‘evidence.’ The goal? To collect examples of religious discrimination under the Biden administration, because nothing says “freedom of religion” quite like your coworkers quietly documenting your every move for a federal task force.”

According to the Guardian:

One example of the ‘bias’ the department wants reported includes ‘mistreatment for opposing displays of flags, banners or other paraphernalia’ – a thinly veiled reference to Pride flags displayed at US embassies under the previous administration. The cable also specifically points to ‘policies related to preferred personal pronouns’ as potentially discriminatory against religious employees.

George W. Bush’s Operation TIPS

In early March  2002, professional sidekick Ed McMahon (look up Johnny Carson) introduced Attorney General John Ashcroft to an enthusiastic audience of representatives from more than 300 Neighborhood Watch groups meeting in Washington, D.C. Ashcroft unveiled an expanded mission for the Neighborhood Watch Program, announcing a grant of $1.9 million in federal funds to help the National Sheriffs’ Association double the number of participant groups to 15,000 nationwide.

According to the government’s web page at citizencorps.gov/watch.html, “Community residents will be provided with information which will enable them to recognize signs of potential terrorist activity, and to know how to report that activity, making these residents a critical element in the detection, prevention, and disruption of terrorism.” Under the supervision of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), “Terrorism prevention” was intended to become the “routine mission” of the Neighborhood Watch Program, the web site pointed out.

The new thrust of Neighborhood Watch is just part of the Bush Administration’s plan to set up a whole network of citizen snitches. In August, for instance, it will unveil a new Justice Department initiative called Operation TIPS, which stands for Terrorist Information and Prevention System.

Operation TIPS “will be a nationwide program giving millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and others a formal way to report suspicious terrorist activity,” says the citizencorps.gov web site. Involving one million workers in ten cities during the pilot stage, Operation TIPS will be “a national reporting system…. Every participant in this new program will be given an Operation TIPS information sticker to be affixed to the cab of their vehicle or placed in some other public location so that the toll-free number is readily available.”

Encouraging people to skulk around their neighborhoods in search of immigrants, and at government workplaces hunting anti-Christian bias is a totally anti-American undertaking. Trump’s policies could easily lead to abuse and misuse, including racial profiling, false reports and personal vendettas. It could also foster fear and mistrust within communities.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bill Berkowitz.

Soybeans – which feed the production of China’s 435-million-strong pig industry – remains America’s top agricultural export, selling more than 27 million metric tons or over half of the $24.6 billion in total U.S. agricultural products Beijing imported in 2024.

The steep tariff hikes on agricultural products like soybeans and corn, both major components of hog feed, will drive up the cost of breeding livestock and translate into higher food prices for ordinary consumers for China – the world’s largest producer and consumer of pork, industry insiders said.

On April 11, China announced 125% tariffs on U.S. imports, in retaliation to U.S. President Donald Trump’s increase of duties on Chinese imports to 145%. With this, the total tariff on U.S. soybean imports rose to 135%, after adding in the 10% duty China imposed on certain U.S. agricultural products in March.

At an estimated 125% tariff hike, the CIF – cost, insurance, and freight – price of U.S. soybean imports will rise to $1,026 per metric ton, nearly double that of Brazilian soybeans at about $580 per metric ton, prompting China to increase its soybean shipments from Brazil, said the derivatives marketplace operator, CME Group.

(China Stringer Network via Reuters)

Ever since the world’s two largest economies engaged in an earlier trade war in 2018 during Donald Trump’s first term as U.S. president, China has been turning to countries like Brazil to meet its demand for farm goods. It has also made a push for more self-sufficiency, reducing its reliance on imports of U.S. agricultural products.

Today, China has significantly increased its reliance on Brazil, the world’s top soybean producer, importing 72.5 million metric tons of Brazilian soybeans in 2024, up from 19 million metric tons in 2010. In comparison, U.S. soybean imports stood at 27.2 million metric tons in 2024, largely unchanged from its 2010 levels.

China is now making a similar push to import more of the protein- and oil-rich seeds from Brazil to meet the demand of its hog industry, but hog farmers believe this won’t be enough to stem the impact of high tariffs on U.S. agricultural imports.

“For soybeans and corn, they (the government) can import from wherever they want. We ordinary people have no choice,” said Sun Jun, a hog farmer in China’s southwestern province of Sichuan.

To be sure, the composition of soybeans and corn is high in feed for livestock, including pigs, poultry, and cattle.

Sun estimates that an animal feed weighing 100 kilograms (220.5 pounds) would typically contain around 25 kilograms (55 pounds) of corn and wheat, and 20 kilograms (44 pounds) of soybean meal, a by-product of oil extraction from soybean seeds.

“Once the price rises, it will directly push up the breeding cost,” said Sun.

Sun now buys about 3 metric tons of hog feed every month, which costs about 14,000 yuan (US$1,915) per month, he said.

That’s already a one-third increase from an estimated 10,500 yuan (US$1,436) in cost he would have incurred for the same amount of hog feed a week earlier, based on the price of 3.46 yuan (49 U.S. cents) per kilogram (2.2 pounds), as listed by Chengdu Development and Reform Committee then.

(Florence Lo/Reuters)

The impact of rising feed costs will be felt by ordinary consumers through higher food and meat prices, said industry insiders.

“The breeding costs of the livestock industry are already very high … The price of meat (as a result) has been rising for more than half a month and is bound to increase,” Lu, a resident of Linyi, Shandong, told RFA.

Lu, like some of the other industry insiders RFA interviewed for this story, provided only her first name for safety reasons.

“The tariff increase will ultimately be borne by consumers,” she added.

From a macro perspective, China remains highly dependent on agricultural product imports, said Li Qiang, who previously worked at the Agricultural Product Pricing Bureau.

“25% of the food needed by mainlanders depends on imports, and mainly comes from the United States, mainly wheat and soybeans,” added Li, who is a resident of Qingdao prefecture-level city in Shandong province.

Shandong, which is a key player in China’s hog breeding industry, has seen the construction of multi-story pig farms that are at the center of the country’s efforts to ramp up domestic production to cut its reliance on pork imports.

But China’s food and catering sector, which imports much of its pork and beef from the U.S., will not be spared the effects of the tariff hikes, say industry insiders.

Since the start of April, the price of high-end steaks has increased by 30% to 50%, said Geng, the head of a restaurant in Wuhan city in Hubei province.

His company purchases beef from Inner Mongolia, but high-quality steaks still need to be imported from the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, said Geng.

“If tariffs are added, the price will be even more expensive,” he added.

Edited by Tenzin Pema and Mat Pennington

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

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When news broke in January that the Trump Justice Department was freezing significant work on civil rights litigation, including police reform cases, attention immediately focused on two cities: Minneapolis and Louisville, Kentucky.

Both places were on the cusp of entering court-enforced agreements to overhaul their police forces after high-profile police killings there sparked a nationwide reckoning over race and policing.

But it’s now clear that the administration’s move will be felt well beyond those two cities. In fact, it throws into question police reform efforts in at least eight other communities across the country, according to a ProPublica review. The need for change in these places was documented in a flurry of investigations published by the Justice Department in the final year of Joe Biden’s presidency. All of the probes found a “pattern or practice” of unlawful behavior that was routine enough that the federal government recommended reforms.

From Phoenix to Trenton, New Jersey, federal officials investigating the eight agencies found unjustified killings, excessive force, debtors’ prisons, retaliation against police critics, racial discrimination, unlawful strip searches and officers having sexual contact with sex workers during undercover operations.

Such findings are typically the first step toward a department agreeing to federal oversight and court-ordered reform. Over the years, the DOJ has credited such agreements, known as consent decrees, for having helped departments reduce unnecessary use of force, cut crime rates and improve responses to people with behavioral health needs. President Donald Trump’s Justice Department, however, has ordered its civil rights attorneys to pause such work until further notice, effectively reinstating the limited approach it took during the president’s first term. Department officials did not respond to questions about the pause or how long it would remain in effect.

For now, that means any reform efforts will be up to local leadership — a dynamic that experts say could bode poorly for communities with long histories of police abuse.

Cliff Johnson, an attorney and director of the Mississippi office of the MacArthur Justice Center, a nonprofit legal organization, was not optimistic.

“While those DOJ reports sometimes can lead municipalities, police departments and other offenders to come to Jesus,” Johnson said, “what we’ve been seeing, from our perspective, is folks saying, ‘I don’t need Jesus. I got Trump.’”

Louisiana leaders, for example, have slammed the Justice Department’s report, which found a pattern of problems in the way the state police used force against civilians. Gov. Jeff Landry said the report was an attempt by the Biden administration to “diminish the service and exceptionality” of the state police. And state Attorney General Liz Murrill said the Justice Department was being used to “advance a political agenda.”

The report was partly spurred by the 2019 death of Ronald Greene, who was killed while in the custody of Louisiana State Police. Officers repeatedly shocked him with a Taser, dragged him by his ankle shackles and then left him face down in the road. Some officers deactivated or muted their body cameras during the incident. Louisiana troopers had claimed Greene died when his car crashed after a high-speed chase. The department was forced to change its story when The Associated Press obtained and published body-camera footage of the incident.

Federal investigators found the episode was not an outlier. According to their report, officers in the department used Tasers without warning and against people who were restrained or who did not pose a threat, didn’t give people the chance to comply before using force, used force against people who weren’t a threat, and used excessive force against people running from officers.

A spokesperson for the Louisiana State Police did not answer questions about the report’s findings but said the agency is working to improve its relationship with citizens and other stakeholders. Landry’s office did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about the report and the state’s response, and Murrill’s office declined to comment.

Across the state line in Lexington, Mississippi, the Justice Department’s shift away from police accountability could also be consequential. Department officials said residents there were so afraid of local police that they were hesitant to meet with investigators in public, fearful of retaliation.

They had good reason to be concerned. In 2023, officers arrested an attorney who was representing citizens in police abuse cases against the department. She had been filming a traffic stop at the time.

The police force — made up of about 10 officers, some of whom are part time — is the smallest the Justice Department has investigated in decades. Federal investigators ultimately found that its officers use excessive force, discriminate against Black people, conduct stops and searches without probable cause, and arrest people purely for not having the money to pay fines.

It’s unclear what steps, if any, the Lexington Police Department is taking in response to the report. Police Chief Charles Henderson declined to comment and directed questions to the city attorney, who did not return a call.

Reform advocates have put their hopes in upcoming elections in Lexington that could bring in new leadership that is more interested in making changes at the police department.

In Mount Vernon, New York, advocates say they’ve seen little movement since the Justice Department found police there use excessive force, conduct unlawful strip and body cavity searches of arrestees, and fail to properly train officers and supervisors. It also found police discriminated against Black people. One group is considering legal action to bring the city to the table.

“It seems like Mount Vernon has put lip service on addressing the findings,” said Daniel Lambright, an attorney with the New York Civil Liberties Union. “It remains unclear actually what they’re doing to address the findings.”

In their report, federal investigators expressed concern that the police department’s “overly aggressive tactics unnecessarily escalate encounters.” In one instance, they wrote, five Mount Vernon officers used force on a man they thought was selling drugs — without announcing their presence or attempting to arrest him peacefully. Instead, one of the officers approached the man from behind and attempted to put him in an “upper body hold,” which started an altercation, according to the report. Police then threw the man to the ground. One officer drove his Taser into the suspect five times while another repeatedly punched him in the head. The man suffered a broken nose.

“The reform efforts have to continue,” said the Rev. Stephen Pogue, a member of the United Black Clergy of Westchester, an organization that works on social justice matters in Mount Vernon and surrounding areas. “We’re not in one of those places where Trump is our god. In Mount Vernon, we still need Jesus.”

Pogue said he hopes the city will host a public meeting about the report before the summer.

Mayor Shawyn Patterson-Howard and a police spokesperson did not reply to interview requests. But in December, the mayor said in a statement that the city would work with the Justice Department to address its findings. “We wholeheartedly support our good officers and at the same time will not tolerate and will punish unconstitutional policing,” she said.

In Phoenix, city and police officials have sent conflicting signals about the federal investigation, which found the Police Department used excessive and deadly force, violated the rights of homeless people, and discriminated against Black, Latino, Native American people, as well as those who have behavioral disabilities. “Why the hell would anybody ever accept a consent decree?” said one City Council member months before the report was released. Afterward, the head of the police union said the investigation was a “farce” and part of an “unprofessional smear campaign.”

But Mayor Kate Gallego has said the city is taking the report seriously. In September, the City Council passed several police reform measures, including requiring all officers who deal with the public to use body-worn cameras, even the special units that have been at the center of controversial shootings.

“Regardless of the new federal administration, these reforms are moving forward, and the mayor’s commitment to improving the police department is unwavering,” a mayoral spokesperson told ProPublica.

Some of the other cities the Justice Department had targeted are taking small steps toward fixing problems the federal investigators identified, though it’s unclear whether the efforts will result in lasting change.

In Oklahoma City, where Justice found in January that police officers discriminate against people with behavioral health disabilities, the city recently began funding mobile mental health units that can respond to incidents instead of police, said Jessica Hawkins, chair of the city’s Crisis Intervention Advisory Group. She said the city is also working on a written response to the DOJ report but didn’t know when it would be completed.

Police Chief Ron Bacy declined ProPublica’s request for an interview and through a spokesperson said the department was “still reviewing the report.”

In Memphis, Tennessee, where federal investigators found that police use excessive force, conduct unlawful stops and discriminate against Black people, the mayor put together a reform task force, led by a retired federal judge. “The DOJ report, in our case, kick-started a conversation that had sort of gone cold,” said Josh Spickler, executive director of Just City, an organization that works on litigation and justice matters in Memphis.

And in Trenton, New Jersey, where the Justice Department found that local police have a pattern or practice of using excessive force and conducting unlawful pedestrian and vehicle stops, City Council member Jasi Edwards has been hosting community meetings to introduce the idea of a civilian complaint review board and build support for the measure. Edwards said she plans to formally put forth her proposal sometime in the fall.

It will likely run into resistance, though. Representatives of the Police Department and mayor told ProPublica that they didn’t believe a civilian review board was necessary because it would be costly and there are existing ways for citizens to complain about police conduct. The DOJ report, they said, highlighted some areas in need of improvement but mischaracterized a number of cases and gave an inaccurate depiction of the department’s culture.

In Worcester, Massachusetts, reforms are already moving forward in response to the Justice Department’s investigation.

Last month, the police chief released a 15-page report on proposed measures intended to remedy the problems identified by federal investigators. The changes, which are still awaiting legal review, include prohibiting police from releasing K-9 dogs into mass gatherings or riot scenes and requiring a supervisor to go to a scene if someone reports being injured by police.

The police chief, Paul Socier, has also proposed several changes to how officers approach prostitution. Investigators found the department engaged in “outrageous government conduct” with sex workers by having sexual contact during undercover operations.

“We are hopefully headed in the right direction,” said Audra Doody, co-executive director of Safe Exit Initiative, an organization in Worcester that provides services, housing and counseling to sex workers who want to leave the sex trade. “With a time of such uncertainty, I want to believe our people in the community are telling the truth and actually are going to do what they say they’re going to do, which they seem like they are, right now.”

ProPublica is reporting on how the Trump administration’s efforts to reshape the federal government will impact the Department of Justice and its work on civil rights. If you’re a former or current Justice Department employee and you want to send us a tip, please contact us. We’re especially interested in the department’s Civil Rights Division. Topher Sanders can be reached by phone or on Signal at 904-254-0393 or by email at topher.sanders@propublica.org.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Topher Sanders.

Southeast Asian nations were some of the hardest hit by the tariffs announced Wednesday, at nearly 50% in some cases. The tariffs will be paid by U.S. importers and could have a range of consequences – from higher prices for American consumers to falling incomes for the exporting nations.

China, the world’s second-largest economy after the U.S., faces an additional 34% tariff on top of the 20% the U.S. imposed earlier this year when Trump demanded the country buy more U.S. goods and stop the flow of the deadly synthetic opioid Fentanyl.

“China firmly opposes this and will resolutely take countermeasures to safeguard its own rights and interests,” the country’s commerce ministry said Thursday, accusing Trump of adopting bullying and damaging tactics.

The tariff shock therapy is aimed at encouraging a revival of American manufacturing, which fell as a share of the economy and employment over several decades of global free trade and competition from production in lower-cost countries.

Any changes could take years as many U.S. corporations have made substantial investments in overseas production. Manufacturing in the U.S., like elsewhere, also is reliant on components produced in other countries.

The 49% duties imposed on Cambodian exports will force the country’s garment industry to slow to a near halt, according to Stephen Higgins, managing partner at Mekong Strategic Capital in Phnom Penh.

The broader economy is likely to suffer since the garment and apparel industries contribute more than one third of Cambodia’s gross domestic product. Higgins says production may shift to India, which only faces a 36% U.S. tariff and giving workers the skills to produce more high-end products may have little immediate impact.

“In the short term, things like tech innovation and training just aren’t going to shift the dial enough to help Cambodia, or any country, weather these punitive tariffs. Redirecting trade is going to take time, and in the interim, a lot of Cambodians who can least afford it are going to lose their jobs,” Higgins said.

“If there’s one thing we’ve learned, it is that Washington is highly unpredictable these days. Hopefully once constituents in red (Republican) seats start seeing prices go up, or they start suffering from retaliatory tariffs from the E.U., they’ll put a lot of pressure on their representatives to do something about these tariffs. But I just don’t see that happening overnight.”

Vietnam, meanwhile, had the fourth-largest trade surplus with the U.S. last year at a record US$123 billion and faced growing pressure from Washington to lower it.

Hanoi lobbied unsuccessfully to try to avoid higher tariffs. Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh met U.S. Ambassador Marc Knapper last month and promised higher imports of American products.

On Tuesday, Vietnam cut import duties on some American fuel, automobile and agricultural products, but that did not stop Trump targeting the country’s exporters with a 46% tariff, the second-highest in Asia.

Pham met with Trade and Industry Minister Nguyen Hong Dien on Thursday to discuss the impact on Vietnam’s economy and to look for ways of reducing the trade surplus, Tien Phong online reported.

Trump has a track-record of abruptly raising and lowering tariffs imposed on Canada and Mexico and, according to Tien Phong, Vietnam’s Deputy Prime Minister Ho Duc Phoc is hoping to persuade him to roll back import duties when he visits the U.S. capital next week.

In Thailand, Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra said her government was working to help affected exporters and would set up a committee to negotiate with the U.S. over the 36% tariffs slapped on its exports.

She said Thailand was willing to lower the 72% duties the U.S. says Thailand charges, which include the effect of currency manipulation and market barriers.

Edited by Stephen Wright.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Mike Firn for RFA.

• Trump levies tariffs on America’s 3 largest trade partners, triggering retaliation in-kind from Canada, Mexico and China
• Trump threatens funding for schools that allow “illegal protests”, says agitators will be imprisoned or deported
• Federal employee union rallies to protest DOGE for mass firings, dismantling federal programs and agencies
• Local officials blast “No Bailout for Sanctuary Cities Act”, say Administration using fear to push Trump agenda
• Mexico lawsuit against US gunmakers reaches Supreme Court, alleges gunmakers cashing in on cartel violence
• CDC sends “disease detective” epidemiologists to respond to Texas measles epidemic, HHS Secretary Kennedy sends Vitamin A and recommends cod liver oil

The post Trump tariffs on 3 largest trading partners trigger retaliation from Canada, Mexico and China; local officials say No Bailout for Sanctuary Cities Act uses fear to push Trump agenda – March 4, 2025 appeared first on KPFA.

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

“Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

Spoken by a fellow in a time when tolerance and trust, faith in the essential goodness of human beings, belief in turn-the-other-cheek stoicism, all were still possible. It was innovative even back then, but an option which could be considered.

These are different times. No longer does innocence bloom. Hope is a four-letter word, gutted by abuse, now a contemptuous metaphor for hypocrisy and cunning. Faith, charity and love have been quantified, digitized, commodified, sexualized, turned into more weapons of mass deception and poisoning of the human spirit, just box cutters in the toolbox of a tiny elite, self-anointed as the class of absolute privilege and ultimate prerogative, self-appointed as Masters of the Universe. The sociopaths have won the class war and sit at the top of the sh*tpile they’re fabricating.

No, good people, forgiveness is no longer recommended, no longer possible, such graciousness is not the appropriate noble response anymore.

We simply cannot forgive those who are doing to our world what we see happening right now.

It’s unconscionable. It’s repulsive. It’s malevolent. It’s nihilistic. It’s … unforgivable.

Jesus Christ surely would not approve of what I’m about to say. Then again, these days He’s basically irrelevant, just another marketing brand, an advertising gimmick for knee-jerk religiosity.

Please listen, friends. Take heed. It’s getting late. We have no choice. Urgency drives our mission. Common decency and timeless morality dictate our agenda.

Forgive them not … for endless war, carnage for conquest, slaughter for power and control, the creation of enemies to drive weapons sales, the demonization of other countries and their leaders to prepare the public for war and more war.

Forgive them not … for destroying the environment, killing untold numbers of species, filling the waterways with toxins, polluting the air, pumping greenhouse gases at an accelerating rate into the atmosphere.

Forgive them not … for poisoning our bodies with man-made chemicals and for-profit pharmaceuticals, for poisoning our food with herbicides, pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, for boosting the bottom line with no regard for human health or dignity.

Forgive them not … for filling the oceans with millions of tons of the debris of “civilization” and turning the vast expanses of life-giving, life-sustaining water into graveyards for the creatures of the sea.

Forgive them not … for fostering suspicion and hatred, promoting racism and intolerance, for setting humans against one another to make us all easier to control, manipulate and exploit.

Forgive them not … for persecuting Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and other truth-tellers, while promoting to positions of power serial liars, prevaricating warmongers, self-enriching enemies of truth.

Forgive them not … for destroying science as an objective methodology for obtaining knowledge and achieving understanding, for buying and bribing scientists to front for their deceptive, money-driven agendas.

Forgive them not … for rigging the economy via influence peddling and grotesque warping of the democratic process with enormous infusions of money, in order to accelerate the transfer of wealth to a handful of beneficiaries at the top, then use that wealth to leverage even more money to further enrich the already incomprehensibly rich.

Forgive them not … for desertification, deforestation, the destruction of enormous swaths of arable land, the destruction of rainforests, the ruin of ecologically-sensitive marshlands, the oil spills, chemical spills, all the direct result of blind avarice and predation.

Forgive them not … for hoarding epic, inconceivable piles of money, while so many millions on the planet struggle to survive, live meal-to-meal, starve to death, die of easily curable diseases.

Forgive them not … for flooding the planet with weapons, seeding crisis after crisis, being witness and perpetrators of killing, slaughter, unconscionable terror, death and destruction, all in the name of defense industry profits and stock portfolios.

Forgive them not … for using the media, movies, TV and internet, entertainers and celebrities, to spread lies, propaganda, disinformation, fake news to slander and marginalize bearers of truth, and to confuse, distract, and disempower everyday people.

Forgive them not … for destroying democracy and the promise of our bold and once-affirming experiment in self-government.

Forgive them not … for exploiting our innate fear of death and universal desire for well-being, for turning medical care and maintenance of health into yet another revenue stream for predatory capitalism.

Forgive them not … for violating the innocence of children, exploiting their thirst for knowledge and natural curiosity, destroying their inherent creativity, and turning our educational system into a factory for consumer robots.

Forgive them not … for taking the beautiful, majestic heavens, the pure, wholesome expanse of outer space and turning it into yet another battlefield, bristling with weapons of terror and killing.

Forgive them not … for mangling and mutilating timeless messages for spiritual growth and healing; for inverting the lessons teaching the virtues of compassion, caring and sharing; for turning institutionalized religion into cults of self-worship and warring tribes of exclusion and vilification.

Forgive them not … for Monsanto, Raytheon, Pfizer, Chase, the Fed, Amazon, Google, the NYT, Facebook, Microsoft, the entire web of corporate tyranny.

Forgive them not … for the Patriot Acts, for the 17 intelligence agencies, the CIA, NSA, FBI, DHS, the NDAA, the duopoly, Citizens United, for election rigging, voter machine fraud, gerrymandering, the scam of government by the people.

Forgive them not … for massive intrusive unconstitutional citizen surveillance, both by security agencies and private corporations, and for the oppressive censorship which has destroyed the most fundamental rights of free expression and open exchange of ideas and information.

Forgive them not … for simply being so self-centered, so selfish, so arrogant, so self-righteous and delusional, they are undermining everyone else on the planet, and creating a world which will eventually be uninhabitable for any of us, including them — the stupid self-sabotaging bastards!

FORGIVE THEM NOT … FOR THEY KNOW EXACTLY WHAT THEY DO.

And what they do is sick and evil … pure and simple.

We have to get it together, folks! Tolerate none of this. Do not forgive the “people of privilege”. Capture them. Bring them to trial. Imprison them. They know exactly what they’re doing. They do it callously, maliciously, mercilessly, intentionally, with plan and pre-meditation. We know who they are. They cannot be trusted. They cannot be excused — now or ever — if there is to be a world which is functional and supports life and positive human interaction.

No forgiveness. No excuses. No compromises. No fear.

FORGIVE THEM NOT …

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John Rachel.

Paetongtarn will travel to China on Wednesday to mark the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations and for talks with President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Li Qiang on economic cooperation, her government’s spokesman said, adding that she would not raise the issue of the Uyghurs.

Thailand has said it has no plan to deport the men from the mostly Muslim minority from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China, who have been held at a Thai Immigration Detention Center since 2014 after attempting to escape Beijing’s persecution through Thailand.

Nevertheless, rights groups worry that they could be deported back to China where they would face the risk of torture.

“The CCP has a pattern of pressuring foreign governments, and bending international law for its own agenda,” Rushan Abbas, executive chair of the World Uyghur Congress, which advocates for Uyghurs around the globe, told Radio Free Asia on Friday, referring to the Chinese Community Party.

“If Thailand is truly committed to human rights and international law, it must immediately release the Uyghur refugees and facilitate their safe resettlement. The world is watching, and these Uyghurs must not be sent to their deaths,” Abbas said.

The rights group Justice for All said last month that reports from the detained Uyghurs indicated that Thai authorities were coercing them to fill out forms in preparation for their deportation.

But the Thai government has denied that.

Asked about the Uyghurs last week, Defense Minister Phumtham Wechayachai reiterated that the detained Uyghurs would not be deported.

“It is important to abide by international laws, human rights basis and non-refoulement principle. These remain Thai government principles. Don’t you worry,” he told reporters.

Uyghurs in China’s vast Xinjiang region have been subjected to widespread human rights abuses, including detention in massive concentration camps.

The group of refugees in Thai detention is part of an originally larger cohort of over 350 Uyghur men, women and children, 172 of whom were resettled in Turkey, 109 deported back to China, and five who died because of inadequate medical conditions.

In 2015, Thailand, Washington’s longest-standing treaty ally in Asia, faced stiff international criticism for those it did deport back to China.

Thailand is not a signatory to the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention, and therefore does not recognize refugees.

New U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at his confirmation hearing last month that he would reach out to Thailand to prevent the return of the Uyghurs to China.

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Thai government spokesman Jirayu Huangsab said the Uyghurs would not be on the prime minister’s agenda during her China visit.

“There won’t be talks on the Uyghur, it’s not on the agenda. There’s nothing to this issue,” Jirayu told RFA on Tuesday.

A Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman, asked about the Uyghurs in Thailand at a Jan. 22 briefing, said she was not familiar with the issue but said that more broadly, China was resolutely opposed to illegal immigration.

The international rights group Amnesty International has told Thailand that it too was concerned the men “would be at risk of human rights violations, including arbitrary detention, torture and other ill-treatment, if returned to China.”

“The organization calls on your government to strictly adhere to domestic and international legal obligations not to forcibly return individuals in violation of the internationally recognized principle of non-refoulement,” the group said in a Jan. 27 letter to Phumtham, who is also a deputy prime minister.

The prohibition on refoulement prevents the forcible transfer of people to a place where their life and liberty may be at risk.

The rights group called for the release of the Uyghurs.

U.N. experts last week joined rights groups in raising concern about the Uyghurs.

A Thai lawyer has submitted a petition to a court calling for the release of the Uyghurs on the grounds that they have spent enough time locked up. The court is due to consider the submission on Feb. 17.

Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang.

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

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

Pastor Randy Mayer skillfully maneuvers his SUV over rough dirt roads, dodging giant potholes and jostling up steep inclines in the predawn darkness. The rugged terrain in this remote stretch of the Arizona-Mexico border is familiar territory. Mayer, co-founder of the Green Valley-Sahuarita Samaritans, a nonprofit that provides humanitarian aid to migrants, has traveled here for nearly 25 years.

His destination on that Friday in January was a small encampment about 20 miles east of Sasabe, Arizona, where for the past two years his and other religious and humanitarian organizations have provided food, water and first aid to migrants stranded in the Pajarito Mountains.

A 30-foot-tall bollard fence built during President Donald Trump’s first term ends in the foothills. In 2022, human smugglers began exploiting the gap to move people into Southern Arizona in greater numbers, adding to a sharp increase that year in migrants crossing between ports of entry.

“There were days that we would find two, three, four, 500 people walking along out there,” Mayer says. The following year, more than 500,000 people entered between ports of entry in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Tucson Sector. Their numbers overwhelmed the agents, causing them to wait days to be picked up.

The rugged mountain range, which stretches into Mexico, can be deadly, with temperatures climbing close to 100 degrees in summer, with torrential downpours and flash floods. In winter, temperatures regularly plunge below freezing.

“People were in great danger,” says Mayer, who is also pastor of the Good Shepherd United Church of Christ in Sahuarita, Arizona.

Most people who stop at the camp in the Coronado National Forest — which has two large circular tents, fire pits and portable bathrooms — want to turn themselves over to Border Patrol.

The Samaritans and other groups that run the camp, including Humane Borders and No More Deaths, said they cooperate with the U.S. Forest Service and border officials in Arizona and hope to continue working with them under the Trump administration. Border Patrol and the Forest Service allowed them to operate the camp over the past two years, Mayer added, because it didn’t disrupt their operations — and in some ways it enhanced them.

But a few weeks before Trump took office, a liaison with the Forest Service notified volunteers that they must close the camp and clear off federal land, according to Mayer.

The volunteers said they won’t willingly dismantle the camp because doing so would endanger migrants. Human smugglers on the Mexican side still drop off people in the area. And a Trump executive order effectively suspending asylum access borderwide will inevitably push migrants to attempt more remote and riskier routes through the deserts and mountains of Southern Arizona, the volunteers said.

“If he cracks down on us, we will fight back,” said Paula Miller, who volunteers at the camp with Tucson Samaritans, a mission of the Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson. “We will respond to the need because it saves lives.”

The Forest Service didn’t answer Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica’s questions about the status of the camp or the groups’ pending application for a special use permit to continue operating on federal lands. The agency said it was reviewing Trump’s executive orders and determining how to implement them.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials told the news organizations in an emailed statement on Jan. 24 that agents’ work patrolling the Tucson Sector is not enhanced by humanitarian aid volunteers, saying the agency is able to provide medical and rescue support when necessary. Agents often engage with members of aid groups while on duty. They encourage private organizations and citizens alike to report any illegal activity or emergencies they become aware of, the agency added.

The number of border crossings has declined since June, when President Joe Biden suspended access to asylum in between ports of entry. At the camp in Sasabe, volunteers see an average of 35-50 migrants per day now, compared to hundreds just over a year ago, Mayer said. Twenty-five migrants — including families with children — stopped at the camp that Friday morning in January.

It’s hard to predict whether those numbers will rise or fall as Trump’s crackdown on legal pathways to enter the United States takes hold. But the volunteers believe the work of providing humanitarian assistance to people crossing the border will come with many more legal risks. During Trump’s first term, the U.S. attorney’s office in Arizona prosecuted at least five volunteers doing humanitarian aid work in Southern Arizona, including members of No More Deaths. Border agents also raided a migrant camp run by volunteers near Arivaca, Arizona.

Still, the volunteers say they have a constitutional right to feed, clothe and save the lives of people seeking refuge. Past crackdowns, and the one they fear might be coming for the camp near Sasabe, infringe on their religious freedoms, which they’re prepared to defend, they say.

“We are following God’s executive order,” Miller said.

Sunrise is still 90 minutes away when Mayer arrives at the camp. Temperatures are below freezing, and winds funneling through nearby canyons intensify the biting cold.

Mayer immediately sets out hot chocolate and coffee, assembles a camping stove and begins to make bean burritos with flour tortillas. Volunteers have provided blankets to the migrants, who huddle around the camp’s firepits.

The group that day had walked around the fence during the night and were waiting for border agents to arrive. They had come from Mexico, Guatemala, Brazil, Guinea and Russia.

Before volunteers established the camp, migrants cut down vegetation to build fires, risking igniting wildfires in the protected wilderness area. And trash and human waste accumulated along the fence. Mayer said shutting down the camp would make things more difficult for the Border Patrol and Forest Service. The camp serves as a gathering point where agents can routinely pick up migrants several times a day, he said.

Federal authorities, however, have alleged humanitarian assistance can veer into aiding illegal activity, such as facilitating migrants’ entry into the country or concealing them from law enforcement.

In 2018, border agents raided an Ajo, Arizona, property that No More Deaths used as a staging area for water drop-offs in the desert. Scott Warren, a volunteer with the group, was charged with felony harboring and conspiracy. The case was tried twice, the first ending in a hung jury and the second in acquittal.

In 2019, four volunteers with No More Deaths were found guilty of entering the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in Southern Arizona — another deadly smuggling corridor — without a permit. The volunteers were dropping off canned beans and gallon bottles of water for migrants. The volunteers were sentenced to probation and each fined $250, but a federal judge overturned their convictions on appeal, citing their “sincere religious beliefs."

No More Deaths said in a written statement that it remains committed to its work of saving lives despite the threat of criminalization. The group cited recent situations in which people were in life-threatening situations, noting that Border Patrol’s response was “largely non-existent.”

“No More Deaths, like other humanitarian aid groups in the region, exists as a response to the absolute dearth of medical and rescue services available for migrants. And this is not due to a lack of resources on the part of CBP; it is by design and a matter of policy that people are left to die in the desert,” the group said in its statement.

Another ongoing lawsuit offers a glimpse of what faith-based migrant aid groups nationwide could face in Trump’s second term. In Texas, the state’s Republican leaders are trying to shut down El Paso’s Annunciation House, a Catholic migrant shelter, accusing the charity of violating state laws by harboring undocumented migrants.

During oral arguments before the Texas Supreme Court on Jan. 13, attorneys for Annunciation House argued, among other things, that their work caring for migrants at the border is protected by the First Amendment’s religious freedom clause. They have the backing of the First Liberty Institute, a conservative Christian legal group that litigates religious freedom cases, which argued that Annunciation House’s work with migrants is protected activity under Texas’ religious freedom law.

“It says the government ‘may not substantially burden a person’s free exercise of religion,’” said Elizabeth Kiernan, who appeared on behalf of the institute at the hearing. “And terminating a religious charity’s corporate charter absolutely is a burden on that exercise of religion.”

As Biden left office, fewer migrants were attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border than when he entered the White House, enforcement numbers show. He also left in place restrictions that made it harder to access asylum at the southern border.

Trump in the first week of his second term has further sealed off access. On Jan. 20, he ended the use of the CBP One phone app to process asylum claims at ports of entry and cancelled all scheduled appointments, stranding about 270,000 asylum-seekers in Mexican border cities.

Trump also issued executive orders further curbing asylum access by declaring an invasion at the border and reinstating the Migrant Protection Protocols forcing asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico for their proceedings. In addition, he called for construction of more physical barriers on the border.

That directive could seal off the gap used by smugglers now at the Pajarita Wilderness, one of the remaining unfenced portions of Arizona’s border with Mexico.

Humanitarian aid workers fear Trump’s executive orders will push migrants to riskier routes outside of ports of entry, including through the Pajarito Mountains, to evade detection. The groups said that over the past 30 years they have seen barrier construction in Arizona push migrants to more remote areas.

“I’ve been here for five administrations and each administration continues to build upon the bad policies of the other,” Mayer said. “No new ideas.”

Aid groups said they are already anticipating the need for more water drops in the Sonoran Desert to prevent migrants from dying in remote stretches of the Arizona border.

Humane Borders, which provides support for the camp near Sasabe, does water drops across the borderlands. They also have tracked the recovery of human remains since 1981. In that time, they’ve logged more than 4,300 migrant deaths in Southern Arizona.

“We have been doing this a long time. We’ve been doing this longer than Trump has been in power,” Miller, the volunteer from Tucson, said.

As dawn arrived that Friday morning, flashing lights appeared to the west. Border Patrol agents were en route to the camp.

When they arrive, they tell the migrants to form two lines, one for families and the other for single adults. Miller uses an app on her phone to translate the instructions into Russian and Portuguese.

The migrants climb into two vans bound for the Border Patrol’s Forward Operating Base in Sasabe, where they’ll be processed. Because of the new restrictions on asylum access at the border, Mayer says most of the people they assist at the camp are barred from claiming asylum and will likely be deported. Some as soon as that day.

As the Border Patrol’s red and blue lights disappear into the distance, Mayer disassembles his camping stove and packs the coffee and hot chocolate into his SUV.

“Nowhere in my ordination vows did I ever have to say, ‘I will only care for U.S. citizens,’” Mayer says. “I am a pastor of the world. My faith calls me to it.”

Mayer says he will keep returning to the camp as long as it is operating. If they’re forced to remove it, he adds, he’ll go to wherever the need is greatest.

Help ProPublica Reporters Investigate the Immigration System

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Rafael Carranza, Arizona Luminaria, photography by Cengiz Yar, ProPublica.

I think that being a creative is sort of like a long battle to saying what it really is you want to do. So I think that I knew I always wanted to act, both dramatically and comedically, but I was always inclined more towards comedy early on, and I did improv in college. Then, there was something a little bit more tangible about comedy, so I think that I started out focusing on comedy, but I think part of me, deep down, knew I wanted to do drama and comedy all along.

Have you auditioned for or wanted to audition for any dramatic screen roles, and maybe agents or casting directors have said, “No, we can’t envision you in this dramatic role, because we haven’t seen you do that before”?

I’m sure maybe those conversations are happening. I haven’t heard that. Who knows though? Maybe I have not been considered for something because of my comedy, but just this week I’m on Dexter as a sort of a dramatic role, in which I’m playing a lawyer. I have a short film coming out with my friends where I play a girl who just attempted suicide, and it’s super dark. I think that we all have so many dimensions, and I am lucky to be here and alive in a time where I can make my own stuff. I think that when I started, I started basically by making all of my own comedic videos, because at that time I didn’t have an agent or a manager, and I really wanted to act and show who I was comedically, and how lucky that I had a phone and editing software, and I was able to do that.

I felt so happy that I was like, even if I’m not getting a role, I know that I am getting to do what I want, which is be funny and show people what I think it is that I do or that’s unique to me, and I think I started doing that with drama too, where it’s like once I decided, “Okay. I love comedy, I also want to merge into drama,” I made some short films, I wrote some pieces that were a little bit darker, and that kind of naturally built to a place where, then, I also had dramatic roles on my reel. So, in the same way that the internet helped me become visibly a comedian, I think short films and independent projects helped me show that I can also do dramatic work.

I’m very interested in that short film. Sometimes it’s hard to see, especially indie stuff, in Australia, but you’re going to have to let me know when that’s out so I can hunt it down.

I will. I did a special called No Bad Days, which was about losing my dad to brain cancer, and that was a standup show when I started it. I think the two worlds of drama and comedy live so closely together. It was like, “I’m going to comment on what’s happening in my life. This is what’s happening, and the way that I’m going to comment on it is showing both the dark side and the comedic side of it.”

Have you ever referred to someone else in a sketch, and later had to navigate a conversation with them, knowing that they know what you’ve said?

Oh, gosh. No, but it’s funny you say that, because anytime I make videos with my mom, so my mom films, when I make those videos of her, basically anytime I’m back east and I’m making an East Coast video. I’ll always want to say a name, and it always takes me 20 minutes to find a funny name that isn’t a name of one of my mom’s friends, for that exact reason. No, I’m pretty fascinated, usually by strangers or behaviors that I see in public, so it’s usually something that I see and I recognize even within myself. That’s usually where all my stuff comes from. I like to have love in all my characters, so even if they’re lunatics or they’re doing things that seem crazy, you almost see the pain behind their eyes. Why is this woman talking so much in a coffee shop? It’s like there’s a pain and loneliness there, so I like to always have some empathy for the character, even if it’s a wonky sketch.

I’m wondering whether you’ve had experiences of raising issues in stand-up or videos, and later, people maybe using that in a way that feels like a violation of some nature?

I think that the good outweighs the bad. I think that I remember the first time of breaking that seal. I wrote about having an eating disorder and being in recovery. It was one of my first published pieces, and I have never felt so exposed in my life, and I remember wanting to crawl in a hole. I felt so naked, and then it goes away, and then you give it less power. My first blog was called “What I Mean When I Say I’m Okay,” and it was basically this long piece about what it was like taking care of my dad as he was dying, and so, both pieces, I do remember feeling just like a lot of fear at first, but then you give it less power.

There’s less power in an eating disorder if you’ve said it out loud, you’ve shared it, and people understand and can share that they’ve been through it too. Oh, now we’re less alone. So many people coming up to me, “I’ve dealt with my parent dying. I’ve dealt with this person dying. I’ve dealt with an eating disorder,” and I think loneliness is basically the big killer. That’s the one that makes you spiral and feel the worst. So, to kind of air out your stuff, it’s scary, and sometimes you’re like, “I wish I could just not talk about this,” but the net benefit is always much bigger, and then you can just live your life. My life is, there’s a lot of good I’ve done. I always talk to my friends who also deal with eating disorders, where I’m like, “Isn’t it just wonderful that we are living, and all of our energy is going to this instead of what it used to go to?”

LA is an expensive place to live, by all accounts, and I’m wondering, have you ever struggled to pay rent or bills, and has the way that you approach financial management changed over time?

Let’s see how to answer this. Again, I’m from Massachusetts, and I grew up in, my dad was a sheet metal salesman, my mom was a teacher, so I knew I wanted to act forever. I wanted to not go to college and act, but my parents were like, “You should go to college,” so I did. So the minute I graduated, I wanted to go try acting, and my dad was very big on, “Right, but you need money, and you need structure in order to do that.” So, I was a management consultant my first year out of college, so I had a suit. I just saw a picture of myself, and you know when you see a picture and you’re like, “That’s not me”? That was me. So, I had a suit and a little bob cut, and I would literally fly, Monday through Thursday, to Fortune 500 companies, and I was a financial analyst for them, and I went to Tuck Bridge business program, and so I was able to save up money there. My dad was like, “Stay for a year.” I stayed for a year on the dot.

Before I quit, I got a job, waitressing tables at The Butcher’s Daughter, which is this awesome vegetarian spot in New York. All this to say, I was very risk averse, financially, so I never leapt without a net financially. I’m pretty big on that because I think that in order to be creative, you don’t want to have to be worrying about money, so even if it takes up more of your time to work a full-time job, if you’re not worried about how you’re going to pay your bills, how you’re going to live, how you’re going to eat the foods you want to eat, then that creative energy is going to go somewhere else. Then, I worked at Conde Nast, and I was a full-time there, making videos and writing, then, I started booking acting work. Then, once I did that, I moved to LA, and I’ve been fortunate to stay acting since then. All that to say, I have been okay and been fortunate to be okay, and that I do thank my dad. I’m grateful that I started in the career already with a nest egg, so I never had to feel panic.

There’s a great self-help book from the 1970s called Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. It’s a bit of a cult classic.

Yes. I love it. I think I’ve heard something like that: “Do it scared.” People don’t get to a place where they don’t get scared. It’s just they do it scared, so whenever I’m nervous for an audition or for a job, I’m like, “Yeah, of course you are. This is part of it. Do it.” Do it anyway, and if you’re scared, you’re growing and you’re trying and you’re pushing, whereas if you’re not scared, you’re probably staying in a comfortable spot. So, I feel in a comfortable spot right now, so it’s nice to be like, “All right. You’ve got your comfort, you’ve got your friends, you’ve got your family, you’ve got your people. You can go do it scared.”

How often do you reflect on what you’ve achieved, and are you good at applauding yourself, or is that a work in progress?

My dad has passed away, and I think that he was very funny, and again, he was a sheet metal salesman. He wasn’t in [the entertainment business], but I like to think everything I do is sort of shared with him, so that’s helped me love myself and appreciate myself more. Anytime I have something good, I’m always just like, “Look at what we’re doing.” Yeah, there’s so many losses. Oh my god. There’s a loss every day. There is a loss every day in this job, and that’s just what it is. I auditioned twice today, so there will probably be two losses today, the day I talked to you, so that’s just what it is. There’s just constant losses, and then you get a win, and so you got to celebrate the win. I’m good at it. Maybe that used to be a hard thing, but I think I’ll get myself a treat, or I have posters on my wall of all the things that I’m proud of.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Cath Woods.

The Sumy district court dismissed the legal proceedings against the journalists on January 15 after finding that their rights had been “grossly” violated. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense suspended Chumakov’s accreditation on January 9 “pending clarification of the circumstances of my possible unauthorized work,” Chumakov told CPJ.

As of January 30, Chumakov had not received an update on his status. Pelda told CPJ he feared the ministry would not renew his and Zehnder’s accreditations, which expire on April 15 and July 8. 

“Journalists accredited to cover the war in Ukraine and complying with the rules for reporting in war zones should be able to do their work without obstruction,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Ukrainian authorities must immediately reinstate the accreditation of Ukrainian journalist Petro Chumakov and commit to renewing those of Kurt Pelda and Josef Zehnder.”

CPJ’s email requesting comment from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense’s press service did not receive a response. The ministry’s accreditation office declined to comment.

“It goes without saying that one of the duties of a war reporter is to withhold sensitive information… I have been reporting from the Ukrainian war zone for almost three years now and not only know these rules but also abide by them. In certain circles of the Ukrainian military leadership, however, the aim is to ban independent reporters from the combat zones altogether,” Pelda said, pointing to the zoning rules that have limited reporters’ frontline access.     

“Nobody knows where these zones are, and this gives the local commanders [and press officers] a lot of discretion,” Pelda told CPJ.

Pelda is one of a number of foreign journalists facing Russian criminal charges for an allegedly illegal border crossing – a charge carrying a penalty of up to five years in prison – into the Kursk region last year. 

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

A dramatic standoff between the U.S. and Colombia unfolded Sunday with Colombian President Gustavo Petro turning back two U.S. military planes that were carrying deported migrants in shackles, saying immigrants should be treated with dignity. The two countries then traded tariff threats before announcing a deal in which Colombia would begin accepting flights of deported migrants. Meanwhile, Trump has sent 1,500 active-duty troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, further militarizing the region. “We’re very, very concerned,” says immigration activist Fernando García of the El Paso, Texas-based Border Network for Human Rights, whose organization is among those providing resources like Know Your Rights training to immigrants now living under a regime of “anxiety and fear.”

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

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 Republican-controlled Supreme Court of North Carolina threw the election of one of its members into disarray on Tuesday as it temporarily blocked the certification of the Democrat incumbent’s narrow victory. The move gives the court time to consider a challenge by her Republican opponent, state appeals court Judge Jefferson Griffin, who has cited debunked legal theories in his previous failed attempts to block Justice Allison Riggs’ reelection.

Griffin has sought for his claims to be decided by the Supreme Court he hopes to join, which is led by his mentor. On Monday, a federal judge appointed by former President Donald Trump remanded Griffin’s challenge to the state Supreme Court. The state election board is now requesting a federal appeals court to return the case to federal court.

Riggs won reelection by 734 votes — a minuscule margin of victory that was confirmed by two recounts. She will remain on the court while the election results are being contested, though she has recused herself from this matter.

Griffin is asking the Supreme Court to throw out roughly 60,000 ballots — an unprecedented request based on a theory that has been dismissed by both the state election board and a federal judge.

Griffin did not respond to a request for comment. He previously declined to answer questions from ProPublica, saying that commenting on pending litigation would be a violation of the state’s judicial code of conduct.

“This is hugely dangerous for democracy in North Carolina,” said Ann Webb, the policy director for Common Cause North Carolina, a voting advocacy organization. If the state Supreme Court sides with Griffin and overturns Riggs’ win, it would open the possibility for future candidates to “challenge the rules that were in place for elections and get votes retroactively discarded. If there’s a never-ending process of challenging election rules and results after the fact, our entire system could come to a standstill.”

This case is even more exceptional, Webb said, because “so far, Judge Griffin has not produced evidence of a single instance of voter fraud or illegal voting. He’s just vaguely raised the specter that there’s not been enough verification of voter identities and is using that to try to overturn an election.”

Griffin is arguing that voters in North Carolina’s elections database who are missing driver’s license or Social Security information should have their ballots discounted. That theory was originated and championed by far-right activists working with a conservative organization that was secretly preparing to contest election results if Trump had lost the 2024 election, ProPublica has reported. The organization, the Election Integrity Network, is led by a lawyer who helped Trump try to overturn the 2020 election.

State election officials and a federal judge have rejected this theory multiple times, finding that there are many legitimate reasons for that information to be missing, including voters registering before state paperwork was updated about a year ago to require those details. “There is virtually no chance of voter fraud resulting from a voter not providing her driver’s license or social security number on her voter registration,” attorneys for the state election board wrote in legal filings.

Neither Griffin nor the right-wing activists have proven a single case of voter fraud among the 60,000 ballots.

In a July 2024 call of the North Carolina chapter of the Election Integrity Network, a right-wing activist argued that a candidate who lost a close election could use the theory to contest an outcome they did not agree with, according to a recording obtained by ProPublica. When the chapter’s leader voiced concern about the theory’s legality, calling it “voter suppression” and “100%” certain to fail in the courts, another activist said, “I guess we’re gonna find that out.” That activist’s data analyses and arguments then became the foundation for an attempt by the Republican National Committee to disqualify hundreds of thousands of voters before the election and Griffin’s attempt to overturn the election, ProPublica found.

ProPublica reported in December that Griffin has described Chief Justice Paul Newby as a “good friend and mentor,” and that Griffin wrote, when announcing his candidacy for the Supreme Court: “We are a team that knows how to win — the same team that helped elect Chief Justice Paul Newby and three other members of the current Republican majority.”

Newby and other justices did not respond to a detailed list of questions regarding the December story.

Not all the Republican justices concurred with blocking the certification of Riggs’ victory. “Permitting post-election litigation that seeks to rewrite our state’s election rules — and, as a result, remove the right to vote in an election from people who already lawfully voted under the existing rules — invites incredible mischief,” Republican Justice Richard Dietz wrote in a dissent, emphasizing that Griffin’s challenge to the 60,000 ballots was “almost certainly meritless.” He was joined by Democratic Justice Anita Earls, breaking ranks with the four other Republican members of the court.

Permitting Griffin’s litigation to proceed, Dietz stated, “will lead to doubts about the finality of vote counts following an election, encourage novel legal challenges that greatly delay certification of the results, and fuel an already troubling decline in public faith in our elections.”

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

CHIANG MAI, Thailand — Visitors who walk through a new housing development in Hang Dong, a district of Chiang Mai, might think they’ve stumbled into a slice of China because Chinese letters dominate storefront signs.

This isn’t isolated to Hang Dong. Across Chiang Mai, Thailand’s northern cultural capital, Chinese investment is rapidly reshaping entire neighborhoods – and raising alarm about the city’s future identity and economic independence.

“If Chinese investors seriously enter the dormitory business and buy up properties to rent at higher prices exclusively to Chinese tenants, people living paycheck to paycheck who rent cheap accommodations will definitely struggle,” Naret Puntasrivichai, 43, who runs a monthly apartment rental business in Hang Dong, told BenarNews.

His concerns aren’t unfounded.

Over the past decade, buyers from mainland China have snapped up more than 1,000 housing units in Chiang Mai, with investments totaling between 3 billion and 5 billion baht (U.S. $86.1 million and $143.5 million), according to the Chiang Mai Real Estate Association.

These properties, with pricetags starting at 3 million baht ($86,133) per unit, have spread across Chiang Mai’s three major districts – Hang Dong, San Kamphaeng and San Sai.

In Hang Dong district alone, one Chinese-backed project spent 350 million baht ($10 million) on only four acres of land – a level of investment that dwarfs local developers’ capabilities, Prachachat Business, a local newspaper, reported in early 2023.

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The Chiang Mai Provincial Office reported that the city has a population of about 1.62 million Thai nationals, 7,190 Chinese and about 150,000 people from other nationalities.

In addition to the 7,190 residents, many other Chinese take advantage of tourist visas allowing them to stay in Thailand for up to 60 days per visit. In Chiang Mai, it is common for Chinese nationals to use this route to reside and conduct business, according to authorities.

In 2023, Chinese nationals were the largest group of tourists – about 200,000 – traveling to Chiang Mai.

“Chinese investors are transforming Chiang Mai from a tourist destination into their second home,” said Danaitun Pongpatcharatrontep who heads Chiang Mai University’s China Intelligence Center.

“They’re planning businesses in tourism and second-home construction, bringing their children to study here and establishing long-term residences for elderly Chinese. Investment comes both through pure Chinese companies and joint ventures with Thais,” he told BenarNews.

Europeans, Americans and Middle Easterners dominated foreign property purchases in Thailand before the COVID-19 pandemic forced travel restrictions.

Today, Chinese buyers outstrip not just other foreigners but even Thai nationals in the local property market, according to the Chiang Mai Real Estate Association 2024 report.

Property prices in Chiang Mai can be several times lower than in China and budget airlines offer direct flights from major Chinese cities, cutting travel times to two to three hours. For China’s burgeoning middle class, Chiang Mai represents an affordable slice of paradise.

In major cities Beijing and Shanghai, housing prices can average $6,800 to $8,400 per square meter, meaning a 1,200 square-foot (110 square-meter) home could cost $740,000 or more – compared to $80,000 to $180,000 in Chiang Mai.

A 2023 survey by private education company New Oriental found many Chinese families choose Thailand to educate their children, where tuition and cost of living are lower than in Singapore and Japan.

Local losses

Thai law restricts foreign condominium ownership to 49% of total units and bars foreigners from owning land or houses. Yet Chinese investors have found creative ways around these restrictions, often using Thai nominees to hold their businesses.

“These practices not only circumvent the law but could affect the country’s economic system and security in the long term,” said Naret, who rents apartments in Hang Dong. “Chinese investors often operate through informal channels, avoiding official registration while maintaining significant control over properties.”

Local real estate professionals have experienced the change, according to agent Hathairat Polnirun, 38.

“The Chinese real estate system differs greatly from Thailand’s,” she told BenarNews. “In Thailand, sellers pay commissions of 3% to 5%, while in the Chinese system, buyers pay 10% or more, making it impossible for Thai agents to compete when selling to Chinese clients.”

This occurs when buyers, sellers and brokers negotiate additional terms beyond those stipulated by law, she said.

“Recently, Chinese operators have begun establishing their own real estate companies directly, though often using Thai names as cover,” Hathairat said. “If large Chinese real estate companies with substantial capital enter this market, small agencies – both Thai and Chinese – won’t survive.”

In September, a small survey by a local think-tank, The Glocal, reported on concerns among a group of Thai residents.

Of the 30 respondents between the ages of 19 and 62, 60% said Chinese investment significantly impacted local businesses. The real estate sector topped concerns at 40%, followed by tourism (20%) and retail (16.7%). Notably, 17 supported increased regulation of Chinese investment.

In neighborhoods with high Chinese concentration, cultural friction is becoming more apparent.

“Their behavior creates discomfort for Chiang Mai and Thai people, who have a culture of politeness, humility, and mutual respect,” Naret said, citing issues from loud conversations to traffic law violations to disregard for customs.

Stricter control

A legal analyst has advocated for comprehensive oversight.

Tossapon Tassanapan, an associated professor at Chiang Mai University’s Faculty of Law, called for a thorough investigation of business practices.

“We must examine all aspects, from entry permits to financial transactions,” he said. “While general laws don’t specifically target Chinese investment, as we must treat all foreigners equally, we need to investigate whether their activities fall into gray areas, whether officials are complicit and whether there are connections to money laundering or other criminal activities.”

The solution, Tossapon said, involves rigorous enforcement of existing laws.

“We need to check everything – from tourist visas being used for business purposes to tax payments and financial trails. If these businesses can operate, it likely indicates either official complicity or negligence.”

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Wittayakorn Boonruang for BenarNews.

Janine Jackson interviewed FAIR’s Julie Hollar and Jim Naureckas about placing blame for Trump for the November 8, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: Of the many things to be discussed about what just happened, surely the role of corporate news media is critical. Some issues are legend: Horserace over substance, ignoring actual popular opinion that doesn’t serve major-party talking points, top-down sourcing that ensures that those most harmed by social policies are not at the table when responses are discussed.

But there’s also something about the role of elite media in this election that needs some illuminating as we try to move forward. My guests have just written the first of no doubt many pieces about media’s role. I’m joined by FAIR’s senior analyst Julie Hollar from Brooklyn, and FAIR’s editor Jim Naureckas here in studio. Welcome back to CounterSpin, both of you.

Jim Naureckas: Thanks for having us on.

Julie Hollar: Thank you, Janine.

FAIR.org (10/30/24)

JJ: Well, Jim, the Washington Post’s non-endorsement was a pretend silence that actually said a lot. But we know that most outlets would not stand up and yell, “Donald Trump is our guy.” So we have to think deeper than these once-in-four-years endorsements about how elite news media, still labeled liberal by very many, can grease the wheels of something like what just happened.

JN: Yeah, I do think that the non-endorsement was an important moment in the election. By saying, “We’re not going to take a position between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris,” they’re saying these are two acceptable positions that you can take. And, obviously, a lot of people took the Donald Trump position, so I think that did have more impact than the expected Kamala Harris endorsement would’ve had.

JJ: But when you look at the issues and the other things apart from the election per se, when you look at the way media covered particular issues, you found something that you found important.

JN: I think that there’s an interesting parallel between the Trump campaign strategy and the business strategy of corporate media; there was kind of a synergy there. I don’t think that MAGA Republicans and corporate media have the same goals, necessarily, but I think they share a strategy, which is “fear sells.”

FAIR.org (11/8/24)

I think that media have long understood that fear is a great way to catch and hold an audience’s attention, because we are really evolutionarily attuned to things that are dangerous. Our brains tell us to pay extra attention to those things. And so news media are prone to describe issues in terms of, “Here’s something scary, here’s something that’s going to hurt you.”

And that is also the strategy that Donald Trump has hit on. His campaign ads were all about fear, all about the danger of Democrats and the Biden/Harris administration. And he played on a lot of issues that corporate media have used to sell their papers, to sell their TV programs.

Immigration is one of the most obvious ones: Corporate media have treated immigration as, “Here’s something that you should be afraid about. There’s this flood of immigrants coming over the border. It’s a border crisis.” Particularly since the beginning of the Biden administration, this has been a drumbeat.

And there’s been a lot of distortions of numbers, of presenting this as some kind of unprecedented wave of migrants, that is not true. But by presenting it as this brand new threat, they’re able to sell more papers than they would otherwise have done–or sell clicks, I guess is what they’re in the business of now.

And so Trump was able to piggyback on a picture that had already been painted for him by corporate media, that these immigrants are something you should be afraid of. And he was the person who was promising to do something about them.

FAIR.org (7/25/24)

JJ: And it built on years, also, of crime coverage. The way that immigration and crime were stirred up together, I think, is also part of that fear mongering that you’re talking about.

JN: When you look at crime statistics, the striking thing is how much lower crime is now than it was 30 years ago, 40 years ago. It was at a much higher level than it is today, but that is not a story that is going to sell news to people. You want to sell people with the idea that, “You’re in danger, read our news report to find out how.”

And so even though crime is both historically down from earlier decades, and it’s been down over the course of the Biden administration, that is not the story that people have been told. The story is that, “Here’s some scary crimes, and what are we going to do about this crime crisis?” And, again, Donald Trump was able to use that picture, that had been painted by right-wing and centrist media alike, in order to present himself as this strong man who is going to do something about the criminal threat.

JJ: We can add to that: Truthout reported, as you note, that “Republicans spent nearly $215 million on network TV ads vilifying transgender people in this election cycle.” And that fits, too, with this, “There’s something to be afraid of. There are people to be afraid of.”

FAIR.org (5/11/23)

JN: Yeah, it is really striking that this was the big push in the closing days of the campaign; the Trump campaign was pumping their campaign funds into ads that presented this transgender threat. That was the thing that they thought was going to get people to vote.

Interestingly, a lot of the ads focused on the idea that Kamala Harris wanted to pay for gender reassignment surgery for federal prisoners. So it sort of ties in the trans threat and the crime threat, as trans criminals…. It’s hard to construct a rational danger that is posed by the situation.

JH: Can I jump in here? Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t it also immigrant trans prisoners?

JJ: Just to tie it all up with a bow.

JH: I could be wrong, so delete that if I’m wrong. But….

JJ: I don’t doubt it. Just for the reason that Jim’s saying, it’s hard to create a rational story around it. And the truth is, you don’t have to. You just say a number of words that have been designated hot buttons, and if you can throw ’em all together, well, then, so much the better.

JN: And this is really an issue where the groundwork was laid by right-wing and centrist media alike. Fox News, trans threat stories are part of their bread and butter, but the New York Times has also done a great number of stories about the supposed threat trans youth pose. They’re going to be getting into girls sports, or gender-affirming care is somehow going to snatch your child away from you.

These are stories that the supposedly liberal press has been hammering hard on, and so really given someone like Trump, who wants to demagogue these issues, a real platform to begin his harangue from, because you’ve already read about it in a supposedly authoritative source like the New York Times.

Julie Hollar: “You would expect journalists in a democratic society to take as the central story here that targeting of these minority groups.”

JH: I wanted to underscore that. I was thinking about how the corporate media, to me, bear such responsibility on both the issues of immigration and trans rights, because those two issues are miscovered by the corporate media in a very similar way. They’re both this beleaguered, very small minority–although the right wing, of course, is trying to make everyone believe that they are not a small minority, either of them–but both are very small minorities who are the target of these really punitive campaigns, whose bottom-line goal really is eliminating them from our society, which is classic fascism.

So you would expect journalists in a democratic society to take as the central story here that targeting of these minority groups. For the past many years, they should have been reporting these issues from the perspective of immigrants, from the perspective of trans people, humanizing them, providing us with this understanding of who’s really being harmed here, which is the opposite story of what the right wing is trying to tell.

And by not doing that at all–and I should also interrupt to say that not every corporate media outlet has been doing that on trans issues; the New York Times does really stand out, in terms of being bad about this. On immigration, it’s pretty much across the board bad in corporate media.

But instead of doing the kind of democratic journalism that you need in a moment like this, you have them really just feeding into the same narrative that the right-wing movement is putting out there. So when they then turn around–well, I’m getting ahead of myself–and then blame the left for these losses, it’s very angering.

JJ: I want to draw you out on that, because the New York Times itself came out swinging. They’re pretty sure why Democrats lost, but you described their explanation as “mind boggling,” so just keep going with what you’re saying there.

New York Times (11/6/24)

JH: So the editorial board put out their diagnosis of the Democrats’ problem the day after the election. They had no doubts about this. They blamed it, in part, on the fact that it took, here I’m going to quote, “it took too long to recognize that large swaths of their progressive agenda were alienating voters.”

They don’t say exactly what progressive agenda this was. From a progressive perspective, it’s hard to see very much progressivism in the Democratic agenda. But in the same paragraph, it goes on to talk about how Democrats have really struggled for the last three elections to find a persuasive message that Americans really can believe in, that they can’t find a way to offer a vision to people to improve their lives.

This is the same paragraph where they’re talking about this alienating progressive agenda, and when you look at the exit polls, it’s very clear that the main driver, it seems, of the Trump vote, when you set aside the real core believers, this election was won because of the economy.

And if the Democrats are struggling to find a vision that appeals to voters, the progressive agenda is the agenda that appeals to voters. It’s not in question. Medicare for All, a wealth tax, living minimum wage: all of these big, very popular progressive agenda items that the Democratic Party flirted with in the primaries four years ago, and has since really run pretty hard away from.

Harris had a few little economic agenda items that were somewhat progressive, like her anti–price gouging plan. She did have something about minimum wage, but, really, the big ticket items that people really want to see and could really make a big difference in their lives, those weren’t the things that Kamala Harris was hitching her wagon to.

Jim Naureckas: “When Democrats do talk about progressive economic programs, that is when the corporate media really watchdogs them.”

JN: And when Democrats do talk about progressive economic programs, that is when the corporate media really watchdogs them. They are very alert to any signs of economic radicalism, like universal healthcare. When Harris was talking to media, the repeated demand that she re-renounce her former endorsement of Medicare for All was really striking. There was a suspicion that “you haven’t really changed from the candidate in 2020, who was suggesting that we ought to pay for everybody’s healthcare.” That is the kind of stance that that community finds very suspicious, and very nervous-making.

JJ: We only have a couple more minutes, and I do want you both to have an opportunity to talk about other takeaways. Obviously, this is a work in progress. We’re just getting started here, but it seems as though asking for corporate news media to be self-aware, to actually take some accountability, to acknowledge that there’s a relationship between what they report and how and what happens in the world. It seems like we’re moving farther and farther from that, and I’m reminded of the Upton Sinclair quote, “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Now, you might say that more of media owners, more so than reporters, but it does just bring us back, doesn’t it, to the fact of who owns and controls our news media, who they feel accountable to. And it’s not us. The top-down problems that we’re talking about, they’re structural.

JN: Absolutely. If you have a media that is dominated by billionaires, you are going to get a different take on the problems facing the country than if you had democratic media that was answerable to the general public.

Going back to the Washington Post, and Jeff Bezos refusing to let them endorse a candidate in the election, he’s a guy who is one of the richest people on earth. His fortune is largely based on government contracts, and so he has a super strong interest in making sure that the president of the United States doesn’t have a vendetta against him.

FAIR.org (7/14/23)

And he’s got another strong interest in the fact that the Biden administration was pursuing antitrust claims against Amazon, which was very important. The amount of money taken from the public by Amazon‘s artificially increased prices is actually quite large, and has a lot to do with why Jeff Bezos is one of the richest people on Earth. And so having Harris not in the White House could be a real boon for his personal fortune.

And then you have Elon Musk, again, someone who depends heavily on government contracts, who has been promised a prominent role in a Trump administration, and he was using his takeover of Twitter to pump out election disinformation on a really wholesale scale. The claims about illegal immigrants voting was a nonstop flow on what he calls X now, in the weeks running up to the election.

And he’s got tens of millions of people who are getting his stuff, and he’s rigged the platform so that if you’re on it, you’re definitely going to hear from the boss. It is just a firehose of disinformation, coming from the owner himself of this centrally important social media platform.

JJ: Julie Hollar, any final thoughts?

CounterSpin (10/27/24)

JH: Journalism is absolutely critical for democracy, and we have to remember that moving forward. And I think we can’t just ignore the big corporate outlets and let them off the hook and say, “Well, write them off because they’re never going to get better.” I mean, there are structural issues that are going to always limit them, and we have to keep demanding better, always.

And at the same time, I think it’s really important that everybody dig deep and support tough, strong, independent journalism that exists all over this country. Local outlets, wherever you are, that are doing really important work in your city or in your neighborhood, all of the independent media that are working nationwide as well, all the media critics; everyone is going to need so much support for the coming years to help defend this democracy, and we all really need to step up and support them.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with FAIR senior analyst, Julie Hollar, and FAIR’s editor, Jim Naureckas. Thank you both, Julie and Jim, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

JN: Thank you.

JH: Thank you.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

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.

On the second day of school this year in Hamilton County, Tennessee, Ty picked out a purple bunny from hundreds of other plushies in his room. While his mom wasn’t looking, the 13-year-old snuck it into his backpack to show to his friends.

It was the 10th anniversary of his favorite video game franchise, Five Nights at Freddy’s, and Bonnie the bunny is one of the stars. Ty has autism and Bonnie is his biggest comfort when he gets agitated or discouraged. No one other than Ty, not even his mom, is allowed to touch Bonnie.

Ty was new to Ooltewah Middle School, located just east of Chattanooga. In class that morning, he told his teacher he didn’t want anyone to look in his backpack, worried they would confiscate his toy, according to Ty and his mom. When the teacher asked why, Ty responded, “Because the whole school will blow up,” he and his mom recalled.

School officials acted quickly, Ty’s mom said: The teacher, who had only known Ty for one day, called a school administrator, who got the police involved. They brought Ty to the counselor’s office and found Bonnie in the backpack. As Ty stood there, he said, confused about what he had done wrong, the police handcuffed him and patted him down before placing him in the back of a police car.

“I think they thought an actual bomb was in my backpack,” Ty told ProPublica and WPLN. But he didn’t have a bomb. “It was just this, right here,” he said, holding Bonnie. “And they still took me to jail.”

The sheriff’s department issued a press release about the incident stating that police checked the backpack and it was “found to not contain any explosive device.” ProPublica and WPLN are using a nickname for Ty at his mother’s request, to protect his identity because he’s a minor. The sheriff’s department didn’t respond to questions about Ty’s case. The Hamilton County School district, which includes Ty’s school, declined to respond, even though his mother signed a form giving officials permission to do so.

Ty’s arrest was the result of a new state law requiring that anyone who makes a threat of mass violence at school be charged with a felony. The law does not require that the threat be credible. ProPublica and WPLN previously reported on an 11-year-old with autism who denied making a threat in class and was later arrested at a birthday party by a Hamilton County sheriff’s deputy.

Advocates had warned Tennessee lawmakers during this year’s legislative session that the law would be particularly harmful for students prone to frequent outbursts or disruptive behavior as a result of a disability.

Lawmakers did include an exception for people with intellectual disabilities. And according to Ty’s mom and a school district psychological report, Ty has an intellectual disability as defined by Tennessee statute, in addition to autism. But the family’s lawyer said there is no evidence that law enforcement took that into consideration — or even checked to see if Ty had a disability — before handcuffing and arresting him.

The law doesn’t state how police should determine whether kids have intellectual disabilities before charging them. Rep. Cameron Sexton, the Tennessee House speaker and Republican co-sponsor of the law, said Ty’s case shows that “there may need to be more training and resources” for school officials and law enforcement.

Rep. Bo Mitchell, a Nashville Democrat who co-sponsored the law, said he hoped the exception for kids with intellectual disabilities would be enough to keep students like Ty from being arrested. “No one passed that law in order for a child with any type of disability to be charged,” he said.

But he said the law was still necessary to help prevent hoax threats that disrupt learning and terrify students. “I don’t know whose level of trauma is going to be the greatest: the kids in the classroom wondering if there’s an active shooter roaming their halls or a kid that didn’t know better and says something like that and gets arrested,” Mitchell said. “It’s a no-win situation.”

The state does not collect information about how the felony law, which went into effect in July, has applied to kids with disabilities like Ty. Data from Hamilton County provides a limited glimpse. In the first six weeks of the school year, 18 kids were arrested for making threats of mass violence. A third of them have disabilities, more than double the proportion of students with disabilities across the district.

Before the academic year began, Ty’s mom sent an email to school officials asking for their help to make her son’s transition to eighth grade as smooth as possible.

Ty’s specialized education plan states that he is social and friendly with other students but regularly has outbursts and meltdowns in class due to his disability. He struggles to regulate his feelings when asked to follow classroom guidelines and to understand social situations and boundaries.

Federal law prohibits his school from punishing him harshly for those behaviors, since they are caused by or related to his disability. But Ty’s principal later told his mom in an email that Tennessee’s threats of mass violence law requires school officials to report the incident to police.

When Ty’s mom got the phone call that her son was going to be arrested, she said it was her worst fear come true: Her son’s autism was mistaken for a threat. “Once you looked at his backpack, if there was nothing in there to hurt anyone, then why did you handcuff my 13-year-old autistic son who didn’t understand what was going on and take him down to juvenile?” she said.

Disability rights advocates said kids like Ty should not be getting arrested under the current law. And they tried to push for a broader exception for kids with other kinds of disabilities.

In a meeting with Mitchell before the law passed, Zoe Jamail, the policy coordinator for Disability Rights Tennessee, explained that the legislation could harm kids with disabilities who struggle with communication and behavior — such as those with some developmental disabilities — but aren’t diagnosed with an intellectual disability. She proposed language that Mitchell and other sponsors could include in the law, to ensure children with disabilities were not improperly arrested.

“No student who makes a threat that is determined to be a manifestation of the student’s disability shall be charged under this section,” one version of the amendment read.

The amendment was never taken up for a vote in the state legislature. Lawmakers passed the narrower version instead.

“I think it demonstrates a lack of understanding of disability,” Jamail said.

Sexton, the Republican House speaker, said kids with disabilities were capable of carrying out acts of mass violence and should be punished under the law. “I think you can make a lot of excuses for a lot of people,” he said.

Ty still doesn’t fully grasp what happened to him, and why.

On a recent morning in October, Ty turned the stuffed bunny toward his mom and asked, “Is he the reason why I can’t bring plushies anymore?”

Ty’s mom told him the reason is because he didn’t ask first. “You can’t just sneak stuff out of the house,” she said.

“Will I get in trouble for that?” he asked her.

“Yeah, absolutely,” she said. “You want them to possibly think it’s another bomb and take you back down to kiddie jail?”

“No,” he said, emphatically.

After the incident, Ty’s middle school suspended him for a few days. His case was dismissed in juvenile court soon after.

The principal told Ty’s mom in an email that if Ty said something similar again, the school would follow the same protocol. She decided to transfer him out of Ooltewah Middle School as soon as she could.

“Whenever we go past that school, Ty’s like: ‘Am I going back to jail, mom? Are you taking me back over there?’ He’s for real traumatized,” she said. “I felt like nobody at that school was really fighting for him. They were too busy trying to justify what they did.”

Mitchell, the Democratic representative, said he was “heartbroken” to hear that Ty was handcuffed and traumatized. But, he added, “we’re trying to stop the people who should know better from doing this, and if they do it, they should have more than a slap on the wrist.” He said he would be open to considering a carve-out in the law in the upcoming legislative session for kids with a broader range of disabilities.

But, he said, he believes that the law as it stands is making all children in Tennessee, with or without disabilities, safer.

Help ProPublica Report on Education

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Aliyya Swaby, ProPublica, and Paige Pfleger, WPLN/Nashville Public Radio.

This morning, I am afraid. I am very afraid.

I fear that by the time I go to bed democracy in the United States will be imperilled by a man, the nature of which the Founding Fathers could never envisage when creating the protective elements of the constitution.

The risks will not be to Americans alone. The world will become a different place with Donald J Trump once again becoming president.

• READ MORE: World reactions as Donald Trump wins US presidential election after a turbulent and defiant campaign
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My trepidation is tempered only by the fact that no-one can be sure he has the numbers to gain sufficient votes in the electoral college that those same founding fathers devised as a power-sharing devise between federal and state governments. They could not have foreseen how it could become the means by which a fraction of voters could determine their country’s future.

Or perhaps that is contributing to my disquiet. No-one has been able to give me the comfort of predicting a win by Kamala Harris.

In fact, none of the smart money has been ready to call it one way or the other.

The New Zealand Herald’s business editor at large, Liam Dann, predicted a Trump win the other day but his reasoning was more visceral than analytical:

Trump provides an altogether more satisfying prescription for change. He allows them to vent their anger. He taps into the rage bubbling beneath America’s polite and friendly exterior. He provides an outlet for frustration, which is much simpler than opponents to his left can offer.

That’s why he might well win. Momentum seems to be going his way.

He is a master salesman and he is selling into a market that is disillusioned with the vague promises they’ve been hearing from mainstream politicians for generations.

Heightened anxiety
Few others — including his brother Corin, who is in the US covering the election for Radio New Zealand — have been willing to make the call and today dawned no clearer.

That may be one reason for my heightened anxiety . . . the lack of certainty one way or the other.

All of our major media outlets have had staff in the States for the election (most with some support from the US government) and each has tried to tap into the “mood of the people”, particularly in the swing states. Each has done a professional job, but it has been no easy task and, to be honest, I have no idea what the real thinking of the electorate might be.

One of my waking nightmares is that the electorate isn’t thinking at all. In which case, Liam Dann’s reading of the entrails might be as good a guide as any.

I have attempted to cope with the avalanche of reportage, analysis and outright punditry from CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. I have tried to get a more detached view from the BBC, Guardian, and (God help me) Daily Mail. I have made my head hurt playing with The Economist’s poll prediction models.

I am no closer to predicting a winner than anyone else.

However, I do know what scares me.

If Donald Trump takes up residence in the White House again, the word “freedom” will lose its true meaning and become a captured phrase ring-fencing what the victor and his followers want.

Validating disinformation
“Media freedom” will validate disinformation and make truth harder to find. News organisations that seek to hold Trump and a compliant Congress to account will be demonised, perhaps penalised.

As president again, Trump could rend American society to a point where it may take decades for the wound to heal and leave residual feelings that will last even longer. That will certainly be the case if he attempts to subvert the democratic process to extend power beyond his finite term.

I worry for the rest of the world, trying to contend with erratic foreign policies that put the established order in peril and place the freedom of countries like Ukraine in jeopardy. I dread the way in which his policies could empower despots like Vladimir Putin. By definition, as a world power, the United States’ actions affect all of us — and Trump’s influence will be pervasive.

You may think my fears could be allayed by the possibility that he will not return to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Were Kamala Harris facing any other candidate, that would certainly be the case. However, Donald Trump is not any other candidate and he has demonstrated an intense dislike of losing.

I am alarmed by the possibility that, if he fails to get the required 270 electoral votes, Donald Trump could again cry “voter fraud” and light the touch paper offered to him by the likes of the Proud Boys. They had a practice run on January 6, 2021. If there is a next time, it could well be worse.

Sometimes, my wife accuses me of unjustified optimism. When I think of the Americans I have met and those I know well, I recall that the vast majority of them have had a reasonable amount of common sense. Some have had it in abundance. I can only hope that across that nation common sense prevails today.

I am more than a little worried, however, that on this occasion my wife might be right.

Dr Gavin Ellis holds a PhD in political studies. He is a media consultant and researcher. A former editor-in-chief of The New Zealand Herald, he has a background in journalism and communications — covering both editorial and management roles — that spans more than half a century. Dr Ellis publishes the website knightlyviews.com where this commentary — written before the election results started coming in — was first published and it is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.

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

No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.

— Edward R. Murrow, broadcast journalist

America is in the midst of an epidemic of historic proportions.

The contagion being spread like wildfire is turning communities into battlegrounds and setting Americans one against the other.

Normally mild-mannered individuals caught up in the throes of this disease have been transformed into belligerent zealots, while others inclined to pacifism have taken to stockpiling weapons and practicing defensive drills.

This plague on our nation—one that has been spreading like wildfire—is a potent mix of fear coupled with unhealthy doses of paranoia and intolerance, tragic hallmarks of the post-9/11 America in which we live.

Everywhere you turn, those on both the left- and right-wing are fomenting distrust and division. You can’t escape it.

We’re being fed a constant diet of fear: fear of terrorists, fear of illegal immigrants, fear of people who are too religious, fear of people who are not religious enough, fear of extremists, fear of conformists, fear of the government, fear of those who fear the government, fear of those on the Right, fear of those on the Left… The list goes on and on.

The strategy is simple yet effective: the best way to control a populace is through fear and discord.

Fear makes people stupid.

Confound them, distract them with mindless news chatter and entertainment, pit them against one another by turning minor disagreements into major skirmishes, and tie them up in knots over matters lacking in national significance.

Most importantly, divide the people into factions, persuade them to see each other as the enemy and keep them screaming at each other so that they drown out all other sounds. In this way, they will never reach consensus about anything and will be too distracted to notice the police state closing in on them until the final crushing curtain falls.

This is how free people enslave themselves and allow tyrants to prevail.

This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being manipulated into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. Instead, fueled with fear and loathing for phantom opponents, they agree to pour millions of dollars and resources into political elections, militarized police, spy technology and endless wars, hoping for a guarantee of safety that never comes.

All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward, and “we the suckers” get saddled with the tax bills and subjected to pat downs, police raids and round-the-clock surveillance.

Turn on the TV or flip open the newspaper on any given day, and you will find yourself accosted by reports of government corruption, corporate malfeasance, militarized police and marauding SWAT teams.

America has already entered a new phase, one in which children are arrested in schools, military veterans are forcibly detained by government agents because of their so-called “anti-government” views, and law-abiding Americans are having their movements tracked, their financial transactions documented, and their communications monitored.

These threats are not to be underestimated.

Yet even more dangerous than these violations of our basic rights is the language in which they are couched: the language of fear. It is a language spoken effectively by politicians on both sides of the aisle, shouted by media pundits from their cable TV pulpits, marketed by corporations, and codified into bureaucratic laws that do little to make our lives safer or more secure.

This language of fear has given rise to a politics of fear whose only aim is to distract and divide us. In this way, we have been discouraged from thinking analytically and believing that we have any part to play in solving the problems before us. Instead, we have been conditioned to point the finger at the other Person or vote for this Politician or support this Group, because they are the ones who will fix it. Except that they can’t and won’t fix the problems plaguing our communities.

Nevertheless, fear remains the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government.

The government’s overblown, extended wars on terrorism, drugs, violence, disease, illegal immigration, and so-called domestic extremism have been convenient ruses used to terrorize the populace into relinquishing more of their freedoms in exchange for elusive promises of security.

An atmosphere of fear permeates modern America. However, with crime at an all-time low, is such fear rational?

Statistics show that you are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack. You are 11,000 times more likely to die from an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane. You are 1,048 times more likely to die from a car accident than a terrorist attack. You are 404 times more likely to die in a fall than from a terrorist attack. You are 12 times more likely to die from accidental suffocating in bed than from a terrorist attack. And you are 9 more times likely to choke to death in your own vomit than die in a terrorist attack.

Indeed, those living in the American police state are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist. Thus, the government’s endless jabbering about terrorism amounts to little more than propaganda—the propaganda of fear—a tactic used to terrorize, cower and control the population.

In turn, the government’s stranglehold on power and extreme paranoia about the citizenry as potential threats has resulted in a populace that is increasingly viewed as the government’s enemies.

Why else would the government feel the need to monitor our communications, track our movements, criminalize our every action, treat us like suspects, and strip us of any means of defense while equipping its own personnel with an amazing arsenal of weapons?

So far, these tactics—terrorizing the citizenry over the government’s paranoia and overblown fears while treating them like criminals—are working to transform the way “we the people” view ourselves and our role in this nation.

Indeed, fear and paranoia have become hallmarks of the modern American experience, impacting how we as a nation view the world around us, how we as citizens view each other, and most of all how our government views us.

The American people have been reduced to what commentator Dan Sanchez refers to as “herd-minded hundreds of millions [who] will stampede to the State for security, bleating to please, please be shorn of their remaining liberties.”

Sanchez continues:

I am not terrified of the terrorists; i.e., I am not, myself, terrorized. Rather, I am terrified of the terrorized; terrified of the bovine masses who are so easily manipulated by terrorists, governments, and the terror-amplifying media into allowing our country to slip toward totalitarianism and total war…

I do not irrationally and disproportionately fear Muslim bomb-wielding jihadists or white, gun-toting nutcases. But I rationally and proportionately fear those who do, and the regimes such terror empowers. History demonstrates that governments are capable of mass murder and enslavement far beyond what rogue militants can muster. Industrial-scale terrorists are the ones who wear ties, chevrons, and badges. But such terrorists are a powerless few without the supine acquiescence of the terrorized many. There is nothing to fear but the fearful themselves…

Stop swallowing the overblown scaremongering of the government and its corporate media cronies. Stop letting them use hysteria over small menaces to drive you into the arms of tyranny, which is the greatest menace of all.

As history makes clear, fear and government paranoia lead to fascist, totalitarian regimes.

It’s a simple enough formula. National crises, reported terrorist attacks, and sporadic shootings leave us in a constant state of fear. Fear prevents us from thinking. The emotional panic that accompanies fear actually shuts down the prefrontal cortex or the rational thinking part of our brains. In other words, when we are consumed by fear, we stop thinking.

A populace that stops thinking for themselves is a populace that is easily led, easily manipulated and easily controlled.

The following, derived by from John T. Flynn’s 1944 treatise on fascism As We Go Marching are a few of the necessary ingredients for a fascist state:

• The government is managed by a powerful leader (even if he or she assumes office by way of the electoral process). This is the fascistic leadership principle (or father figure).
• The government assumes it is not restrained in its power. This is authoritarianism, which eventually evolves into totalitarianism.
• The government ostensibly operates under a capitalist system while being undergirded by an immense bureaucracy.
• The government through its politicians emits powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.
• The government has an obsession with national security while constantly invoking terrifying internal and external enemies.
• The government establishes a domestic and invasive surveillance system and develops a paramilitary force that is not answerable to the citizenry.
• The government and its various agencies (federal, state, and local) develop an obsession with crime and punishment. This is overcriminalization.
• The government becomes increasingly centralized while aligning closely with corporate powers to control all aspects of the country’s social, economic, military, and governmental structures.
• The government uses militarism as a center point of its economic and taxing structure.
• The government is increasingly imperialistic in order to maintain the military-industrial corporate forces.

The parallels to modern America are impossible to ignore.

“Every industry is regulated. Every profession is classified and organized. Every good or service is taxed. Endless debt accumulation is preserved. Immense doesn’t begin to describe the bureaucracy. Military preparedness never stops, and war with some evil foreign foe, remains a daily prospect,” writes economist Jeffrey Tucker. “It’s incorrect to call fascism either right wing or left wing. It is both and neither… fascism does not seek to overthrow institutions like commercial establishments, family, religious centers, and civic traditions. It seeks to control them… it preserves most of what people hold dear but promises to improve economic, social, and cultural life through unifying their operations under government control.”

For the final hammer of fascism to fall, it will require the most crucial ingredient: the majority of the people will have to agree that it’s not only expedient but necessary. In times of “crisis,” expediency is upheld as the central principle—that is, in order to keep us safe and secure, the government must militarize the police, strip us of basic constitutional rights and criminalize virtually every form of behavior.

We are at a critical crossroads in American history.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, fear has been a critical tool in past fascistic regimes, and it has become the driving force behind the American police state.

All of which begs the question what we will give up in order to perpetuate the illusions of safety and security.

As we once again find ourselves faced with the prospect of voting for the lesser of two evils, “we the people” have a decision to make: do we simply participate in the collapse of the American republic as it degenerates toward a totalitarian regime, or do we take a stand and reject the pathetic excuse for government that is being fobbed off on us?

There is no easy answer, but one thing is true: the lesser of two evils is still evil.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

The mission met with civil society representatives and political and institutional leaders and heard the testimony of journalists who cited a growing climate of fear amid a deeply polarized environment, increasingly authoritarian governance, and escalating attacks against the press. Journalists expressed grave concern over their ability to continue operating in the country following the enactment of a Russian-style “foreign agents” law earlier this year.

The mission concluded with a press briefing and will be followed by a detailed report with recommendations.

Read the interim findings here.

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

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Liberals see former President Donald Trump as the leading perpetrator of creating an authoritarian state. Organizations backing him, like the conservative Heritage Foundation, which released Project 2025, reinforce this perception.

Trump claimed not to know who was behind Project 2025; however, a CNN review found that at least 140 people who worked for him were involved. The 900-page document details how the federal government’s “deep state” must be destroyed in a new Trump Administration.

Liberals from the west to the east coast feared a possible authoritarian future. From the heartland, the Nebraska Examiner contributor professor Steve Corbin writes in his piece, Authoritarian rule threatens America’s democracy, that 147 congressional Republicans voting to overturn the 2020 election results was authoritarianism in action.

Veteran national political columnist Dick Polman, in the Progressive Populist, describes today’s political fight as between a pro-democracy party and an authoritarian cult.

Ralph Nader accuses Roberts and his “clique” of five like-minded Supreme Court judges as authoritarians who re-installed the doctrine of “The King Can Do No Wrong.”

Donald Trump is seen triggering authoritarian views.

Because Trump ignited the MAGA movement, he is viewed as the embodiment of authoritarian behavior. Even mild-spoken President Joe Biden remarked at a Maryland fundraiser that the MAGA philosophy was “semi-fascism.”

Consequently, liberal commentary interprets Trump’s language and actions as displaying approval for authoritarian government leaders.

He has expressed admiration for Russian President (Dictator) V. Putin. At a campaign rally in 2022, Trump said, “The smartest one gets to the top,” Trump told the crowd. “That didn’t work so well recently in our country. But they ask me, ‘Is Putin smart?’ Yes, Putin was smart.”

Just before one of his other rallies, Trump was caught on a hot mic saying that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un was his kind of guy: “He speaks, and his people sit up in attention. I want my people to do the same.” His list of dictators he respects or envies goes on to include others.

Trump provides liberals a big easy target for fearing a coming authoritarian state. Biden does not offer that target for Conservatives. Also, Democratic presidential candidate VP Kamala Harris lacks the baggage of quotes that can match the veracity of Trump’s allegiance to exercising raw power.

The far right believes we are already halfway to being an authoritarian state.

Trump’s MAGA is a core group fearful of the federal government. The large crowd attending Trump’s January 6, 2021, speech at the White House Ellipse shared that belief. They cheered when he said he would “never concede” the race and that if his supporters didn’t “fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

Mainstream media rarely notes the size of the crowds that Trump attracts other than in general terms. Trump also contributes to doubting their size when he describes them in absurd comparisons.

For instance, Trump claims that his January 6 crowd was larger than the 250,000 people who attended Martin Luther King’s DC speech in 1963 from the Lincoln Memorial. However, by repeating the Associated Press’s estimate that it was at least 10,000, the media diminishes the level of Trump support. Rarely mentioned is that according to Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, the crowd size before heading to the Capitol was possibly as much as 80,000.

However, despite Trump’s language, some conservatives critical of Trump do not see him as a danger to democracy. John Bolton, former US national security adviser and former US Ambassador to the United Nations, says former President Donald Trump is not fit to be president. Still, he’s not a threat to our democracy.

As faith in our democracy falls, support for more authoritarian rule increases.  

What does endanger our democracy is that many citizens see the federal bureaucracy as currently or potentially restricting their freedoms.

A Monmouth (“Mon-muth”) University Poll in the summer of 2023 found the following. A majority (55%) of Americans are very concerned that their fundamental rights and freedoms are under threat – with Republicans (63%) being more likely than Democrats (53%) or independents (51%) to feel this way.

The three top “rights under threat” were speech 26%, guns 21%, and abortion/women’s rights 19%. Republicans were at 38% on speech and guns and 1% on abortion/women’s rights. Democrats were most concerned with abortion/women’s rights at 36%, then speech at 14%, and guns were at 4%.

These threats could explain why polls show low faith in the U.S. institutions necessary to maintain a democracy. A July 2023 Gallup poll measured Americans’ confidence in 16 institutions it tracks annually. Congress was at the bottom at 8%, but the Presidency at 26% and the Supreme Court at 27% were nothing to brag about. The military was at 60%, and the police were right behind them at 43%.

Both polls suggest that people fear losing their freedoms under elected government officials. However, the most trusted institutions are those that use force, the military and police, to ensure their safety. This may explain why the following polls strongly support a strong, authoritative government run by a strong leader or the military. They may see how using state-authorized violence could free them from chaos and insecurity.

According to a February study by the Pew Research Center, 32% of Americans believe a military regime or authoritarian leader would be a good way of governing the country “without interference from Congress or the courts.” The U.S. had the highest percentage of citizens holding this belief among the 14 wealthiest nations surveyed in Europe, including Australia and Israel.

Support for authoritarian rule varies by political leanings and personality traits.

Support for authoritarian rule among Americans registered at 37% from the center, 29% from the right, and 25% from the left. The right’s support for authoritarian rule was the highest percentage in 16 nations of the 18 nations polled, with the center having the highest percentage in the U.S. and Australia. These labels are self-identified by those surveyed.

The high percentage of those in the center who support authoritarian rule would indicate that the term “moderate” is not the same as being in the center. It’s just that these folks don’t like the major parties representing the right or the left. They still want drastic measures that are more reflective of their core beliefs than affiliating with a party.

Historians have observed that the tendencies of the farthest wings of the left and right movement overlap. In the Atlantic, psychiatrist Sally Satel, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, points to some research that supports that belief. She writes that researchers found some common traits between left-wing and right-wing authoritarians, including a “preference for social uniformity, willingness to wield group authority to coerce behavior, cognitive rigidity, outsized concern for hierarchy, and moral absolutism.”

These traits are shared by political and religious groups across the spectrum who strongly believe that the policies they support are best for everyone. For them, our democracy is failing to pursue their policies. Given the results of a Pew Research Center survey in July 2023, they also have many potential followers to preach to. Pew found that 63% of Americans are exhausted by politics, and 55% are just plain angry with politics. Just 16% of the public say they trust the federal government always or most of the time.

Where do we go from here?

Remember Barack Obama’s campaign theme, “Hope”? That Pew survey found that only 10% were hopeful about American politics. Nevertheless, although many other polls show dissatisfaction with our government, that level is similar to that of other functioning democracies in wealthy countries.

In a 2022 Pew survey, France, Japan, Italy, and Spain, like the U.S., had majorities dissatisfied with their democracies. The political orientation of those governments didn’t matter; Japan was conservative-nationalist, France was centrist, Italy and the U.S. were liberal, and Spain was Socialist leaning.

When asked if their political system “allows people like them have not much or none at all influence on politics,” Japan, Australia, and the U.S. all scored 71% for those polled who agreed with that measurement.

However, complaining is not the same as rejecting the principles democratic institutions protect. Americans surveyed by Pew in 2020 were asked, “What are very important” functions of their democracy to possess? The following six, in order of importance and percentage, were: Fair Judiciary 93%, Gender Equality 91%, Free Religion 86%, Regular Elections 84%, Free Media 80%, and Free Speech 77%. These conditions could easily be restricted if not eliminated under authoritarian rule.

To sustain a functional, not a fake, democracy, we must measure whether these conditions are being provided. Failing to provide and protect them will gradually transform any country into an authoritarian state.

The post Understanding the Fear of the US Becoming an Authoritarian State appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nick Licata.

The 17-minute trailer for "Zero Day" has sparked intense reactions in democratic Taiwan, with a prominent opposition politician accusing the ruling Democratic Progressive Party of funding the show to fuel a sense of threat ahead of the 2026 local elections.

Former opposition Kuomintang presidential hopeful Jaw Shau-kong hit out at the show soon after its official trailer was released in late July, garnering more than 2 million views across different platforms.

He pointed to a government subsidy for the show from the Ministry of Culture, accusing the ruling Democratic Progressive Party of funding "cognitive warfare" to shore up its national security platform at the next election. 

Yet showrunners say the show is simply a speculative dramatization of an event that many fear could take place in the near future -- a Chinese invasion.

Producer and screenwriter Cheng Hsin-mei told RFA Mandarin in a recent interview that none of the show's creators have ties to the ruling Democratic Progressive Party or to the current administration. 

Instead, show-runners consulted with military experts and Puma Shen, a specialist in information warfare who later went on to become a DPP member of the democratic island's Legislative Yuan, she said.

Bank run and social unrest

In the official trailer released July 23, Chinese helicopters overfly the presidential palace in Taipei as China's People's Liberation Army blockades Taiwan on the pretext of a search and rescue operation for a downed aircraft. 

Reports emerge on social media of a Chinese landing on Taiwan's Kinmen island, amid rumors that the democratically elected president has left town, as some journalists hesitate to call the invasion what it is.

Social media influencers spread the idea that the island is unable to defend itself, and had better sign a peace agreement with China as soon as possible.

The next day, there's a run on the banks, sparking social unrest as foreign nationals evacuate and hackers disrupt internet access along with critical power and water supplies. Pro-Beijing activists take to the streets to call for surrender and "unification" with China.

It's a gradually evolving nightmare scenario likened by one character to "a zombie movie" that sees the foundations of Taiwan's democracy shaken and undermined in just a few days.

The scenes have sparked intense debate in Taiwan, where a nascent civil defense movement is beginning to take root.

"Some people said that after watching it, horror movies didn't seem scary any more," Cheng said. "Some people said they wanted to protect Taiwan, while others said it was overly exaggerated, and defeatist."

"The show addresses that dark shadow of war that looms in the minds of the Taiwanese people," she said. "No one can deny that Taiwan is a place where war is likely to break out, nor that a war would destroy the familiar lifestyle Taiwanese people enjoy. This should be the consensus of all Taiwanese people."

"It is war, not this script, that will shake the foundations of our country and destroy Taiwan."

‘Human nature in wartime’

Cheng started work on the storyline in the second half of 2022, just months after Russia's invasion of Ukraine met with stronger-than-expected military resistance.

"I've always felt that the most important thing we don't talk about, and we should talk about, is the fear of war," Cheng said. "Taiwan has faced threats from across the Strait since 1949, and the topic has become more urgent with the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war."

The show will offer 10 episodes by 10 different directors with plotlines showing the different paths taken by characters as their once-comfortable world is changed forever. The episodes portray political intrigue, media infiltration, internet celebrities and AI deep fakes, with nods to the supernatural, horror, comedy and other genres.

But overall, the show tries not to take a particular point of view, according to Cheng.

"The point isn't to promote resistance or surrender," Cheng said. "It's to focus on human nature in wartime."

She is personally skeptical that all of the island's 23 million residents would follow the call to arms in the event of an invasion by Chinese forces.

"Most people will make the choice that's in their best interests and those of their loved ones," she said. "Most people's first instinct will be to leave."

"But when you think about it, it's also not that simple. Can an entire family and their friends all leave together? Will they have to give up their entire way of life forever?"

Realistic depictions

Cheng added: "This drama is actually about opposing war, alerting people to the horror of war, so as to prevent it."

Cheng cited recent media reports claiming that Taiwanese are indifferent to frequent military incursions by China in recent years, adding: "Some foreign journalists ... are finding that the Taiwanese are just feigning indifference, and avoiding talking about it out of a sense of helplessness, the feeling that if they really did attack, there would be nothing they could do about it."

The show is based on predictions from analysts that the most likely time for China to invade would be during the transition between presidents, in the four-month window between late January elections and the new president's inauguration in May.

Lo Ging-zim, who made the 17-minute trailer and who directs one of Zero Day's episodes, is a former director of Chinese TV commercials who shot a campaign documentary about ruling Democratic Progressive Party President Lai Ching-te and his running mate Hsiao Bi-khim.

He said the show has tried to keep its depictions as realistic as possible, and show how Chinese infiltration today could tip the balance in a future invasion, by preparing a "fifth column" of agents and supporters of the Chinese state.

"It's not about sensationalism," Lo said. "Removing those factors will give us a chance to see China's red infiltration and gray-zone warfare against Taiwan -- something everyone really needs to understand and help with."

"It's quite similar to a military exercise, where you have to imagine the worst-case scenarios," he said, adding that if the show shocks people into being more vigilant, it will have been worth it.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Hsia Hsiao-hwa for RFA Mandarin.

Ride-sharing platforms were given the green light for the robotaxi service on Monday, with pilot license plates issued for 624 AI-powered vehicles in Shanghai's Jiading district, the Shanghai Daily newspaper reported.

The rapid rollout of robotaxis has sparked fears among professional drivers over the loss of even gig economy jobs in a time of economic hardship.

The cars use both sensors and remote control to navigate more than 1,000 kilometers (620 milies) of specially equipped roads through the city, and can be booked via apps, including Dazhong, Jinjiang and Xiangdao Chuxing, the paper said.

Shanghai's Pudong New Area has also started handing out licenses to mark the sixth World Artificial Intelligence Conference in the city, the state-backed China Daily newspaper reported, adding that Baidu's Apollo Go, AutoX and Pony.ai were among the first to obtain permits from the Pudong government for testing driverless vehicles.

During the trial phase in Shanghai, all rides are being offered free of charge, the Global Times reported.

Similar moves are already underway in Beijing and the central city of Wuhan, the paper reported, citing comments from Pony.ai, an autonomous driving startup.

While robotaxis have been seen on a trial basis on the streets of both cities since 2021, new smart routes have been added connecting the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area, Beijing Daxing International Airport and the Beijing South Railway Station, and more routes are in the pipeline, the paper quoted the company as saying.

In Wuhan, the first batch of driverless taxis is now running 24 hours a day, offering cheaper fares to users compared with driver-operated vehicles.

On Baidu's Apollo Go app, rides cost 4-16 yuan (US$0.55-2.20) per 10-kilometer (6-mile) trip, compared with 18-30 yuan for driver-operated cars, according to the Huxiu news client.

The app is booming, while Wuhan's human drivers are scrambling to land fares, the report said.

Wuhan resident and former taxi driver Xu Ning said driverless taxis are still only allowed to operate on the outskirts of the city, not yet in the downtown area.

"They're running out in the East and West Lake districts, Huangpi, Jiangxia and Hongshan, places like that," Xu said. "A lot of young people like using them because they're cheap, and you can just get a ride by scanning a code."

But there have been some technical hitches, Xu said.

"But some people have found that the door won't open to let them out, and they've had to call Apollo Go for help," Xu said. "They've been having some software issues, where the doors aren't unlocking."

Xu said it wasn't a good time to be bringing such services online.

"There are so many people who can't find work, and now they're inventing driverless cars," Xu said. "These people have vested interests and only care about money, not the lives of ordinary people."

A resident of Shanghai who gave only the surname Jiang for fear of reprisals called on the government to take steps to support drivers who will inevitably be made redundant by driverless vehicles.

"The emergence of driverless cars means that traditional drivers have no long-term future," he said. "They're only thinking about how to make money, but not so much about the livelihood of ordinary people."

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Roseanne Gerin.

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

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Aisha Khalid and Imran Qureshi (Pakistan), Two Wings to Fly, Not One, 2017.

Half of the world’s population will have the opportunity to vote by the end of this year as 64 countries and the European Union are scheduled to open their ballot boxes. No previous year has been so flush with elections. Among these countries is India, where a remarkable 969 million voting papers had to be printed ahead of the elections that culminated on 1 June. In the end, 642 million people (roughly two-thirds of those eligible) voted, half of them women. This is the highest-ever participation by women voters in a single election in the world.

Meanwhile, the European Union’s 27 member states held elections for the European Parliament, which meant that 373 million eligible voters had the opportunity to cast their ballot for the 720 members who make up the legislative body. Add in the eligible voters for elections in the United States (161 million), Indonesia (204 million), Pakistan (129 million), Bangladesh (120 million), Mexico (98 million), and South Africa (42 million) and you can see why 2024 feels like the Year of Elections.

Alfredo Ramos Martínez (Mexico), Vendedora de Alcatraces (‘Calla Lily Vendor’), 1929.

Over the past few weeks, three particularly consequential elections took place in India, Mexico, and South Africa. India and South Africa are key players in the BRICS bloc, which is charting a path towards a world order that is not dominated by the US. The nature of the governing coalitions that come to power in these countries will have an impact on the grouping and will certainly shape this year’s BRICS Summit to be held in Kazan (Russia) in late October. While Mexico is not a member of BRICS and did not apply for membership during the expansion last year, the country has sought to relieve itself of the pressures from the United States (most Mexicans are familiar with the statement ‘Poor Mexico: so far from God, so close to the United States’, made by Porfirio Diaz, the country’s president from 1884 to 1911). The Mexican government’s recent aversion to US interference in Latin America and to the overall neoliberal framework of trade and development has brought the country deeper into dialogue with alternative projects such as BRICS.

While the results in India and South Africa showed that the electorates are deeply divided, Mexican voters stayed with the centre-left National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), electing Claudia Sheinbaum as the first woman president in the country’s history on 2 June. Sheinbaum will take over from Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), who leaves the presidency with a remarkable 80% approval rating. As the mayor of Mexico City from 2018 to 2023 and a close ally of AMLO, Sheinbaum followed the general principles laid out in the Fourth Transformation (4T) project set out by AMLO in 2018. This 4T project of ‘Mexican Humanism’ follows three important periods in Mexico’s history: independence (1810–1821), reform (1858–1861), and revolution (1910–1917). While AMLO spoke often of this 4T as an advance in Mexico’s history, it is in fact a return to the promises of the Mexican Revolution with its call to nationalise resources (including lithium), increase wages, expand government jobs programmes, and revitalise social welfare. One of the reasons why Sheinbaum triumphed over the other candidates was her pledge to continue the 4T agenda, which is rooted less in populism (as the bourgeois press likes to say) and more so in a genuine welfarist humanism.

George Pemba (South Africa), Township Games, 1973.

In May of this year, thirty years after the end of apartheid, South Africa held its seventh general election of the post-apartheid era, producing results that stand in stark contrast to those in Mexico. The ruling tripartite alliance – consisting of the African National Congress (ANC), South African Communist Party, and Congress of South African Trade Unions – suffered an enormous attrition of its vote share, securing just 40.18% of the vote (42 seats short of a majority), compared to 59.50% and a comfortable majority in the National Assembly in 2019. What is stunning about the election is not just the decline in the alliance’s vote share but the rapid decline in voter turnout. Since 1999, less and less voters have bothered to vote, and this time only 58% of those eligible came to the polls (down from 86% in 1994). What this means is that the tripartite alliance won the votes of only 15.5% of eligible voters, while its rivals claimed even smaller percentages. It is not just that the South African population – like people elsewhere – is fed up with this or that political party, but that they are increasingly disillusioned by their electoral process and by the role of politicians in society.

A sober appraisal of South Africa’s election results shows that the two political forces that broke from the ANC – Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) and Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters – won a combined 64.28% of the vote, exceeding the vote share that the ruling alliance secured in 1994. The overall agenda promised by these three forces remains intact (ending poverty, expropriating land, nationalising banks and mines, and expanding social welfare), although the strategies they would like to follow are wildly different, a divide furthered by their personal rivalries. In the end, a broad coalition government will be formed in South Africa, but whether it will be able to define even a social democratic politics – such as in Mexico – is unclear. The overall decline in the population’s belief in the system represents a lack of faith in any political project. Promises, if unmet, can go stale.

Kalyan Joshi (India), Migration in the Time of COVID, 2020.

In the lead-up to the election in India, held over six weeks from 19 April to 1 June, incumbent Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) said that his party alone would win a thumping 370 seats in the 543-seat parliament. In the end, the BJP could only muster 240 seats – down by 63 compared with the 2019 elections – and his National Democratic Alliance won a total of 293 (above the 272-threshold needed to form a government). Modi will return for a third term as prime minister, but with a much-weakened mandate. He was only able to hold on to his own seat by 150,000 votes, a significant decrease from the 450,000-vote margin in 2019, while fifteen incumbent members of his cabinet lost their seats. No amount of hate speech against Muslims or use of government agencies to silence opposition parties and the media was able to increase the far-right’s hold on power.

An April poll found that unemployment and inflation were the most important issues for two-thirds of those surveyed, who say that jobs for city dwellers are getting harder to find. Forty percent of India’s 1.4 billion people are under the age of 25, and a study by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy showed that India’s youth between the ages of 15 and 24 are ‘faced with a double whammy of low and falling labour participation rates and shockingly high unemployment rates’. Unemployment among young people is 45.4%, six times higher than the overall unemployment rate of 7.5%.

India’s working-class and peasant youth remain at home, the sensibility of their entire families shaped by their dilemmas. Despair at everyday life has now eaten into the myth that Modi is infallible. Modi will return as prime minister, but the actualities of his tenure will be defined partly by the grievances of tens of millions of impoverished Indians articulated through a buoyant opposition force that will find leaders amongst the mass movements. Among them will be farmers and peasants, such as Amra Ram, a leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and All India Kisan Sabha (‘All India Farmers’ Union’) who won decisively in Sikar, an epicentre of the farmers’ movement. He will be joined in parliament by Sachidanandam, a leader of the All India Kisan Sabha and Communist Party of India (Marxist) from Dindigul (Tamil Nadu), and by Raja Ram Kushwaha, a leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation from Karakat (Bihar) and the convenor of the All-India Kisan Sangharsh (‘All India Farmers’ Struggle’) Coordination Committee, a peasant alliance that includes 250 organisations. The farmers are now represented in parliament.

Nitheesh Narayanan of Tricontinental Research Services writes that even though the Left did not send a large contingent to parliament, it has played an important role in this election. Amra Ram, he continues, ‘enters the parliament as a representative of the peasant power that struck the first blow to the BJP’s unquestioned infallibility in North India. His presence becomes a guarantee of India’s democracy from the streets’.

Heri Dono (Indonesia), Resistance to The Power of Persecution, 2021.

The idea of ‘democracy’ does not start and finish at the ballot box. Elections – such as in India and the United States – have become grotesquely expensive. This year’s election in India cost $16 billion, most of it spent by the BJP and its allies. Money, power, and the corrosiveness of political dialogue have corrupted the democratic spirit.

The search for the democratic spirit is at least as old as democracy itself. In 1949, the communist poet Langston Hughes expressed this yearning in his short poem ‘Democracy’, which spoke then to the denial of the right to vote and speaks now to the need for a much deeper consideration of what democracy must mean in our times – something that cannot be bought by money or intimidated by power.

Democracy will not come
Today, this year,
Nor ever
Through compromise and fear.
I have as much right
As the other fellow has
To stand
On my two feet
And own the land.

I tire so of hearing people say,
Let things take their course.
Tomorrow is another day.
I do not need my freedom when I’m dead.
I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread.

Freedom
Is a strong seed
Planted
In a great need.
Listen, America—
I live here, too.
I want freedom
Just as you.

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

Under the People’s Military Service Law, enacted by the junta in February, men between the ages of 18 and 45 can be conscripted after junta forces have suffered battlefield defeats to rebel forces. The announcement triggered a wave of killings of administrators enforcing the law and driven thousands of draft dodgers into rebel-controlled territory and neighboring Thailand. 

In April, the Thai Labor Ministry announced that workers from Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos working under a government visa sponsorship program will have to return to their own countries to extend the terms of their four-year contracts when they expire.

Ye Min, with the Aid Alliance Committee, which assists Burmese workers in Thailand, confirmed the new visa requirements in an interview with RFA Burmese and said he believes Myanmar’s junta requested the policy as part of its conscription drive.

“Normally, workers can renew their books in Thailand, and work at their same workplace – they prefer this system,” said the aid worker, who is also a leader of the Migration Health Assessment Center. “However, they now have to return home for an extension after they have worked in Thailand for four years due to pressure from the Myanmar junta.”

Ye Min noted that many Burmese migrants in Thailand are supporting or actively participating in Myanmar’s anti-junta movement, and he suggested that the junta may have pressured Bangkok to make the new requirements as part of a bid to “cut supplies and support to the rebellion.”

A migrant who is working at a chicken-processing plant in LopBuri, Thailand, told RFA on condition of anonymity that two groups of workers from Myanmar at his plant have already returned home after their contracts expired.

“[The contract] of another group of Myanmar workers is set to expire on June 13 or 14 and they will be sent home,” said the migrant, who declined to be named due to security concerns. “About 26 workers have already returned home in two groups. It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of workers will have to go back.”

Returnees at risk

On May 1, the junta activated the mandatory military services law and its labor ministry announced that young men would no longer be allowed to work abroad.

Kyaw Ni, the deputy labor minister of Myanmar’s shadow National Unity Government, or NUG, told RFA his administration has requested that the Thai government allow Burmese migrant workers to continue working inside the country without having to return home.

Attempts by RFA to contact the junta’s labor ministry and the Myanmar Labor Attache Office in Bangkok about the new requirements went unanswered Friday.

The Aid Alliance Committee’s Ye Min said it is extremely risky for migrant workers to go back to Myanmar.

"It’s not easy to re-enter Thailand within one or two months, so it’s a very risky system for repatriated workers,” he said.

Aung Kyaw of the Thailand-based Labor Rights Foundation told RFA that his group has also called on the Thai government to allow the migrant workers to continue living there on humanitarian grounds.

“The migrant workers will be forced into conscription if they are in the age range,” he said. “The junta is on the attack both day and night, so the lives of these migrant workers are at risk in the country.”

On May 1, in observance of World Labor Day, labor groups rallied in Bangkok to demand that workers be allowed to apply for extensions to their four-year work contracts from within Thailand.

Translated by Aung Naing. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

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

Premier Cho Jung-tai said Lai's administration, known as the Executive Yuan, will be looking at the possibility of bouncing the new legislation back to lawmakers for review, based on the Additional Articles of the island's constitution.

"When the Executive Yuan receives the documents from the Legislative Yuan, it will deliberate carefully over how the constitutional organs can best fulfill their responsibilities," Cho said in  comments reported by Taiwan's Central News Agency. 

Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP, which holds the presidency but which has lost control of the legislature, has called for a constitutional interpretation of the controversial amendments.

Pro-China lawmakers voted through a package of legislative amendments as tens of thousands of people protested outside the Legislative Yuan on Tuesday, giving themselves new investigative powers, the power to hold hearings and the ability to sanction officials if they don't comply with requests.

One amendment requires the president to report to the Legislative Yuan annually and to submit to questioning by lawmakers.

'Bluebird Movement'

Protesters, some of whom held up effigies of blue birds, pushed large balloons into the legislature on Tuesday night emblazoned with the "Citizens Defend Democracy" and "Reject Chinese Interference in Politics," while one DPP lawmaker threw a paper aircraft made from blue paper at the podium.

But the amendments were passed by the pro-China Kuomintang and the Taiwan People's Party, which together command a majority of 60 out of the 113 seats in the Legislative Yuan, as crowds gathered in protests that are being dubbed the "Bluebird Movement."

President Lai Ching-te's DPP, which holds just 51 seats following January's general election, has called for a constitutional interpretation of the new laws, which critics say will open up the island's government to manipulation and sanction by politicians with close ties to Beijing.

Lai called on Beijing in his May 20 inauguration speech to stop threatening his country, and respect the will of its 23 million people, the majority of whom have no wish to be ruled by the Chinese Communist Party.

National Security Bureau Director-General Tsai Ming-yen warned on Wednesday that Beijing is planning to take advantage of the DPP's loss of control over the legislature by stepping up contacts with lawmakers, local politicians and religious and business groups, using a strategy of exchanges with friendly associations while attacking those that refuse to cooperate.

Beijing vowed in January to step up its efforts to achieve "peaceful unification" with the island after Taiwanese voters in January elected Lai, Beijing's least favorite candidate.

Tsai said his agency is "closely monitoring developments, having obtained both public and secret intelligence about relevant policy discussions inside China’s establishment," Taiwan's Central News Agency reported.

'Taiwan belongs to all'

The Kuomintang, or KMT, whose former president Ma Ying-jeou recently met with Xi Jinping, says the new laws will allow the island's democracy to be more transparent and accountable, after eight years of domination by the ruling DPP, immediately announcing it would set up a "private special investigation team" to go after "corrupt" DPP officials.

Kuomintang caucus convenor Fu Kun-chi told journalists: "Taiwan doesn't belong to the Democratic Progressive Party, nor does it belong to Lai Ching-te. Taiwan belongs to all of its people."

"Starting today, we will expose every instance of Democratic Progressive Party corruption, one by one," said Fu.

DPP Legislative Yuan caucus leader Ker Chien-ming said Tuesday's vote was "a day of national humiliation," accusing parliamentary speaker and pro-China politician Han Kuo-yu of failing to abide by procedural justice in his handling of the legislative amendments.

"We will definitely propose a constitutional interpretation, which can only be put forward after the president's announcement," Ker said. "The DPP will abide by the legal requirements and procedures for constitutional interpretation."

'Last breath'

A protester who gave only the nickname Chili told Radio Free Asia outside the Legislative Yuan on Tuesday night: "I feel very heavy, and sad, very sad. The [KMT and TPP] totally ignored the rules of procedure and refused to discuss the issue with the Democratic Progressive Party."

He said protesters would start issuing recall proceedings for KMT and TPP lawmakers from their respective constituencies.

Many in the crowd were refugees from an ongoing crackdown on political dissent under Chinese Communist Party rule in Hong Kong.

"I may not be able to achieve anything special, but I will keep on coming out, time and again, as a person who is from Hong Kong and Taiwan," a protester who gave only the nickname Ah K for fear of reprisals told RFA on Tuesday night. 

Another Hong Konger said she had brought her children along to "take a last breath of free and democratic air before their eyes were blindfolded" by government propaganda on their return.

Wu Jui-jen, an associate history researcher at Taiwan's Academia Sinica, called on protesters to "go back home, go back to school, go back to work, and start organizing and acting, learning and discussing, and build a movement to strengthen civil society."

Wu said he expects pro-China lawmakers to boost trade ties with China, amend national security legislation to dismantle the island's defenses against political infiltration, and even sign the island up to Chinese President Xi Jinping's Belt and Road international influence and infrastructure program, and begin the process of controlling Taiwan's economy, society and culture.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Roseanne Gerin.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Alice Yam for RFA Cantonese and Huang Chun-mei for RFA Mandarin.

The United States has said it is “ready to lend a helping hand” to the people of Mulitaka, Enga province, after a devasting landslide swallowed an entire village in Papua New Guinea’s highlands yesterday.

US President Joe Biden and his wife said in a personal message their prayers were with the people of Enga who had been affected by the disaster at Yambili village.

Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong has also advised her counterpart, Foreign Minister Justin Tkatchenko, that Australia is also ready to assist.

• READ MORE: Hundreds feared dead after huge landslide in Papua New Guinea

Relief officials say 300 people are missing and more than 1000 homes and a local lodge were buried under the rubble of mud, trees and rock.

Lagaip Open MP Aimos Akem called for immediate assistance from the national government, Enga provincial government, development partners and Barrack Niugini Ltd to help provide the necessary support for rescue operations after a deadly landslide struck Yambili village.

The village is near the Maip-Mulitaka LLG bordering the Lagaip and Pogera districts respectively.

A local leader and former MP for the then Lagaip-Porgera Open, Mark Ipuia, confirmed that Yambili village was covered by a huge pile of rocks that fell from the landslide.

It covered the Kapil clan, including all their homes and more than 5000 pigs, plus 100 trade stores and five vehicles.

ABC’s Pacific reporter Belinda Kora filed this report.        Video: ABC Pacific

ABC Pacific reporter Belinda Kora said rescue and recovery efforts had been hindered by the village’s remote location.

The PNG government has not yet released an official death toll.

Republished from the PNG Post-Courier with permission.

Rescue efforts are underway in a remote village in Papua New Guinea, where 100 people are feared dead after a landslide.https://t.co/BmhAUrmfle

— ABC News (@abcnews) May 24, 2024

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

I’m going through such a crazy transformation in life right now. I definitely am an artist, but I saw something recently online that said, “Art exists, but the artist is a myth.” I found that interesting because in my mind, everybody is an artist. Everybody strives to be an artist in our online-driven space, where everyone is making something, positioning themselves to be seen, or hoping to sell something—whether they made it or whether they stole it. Everybody is attempting to position themselves as a creator. With the idea that art exists, but the artist is a myth—that’s a different framework. It is through this understanding that we all have the creative capacity to make something and to envision something and to render that into reality. But what we’re seeing now is a marketplace where everyone is intent on selling something and not necessarily centering what they can contribute to the betterment of the collective.

I’m trying to see myself through the lens of the former, the myth of the artist, the artist as contributor, the artist as a member of the collective. What am I offering up that will be helpful in some way that will bring about beauty, that will bring about understanding, that will bring about the transformation that we are so desperately in need of?

I think a lot of this does come from the fact that I descend from these people who were all about service, whether they were the preachers or the evangelists that I come from, or whether they were working with the homeless or they were answering the phones on the prayer hotline where folks will call in and ask for prayer. It’s really about what we can do, what we can give that will alleviate some sort of suffering or bring about some understanding or change the way we view things.

I’m not out to make myself out to be some sort of martyr. I definitely get paid for what I do. I operate within the context of capitalism, but I definitely see myself as somebody who is a conduit or a vessel, and the contributions that I’m bringing forth are hopefully very necessary and useful. Whether it is a film or an object or whether it’s a talk, or something that has been said or shared, or a written piece. I’m hoping that it can be of some sort of edification for the collective and not just for myself. Now whether the collective can receive it or not is another question. Maybe it’s a collective that has yet to come, a future collective, a future group of people who have yet to be born.

Ja’Tovia Gary: THE GIVERNY SUITE (2019), ZOLLAMT MMK / MUSEUM MMK FÜR MODERNE KUNST, Frankfurt, as part of IDEOLOGIES: Triennial RAY Festival, June 3 - August 8, 2021. Photo: Leonore Schubert.

I love thinking about art making as an offering or in service. You touch on a lot of things I wanted to cover with you, particularly on these themes of perception and gaze and performance, which are central to your work. What advice would you give to other artists or creatives who are trying to develop their unique point of view or find their artistic voice?

I think when you’re very early starting out, oftentimes the impulse is to latch onto something that you’ve seen and maybe emulate aspects of it, if not the entirety of it. And that’s normal. But understand that that is the beginning of the thing. One cannot get comfortable emulating or attempting to reenact something that you have already seen before because it’s already been done. I would encourage emerging artists to have the courage to do the thing that naturally occurs or the impulse that naturally springs forth inside of them unabashedly, without worry, without fear. In fact, especially if it scares them. If im fearful of the project, then I know that I am on to something interesting.

And of course, it’s very hard, right? It’s easier to say this than to do it, but move ahead into unmarked territory as strongly as you can, as often as you can, even when that requires a certain amount of failure, even when that may require a bit of ostracization. Attempting to break new ground is what the artist is supposed to do. The artist is here to show us things that we are unfamiliar with, whether they’re about ourselves or whether it’s about the collective. We are here to expose in many ways what can be done, what can emerge, to excavate the future from the ashes of the past. Some of the most incredible things that I’ve done have come from mistakes or started initially from a place of fear. Forge ahead anyway!

Also within the theme of perception and being seen—I want to talk about audience. With your art making, do you have an audience in mind? What advice might you have for artists who are searching for their audience?

Historically, I’m always thinking about Black people when I’m making work. When I was coming up in schools, and even when I was fundraising for things, everyone really stressed the universal. And for me, I felt like there was subtext underneath that. It meant “How are white people going to access this?” And for me, as a Black person who’s been alive for almost 40 years, white people are going to come and look at it regardless, especially if it’s for Black people. My idea of universal is to be very specific. This is a notion that comes from Toni Morrison…the more detailed and specific you are about your audience and about your experience when you are creating your work, the more universal it becomes.

If I were constantly thinking about the larger audience, the global audience, then everything would be watered down. I would be worried about whether or not they can understand it. In order to streamline my message, in order to get very clear about what I’m saying, in order to know what to leave out, in order to know what to specify, what to define or not define, I’m thinking of the Black audience member. Sometimes that gets very specific. I might be thinking of a Black woman. I might be thinking of the Black South. But there is a nuanced reality that I’m trying to get at. Now, of course, that doesn’t mean that white people can’t watch the films or experience the work. No, I am just one lone Black woman in America. I can’t stop anyone from doing anything. But what I can do is be very, very clear about what I’m trying to say. And that’s also something that I recommend for young artists coming up. What are you saying and who are you talking to? Those are two questions that I’m constantly asking myself when I’m making my work.

Ja’Tovia Gary, Citational Ethics (Zora Neale Hurston, 1943), 2023, copyright Ja’Tovia Gary, courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York Photo: Steven Probert

To go even deeper on audience, something I’ve been wrestling with is representation and representational politics, which have been packaged and offered to marginalized communities as this magic remedy for undoing oppression. What’s your evaluation there? How do we hold that tension between visibility, with its potential to be a resource and a lifeline, but also making us vulnerable to theft, appropriation, or even violence?

Or continued death, right? Visibility doesn’t equal power. I think representational politics is a neoliberal proposition that maintains, “We’ll allow a few of you to reach a higher perch. Maybe you’ll have a really good job. Maybe we’ll allow a Black president, maybe we’ll put a bunch of Black folks as CEO’s or the head of this corporation or this company. Maybe we’ll give a few of you grants, and we will market that as some sort of liberatory gain for the whole.” When in actuality, what we do is create a kind of overseer class or a kind of managerial class, which has always been in play with this formation in some ways.

We have an ownership class, elite class, and we have a bonded class whose labor we can accumulate money and capital off of. What we’ve done is we’ve traded trinkets that don’t even belong to us. They belong to that managerial class. We’ve traded the opportunity to clap for a Black person succeeding for liberation. “Peaceful coexistence.” That’s actually quite scary, and it’s really quite interesting because a lot of people see this continuum of time as if we are progressing, when in actuality if we remove that very Western idea of linear time, we’ll see that time kind of spirals. It’s all over the place. We’re constantly moving forward and constantly moving backwards all the time. Yes, there are some things that we have accomplished as a collective, but as you see now very clearly, there’s still a very , brutal regime and formation at play that is intent upon grinding us down in order to maintain domination of the resources here on earth.

We talked about your resistance to the linear conception of time. I want to talk about how that might translate process wise. How do you start a project and how do you know when a project is done?

When I start a project, it’s a kind of investigation and curiosity at the beginning. I’m basically culling materials. I’m gathering. A lot of the work takes on a collage aesthetic. So I am thinking through an idea and then gathering all of the supporting documents. In some ways it’s essayistic. I’m attempting to put forth an idea or a thesis. There are assertions that are being made, and what can I use visually, whether it is 16 millimeter film from the past or things that I shoot myself, whether it’s interview that I go out and get, whether it’s me painting on film and creating some sort of abstraction that alludes to or gestures towards the assertion. It’s playtime at the beginning. It’s almost like a very active brainstorming that requires me to go out and find materials as well as make notes, as well as look at footage as well as read. It’s investigative curiosity at the beginning, this phase of questioning and garnering. And at the end it’s instinctual. It’s a sweet spot. There have been times where I’ve gone out and presented something thinking that it’s done and then brought it back. I’ve gotten audience reactions, brought it back, turned it up a little bit, and then it was done. Sometimes my finishing process requires me to see it with a large group of people.

Ja’Tovia Gary, You Smell Like Outside… at Paula Cooper Gallery, 2023, copyright Ja’Tovia Gary. Courtesy: Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Steven Probert.

Can you talk a little bit more about process? Given that your work with your material is so intimate, how do you avoid burn-out with labor intensive art-making?

Well, I don’t handle the film material or do direct animation all the time. It’s something that I return to when I need that space or when a project demands it. I know that I’m usually going to need the animated abstractions , and oftentimes it comes at the very beginning of a film. And it’s fun. It is not an obligation, it is moreso play. So, I don’t view the animating as an activity that produces burnout, though it does take its toll on the body. The burnout to me comes when you’re editing. There are moments of tedium during the edit that can feel like drudgery. Then there are moments of deep exploration and discovery so it all works out in the end. Anything can be a burnout, of course, if you’re doing it repetitively and you’re not taking a break and you’re not resting. But for me, the painting and the interaction with the materials is a freeing space. There’s no burnout usually there because it is like play. It’s literally me painting and drawing and-

Improvisation.

Yeah, exactly. Improvisation. The child self emerges, the child artist emerges, and things get very elemental and foundational and emotional. This part of the process is integral to everything because I feel like without it, the work would be so heady. Even if people can’t understand all of my work, people always have questions. Even if they can’t understand every single cut or every single totem or image or figure that’s presented, there’s always an emotional response that emerges after they see it. It’s in their body. And I attribute that to the works with the material. I attribute that to the painting and the etching, that play, that improvisation. It has to be that. That’s where the life force is.

Has there been anything that work has taught you about yourself?

There’s a lot… I can’t talk too much about it. But, I’m working on something that has a trajectory of 10 years. I see myself 10 years ago, in fact I see myself even earlier, because there’s a bunch of archival footage present on the timeline. I see a vast change in who I am as a human being and an artist. Not just how I look, because of course you can chart time via the changes in someone’s appearance, but hearing and seeing testimonials from myself on camera, direct address. What I witness is such a vast difference in who I am now versus then. And it’s really wild to see. So, I can’t necessarily say what it’s taught me just yet, except that people change. They self actualize and they hopefully become healed or at least move towards a healed space. You can become a different person. That’s actually my favorite thing about Malcolm X is that he transformed himself multiple times over. He became a different person and always for the better. He kept leveling up. And to see this on the timeline is quite remarkable. I’m excited.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Pola Pucheta.

It is the function of mass agitation to exploit all the grievances, hopes, aspirations, prejudices, fears, and ideals of all the special groups that make up our society, social, religious, economic, racial, political. Stir them up. Set one against the other. Divide and conquer. That’s the way to soften up a democracy.

― J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit

“Nothing is real,” observed John Lennon, and that’s especially true of politics.

Much like the fabricated universe in Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show, in which a man’s life is the basis for an elaborately staged television show aimed at selling products and procuring ratings, the political scene in the United States has devolved over the years into a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population.

Take the media circus that is the Donald Trump hush money trial, which panders to the public’s voracious appetite for titillating, soap opera drama, keeping the citizenry distracted, diverted and divided.

This is the magic of the reality TV programming that passes for politics today.

Everything becomes entertainment fodder.

As long as we are distracted, entertained, occasionally outraged, always polarized but largely uninvolved and content to remain in the viewer’s seat, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.

Studies suggest that the more reality TV people watch—and I would posit that it’s all reality TV, entertainment news included—the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between what is real and what is carefully crafted farce.

“We the people” are watching a lot of TV.

On average, Americans spend five hours a day watching television. By the time we reach age 65, we’re watching more than 50 hours of television a week, and that number increases as we get older. And reality TV programming consistently captures the largest percentage of TV watchers every season by an almost 2-1 ratio.

This doesn’t bode well for a citizenry able to sift through masterfully-produced propaganda in order to think critically about the issues of the day.

Yet look behind the spectacles, the reality TV theatrics, the sleight-of-hand distractions and diversions, and the stomach-churning, nail-biting drama that is politics today, and you will find there is a method to the madness.

We have become guinea pigs in a ruthlessly calculated, carefully orchestrated, chillingly cold-blooded experiment in how to control a population and advance a political agenda without much opposition from the citizenry.

This is how you persuade a populace to voluntarily march in lockstep with a police state and police themselves (and each other): by ratcheting up the fear-factor, meted out one carefully calibrated crisis at a time, and teaching them to distrust any who diverge from the norm through elaborate propaganda campaigns.

Unsurprisingly, one of the biggest propagandists today is the U.S. government.

Add the government’s inclination to monitor online activity and police so-called “disinformation,” and you have the makings of a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.

This “policing of the mind” is exactly the danger author Jim Keith warned about when he predicted that “information and communication sources are gradually being linked together into a single computerized network, providing an opportunity for unheralded control of what will be broadcast, what will be said, and ultimately what will be thought.”

You may not hear much about the government’s role in producing, planting and peddling propaganda-driven fake news—often with the help of the corporate news media—because the powers-that-be don’t want us skeptical of the government’s message or its corporate accomplices in the mainstream media.

However, when you have social media giants colluding with the government in order to censor so-called disinformation, all the while the mainstream news media, which is supposed to act as a bulwark against government propaganda, has instead become the mouthpiece of the world’s largest corporation (the U.S. government), the Deep State has grown dangerously out-of-control.

This has been in the works for a long time.

Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein, in his expansive 1977 Rolling Stone piece “The CIA and the Media,” reported on Operation Mockingbird, a CIA campaign started in the 1950s to plant intelligence reports among reporters at more than 25 major newspapers and wire agencies, who would then regurgitate them for a public oblivious to the fact that they were being fed government propaganda.

In some instances, as Bernstein showed, members of the media also served as extensions of the surveillance state, with reporters actually carrying out assignments for the CIA. Executives with CBS, the New York Times and Time magazine also worked closely with the CIA to vet the news.

If it was happening then, you can bet it’s still happening today, only this collusion has been reclassified, renamed and hidden behind layers of government secrecy, obfuscation and spin.

In its article, “How the American government is trying to control what you think,” the Washington Post points out “Government agencies historically have made a habit of crossing the blurry line between informing the public and propagandizing.”

This is mind-control in its most sinister form.

The end goal of these mind-control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in re-shaping the country in the image of a totalitarian police state.

The government’s fear-mongering is a key element in its mind-control programming.

It’s a simple enough formula. National crises, global pandemics, reported terrorist attacks, and sporadic shootings leave us in a constant state of fear. The emotional panic that accompanies fear actually shuts down the prefrontal cortex or the rational thinking part of our brains. In other words, when we are consumed by fear, we stop thinking.

A populace that stops thinking for themselves is a populace that is easily led, easily manipulated and easily controlled whether through propaganda, brainwashing, mind control, or just plain fear-mongering.

Fear not only increases the power of government, but it also divides the people into factions, persuades them to see each other as the enemy and keeps them screaming at each other so that they drown out all other sounds. In this way, they will never reach consensus about anything and will be too distracted to notice the police state closing in on them until the final crushing curtain falls.

This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being brainwashed—manipulated—into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward.

This unseen mechanism of society that manipulates us through fear into compliance is what American theorist Edward L. Bernays referred to as “an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

It was almost 100 years ago when Bernays wrote his seminal work Propaganda:

“We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of… In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

To this invisible government of rulers who operate behind the scenes—the architects of the Deep State—we are mere puppets on a string, to be brainwashed, manipulated and controlled.

All of the distracting, disheartening, disorienting news you are bombarded with daily is being driven by propaganda churned out by one corporate machine (the corporate-controlled government) and fed to the American people by way of yet another corporate machine (the corporate-controlled media).

“For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it,” writes investigative journalist Nick Davies.

So where does that leave us?

Americans should beware of letting others—whether they be television news hosts, political commentators or media corporations—do their thinking for them.

A populace that cannot think for themselves is a populace with its backs to the walls: mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s time to change the channel, tune out the reality TV show, and push back against the real menace of the police state.

If not, if we continue to sit back and lose ourselves in political programming, we will remain a captive audience to a farce that grows more absurd by the minute.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

Much like the fabricated universe in Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show, in which a man’s life is the basis for an elaborately staged television show aimed at selling products and procuring ratings, the political scene in the United States has devolved over the years into a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population.

Take the media circus that is the Donald Trump hush money trial, which panders to the public’s voracious appetite for titillating, soap opera drama, keeping the citizenry distracted, diverted and divided.

This is the magic of the reality TV programming that passes for politics today.

Everything becomes entertainment fodder.

As long as we are distracted, entertained, occasionally outraged, always polarized but largely uninvolved and content to remain in the viewer’s seat, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.

Studies suggest that the more reality TV people watch—and I would posit that it’s all reality TV, entertainment news included—the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between what is real and what is carefully crafted farce.

“We the people” are watching a lot of TV.

On average, Americans spend five hours a day watching television. By the time we reach age 65, we’re watching more than 50 hours of television a week, and that number increases as we get older. And reality TV programming consistently captures the largest percentage of TV watchers every season by an almost 2-1 ratio.

This doesn’t bode well for a citizenry able to sift through masterfully-produced propaganda in order to think critically about the issues of the day.

Yet look behind the spectacles, the reality TV theatrics, the sleight-of-hand distractions and diversions, and the stomach-churning, nail-biting drama that is politics today, and you will find there is a method to the madness.

We have become guinea pigs in a ruthlessly calculated, carefully orchestrated, chillingly cold-blooded experiment in how to control a population and advance a political agenda without much opposition from the citizenry.

This is how you persuade a populace to voluntarily march in lockstep with a police state and police themselves (and each other): by ratcheting up the fear-factor, meted out one carefully calibrated crisis at a time, and teaching them to distrust any who diverge from the norm through elaborate propaganda campaigns.

Unsurprisingly, one of the biggest propagandists today is the U.S. government.

Add the government’s inclination to monitor online activity and police so-called “disinformation,” and you have the makings of a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.

This “policing of the mind” is exactly the danger author Jim Keith warned about when he predicted that “information and communication sources are gradually being linked together into a single computerized network, providing an opportunity for unheralded control of what will be broadcast, what will be said, and ultimately what will be thought.”

You may not hear much about the government’s role in producing, planting and peddling propaganda-driven fake news—often with the help of the corporate news media—because the powers-that-be don’t want us skeptical of the government’s message or its corporate accomplices in the mainstream media.

However, when you have social media giants colluding with the government in order to censor so-called disinformation, all the while the mainstream news media, which is supposed to act as a bulwark against government propaganda, has instead become the mouthpiece of the world’s largest corporation (the U.S. government), the Deep State has grown dangerously out-of-control.

This has been in the works for a long time.

Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein, in his expansive 1977 Rolling Stone piece “The CIA and the Media,” reported on Operation Mockingbird, a CIA campaign started in the 1950s to plant intelligence reports among reporters at more than 25 major newspapers and wire agencies, who would then regurgitate them for a public oblivious to the fact that they were being fed government propaganda.

In some instances, as Bernstein showed, members of the media also served as extensions of the surveillance state, with reporters actually carrying out assignments for the CIA. Executives with CBS, the New York Times and Time magazine also worked closely with the CIA to vet the news.

If it was happening then, you can bet it’s still happening today, only this collusion has been reclassified, renamed and hidden behind layers of government secrecy, obfuscation and spin.

In its article, “How the American government is trying to control what you think,” the Washington Post points out “Government agencies historically have made a habit of crossing the blurry line between informing the public and propagandizing.”

This is mind-control in its most sinister form.

The end goal of these mind-control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in re-shaping the country in the image of a totalitarian police state.

The government’s fear-mongering is a key element in its mind-control programming.

It’s a simple enough formula. National crises, global pandemics, reported terrorist attacks, and sporadic shootings leave us in a constant state of fear. The emotional panic that accompanies fear actually shuts down the prefrontal cortex or the rational thinking part of our brains. In other words, when we are consumed by fear, we stop thinking.

A populace that stops thinking for themselves is a populace that is easily led, easily manipulated and easily controlled whether through propaganda, brainwashing, mind control, or just plain fear-mongering.

This unseen mechanism of society that manipulates us through fear into compliance is what American theorist Edward L. Bernays referred to as “an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

To this invisible government of rulers who operate behind the scenes—the architects of the Deep State—we are mere puppets on a string, to be brainwashed, manipulated and controlled.

Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s time to change the channel, tune out the reality TV show, and push back against the real menace of the police state.

If not, if we continue to sit back and lose ourselves in political programming, we will remain a captive audience to a farce that grows more absurd by the minute.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

As Israel continues bombarding the Gaza Strip, we speak with a Palestinian photographer who recently fled the territory with his family. Ahmed Zakot has been documenting Gaza for the last 25 years, and two of his photographs were just featured in a project by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and published by Rolling Stone earlier this month in a piece titled “Gaza’s Carnage Through the Eyes of Palestinian Photojournalists.” One of Zakot’s photos shows a Gaza neighborhood lit up by Israeli airstrikes at night, while the second is of thousands of Palestinians fleeing their homes with their belongings in a scene reminiscent of the 1948 Nakba that displaced some 700,000 Palestinians from their homes. “It reminds me [of] what my grandfather told me about this displacement. It’s the same [that] happened since 1948 — now we are in 2024,” Zakot says.

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

The Safeguarding National Security Law, known as “Article 23,” took effect on March 23, and has been billed by the government as a way to protect the city from interference and infiltration by "hostile foreign forces" that Beijing blames for waves of mass popular protests in recent years.

But its critics -- and some of the city's residents -- say they will now have to be far more careful about what they say in casual conversation or online.

"I used to get together regularly with a dozen or so friends to eat and chat for fun," a Hong Konger who gave only the surname Chow for fear of reprisals told RFA on Monday.

"I won't be inviting people to my home for dinner any more, or going to theirs, because I don't know if I can trust everyone I meet up with not to report me," she said. "I don't know if I could get into trouble for saying the wrong thing."

Chow said she has already thrown out all of her old copies of the pro-democracy Apple Daily, which was forced to shut down amid an investigation under the first national security law in 2021.

‘Soft confrontation’

Chow is also planning to spend some tourist dollars in the neighboring Chinese city of Shenzhen to demonstrate her patriotism and loyalty.

"It's to avoid being labeled by others, who might say I'm engaging in soft confrontation with the government," Chow said.

"Soft confrontation" is a term that has been used by Hong Kong officials including Chief Executive John Lee to justify the second round of national security legislation.

In January, Lee warned that "soft confrontation" could disguise itself as "so-called human rights, freedom, democracy and people's livelihood," and said the city needed the law to protect itself against "hostile forces" waiting to pounce.

Pro-democracy media mogul Jimmy Lai is currently on trial for "collusion with foreign forces" under the 2020 National Security Law -- the case against him relies heavily on opinion articles published in his flagship Apple Daily newspaper.

Self-censorship

A former 2019 protester who gave only the surname Tin for fear of reprisals said she had been careful not to criticize Article 23 in public because she feels that the risk of arrest just got a lot higher with the new law.

"There are so many ways that they can get you under Article 23 that you have to censor yourself," Tin said, citing a recent exchange at her place of work, in which a colleague was shushed for criticizing John Lee's appearance.

"Someone said something critical about John Lee's appearance, and another person immediately warned them not to, saying we need to be careful not to break the law once Article 23 is passed," she said. "Everyone immediately fell silent."

Tin said that while everyone knows that self-censorship isn't ideal, they will do it anyway.

"The only silver lining is that we know self-censorship is wrong -- we don't yet completely accept it as they do in mainland China," she said.

‘Rebuttal team’

The government launched a "rebuttal team" in January to hit back at international criticism of the new law, and has been busy sending officials out to reassure people in media interviews since.

On Monday, Justice Secretary Paul Lam set out to reassure people that journalists wouldn't be targeted simply for reporting criticism of the Hong Kong authorities.

"Anyone carrying out sincere journalistic work has absolutely no need to worry," Lam told a local radio show, without explaining how such "sincerity" would be measured by the authorities.

"Sometimes it's important to report comments that are unfriendly to Hong Kong ... but the purpose should be to let us know so we can deal with it," Lam said.

A Hong Kong journalist who gave only the nickname Chin for fear of reprisals said he feels under far more pressure than he did before the Article 23 legislation took effect.

"It feels like the calm before the storm," Chin said. "I'd be lying if I said I wasn't under any pressure."

"As I continue to work in the media, I will ... be constantly assessing the risks and making professional judgments, to make sure I'm doing what I'm supposed to do," he said.

Quieting criticism

Meanwhile, Lam has also warned that anyone who "relentlessly" reposts critical comments online could be targeted.

“[W]hen someone publishes criticism relentlessly, even if they have been told why their criticism is unreasonable or why it wouldn’t be accepted ... then I would begin to have a doubt: Are they actually making criticism?” Lam said in comments reported by the Hong Kong Free Press.

A Hong Kong resident surnamed Hui said he would be making some changes too, but said he would keep viewing overseas media content on YouTube that was critical of the government.

Secretary for Security Chris Tang has also been defending the new security law in public, claiming in a statement on Friday that it won't affect "normal business operations" in the city.

"Law-abiding persons (including US businessmen and enterprises in Hong Kong and US travelers visiting Hong Kong) will not engage in acts and activities endangering our national security and will not unwittingly violate the law," Tang said in a statement on March 23.

But an accountant in a logistics company who gave the pseudonym Avis for fear of reprisals said his employer has warned colleagues to be careful what they do and say, now that the law has taken effect.

But he said that's not always straightforward.

"It's not always clear when doing business whether a client has done something to violate national security laws," Avis said. 

He said it will likely mean a lot more due diligence to ensure the company isn't put at risk by its business contacts.

"You can lose a lot of business opportunities if you have to take a lot of care to know the other party very well before acting," he said.

A civil servant who gave only the nickname Ming said it's too soon to say how much their work will be affected, however.

"I won't be talking to my colleagues about Article 23," he said. "We will just get on with our work, and there won't be any discussion of it."

"It's not for us to comment, right?" 

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Ray Chung for RFA Cantonese, Chen Zifei for RFA Mandarin.

The Atlantic logo

“We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

– Franklin D. Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, 1933.

These are indeed perilous times for the United States at home and abroad.  It is unfortunate, however, that various experts and observers are advancing speculative theories that add an element of fear that is unwarranted and destabilizing.  U.S. experts on Russia have exaggerated the possibility of Russia’s use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine as well as the possibility that a Putin victory in Ukraine would lead to additional Russian attacks in the Baltics or East Europe.  Sinologists have exaggerated the threat of a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan without presenting any new evidence for their assessments.  Leading experts on North Korea, including Professor John Delury, argue that Kim Jong-un “may be preparing for war.”

And now The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer is spreading fear about the home front.  In his cover story, Foer emphasizes a political threat to the U.S. Jewish community that will “end an unprecedented period of safety and prosperity for Jewish Americans–and demolish the liberal order they helped establish.”  Foer argues that the United States is holding its Jews “at arm’s length,” which makes America “more intent on hunting down scapegoats than addressing underlying defects.”  In any event, Jews in the United States are not the minority most likely to be scapegoated by white supremacists.

Foer concludes that “such societies are prone to decline,” citing England’s “long dark age after expelling its Jews in 1290” and “Czarist Russia limping toward revolution after the pogroms of the 1880s.”  History may repeat itself, but each time it is different.
The Jewish community in the United States is economically prosperous and politically powerful, and there are no signs that this will change in any way.  There has been no Jewish diaspora anywhere in the world that rivals the American homeland.  The great regret of the founding generation of Israel was that the Jews in the United States had no interest in making “aliyah” to Israel, which is still true today.  But Foer lamely supports his arguments for increased Jewish anxiety by citing the efforts of his own mother to get a passport from Poland, the country of her birth, and an immigration lawyer he knows who had obtained a German passport.  These anecdotal examples prove nothing of course, and the view that life in Poland or Germany may provide a “safer haven” and assuage Jewish anxiety is risible.

There are legitimate reasons for Jewish Americans to be concerned by dire international conditions in view of their historical experiences as well as the examples of anti-Semitism that Foer cites. But the notion that the United States is on a course that would be the “end of the Golden Age not just for the Jews, but for the country that nurtured them” is both hyperbolic and polemical.  In view of the overrepresentation of Jews in the Congress, the judiciary and law, in medicine, in technology, and in finance, The Atlantic’s handwringing over the plight of Jewish Americans is particularly risible.
The Atlantic would be better off examining the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a factor in the increase of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism as well as the deep divisions in the progressive movement, the Democratic Party, and even the Jewish-American community as a result of the horrific military campaign that Israeli Defense Forces are waging.

Even the Israeli military is growing critical of Netanyahu’s leadership.  Brig. Gen. Dan Goldfus, who commands the only division still fighting on the ground in Gaza, said that Israel’s political leaders must “get their act together.  You have to be worthy of us.”  Thus far, Netanyahu has not acknowledged any responsibility for the war and refuses to permit an investigation into “what went wrong.”

Netanyahu’s actions have also fractured the Jewish-American consensus on Israel, although this could actually lead to a more cohesive and stronger liberal and progressive order in the United States in the long run.  Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s criticism of the Netanyahu government suggests that he recognizes the increased opposition within the progressive and liberal movement regarding Israel’s genocidal actions, and as a result has drastically changed his position on the war.

One of the lessons of the Cold War should have been the danger of exaggerating the threat or key adversaries in order to avoid the great cost of unnecessary military buildups.  We spent unnecessarily against a Soviet “threat” that was hyped beyond reality.  Politicians and pundits alike are failing to actually assess the the threat or the adversary, which is contributing to budget deficits and heightened fears.  More time should be devoted to the study of diplomatic history in order to examine precedents for improving bilateral relations.  Fear is driving us toward arms races; diplomacy could drive us to arms control and disarmament as well as a more stable international environment.

The attention given to the notion of a threat to the Jewish-American community draws attention away from the horrors that Netanyahu’s right-wing government is doing to Palestinians in Gaza.  The ruthlessness of Israel’s military response to the terrible events of October 7th is far more threatening to the cohesion of the Jewish community in the United States than the isolated acts of anti-Semitism that Foer cites.  According to the New Republic, a quarter of American Jews consider Israel an “apartheid state,” and 22 percent believe Israel is committing genocide.  Shaul Magid, distinguished fellow of Jewish studies at Dartmouth, argues that “American Jewry is kind of broken.”  Once again, we have “met the enemy, and he is us.”

The post The Atlantic Joins the Chorus of Fear appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Josh Frank.

It’s a double-edged sword. For me it was integral because I was incredibly bored when I was young. I was homeschooled, lived out in the middle of nowhere. The only way I could entertain myself was through music and art. It’s something I think about a lot even now because I still live in Amarillo. Sometimes I think being entertained is the death of creativity. Boredom can be one of the greatest things to inspire creativity. Boredom forces me to do things because there’s a sense of paranoia, a fear of missing out. Musically, the culture is not in Amarillo. Whenever I go to L.A., it feels like everything’s happening, it kind of blows my brain. I always knew if I lived in L.A. I would be so overwhelmed that I probably wouldn’t make things anymore.

I’d imagine it pushed you to be more self-sufficient as well.

Absolutely. When I was a teenager, I got into John Fahey, like a lot of others have. I dove into it head first, but I wasn’t associated with any kind of regional scene, I had none of that. It opens up this whole Pandora’s box. We’re living in this post-genre, post-everything age. I was reading about this shoegaze band, they’re super young and their influencers are wild, all over the place. Thinking about bands like 100 Gecs, the post-genre idea, about how awesome that is. I saw it bubbling up when I was younger with people like James Ferraro and Ariel Pink. To me, they were early post-genre, post everything musicians. We’re in this post-genre age because we have access to everything. We don’t really have regional music anymore. Everything from western swing music from a certain part of Texas, like Bob Wills or hill country blues, like R. L. Burnside.

I think it encourages bands to skip that stage and go on tour right away.

I didn’t tour at all for eight, nine years. I started putting out music when I was 18, and only started touring in the past two years. I waited a crazy long time. My first four albums were made in Garageband at home. Rough, minimal recordings. I only just now feel like I’m coming into my own with my music and understanding what it is that I do. I wouldn’t have wanted people to hear me live five years ago.

How did Odd Future impact your approach to releasing music?

I discovered Odd Future when I was 18. I was a little late to them. They had already gotten quite a bit of buzz. I was into blog-era experimental music. There was a website called Mutant Sounds that I was obsessed with. I hadn’t listened to a ton of rap music, but was intrigued by their aesthetic. It was brash, obnoxious, and it clicked with my sense of humor.

I was more interested in their aesthetic and approach before getting into the music. All of a sudden, it started to make sense. I was like, “What if I take Odd Future’s approach and attach it to what I do?” That’s why I ended up reaching out to people I wanted to collaborate with through Facebook, and how things started to grow from there. That was part of the internet that I really enjoyed.

Did you have any hesitation when you started reaching out?

I didn’t have a lot of fear. The reason why is because I was homeschooled the entire way. I never went to public school. I was very isolated, and didn’t have friends growing up. I’ve always said that if you’re homeschooled, it rewires your brain. I think public schooling, for better or worse, instills in you a kind of social hierarchy. You understand a chain of command in terms of how things are done. For most public schoolers, if they wished chicken strips were on the menu, they wouldn’t walk down to the principal’s office, knock on the door and say, “Hey, I want chicken strips on the menu. How can we get this done?” They would understand that would be kind of inappropriate, and wouldn’t do that. If I wanted chicken strips for dinner, I would go talk to my mom, she was also my school teacher.

Immediately the hierarchy is different because the hierarchy is my parents and I feel comfortable to go talk to them. Once I got on the internet, I was an incredibly odd, forward kid. I probably have so many embarrassing Facebook messages that are cringey because I was like, “Hey, I have this idea.” It was unreal how many people I was reaching out to, but I was probably too dumb to know how weird I looked. That was the whole deal, I didn’t understand that I looked strange, but it worked to my benefit that I was overly forward with people asking, “Hey, want to work together?” My intentions were good, people picked up on the fact that I wasn’t doing it for clout, I was doing it for interest.

It’s important to start from a place of pure excitement.

I had a conversation a couple of weeks ago on tour. I was in San Francisco and stayed with my friend Chip Lord. I believe he’s 80 years old. He’s one of three guys that created Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo. An absolutely unreal artist. While I was there, he was showing me pieces he’d made over the years. While he was telling me about them, his passion was so tangible that I said, “The reason why your stuff is so great is when I look at it, before I even think about art, I see the interest.” The best art should have the same feeling as when a 5-year-old kid is telling you why he loves his train set. That’s the truest interest you’ll ever see. This 80-year-old artist still has that same interest as a five-year-old kid.

You are now doing music ‘full-time.’ What are the pros and cons of holding down a day-job?

For over 10 years I was working at bank jobs. For a long time, there was this level of intrigue. Playing in experimental noise bands and working at a bank during the day. There was chaos in it that I liked. Two opposite things clashing together into this messy hodgepodge of insanity. It feels more insane than being a full-time artist or musician. There’s something far more chaotic about it. I liked the dual personality thing.

I would also have some of my best ideas on the clock. I feel weird saying this, but sometimes I would do the bare minimum and pretend to be on the computer while I was reading articles about music and art. I was also sending emails to record labels. I signed with Mexican Summer while on the clock. Signed my contract and scanned it on the workplace copier. There’s an element of being sneaky, trying not to get caught.

In 2016 or ‘17, I took a trip to San Francisco to perform. After the show I met Christopher Owens from Girls, who I’d looked up to forever because he lived in Amarillo. We stayed up walking around till 1 A.M. talking about music. It felt like a dream. The next morning I get on the plane, fly home, then I’m in my cubicle at the bank. That was the worst part, it felt like I was giving myself brain damage. The whiplash was too much. I realized going back and forth is actually dangerous and not healthy.

Have you felt more at ease since leaving?

Yes and no. Yes because I’ve been able to focus on what I do, and that is incredibly liberating, but also terrifying because it makes you view what you do in a more serious way. It’s a different type of pressure and expectation from yourself. People say, “Oh, you’ll feel more pressure to make stuff when it’s your full-time thing.” I appreciate having pressure to do something I enjoy versus the pressures I had at banks to get work done that I had no interest in. There’s nothing worse than pressure to do something you don’t care about. It can be scary to have pressure to do something you deeply care about. I feel honored that I feel pressured to do something that means a lot to me. I take it incredibly seriously. I can seem silly on social media, but I care a lot, even when it’s joking around, posting something dumb or writing an essay or posting a photo.

Do you feel pressure to finish songs or albums quickly?

I opened up this discussion the other day on Instagram. I was talking about streaming killing the album and the pressure of constantly having to produce singles, EPs, Bandcamp subscriptions, etc. I had a caveat where I was saying, look, for some people being prolific and releasing a lot of stuff works. I understand that. It’s not inherently bad. I’m a motivated person, but I don’t like being motivated by stuff I don’t care about. I view albums like films. No one ever asked Stanley Kubrick to release short films in between his movies. It’d feel weird. “Can you release a 15-minute short film before you release The Shining?” No one ever would ask that of him. He always produced intriguing, bizarre films that are different from each other. You can see the time that went into then.

I try to hold tight to the fact that I don’t owe anyone anything when it comes to my music. I don’t owe it to people to put it out. Ultimately I want to impress myself. If I do that, it’s good for everyone else. I have no interest in fulfilling expectations in terms of how much I put out or when people want to hear more. Unfortunately streaming, Bandcamp Fridays, things like that put pressure on me to go faster, even though I don’t want to. That’s bad motivation. That’s not the positive motivation that I naturally have.

You’ve described yourself as a competitive person. Does competition create motivation?

Absolutely. Again, it’s this double-edged sword. I’ve been competitive with other people, along with being competitive internally. Being competitive to create, to me, is like nitrous oxide with a car. It will make it go faster and it works, but there’s a high risk of blowing up your engine. It works well until it doesn’t. I can get into trouble quickly with that mentality. It’s a young thing. When you’re in your 20s, you’re very competitive. That can be a great motivator, but it’s not a sustainable motivator.

You speak about stage fright during performances. What led to wanting to be vulnerable with audiences?

This past summer I went on tour with Jenny Lewis. I agreed to do that, but didn’t actually think about what was required to do those opening sets. It wasn’t until I showed up to the first show in Chicago, an 8,000 capacity venue, that I realized, “Wait, I don’t know if I can do this.” I agreed to play these shows without knowing if I can play a solo guitar set to this many people. It was pure terror, but also this belligerent “Hell, no, I can’t let this stop me. I have to do everything in my power to ensure I can play this show.” Luckily, the first show I played I held on for dear life and made it.

It was terrifying, but I made it through. I started to get my confidence up, had one show where I nearly lost it on stage. I thought I was going to have to walk, my nerves were so high. I had my head pressed against the guitar, as if I was going to fly away. The first three shows had gone great, then that fourth one went so bad. I was terrified the next night because I thought it would be a repeat. From there I started talking about my stage fright. I saw massive improvements when I was just addressing it. Mentally this wall was broken because the audience had context. Internally I started having this mentality of, I don’t care if I look insane or dumb on stage. A lot of that came from comedians like Nathan Fielder. You know he’s the most confident person because he doesn’t care how embarrassing he looks. That translates to live music, this idea of “I don’t care what the audience thinks of me” as a tool to know that I really do care. The best way to give them my best performance is not considering what they think.

What happens if you get stuck?

If by the second or third day I’m stuck and it’s not working, I usually will scrap it. I find an open tuning and start picking around until I find a melody or something I like. I follow that melody to the end of the song. I have to be willing to scrap the entire thing and move on because I can’t waste a lot of time. Everyone has a different approach with writing, this long excursion, excavating out of the ground, like you’re digging and finding it can be this long process. For me it’s more like following a bird. If it flies away too quickly, it just wasn’t meant to be.

How do you deal with the post-release come down?

That goes back to why I don’t write a single piece of music for over a year. A lot of people don’t understand, you can write a whole other record four months after the last one, but it could potentially be B-sides because you haven’t given enough time to create a new thing. I think of music like going to a greasy-spoon style diner. The joke being that on those grills, you can taste everything. You get a burger, you can still taste the pancakes or bacon. There’s a beauty in that, but when it comes to music, I don’t want people to hear my record and be like, “Well, this feels a lot like that last record.” I’m always trying to give myself enough room to tell a different story.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Jeffrey Silverstein.

Francis was quoted on March 9 in a partially released interview suggesting Ukraine, facing possible defeat, should have the "courage" to sit down with Russia for peace negotiations, saying there is no shame in waving the "white flag."

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine

RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia's full-scale invasion, Kyiv's counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy hit out in a Telegram post and in his nightly video address, saying -- without mentioning the pope -- that "the church should be among the people. And not 2,500 kilometers away, somewhere, to mediate virtually between someone who wants to live and someone who wants to destroy you."

Earlier, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba reacted more directly on social media, saying, “When it comes to the 'white flag,' we know this Vatican strategy from the first half of the 20th century."

Many historians have been critical of the Vatican during World War II, saying Pope Pius XII remained silent as the Holocaust raged. The Vatican has long argued that, at the time, it couldn't verify diplomatic reports of Nazi atrocities and therefore could not denounce them.

Kuleba, in his social media post, wrote: "I urge the avoidance of repeating the mistakes of the past and to support Ukraine and its people in their just struggle for their lives.

"The strongest is the one who, in the battle between good and evil, stands on the side of good rather than attempting to put them on the same footing and call it 'negotiations,'" Kuleba said.

"Our flag is a yellow-and-blue one. This is the flag by which we live, die, and prevail. We shall never raise any other flags," added Kuleba, who also thanked Francis for his "constant prayers for peace" and said he hoped the pontiff will visit Ukraine, home of some 1 million Catholics.

Zelenskiy has remained firm in not speaking directly to Russia unless terms of his "peace formula" are reached.

Ukraine's terms call for the withdrawal of all Russian troops from Ukraine, restoring the country's 1991 post-Soviet borders, and holding Russia accountable for its actions. The Kremlin has rejected such conditions.

Following criticism of the pope’s reported comments, the head of the Vatican press service, Matteo Bruni, explained that with his words regarding Ukraine, Francis intended to "call for a cease-fire and restore the courage of negotiations," but did not mean capitulation.

"The pope uses the image of the white flag proposed by the interviewer to imply an end to hostilities, a truce that is achieved through the courage to begin negotiations," Bruni said.

"Elsewhere in the interview…referring to any situation of war, the pope clearly stated: 'Negotiations are never capitulations,'" Bruni added.

The head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Major Archbishop Svyatoslav Shevchuk, said Ukraine was "wounded but unconquered."

"Believe me, no one would think of giving up. Even where hostilities are taking place today; listen to our people in Kherson, Zaporizhzhya, Odesa, Kharkiv, Sumy! Because we know that if Ukraine, God forbid, was at least partially conquered, the line of death would spread," Shevchuk said at St. George's Church in New York.

Andriy Yurash, Ukraine's ambassador to the Vatican, told RAI News that "you don't negotiate with terrorists, with those who are recognized as criminals," referring to the Russian leadership and President Vladimir Putin. "No one tried to put Hitler at ease."

Ukraine's regional allies also expressed anger about the pope's remarks.

"How about, for balance, encouraging Putin to have the courage to withdraw his army from Ukraine? Peace would immediately ensue without the need for negotiations," Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski wrote on social media.

Lithuanian President Edgars Rinkevichs wrote on social media: "My Sunday morning conclusion: You can't capitulate to evil, you have to fight it and defeat it, so that evil raises the white flag and surrenders."

Alexandra Valkenburg, ambassador and head of the EU Delegation to the Holy See, wrote "Russia...can end this war immediately by respecting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine. EU supports Ukraine and its peace plan."

With reporting by RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service

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

In a public address on February 17 in the provincial capital of Pemba, Tauabo accused journalists of striking “deals” with terrorists and being “in sync with terrorists,” according to media reports. Tauabo also alleged that journalists’ views had been influenced and “formatted by terrorists,” and he claimed that this undue influence had led to coverage of the region with an “imprint of evil,” according to those same reports. Tauabo, who warned the media “not to create a situation” with their reports, did not name any specific journalist or media outlet.

In a February 16 radio interview, Sidónio José, administrator of Quissanga district in Cabo Delgado, accused journalists of “fabricating false news about terrorism to traumatize communities,” without naming a specific journalist or news outlet, according to a news report by the private news site Integrity Magazine and a statement by the Mozambican chapter of the press rights group, the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA).

Since 2017, Cabo Delgado has been the at the center of an insurgency in which thousands have been killed and at least a million people displaced, amid fighting between militants affiliated with the Islamic State and state forces backed by troops from other countries in the region. After three months of calm, a new wave of attacks between late December 2023 and February 2024 forced over 70,000 people to flee their homes in Cabo Delgado, according to reports by United Nations agencies, the media and Human Rights Watch.

“It is alarming that officials in Cabo Delgado are issuing threats against the media and making inflammatory comments about journalists who already face high levels of risk covering the insurgency in Cabo Delgado,” said CPJ Africa Program Coordinator Muthoki Mumo from Nairobi. “Officials in Cabo Delgado should withdraw recent comments accusing journalists of colluding with terrorists and desist from intimidating the media. Mozambican authorities should instead support the timely and independent journalism that the public needs to make crucial decisions amid a new wave of attacks.”

A journalist based in Cabo Delgado, who spoke to CPJ on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal, said authorities rarely provide timely information or respond to journalistic queries about the conflict, creating a “vacuum of official information that feeds disinformation about the security situation in the region.”

Another journalist, who also asked not to be named for safety concerns, told CPJ that “the narrative of blaming journalists for the difficulty in combating insurgency is the same that led to arrests and the disappearance of a journalist in Cabo Delgado.”

Since 2019, CPJ has documented the arrest of at least two journalists in Cabo Delgado on terrorism allegations. In 2020, radio journalist Ibraimo Mbaruco disappeared in Cabo Delgado, after texting a colleague that he was “surrounded by soldiers.” Authorities have yet to provide a credible account of his whereabouts.

CPJ’s repeated calls to Tauabo went unanswered. An email sent to the governor returned an error message. When CPJ contacted José via messaging app, he declined to comment, saying “only the defense institutions could speak about the delicate situation in the region.”

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

In a public address on February 17 in the provincial capital of Pemba, Tauabo accused journalists of striking “deals” with terrorists and being “in sync with terrorists,” according to media reports. Tauabo also alleged that journalists’ views had been influenced and “formatted by terrorists,” and he claimed that this undue influence had led to coverage of the region with an “imprint of evil,” according to those same reports. Tauabo, who warned the media “not to create a situation” with their reports, did not name any specific journalist or media outlet.

In a February 16 radio interview, Sidónio José, administrator of Quissanga district in Cabo Delgado, accused journalists of “fabricating false news about terrorism to traumatize communities,” without naming a specific journalist or news outlet, according to a news report by the private news site Integrity Magazine and a statement by the Mozambican chapter of the press rights group, the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA).

Since 2017, Cabo Delgado has been the at the center of an insurgency in which thousands have been killed and at least a million people displaced, amid fighting between militants affiliated with the Islamic State and state forces backed by troops from other countries in the region. After three months of calm, a new wave of attacks between late December 2023 and February 2024 forced over 70,000 people to flee their homes in Cabo Delgado, according to reports by United Nations agencies, the media and Human Rights Watch.

“It is alarming that officials in Cabo Delgado are issuing threats against the media and making inflammatory comments about journalists who already face high levels of risk covering the insurgency in Cabo Delgado,” said CPJ Africa Program Coordinator Muthoki Mumo from Nairobi. “Officials in Cabo Delgado should withdraw recent comments accusing journalists of colluding with terrorists and desist from intimidating the media. Mozambican authorities should instead support the timely and independent journalism that the public needs to make crucial decisions amid a new wave of attacks.”

A journalist based in Cabo Delgado, who spoke to CPJ on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal, said authorities rarely provide timely information or respond to journalistic queries about the conflict, creating a “vacuum of official information that feeds disinformation about the security situation in the region.”

Another journalist, who also asked not to be named for safety concerns, told CPJ that “the narrative of blaming journalists for the difficulty in combating insurgency is the same that led to arrests and the disappearance of a journalist in Cabo Delgado.”

Since 2019, CPJ has documented the arrest of at least two journalists in Cabo Delgado on terrorism allegations. In 2020, radio journalist Ibraimo Mbaruco disappeared in Cabo Delgado, after texting a colleague that he was “surrounded by soldiers.” Authorities have yet to provide a credible account of his whereabouts.

CPJ’s repeated calls to Tauabo went unanswered. An email sent to the governor returned an error message. When CPJ contacted José via messaging app, he declined to comment, saying “only the defense institutions could speak about the delicate situation in the region.”

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

It is a historical fact that powerful elites do not wish to be diverted from pursuing their selfish interests by the public. Minimal, unthreatening expressions of dissent may be tolerated in ostensible ‘democracies’. But public opinion needs to be managed, manipulated or, if necessary, simply ignored.

After all, as Noam Chomsky has said, real ‘democracy is a threat to any power system’. He noted that Edward Bernays, one of the founders and leading figures of the huge public relations industry:

reminded his colleagues that with “universal suffrage and universal schooling… even the bourgeoisie stood in fear of the common people. For the masses promised to become king.” That unfortunate tendency could be contained and reversed, he urged, by new methods of “propaganda” that could be used by “intelligent minorities” to “[regiment] the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers.

(Preface to The Myth of the Liberal Media, Edward S. Herman, Peter Lang Publishing, 1999, pp. x-xi.)

Elite shaping of public opinion is not 100 per cent foolproof, of course, but it is often highly effective. As Peter Beattie, an assistant professor in political economy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, observed:

‘While the media is far from a brainwashing “influencing machine” or a hypodermic needle capable of injecting ideas into our minds, it is nonetheless the greatest influence on public opinion, as it is the conduit through which the building blocks of public opinion are transported.’

(Beattie, Social Evolution, Political Psychology, and the Media in Democracy: The Invisible Hand in the U.S. Marketplace of Ideas, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, p. 8)

In fact, one could argue that the media is ‘a brainwashing “influencing machine”’, as demonstrated, for example, by the power and success of the propaganda blitz against Jeremy Corbyn, and the deliberate conflation of antisemitism with anti-Zionism in establishment attempts to smear critics of Israel. However, if public opinion remains stubbornly immune from establishment pressure, it can simply be rejected or overridden.

Consider a YouGov poll last October showing that 66 per cent of the British public support reinstating public ownership of energy companies. Likewise, a 2022 survey by campaign group We Own It revealed that a majority want to see public ownership of utilities such as energy and water.

We Own It director Cat Hobbs said:

Privatisation has failed for nearly 40 years. Politicians can’t ignore the truth any longer: these monopolies are a cash cow for shareholders and we need to take them back.

We need energy companies that don’t rip us off, public transport that works for passengers and water companies that don’t pour sewage into our rivers.’

The poll also showed very strong support for public ownership of buses, the railways, the National Health Service and Royal Mail. These findings were echoed in an Ipsos poll last August.

None of these popular policies are consistent with the extremist, corporate agenda of the Tory government or the ‘opposition’ Labour party. Nor do they feature much in ‘mainstream’ media reporting and commentary. This sums up the reality of British ‘democracy’: a state that suppresses the wishes of the majority and is run for the benefit of a very rich minority.

None of this is unique to the UK; it is an endemic feature of capitalist societies. Justin Lewis, professor of communication at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Culture, wrote that:

Majorities [in the US and other western countries] consistently support increased government spending in traditionally “liberal” areas such as healthcare, education, environmental protection, and even – when the word “welfare” is not used – programs for assisting the poor. This has been well documented in a number of comprehensive studies. And yet the media’s interpretative frameworks tend to suppress the leftist leanings of opinion poll responses, creating a picture of a moderate to conservative citizenry that matches a moderate to conservative political elite.

(Lewis, Constructing Public Opinion: How Political Elites Do What They Like And Why We Seem To Go Along With It, Columbia University Press, 2001, p. 44.)

Of course, the notion that power is held to account by a ‘free press’ in a modern ‘democracy’ is a discredited myth. Patrick Lawrence, formerly a foreign correspondent for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, noted that the US:

does not have a press by any serious definition of the term. It has a government that, over the course of many decades, has turned the press into an appendage responsible for the manipulation of public opinion.

For instance, US political journalist Glenn Greenwald observed of Ukraine war coverage:

Every word broadcast on CNN or printed in The New York Times about the conflict perfectly aligns with the CIA and Pentagon’s messaging.

Journalists with successful careers in the major Western news media would never dare make such a cogent remark in public. Instead, attention has to be directed towards the propaganda operations of whoever the current ‘Official Enemy’ happens to be. To give just one example: on 27 February 2022, Steve Rosenberg, the BBC’s Moscow correspondent, stood outside the Kremlin and declaimed live on BBC News that evening:

In Russia, television remains the key tool for shaping public opinion. So, if you control TV, as the Kremlin does, you control the messaging. But not 100 per cent, because today many Russians do get their news and information online. And there they see a very different picture.

Likewise, a BBC ‘Live’ webpage about the Ukraine war on 24 February last year included a supposed analysis by Francis Scarr of BBC Monitoring titled, ‘The evolution of Russian propaganda at home’. It began:

A year since the invasion of Ukraine, coverage of the war on Russia’s state-controlled TV channels has shifted as the Kremlin attempts to shape public opinion at home.

Scarr continued:

Two-thirds of Russians receive most of their information from TV, where the messaging is under tight Kremlin control.

What about the ‘tight control’ of government ‘messaging’ via BBC News? It does not necessarily require direct instructions from Whitehall or Downing Street. But senior BBC managers and editors have certainly risen to their positions by thinking the right thoughts and saying the right things.

You will therefore struggle to find a BBC journalist pointing to the disparity between state-mandated BBC News ‘messaging’ and informed sources challenging establishment ideology via non-corporate media. A vanishingly rare exception is Rami Ruhayem, a BBC Arabic and BBC World Service journalist and producer since 2005, who was scathing about the BBC’s coverage of the current phase of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (see our recent alert). Ruhayem has essentially been ‘disappeared’ with no public response from the BBC and virtually zero coverage in state-corporate media.

Nor will BBC News inform its audiences that government policy is largely determined by the wishes of business elites, as independent studies have shown. Chomsky referred to one of these studies in his 2010 book, ‘Hopes and Prospects’:

In a rare and unusually careful analysis of the domestic influences on U.S. foreign policy, Lawrence Jacobs and Benjamin Page find, unsurprisingly, that the major influence on policy is “internationally oriented business corporations,” though there is also a secondary effect of “experts,” who, they point out “may themselves be influenced by business.” Public opinion, in contrast, has “little or no significant effect on government officials,” they find. (p. 47.)

For example, opinion polling in Germany and France revealed that most people there blame the United States and/or NATO for the war in Ukraine. US political analyst Ben Norton commented:

These results suggest that many average Europeans can see clearly that the conflict in Ukraine is not merely a battle between Kiev and Moscow, but rather a proxy war that the NATO military alliance, led by the United States, is waging against Russia.

Such unacceptable public opinions are dismissed routinely by political leaders. Germany’s hawkish Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock insisted NATO must ‘stand with Ukraine as long as they need us’, pledging military support ‘no matter what my German voters think’.

Israel’s Claims Against Unrwa: “No Evidence”

Meanwhile, the massive public opposition to Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza is generating concern at senior levels in western capitals. Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte reportedly even asked the country’s legal affairs ministry:

What can we say to make it look like Israel is not committing war crimes?

Here in the UK, a recent YouGov opinion poll starkly highlighted just how out of step both the Tory government and Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party are with British public opinion on Israel and Palestine. 66 per cent of Britons believe Israel should stop attacking Gaza and agree to an immediate ceasefire. Only 13 per cent of Britons think Israel should continue with its ‘military action’.

On 20 February, with the death toll in Gaza at almost 30,000, and more than four months after the Israeli carnage began, Labour finally called for ‘an immediate humanitarian ceasefire’, under parliamentary pressure from a Scottish National Party (SNP) motion. However, in the end, a formal vote on a ceasefire did not take place with the Commons debate descending into chaos. There were accusations that the House of Commons Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, and Starmer had colluded to block Parliament voting on the SNP motion, thus avoiding a mutiny among Labour MPs who have been demanding a less barbaric stance from the Labour leader. SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn said:

This should have been the chance for the UK Parliament to do the right thing and vote for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and Israel – instead it turned into a Westminster circus.

Much of the public, as well as legal experts and informed commentators, regard Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocidal; not least the majority of judges who heard the recent South African case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Netherlands.

The cynical and premeditated response of Israel to the ICJ ruling was to make unsubstantiated claims that Unrwa employees, the UN agency which provides relief for six million Palestinian refugees, were involved in the Hamas attacks of 7 October last year. News media, notably including BBC News, gave the claims wall-to-wall coverage. The staff – 12 people out of 13,000 employees – named by Israel were summarily dismissed, without an investigation, by Unrwa. This did not prevent many countries, including the US and the UK, suspending vital humanitarian contributions to the relief agency.

To its credit, Channel 4 News investigated Israel’s allegations and broadcast a report showing that Israel had provided ‘no evidence’ of its claims against the Unrwa staff, other than details identifying the employees alleged to have been involved. As Peter Oborne observed, it appears that, in immediately suspending aid, Britain’s foreign secretary David Cameron had:

jumped to attention solely based on claims made by a government which has long had a strong interest in discrediting Unrwa.

Oborne expanded:

As Israeli television has reported, based on a “high-level classified foreign ministry report”, Israel plans to push Unrwa out of the Gaza Strip.

The plan involves three stages: the publication of a report alleging Unrwa cooperation with Hamas; followed by the promotion of alternative organisations to provide welfare services; and finally, the removal of Unrwa from Gaza altogether.

He continued:

It’s not as if Israel deserves to be automatically believed. The Israeli military has repeatedly been caught out making false and fabricated statements about events in Gaza and elsewhere. This means that every claim emanating from Israel should be treated sceptically. (The same applies, of course, to Hamas.)

Compare this with the UK government’s response to the evidence-based ICJ judgment that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza:

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Cameron trashed the court even before it had reached its judgment, and have continued to do so since.

By contrast, Britain responded at once to allegations regarding Unrwa produced by Israel and suspended funds to the one agency capable of delivering aid in the face of a humanitarian catastrophe.

The huge public protests in the UK, and around the world, highlight the great divide between the public and governments on Israel and Palestine, and wider foreign policy. This has been the case historically.

Establishment Alarm At Public Protest

In February 2003, when a massive global movement attempting to stop the impending Iraq war took to the streets, the New York Times wrote:

The huge anti-war demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.

A similar phenomenon is occurring now, with international grassroots pressure demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. But coverage in the state-corporate media does not reflect the power or importance of public protest. As Des Freedman, a professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, observed:

Mainstream [sic] media like the BBC will not represent this movement nor hold to account those governments who are complicit in the destruction of Gaza because they are overwhelmingly tied to an imperial world view.

Instead, the BBC and other news media endlessly platform Israeli propaganda, notably the apartheid state’s repeated claims to be ‘defending itself’ in ‘responding’ to the Hamas attacks of 7 October last year.

It is important to emphasise, however, that elite power is not invulnerable to public opinion. In the years following the Iraq war, much of the public came to realise it had been deceived. The US-led invasion-occupation was not about disarming Saddam of mythical ‘weapons of mass destruction’ or about bringing ‘democracy’ to Iraq. It was about oil and western hegemony in the Middle East.

In 2014, a huge 71 per cent of Americans said that the war in Iraq ‘wasn’t worth it’. Likewise, three opinion polls conducted from 1990-2000 found that about 7 in 10 Americans believed that the US war against Vietnam was a ‘mistake’. Many no doubt would have said that the Vietnam war, like the Iraq war, was an international war crime, not merely a ‘mistake’.

On the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq last February, journalist Ian Sinclair published an important analysis in the Morning Star. He pointed out that, although the enormous Stop the War marches did not prevent the war going ahead, or the UK’s participation in it, the anti-war movement did have significant impacts. It helped to inform public opinion and mobilise public action that challenged British foreign policy. Sinclair wrote:

As a politician, Blair was fatally wounded over Iraq, with a 2010 ComRes poll finding 37 per cent of respondents thought he should be put on trial for the invasion.

He added:

The anti-war public mood was also likely a constraining influence on British forces in Iraq. In a 2016 RUSI Journal article, Major General Christopher Elliott noted there was “a cap on numbers, driven by political constraints rather than military necessity.

Milan Rai, editor of Peace News, argued that the UK anti-war movement came close to derailing Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war:

Wobbly Tuesday is one of the great secrets of the Iraq war, kept secret not by state censorship and repression, but by media and academic self-censorship.

‘Wobbly Tuesday’ was Tuesday, 11 March 2003, the date when the British government began to panic that it might lose a parliamentary vote on the war, given the massive public protests. The Sunday Telegraph reported that on that day, Geoff Hoon, the Minister of Defence, was ‘frantically preparing contingency plans to “disconnect” British troops entirely from the military invasion of Iraq, demoting their role to subsequent phases of the campaign and peacekeeping.’ In the end, the government won the Commons vote and the UK shamefully took part in the invasion-occupation of Iraq which led to the deaths of around one million Iraqis.

A 2019 YouGov survey showed that 52 per cent of respondents now oppose British military interventions overseas. This new reality was already evident in August 2013 when MPs voted against a government motion to support planned US air strikes on Syria. Public opinion had been strongly opposed to military action, with a YouGov poll just before the vote showing opposition at 51 per cent, and support at just 22 per cent. This was the first time a British prime minister had lost a vote on war since 1782.

Sinclair observed that:

This defeat generated significant alarm within the Establishment. Speaking two years later, Sir Nick Houghton, Britain’s chief of defence staff, worried “we are experiencing ever greater constraints on our freedom to use force” due to a lack of “societal support, parliamentary consent and ever greater legal challenge.

Julian Assange: Persecuted For Reporting The Truth

One of the biggest establishment campaigns in recent times to manipulate public opinion has been the attempted smearing of WikiLeaks co-founder, Julian Assange, as we have repeatedly highlighted in media alerts (for example, see here and here).

The latest stage of this campaign has been the final High Court hearing in London this week to decide whether Assange will be sent to trial in the US under the 1917 Espionage Act, a first for the prosecution for any journalist or publisher. And all for the supposed ‘offence’ of publishing the truth about US war crimes.

Nina Cross, an investigative reporter for The Indicter website, noted that ‘the defamation of Assange’s character by the British government is institutional’ and that ‘only through the complicity of the corporate media has this abuse been possible.’

She added:

Without its sustained collusion and servility, the powerful would not have impunity; they would not dare attempt what appears to be the slow assassination of a journalist in full public view for exposing their crimes.

Noam Chomsky and Alice Walker pointed out how the media bowed down to the US government’s dictate that they focus on Assange’s personality, and not on the principles of the case:

Assange is not on trial for skateboarding in the Ecuadorian embassy, for tweeting, for calling Hillary Clinton a war hawk, or for having an unkempt beard as he was dragged into detention by British police. Assange faces extradition to the United States because he published incontrovertible proof of war crimes and abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan, embarrassing the most powerful nation on Earth. Assange published hard evidence of “the ways in which the first world exploits the third”, according to whistleblower Chelsea Manning, the source of that evidence. Assange is on trial for his journalism, for his principles, not his personality.

They added:

By drawing attention away from the principles of the case, the obsession with personality pushes out the significance of WikiLeaks’ revelations and the extent to which governments have concealed misconduct from their own citizens. It pushes out how Assange’s 2010 publications exposed 15,000 previously uncounted civilian casualties in Iraq, casualties that the US Army would have buried. It pushes out the fact that the United States is attempting to accomplish what repressive regimes can only dream of: deciding what journalists around the globe can and cannot write. It pushes out the fact that all whistleblowers and journalism itself, not just Assange, is on trial here.

Whatever the outcome of this week’s High Court hearings, the valiant example of Assange and WikiLeaks in exposing power serves as inspiration for what can be achieved through the power of truth, humanity and compassion.

Elite power may, at times, seem overwhelming, bordering on invincible. It is an oft-quoted line, but a vital truth that: ‘We are many and they are few’. At root, elite interests fear public power. Therein lies hope.

The writer Maria Popova highlighted David Byrne, former frontman of Talking Heads, as:

one of the last standing idealists in our world — a countercultural force of lucid and luminous optimism, kindred to Walt Whitman, who wrote so passionately about optimism as a mighty force of resistance and a pillar of democracy.

In ‘One Fine Day’, co-written with Brian Eno, Byrne sings a ‘buoyant hymn of optimism [that] ripples against the current of our time as a mighty countercultural anthem of resistance and resilience.’

The song observes movingly:

Shouts and battle cries, from every part
I can see those tears, every one is true

It concludes on an uplifting note:

Then a peace of mind fell over me —
In these troubled times, I still can see
We can use the stars, to guide the way
It is not that far, the one fine —

One fine day

That one fine day is still within our reach.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Media Lens.

Since enforcing the People’s Military Service Law on Saturday, junta leader Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing announced conscription would begin immediately. Refusing to serve could result in a five-year prison sentence for young men and women across the country.  

This isn’t the first time the area has faced conscription efforts. Soldiers in January made rounds across several townships, trying to gain numbers through threats, fines, and incentives. 

On Monday, soldiers entered Htantabin township’s Za Yat Gyi city in eastern Bago, where locals fled conflict days before the arrests. It was the site of a battle a week ago when the Karen National Liberation Army and People’s Defense Forces fought with junta troops. Around 50 people were killed by junta artillery fire and more than 10,000 were forced to leave their homes amid heavy shelling.

The city was left mostly empty, but residents who chose not to flee were abducted from their homes, locals said. Junta troops stationed at Za Yat Gyi Hospital also detained young people in Htantabin township’s surrounding villages.

A local in Za Yat Gyi city who wished to remain anonymous for security reasons told RFA on Tuesday that he fled because people who have reached the age of 18 are being rounded up for military service.

“At the moment, the whole village is fleeing because the junta’s army entered the village and dragged people out. We are also hiding and fleeing,” he said. “They arrest women who are around 18 and 19 years old. Men at that age are also being taken to the trucks and forced to serve in the military.”

Since troops began raids, villages are nearly empty, he added. Internally displaced people from nearby villages were also targeted, although locals said they could not confirm the details of the arrests. 

Regime denies mass arrests

Junta forces set up blockades on roads leading from Za Yat Gyi to Htantabin city and conducted spot checks and arrests at Htantabin Bridge, according to locals. 

Bago residents near the Sittaung river and Kayin state border haven't been able to get to Taungoo city, roughly 290 kilometers (180 miles) north of Htantabin since the weekend because of blockades, they said.

Bago region’s junta spokesperson Tin Oo denied people were being press-ganged into military service. 

“As far as arrests are concerned, we are arresting organizations related to the People’s Defense Forces and organizations that support terrorists according to the law,” he told RFA. “We do not arrest innocent people without reason.”

No mass arrests occurred, and only three or four people were taken in for interrogation, he said.  

On Tuesday night, the regime-backed media announced the formation of a Central Militia Recruitment Team led by the Ministry of Defense. 

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.

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

Democracy Now! speaks with filmmaker Nawal Al-Maghafi about her BBC investigative report which reveals new details about how the United Arab Emirates hired American mercenaries to carry out over 100 assassinations in southern Yemen, targeting politicians, imams and members of civil society. Al-Maghafi interviewed several mercenaries for the first time on camera about how they conducted the targeted killings and trained others to run similar operations. “What we’ve seen is a systematic targeting campaign of … political activists, members of Al-Islah, civil society members,” says Al-Maghafi. “It’s just created a climate of fear in southern Yemen.”

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

Beginning in November, anti-junta forces seized the towns of Kawlin, Khampat, Shwe Pyi Aye and Maw Lu. National Unity Government, or NUG, officials entered the towns shortly afterward and set up basic administrative services.

“The civil administrative mechanism was put in place after the first round of conflicts,” said an information officer with the People’s Administration Organization in Khampat who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke to RFA Burmese on condition of anonymity due to security concerns.

“The town is now firmly under the control of the NUG and the People’s Administration Organization is formed and functioning,” he said.

But a series of junta attacks on the towns since their seizure have left residents fearing for their safety, and some who have fled their homes say they are reluctant to return.

From Dec. 10-16, Khampat township was the center of fierce fighting due to incursions by junta forces, while on Jan. 7, the military conducted airstrikes that hit a church service in the township’s Ka Nan village, killing 17 civilians, including nine children, and injuring 19 others, according to a report by the NUG.

“It is safer to travel than before due to fewer security checkpoints,” a resident of the township told RFA Burmese. “But we are constantly alert to loud noises of cars and motorcycles, as we live in fear of airstrikes. We are still worried that fighting will resume.”

Similarly, a joint force of anti-junta fighters under the NUG and members of the ethnic Kachin Independence Army seized Kawlin on Nov. 6, and the NUG began administering the town on Dec. 6.

But residents told RFA that civilians have since been killed by junta artillery attacks and said transporting goods around the area remains unsafe.

“The junta is blocking cargo trucks and travelers into Kawlin … so there are many difficulties affecting the flow of commodities,” one inhabitant of the town said. “The junta’s Light Infantry Battalion No. 120 fires artillery shells from [nearby] Wuntho township ... [and] more than 10 civilians were killed after the town fell under the control of resistance forces.” 

Residents said that on Jan. 2, a junta artillery attack on Kawlin’s market killed six civilians, and injured two. Five days later, the bodies of 19 civilians killed by the military council were discovered near Wuntho township, six of whom were from Kawlin, they said.

NUG governing with ‘all possible resources’

Some residents told RFA that they feel they have the right to expect better protection from the NUG, now that the shadow government has assumed administrative control in their towns.

Kyaw Zaw, the spokesperson of the NUG President’s Office, said that his administration is doing the best it can with the resources in the areas under its control.

“We are implementing civil administrative mechanisms with all possible resources, while our defense forces are working to prevent attacks by the junta,” he said. 

He added that the NUG has established interim administration in more than 170 townships across the country, and is working to enhance rule of law, development, education, health and the economy.

In other towns, the NUG has faced challenges implementing its goals, acknowledged a member of the People’s Administration Organization in Maw Lu township, who also declined to be named citing fear of reprisal.

“We have experienced some difficulties in the administrative process as we are not civil service personnel,” he said of the town, which was seized by a joint force of the Kachin Independence Army, the All Burma Students’ Democratic Front, and anti-junta People’s Defense Force paramilitaries on Dec. 13.

A resident of Maw Lu confirmed that inhabitants have “many needs” at the moment.

“We have been relieved from some adversities [under the junta], but frankly, we don’t enjoy total peace,” the resident said. “We expect a genuine democracy, in which an administration treats us humanely. We hope the people will not have to suffer much longer and that the end of revolution will come as soon as possible.”

The junta has issued no statements about the towns it lost to the NUG in Sagaing region.

According to a Nov. 28 report by the independent research group ISP-Myanmar, which documents the impact of conflict on civilians in the country, at least 119 armed clashes took place in Sagaing since the Oct. 27 launch of Operation 1027, an offensive led by the Three Brotherhood Alliance of ethnic armies.

Translated by Aung Naing. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Matt Reed.

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

What’s scarier than a shark attack? An increase in the minimum wage.

At least that’s what many corporate media outlets seem to want you to believe, given the apocalyptic tone of much of the coverage of California’s recent decision to raise the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $20 an hour, starting this April, a bump from the current level of $16.

CBS‘s headline (12/27/23) frames California’s minimum wage raise as an act of aggression, against which fast-food companies have to “fight back.”

While outlets like the New York Times (10/23/23), the Associated Press (9/28/23), CalMatters (12/21/23, 9/28/23) and the Sacramento Bee (9/29/23, 9/15/23, 9/11/23) have responsibly covered the policy change, highlighting the large positive effects that it will likely have on workers, others are obsessively accentuating the negatives.

Consider the following sampling of articles, by no means exhaustive, all of which link the minimum wage increase to higher prices or harm to workers:

• “Pizza Hut Franchisees Lay Off More Than 1,200 Delivery Drivers in California as Restaurants Brace for $20 Fast-Food Wages” (Business Insider, 12/22/23)
• “I’m a California Restaurant Operator Preparing for the $20-an-Hour Fast-Food Wage by Trimming Hours, Eliminating Employee Vacation and Raising Menu Prices” (Business Insider, 1/16/24)
• “As New Minimum Wages Are Ushered In, Companies Fight Back With Fees and Layoffs” (CBS, 12/27/23)
• “California Pizza Huts Lay Off All Delivery Drivers Ahead of Minimum Wage Increase” (USA Today, 12/26/23)
• “Fatburger Owner to Raise Prices, Trim Hours as California Hikes Minimum Wage” (New York Post, 1/16/24)
• “California Pizza Hut Franchises Announce Layoffs of Delivery Drivers Before New $20 Minimum Wage: Report” (New York Post, 12/27/23)

Anecdotes instead of evidence

“The money has to come from somewhere,” a fast-food franchise owner tells Business Insider (1/16/24)—which doesn’t mention that such franchises typically have a profit margin of 6–9%, higher than full-service restaurants (Restaurant365, 2/25/20).

Extensive academic research on the topic of wage floors has repeatedly found that minimum wage hikes tend to have little to no effect on employment. The catch, of course, is that most of the hikes analyzed have been relatively modest, given the US’s stinginess towards workers. But a recent study looking at the effects of large jumps in the minimum wage on the fast-food industry in California and New York found the result was actually higher employment, not mass layoffs. Is any of that research cited in these pieces? No.

Instead, the articles elevate anecdotes about what individual companies have done and say they plan to do in response to the minimum wage boost. The second Business Insider piece (1/16/24), for instance, quotes the owner of four Fatburger franchises as saying, “I feel that there will be a lot of pain to workers as franchise owners are forced to take drastic measures.” Scary!

It’s worth emphasizing that these anecdotes about layoffs are entirely compatible with a story of the minimum wage hike having a negligible or even positive effect on employment. That’s because, when assessing the effect on overall employment, what matters is not whether there are individual companies that are laying off workers, but whether the net effect across all companies in the industry is positive or negative.

Consider that, as of late, a typical month has seen layoffs in the range of 160,000 in California. If you want to spin a story about how horrible the economy is, just run endless headlines on these layoffs—and ignore the fact that the state’s monthly hires have been averaging nearly 600,000.

Similarly, if you want to spin a story about how evil a rise in the minimum wage is, run endless headlines linking the minimum wage to layoffs, because layoffs will happen even if employment stays the same or increases overall. As Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage, a classic text in the minimum wage literature, put it:

A hike in the minimum wage could lead to an increase in employment in some firms, and to a decrease at others. As a result, it is always possible to find examples of employers who claim that they will go out of business if the minimum wage increases, or who state that they closed because of a minimum-wage increase.

Despite this reality, the authors found that “on average…employment remains unchanged, or sometimes rises slightly, as a result of increases in the minimum wage.”

‘Fears of skyrocketing prices’

Yahoo (1/4/24) claims the report of a Connecticut McDonald’s “charging $18 for a Big Mac combo meal…is not isolated”—failing to mention that the average price of a Big Mac combo meal in Connecticut is $10.79.

A worrying number of media outlets are allergic to this level of nuance. And perhaps none so much as Yahoo Finance. Tying fearmongering over minimum wage hikes to inflation hysteria, Yahoo (1/4/24) ran this mess of a headline at the start of the month:

McDonald’s $18 Big Mac Meal Goes Viral Again as Fast-Food Minimum Wage Hike to $20 Triggers Fears of Skyrocketing Prices and Layoffs, Leaving People Questioning: ‘Maybe This Went Up Way Too Fast.’

The grain of truth here is that prices have risen substantially at fast-food restaurants lately, and especially at McDonald’s. Moreover, part of this increase can be attributed to strong wage growth. As Vox (1/9/24) has reported:

According to [the economist Michael] Reich, for every percentage point increase in a fast-food firm’s labor costs, one might expect to see a bit less than a 0.333 percentage point increase in menu prices. This is a rough estimate, but it’s a decent rule of thumb. And it would imply that rising wages have nudged fast-food prices up by more than 9% since the pandemic’s onset.

These numbers imply that a minimum wage hike would result in higher prices, which is in line with what academic research has found. The thing is, at least to this point, these price increases have been quite modest. The same recent analysis of large minimum wage hikes in California and New York that found a positive employment effect also found that a “roughly 50% increase in the minimum wage resulted in an approximately 3% increase in prices.” The new minimum wage increase in California would be closer to a 30% jump (relative to where the wage was when the legislation was passed in the fall). There’s no firm basis to suggest that such a rise would send prices “skyrocketing.”

‘Blaming whoever wrote that law’

Did a laid-off pizza deliverer really know the name of the Pasadena assembly member who wrote the minimum wage law? Regardless, the right-wing California Globe (1/2/24) was able to get its defense of business owners in the voice of a low-wage worker distributed widely through Yahoo (1/4/24).

But Yahoo doesn’t need a firm basis for its narrative; all it needs is some good old right-wing propaganda. So it turns to reporting from the California Globe. As the Sacramento Bee  (10/29/20) detailed in a 2020 expose of California news sites backed by conservative political operatives:

The California Globe, founded by an associate of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, describes itself as “pro-growth and pro-business, nonpartisan and objective”—but serves up a steady diet of conservative news and opinion. The Globe boasted that its stories racked up 1.1 million page views in July, which it described as a landmark achievement for the two-year-old site.

Unsurprisingly, under the headline “The Number of Victims Is Growing of New $20 Fast-Food Minimum Wage Law,” the Globe (1/2/24) was able to cobble together some horror stories about the effects of the new minimum wage legislation. The piece centers around the testimony of two workers who were victims of the recent layoffs at Pizza Hut. The core takeaway is basically the following quote, attributed to an anonymous Pizza Hut worker:

I, as well as pretty much everyone else here, is blaming whoever wrote that law or bill or whatever. There are a few who are saying that Pizza Hut is doing this out of greed or that they could have cut costs elsewhere, but most are like, maybe this went up way too fast. Some workers benefit, others are now out of a job. So the guy who wrote it, [Assemblyman] Chris Holden [D-Pasadena], as well as anyone else who thought this was a good idea. Great job. We hate you forever now.

Again, as unfortunate as what happened to these two workers is, the fact that they were laid off tells us very little about what the overall impact of the new minimum wage law will be. But that won’t stop media outlets from cynically elevating such stories to demonize a policy that is set to raise the wages of hundreds of thousands of workers. Yahoo borrows parts of this quote, as well as others from the article, to fill out its piece, giving the Globe a further boost beyond its already substantial circulation.

Defying ‘economics and common sense’

The Wall Street Journal (12/28/23) states that when the government raises wages above what the market determines, “jobs simply disappear”—an ideological assertion contradicted by decades of research (CEPR, 2/13).

National conservative media have likewise been promoting the propaganda line that the minimum wage increase will inevitably lead to job loss (with the benefit of increased wages to hundreds of thousands of workers conveniently ignored). At the end of last year, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial (12/28/23) headlined “California’s Fast-Food Casualties,” which opened:

California’s $20 an hour minimum wage for fast-food workers doesn’t take effect until April, but the casualties are already piling up. Pizza Hut franchises this week told more than 1,200 delivery drivers that they’ll lose their jobs before the higher wage kicks in. Gov. Gavin Newsom no doubt sends condolences, though what he should send is an apology.

It continued by arguing that “it defies economics and common sense to think that businesses won’t adapt by laying off workers” in response to the new law. But does it? Or is skepticism of the idea that the law will lead to net job loss warranted, given the existing evidence base? The history of debates over the minimum wage is filled with claims about the detrimental effect of raising the wage floor that have repeatedly flopped in the face of empirical evidence.

But maybe this time will be different. The California law breaks with the standard approach towards wage floors in the US, where a floor is set across all industries in a particular region. Instead, the law sets a floor for a particular sector, and it establishes a wage council that will oversee wage increases from 2025 to 2029, something novel in American labor law. The layoffs that we’re seeing could have something to do with this unique setup.

Because the law sets a minimum standard solely for the fast-food industry, it leaves a loophole for fast-food companies to exploit. Rather than keeping delivery services in-house, they can dump those workers off on companies like DoorDash and Uber Eats, which are not subject to the same labor regulations. Because these companies can pay the workers less, the most sensible decision may now be for fast-food companies to scrap their delivery teams and outsource to outside delivery services.

This is a totally plausible story about what’s going on, though not the only plausible story. But even if it does fit with reality, it just looks like these delivery jobs are being transferred out of the fast-food sector, with the economy-wide net effect on employment unclear. So to cite these layoffs as evidence that the minimum wage hike will have a negative overall effect on employment is at best premature.

All of this focus on the possibilities of layoffs, moreover, totally distracts from the far-reaching benefits that the policy change is likely to have. California has over half a million fast-food workers, who, as of 2022, earned a median wage of a bit over $16. Raising the minimum wage to $20 would directly affect the vast majority of those in the fast-food industry—even the 90th percentile worker made less than $20 in 2022. If there is in fact some rise in unemployment, which is not entirely out of the question, it would have to be pretty substantial in order to cancel out the positive effects of the wage boost.

Broadening the discussion

It’s the media’s role to inform the public about reality, not to run sensational headlines about good intentions bringing disastrous consequences, as effective as that may be at attracting eyeballs. A solid start on the way to fulfilling this role would be for media outlets to consistently bring in experts to talk about the decades’ worth of research on the effects of minimum wage hikes. Some outlets already do this. Others, not so much.

Even better would be for the media to more frequently broaden the discussion beyond the minimum wage to other policy changes that would complement the minimum wage or fill in its gaps, policies like expanded unemployment insurance, the Earned Income Tax Credit, a job guarantee, and universal basic income. The narrow focus on sensational events does little other than distort the picture. Taking a wider view would bring things into focus.

At the moment, however, it might be best just to ask media outlets to stop trotting out propaganda lines that should have died a long time ago.

The post Reporting on California’s Fast-Food Minimum Wage Raise Comes With Side Order of Fear appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Conor Smyth.

The New York Times (5/30/23) directs attention toward a hypothetical future AI apocalypse, rather than towards present-day AI’s entrenchment of contemporary oppression.

It’s almost impossible to escape reports on artificial intelligence (AI) in today’s media. Whether you’re reading the news or watching a movie, you are likely to encounter some form of warning or buzz about AI.

The recent release of ChatGPT, in particular, led to an explosion of excitement and anxiety about AI. News outlets reported that many prominent AI technologists themselves were sounding the alarm about the dangers of their own field. Frankenstein’s proverbial monster had been unleashed, and the scientist was now afraid of his creation.

The speculative fears they expressed were centered on an existential crisis for humanity (New York Times, 5/30/23), based on the threat of AI technology evolving into a hazard akin to viral pandemics and nuclear weaponry. Yet at the same time, other coverage celebrated AI’s supposedly superior intelligence and touted it as a remarkable human accomplishment with amazing potential (CJR, 5/26/23).

Overall, these news outlets often miss the broader context and scope of the threats of AI, and as such, are also limited in presenting the types of solutions we ought to be exploring. As we collectively struggle to make sense of the AI hype and panic, I offer a pause: a moment to contextualize the current mainstream narratives of fear and fascination, and grapple with our long-term relationship with technology and our humanity.

Profit as innovation’s muse

So what type of fear is our current AI media frenzy actually highlighting? Some people’s dystopian fears for the future are in fact the dystopian histories and contemporary realities of many other people. Are we truly concerned about all of humanity, or simply paying more attention now that white-collar and elite livelihoods and lives are at stake?

We are currently in a time when a disproportionate percentage of wealth is hoarded by the super rich (Oxfam International, 1/16/23), most of whom benefit from and bolster the technology industry. Although the age-old saying is that “necessity is the mother of invention,” in a capitalist framework, profit—not human need—is innovation’s muse. As such, it should not be so surprising that human beings and humanity are at risk from these very same technological developments.

Activists and scholars, particularly women and people of color, have long been sounding the alarm about the harmful impacts of AI and automation. However, media largely overlooked their warnings about social injustice and technology—namely, the ways technology replicates dominant, oppressive structures in more efficient and broad-reaching ways.

Cathy O’Neil in 2016 highlighted the discriminatory ways AI is being used in the criminal justice system, school systems and other institutional practices, such that those with the least socio-political power are subjected to even more punitive treatments. For instance, police departments use algorithms to identify “hot spots” with high arrest rates in order to target them for more policing. But arrest rates are not the same as crime rates; they reflect long-standing racial biases in policing, which means such algorithms reinforce those racial biases under the guise of science.

Wired (10/15/19): Joy Buolamwini “learned how facial recognition is used in law enforcement, where error-prone algorithms could have grave consequences.”

Joy Buolamwini built on her own personal experience to uncover how deeply biased AI algorithms are, based on the data they’re fed and the narrow demographic of designers who create them. Her work demonstrated AI’s inability to recognize let alone distinguish between dark-skinned faces, and the harmful consequences of deploying this technology as a surveillance tool, especially for Black and Brown people, ranging from everyday inconveniences to wrongful arrests.

Buolamwini has worked to garner attention from media and policymakers in order to push for more transparency and caution with the use of AI. Yet recent reports on the existential crisis of AI do not mention her work, nor those of her peers, which highlight the very real and existing crises resulting from the use of AI in social systems.

Timnit Gebru, who was ousted from Google in a very public manner, led research that long predicted the risks of large language models such as those employed in tools like ChatGPT. These risks include environmental impacts of AI infrastructure, financial barriers to entry that limit who can shape these tools, embedded discrimination leading to disproportionate harms for minoritized social identities, reinforced extremist ideologies stemming from the indiscriminate grabbing of all Internet data as training information, and the inherent problems owing to the inability to distinguish between fact and machine fabrication. In spite of how many of these same risks are now being echoed by AI elites, Gebru’s work is scarcely cited.

Although stories of AI injustice might be new in the context of technology, they are not novel within the historical context of settler colonialism. As long as our society continues to privilege the white hetero-patriarchy, technology implemented within this framework will largely reinforce and exacerbate existing systemic injustices in ever more efficient and catastrophic ways.

If we truly want to explore pathways to resolve AI’s existential threat, perhaps we should begin by learning from the wisdom of those who already know the devastating impacts of AI technology—precisely the voices that are marginalized by elite media.

Improving the social context

Conversation ( 4/19/23): “News media closely reflect business and government interests in AI by praising its future capabilities and under-reporting the power dynamics behind these interests.”

Instead, those media turn mostly to AI industry leaders, computer scientists and government officials (Conversation, 4/19/23). Those experts offer a few administrative solutions to our AI crisis, including regulatory measures (New York Times, 5/30/23), government/leadership action (BBC, 5/30/23) and limits on the use of AI (NPR, 6/1/23). While these top-down approaches might stem the tide of AI, they do not address the underlying systemic issues that render technology yet another tool of destruction that disproportionately ravages communities who live on the margins of power in society.

We cannot afford to focus on mitigating future threats without also attending to the very real, present-day problems that cause so much human suffering. To effectively change the outcomes of our technology, we need to improve the social context in which these tools are deployed.

A key avenue technologists are exploring to resolve the AI crisis is “AI alignment.” For example, OpenAI reports that their alignment research “aims to make artificial general intelligence (AGI) aligned with human values and follow human intent.”

However, existing AI infrastructure is not value-neutral. On the contrary, automation mirrors capitalist values of speed, productivity and efficiency. So any meaningful AI alignment effort will also require the dismantling of this exploitative framework, in order to optimize for human well-being instead of returns on investments.

Collaboration over dominion

What type of system might we imagine into being such that our technology serves our collective humanity? We could begin by heeding the wisdom of those who have lived through and/or deeply studied oppression encoded in our technological infrastructure.

Greta Byrum & Ruha Benjamin (Stanford Social Innovation Review, 6/16/22): “Those who have been excluded, harmed, exposed, and oppressed by technology understand better than anyone how things could go wrong.”

Ruha Benjamin introduced the idea of the “New Jim Code,” to illustrate how our technological infrastructure reinforces existing inequities under the guises of “objectivity,” “innovation,” and “benevolence.” While the technology may be new, the stereotypes and discriminations continue to align with well-established white supremacist value systems. She encourages us to “demand a slower and more socially conscious innovation,” one that prioritizes “equity over efficiency, [and] social good over market imperatives.”

Audrey Watters (Hack Education, 11/28/19) pushes us to question dominant narratives about technology, and to not simply accept the tech hype and propaganda that equate progress with technology alone. She elucidates how these stories are rarely based solely on facts but also on speculative fantasies motivated by economic power, and reminds us that “we needn’t give up the future to the corporate elites” (Hack Education, 3/8/22).

Safiya Noble (UCLA Magazine, 2/22/21) unveils how the disproportionate influence of internet technology corporations cause harm through co-opting public goods for private profits. To counter these forces, she proposes “strengthening libraries, universities, schools, public media, public health and public information institutions.”

These scholars identify the slow and messy work we must collectively engage in to create the conditions for our technology to mirror collaboration over domination, connection over separation, and trust over suspicion. If we are to heed their wisdom, we need media that views AI as more than just the purview of technologists, and also engages the voices of activists, citizens and scholars. Media coverage should also contextualize these technologies, not as neutral but as mechanisms operating within a historical and social framework.

Now, more than ever before, we bear witness to the human misery resulting from extractive and exploitative economic and political global structures, which have long been veiled beneath a veneer of “technological progress.” We must feel compelled to not just gloss over these truths as though we can doom scroll our way out, but collectively struggle for the freedom futures we need—not governed by fear, but fueled by hope.

Featured Image: “Robot Zombie Apocalypse” by Nicholas Mastello

The post The Dystopian AI Future Some Fear Is the Present-Day Reality Others Live appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Beatrice Dias.

Relatives of the Thais have reached out to the Chinese government seeking its help in evacuating their loved ones. On Friday, the group submitted a letter to China’s Embassy in Bangkok, through a local police officer, requesting that Beijing intervene, according to a report from BenarNews, an online news outlet affiliated with RFA.

In a video posted on Facebook Live by Ekarat Sukonthamas, a Thai man trapped in Laukkaing said he and his friends were living in a field hospital at a local school after they were rescued from a call center after being trafficked and recruited as part of a scam. They wanted to return to their Thai homes, the man said.

“Living in the midst of explosions and gunfire all day and night is really terrible. Some people are in a state of stress and pressure to the point where they can’t sleep,” said another Thai man who appeared in the Facebook post but also did not identify himself.

“We have been cut off from water and electricity. Now we have to buy our own drinking water,” he said, adding he and the others had received small portions of rice, including some that was not edible.

Post-coup Myanmar has disintegrated into bloodshed through various conflicts since the Burmese military overthrew Aung San Suu Kyi’s elected government in February 2021. Lately, it has become a regional hub for online scam operations and casinos that employ people trafficked from other countries in Southeast Asia, as BenarNews-affiliated Radio Free Asia (RFA) has reported.  

A woman, who also did not identify herself, said in the Facebook video that the group had been alerted about a major battle that would take place sometime soon.

“We want to return before the 18th [Saturday]. We would like the government to help and appeal to the Chinese government as well,” the woman said.

BenarNews could not immediately verify the authenticity of the video.

In August, a report by the U.N. human rights agency identified Myanmar and Cambodia as epicenters of a new human trafficking scourge in Southeast Asia.

Hundreds of thousands of people were “being forcibly engaged by organized criminal gangs into online criminality in Southeast Asia – from romance-investment scams and crypto fraud to illegal gambling,” the U.

N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, or the OHCHR, reported.  

In Bangkok, a spokesperson for the Thai Ministry of Foreign Affairs said about 300 Thais remained in Laukkaing as of Friday. Of those, 254 were being kept safe by the Myanmar military while 40 to 50 were being held by their employers.

Meanwhile, a group of 41 Thais have been removed from the region and were being held in Myitkyina province where they were undergoing background checks. Myitkyina province borders Mae Sai district in Thailand’s Chiang Rai province.

The Thai government previously said the 41 were to be sent home on Thursday.

On Friday, Col. Nathee Timsen, commander of the Chaotak Unit of the Pa Muang Task Force and a member of the Thai-Myanmar Border Local Committee (TBC), said he met with Col. Thura Soe Win So, commander of the Tachileik Tactical Operation Command, to inquire about their return. 

The Myanmar commander said he was waiting for approval from his superiors, expected in a day or two, to allow their release.

‘Not an easy situation’

In the Thai capital, eight relatives of Thais trapped in Laukkaing town traveled to the Chinese Embassy to submit a letter seeking assistance from the Chinese government.

“My niece is stuck there. She went there in June. After the first month, she contacted us and said that she was taken to Laukkaing, locked up and she wanted help,” Kanisorn Payomhom told BenarNews. 

“Her sister went to report to different foundations, but we got no response. Some family members contacted the Thai consulate in Myanmar for help, but when the gang found out about it, some people were beaten up.” 

Kanisorn said her niece was rescued earlier this month and was now in the care of the Myanmar government, which has not allowed her to leave the country.

“We think that the Chinese government can help because they are allies,” she said, adding family members were worried about a potential junta attack in that region.

Kanisorn’s group delivered the letter to police Col. Ekarat Malawanno, deputy superintendent of Huai Khwang Police Station, because the Chinese Embassy did not send a representative to receive it.

The group then went to Government House, the prime minister’s office in Bangkok, to submit a similar letter.

Kanchana Patarachoke, director-general of the Department of Information and spokeswoman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said the Thai government was making every effort to assist those stranded in Myanmar.

“We assure you that we are trying, but it is not an easy situation. We are also discussing the legal process of cases in Laukkaing,” Kanchana said. “We are trying to work with the person in charge of this matter instead of hiring a random person out of necessity.” 

The Thai Embassy in Myanmar issued warnings to citizens in June and October to be wary of being lured to work in Myanmar through online job postings. It warned that while the postings promise good salaries, respondents could be sold to work in scam centers or forced into prostitution. 

Malaysian efforts to extricate nationals

Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, Fadillah Yusof, Malaysia’s deputy prime minister, asked the Chinese government on Thursday to assist in efforts to repatriate citizens who had fallen victim to similar scams and were trapped in Myanmar.

Fadillah, who was on a working visit to China, said Malaysian nationals had their passports taken away and were unable to leave. He said Chinese officials pledged to help.

Earlier this week, 16 Lao workers who had been released from a Chinese-run casino in Myanmar and had been the victims of human trafficking were able to return home, RFA reported. The 16 were held in a police station for two months before being released.

On Friday, the ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR), an NGO of Southeast Asian lawmakers, called on the international community to “turn their attention to the plight of internally displaced people (IDPs) and refugees at the [Thailand-Myanmar] border.”

“We therefore reiterate our calls to ASEAN and the international community to take firm action against the illegal Myanmar junta, including by suspending any military or diplomatic cooperation, and to recognize the National Unity Government as the legitimate representatives of the Myanmar people,” Mercy Barends, chairwoman of the parliamentarians group, said in a statement.

“As long as the junta remains in power, the suffering of IDPs and refugees will only increase, leading to an unsafe Thai border as well as wider regional instability.”

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

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Nontarat Phaicharoen for BenarNews.

[laughs] It’s wild that you asked me that right now, because almost an hour ago, I was in my mama’s kitchen, making some supper for us to eat. And we were talking about this recent conflict happening within my family over my debut book. Some of my kin feels embarrassed and real hurt by my stories. And this is something I never intended. And this has caused great stress within my life. I’ve been having bad dreams about it. Because where I’m from, family is most important. You sacrifice everything for the family. Every decision you make is for the family. There is no “I,” only kin.

So now, I feel like I have to pick between the work or the family. And I hate that so much. But when it comes down to it, the art and the work is most important. It kinda hurts me a little to even say it. But even if folks get hurt in the process, after we all die, the work’s the only thing that’s gonna be left. After everybody’s gone, the work will be there forever. And other folks can interpret it and enjoy it, and maybe somehow find meaning in it. Maybe it’ll even bring some sort of solace or peace. I write about my people because I don’t want their hard lives and hurts to have been for nothing. Don’t nobody in the bigger world ever see them or hear them now anyways.

So, I guess I was nodding way back in the day at that Stephen celebration, like I was taught to when I was a little girl in church, to nod enthusiastically at the part of the sermon that sounded good, even if you didn’t really know exactly what it meant. Being “all about the work” sounded right to me, it was preparing me for my book to debut.

You live in Baltimore now, but we’re doing this interview while you’re in Woodland, North Carolina, a town of less than 800 people, and the place you grew up. Your most recent collection Sleepovers is inspired by people back home and being proud of them. And these are people that don’t show up that much in literary fiction. I feel when you’re writing your own people, especially if they aren’t represented much in fiction, there’s this feeling of extra responsibility or extra burden to get it right. Like, am I playing into what other people will think is going to be a stereotype or a trope? Or am I trying too hard to resist that trope, and then I end up writing something emotionally dishonest? Was that a consideration for you? Or do you not think about things like that?

When I was writing these stories, I wasn’t thinking about a reader. Especially my first person narrators, of which there are plenty in Sleepovers, those narrators sure ain’t thinking about someone sitting down and reading what they’re thinking and seeing and saying on a page in a book. I’m just documenting, to the best of my ability, what’s going through the heads of my characters, everything they’re seeing, everything they’re feeling, everything they’re smelling, touching, tasting. And I believe that if I’m just honestly transcribing in this way, surprising things will pop up that are hopefully fresh and hopefully exciting and new and feel really real and immediate. And those surprises and bits of freshness will counteract or complicate the stereotypes that pop up as well. As much as stereotypes harm us and keep us ignorant, they’re strong as hell to combat after they’ve been inbred within our society since the beginning of time. At a reading I did recently, someone asked me if I grew up in a church handling snakes.

Really?

Yeah. And though I didn’t, I did grow up seeing a lot of snakes out in the country. So I guess the spirit is there. Earlier today, though, I tried my damndest to get my mama to throw away this Confederate flag shot glass that said, “These colors never run.” And I can tell you this because it’s true, it’s a true detail. It’s also true that my mama has never been north of Washington, DC. It’s also true that she struggles to get by financially. And I can’t get her to see systemic racism for the life of me. It is what it is. Because I am of the stereotype and trope of redneck simpletons, I can get in there and wrestle with all its nastiness, it’s my job to do it. And I hope that other people from rural or overlooked places will do the same. Hopefully we can come out the other side with some revelation.

When you’re not of the stereotype or trope, it’s hard as hell to get in there and poke it and prod it and come out with something enlightening. Like I can’t imagine myself trying to write a Londoner. That Londoner would say “loo” all the time and be really into “pubs,”—my god, so dumb, so useless.

I want to wrestle with complications. And I can only do that if I’m working from what I know. Here’s where I give my “where I’m from testimony” that I’ve had to give to all sorts of folks since Sleepovers has come out. All I know is I’m from an isolated and poor county in North Carolina where there’s more deer than people. Folks here don’t have therapists, they have alcohol or drugs or they talk to god. Folks here sleep with guns and bring you food when someone you love is dying. My mama grew up suckering tobacco and my daddy was a mechanic and he always told me, “Never forget where you come from.” And when I left home for the first time for college and found myself surrounded by people who saw me as a redneck country cousin, I was ashamed and embarrassed and wished I coulda been born and raised somewhere else. Luckily I was a good reader so things were easier for me to go to college. But a lot of kids back home never get the proper help they need with simple reading skills and just due to that, a whole world is much more difficult to access. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about that. And it was scary for me to tell you about that Confederate shot glass, but it’s true. We’re not going to learn anything as long as we’re comfortable and safe. We have to explore where we’re scared and vulnerable and ashamed.

I feel the same way. You mentioned how you want to see more rural people writing. There’s a lot of talk lately in publishing about representation. And I don’t really see a lot of discussion happening around diversity of education level and class and I’d like to see that enter the conversation, too.

I really liked this quote you said in an interview with Jeff Oloizia, “Imagine how powerful it would be if we were to equip poor rural people with the ability to get their work published with its flaws and all. I want to see misspellings and run-on sentences, I want it to be as pure and untouched by editors in New York City as possible.”

I wondered if you wanted to talk more about that and if you had any more ideas of how you think that could happen, because that’s something I’d like to see as well.

We’ve seen it in visual art. My favorite type of visual art is often called outsider art, where folks from rural isolated places create from their own passion without any instruction. Never seen a Matisse, never seen a Monet, they’re just doing their own thing. And it’s so pure and powerful.

I would love to see The Paris Review publish a story by someone written from the house across the street. The house across the street from my mama is where a little boy was found dead in his trash can. That tore mama all to pieces too because she’d given that boy’s mama money for diapers from time to time.

Unless we start listening to the people that need the help the most, we’re going to keep killing each other, we’re going to keep letting each other suffer and die. Our government ain’t gonna take care of us, we can see that clear as day, so we got to do whatever we can to start taking care of ourselves.

The way I see it, the publishing world should seek out writers from lower economic backgrounds, who grew up in low literacy households, and who can actually shed light on what the actual fuck is happening in the forgotten places of America, where folks need help the most.

And I think the only way it’s going to happen is if we have somebody inside the gates of the publishing world who’s lived it. I feel like the gatekeepers, the folks on the inside, whenever they get stories from folks that aren’t represented in literature, they don’t know the difference between the cliché and what’s real because they’ve never lived it before themselves.

Luckily change is already happening. Vanity Fair just brought on some new editors, including Kiese Laymon, one of the lights of our times.

You talked about how you don’t think of the reader when you’re first writing, but what’s your process for revision?

Most of the time when I write a story, I’ve been seeing it and hearing it in me for a very long time. So when I write that first draft, I don’t really fuck with it that much. If I do, maybe some scenes get cut, some things get more streamlined. Sometimes I’ll change a point of view.

I’m not a big believer in sitting down every day and putting words on the page. Words on a page do not help me. I’m trying to transcribe an experience of a person. And that can only happen if the person is willing to share.

So you’re like, walking with them more before you even sit down to write.

Yes. And I’m listening and observing everything that’s happening around me. And when I come across something that makes sense to what I’m hearing and seeing in my head then I just kind of lock it in. Because you never know what you’re going to encounter in your everyday life that is going to make sense to the story that you’re building. It can be little things, like one time I was in the grocery store and I was looking at canned beans. And I was like, “Oh my god, my [character] Krystal, she always buys Bush beans because even if they’re more expensive, they taste better and that’s important to her.” And even though I didn’t use that in any of Krystal’s stories, it’s still very important to know that about her.

I like to see and hear my story like a movie in my head before I write it. I’ve found that in my experience of being in workshops and teaching creative writing that folks who need to revise a lot are big fans of ideas. They don’t really know who their characters are, what they want, where they’re from, where they are, what it all looks and sounds like exactly. They have some ideas about it but nothing’s set in stone. For me, there’s no real meat to it.

You mentioned teaching, what kind of things about writing do you teach?

In Bible school camp that I used to have to go to every summer, there would always be a scripture that we would repeat every day. And we would have it remembered by the time we went home from camp. So the scripture I get my students to learn is “No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language or knowledge.” It’s one of Jack Kerouac’s rules of writing that I stumbled on one day. And I’m not even a disciple of Kerouac, I’ve never read a book by him. But if I can get my students to remember anything when they go home from my class, I hope it’s that lil rule. It’s guided my work and helped me wrestle with hurts and fears.

Beginning writers are really afraid when they’re first starting out because they want to write something cool. They want to write something good. They want to make art. There are all of these expectations.

But I feel like in order to create any gripping, true, real work, you have to be unafraid. And you have to be honest about who you are and what you’ve experienced, because that’s immediately going to reach the reader. I just try to get my students comfortable with who they are and where they’ve come from. And I do that by telling them where I come from. Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and Dolly Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors” are also very helpful. Those preach “No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language or knowledge” all day long.

I try to make my students proud of their work too. I do a lot of memory driven writing exercises, a lot of psychologically driven writing exercises so that students can get to know themselves better, can get to revisit their memories and stories. A lot of folks don’t realize they have the most amazing stories from their lives. All you gotta do is be willing to look closely and honestly, with no fear or shame.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Kristen Felicetti.

“America is supporting Israel, and that’s what makes us mad as American citizens,” she told The Straits Times.

“We know that America always says it seeks justice, but we don’t see any justice in this,” she said, as friends around her unfurled a Palestinian flag.

Ms Awad was among several hundred protesters at the Washington Monument on Saturday demanding a ceasefire in the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. Alongside her was a friend, Ms Ayesha Kuhil, 72, who said she had family in Gaza and had not heard from them for three days.

Many in the Palestinian diaspora in the United States are deeply conflicted. The war is being broadcast in real time on the Internet – amped up and often distorted by propaganda and disinformation.

That has spilled over into the US, where Palestinian Americans and, more broadly, Arab Americans and Muslims, now face a new wave of Islamophobia.

Reports of Islamophobic language or incidents have come from across the country. Much of them are being fanned by right-wing politicians and media.

In its review of instances of Islamophobia, the journal HuffPost cited Mr Eric Bolling, a host at the conservative cable news company Newsmax, as saying that Palestinians are “addicted to violence” like an “addict is addicted to drugs”.

Mr Dan Gainor, a freelance opinion editor at Fox News, in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, called Palestinians and Arabs “barbarian pigs”.

Others have attacked Muslim legislators. Somali American Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar, one of only two Muslim women in Congress – the other is Ms Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, the lone Palestinian in Congress – has been receiving death threats over the phone.

Mr Charles Kirk, president of the right-wing organisation Turning Point USA, which has promoted Christian nationalism, referred to Ms Omar as “an active threat to the United States”.

Ms Tlaib has been called a “terrorist sympathiser” by Republican congresswoman and Donald Trump ally Marjorie Taylor Greene.

The war has reverberated through university campuses as well, filling social media feeds with scenes of outrage.

In one case, an elite law firm reportedly revoked job offers to three Ivy League students from the universities of Harvard and Columbia who had signed a letter expressing support for Palestinians that blamed Israel for the Hamas attacks.

Anti-Semitism, not far below the surface in the country, has also risen on the back of the war in the Middle East. Much of this, wrote Jewish writer Michael Cohen, a fellow with the Eurasia Group Foundation, in an Oct 21 column for MSNBC, is an “age-old anti-semitic trope that Jews are responsible for their own suffering”.

Former journalist and author Sanford J. Ungar, director of the Free Speech Project at Georgetown University, in an e-mail to ST, said: “On college and university campuses... nearly everyone has by now taken a side in the seemingly endless, symbolic Middle East struggle, and the feelings run very high; nuances have been dropped.

“Professors are being scrutinised in the classroom for alleged bias, and volatile accusations are being exchanged among students.”

The best that university administrators can hope for, he added, is to get deeply polarised groups together for civil conversation about their differences.

Ms Rania Mustafa, New Jersey-based executive director at the non-profit Palestinian American Community Centre, noted “a really deep fear running in our community”.

The centre advocates for the cause of Palestine, and supports and counsels the Palestinian community, among other activities.

Palestinians are struggling to humanise themselves against the trope of radical Islamic militant groups, she told ST. The broader Arab and Muslim community is being stained as well, she said.

“These tropes are hurting (the communities) and taking away from what I think is the root cause of all of this, the Israeli occupation of Palestine. It’s kind of flipping the script, painting the oppressor as the victim, rather than as the oppressor. It’s a difficult time for all Palestinians.”

She added: “Americans that identify as Muslim, Palestinian or Arab are getting the brunt of it and people don’t understand some of the nuances or don’t understand the context or the history.

“They’re just seeing that there’s this evil thing that’s out there that’s coming out of Islamic radicalism, and are painting a huge group of people to be part of that – and we are the ones who are paying the price.”

Palestinian Americans number around 200,000 to 400,000 – part of a 3.7 million-strong Arab American population. New Jersey has one of the largest Palestinian populations in the country.

The current crisis comes just as US public opinion has become “modestly more positive towards both sides in the Israel-Palestinian conflict”, according to a 2022 Pew Research Centre survey.

Overall, Americans continued to express more positive feelings towards Israelis than towards Palestinians – and to rate the Israeli government more favourably than the Palestinian government, Pew found.

But there was a difference between older and younger people. Adults under 30 viewed Palestinians at least as warmly (61 per cent very or somewhat favourable) as Israelis (56 per cent), Pew found.

“There’s a lot of invigorated pro-Palestinian solidarity in the US, not just from the Palestinian American diaspora, but from allies across the spectrum,” said Mr Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a New York-based US Policy Fellow at a Palestinian policy think tank called Al-Shabaka.

“But there’s this reinvigorated hatred that I believe has roots back in the post 9/11 years and that led up to the (2003) Iraq – and these two strands are definitely clashing,” he noted.

The post Israel-Hamas war plunges Palestinian Americans into vortex of fear and emotion appeared first on Al-Shabaka.

This content originally appeared on Al-Shabaka and was authored by Tariq Kenney-Shawa.

Between March and September 2023, IStories received four threatening messages via the feedback form on the outlet’s website. The messages mentioned the names, addresses, and travel plans of IStories’ reporters Alesya Marokhovskaya and Irina Dolinina, according to a IStories report published September 19.

Both Marokhovskaya and Dolinina live in the Czech capital of Prague, where most of IStories’ editorial staff relocated following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and subsequent criminalization of “false information” about the Russian military.

“The threats sent to exiled journalists Alesya Marokhovskaya and Irina Dolinina are another alarming reminder that the risks faced by independent Russian journalists do not stop when they relocate to European countries to continue their work,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Czech authorities must take those threats seriously, conduct a swift and thorough investigation into them, and ensure the journalists’ protection and safety.”

The first message, sent on March 3, said, “May your nits from the streets of [name of a street] and [name of another street] not sleep in peace! Hello to them!” according to a screenshot published by IStories. Marokhovskaya and Dolinina, whose home addresses are not publicly available, at that time lived in the streets mentioned in the message, the report said.

“Rest assured, you can’t hide from us anywhere. We know your scumbag ran away like a rat in terror, we will find her elsewhere. She’s not anywhere to go and she’ll have to answer for every lie and evil thing she’s said […]. We’ll find her wherever she walks her wheezing dog. None of you can hide anywhere now,” read the second message, which was sent August 24. Marokhovskaya has a dog that makes wheezing-like sounds due to breathing problems, IStories reported.

IStories said they decided to go public about the threats after having recently received messages warning both journalists against attending a journalism conference in Sweden. “You know who to tell this to: they can’t go to Gothenburg. Not even for a day. It’s known where to look for them. Trust me,” a September 14 message said.

The next day, IStories received a message mentioning the names of Marokhovskaya and Dolinina, as well as their flight and hotel information. “Take it seriously. I don’t want to scare you. I want to help. Tickets, hotel — everything is known. These are not just words,” the message said.

The journalists did not go to the conference for fear that they “could put in danger other participants,” Dolinina told CPJ via messaging app.

All the messages were sent from the email address “zzz@mail.ru,” according to the screenshots. The March message was signed by “Yevgeny P.,” while the others were not signed. The letter “Z” became a pro-war symbol shortly after Russia began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The journalists cannot tie the threats to any specific reporting, but both believe that they are connected to their reporting on the war, Dolinina told CPJ, adding, “We have done a lot about it.”

Marokhovskaya told CPJ via email that it has become “very difficult” to feel good. “It’s a lot of pressure when you don’t know what else to expect and from whom exactly,” she said. “It’s hard not to slip into paranoia.”

Dolinina and Marokhovskaya both filed a complaint with the Czech police on September 6, they told CPJ. Major Jan Danek, the head of the press department of the Regional Directorate of the Prague Police, told CPJ via email Thursday that he did not know whether the journalists had contacted the police.

Russian authorities’ have repeatedly harassed IStories, including by trying to intimidate its journalists and labeling the outlet a “foreign agent” and an “undesirable” organization.

Other Russian journalists living in exile have also been targets of harassment, surveillance, and suspected poisoning. On September 13, an investigation by rights group Access Now and research organization Citizen Lab revealed that the phone of Galina Timchenko, the Latvia-based head of independent Russian-language news website Meduza, was infected by Pegasus, a form of zero-click spyware produced by the Israeli company NSO Group, while she was in Germany in February. On the next day, three Latvia-based journalists reported that Apple had notified them that their phone could have been targeted by hacker attacks.

In August, Elena Kostyuchenko and Irina Babloyan, two exiled Russian journalists reported that they may have been poisoned in Germany and Georgia, respectively, in October 2022.

In July, Russian journalist Marfa Smirnova, a reporter with independent news website The Insider, who is now living in Georgia, reported that unidentified individuals have been sending her threatening messages via Telegram since April.

Those individuals had warned Smirnova to “stop writing” and “change her profession,” or otherwise face an “unavoidable meeting,” and sent her an audio recording of a conversation in her family’s Moscow apartment, a photo of her family members in a car, and said they knew her family’s home address, according to those reports. In an interview with the U.S. Congress-funded international broadcaster Voice Of America, she said the threats came after her reporting on the war in Ukraine.

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

Posters have been appearing on university campuses across the country calling for sanctions amid an ongoing crackdown on peaceful dissent and political opposition under the Hong Kong National Security Law, amid a risk of violent attacks from supporters of Beijing.

Some 30-40 students at nine universities including Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh and University College London have signed up for a poster and leaflet campaign launched by the campaign group HKers United, the head of the organization told Radio Free Asia. 

"There are a great many international students in the United Kingdom, and a lot of students come to the U.K. to study," said the group’s leader, who gave only the name Rex. 

"In some countries, for example, Sweden, or Poland, they may not have a clear understanding of what is happening in Hong Kong, and we want more people to pay attention to this. Then they can explain it to people back home."

But Rex said the poster campaign has been marred – apparently by the actions of Beijing's supporters on British soil.

"We put up the posters, and they disappeared the next day," Rex said. "We all know that there are a lot of Chinese students on [British] campuses, and we highly suspect that it was them."

"But we can't let that stop us because it's hard to avoid."

The renewed campaign comes amid growing concerns over Chinese Communist Party infiltration of all aspects of British life, and warnings from Hong Kongers in exile over growing acts of violence by Beijing’s supporters and officials alike.

Overseas activists frequently report being targeted by agents and supporters of the Chinese state, including secret Chinese police stations in a number of countries.

Protecting culture and freedom

Meanwhile, a petition calling on the government to sanction officials and civil servants whose actions contribute to breaches of rights and freedoms that Beijing promised would remain after the 1997 handover had garnered more than 20,000 signatures when viewed on Monday.

"The U.K. has to take responsibility to monitor China’s implementation," the petition read, citing the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration governing the handover to Chinese rule.

"We want the U.K. Government to implement sanctions to pressure the Chinese regime not to undermine the rules of law, democracy and autonomy of Hong Kong and protect the interests of the British in Hong Kong," it said.

A Hong Kong student who gave only the nickname Water said people had been out on his campus in London on Monday, promoting the petition.

"Students ... represent the opinions of the next generation of Hong Kongers," Water said. "We are very worried right now about whether we can pass on Hong Kong's culture and its freedoms can be passed on [to the next generation]."

"If our generation doesn't do this, then there's no guarantee that the next generation will," he said.

He said older Hong Kongers sometimes express fear and concern for his generation of student activists, however.

Activists at risk

U.K.-based former pro-democracy lawmaker Dennis Kwok, who is among eight overseas activists wanted by Hong Kong's national security police for allegedly "serious crimes" under the national security law, said he believes many more people are too scared of potential repercussions to join the campaign.

Calling for sanctions has been criminalized under the National Security Law, under clauses banning "collusion with foreign powers."

National security police have hauled in family members of most of the eight wanted activists in recent weeks for questioning, in addition to placing a HK$1 million bounty on each of the activists' heads.

"Our goal is to obtain 100,000 signatures to show the strength of public opinion ... by Jan. 10 next year," Kwok told Radio Free Asia. "We are hoping that the British government will use stronger diplomacy ... to protect political dissidents and activists with British National Overseas passports or British nationality, including Jimmy Lai."

Lai, a British citizen who founded the now-shuttered pro-democracy Apple Daily newspaper, faces two counts of "conspiracy to collude with foreign forces" and one count of "collusion with foreign forces" under a draconian security law imposed by Beijing in the wake of the 2019 protest movement, along with a charge relating to "seditious" publications. 

He was first arrested in August 2020 and is currently serving time for fraud in connection with the lease on his Next Digital media empire's headquarters.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office replied to the petition: "We keep all sanctions designations under close and regular review. We do not speculate about future sanctions designations, as to do so could reduce their impact."

It said China is in "ongoing non-compliance" with the 1984 Joint Declaration, pointing to its suspension of the extradition treaty with Hong Kong, and the extension of an arms embargo on mainland China to Hong Kong.

Kwok dismissed the British government's response to the petition as "insufficient."

Translated by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Cheryl Tung for RFA Cantonese.

Clashes between junta troops and the Shan State Progressive Party/Shan State Army, or SSPP/SSA, in southern Shan’s Laihka township, and the Ta’ang National Liberation Army, or TNLA, in northern Shan’s Muse, Lashio and Kutkai townships since late last month are the military’s first orchestrated attacks against the groups since its 2021 coup d’etat.

Analysts said the offensives suggest the junta is trying to cut off the flow of weapons from the two groups to the armed resistance in lower Sagaing and Magway regions.

Following pressure from the junta on SSPP/SSA troops to withdraw from Laihka, fierce fighting broke out between the two sides on Aug. 6, prompting around 1,000 ethnic Ta’ang and Shan people to flee area villages, according to SSPP/SSA spokesman Major Sai Phone Han.

“There has been news that all anti-junta forces will be driven out from the Laihka area,” he told RFA Burmese, noting that the military had called in reinforcements of about 1,000 more soldiers, including members of the pro-junta Pyi Thu Sit militia. “[Anti-junta armed groups] in the south have tried to convince us to come to them, but we intend to stay here [to ensure the security of the area].”

In the meantime, residents of Laihka said they are frightened because of increased junta troop activity in the township.

“One side of the fighting has reinforced and the other side is trying to block them – it’s worrying indeed, as the tension between them is high,” said one resident, who declined to be named citing security concerns. “We saw two military junta helicopters hovering over our town today.”

The resident said that the local community is worried that the fighting will reach the seat of Laihka township, noting that those displaced by earlier clashes have yet to return home.

In Muse, Lashio and Kutkai townships, junta troops and TNLA forces fought “nearly everyday” from July 23 to Aug. 12, with the military deploying attack helicopters in Lashio during the last two days, TNLA spokesman Lieutenant Col. My Aik Kyaw told RFA.

“We don’t know what they aim to achieve in their offensives,” he said, adding that at least a dozen battles took place over the period.

RFA attempts to reach junta Shan state spokesman and economic minister Khun Thein Maung regarding the situation in the region went unanswered Thursday. 

RFA contacted junta Shan State Security and Border Affairs Minister Colonel Sein Win by telephone, but he declined to comment, saying he was in a meeting.

Targeting flow of weapons

Than Soe Naing, a researcher of Myanmar affairs, told RFA he believes the junta is putting pressure on ethnic armies in Shan state to stop the flow of weapons to the armed resistance in other parts of the country.

"[The military] assumes that the weapons flowing into Sagaing and Magway are coming from the Ta’ang region, so blocking the Ta’ang region is an important task for them,” he said. “No matter how many political discussions they hold with the … armed groups [in Shan], including the Ta’ang, they cannot help but interfere militarily. That’s why they will continue to fight.”

He said that the junta wants to remove the SSPP/SSA from Laihka and replace it with a rival group, the Restoration Council of Shan State/Shan State Army, or RCSS/SSA, with whom it has a good relationship, and is willing to fight a protracted war to do so.

While the SSPP/SSA is not a signatory to the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement, signed in 2015 and aimed at ending the country’s long-running armed conflicts, it is among the groups that meet frequently in the capital Naypyidaw with the junta’s Peace Delegation.

Two other rebel groups signed the agreement in 2018, bringing the number to 10. The signatories want a national military that cannot participate in politics and the formation of a federal democratic union in Myanmar.

The peace process was killed off when the Myanmar military seized power from the elected civilian-led government in a February 2021 coup, sparking new waves of violence with ethnic armies joining forces with anti-junta resistance fighters and engaging in insurgency and heavy clashes across the country.

TNLA leaders said that the situation in Shan state “depends on the military,” and that fighting is likely to continue as the junta’s offensive intensifies.

Translated by Myo Min Aung. Edited by Joshua Lipes.

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

Photograph Source: Caleb Roenigk – CC BY 2.0

In the wake of the Great Recession there was a spate of news articles warning of the menace of deflation. The story was that something really bad would happen if the rate of inflation went from a modest positive rate to a modest negative rate. This means something really bad would happen if the rate of inflation was -0.5 percent, as opposed to 0.5 percent. This made zero sense then and it also makes zero sense now.

To understand the issue, it is important to realize there is a grain of truth to the story. In principle, when companies are considering an investment, they will look at the real rate of interest they have to pay. This is the rate of interest they pay in the market, say 6.0 percent on a bond they issue to borrow money, minus the expected rate of inflation in the product they expect to produce.

That means that, if they are producing cars, and they expect the price of cars to rise at a 2.0 percent annual rate over the period of time their investment will be operating, they will effectively be looking at a 4.0 percent real interest rate (6.0 percent minus 2.0 percent equals 4.0 percent). In this story, if the rate of inflation in car prices falls, say to 1.0 percent, then the real rate of interest will rise, in this case to 5.0 percent. At this higher real rate of interest, businesses will be less likely to invest.

The general story is that other things equal (yes, this is a huge qualifier), the lower the rate of inflation, the higher the real rate of interest. This means that lower inflation (and more importantly lower expected inflation), will discourage investment.

So, what’s the deal with deflation? First, it is important to recognize that a lower inflation rate means a higher real interest rate. From this perspective, any drop in the rate of inflation is bad news, there is no special magic to crossing zero. The drop in the rate of inflation from 0.5 percent to -0.5 percent is not qualitatively different from the drop from 1.5 percent to 0.5 percent. Both declines have the effect of raising the real rate of interest and reducing investment.

The other point is simply definitional. The consumer price index, or whatever inflation measure we use, is simply an average of the rates of inflation across thousands of different items. When the rate of inflation gets near zero it means that the prices of many items are already falling. It just means that price rises in other items outweigh the declines in the items with falling prices.

When the overall index crosses zero and goes negative, it just means that the weight of the items with falling prices now exceeds the weight of the items with rising prices. This is not a crisis, it doesn’t really mean anything.

There is a story where deflation can become self-perpetuating, but this is not a case where we edge below zero, it’s a case where there is a sudden economic collapse that sends prices plummeting, as happened at the start of the Great Depression. In that case, we were talking about double-digit price declines, not rates of inflation that were just slightly less than zero.

And no, edging downward does not threaten a deflationary spiral. Japan had several periods of deflation in the last three decades. There was no tendency for the rate of deflation to accelerate. It is reasonable to assume that China is in the same situation.

This doesn’t mean China’s economy doesn’t face problems. Its pattern of growth based on booming exports seems to have to come to an end, due to competition from lower wage countries and protectionist measures from the United States. Its government has also hampered its tech sector by imposing stronger controls.

Nonetheless, its economy is still growing much faster that of the U.S. and other rich countries, so no one should imagine that it is now dead in the water. In any case, its problem is not deflation. Contrary to what you read in the paper, if China’s rate of inflation crosses zero and turns negative, it really doesn’t matter.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.  

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.

It takes about an hour to drive to the Canadian border from the tiny town of Croghan, New York. The area is heavily forested, on the edge of the sprawling Adirondack Park, and in the event of a wildfire, local volunteers bear responsibility for controlling and containing the blaze — even if it’s on state land. So far, they’ve had success.

“We’re lucky up here,” retired firefighter Steve Monnat told New York Focus. “When it gets dry, it doesn’t last very long.”

In his nearly five decades with the Croghan Volunteer Fire Department, Monnat never encountered a wildfire larger than a few acres. Few in New York have. But with the climate, that may change.

As heatwaves intensify and weather patterns swing between periods of heavy precipitation and prolonged drought, New York’s favorable, wildfire-stifling conditions may soon turn. Some argue that the present lack of fire increases the risk of deadly blazes in the future, and that intentional controlled burns are the best preparation. Others find the prospect too destructive, too risky.

“It is very likely that fire frequency and fire regimes are going to change here in the northeast, and that the chances of wildfire are going to increase,” said Andrew Vander Yacht, an ecologist at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse. Extensive droughts and rising temperatures may dry forest fuels, he said, increasing the likelihood and severity of wildfires — unless New York burns the fuels first.

The state boasts 18.6 million acres of forested land, much of it publicly owned or constitutionally protected. Though many states perform extensive controlled burns to mitigate the risk of wildfires, New York prohibits the practice in its two largest forested regions. One of them, the Catskill Park, is nearly the size of Rhode Island. The other, the Adirondack Park, is larger than the Yellowstone, Everglades, Glacier, and Grand Canyon national parks combined. And unlike in those national parks — or the forested regions now burning in Canada — hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers live in and around state-protected woodlands.

Relatively few are on staff to manage them. New York employs about 130 forest rangers to cover 4.9 million acres of land — over 36,000 acres per ranger. They don’t just care for the state’s forests; their duties include law enforcement and search and rescue. Forest ranger attrition has plagued the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation for years, and some fear these personnel strains could inhibit the agency from carrying out a more involved fire management strategy.

In Croghan, about 50 volunteer firefighters put out the flames in town and on dec land alike. They range from high school students to senior citizens, some of whom maintain their membership solely to participate in the department’s social functions and no longer respond to emergencies. In the event of a major forest fire, they would need to call for additional help from downstate.

Fortunately, the department has not faced a major forest fire in living memory. “Never happened,” said Monnat. “Hopefully it never does.”

Not only does New York have a wetter climate than wildfire-prone regions of Canada and the American West, but the state’s tree species tend to be less susceptible to fire.

“Canada has large remote tracts of spruce, fir boreal forest,” dec spokesperson Jeff Wernick told New York Focus. “New York has some boreal forest in the Adirondacks, but it is segmented. New York has more temperate hardwood forests, which are a lot less susceptible to the types of fire Canada is having, especially after the spring green-up.”

Art Perryman, a longtime ranger who recently returned from fighting forest fires in Nova Scotia, is less sanguine. This summer, unprecedented wildfires in the historically wet Canadian province burned over 58,000 acres of land and displaced over 6,000 people. Perryman said that the similarities between Nova Scotia and the Adirondacks disturbed him.

“They have a very similar climate to us in terms of rainfall,” Perryman told New York Focus. “They’re essentially at the same latitude as us here in the Adirondacks and the fuel type is not all that different.”

Without consensus on whether proactive wildfire prevention measures — like underbrush-clearing burns — are prudent or feasible, the state’s plan is unchanged: Keep suppressing the blazes as they come.

Before Canada’s wildfire smoke started to blow down this summer, forest fires rarely troubled New Yorkers. Wildfires seldom burn more than 3,000 acres in New York per year, passing mostly unnoticed by the state’s population.

That wasn’t always the case. In the early 20th century, upstate wildfires decimated hundreds of thousands of acres every year, poisoned waterways, and blanketed New York City in ash. Rampant logging littered forests with fuel, and the state’s booming railway industry provided ample sparks. In 1903, New York suffered 643 wildfires that together burned over 450,000 acres of land.

Prior to the arrival of European settlers, New York’s indigenous inhabitants used prescribed burns to clear underbrush. According to Les Benedict and Jessica Raspitha of the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe Environment Division, which manages the reservation’s 6,800 acres of forested land along the Canadian border, controlled burns aren’t just part of their people’s past. Soon, they may use them again to clear invasive phragmites — a common type of dry, grassy reed — that have spread throughout their tribal forests.

“The reeds grow very close together,” Raspitha told New York Focus. “They push out all the native vegetation that would grow around it.” If left undisturbed, phragmites multiply and accumulate from year to year — providing rich fuel for fires.

Forest managers like Benedict and Raspitha see controlled burns as a useful tool, yet they remain off limits in the Catskills and Adirondacks.

“We are so ignorant when it comes to fire management in New York state,” Ryan Trapani, director of forest services for the nonprofit Catskill Forest Association, told New York Focus. “I wish we were burning more.”

Not all environmentalists agree. For John Sheehan, director of communications for the conservationist nonprofit Adirondack Council, wildfires do not, and will not, pose a significant enough threat to justify controlled burns.

“We had 60 wildfires last year that burned almost a thousand acres in the Adirondacks,” Sheehan told New York Focus. “You double that you’re still not talking even a tiny fraction of the 6 million [acres] we have inside the park.”

Mismanaged, controlled burns can have devastating effects. In 2022, the us Forest Service lost control of a fire it’d set in New Mexico, accidentally destroying over 300,000 acres of land and displacing tens of thousands of people.

Benedict and Raspitha understand the risks and said their division will not perform any controlled burns without proper authorization, training, and preparation. “You need trained experts,” Benedict said.

A single controlled burn requires at least three people to perform. New York may not have the staff. The state’s forest rangers have expressed concerns that they do not have enough personnel to perform their existing duties, let alone any new ones.

“There’s not enough rangers,” said Dave Holden, an environmental activist and longtime resident of the Catskills region. “They’re underfunded for regular operations.”

But if you ask Perryman, the state has the money. He estimates that New York receives about $7,500 each time a ranger deploys out of state to fight wildfires, which he believes should finance a dedicated wildfire protection fund.

“It’s a pittance for New York state,” Perryman said. “But it’s very important … for our program and being ready for these large, destructive wildfires.”

Vander Yacht, who runs suny’s Applied Forest and Fire Ecology Lab, is also in favor of controlled burns. He points to a 2021 study that predicts the frequency of wildfires in New York will more than double by the end of this century.

The Catskills’s oak forests pose the greatest risk of burning in the near future, Vander Yacht said, and a major forest fire in the Adirondacks is less likely. But a blaze in that region could wreak immense destruction due to dense growth and underbrush accumulation — made possible by decades without fires.

Other states, including California, Florida, Vermont, and Pennsylvania, liberally employ prescribed burns to mitigate the risk of wildfires. In New York, they’re far less common, but not unheard of.

Sheehan lives in Albany, and he acknowledges the regular use of controlled burns near his home to mitigate the risk of wildfires in the Albany Pine Barren. But he worries that human intervention in New York’s protected forests could disturb the natural conditions that have long suppressed wildfires.

“Really the only period of time that we had major wildfire problems inside the [Adirondack] park was after a period of long deforestation,” Sheehan said, pointing to the dark history of exploitative logging in the 19th and early 20th centuries. “The forest floor got exposed to sunlight in ways that had never happened before, not because trees fell down or something in a storm, but because they were hauled away.”

In 1885 — spurred by the rapid decimation of the state’s woodlands — the New York state legislature established the Forest Preserve, which grew to include millions of acres in the Catskills and Adirondacks. Nine years later, at the 1894 constitutional convention, the Forest Preserve gained even stronger protections.

Article xiv of the New York state constitution states that the Forest Preserve “shall be forever kept as wild forest lands.” Sheehan believes the “forever wild” clause prohibits controlled burns in the Catskills and Adirondacks. Vander Yacht and Trapani also expressed doubts that the state constitution allows such measures in protected forests. But in a 1930 case, the state’s top court found that the “forever wild” clause exists to protect state forests, and therefore permits “all things necessary” to preserve those forests, including “measures to prevent forest fires.”

Wernick, the dec spokesperson, said state environmental conservation law grants the agency “broad statutory authority” to suppress fires on state lands, and that the dec may determine which fire suppression strategies — including controlled burns — are appropriate and warranted.

The dec does not currently allow prescribed burns in the Catskills and Adirondacks, and it hasn’t shown any inclination to use them in the future.

Some of the agency’s frontline staff are pushing to change that. Leading a group of rangers who helped fight this summer’s Canadian wildfires, Perryman plans on lobbying dec leadership to revamp the agency’s wildfire prevention policies — advocating for the use of prescribed burns, additional training for rangers and firefighters, and an update for the state’s aging inventory of forest firefighting equipment.

Perryman told New York Focus he reached out to dec Commissioner Basil Seggos, but he has yet to receive a direct response.

Even absent major forest fires, volunteering with a rural fire department is “a busy little way of life,” according to Monnat. Holden worries that unless New York revamps its wildfire management policies, the state’s firefighters may find themselves much busier.

Holden acknowledges that many voters and policymakers remain unconvinced that New York needs to do more to mitigate the risk of wildfires in the state’s protected forests. His pitch is short and to the point.

“What would you rather have?” Holden asks. “Us clearing your property, preventing it from burning up? [Or] would you rather have firefighters coming on your property, whether you want them or not, because it’s burning up?”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Will a fear of fires burn New York? on Aug 5, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Nathan Porceng, New York Focus.

The post Republicans Fear America Will Become Communist…Really? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nick Licata.

Image by Fabrizio Frigeni.

When in 2018, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed took office in Ethiopia, a wave of hope and optimism enveloped the nation. After 27 years living under the brutal TPLF (Tigray People’s Liberation Front) dominated EPRDF coalition, the people breathed a collective sigh of relief. Many Ethiopians living overseas, eager to contribute, returned to their beloved homeland; exiled opposition parties, media workers and activists were invited to return in a spirit of inclusion.

Publicly at least, PM Abiy said all the right things: he spoke of unity, democracy and human rights. And in September 2018, five months after taking office, the positive mood was cemented when a peace deal was agreed with President Isaias Afewerki of Eritrea. Hostilities (fueled by the TPLF, which had been going on for 20 years), came to an end, and in 2019 Abiy was awarded The Noble Peace Prize for his efforts. Unsurprisingly perhaps, Afewerki, who has successfully resisted global interference in Eritrea, was not included in the honor.

Optimism and national hope was quickly extinguished however, and the true repressive colors of Abiy and his regime were revealed; a controlling divisive methodology that has intensified year on year.

The sight of a despot masquerading as a lover of democracy is as repulsive as it is common. Leaders like Abiy, rule through fear, control, and the fermentation of social division. The antidote to their brutality, difficult to accomplish, is unity; sustained, peaceful, collective action (think Arab Spring e.g.). Against a united populous, focused and mobilized, no regime, no matter how cruel, can stand. Repressive regimes know this well, hence the focus on fueling communal divisions and maintaining social hardship. Political activism is a luxury when you’re hungry or destitute.

Crushing criticism

Freedom of all kinds is the enemy of all such regimes; freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and freedom of the media; essential elements of a democratic nation and a free society, enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

Freedom of expression, like all such rights, flows from The Good – that Center of Righteousness, which sits within the heart of everyone, even the dictator, where it is suffocated under the weight of self-delusion and enmity. Animated by the unifying force of love, freedom of expression is rightly seen as a threat, perhaps the major threat to men like Abiy and his cronies. To counter this, a methodology of suppression becomes necessary, with the aim of controlling the flow of information, stifling dissent and silencing government critics.

Open criticism of the regime, in particular the government’s involvement in the genocide of the Amhara people is not tolerated. Tens of thousands (estimates between 25,000 – 40,000) of Amhara, the second largest ethnic group in Ethiopia, have been killed by Oromo fanatics – led by the Oromo Liberation Front/Army (OLF/A), an extreme group of Oromo nationalists, and their sympathizers, including members of the Oromo Regional Authority. Hundreds of thousands are displaced, adding to the estimated 5-7 million of IDP’s already scattered throughout the country.

Predictably, outspoken journalists and independent media outlets of all kinds (including social media), opposition politicians and local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are the primary targets. Internet access is closely controlled, surveillance of Government critics is widespread. The US-based NGO Freedom House (FH) report that, “Government security agencies surveil individuals and politicians through wire-tapping. Digital surveillance and the use of individual informants to spy on people is widespread.”

Arbitrary arrests are commonplace. Journalists, political activists and NGO workers taken without warning from their home, place of work or grabbed on the street by “security personnel”, to be hauled away and held in a non-disclosed location.

Dozens of advocates of the truth from the Governments “To Be Silenced” list have been removed from their keyboard, camera or TV screen, their desk or podium, and locked away. Routinely detained without charge or trial and held incommunicado, after an initial period many are accused under the widely criticized Anti-Terrorism Law, which allows individuals to be imprisoned indefinitely.

Commenting on the unlawful detentions, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) state that it “paints a deeply depressing picture of the state of press freedom in the country … authorities should release all detained journalists, investigate allegations that some members of the press have been mistreated or assaulted while in state custody, and ensure that journalists do not operate in an environment of fear.”

An “environment of fear” however, is precisely the atmosphere the Government wants to create; this is being facilitated not just by the arrests but by the violent treatment (including sexual violence) those arrested face in custody. Fear it is that animates the actions of regimes like the one ensconced in Addis Ababa, and fear it is that allows them to remain in place.

‘Not free’

Freedom of expression is a pivotal right, one that relates to and strengthens a range of other universal principles. These include freedom of assembly, freedom for NGO’s to operate, academic freedom, religious freedom, freedom of movement, and freedom from exploitation. Combined with the existence of an independent judiciary, of non-prejudicial laws and the observation of due process, these are the foundations of a democratic nation.

Freedom House looked at all of these areas in there country assessment, and concluded, to the surprise of nobody, that Ethiopia is “not free”. There is no freedom of the media, “reports from state media agencies must follow the narrative of the ruling party; content that is contrary to the government’s narrative is removed.” Academic freedom is highly restricted and “self-censorship remains common in the context of ongoing conflicts and political tensions”. NGOs including local civil society organizations “face threats and warnings for advocating for issues contrary to the government’s position, especially in relation to internal conflicts.”

In practice speaking out against the official line, or drawing attention to Government involvement in the slaughter of Amhara people will lead, not just to “threats and warnings”, but to arrests and potential imprisonment. Once detained, the accused, if they reach the courts, has little or no chance of a fair hearing. “Due process rights are generally not respected. The right to a fair trial is often not respected, particularly for government critics.” The FH report goes on to make clear that the judiciary “is subject to political interference, and judgments rarely deviate from government policy”. Furthermore, “corruption within the justice system remains a significant challenge, and judges caught accepting bribes are rarely punished.”

Those who are being punished in Ethiopia are the lovers of truth, advocates for democracy, human rights and political pluralism. There is no law and order worthy of the name – terrorists in the shape of the TPLF and OLF are part of the political class; ethnic violence against Amhara people and house demolitions of Amhara communities and other non-Oromos are ignored or, as many believe, facilitated by government agencies. Trust in the PM, in government bodies and national institutions is weak, uncertainty and anger is pervasive, particularly among the Amhara people.

For decades Ethiopia has been one of the most repressive places in the world. For independent journalists, political activists and local NGO workers, who refuse to be silenced, it is also one of the most dangerous. The TPLF designed a Methodology of Control and Division; PM Abiy and his Prosperity Party, have refined and expanded it.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Graham Peebles.

And so began my latest trip to London. This time, I wasn’t there to talk to “the Left” or to hunt down endoparasitoid xenomorphs. I was there on Serious Conspiracy Theorist Business, which I explained to the chirpy MI6 operative posing as a “survey taker” that followed me out of Border Control asking questions about my “nation of residence” and my “experience with the passport scanners,” and so on. She was wearing one of those rubber “Mission Impossible” masks that made her look like a middle-aged British woman. I waited for an opportunity, head faked, juked right, and lost her in the crowd. As I entered the “Arrivals” lobby, I turned and shouted in her general direction, “NOT MY FIRST RODEO, MR. PHELPS!”

I don’t know what was up with all the shouting. I’ve been experimenting with different types of medication for this sinus condition I’ve had for months. My Sinus Specialist diagnosed me with “long” or possibly “permanent Covid,” or some yet-to-be-named debilitating syndrome caused by some other bio-weapon that produces cold-and-flu-like symptoms and has a survival rate of 99.8 percent. So, maybe it was bad reaction to my meds. Whatever it was, I was feeling jumpy.

And the climate-change apocalypse didn’t help. Emerging from the Tube in Westminster was like walking into an enormous open-air sauna. Bodies were lying all around on the sidewalks. AFP photographers in hazmat suits were taking pictures of the carnage. Herds of corpulent American tourists staggered through the streets in semi-fugue states sweating profusely and thumbing their phones like an invasion of alien albino hippos trying to call up to their UAPs and arrange for immediate emergency extraction. I pushed and shoved and elbowed my way down Tothill Street to my pod hotel, checked in, and proceeded to get hopelessly lost in the maze of identical Kubrickian hallways that eventually led me to my luxury pod, and cleaned myself up for the night’s festivities.

What was I doing back in London in the middle of a heat wave? Well … OK, I’m allowed to tell you about it now. As you are probably aware, Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Russell Brand were doing this public event last Thursday …

… but that’s not what I was really there for.

Not that the Thursday event wasn’t fun. It was. Despite the rather pricey tickets, there was a good size house and spirits were high. Russell Brand was in top form, pouring out torrents of intellectual free-association like an English Neal Cassady and nailing the punchlines of all the jokes. Michael was also firing on all cylinders. He worked the house like a seasoned politician, whipping the crowd into a veritable frenzy of anti-totalitarian fervor. Stella Assange took the stage at one point and briefed us on the official crucifixion of her husband, which, sadly, now looks like a fait accompli. Matt, who had just made it to London that morning, and so was jet-lagged and delieriously sleep-deprived, dispensed with the speech he had rewritten on the plane, and just winged it, and somehow pulled it off … because that, as they say, is show biz.

Here’s the money part of Matt’s speech, which he paraphrased in London (emphasis mine):

What Michael and I were looking at was something new, an Internet-age approach to political control that uses brute digital force to alter reality itself. We certainly saw plenty of examples of censorship and de-platforming and government collaboration in those efforts. However, it’s clear that the idea behind the sweeping system of digital surveillance combined with thousands or even millions of subtle rewards and punishments built into the online experience, is to condition people to censor themselves.

Early the next morning, Michael, Matt, and a secret cabal of international journalists, editors, organizers, political satirists, academics, and other Very Serious People whose names I am not at liberty to mention gathered in an undisclosed location and spent the better part of the day sharing harmful misinformation and strategizing about how to defeat (or marginally disrupt) the network of governments, Intelligence agencies, global corporations, NGOs, and so-called disinformation experts known as the Censorship Industrial Complex. There were delegates from the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, and other nominally sovereign countries.

This heretofore clandestine meeting was conducted in what appeared to be a WWII-era air-raid shelter that had been converted into a private BDSM club under military-level OPSEC protocols (i.e., the meeting was conducted according to the protocols, not the architectural conversion). I’m not entirely sure why that was. We weren’t doing anything even remotely illegal. However, given that I’m under criminal investigation here in Germany for tweeting the cover art of my book, and the IRS’s sudden interest in Matt, and Kit Klarenberg’s recent experience in Luton, perhaps the abundance of caution was warranted. The last thing we needed was the UK Thought Police goose-stepping in like Basil Fawlty and dragging everyone off to Room 101.

Anyway, that’s what I was actually there for. I had never met most of the people in attendance, except online on the double-encrypted Russian-backed dark-web conspiracy-theorist channels where we hatch our right-wing-extremist plots to defend people’s rights to freedom-of-speech and engage in other harmful anti-Democracy behaviors. I’m still not sure who I actually met in London, as we were all wearing identical Mickey-Mouse masks and speaking through portable voice modifiers. (In any secret meeting like this, you have to assume you’ve been infiltrated!)

After the obligatory arguing about the agenda, we settled in and shared our country reports, which, unsurprisingly, were all variations on a theme. I won’t go into all the details. Michael Shellenberger’s non-profit has been tracking those developments. Matt Taibbi and Racket News are reporting it. Other alternative media outlets are reporting it. Millions of people all around the world are talking about it, writing about it, and arguing with each other about it. Your Twitter feed is probably full of it. Alex Gutentag just published a huge article about it.

So, what is it, exactly, that is going on?

The thing that was horrifying about listening to my colleagues reporting on the state of things in their countries — or, rather, the thing that should be horrifying but is becoming a mundane fact of life — is that more or less the same totalitarian program is being rolled out in countries throughout the world. The censorship. The official propaganda. The criminalization of dissent. The pathologization of dissent. The manipulation of our perception of reality. The coordinated transformation of the world into a smiley-faced neo-Orwellian police state in which politics no longer matters because society has been divided into two basic classes; i.e., “the normals,” who are prepared to mindlessly follow orders and parrot whatever official propaganda they are fed, and “the deviants,” or “extremists,” who are not.

Seriously, all satire aside, think about the implications of that.

As you sit there in whichever nominally sovereign country you’re sitting there reading this in, ask yourself, “how and why is this happening?” Then ask yourself, “why is it happening now?”

If you do not have answers to those questions, it might behoove you to attempt to come up with some. That is basically what I’ve been trying to do — in a satirical and sometimes not so satirical manner — in these Consent Factory essays for the last seven years. I’m not going to summarize it all again here. I’ve done that, repeatedly, in my essays and books. I did it the last time I visited London to give a talk at the Real Left Conference.

I did it again at this gathering in London. It did not go over all that well.

The thing is, most of us are so laser-focused on the trees that we cannot see the forest. But our adversaries see the forest. They see the forest like fucking eagles. They own the fucking forest and everything in it. While we hop like squirrels from tree to tree, distracted from distraction by distraction, from limited hangout by limited hangout, they are building a big fucking fence around it and deploying the Forest-Ranger Sturmabteilung.

I’m reminded of that infamous Karl Rove quote. He was referring to the USA, of course, but it was GloboCap (i.e., the Corporatocracy) that he was really speaking for whether he knew it or not …

That’s not the way the world really works anymore … we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.  [The New York Times Magazine]

If we do not want to end up “studying that reality,” the global, pathologized-totalitarian reality that is being subtly and not so subtly implemented simultaneously in countries throughout the world, at some point we had better come up with some actual answers to those questions above.

The supranational, globally-hegemonic, post-ideological system of power that runs our world — whatever you need to call it — has answers to those questions. It has a story. It is a story about a beneficent global empire governed by authoritative scientific experts who are trying to save the world from Whatever and protect everyone from “disinformation” and “harmful” speech, ideas, and so on. Like every good story, it has an antagonist. Us. We are the official enemy. Right, Left, libertarian, anarchist, Islamic fundamentalist, Christian fundamentalist … it does not make one iota of difference. There is only the Empire, and those who oppose it. The Empire does not give a shit why. It is conducting a global “Clear-and-Hold” operation, wiping out internal resistance and establishing ideological uniformity. It could not care less what you think you believe in. All it wants is mindless obedience and rote repetition of its propaganda. That’s how totalitarianism works.

And there I go with my story again. If anyone has a different story that makes sense of the last seven years — and arguably the last 30 years — honestly, I would love to hear it. My story fills me with fear and loathing, but the only other coherent story I’m hearing at the moment is the Empire’s story, and I think we all know how that one ends.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by C.J. Hopkins.

It has been six months now, but I have to make a strange admission. I miss the laughs I used to get over the pseudo-authoritative pronouncements of Fiji’s former attorney-general Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum (pictured).

I recall that he got a bit over-excited in January this year. That was when he decided to lecture the new government on “constitutionalism” and “rule of law”.

This was apparently without any reflection on how he and his FijiFirst party government had performed by the rule of law standards on which he was pontificating.

• READ MORE: Read other Richard Naidu columns

But in the last few days he decided to debate Deputy Prime Minister Manoa Kamikamica on the FijiFirst party’s 2022 financial accounts, apparently insisting that FFP was not insolvent.

This was never going to be an equal contest. Kamikamica is a chartered accountant. Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, well — he isn’t.

You don’t need to be an accountant to read a balance sheet — or to understand the simple definition of insolvency.

It’s not hard. You are insolvent if you “cannot pay your debts as they fall due”. You can find the accounts of all the main political parties on the Fiji Elections Office website.

More cash than others
FFP’s balance sheet (see image) says it has cash and term deposits of more than $270,000 in the bank.

That’s pretty good. It’s actually more cash than all the other political parties combined. But FFP also has debts (called, in accountant-speak, “payables and accruals”).

These come to well over $1.6 million. Once you add and subtract all the smaller stuff, FFP is left with net liabilities of just over $1 million.

In other words, that’s $1 million that FFP, even if it sold everything it owns, still could not pay to its creditors.

That $1.6 million in debts “fell due” months ago. And FFP could not pay them as they fell due. So FFP is insolvent.

Why pretend otherwise? Luckily for FFP, there isn’t a simple legal way for a creditor to wind up a political party for not paying its debts. Presumably FFP’s unpaid suppliers have learned that bitter lesson a bit late.

Learning lessons
But we are all learning lessons about FFP. Six months ago it was all-powerful. Its leaders sat in taxpayer-funded government offices and did (pretty much) whatever they wanted.

They regularly lectured the rest of us on all of our failings and all the things we were doing wrong. They exuded competence. Fast forward to June 2023.

The same FFP — which previously ran a government that spends $4 billion a year — had been suspended because it couldn’t prepare its own accounts on time.

The deadline for submitting political party accounts is March 31 each year. That’s in the Political Parties Act. Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum presumably knew that because, after all, he “wrote the law”.

FFP’s accounts were not submitted by March 31. The Acting Supervisor of Elections (in stark contrast to her predecessor) did not fire off a suspension letter one day later.

She gave FFP (and some other political parties) an extension of time to put in their accounts. Six weeks later, FFP still had not filed its accounts.

And at that point even the most reasonable supervisor is entitled to be annoyed. That was when the suspension letter went out. Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum’s reaction at the time was the usual legalistic bluster unsupported by the facts. FijiFirst, he said, had not been afforded “due process and natural justice”.

Failed to meet deadline
He did not elaborate. And what could he say? His party had been given a six-week extension of time and still not met the deadline under the law he had himself drafted. And then we found out.

FFP was deeply in debt — and presumably too embarrassed to tell the rest of us. If it hadn’t been suspended, we would probably still not know.

What else can we learn from the accounts of the former ruling party? We can see from its balance sheet that it began 2022 with (cash and term deposits) more than $860,000 in the bank.

That’s the sort of money other politicians could only dream of. At that time the People’s Alliance and National Federation Party, between them, had less than $20,000.

However FijiFirst then went on to spend $4.2 million — or more accurately, it ran up debts of that amount, and now it has to find $1.6m to pay off those debts.

That is because FFP raised only $2.2 million in donations. I say “only” — but that $2.2 million was twice as much as the three parties now in government could collect.

More lessons
There are other, bigger, lessons to learn from all of this — lessons about money and politics. What was FFP thinking as it threw around the cash in the 2022 election campaign?

Who would spend $1.6 million they didn’t have? The answer — a party that thought that, as long as it could win, the cash would keep rolling in.

No political party in Fiji’s history has ever had millions of dollars to spend.

And no political party in Fiji has ever cashed in on its political power as cynically as FFP did in the past 10 years. It was FFP that made the laws on electoral funding for political parties.

Companies were not allowed to contribute — only individuals and only up to $10,000 each. All donors had to be publicly disclosed — this included someone who put $2 in a bucket during a soli.

SODELPA leader Viliame Gavoka famously commented on how the laws required his party to issue a receipt for selling a $1 roti parcel. FFP of course, did not have to bother with the small stuff.

Soli? Roti parcels? Why bother when you can just wait for the $10,000 cheques? And the cheques rolled in — with embarrassing enthusiasm.

Early donor lists
Many of us saw the early FFP donor lists when they were published. Prominent business families fell over themselves to write their $10,000 cheques.

Of course, these cheques were from “individuals”. Those individuals were company directors, their spouses and even their under-age children, even if those children (and probably some of the spouses) didn’t have bank accounts to write cheques from.

You would hear from other, less enthusiastic, business people about invitations to FFP fund-raisers. You went — and you took your chequebook with you — because if you didn’t, well…

One business man complained to me: “If I pay, I get to talk to them — but they don’t do anything about my business problems anyway.”

Fiji is not the first country to encounter unhealthy problems about money and politics.

These create challenges in every democracy. In Fiji’s so-called “true democracy”, the rules about who donated money were supposed to be transparent.

The Political Parties Act originally required the Supervisor of Elections to publish the names of people who donated to political parties. But as FFP’s donors squirmed with discomfort under the spotlight of social media, in 2021 FFP quietly changed the law — buried, of course, in one of those Bills that would be rushed to Parliament on two days’ notice and rushed through the infamous Standing Order 51.

The law change meant that those party donor lists still had to be disclosed to the Supervisor of Elections — but the Supervisor no longer had to publish them in the newspapers.

Climate of political fear
Of course, in the climate of political fear that FFP actively promoted, that created a separate problem.

The ruling party always collects the millions. But the opposition parties would have to work much harder to collect their cash because no one with any serious money wanted to be identified on those disclosure lists as giving money to the opposition.

Because, even though the Supervisor of Elections no longer had to publish those lists, any member of the public could still inspect them.

Most Fiji citizens might not know that. But the one person who would know that was the general secretary of FFP — also the minister for elections, attorney-general and minister for economy.

Now, however, for the first time since 2014, we can do something about our money-and-politics laws.

Those laws need to be reviewed, with a strong eye on the lessons of the past.

But the most critical lesson is probably not about those laws. It is about the climate of fear that enabled one political party to raise millions of dollars to keep itself in power while keeping all of its opponents out of cash.

Some good news?
Finally, for diehard FijiFirst supporters — a small spot of good news in those accounts. Apparently FFP still has 6120 “promotional sulu” in stock.

The sulu, according to the accounts (Note 11), have been “fully expensed”. This is because “realisable value cannot be determined with reasonable accuracy.” This is the way accountants say: “We don’t think anybody wants them so we can’t put any value to them.”

Perhaps to show their loyalty, FFP’s fans could buy the sulu to pay off the $1.6 million debt. This would cost only $270 per sulu. Just thought I’d try to help.

Richard Naidu is a Suva lawyer who writes a regular independent column for The Fiji Times. He has enough sulu.

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

After dialing 1526 to report an issue, callers must also provide their names, phone numbers and addresses so that police or officials can contact them if they require more information.

“If they call asking authorities to solve a particular problem, the police can call them back easily after the issue is investigated and solved,” a related government official, who like all sources in this report requested anonymity for security reasons, told RFA’s Lao Service. 

The official said since the hotline was launched on June 1, many have called asking for the ministry to solve problems and others have called to comment on the work of the ministry, but she was not at liberty to discuss how many people have called or what any of their requests were.

The Lao government has been using hotlines for public engagement since 2016. The country’s National Assembly also has an open hotline where people can raise issues for it to address.

But several Lao residents said they were reluctant to use the new hotline because they doubt the ministry can do anything to solve the problem, and they do not want to get in trouble for reporting problems.

“If you ask for help from the government in a one-party country, and ask them too many times, it’s not good for you,” a resident said. “You have to reveal all your personal information so everybody is afraid to call.”

Another resident said he was not interested in using them because hotlines in the past were ineffective in solving problems.

A third villager said that usually nobody answers government hotlines so it is useless to call them.

A Lao resident who identified as a Christian said that Christians have used hotlines once in a while to inform the ministry when they are harassed by local authorities. 

Sometimes officials come to try to solve the problem but most of the time the complaints are ignored, the person said.

“The good part of using the hotline is that we can inform the ministry of problems that we are concerned about and need them solved,” the Christian said. “However, many problems are still not solved … they always say they are still working on it”

A Lao intellectual told RFA that most people do not trust government hotlines because they are afraid of retribution. For example, if they were to reveal government corruption, the responsible officials could use the power of their positions to punish them.

Translated by Sidney Khotpanya. Edited by Eugene Whong.

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

Mister Speaker, our collective question without notice is to you mister Speaker. We want the Prime Minister and his deputy to take note Sir.

Our question from the Media Gallery is specifically directed to you, Mr Speaker, because of events that have transpired in the last 48 hours in which the freedom of the media in the people’s house has been once again curtailed.

Mr Speaker, we are aware of proposed changes to laws that are yet to reach the House that have been circulated by the Minister for Communications for consultation with all stakeholders in the media industry on the media development policy document, we are still concerned about what these will further impinge on the operations of mainstream media in PNG in covering, questioning and investigating Parliament, politicians and government departments and their activities.

• READ MORE: Media access restricted, says Acting Speaker Koni Iguan
• The beginning of the end for PNG press freedom?
• Other PNG media freedom reports

Last week, our members’ movements in and around the National Parliament at Waigani was further restricted by members of the Parliamentary Security Services.

We are now restricted to the press gallery and cannot further venture around the House in search of news. Mr Speaker, is the media really a serious threat to you and the members of the House that you have to apply such stringent measures to curtail our movements?

Parliament is an icon of our democracy. It is rightfully the people’s House, might we remind you mister Speaker, that we are guaranteed freedom of movement, freedom of speech, freedom to engage with all leaders mandated by the people to represent them here.

What then is the reason for you to set up barriers around the hallways, offices of MPs and public walkways, Mr Speaker?

Your Parliamentary Clerk is lost, Mr Speaker. In our queries not aware of any order to gag the media in the people’s House. His deputy is muted and cannot find a reason for this preposterous decision to restrict our movements in the House.

Mr Speaker, we consider this a serious impingement on the freedom of journalists to access Parliament House, report on the proceedings, seek out and question MPs on the spot.

Sir, Mr Speaker, we are well aware of the processes, procedures and decorum of the house, and where we as political reporters and photographers can traverse and that we always stay on our side of the fence.

Mr Speaker, let us remind you once again that Parliament belongs to the people. Their voice must be heard. Their MPs must be on record to deliver their needs and wants and their views.

The people cannot be denied. This will be a grave travesty Mr Speaker, if you deny the people their freedom to know what is transpiring in Parliament by silencing the media.

In the past, the media had a very good relationship with your office and we are pleased to say that the Speaker has on more than one occasion, assisted the members of the media with accreditation, and even transportation.

But Mr Speaker, don’t entertain any point of order from other Members on our question. They have had their day on the floor.

Mister Speaker, we members of the media are not primitives. Far from it, we are just the messengers of the people.

One last friendly reminder Mr Speaker. The very people that you are trying to restrict are the ones that you will need to get the message out to the people and to the world.

We are not your enemies. We are here to ensure your all 118 MPs do a proper job transparently without fear or favour.

Thank you Mr Speaker.

This PNG Post-Courier editorial was published under the headline “A Question without Notice” on 12 June 2023. Republished with permission.

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

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Burmese junta troops killed 29 of the village’s menfolk, maiming and burning the bodies in a 44-hour orgy of violence that was recorded on a soldier’s cell phone.

Today, the villagers of this forsaken community in Myanmar’s northern war-torn Sagaing region still mourn their losses and live in perpetual fear of another military assault as the junta attempts to squelch resistance to its two-year-old military takeover.

“If the military comes from the south, we have to run to the north. If they come from the north, we have to run to the south,” said one 40-year-old woman, who lost both her husband and her brother in the May 10-12 attack. 

“We are still panic-stricken,” she added. “I depended on my husband’s daily bread and now I don’t know what to do.” Like all the Mon Taing Pin residents cited in this report, the woman requested anonymity for safety reasons.

Radio Free Asia revealed the massacre last June after analyzing a cache of files retrieved from a cell phone that was dropped in a neighboring township and found by a villager. 

It included an image of about 30 men with their hands tied behind their backs on the grounds of a monastery, and victims of execution a day later.

Boasting about killings

Stoking further outrage, the phone included photos of armed men posing next to corpses, and a video in which they boast about how many people they have killed, and how they have killed them. 

The photos and video indicated the presence of Light Infantry Battalion 708, which is part of the Yangon-based Military Operations Command No. 4. Witnesses also said members of the pro-junta Pyu Saw Htee militia took part in the raid on the village.

Ample proof of Burmese military atrocities and abuses by security forces has emerged in the past two years. There has been detailed testimony from victims and military defectors; images and footage from citizens’ cell phones; CCTV video; and satellite imagery analysis of dozens of villages in Sagaing burned to the ground. 

But the Mon Taing Pin massacre appeared to be the first time in which Burmese soldiers had been caught on film talking about the horrors that they were visiting upon people. It was part of an ongoing scorched earth campaign that has terrorized this rural heartland of northern Myanmar since the Feb. 1, 2021, coup against a civilian government.

In follow-up reporting, RFA has verified accounts of what happened in the village by speaking to the people who lived there. 

One woman said that she lost all three of her sons in the onslaught that began at around 6 a.m. on May 10 with heavy weapons fire. About 150 Burmese military and pro-junta militia entered the village with guns blazing. The attack ended around 2 a.m. on May 12, as soldiers left after slaughtering the men they had detained.

Most of Mon Taing Pin’s survivors returned to their homes within a couple of days of the attack, and they continue to eke out a fragile existence. Residents say the last time junta troops came to the village was March 5 this year.

Junta target

The surrounding Ye-U township has become a frequent target for junta forces. Since the coup, some 3,332 homes in 53 villages have been burned down there, according to the residents and local militia. 

Across the whole of Sagaing, nearly 48,000 houses have been burned as of the end of February 2023, according to the non-government research group, Data for Myanmar. That’s out of a total of about 60,500 houses burned nationwide. 

“For three months after the incident, they raided the village every month,” said a 64-year old man who lives in Mon Taing Pin. “Now, they have left for the southern part of Tabayin,” he added, referring to the township to the southwest of Ye-U. 

He said that villagers have struggled to grow new crops this year and have to share what they have with neighbors. There are about 400 households in Mon Taing Pin, and a total of about 1,800 people. Some 30 houses were burned down during the violence, and charred bodies were found inside the burned homes. 

One mother, whose 34-year-old son Kyaw Min Aung was among those slain, said she constantly thinks about his killing. Whenever she misses her son, she grasps the long-sleeved checkered shirt and hat he was wearing on May 11 – the day he died.

“Now it is the anniversary. My heart is broken. I cannot forget [my son] for a single day,” she said.   

Myanmar’s military, however, appears to have done just that.

When junta spokesman Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun spoke to RFA about events in Mon Taing Pin last June, he said that authorities had opened a probe into the matter. “Regarding these incidents, we can respond only after investigation in the field,” he said. 

Since then, RFA has repeatedly sought an update from the spokesman, including for this report. He did not pick up a reporter’s calls. 

Allegations of atrocities and war crimes by junta forces have piled up since the Mon Taing Pin massacre. In the deadliest reported incident since the coup, as many as 200 people were killed in an April 11 air strike on Pa Zi Gyi village in Sagaing’s Kanbalu township.

‘Evil’ military dictatorship

In Mon Taing Pin, grief now mingles with defiance.

“What I want to say is that this evil of military dictatorship must be rooted out,” the male resident said. “We can cure our loss if the junta is toppled. So, we must revolt until the military dictatorship is eliminated.”

Myint Htwe, who was an elected parliamentarian representing Ye-U township before the coup, said it was “vital” to persecute the perpetrators by courts martial for what was a violation of military conduct and international law.

“After the revolution, the perpetrators must be held to account for their role in overseeing or carrying out the killing. Everyone knows it,” he said.

The woman who lost her husband and brother in the massacre also demanded justice. 

“There was a mass killing. There are widows who lost their husbands. Some lost two or three sons. They have been suffering from mental disorders,” she told RFA. 

“We are the same. Husbands and brothers were burned alive and that caused deep resentment,” she said. “We want justice for those victims and their families.”

Edited by Mat Pennington.

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

International press freedom groups say the ruling Communist Party under supreme leader Xi Jinping has "gutted" press freedom in the formerly freewheeling city amid an ongoing crackdown on dissent in the wake of the 2019 protest movement.

Hong Kong journalists who fled the city after Beijing imposed a national security law from July 1, 2020, continue to campaign for press freedom for the city from overseas, while some eke out a freelance living following the closure of pro-democracy news outlets.

Lam Yin-bong, former assignment editor at Stand News, which shut down under investigation by national security police a few months after the Apple Daily was forced to close, said there are plenty of stories that are largely ignored by mainstream media outlets in Hong Kong these days.

"Quite a lot of voices have disappeared in the mainstream media in Hong Kong," Lam said. "For example, protesters who are about to go to prison or are about to be released from prison seem to have disappeared from public view."

He cited the recent release of "fishball rebellion" protester Lo Kin-man, jailed for "rioting" in the wake of 2016 unrest in the Mong Kok section of the city.

"He was given the longest sentence out of all the defendants, and the Mong Kok riot was a major event in Hong Kong history, and he was the last one to be released from prison, so personally, I think this is a news story," Lam said. 

"Yet when he was released from the fairly remote Tong Fuk Prison, I was the only one waiting for him." 

Trying to fill a gap

Lam, who set up his own ReNews online news service a year ago, said he is trying to fill a gap left by self-censorship in Hong Kong's mainstream media, but lacks resources to make much of a difference.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media is inundated by a seemingly endless supply of trivial reporting on politically important topics, such as the recent visit by Beijing's Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office chief Xia Baolong.

"The Hong Kong government's manipulation of the media is more obvious and its methods more mature than before, and the mainstream media is only too willing, or has gotten into the habit, of following the official lead," Lam said.

"When Director Xia Baolong visited Hong Kong, a bunch of journalists filmed him going to Kowloon Bay for dim sum, and even quoted sources as saying what kind of dim sum he had," Lam said. "What is the significance of that information?"

"The mainstream media is flooded with this sort of [trivial] information," he said. "It's not that nobody writes about the other stuff. The problem is that there is a huge amount of boring information in the media ... which drowns out the other stuff."

Risker interviews

Former Apple Daily reporter Shirley Leung, who has moved to the democratic island of Taiwan to set up the Hong Kong-focused Photon News, has carried out in-depth interviews with former 2019 protesters, as well as academics, politicians, civil society leaders and rights activists, in a bid to make sure their voices are recorded.

Those kinds of interviews are now much riskier under the national security law for journalists still in Hong Kong, she said.

"Since the Apple Daily and Stand News went, I would say that 80% of the people who once took part in protests and campaigns have disappeared from mainstream media reporting," Leung said.

"There is an atmosphere of fear that made me feel that I had to be able to write freely or report fully what my interviewees are saying," she said of her move to democratic Taiwan.

"Back when I was in Hong Kong, it was very difficult -- frankly there was a lot of self-censorship and I felt like what I wrote was lifeless."

With Photon News, Leung is hoping to exercise the old freedoms once enjoyed by Hong Kong's journalists, and "bring different perspectives back to Hong Kong," she said.

But she said it is getting harder and harder to find people in Hong Kong who are still willing to give media interviews, in the current political atmosphere.

"Those awaiting sentencing are already behind bars, and the ones getting out don't want to talk about it," Leung said. "This is all totally understandable, and very human."

In April, British lawmakers called on their government to issue emergency visas to journalists at risk of arrest or prosecution in Hong Kong, and to apply targeted sanctions to individuals responsible for the arbitrary arrest and pending trial of former Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai.  

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

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

On World Press Freedom Day the world remembers the importance of a free and independent media as the cornerstone of thriving and healthy democracies.

For our developing and developed Pacific nations of the Blue Continent, the 30th anniversary of World Press Freedom Day is also an opportunity to acknowledge the role of journalists whose first rule is to uphold the news creed — to tell the truth without fear or favour, to serve the public interest, to hold power to account.

For our Forum leaders, the primacy and importance of independent reporting and communication of Forum decisions goes back to our beginnings.

One of the key decisions in those early years more than five decades ago was the mandate to communicate, recognising the benefits of sharing information about the leaders meetings and decisions.

I am pleased to note our strong relationship with Pacific media continues to this day.

Across our key regional leader meetings, we actively partner with and brief news journalists to ensure quality reporting of the issues shaping our world. We recognise that editorial independence and quality journalism rely on strong access to facts, information, and certainty.

The watchdog and public interest role of the press as the Fourth Estate complementing the other three — the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary, has never been more important to public accountability, transparency, and good governance.

Together, they ensure engaged, active, and informed Pacific citizens. This level of empowerment sets the basis for a Pacific future that is safe, secure, and peaceful.

From the Biketawa Declaration on Good Governance to the Boe Declaration on Regional Security and the Teieniwa Vision on Anti-Corruption, our leaders are demonstrating their understanding that independent and free media are part of the work we do.

The digital age, amid times of covid and climate crisis, has also brought a new layer of transformative disruption and opportunity.

A free, thriving, and diverse Pacific press is a key partner to our Blue Pacific strategy to 2050. Today we can all celebrate the independence and impact of quality news journalism led by news and media practitioners across the Pacific and globally.

Despite often harsh work conditions, they continue a vocation for a news agenda of truth, transparency, and accountability.

The global rights-based theme of this year’s World Press Freedom Day is a timely recognition that in serving the public interest, the journalist is often the implementing arm of the people’s right to know. Independent truth telling and investigation is not an easy or popular calling.

World Press Freedom Day allows us to reiterate the safety and the rights of journalists, particularly women in journalism.

Without this ability to do their work without fear or favour, we cannot count on the facts that matter, that stand out in a world of fake news, misinformation, and noise.

Today, I join those who pay tribute to all journalists who frame the stories of our times in the values of truth, balance, and our collective right to know. Vinaka vakalevu, thank you.

PIF Secretary-General Henry Puna gave this message for the 30th anniversary of World Press Freedom Day on 3 May 2023. It has been republished from The Fiji Times with permission.

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

A teenage boy rings the wrong doorbell and is shot in the face. A 20-year-old woman is fatally shot when she and her friends pull into the wrong driveway. Two cheerleaders are shot when one accidentally gets into the wrong car. And a six-year-old is shot when kids chase a basketball into a neighbor's yard.

These tragic events seem incomprehensible. But we got a glimpse of an underlying reason for at least one of them, the wrong-doorbell shooting of 16-year-old Ralph Yarl. According to his grandson, the 84-year-old shooter watched a steady diet of Fox News and OAN. He was immersed in a "24-hour news cycle of fear and paranoia."

Sadly, far-right politicians and media figures have habitually stoked fear and manufactured moral panics as a political strategy to amp up their base. And it's having an effect: For decades, Gallup polls have consistently found that Americans believe crime is going up, whether it is or not.

The cost of this paranoia-propaganda machine? Real human lives.

The cost of this paranoia-propaganda machine? Real human lives—and poor policy choices that continue to make America an unnecessarily dangerous place to live.

Fear boosts TV ratings for Fox News and clicks for right-wing websites. It elects "tough on crime" politicians, sells guns, and contributes to the proliferation of "stand your ground" and permissive concealed-carry laws. Violent media scares people into answering their doorbells with guns drawn.

None of these things enhances safety.

Contrary to what the gun lobby says, more guns do not keep people and communities safer. Nearly 30 studies rounded up by Scientific American have linked more guns to more crime—not less. Another recent study shows murder rates are much higher in "tough on crime" red states than "soft on crime" blue states. That's been true every year since 2000.

Evidence keeps piling up that dire warnings and more guns don't make Americans safer. What compounds the disaster is that this rhetoric continues to be weaponized against reforms that actually could save lives.

That's one reason we've been unable to move quickly on police and criminal justice reform—even as civil rights advocates call for changes like deploying alternative first responders to reduce the risk of nonviolent 911 calls, like welfare checks or mental health crises, from turning deadly.

The same fear that makes people believe they need to arm themselves also makes them believe that cities need hugely inflated police budgets. There's scaremongering aimed at reform-minded district attorneys, despite evidence that progressive reforms don't increase crime in general or violent crime in particular. The same attacks are aimed at mayors and legislators who want to make changes to policing.

I know—I experienced this first-hand.

When I was mayor of Ithaca, New York, we got much tougher about screening police applicants. Our city council approved a complete overhaul of our police department to prioritize unarmed responses. And the city halted no-knock warrants for suspected drug crimes.

I was routinely called "anti-police" by the far-right wing. But we forged ahead with our forward-thinking approach to public safety and crime remained low—often dramatically lower than in other cities our size.

The recent rash of shootings are horrific at an individual level. At the social level, a critical lesson here is that a climate of fear—and those who benefit politically or financially from it—gives us bad laws, bad politics, and bad behavior that endanger us all.

It's time for that to stop. It's time to turn away from the fearmongers and toward solutions that work.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Svante Myrick .

Photograph Source: Fibonacci Blue – CC BY 2.0

A teenage boy rings the wrong doorbell and is shot in the face. A 20-year-old woman is fatally shot when she and her friends pull into the wrong driveway. Two cheerleaders are shot when one accidentally gets into the wrong car. And a 6-year-old is shot when kids chase a basketball into a neighbor’s yard.

It’s time for that to stop. It’s time to turn away from the fearmongers and toward solutions that work.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Svante Myrick .

The United States and other countries moved to evacuate diplomats and citizens from Sudan over the weekend amid fighting between rival military factions that’s killed at least 420 people and injured over 3,700 more, in a crisis that began on April 15 when the Sudanese military and the paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces began exchanging fire in the capital Khartoum, further dashing hopes of a return of civilian rule in the country. CNN reports the powerful Russian mercenary group Wagner has backed the RSF by providing the paramilitaries with surface-to-air missiles. Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin has denied the report but offered on Friday to act as a mediator between the two warring factions. Meanwhile, many residents remain trapped in Khartoum with dwindling supplies of food, water, medicine and power. For more on the crisis, we speak with Khalid Mustafa Medani, associate professor of political science and Islamic studies who chairs the African Studies Program at McGill University. He says neither side has much support from the civilian population, which has shown an overwhelming commitment to a democratic transition. “It’s not so much a civil war, but essentially a fight to the death between two generals,” says Medani.

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