“Iranian authorities must immediately clarify the legal basis for this mass detention of its citizens and cease treating those who communicate with the media as criminals,” said CPJ Chief Programs Officer Carlos Martinez de la Serna. “Labeling ordinary Iranians as ‘operational agents’ simply for their association with a news outlet is a dangerous tactic of intimidation and a blatant escalation in Iran’s violations of press freedom.

Iran’s intelligence ministry had been monitoring “the so-called citizen-journalists of the Zionist-Terrorist International Network” – a term the government uses to describe London-based Iran International – during the June 13 to 24 Iran-Israel war, state-owned Mehr News Agency reported. The ministry then “arrested and summoned 98 affiliated operational agents,” the agency said on July 28.

The ministry provided no evidence to support its allegations and did not disclose the names, locations, or legal status of those detained or summoned.

The Islamic Republic has previously arrested Iranians working with international media on vague charges, such as for “collaborating with hostile states” or “propaganda against the state.”

Iran’s reformist Ham Mihan newspaper reported that more than 100 journalists had been fired in the aftermath of the 12-day war, as authorities have cracked down on critical voices, with hundreds of arrests and several executions. 

CPJ emailed Iran’s mission to the United Nations in New York for comment but received no response.

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

In the land of the Condor, near the base of the tallest mountain in the Western hemisphere, an Incan community lived. The people hunted, along the sheer hillsides, they farmed, they collected water from the river gushing from snowmelt. They had children, built families, and passed on traditions to generations of descendants.

The land was cold, inhospitable, but their village grew and their community thrived at the far Southern reaches of the vast Incan empire, in present-day Argentina. Today, centuries have passed, the people are gone, but the stones and dirt that made their homes remain. The stories and language of their ancestors have been lost to time. But their spirits remain. And the ruins remember.

This is episode 60 of Stories of Resistance—a podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange’s Human Rights in Action program. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

Written and produced by Michael Fox.

A note from Stories of Resistance host Michael Fox: 

If you enjoy this podcast, please subscribe, like, share, comment, or leave a review. 

And please consider signing up for the Stories of Resistance podcast feed, either in Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Spreaker, or wherever you listen.

You can check out pictures of these Incan ruins in Argentina’s Andes Mountains, on Michael’s Patreon account

Please consider supporting this podcast and Michael Fox’s reporting at patreon.com/mfox. There you can also see exclusive pictures, video, and interviews. 

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Michael Fox.

The debate is over. The Israel apologists lost. And we are seeing this reflected in mainstream discourse.

Pop megastar Ariana Grande has started speaking out in support of Gaza, telling her social media followers that “starving people to death is a red line.” This is a new threshold. Opposing Israel’s genocide is now the most mainstream as it has ever been.

MSNBC just ran a piece explicitly titled “Israel is starving Gaza. And the U.S. is complicit.”, featuring a segment with the virulently pro-Israel Morning Joe slamming the mass atrocity. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, himself a former AIPAC employee, has done a 180 and is now raking Israel over the coals on the air for its deliberately engineered starvation campaign. The New York Times finally overcame its phobia of the g-word with an op-ed titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.”

We’re now seeing notoriously Zionist swamp monsters in the Democratic Party like Barack Obama, Hakeem Jeffries, Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar changing their tune and attacking Netanyahu and Trump for their joint genocide project in Gaza, with increasingly forceful pushback from some on the right like Marjorie Taylor Greene as well.

As western pundits, politicians, and celebrities suddenly pivot to denouncing Israel’s genocidal atrocities after two years of silence, it’s hard to believe that just a few weeks ago, we were being told that saying “death to the IDF” is a hate crime.

People who’ve been staring at this genocide from the beginning have been asking the entire time, what is it going to take? What will it take for our society to stop sleepwalking through inane trivialities and vapid distractions and start opposing the holocaust of our day?

Raining military explosives on a giant concentration camp packed full of children wasn’t enough.

Burning children alive wasn’t enough.

Systematically destroying Gaza’s entire healthcare infrastructure — up to and including entering hospitals they’ve attacked and destroying individual pieces of medical equipment one by one — wasn’t enough.

Killing more journalists than were killed in both World Wars, plus the US Civil War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Yugoslav Wars, the War in Afghanistan, and the ongoing war in Ukraine wasn’t enough.

The systemic rape and torture of prisoners wasn’t enough.

IDF soldiers routinely sharing photos and videos of themselves mockingly dressing in the clothes of dead and displaced Palestinian women and playing with the toys of dead and displaced Palestinian children wasn’t enough.

Israeli officials openly expressing genocidal intent for the people of Gaza wasn’t enough.

The US president and Israeli prime minister openly declaring their goal of the complete ethnic cleansing of a Palestinian territory wasn’t enough.

Field testing new weapons of war on Palestinians like they’re guinea pigs in a laboratory wasn’t enough.

Leaving countless civilians to slowly suffocate or die of dehydration, trapped under the rubble of bombed buildings, wasn’t enough.

Creating an AI system to ensure that suspected Hamas fighters are bombed when they’re at home with their children and naming it “Where’s Daddy?” wasn’t enough.

Using Palestinians as human shields wasn’t enough.

Burying injured civilians alive with bulldozers wasn’t enough.

The IDF admitting to running a popular Telegram channel called “72 Virgins,” which posted extremely gory and sadistic snuff films of people in Gaza being butchered by Israeli forces, wasn’t enough.

IDF snipers routinely shooting children in the head and chest throughout the Gaza Strip wasn’t enough.

The IDF flying drones, which play the sounds of crying babies at night in order to lure out hiding civilians to murder them, wasn’t enough.

IDF troops telling the Israeli press that they’re being ordered to massacre starving civilians seeking food from aid sites wasn’t enough.

Israeli snipers targeting different body parts of starving civilians on designated days — leg day, head day, genitals day, etc — wasn’t enough.

Far right Israeli citizens setting up blockades to stop aid trucks from entering Gaza while they enjoyed parties and barbecues at the blockade sites wasn’t enough.

Using lies and propaganda to dismantle the aid system for bringing essential food and life-supporting supplies into Gaza, to replace it with a US/Israeli op where aid seekers are massacred every single day, wasn’t enough.

Using siege warfare to starve Gaza for the previous 22 months deliberately wasn’t enough.

But now that starvation has hit a critical point and deaths from malnutrition are skyrocketing, now that images of dead skeletal children are filling our screens, now that the damage to organs and brains from starvation will be irreversible in many cases — now it’s enough.

That was the line, apparently. That’s what mainstream Western consciousness has decided is too much. Everything up until that line was fine, but now it’s not fine anymore.

And the killing is still going on. The sudden awakening of conscience hasn’t translated into any material actions or changes at all yet. If it had come in October or November 2023, like it should have, we might be seeing that opposition translate into actually saving Gaza by now, but the light has only just been switched on. It’s not even guaranteed that those who are speaking up will continue to do so.

I’m glad people are waking up to the cruel reality of this nightmare. I’m grateful to each and every influential voice who uses their platform to speak out, even at this late date. I truly am.

But I also think we need to take a very hard, very uncomfortable look at ourselves as a society right now. If all those monstrous abuses were tolerable for us over these last two years, there’s something deeply and profoundly sick about our civilization.

We are not living right. We are not thinking right. We are not feeling right. We are warped and twisted. The information we consume and the norms we’ve been conditioned to accept have corrupted our souls.

We have been made into something bad. Something ugly. Something shameful. Something we need to do everything in our power to change.

We need to rescue ourselves from what we have become. We need to transform, deeply and radically, into something that could never again allow something like this to occur.

The way things are clearly isn’t working. The mainstream worldview is clearly a lie. Everything we’ve been taught to believe about our society, our nation, our government, and our world was clearly false.

We need to fight our way through the cognitive dissonance of recognizing that our entire way of looking at things as a collective has failed, and we need to find a new way of being.

Otherwise, we’re going to keep being smashed in the face with increasingly horrifying reminders of what we have allowed ourselves to become.

The lessons will repeat until they are learned.

We had better start learning them.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Caitlin Johnstone.

This story originally appeared in Truthout on July 28, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

Palestinian activist who helped film the No Other Land documentary highlighting Israel’s violent occupation of the West Bank, Awdah Hathaleen, was shot and killed by an Israeli settler on Monday, according to one of the film’s directors.

Israeli co-filmmaker Yuval Abraham posted about Hadalin’s death on social media on Monday. “An Israeli settler just shot [Hathaleen] in the lungs, a remarkable activist who helped us film No Other Land in Masafer Yatta,” Abraham wrote. About an hour later, Abraham wrote that Hathaleen had succumbed to the shooting. “[Awdah] just died. Murdered,” said Abraham.

“I can hardly believe it. My dear friend Awdah was slaughtered this evening. He was standing in front of the community center in his village when a settler fired a bullet that pierced his chest and took his life. This is how Israel erases us — one life at a time,” said Basel Adra, activist and Palestinian co-director of No Other Land.

Accompanying Abraham’s post was a video of the settler angrily facing a group, wielding a handgun. He waves the gun around, firing it, and keeping his hand on the trigger as he paces and angrily pushes those trying to confront him.

Hathaleen was previously targeted by the U.S. government. Last month, he flew to the U.S. to do a speaking tour with his cousin, Eid Hathaleen, to speak in synagogues and churches. However, U.S. authorities detained and deported them upon arrival at the San Francisco airport.

He had previously reported about Israeli settler violence, and was a leader in his community advocating against Israel’s occupation of his village, Umm al-Khair in Masafer Yatta.

Wafa reported that two Palestinians had been injured in Umm al-Khair by Israeli settlers, who invaded the village with a bulldozer in an attack on Monday evening.

Palestinian activist Issa Amro, from Hebron, mourned the loss of Hathaleen.

“Israeli settlers have murdered our beloved hero, Awdah Hathaleen, from the Um Al-Khair community in Masafer Yatta,” Amro wrote on social media. “Awdah stood with dignity and courage against oppression. His loss is a deep wound to our hearts and our struggle for justice. May he rest in peace. We will never forget him.”

Abraham said that local residents identified Hathaleen’s killer as Yinon Levi, who lives in an illegal Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank. Levi was sanctioned by the Treasury Department under the Biden administration in April 2024, with officials saying that he “regularly led groups of violent extremists” in assaults on Palestinian and Bedouin communities in the West Bank. He was also sanctioned by the European Union around the same time.

President Donald Trump lifted the U.S. sanction on Levi and other Israeli settlers and settler groups on his first day in office this January. Even before that, however, the Biden administration’s and other international authorities’ sanctions on Israeli settlers were criticized as weak and ineffective, with Israeli leaders who are backing and often funding settler groups going unpunished.

In fact, Levi told The Associated Press last June that he only felt the financial impact of sanctions for a few weeks after banks froze his accounts. His community raised thousands of dollars for him, and Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a key architect of Israel’s de facto annexation of the West Bank, pledged to intervene to personally help take care of sanctioned settlers. The bank, which was supposed to freeze his assets, slowly lifted restrictions until he was able to access his money for whatever he wanted again.

“America thought it would weaken us, and in the end, they made us stronger,” Levi said at the time. Indeed, The Associated Press reported that local rights groups and settlers said that the sanctions only emboldened them.

This is just the latest settler attack on someone involved in making No Other Land. In March, just weeks after the documentary won an Oscar, an Israeli settler mob attacked and beat Palestinian filmmaker and activist Hamdan Ballal, in his home village of Susiya in Masafer Yatta. While he was in an ambulance to be treated for his injuries, Israeli soldiers invaded the vehicle and took him into custody. He emerged, bloody and bruised, saying that he has faced increased violence from settlers due to his role in making the film.

Israeli settlers and soldiers have intensified their violence in Masafer Yatta since the film won an Oscar, and Israeli authorities have now ordered a large swath of the region to be turned into a live-fire zone — effectively ordering the forcible transfer of over 1,200 Palestinians living in the region. Palestinians in the region report that Israel’s demolition of their homes is being fast-tracked by authorities.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Sharon Zhang.

Vietnam, the world’s second-largest exporter of coffee, is known for growing robusta beans. Earthier and more bitter than the arabica beans grown in Brazil, Colombia, and other coffee-growing regions near the Equator, robusta beans are often thought of as producing lower-quality coffee. 

In an effort to rebrand robusta, Mullin signed deals with coffee farming cooperatives in Vietnam and created smooth blends. Over the years, she helped a cohort of farmers convert their operations to organic. “We put in huge investments and were certified as the first organic specialty-grade coffee farms ever in Vietnam,” said the CEO and founder. In a few weeks, Copper Cow is planning to launch its first line of organic coffee at Whole Foods and Target.

But the second Trump administration has changed the calculus of her business. Mullin said she “was bullish” about her company’s prospects when President Donald Trump first took office, believing that Vietnam would likely be exempt from exorbitant tariffs since the president has many supporters in the coastal Southeast Asian country. Then, in April of this year, the White House announced a 46 percent tariff on goods from Vietnam. 

The shock left Mullin rethinking the very thesis she had set out to prove. “A big part of our mission is about how robusta beans, when treated better, can provide this really great cup of coffee at a lower price,” she said. “Once you put a 46 percent tariff on there, does this business model work anymore?”

Trump soon paused his country-specific tariffs for a few months, replacing them with a near-universal 10 percent tax. This month, Trump announced on social media that he would lower Vietnam’s eventual tariff from 46 to 20 percent — a sharp price hike that still worries Mullin. Meanwhile, Trump has threatened to impose an astounding 50 percent tariff on goods from Brazil, the nation’s largest importer of coffee, starting August 1. 

“I joke with my partner that I feel like I’m in a macroeconomics class,” said Mullin. In lieu of raising its prices, Copper Cow, which sells directly to consumers as well as to retailers, has scrambled to cut costs by reconsidering its quarterly team get-togethers and slowing down its timeline for helping more farmers go organic. The price of coffee hit an all-time high earlier this year, a dramatic rise due in part to ongoing climate-fueled droughts in the global coffee belt. As the U.S. considers fueling a trade war with coffee-producing countries, “it just feels like such an insult to an injury,” said Mullin. “It’s like, let’s have an earthquake hit a place that is in the middle of a hurricane.”

Economists like to say that demand for coffee is relatively inelastic — drinkers are so attached to their daily caffeine fix that they keep buying it even when prices increase. As the Trump administration mounts its retaliatory trade agenda, that theory will be put to the test. Coffee growers, as well as the roasters and sellers that purchase them in the U.S., are now facing unforeseen geopolitical and economic challenges. “We have not seen tariffs of this magnitude before,” said David Ortega, a professor of food and economics policy at Michigan State University. “There’s no playbook for this.” 

Should Trump’s threatened tariffs go into effect next month, it will likely hurt consumers, as many businesses will pass on the costs by raising prices. But it could also have ripple effects on coffee farms, as companies may cut costs by pulling back on investments in environmentally-conscientious practices like organic or regenerative agriculture. “Our goal was always to slowly convert the rest of our products to certified organic,” said Mullin. “And we feel like that is not an option anymore because of the tariffs.”

Even if the tariffs do not go into effect in August, the ongoing economic uncertainty will likely impact coffee growers in Brazil, which provided 35 percent of America’s unroasted coffee supply as of 2023. As U.S. coffee companies navigate the Trump administration’s evolving trade policies, they are likely to seek out new, cheaper markets for coffee beans. “Suddenly, they become less attached to where they source their coffee from,” said João Brites, director of growth and innovation at HowGood, a data platform that helps food companies measure and reduce carbon emissions along their supply chain. 

The problem with that, according to Ortega, is that other countries in the coffee belt, such as Colombia, do not have the production capacity to match Brazil’s and meet U.S. demand for coffee. If the threat of punitive tariffs on Brazil kickstarts an increase in demand for coffee from other countries, that will likely raise prices. For coffee drinkers, “there are very few substitutes,” said Ortega.

These pressures on coffee farmers and buyers are coming after a period of worsening climate impacts. A majority of coffee grown in Brazil — about 60 percent — comes from smallholder farms, grown on about 25 or fewer acres of land. “The current reality they’re operating in is that they’re already very stretched,” particularly because of weather disruptions, said Brites. Coffee grows best in tropical climates, but in recent years unprecedented droughts in Brazil have stunted growers’ yields, forcing exporters to dip into and almost deplete their coffee reserves. Vietnam has been rocked by drought and heat waves — and though robusta beans need less water to grow than arabica beans, making them a relatively climate-resilient crop, growers have also seen their yields decline. (Mullin said she is seeing early signs of harvests rebounding this year.)

Brites speculated that U.S. companies buying from smallholder farms in Brazil may be able to pressure growers into selling their beans at lower prices, adding to the economic precarity that these growers face. “For a lot of these coffee growers, the U.S. is such a big market,” he said, adding that it would take time for them to find new buyers in other markets.

Growers themselves are worried. Mariana Veloso, a Brazilian coffee producer and exporter, said producers are facing logistical challenges — and anticipating more. “If we want to ship a coffee in the next month, we will probably not be able to,” said Veloso, remarking that sometimes cargo ships holding coffee sit at Brazilian ports for weeks before setting out. Shipping companies seem to be delaying shipments from Brazil, said Veloso, perhaps in anticipation of the looming tariffs.

In the U.S., not every coffee company sources from Brazil or Vietnam. But the Trump administration’s existing 10 percent across-the-board tariffs are still rattling the coffee business. “We source coffees from all around the world. So we’re not immune to anything,” said Kevin Hartley, founder and CEO of Cambio Roasters, an aluminum K-cup coffee brand. He added, “You know, 10 percent here and 30 percent there, that’s not trivial.”

Hartley added that one of the impacts of droughts on coffee growers is that younger farmers worried about the future are considering leaving the business. “In coffee farming families around the world, it’s a tough life and the current generation is showing reticence to take off where their parents began,” he said. 

Regardless of whether the U.S. imposes prohibitive tariffs on individual coffee-growing countries, climate change is already taking a toll on this workforce. “Everyone’s looking for a solution for this,” said Mullin, who believes robusta beans can offer a drought-resistant alternative to the ever-popular arabica beans. 

Copper Cow has even started experimenting with a lesser-known varietal of coffee beans called liberica, which requires even less water to grow than robusta beans. “And it’s delicious,” Mullin said. It’s an extremely labor-intensive crop because the coffee plant grows so tall, but one of the farmer cooperatives she works with is starting to plant them now, thinking the investment will be worth it as temperatures keep rising. 

This new era of environmental, economic, and geopolitical challenges has shaken coffee brands. “Everybody’s wondering, in 50 years, will there be much coffee anymore? People are trying to be really realistic about what that world is going to look like,” said Mullin. In the midst of that broader uncertainty, the impact of Trump’s tariffs is another question only time can answer.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate change has sent coffee prices soaring. Trump’s tariffs will send them higher. on Jul 29, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Frida Garza.

Support for Israel’s genocidal slaughter of Palestinians has become a critical political dividing line, not just in the United States, but in countries around the globe. At a recent pro-Donald Trump rally in São Paulo, Brazil, for instance, a protester waving an Israeli flag fought with a man in a Palestinian shirt. In this on-the-ground report, Brazil-based journalist Michael Fox shows how Israel’s US-backed war on Gaza and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is playing out in South America’s largest country.

Additional resources:

• Michael Fox, Brazil on Fire podcast

Filming / Post-Production: Michael Fox

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Michael Fox.

The report is based on a fact-finding mission carried out between October 2024 and January 2025, with investigators interviewing dozens of community journalists, indigenous radio station workers, and civil society representatives across nine departments in Guatemala.

The mission identified a pattern of serious and persistent threats, including legal harassment; violence; intimidation; gender-based attacks; structural racism, particularly against indigenous women journalists; and surveillance by both local authorities and private actors, among other threats.

Among its key recommendations, the report urges authorities to implement the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruling on indigenous community radio, develop tailored protection mechanisms for community journalists, and formally recognize the legitimacy of community media outlets.

Read an executive summary of the report in English and Español.

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

The International Press Institute (IPI) has joined calls for urgent action to halt the unfolding humanitarian crisis in Gaza as global news organisations warn that their journalists there are experiencing starvation.

Israel must immediately allow life-saving food aid to reach journalists and other civilians in Gaza, IPI said in a statement today.

“The international community must also put effective pressure on Israel to allow all journalists to enter and exit the territory and to document the ongoing catastrophe,”it said.

• READ MORE: BBC, AFP and other news outlets warn journalists in Gaza at risk of starvation
• ‘We are dying’: Palestinians slam world’s inaction as hunger ravages Gaza
• Other Israeli war on Gaza reports

In an unprecedented joint statement this week, the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, BBC News, and Reuters — four of the world’s leading news agencies — said their journalists on the ground “are increasingly unable to feed themselves and their families”.

The news outlets added: “Journalists endure many deprivations and hardships in warzones. We are deeply alarmed that the threat of starvation is now one of them.”

Separately, Al Jazeera Media Network said in a statement that journalists on the ground “now find themselves fighting for their own survival” due to mass starvation.

Harrowing accounts
AFP and Al Jazeera journalists shared harrowing accounts of conditions on the ground.

One AFP photographer was quoted as saying, “I no longer have the strength to work for the media. My body is thin and I can’t work anymore.”

Al Jazeera Arabic’s Gaza correspondent said he was “drowning in hunger”.

In an interview with NPR, AFP global news director Phil Chetwynd said that the news agency had been working to evacuate its remaining contributors from Gaza, which requires Israeli permission.

The dramatic warnings come as more than 100 international humanitarian organisations said that mass starvation in Gaza was now threatening the lives of humanitarian aid workers themselves, while the civilian death toll continues to rise.

Gaza under siege — a journalist reports on daily survival   Video: Al Jazeera

Meanwhile, Israel continues to refuse to allow international reporters into Gaza to report and cover the war and humanitarian situation independently, obstructing the free flow of news and limiting coverage of the humanitarian crisis.

The ongoing conflict has taken a devastating toll on journalists and media outlets in Gaza.

Highest media death toll
Since October 2023, at least 186 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza — Al Jazeera puts the figure as at least 230 — the West Bank, Israel, and Lebanon, according to monitoring by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

This is the largest number of journalists to be killed in any armed conflict in this span of time.

Independent investigations such as those conducted by Forbidden Stories have found more than a dozen cases in which journalists were intentionally targeted and killed by the Israeli military — which constitutes a war crime under international law.

IPI has made repeated calls, in conjunction with its partners, urging the international community to take immediate measures to protect journalists and allow unimpeded access to the strip from international media.

Today, IPI has strongly and urgently reiterated these calls, as humanitarian conditions in Gaza rapidly deteriorate and as journalists and other civilians face man-made starvation.

The international community must use all diplomatic means at its disposal to pressure Israel to ensure the safe flow of food aid to journalists and other civilians, said IPI in a statement.

“The response by the international community in this critical moment could be the difference between life and death. There is no more time to lose,” IPI said.

RSF warnings over Gaza
In Paris, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) reports that for nearly two years it has warned about the precarious conditions faced by journalists in Gaza — which are deteriorating day by day.

Over the past 20 months in Gaza, more than 200 journalists have been killed by the Israeli army, including at least 46 slain while doing their job,” RSF said today in a statement.

“In addition to bombs, forced displacement, and dire humanitarian conditions, Gaza’s journalists, who are the only ones able to document what is happening in the besieged and closed-off enclave, can no longer find food,” the statement said.

“In response to this catastrophe, RSF reiterates its call to open up Gaza to foreign journalists and lift the blockade, in a joint appeal with over 200 media outlets and organisations from around the world.”

Jamie Wiseman is a journalist of the Vienna-based International Press Institute.

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

Upcoming ISA meetings must secure a moratorium and leave no room for rushed attempts to adopt a Mining Code. Recent developments have made it clear that outstanding political and scientific concerns cannot be hastily resolved under external or industry-driven pressure.

Greenpeace International campaigner Louisa Casson, who attended the meeting, said: “Governments have yet to rise to the moment. They remain disconnected from global concerns and the pressing need for courageous leadership to protect the deep ocean. We call on the international community to rise up and defend multilateralism against rogue actors like The Metals Company. Governments must respond by establishing a moratorium and reaffirming that authority over the international seabed lies collectively with all States—for the benefit of humanity as a whole."

While calls for a moratorium on deep sea mining have not yet gained global consensus, they continue to gain momentum, supported by compelling arguments from a diverse group of countries. Croatia became the 38th government calling for a precautionary pause, moratorium or ban on deep sea mining.

On Tuesday, His Excellency Surangel S. Whipps Jr., President of the Republic of Palau, addressed the Assembly, drawing attention to persistent efforts and intense pressure from the industry to rush the negotiations and finalise a Mining Code. He stated: “Exploiting the seabed is not a necessity – it is a choice. And it is reckless. It is gambling with the future of Pacific Island children, who will inherit the dire consequences of decisions made far from their shores”

In the first meeting of the ISA since The Metals Company (TMC) submitted the world’s first-ever application to commercially mine the international seabed, governments at the ISA Council responded by launching an investigation into whether mining contractors, including TMC’s subsidiaries Nauru Ocean Resources Inc. (NORI) and Tonga Offshore Mining Limited (TOML), are complying with contractual obligations to act following the international legal framework.

Olivier Poivre d'Arvor, speaking on behalf of the French government, defended multilateralism and reaffirmed France’s call for a moratorium: “Our message is clear: no deep-sea mining without science, without collective legitimacy, without equity [...] France is calling for a moratorium or a precautionary pause. What for? Because we refuse to mortgage the future for a few nodules extracted in a hurry, in favour of a few”.

Pacific Leader representing Solomon Island, addressed the ISA Assembly, she said: “As Pacific people, we continue to carry the trauma of what extractive industries have already done to our homes. Mining companies that came with promises, stripped our lands and waters, and left behind ecological, cultural, and spiritual scars. We cannot let that cycle repeat itself, in the ocean that connects us. That sustains us. And that defines us”.

Greenpeace warns that unilateral action to start deep sea mining risks triggering conflict and undermining decades-old agreements and norms that have guided state behaviour in the global ocean. In response, governments must act by establishing a moratorium and reaffirming that authority over the international seabed lies collectively with all nations—for the benefit of humankind as a whole.

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

On the Northeastern Brazilian coast, in the region of Alcântara, Maranhão, there are dozens of traditional villages of Black communities. Their families have lived here for generations — farming and fishing. They are known as quilombos. These villages were founded by their ancestors, who were either freed or who escaped enslavement on the plantations of Brazil.

There are thousands of quilombos across Brazil. But only a small number have the titles to their lands. And many are under threat from development projects, resource extraction, Big Ag, and real estate. This was the story in Alcântara, where these communities have faced removal and threats from Brazil’s Alcântara Space Center. 

But they have fought back.

This is episode 59 of Stories of Resistance—a podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange’s Human Rights in Action program. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

Sign up for the Stories of Resistance podcast feed, either in Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Spreaker, or wherever you listen.

Please consider supporting this podcast and Michael Fox’s reporting on his Patreon account: patreon.com/mfox. There you can also see exclusive pictures, video, and interviews. 

Written and produced by Michael Fox.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Michael Fox.

The joint letter called for Israeli authorities to allow Gazan journalists and their families – many of whom, like the rest of the population, are starving and facing extraordinary challenges to their health and ability to report – to leave Gaza, and allow other journalists to enter Gaza to continue their work. Nearly two years into the war, no international journalists have independently been able to access Gaza.

“Protecting those who report from conflict is a duty shared by all,” the letter said. “Our local journalists have done their jobs with unimaginable resilience and bravery. Letting them leave Gaza if they wish to do so and allowing others in to offer respite and continue their work is a humanitarian obligation we cannot ignore.”

Read the full letter here.

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

Authorities have stated that Askarov died in prison on July 25, 2020, from complications related to COVID-19. But they have failed to adequately respond to credible allegations that the 69-year-old was denied adequate medical care prior to his death, which followed years of declining health and insufficient treatment in jail.

“Five years have passed, and Kyrgyz authorities have yet to answer key questions about the death of the journalist and human rights defender Azimjon Askarov,” said CPJ Europe and Central Asia Senior Researcher Anna Brakha. “We call on the government to deliver justice by conducting a transparent investigation into the circumstances surrounding both his detention and death.” 

Askarov, who contributed to independent outlets including Fergana and Voice of Freedom, was arrested in June 2010 after reporting on human rights abuses during deadly interethnic clashes in southern Kyrgyzstan. 

In September 2010, he was given a life sentence in a trial that was widely rejected as unfair, particularly as he was tortured by the police. Amnesty International condemned the charges as “fabricated and politically motivated.” Askarov was one of dozens of ethnic Uzbeks convicted for their alleged involvement in the violence.

In 2012, CPJ honored Askarov with its International Press Freedom Award and published a special report that found that Askarov was being punished in retaliation for his reporting on corrupt and abusive police and prosecutors.

CPJ emphasizes that without justice in Askarov’s case, press freedom in Kyrgyzstan remains in jeopardy. Since President Sadyr Japarov came to power in 2020, Kyrgyz authorities have launched an unprecedented crackdown on the independent press, shuttering critical outlets and jailing independent journalists.

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

This story originally appeared in Mondoweiss on July 24, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

Israel is accelerating its efforts to cement its permanent control over the West Bank through a number of sweeping legal and institutional changes, according to a new report from Adalah, The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel.

The 87-page report, Legal Structures of Distinction, Separation, and Territorial Domination, describes the ways in which the Netanyahu government is rapidly building on a long-standing legal matrix that further threatens Palestinians’ right to self-determination. 

“These developments are not something new to us,” Dr. Suhad Bishara, Legal Director of Adalah and lead author of the report, told Mondoweiss. “All eyes are on Gaza, justifiably so,” she said. “However… it is important to highlight the intensity of the structural changes that have taken place since the current government took over in December 2022.”

“What is happening in the West Bank is dangerously fast-forwarding annexation policies in a blatant violation of international law,” Bishara said. “Israel is intensifying measures to change the status of the West Bank, the status of many Palestinians living in Area C who are subject to intensified displacement induced by settler violence and Israeli policies.” She said, “This is in addition to settler expansion and further restrictions on Palestinian development in the area.”

Thoroughly researched and footnoted, the report documents how the current extremist government has built on what Adalah describes as “foundational mechanisms through which Israel has entrenched a land regime that facilitates territorial domination and racial segregation.” 

Area C comprises over 60 percent of the West Bank, and is under full Israeli military control. 

Here are the mechanisms of territorial domination Adalah examines in these areas.

Civilian governance for Israeli settlers; military rule over Palestinians

Beginning in the late 1970s, Israel abandoned its security-based justifications for approving settlements and adopted a policy based on civil, not military grounds. The report describes how, soon after, the Civil Administration — the Israeli body governing the West Bank — was established to formalize the division between military and civilian affairs.

As a result, “Israel has steadily transferred governance over Israeli settlers in the West Bank from military to civilian control, entrenching permanent territorial dominance and greatly expanding the settlement enterprise,” according to the report.

Most recently, structural reforms — such as the appointment of Bezalel Smotrich to serve as both Finance Minister and a Minister in the Defense Ministry — have resulted in increasing legal authority for the pro-settler civil servants working with Smotrich in the West Bank. These reforms have cemented the two distinct legal structures that govern life in Palestinian villages and Israeli settlements: the former, in which the military rules, and the latter, administered according to Israeli law. 

1. Administration by local authorities

Adalah’s report dives into the weeds as it describes one of the more concerning mechanisms that reveals Israel’s intent to annex the whole of the West Bank. Having transitioned the settlements from military administration to civilian rule — and having handed over significant legal and administrative decision-making to pro-settler civil servants — Israel can argue that the settlements operate now under Israeli sovereignty. But applying Israeli law in occupied territory, Adalah maintains, is a violation of international human rights law and constitutes “a measure of de facto annexation.” 

2. Financial incentives for settlements 

Readers of the report won’t be surprised to learn that, as Adalah writes, “Israeli settlements receive extensive financial benefits through direct government subsidies, preferential policies, and financial incentives… [covering] multiple sectors, including land allocation, housing, infrastructure, and agriculture.” 

Still, it is remarkable—as documented in the Adalah report—how in contravention of international law, Israel continues each year to pour billions of shekels into the development of settlements in the West Bank. Readers of the report will learn of “the legal mechanisms behind these incentives and how Israeli law facilitates their distribution.” 

3. Declaring State land 

According to Adalah, Israel’s designation of State Land in the West Bank is “the primary legal mechanism through which Israeli authorities have taken possession of Palestinian land since the late 1970s.” Those already familiar with Israel’s use of this means of de facto annexation will be surprised by the extraordinary amount of Palestinian land so designated. The report includes information obtained by Peace Now through a Freedom of Information Act request that shows a shocking fact: in under a one-year period, Israel has designated more Palestinian land as State Land than it had in an 18-year period.

From 1998 to 2016, just over 21,000 dunams were declared as State Land. But in just over nine months (from the end of February 2024 through early December 2024), over 24,200 dunams were declared as State Land. This acceleration is historically unprecedented.

The planning system in Area C

Adalah includes an entire section on the legal and structural framework in place in Area C to further expand Israel’s settlement project, fulfilling one of the Netanyahu government’s guiding principles shared the day before his swearing-in as Prime Minister in December 2022: “The Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel,” promising to expand settlements throughout “Judea and Samaria,” the Israeli term for the occupied West Bank. 

Paralleling the judgments of the ICJ, UN experts, and international, Palestinian, and Israeli human rights groups, the report ends by listing the five international crimes that Adalah finds Israel guilt of: violations of International Humanitarian Law; the deepening of the illegal mechanism of de facto annexation; the denial of Palestinian people’s right to self-determination; the deepening of the apartheid system in the occupied Palestinian territory; and the commission of war crimes and crimes of aggression on the part of Israel.

The most recent newsletter from Ir Amim, an Israeli NGO, describes Israel’s expanding control over illegally annexed East Jerusalem. Asked to comment, Tess Miller, Public Outreach staff at Ir Amim (“City of Nations” or “City of Peoples” in Hebrew) told Mondoweiss that “the mechanisms of displacement that we monitor and advocate against within Jerusalem are not separate from the mechanisms seen today in Gaza and the West Bank.”

“What we are witnessing,” Miller said, “time after time, place after place, is violent control granted to those willing to advance the state’s agenda of expanding Jewish presence and diminishing Palestinian presence.” Ir Amim’s newsletter documents home demolitions, evictions, and starkly discriminatory housing and land confiscation policies.

“Together,” Miller said, “they all contribute to the accelerating erasure of the Palestinian people from their own cities, neighborhoods, and lands — enabled by the complicity of an increasingly radicalized Israeli public and the international community’s persistent refusal to take meaningful action.”

According to Adalah’s Dr. Bishara, it is hoped that the Adalah report, read by advocates for Palestinian rights, stakeholders, and states alike, “will generate international pressure against these long-term changes in the West Bank that violate international law and threaten the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.”

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Jeff Wright.

More than a hundred aid organizations warned Wednesday that “mass starvation” is spreading in Gaza, as Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing of Palestinians reaches an unspeakable turning point. As the crisis of humanity deepens, another Gaza Freedom Flotilla has set sail in the hopes of breaking Israel’s blockade and bringing life-saving supplies to the besieged Gaza Strip. Calling from the Handala ship while en route to Gaza, American labor organizer Chris Smalls, co-founder and former president of the Amazon Labor Union, speaks with TRNN editor-in-chief Maximillian Alvarez about the threats and sabotage attempts the Freedom Flotilla has already faced on its journey—and why that won’t deter the crew from their humanitarian mission.

Additional resources:

• Chris Smalls X account and Instagram
• Gaza Freedom Flotilla linktree 
• Ann Wright, Common Dreams, “Despite 2 sabotage attempts, the Gaza Flotilla Ship Handala sails onward”
• Marium Ali, Al Jazeera, “Freedom Flotillas: A history of attempts to break Israel’s siege of Gaza”

Credits:

• Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
• Post-Production: David Hebden

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Maximillian Alvarez.

“With only rare exceptions,” Norman Solomon writes, “US news media and members of Congress continue to dodge the reality of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, normalizing atrocities on a mass scale.” How did we end up in this Orwellian situation, where the reality of genocide is so thoroughly denied by pundits and politicians even as that genocide is unfolding in front of our eyes? How do we combat this level of inhumane violence and propaganda? Solomon, co-founder of Roots Action, joins The Marc Steiner Show for an urgent discussion about Israel’s manufactured genocide of Palestinians and how the media manufactures consent to, at best, hide and, at worst, justify Israel’s heinous actions.

Guests:

• Norman Solomon is the cofounder of RootsAction.org, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, and the author of numerous books, including War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death and War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of the Military Machine.

Additional resources:

• Norman Solomon, Common Dreams, “In too much of the US, Israel’s Gaza genocide has been made invisible”
• Norman Solomon, Common Dreams, “Who’s afraid of Zohran Mamdani? Billionaires”
• Norman Solomon, Common Dreams, “Bombing Iran Is part of the USA’s repetition compulsion for war, war, war”

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.

This story originally appeared in Mondoweiss on July 22, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

For 100 days, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank town of Idna have been surviving without running water. The town of some 40,000 inhabitants has been relying on rain reservoirs and water tanks sold by vendors. The town’s water crisis was provoked by the April decision of Israeli national water company Mekorot to reduce the daily provision of water to the Hebron governorate of the southern West Bank. The water supply shrank from 32,000 cubic meters to 26,000, which included completely shutting down Mekorot’s water line for Idna.

This water crisis isn’t new, and it isn’t limited to Idna. Every summer, multiple parts of the West Bank experience prolonged water cuts that can extend for up to a month, mainly due to the lack of water supply by Mekorot, which controls most of the water resources in Palestine.

In Idna, residents met in the municipality hall on Monday to discuss the crisis. The mayor of the town shared the Israeli company’s argument for cutting off their water: that some residents were “illegally stealing water.”

“The mayor said that it is not the municipality’s responsibility to look for those who steal water, but to provide water to residents, which is being made impossible,” Rami Nofal, a local journalist and resident of Idna, told Mondoweiss. “Every summer, we go through water cuts, and the argument that some individuals steal water from the main line is not an excuse to leave 40,000 people without water for three months,” he said. 

The mayor went on to assure the crowd that the Palestinian Authority is trying to fix the crisis with Mekorot, but no news of a solution was forthcoming. “In Idna, like in the rest of the West Bank, we receive water on specific days of the week, and my neighborhood’s turn was in April, just a few days before the complete cut was scheduled,” Nofal went on. “I bought a water tank of 13 cubic meters for 180 shekels, and this is the water that my family and I are saving to survive on.”

Tanks of this sort dot the roofs of all buildings in the West Bank, as water shortages are chronic. “We have to watch for every instance of water consumption,” Nofal explained. “Every time my children open the faucet, I tell them to close it back as soon as they can. We economize while washing and even when flushing the toilet.”

How the water system works on the West Bank

Mekorot was established in the 1930s under the British Mandate. After the establishment of the State of Israel, the company was given the exclusive right to explore and exploit water in the country. After 1967, that included the lands of the West Bank and Gaza, which Israel occupied. Mekorot expanded its operations and was assigned to build the national carrier, a line of water pipes that transports water from the northern part of the country, around the West Bank through Israel’s 1948 proper, to the southern dry areas of the Naqab desert. A large part of this water used to feed the Jordan river before the construction of the carrier in the 1960s.

Ihab Sweiti, of the Palestinian water authority, told Mondoweiss that “natural water sources in Palestine are mostly underground, and they classify into four natural reservoirs; the eastern and western acquifers on both sides of the central hill country, the Jordan Valley Basin, and the coastal acquifer, which is the main water source for Israel and the Gaza Strip. The eastern and Jordan Valley reservoirs are mainly in the West Bank, and the western reservoir extends into Israel, too.”

“Since the occupation of 1967, Mekorot dug more wells in the West Bank, ending up controlling about 25 wells, which it uses to provide water to Israeli settlements and to sell water to many Palestinian municipalities, like Idna,” Sweiti continued.

“When the Mekorot company informed us that they were cutting the water supply from the west Hebron area, including Idna, they said that the reason was that there were too many illegal extensions made by Palestinians along the water line.” 

Sweiti says that the Israeli company claims the stealing of water for the towns and villages in the area reduced the water share for the Israeli settlements. Sweiti admits that Palestinians make irregular extensions along Mekorot’s line, but the data belies the claim that the share of Israeli settlements has been reduced. 

According to the Palestinian Hydrology Group, Palestinians consume an average of 70 liters of water per person per day, while Israelis consume 300. For Israeli settlers in the West Bank, however, the average rises to 800 liters per person a day.

According to the World Health Organization, the healthy average for daily water consumption is 100 to 120 liters per individual per day, which is far above the Palestinian average consumption rate and much further below the daily average consumption of Israeli settlers. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics figures from March 2023, the individual water share of Israeli settlers in the West Bank compared to that of Palestinians is seven to one.

Under international law, both Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Israel’s exploitation of the West Bank’s water are illegal. The 4th Geneva Convention, which regulates cases of occupation, explicitly prohibits both the transfer of the citizens of the occupying power to the occupied territory and the exploitation of natural resources of the occupied territory unless it is to the benefit of the occupied population.

When the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993 between the PLO and Israel, water rights were classified as part of the strategic “final status” negotiations phase, along with Palestinian refugees, borders, the status of Jerusalem, and Israeli settlements. The final status negotiations were supposed to conclude in Camp David in the year 2000, but the accords collapsed. Since then, the administration of water distribution continues to take place according to the Oslo Accords’ provisional mechanism: vastly unequal distribution, and total Israeli control.

This mechanism is based on the formation of a joint committee in which Israeli and Palestinian water authorities regularly review and update the number of wells that Palestinians are allowed to dig or exploit and the quantity of water they can extract and distribute based on population growth.

This regular meeting of the joint committee is supposed to take place every few years. According to Ihab Sweiti, the last meeting happened in 2023, before the war on Gaza started. “We, the Palestinian Water Authority, had several new wells  on the agenda that we wanted to get Israeli approval to dig and operate, and there were two other wells that had already received Israeli approval, including in the west of Hebron.” 

Only technical discussions were left, Sweiti says, but the war on Gaza paralyzed everything. “It is all still pending.”

‘People will literally go thirsty’

In Idna, even the irregular extraction of water by Palestinians was cut short by the Israeli army. “On Sunday, occupation forces raided the area outside Idna where the water line passes, dug the ground, and destroyed all the irregular extensions made by some Palestinians,” Rami Nofal noted. “ As a result, now even water tanks are no longer available. If this continues, in two weeks the crisis will get out of control.” 

“People in Idna will literally go thirsty,” Nofal stressed.

Sweiti maintains that irregular extensions to the main line are a problem for Palestinians, not just Israeli settlements. “The water extracted, which is not accounted for, is eventually deducted from Palestinians’ share,” Sweiti says. “But the area where the line passes is located in Area C, where Israel doesn’t allow the Palestinian Authority to have any presence.” 

This means that the Palestinian Authority has no powers to impose order or maintain water infrastructure for Palestinian communities, Sweiti explains. 

“Cutting water off from an entire area or city is not a solution,” he says. “The solution is to allow us Palestinians to run our own water supply and have our own water sources.” 

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Qassam Muaddi.

Groups that have declined to join the government-sponsored “harmony accord” signed yesterday by some Muslim and Jewish groups, say that the proposed new council is “misaligned” with its aims.

The signed accord was presented at Government House in Auckland.

About 70 people attended, including representatives of the New Zealand Jewish Council, His Highness the Aga Khan Council for Australia and New Zealand and the Jewish Community Security Group, reports RNZ News.

• READ MORE: ‘Gaza is not a religious issue’: Advocates split on government harmony accord

The initiative originated with government recognition that the consequences of Israel’s actions in Gaza are impacting on Jewish and Muslim communities in Aotearoa, as well as the wider community.

While agreeing with that statement of purpose, other Muslim and Jewish groups have chosen to decline the invitation, said some of the disagreeing groups in a joint statement.

They believe that the council, as formulated, is misaligned with its aims.

“Gaza is not a religious issue, and this has never been a conflict between our faiths,” Dr Abdul Monem, a co-founder of ICONZ said.

‘Horrifying humanitarian consequences’
“In Gaza we see a massive violation of international law with horrifying humanitarian consequences.

“We place Israel’s annihilating campaign against Gaza, the complicity of states and economies at the centre of our understanding — not religion.

“The first action to address the suffering in Gaza and ameliorate its effects here in Aotearoa must be government action. Our government needs to comply with international courts and act on this humanitarian calamity.

“That does not require a new council.”

The impetus for this initiative clearly linked international events with their local impacts, but the document does not mention Gaza among the council’s priorities, said the statement.

“Signatories are not required to acknowledge universal human rights, nor the courts which have ruled so decisively and created obligations for the New Zealand government. Social distress is disconnected from its immediate cause.”

The council was open to parties which did not recognise the role of international humanitarian law in Palestine, nor the full human and political rights of their fellow New Zealanders.

‘Overlooks humanitarian law’
Marilyn Garson, co-founder of Alternative Jewish Voices said: “It has broad implications to overlook our rights and international humanitarian law.

“As currently formulated, the council includes no direct Palestinian representation. That’s not good enough.

“How can there be credible discussion of Aotearoa’s ethnic safety — let alone advocacy for international action — without Palestinians?

“Law, human rights and the dignity of every person’s life are not opinions. They are human entitlements and global agreements to which Aotearoa has bound itself.

“No person in Aotearoa should have to enter a room — especially a council created under government auspices — knowing that their fundamental rights will not be upheld. No one should have to begin by asking for that which is theirs.”

The groups outside this new council said they wished to live in a harmonious society, but for them it was unclear why a new council of Jews and Muslims should represent the path to harmony.

“Advocacy that comes from faith can be a powerful force. We already work with numerous interfaith community initiatives, some formed at government initiative and waiting to really find their purpose,” said Dr Muhammad Sajjad Naqvi, president of ICONZ.

Addressing local threats
“Those existing channels include more of the parties needed to address local threats, including Christian nationalism like that of Destiny Church.

“Perhaps government should resource those rather than starting something new.”

The groups who declined to join the council said they had “warm and enduring relationships” with FIANZ and Dayenu, which would take seats at this council table.

“All of the groups share common goals, but not this path,” the statement said.

ICONZ is a national umbrella organisation for New Zealand Shia Muslims for a unified voice. It was established by Muslims who have been born in New Zealand or born to migrants who chose New Zealand to be their home.

Alternative Jewish Voices is a collective of Aotearoa Jews working for Jewish pluralism and anti-racism. It supports the work of Palestinians who seek liberation grounded in law and our equal human rights.

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

International public opinion continues to turn against Israel for its war on Gaza, with more governments slowly beginning to reflect those voices and increase their own condemnation of the country.

In the last few weeks, Israeli government ministers have been sanctioned by several Western countries, with the United Kingdom, France and Canada issuing a joint statement condemning the “intolerable” level of “human suffering” in Gaza.

Last week, a number of countries from the Global South — “The Hague Group” — collectively agreed on a number of measures that they say will “restrain Israel’s assault on the Occupied Palestinian Territories”.

• READ MORE: 12 countries agree to confront Israel collectively over Gaza after Bogotá summit
• Israeli attacks on aid seekers continue amid new evacuation threats
• Other Israeli war on Gaza reports

Across the world, and in increasing numbers, the public, politicians and, following an Israeli strike on a Catholic church in Gaza, religious leaders are speaking out against Israel’s killings in Gaza.

So, are world powers getting any closer to putting enough pressure on Israel for it to stop?

Here is what we know.

What is the Hague Group?
According to its website, the Hague Group is a global bloc of states committed to “coordinated legal and diplomatic measures” in defence of international law and solidarity with the people of Palestine.

Made up of eight nations; South Africa, Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, Malaysia, Namibia and Senegal, the group has set itself the mission of upholding international law, and safeguarding the principles set out in the Charter of the United Nations, principally “the responsibility of all nations to uphold the inalienable rights, including the right to self-determination, that it enshrines for all peoples”.

Last week, the Hague Group hosted a meeting of about 30 nations, including China, Spain and Qatar, in the Colombian capital of Bogota. Australia and New Zealand failed to attend in spite of invitations.

Also attending the meeting was UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, who characterised the meeting as “the most significant political development in the past 20 months”.

Albanese was recently sanctioned by the United States for her criticism of its ally, Israel.

At the end of the two-day meeting, 12 of the countries in attendance agreed to six measures to limit Israel’s actions in Gaza. Included in those measures were blocks on supplying arms to Israel, a ban on ships transporting weapons and a review of public contracts for any possible links to companies benefiting from Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

Have any other governments taken action?
More and more.

Last Wednesday, Slovenia barred far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and ultranationalist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich from entering its territory after the wider European Union failed to agree on measures to address charges of widespread human rights abuses against Israel.

Slovenia’s ban on the two government ministers builds upon earlier sanctions imposed upon Smotrich and Ben-Gvir in June by Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK and Norway over their “incitement to violence”.

The two men have been among the most vocal Israeli ministers in rejecting any compromise in negotiations with Palestinians, and pushing for the Jewish settlement of Gaza, as well as the increased building of illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.

In May, the UK, France, and Canada issued a joint statement describing Israel’s escalation of its campaign against Gaza as “wholly disproportionate” and promising “concrete actions” against Israel if it did not halt its offensive.

Later that month, the UK followed through on its warning, announcing sanctions on a handful of settler organisations and announcing a “pause” in free trade negotiations with Israel.

Also in May, Turkiye announced that it would block all trade with Israel until the humanitarian situation in Gaza was resolved.

South Africa first launched a case for genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice in late December 2023, and has since been supported by other countries, including Colombia, Chile, Spain, Ireland, and Turkiye.

In January of 2024, the ICJ issued its provisional ruling, finding what it termed a “plausible” case for genocide and instructing Israel to undertake emergency measures, including the provision of the aid that its government has effectively blocked since March of this year.

What other criticism of Israel has there been?
Israel’s bombing on Thursday of the Holy Family Church in Gaza City, killing three people, drew a rare rebuke from Israel’s most stalwart ally, the United States.

Following what was reported to be an “angry” phone call from US President Trump after the bombing, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office issued a statement expressing its “deep regret” over the attack. The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.

To date, Israel has killed more than 62,000 people in Gaza, the majority women and children.

Has the tide turned internationally?
Mass public protests against Israel’s war on Gaza have continued around the world for the past 21 months.

And there are clear signs of growing anger over the brutality of the war and the toll it is taking on Palestinians in Gaza.

In Western Europe, a survey carried out by the polling company YouGov in June found that net favourability towards Israel had reached its lowest ebb since tracking began.

A similar poll produced by CNN last week found similar results among the American public, with only 23 percent of respondents agreeing Israel’s actions in Gaza were fully justified, down from 50 percent in October 2023.

Public anger has also found voice at high-profile public events, including music festivals such as Germany’s Fusion Festival, Poland’s Open’er Festival and the UK’s Glastonbury festival, where both artists and their supporters used their platforms to denounce the war on Gaza.

Has anything changed in Israel?
Protests against the war remain small but are growing, with organisations, such as Standing Together, bringing together Israeli and Palestinian activists to protest against the war.

There has also been a growing number of reservists refusing to show up for duty. In April, the Israeli magazine +972 reported that more than 100,000 reservists had refused to show up for duty, with open letters from within the military protesting against the war growing in number since.

Will it make any difference?
Netanyahu’s hard-right coalition has been pursuing its war on Gaza despite its domestic and international unpopularity for some time.

The government’s most recent proposal, that all of Gaza’s population be confined into what it calls a “humanitarian city”, has been likened to a concentration camp and has been taken by many of its critics as evidence that it no longer cares about either international law or global opinion.

Internationally, despite its recent criticism of Israel for its bombing of Gaza’s one Catholic church, US support for Israel remains resolute. For many in Israel, the continued support of the US, and President Donald Trump in particular, remains the one diplomatic absolute they can rely upon to weather whatever diplomatic storms their actions in Gaza may provoke.

In addition to that support, which includes diplomatic guarantees through the use of the US veto in the UN Security Council and military support via its extensive arsenal, is the US use of sanctions against Israel’s critics, such as the International Criminal Court, whose members were sanctioned by the US in June over the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant on war crimes charges.

That means, in the short term, Israel ultimately feels protected as long as it has US support. But as it becomes more of an international pariah, economic and diplomatic isolation may become more difficult to handle.

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

This story originally appeared in Mondoweiss on July 17, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

Speaking about Palestine is speaking about resistance in the heart of horror. That is how Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, summed it up at an emergency conference in Bogotá, Colombia. The same Albanese who is currently facing sanctions imposed by the U.S. government for, according to them, making antisemitic remarks, after repeatedly denouncing the brutalities committed by Israel against the Palestinian people.

Despite these accusations, Albanese remains firm in her denunciations. She reiterated on several occasions that we must not allow these actions to distract us from what truly matters: the genocide that, for the past twenty months, has escalated against the people of Gaza, and the massive human rights violations taking place across Palestine, which have left more than 60,000 people dead, most of them women and children.

“The global majority [also known as the Global South] has been the driving force behind actions against Israel’s genocide, with South Africa and Colombia playing key roles in this process,” she told Mondoweiss during a press conference on the first day of the Emergency Conference for Gaza, convened by the governments of Colombia and South Africa. “These actions have led to the creation of spaces for sanctions and resistance. What we’ve been insisting on all along is that more and more countries must join these efforts.”

The Hague Group coordinated this Emergency Conference, which brought together representatives from over 30 states, including China, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, Turkey, and Qatar. Initially formed by Colombia and South Africa, the group seeks to establish specific sanctions against Israel that, according to Colombia’s Vice Minister for Multilateral Affairs, Mauricio Jaramillo Jassir, aim to move beyond discourse and into action.

Heads of state and their representatives emphasized that these sanctions are not retaliatory but are in full compliance with international humanitarian law. They are part of the international community’s commitment to ending the genocide. One of the central calls made was for more nations to join this effort and uphold their duty to defend human rights.

All 30 participating states unanimously agreed that “the era of impunity must end— and that international law must be enforced.” To begin this effort, 12 states from across the world — Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Indonesia, Iraq, Libya, Malaysia, Namibia, Nicaragua, Oman, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and South Africa — committed to implementing six key points:

1. Prevent the provision or transfer of arms, munitions, military fuel, related military equipment, and dual-use items to Israel, as appropriate, to ensure that our industry does not contribute the tools to enable or facilitate genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other violations of international law.

2. Prevent the transit, docking, and servicing of vessels at any port, if applicable, within our territorial jurisdiction, while being fully compliant with applicable international law, including UNCLOS, in all cases where there is a clear risk of the vessel being used to carry arms, munitions, military fuel, related military equipment, and dual-use items to Israel, to ensure that our territorial waters and ports do not serve as conduits for activities that enable or facilitate genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other violations of international law.

3. Prevent the carriage of arms, munitions, military fuel, related military equipment, and dual-use items to Israel on vessels bearing our flag, while being fully compliant with applicable international law, including UNCLOS, ensuring full accountability, including de-flagging, for non-compliance with this prohibition, not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

4. Commence an urgent review of all public contracts, in order to prevent public institutions and public funds, where applicable, from supporting Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian Territory which may entrench its unlawful presence in the territory, to ensure that our nationals, and companies and entities under our jurisdiction, as well as our authorities, do not act in any way that would entail recognition or provide aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

5. Comply with our obligations to ensure accountability for the most serious crimes under international law through robust, impartial and independent investigations and prosecutions at national or international levels, in compliance with our obligation to ensure justice for all victims and the prevention of future crimes.

6. Support universal jurisdiction mandates, as and where applicable in our legal constitutional frameworks and judiciaries, to ensure justice for all victims and the prevention of future crimes in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Both Jaramillo and Zane Dangor, Director-General of South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation, emphasized that these actions must not be seen as reprisals, but rather as part of an international effort to break the global silence that has enabled atrocities in Palestine.

This decision is aligned with Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s renewed order to halt all coal exports from Colombia to Israel: “My government was betrayed, and that betrayal, among other things, cast doubt on my order to stop exporting coal to Israel. We are the world’s fifth-largest coal exporter, which means the country of life is helping to kill humanity. Colombian coal is still being shipped to Israel. We prohibited it, and yet we are being tricked into violating that decision. We cannot allow Colombian coal to be turned into bombs that help Israel kill children.”

In his closing speech, Petro reaffirmed that Colombia would break all arms trade relations with Israel and would continue to support the Palestinian people’s right to resist.

The legitimacy of the Hague Group and these decisions has also been backed by several multilateral organizations that have denounced the genocide. As Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla, Executive Secretary of the Hague Group, stated: “The International Criminal Court (ICC) has already clearly denounced the genocide. The United Nations has stated that Gaza is the hungriest place on Earth. What we lack now is not clarity, it’s courage. We need the bravery to take the necessary actions”.

These words were echoed by Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad Mansour, who emphasized that, together with the Madrid Group (a coalition of over 20 European and Arab countries also taking action against Israel and led by Spain), they could be the key to breaking Israel’s siege of horror: “This will not be an exercise in theatrical politics. The time has come for concrete, effective action to stop the crimes and end the profiteering from genocide. We will defeat these crimes against humanity and give the children who are still alive in Palestine a future full of promise, independence, and dignity. Recognizing Palestine is not a symbolic gesture, it is a concrete act of resistance against colonial expansion”.

His statement was followed by that of Palestinian-American doctor Thaer Ahmad, who worked in Nasser Hospital in Gaza and left the territory two months ago. In his testimony, he said he is certain that official death tolls do not even come close to reality, that Gaza is currently hell on Earth, and that every day the genocide continues brings devastating consequences for Palestinian children: “How can we look ourselves in the mirror? When this ends, if it ends, what will we say? ‘Sorry, we did everything we could’? They can’t afford to keep waiting for vague responses. They are surviving genocide every day. So now, how do we ensure that the effort to erase Palestinians from history does not succeed?”

Although the agreed-upon actions are significant, even the attending delegations acknowledge that their efforts will not be enough. Broader and more forceful measures are required. Yet, one day earlier, standing at the podium of Colombia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Francesca Albanese reaffirmed the historic importance of this event. She stated it could be: “A historical turning point that ends, with concrete measures, the genocide-based economy that has sustained Israel. I came to this meeting believing that the narrative is shifting. Hope must be a discipline that we all preserve.”

Correction: The original version of this article said that all 30 countries participating in the gathering had endorsed the six action points. The article has been updated to make clear that only 12 of the participating countries have committed to implementing the measures at this time.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by María F. Fitzgerald.

This story originally appeared in Truthout on July 16, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

The Trump administration is planning to destroy 550 tons of emergency food relief intended for children in impoverished and war-torn regions.

The food assistance that was part of the now-defunct USAID program is set to be incinerated on Thursday, The Atlantic reported, citing sources with knowledge of the government’s plans.

The food comes in the form of high-energy biscuits that are packed with nutritious substances helpful to kids 5 years of age and under. The biscuits are currently being stored in Dubai and were meant to be sent to war- and disaster-ravaged areas. This particular shipment of food was set to go to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The food set for destruction could feed 1.5 million children for a full week. It could easily feed the entire population of children currently starving in Gaza, for example.

According to The Atlantic’s Hana Kiros, the biscuits “are a stopgap measure, often used in scenarios where people have lost their homes in a natural disaster or fled a war faster than aid groups could set up a kitchen to receive them.”

There are various other U.S.-owned warehouses across the globe that are currently storing at least 60,000 tons of food. However, due to the dismantling of USAID, there is no feasible way for the food to be transferred to the countries it was intended for.

The Trump administration announced its intention to end the USAID program in early January, with Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cohorts making the cuts. Musk baselessly derided the decades-old program as a “criminal organization.”

The program was officially shuttered on July 1. Former USAID officials and humanitarian experts have warned that termination of the program would leave 1 million children facing malnutrition without treatment.

The end of USAID will also likely result in around 200,000 children becoming paralyzed in some manner, as the program distributed polio vaccines. Around 160,000 could also die from malaria because of the program ending.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia) blasted the Trump administration for opting to destroy the food rather than give it to children who are starving.

“If the U.S. has ALREADY purchased specialty foods to keep kids from starving to death, should we deliver that food to dying kids or allow it to spoil, and destroy it?” Kaine wrote on Bluesky. “It’s a simple question, but the Trump Administration can’t answer it. Disgusting.”

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Chris Walker.

About 200 people marched in Devonport last Saturday in support of Palestine.

Pro-Palestine flags and placards were draped on the band rotunda at Windsor Reserve as speakers, including Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick and the people power manager of Amnesty International Aotearoa New Zealand Margaret Taylor, a Devonport local, encouraged the crowd to continue to fight for peace in the Middle East.

The Devonport Out For Gaza rally progressed up Victoria Rd to the Victoria Theatre, crossed the road, came down to the ferry terminal, then marched along the waterfront to the New Zealand Navy base.

• READ MORE: Other Gaza genocide reports

Swarbrick said the New Zealand government and New Zealanders could not turn a blind eye to what was happening in Palestine.

The rally, organised by the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA), marked the 92nd consecutive week that a march has been held in Auckland in support of Palestine.

Republished with permission from The Devonport Flagstaff.

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

It’s an admission that may as well have come from The New York Times itself.

In an article titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.”, a Brown University professor of Holocaust and genocide studies named Omer Bartov argues that “Israel is literally trying to wipe out Palestinian existence in Gaza,” and denounces his fellow Holocaust scholars for failing to acknowledge reality.

“My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people,” Bartov writes. “Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer, and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.”

And resist he did. In November 2023, Bartov wrote another op-ed for The New York Times saying, “As a historian of genocide, I believe that there is no proof that genocide is currently taking place in Gaza, although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening.”

Apparently, he is seeing the proof now and has stopped resisting what has been clear from the very beginning. And it would seem the editors of the Gray Lady have ceased resisting as well.

The New York Times, which has an extensively documented pro-Israel bias, has frenetically avoided the use of the g-word on its pages from the very beginning of the Gaza onslaught. Even in its opinion and analysis pieces the NYT Overton window has cut off at framing the issue as a complex matter of rigorous debate, with headlines like “Accused of Genocide, Israelis See Reversal of Reality. Palestinians See Justice.” and “The Bitter Fight Over the Meaning of ‘Genocide’” representing the closest thing to the pro-Palestinian side of the debate you’d see. During the same time, we’ve seen headlines like “From the Embers of an Old Genocide, a New One May Be Emerging” used in reference to Sudan.

In an internal memo obtained by The Intercept last year, New York Times reporters were explicitly told to avoid the use of the word “genocide”, as well as terms like “ethnic cleansing” and “occupied territory”.

“‘Genocide’ has a specific definition in international law,” the memo reads. “In our own voice, we should generally use it only in the context of those legal parameters. We should also set a high bar for allowing others to use it as an accusation, whether in quotations or not, unless they are making a substantive argument based on the legal definition.”

Earlier this year, the American Friends Service Committee cancelled its paid advertisement in The New York Times calling for an end to the genocide in Gaza, saying the outlet had wanted them to change the word “genocide” to “war” in order for their ad to be published.

So there has been a significant change.

To be clear, this analysis by Omer Bartov is not significant in and of itself. He is only joining the chorus of what has already been said by human rights organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, United Nations human rights experts, and the overwhelming majority of leading authorities on the subject of genocide.

What is significant is that even experts who’ve been resisting acknowledging the reality of the genocide in Gaza because of their bias toward Israel have stopped doing so, and that even the imperial media outlets most fiendishly devoted to running propaganda cover for that genocide have run out of room to hide.

The Israel apologists have lost the argument. They might not know it yet, but they have. Public sentiment has turned irreversibly against them as people’s eyes are opened to the truth of what’s happening in Gaza, and more and more propagandists are choosing to rescue what’s left of their tattered credibility instead of going down with the sinking ship.

Truth is slowly beginning to get a word in edgewise.

Keep pushing. Keep fighting. Keep resisting.

It’s working.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Caitlin Johnstone.

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on July 15, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

In yet another controversial move from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons recently told officers that immigrants who arrived in the United States illegally are no longer eligible for a bond hearing as they fight against deportation and should be detained “for the duration of their removal proceedings.”

The Washington Post first revealed Lyons’ July 8 memo late Monday. He wrote that after the Trump administration “revisited its legal position on detention and release authorities,” and determined that such immigrants “may not be released from ICE custody.” He also said that rare exceptions should be made by officers, not judges.

The reporting drew swift and intense condemnation online. One social media user said: “Unconstitutional. Unethical. Authoritarian.”

In a statement shared with several news outlets, a spokesperson for ICE confirmed the new policy and said that “the recent guidance closes a loophole to our nation’s security based on an inaccurate interpretation of the statute.”

“It is aligned with the nation’s long-standing immigration law,” the spokesperson said. “All aliens seeking to enter our country in an unlawful manner or for illicit purposes shall be treated equally under the law, while still receiving due process.”

The move comes as President Donald Trump and leaders in his administration, including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, attempt to deliver on his promised mass deportations—with federal agents targeting peaceful student activists, spraying children with tear gas, and detaining immigrants in inhumane conditions at the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz.”

In a statement about the ICE memo, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said that “President Trump and Secretary Noem are now enforcing this law as it was actually written to keep Americans safe.”

“Politicians and activists can cry wolf all they want, but it won’t deter this administration from keeping these criminals and lawbreakers off American streets—and now, thanks to the Big Beautiful Bill, we will have plenty of bed space to do so,” she added, referring to $45 billion for ICE detention in Republicans’ recently signed package.

According to the Post:

Since the memos were issued last week, the American Immigration Lawyers Association said members had reported that immigrants were being denied bond hearings in more than a dozen immigration courts across the United States, including in New York, Virginia, Oregon, North Carolina, Ohio, and Georgia. The Department of Justice oversees the immigration courts.

“This is their way of putting in place nationwide a method of detaining even more people,” said Greg Chen, senior director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “It’s requiring the detention of far more people without any real review of their individual circumstances.”

Rebekah Wolf of the American Immigration Council told NBC News that her group has also received reports of some immigration judges “accepting the argument” from ICE, “and because the memo isn’t public, we don’t even know what law the government is relying on to make the claim that everyone who has ever entered without inspection is subject to mandatory detention.”

The Post reported that “the provision is based on a section of immigration law that says unauthorized immigrants ‘shall be detained’ after their arrest, but that has historically applied to those who recently crossed the border and not longtime residents.”

The newspaper also noted that Lyons wrote the new guidance is expected to face legal challenges. Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda—like various other policies—has been forcefully challenged in court, and there has been an exodus from the Justice Department unit responsible for defending presidential actions.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

At 11:26PM, Sunday night, July 6, I received a text from my producers. 

I was in Rio de Janeiro, covering the BRICS summit for an international news agency. They wanted me to go live. The summit was only halfway done, but US President Donald Trump had already posted on Truth Social in retaliation.

“Any Country aligning themselves with the Anti-American policies of BRICS, will be charged an ADDITIONAL 10% Tariff,” he wrote. “There will be no exceptions to this policy. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” Why was the president of the most powerful nation in the world worried about a group of a dozen countries meeting in Brazil? Because that bloc comprises some of the most powerful developing nations in the world, including Trump adversaries like China—but also Iran, who joined BRICS last year as a partner member, alongside Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and the United Arab Emirates. And because, as the world seems to be unraveling, the BRICS group is moving to reform world governance and global trade. And they likely have the best chance of doing it.

“I can affirm that if they keep with the agenda, and they implement what they put down on paper, we don’t see any block in the world that’s pushing much more than the BRICS,” Maureen Santos, the coordinator of the BRICS Policy Center’s Socio-Environmental Platform, told me.

The Summit

“For the fourth time, Brazil is hosting a BRICS Summit,” said Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to kick off the summit on Sunday morning, “Of all the summits, this one is taking place in the most adverse global scenario. The UN turned 80 on June 26, and we have witnessed an unparalleled collapse of multilateralism.”

In Lula’s 10-minute opening speech, he denounced the “genocide” in Gaza and called for a two-state solution. He condemned the “violations of Iran’s territorial integrity” and reminded those in attendance that the BRICS was the heir of the non-aligned movement—the group of 121 nations that did not align with neither the US nor Russia during the Cold War. 

These sentiments were included in the final “BRICS Leader’s Declaration,” which was released on Sunday July 6—the first day of the summit—before Trump’s threats over social media.  The document didn’t explicitly mention the United States, but it rejected “unilateral protectionist measures” and condemned the violence in Gaza and Iran. 

Among the 126 final resolutions in the document were agreements on promoting peace, strengthening cooperation on health and sustainable development, combating climate change, battling hunger, reforming global governance and ensuring equal access to—and global regulation of  artificial intelligence. 

“A collective global effort is needed to establish an AI governance that upholds our shared values, addresses risks, builds trust, and ensures broad and inclusive international collaboration and access, in accordance with sovereign laws,” read the document. The common theme across all these issues was how to build a more equitable global system.

The leaders were vocal about a need to overhaul the global system of governance, where the United States, the EU, and the G7 countries are at the top, and everyone else is picking up the scraps.

The BRICS leaders called in the declaration for a “comprehensive reform of the United Nations, including its Security Council, with a view to making it more democratic, representative, effective and efficient.”

“The BRICS represents a proposal against hegemony,” BRICS Policy Center Director Marta Fernandez told me at a cafe in Rio de Janeiro. “They are demanding multipolarity—financial, cultural, and political multipolarity. And the United States is fighting to maintain a hegemony that is in crisis. It’s US hegemony that is in crisis. And in that sense, the BRICS represents a threat to the US.”

Probably the top issue of concern for the US president are calls to democratize the currency used in trade amongst BRICS countries. Currently, more than half of global transactions are in the US dollar. De-dollarization, or moving away from the US dollar as the top reserve currency, would mean a huge hit for the United States and a big win for democratizing global trade and finance.

Shortly after winning the November 2024 presidential elections, Trump fired off a warning to the BRICS countries.

“We are going to require a commitment from these seemingly hostile countries that they will neither create a new BRICS currency, nor back any other currency to replace the mighty US dollar or, they will face 100% Tariffs,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “There is no chance that BRICS will replace the US dollar in international trade, or anywhere else, and any country that tries should say hello to tariffs, and goodbye to America!”

The BRICS nations were not deterred. In the final declaration they called for the increased use of “local currencies,” and the incorporation of the use of these currencies in the BRICS interbank system in order to “facilitate and expand innovative financial practices” and “support greater trade and investment flows.” The head of the BRICS New Development Bank, former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff announced last week that already a quarter of the bank’s lending portfolio was in local currencies and that they are looking to hit 30% by next year. 

“Obviously, the big BRICS demand is for monetary multipolarity, which goes against the hegemony of the dollar, which has become the reserve currency since World War II,” says Fernandez. “So it’s a direct attack on this system, controlled by the dollar.”

BRICS has many challenges, in part due to the diverse makeup of the cultures, countries, and governments that make up the eclectic, yet powerful international alliance.

The group is not looking to upend the global capitalist system. It’s not proposing socialism. The BRICS countries aren’t going to usher in revolutionary change. But they are pushing to alter the balance of power in the world to move from the hegemony of the United States and the European powers toward something more equal.

“Can anyone tell me why India can’t be included in the UN Security Council? Or a country like Brazil? Or Mexico?” Lula said during the summit. “Or Nigeria or Ethiopia, which has a population of just over 120 million people, or Egypt, which has over 100 million, or South Africa? Why not? There’s no reason why.”

Currently only China, France, Russia, the UK, and the United States have veto power in the Security Council. This structure was implemented at the end of World War II and has remained in place ever since—something the BRICS countries say has to change.

BRICS Popular Council

The BRICS summit did not occur in a vacuum. Representatives say that ahead of the meeting, negotiators from the BRICS countries—which they call “sherpas”—met hundreds of times over the last year to come to agreement on such a wide range of topics.

This past year also saw the creation of a new Popular Council. The council was created last year as a space for grassroots groups to contribute to the BRICS agenda, policies, and future. Representatives from 120 groups from across the BRICS countries met in the months leading up to the summit.

“The existence of this Popular Council is amazing,” said Santos. “Because you know that the majority of the BRICS countries, right now, are very conservative and some of them even undemocratic and don’t have the civil space inside their countries. So bringing this agenda for the BRICS, it’s pushing the other countries to open space for civil society.”

For two days before the official BRICS summit, members of social movements, civil society, and academia from across the BRICS countries met in a large hall in Carlos Gomes Theater, in downtown Rio de Janeiro, for the Popular Council Forum.

Colorful banners from diverse social and labor movements, including Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), were laid out in front of the stage, where panels were held throughout the day. 

They delivered their recommendations to BRICS leaders on Sunday. Delegates of the Popular Council presented their findings, analysis and process during a press conference following the Popular Council forum.

Raymond Matlala, from the BRICS Youth Association of South Africa, said, “What I like about BRICS and why I think BRICS is so appealing to the global majority, the Global South is the principles of BRICS, the mutual respect. The people are leveled. No one comes with superior power. It’s also the respect of one country’s sovereignty. BRICS does not enter in domestic issues.”

How will BRICS respond to Trump?

Early on Monday morning, I responded to the text from my producers and went live at both 1AM and 2AM.

The presenter asked me how BRICS would respond to Trump’s late-night threat over social media. I said it was unclear, but I was sure it was not going to make them change course.

At a press conference the next day, following the close of the summit, Lula stood at a microphone in front of the hall in white shirt and a black suit. Blue carpeted floors. Blue wall behind him, “BRICS – Brasil 2025″ written across it. Journalists packed in rows of chairs before him. Camera shutters clicking. Cold air pumped into the room from two huge air conditioning units.

The first three questions were variations on the same theme: How would BRICS respond?

The answer: They wouldn’t. They didn’t have to.

“The world has changed. We don’t want an emperor,” said Lula, referring to Trump. “We are sovereign countries.” He said Trump’s threat of raising tariffs on BRICS countries wasn’t brought up at all during their meetings that day. It was not even an issue.

This is a subtle, but important point. Trump wants to be the center of attention. That’s how he derails and wins debates, with ever-more shocking statements, actions, decrees, and threats. In Trump’s world, the United States—backed by the US dollar and the US military—should be first, with the rest of the countries of the world revolving around it. That is exactly what the BRICS countries want to change. And the more Trump pushes, the more they are going to look the other way.

“At the moment the United States declares ‘America First,’ the BRICS are saying ‘we all come first,’” international relations analyst Pedro Costa Junior told me at the summit. “The Global South comes first. The community comes first. Not for one. But for everyone.”

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Michael Fox.

On July 17, 1936, the Nazi-backed Spanish General Federico Franco led an armed rebellion against the Spanish government. It began a bloody civil war that would last for years. 

Thousands of people left their homes and traveled to Spain to stand up and defend its democratically elected government against Franco and fascism.

Roughly 35,000 people from more than 50 countries would join the Spanish International Brigade. Of those internacionalistas, roughly 3,000 men and women came from the United States and volunteered to fight. They founded the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

This is episode 58 of Stories of Resistance—a podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange’s Human Rights in Action program. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment, or leave a review. 

And please consider signing up for the Stories of Resistance podcast feed, either in Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Spreaker, or wherever you listen.

Please consider supporting this podcast and Michael Fox’s reporting on his Patreon account: patreon.com/mfox. There you can also see exclusive pictures, video, and interviews. 

Written and produced by Michael Fox.

Resources

• Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives
• Fighting Fascism: The Americans–Women and Men–Who Fought in the Spanish Civil War – Democracy Now
• Homage to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
• The Last Lincoln Veteran By David Rovics
• With the Lincoln Brigade in Spain

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Michael Fox.

Every year, an unknown but potentially large amount of plastic waste continues to be traded in the form of “refuse-derived fuel,” or RDF, ground-up packaging and industrial plastic waste that gets mixed with scrap wood and paper in order to be burned for energy. Environmental groups say these exports perpetuate “waste colonialism” and jeopardize public health, since burning plastic emits hazardous pollutants and greenhouse gases that warm the planet. 

Many advocates would like to see the RDF loophole closed as a first step toward discouraging the development of new RDF facilities worldwide. They were disappointed that, at this spring’s biannual meeting of the Basel Convention — the 1989 treaty that regulates the transboundary movement of hazardous waste — RDF went largely unaddressed. “It’s just frustrating to witness all these crazy, profit-protecting negotiators,” said Yuyun Ismawati, co-founder of the Indonesian anti-pollution nonprofit Nexus3. “If we are going to deal with plastic waste through RDF, then … everybody must be willing to learn more about what’s in it.”

RDF is a catch-all term for several different products, sometimes made with special equipment at material recovery facilities — the centers that, in the U.S., receive and sort mixed household waste for further processing. ASTM International, an American standard-setting organization, lists several types of RDF depending on what it’s made of and what it’s formed into — coarse particles no larger than a fingernail, for example, or larger briquettes. Some RDF is made by shredding waste into a loose “fluff.”

Although RDF contains roughly 50 percent paper, cardboard, wood, and other plant material, the rest is plastic, including human-made textiles and synthetic rubber. It’s this plastic content that makes RDF so combustible — after all, plastics are just reconstituted fossil fuels. According to technical guidelines from the Basel Convention secretariat, RDF contains about two-thirds the energy of coal by weight. 

One of the main users of RDF is the cement industry, which can burn it alongside traditional fossil fuels to power its energy-intensive kilns. Álvaro Lorenz, global sustainability director for the multinational cement company Votorantim Cimentos, said RDF has gained popularity as cities, states and provinces, and countries struggle to deal with the 353 million metric tons of plastic waste produced each year — 91 percent of which is never recycled. Some of these jurisdictions have implemented policies discouraging trash from being sent to landfills. Instead, it gets sent to cement kilns like his. “Governments are promoting actions to reduce the amount of materials being sent to landfills, and we are one solution,” he said.

Lorenz said RDF makes his company more sustainable by contributing to a “circular economy.” In theory, using RDF instead of coal or natural gas reduces emissions and advances companies’ environmental targets. According to David Araujo, North America engineered fuels program manager for the waste management and utility company Veolia, RDF produced by his company’s factory in Louisiana, Missouri, allows cement company clients in the Midwest to avoid 1.06 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions with every ton of RDF burned. The ash produced from burning RDF can also be used as a raw material in cement production, he added, displacing virgin material use.

RDF is also attractive because it is less price-volatile than the fossil fuels that cement production would otherwise depend on. In one analysis of Indonesian RDF production from last year, researchers found that each metric ton of RDF can save cement kiln operators about $77 in fuel and electricity costs.

Lorenz said that the high temperatures inside cement kilns “completely burn 100 percent” of any hazardous chemicals that may be contained in RDF’s plastic fraction. But this is contested by environmental advocates who worry about insufficiently regulated toxic air emissions similar to those produced by traditional waste incinerators — especially in poor countries with less robust environmental regulations and enforcement capacity. Dioxins, for example, are released by both cement kilns and other waste incinerators, and are linked to immune and nervous system impairment. Burning plastic can also release heavy metals that are associated with respiratory and neurological disorders. A 2019 systematic review of the health impacts of waste incineration found that people living and working near waste incinerators had higher levels of dioxins, lead, and arsenic in their bodies, and that they often had a higher risk of some types of cancer such as non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

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“Before they convert it into fuel, the chemicals are still locked inside the [plastic] packaging,” said Ismawati. “But once you burn it, … you spray out everything.” She said some of her friends living near an RDF facility in Indonesia have gotten cancer, and at least one has died from it.

Lorenz and Araujo both said their companies are subject to, and comply with, applicable environmental regulations in the countries where they operate. 

Lee Bell, a science and policy adviser for the International Pollutants Elimination Network — a network of environmental and public health experts and nonprofits — also criticized the idea that burning RDF causes fewer greenhouse gas emissions than burning traditional fossil fuels. He said this notion fails to consider the “petrochemical origin” of plastic waste: Plastics cause greenhouse gas emissions at every stage of their life cycle, and, as a strategy for dealing with plastic waste, research suggests that incineration releases more climate pollution than other waste management strategies. In a landfill, where plastic lasts hundreds of years with little degradation, the nonprofit Center for International Environmental Law has estimated greenhouse gas emissions at about 132 pounds per metric ton. That rises to about 1,980 pounds of emissions per metric ton when plastic is incinerated.

Bell said he’s concerned about the apparent growth of the RDF industry worldwide, though there is little reliable data about how much of the stuff is produced and traded between countries each year. Part of the problem is the “harmonized system” of export codes administrated by the World Customs Organization, which represents more than 170 customs bodies around the world. The organization doesn’t have a specific code for RDF and instead lumps it with any of several other categories  — ”household waste,” for example — when it’s traded internationally. Only the U.K. seems to provide transparent reporting of its RDF exports. In the first three months of 2025 it reported sending about 440,000 metric tons abroad, most of which was received by Scandinavian countries.

Nearly all of the world’s largest cement companies already use RDF in at least some of their facilities. According to one market research firm, the market for RDF was worth about $5 billion in 2023, and it’s expected to grow to $10.2 billion by 2032. Other firms have forecast a bright outlook for the RDF industry in the Middle East and Africa, and one analysis from last year said that Asia is “realizing tremendous potential as a growth market for RDF” as governments seek new ways to manage their waste. Within the past year, new plans to use RDF in cement kilns have been announced in Peshawar, Pakistan; Hoa Binh, Vietnam; Adana, Turkey; and across Nigeria, just to name a few places.  

Araujo, with Veolia, said his company’s RDF program “has grown exponentially” over the past several years, “and we recently invested millions of dollars to upgrade equipment to keep pace with demand.” A separate spokesperson said Veolia does not send RDF across international borders, and a spokesperson for Votorantim Cimentos said the company always sources RDF locally.

Dorothy Otieno, a program officer at the Nairobi-based Centre for Environment Justice and Development, said investment in RDF infrastructure could create a perverse incentive for the world to create more plastic — and for developing countries to import it — just to ensure that facility operators earn a return on their investment. “Will this create an avenue for the importation of RDFs and other fossil fuel-based plastics?” she asked. “These are the kinds of questions that we are going to need to ask ourselves.”

At this year’s Basel Convention conference in May and June, the International Pollutants Elimination Network called for negotiators to put RDF into the same regulatory bucket as other forms of mixed plastic — potentially by classifying it as hazardous waste. Doing so would prohibit rich countries from exporting RDF to poor ones, and make its trade between developing countries contingent on the receiving country giving “prior informed consent.”

Negotiators fell short of that vision. Instead, they requested that stakeholders — such as RDF companies and environmental groups — submit plastic waste-related comments to the secretariat of the Basel Convention, for discussion at a working group meeting next year. Bell described this as “kicking the cans down the road.” 

“This is disappointing,” he added. “We appear to be on the brink of an explosion in the trade of RDF.”

The next Basel Convention meeting isn’t until 2027. But in the meantime, countries are free to create their own legislation restricting the export of RDF. Australia did this in 2022 when, following pressure from environmental groups, it amended its rules for plastic waste exports. The country now requires companies to obtain a hazardous waste permit in order to send a type of RDF called “process engineered fuel” abroad. Although RDF exports to rich countries like Japan continue, the new requirements effectively ended the legal export of RDF from Australia to poorer countries in Southeast Asia.

Ultimately, Ismawati said countries need to focus on reducing plastic production to levels that can be managed domestically — without any type of incineration. “Every country needs to treat waste in their own country,” Ismawati said. “Do not export it under the label of a ‘circular economy.’”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This fuel is 50% plastic — and it’s slipping through a loophole in international waste law on Jul 15, 2025.

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

In response to the hearing, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), International Press Institute (IPI), and Reporters Without Borders (RSF) – called on Monday for Amaglobeli’s immediate release. Ambassadors and diplomats from the European Union mission and seven countries also attended the hearing, in which Amaglobeli provided detailed testimony for nearly three hours.

A prominent  journalist and founder of the online news outlets Gazeti Batumelebi and Netgazeti, Amaglobeli has been unjustly held in pretrial detention since her arrest on January 12.

“Today’s proceedings show that the trial of Mzia Amaglobeli is shrouded in a shocking smear campaign to destroy her credibility, personally and as a journalist. This, along with her deteriorating health, is deeply troubling and must end. Amaglobeli’s powerful testimony reflects her deep commitment to Georgia and to a free and independent media. Journalism is not a crime.”  

— Gypsy Guillén Kaiser, Chief Global Affairs Officer, Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

“The proceedings we witnessed today only confirm our position that this charge against Mzia Amaglobeli is entirely disproportionate and must be dropped. We are also deeply concerned by what appears to be an effort to smear her and to call into question her credibility as a journalist. Mzia is a highly respected, veteran journalist known for her commitment to journalistic ethics and independence. We fully stand by her as an IPI member.”

 — Amy Brouillette, Director of Advocacy, International Press Institute (IPI).

“This hearing once again underlined the lack of foundation in this case. The defense pointed to serious procedural irregularities, including politically charged that should have no place in an ongoing trial. Video footage also called into question the credibility of the alleged victim. Mzia Amaglobeli gave a calm and determined testimony, recalling her arrest and reaffirming her commitment to independent journalism — values for which she is now being prosecuted.”

— Jeanne Cavelier, Head of RSF’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk

Amaglobeli has been charged under the criminal code with attacking a police officer – a charge widely viewed as excessive and politically motivated – which carries a sentence of up to seven years in prison. She has been held in pre-trial detention since January 12, during which time her health has declined and she has been struggling with deteriorating vision.

She is being held at the Rustavi Women’s Prison No. 5, south of the capital Tbilisi. CPJ, IPI, and RSF visited the prison site and stood outside in a gesture of solidarity on July 13. The court’s verdict on this case could be announced at a subsequent hearing, set for July 28.

Amaglobeli is the first woman journalist to be jailed since the country gained its independence in 1991. A widely respected figure known for upholding the highest journalistic standards, her arrest and detention are seen by many in the journalism community in Georgia as a deliberate attempt to intimidate and silence the independent press amidst a broader crackdown on civil society and dissent. Last week, 17 European foreign ministers and the European Union’s High Representative, expressed deep concern regarding “increasing repression” in Georgia.

The outlets founded by Amaglobeli nearly 25 years ago, have reported on human rights violations and corruption, serving the public with impartial, trustworthy news. These outlets have endured four political regimes in Georgia’s post-independence era, despite their journalists and editors being attacked, threatened, blackmailed and detained by authorities. 

Amaglobeli’s detention this January comes amid growing harassment of independent media in Georgia and a broader scaling back of democratic freedoms under the Georgian Dream ruling party. Over the past year, journalists in Georgia have been beaten, harassed, detained, jailed, smeared, and fined. Impunity for attacks on journalists, including those perpetrated by police, remains widespread. A wave of repressive legislation – such as the foreign agents law as well as amendments to the Law on Grants and the Law of Broadcasting – deliberately aims to prevent independent media from operating in Georgia. 

As members of the Media Freedom Coalition’s Consultative Network, CPJ, IPI and RSF have urged robust action regarding Amaglobeli’s detention, along with broader concerns about escalating attacks on press freedom that can weaken democracy in Georgia. 

Read more: CPJ’s remarks during a site visit to Rustavi Women’s Prison on July 13, 2025

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

In response to the hearing, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), International Press Institute (IPI), and Reporters Without Borders (RSF) – called on Monday for Amaglobeli’s immediate release. Ambassadors and diplomats from the European Union mission and seven countries also attended the hearing, in which Amaglobeli provided detailed testimony for nearly three hours.

A prominent  journalist and founder of the online news outlets Gazeti Batumelebi and Netgazeti, Amaglobeli has been unjustly held in pretrial detention since her arrest on January 12.

“Today’s proceedings show that the trial of Mzia Amaglobeli is shrouded in a shocking smear campaign to destroy her credibility, personally and as a journalist. This, along with her deteriorating health, is deeply troubling and must end. Amaglobeli’s powerful testimony reflects her deep commitment to Georgia and to a free and independent media. Journalism is not a crime.”  

— Gypsy Guillén Kaiser, Chief Global Affairs Officer, Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

“The proceedings we witnessed today only confirm our position that this charge against Mzia Amaglobeli is entirely disproportionate and must be dropped. We are also deeply concerned by what appears to be an effort to smear her and to call into question her credibility as a journalist. Mzia is a highly respected, veteran journalist known for her commitment to journalistic ethics and independence. We fully stand by her as an IPI member.”

 — Amy Brouillette, Director of Advocacy, International Press Institute (IPI).

“This hearing once again underlined the lack of foundation in this case. The defense pointed to serious procedural irregularities, including politically charged that should have no place in an ongoing trial. Video footage also called into question the credibility of the alleged victim. Mzia Amaglobeli gave a calm and determined testimony, recalling her arrest and reaffirming her commitment to independent journalism — values for which she is now being prosecuted.”

— Jeanne Cavelier, Head of RSF’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk

Amaglobeli has been charged under the criminal code with attacking a police officer – a charge widely viewed as excessive and politically motivated – which carries a sentence of up to seven years in prison. She has been held in pre-trial detention since January 12, during which time her health has declined and she has been struggling with deteriorating vision.

She is being held at the Rustavi Women’s Prison No. 5, south of the capital Tbilisi. CPJ, IPI, and RSF visited the prison site and stood outside in a gesture of solidarity on July 13. The court’s verdict on this case could be announced at a subsequent hearing, set for July 28.

Amaglobeli is the first woman journalist to be jailed since the country gained its independence in 1991. A widely respected figure known for upholding the highest journalistic standards, her arrest and detention are seen by many in the journalism community in Georgia as a deliberate attempt to intimidate and silence the independent press amidst a broader crackdown on civil society and dissent. Last week, 17 European foreign ministers and the European Union’s High Representative, expressed deep concern regarding “increasing repression” in Georgia.

The outlets founded by Amaglobeli nearly 25 years ago, have reported on human rights violations and corruption, serving the public with impartial, trustworthy news. These outlets have endured four political regimes in Georgia’s post-independence era, despite their journalists and editors being attacked, threatened, blackmailed and detained by authorities. 

Amaglobeli’s detention this January comes amid growing harassment of independent media in Georgia and a broader scaling back of democratic freedoms under the Georgian Dream ruling party. Over the past year, journalists in Georgia have been beaten, harassed, detained, jailed, smeared, and fined. Impunity for attacks on journalists, including those perpetrated by police, remains widespread. A wave of repressive legislation – such as the foreign agents law as well as amendments to the Law on Grants and the Law of Broadcasting – deliberately aims to prevent independent media from operating in Georgia. 

As members of the Media Freedom Coalition’s Consultative Network, CPJ, IPI and RSF have urged robust action regarding Amaglobeli’s detention, along with broader concerns about escalating attacks on press freedom that can weaken democracy in Georgia. 

Read more: CPJ’s remarks during a site visit to Rustavi Women’s Prison on July 13, 2025

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

Thousands on the streets of Brazil, Sao Paulo’s Paulista Avenue packed, angry and protesting US President Donald Trump and his imposition of 50% tariffs on Brazilian products. Trump’s new tariffs on Brazil are in response to the country’s trial against Trump ally, former far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. 

Bolsonaro is accused of leading a “criminal organization” that looked to stop his successor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from assuming the presidency after he won the 2022 elections. The Brazilian courts will decide. Trump has other plans. But Brazilian leaders say they won’t back down. 

“If there’s one thing a government cannot tolerate, it’s interference by one country in the sovereignty of another,” said Brazilian President Lula. “And even more seriously, interference by a president of another country in the Brazilian justice system.”

This is episode 57 of Stories of Resistance—a podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange’s Human Rights in Action program. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

Sign up for the Stories of Resistance podcast feed, either in Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Spreaker, or wherever you listen.

Please consider supporting this podcast and Michael Fox’s reporting on his Patreon account: patreon.com/mfox. There you can also see exclusive pictures, video, and interviews. 

Written and produced by Michael Fox.

RESOURCES

• Brazil on Fire podcast
• Episode: An autopsy of Bolsonaro’s failed coup

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Michael Fox.

Thousands on the streets of Brazil, Sao Paulo’s Paulista Avenue packed, angry and protesting US President Donald Trump and his imposition of 50% tariffs on Brazilian products. Trump’s new tariffs on Brazil are in response to the country’s trial against Trump ally, former far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. 

Bolsonaro is accused of leading a “criminal organization” that looked to stop his successor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from assuming the presidency after he won the 2022 elections. The Brazilian courts will decide. Trump has other plans. But Brazilian leaders say they won’t back down. 

“If there’s one thing a government cannot tolerate, it’s interference by one country in the sovereignty of another,” said Brazilian President Lula. “And even more seriously, interference by a president of another country in the Brazilian justice system.”

This is episode 57 of Stories of Resistance—a podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange’s Human Rights in Action program. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

Sign up for the Stories of Resistance podcast feed, either in Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Spreaker, or wherever you listen.

Please consider supporting this podcast and Michael Fox’s reporting on his Patreon account: patreon.com/mfox. There you can also see exclusive pictures, video, and interviews. 

Written and produced by Michael Fox.

RESOURCES

• Brazil on Fire podcast
• Episode: An autopsy of Bolsonaro’s failed coup

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Michael Fox.

Today, Taiwan is caught in the crosshairs of two imperial rivals: the US and China. This is nothing new for the island nation, which has been a battleground for competing empires for centuries, but what is new is the critical role Taiwan plays in the 21st-century world economy. For example, Taiwan manufacturers 90% of the world’s most advanced microchips—the key component in everything from consumer electronics to the US military’s F-35 fighter jets. In this episode of Solidarity Without Exception, co-host Ashley Smith speaks with Brian Hioe, journalist and editor of New Bloom magazine, about the history of Taiwanese struggles for self-determination, the country’s position in the contemporary US-China rivalry, the increasing threat of imperial war, and the urgency of building solidarity among working-class people in Taiwan, the US, and China.

Guests:

• Brian Hioe is a freelance journalist, translator, and one of the founding editors of New Bloom, an online magazine featuring radical perspectives on Taiwan and the Asia-Pacific. A New York native and Taiwanese-American, Hioe has an MA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University and graduated from New York University with majors in History, East Asian Studies, and English Literature. He was Democracy and Human Rights Service Fellow at the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy from 2017 to 2018 and is currently a Non-Resident Fellow at the University of Nottingham’s Taiwan Studies Programme, as well as board member of the Taiwan Foreign Correspondents’ Club.

Additional resources:

• New Bloom website, Facebook page, X page, and Instagram
• Eli Friedman, Kevin Lin, Rosa Liu, & Ashley Smith, Haymarket Books, China in Global Capitalism: Building International Solidarity Against Imperial Rivalry
• Brian J. Chen, Boston Review, “Semiconductor Island: The colonial making of Taiwan’s chip supremacy”

Credits:

• Pre-Production: Ashley Smith
• Stdio Production / Post-Production: TRNN

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Ashley Smith.

By Helen Clark

The bombing of the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour on 10 July 1985 and the death of a voyager on board, Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira, was both a tragic and a seminal moment in the long campaign for a nuclear-free Pacific.

It was so startling that many of us still remember where we were when the news came through. I was in Zimbabwe on my way to join the New Zealand delegation to the United Nations World Conference on Women in Nairobi. In Harare I met for the first time New Zealand Anglican priest Father Michael Lapsley who, in that same city in 1990, was severely disabled by a parcel bomb delivered by the intelligence service of the apartheid regime in South Africa. These two bombings, of the Rainbow Warrior and of Michael, have been sad reminders to me of the price so many have paid for their commitment to peace and justice.

It was also very poignant for me to meet Fernando’s daughter, Marelle, in Auckland in 2005. Her family suffered a loss which no family should have to bear. In August 1985, I was at the meeting of the Labour Party caucus when it was made known that the police had identified a woman in their custody as a French intelligence officer. Then in September, French prime minister Laurent Fabius confirmed that French secret agents had indeed sunk the Rainbow Warrior. The following year, a UN-mediated agreement saw the convicted agents leave New Zealand and a formal apology, a small amount of compensation, and undertakings on trade given by France — the latter after New Zealand perishable goods had been damaged in port in France.

Both 1985 and 1986 were momentous years for New Zealand’s assertion of its nuclear-free positioning which was seen as provocative by its nuclear-armed allies. On 4 February 1985, the United States was advised that its naval vessel, the Buchanan, could not enter a New Zealand port because it was nuclear weapons-capable and the US “neither confirm nor deny” policy meant that New Zealand could not establish whether it was nuclear weapons-armed or not.

In Manila in July 1986, a meeting between prime minister David Lange and US Secretary of State George Schultz confirmed that neither New Zealand nor the US were prepared to change their positions and that New Zealand’s engagement in ANZUS was at an end. Secretary Schultz famously said that “We part company as friends, but we part company as far as the alliance is concerned”.

Pour les 40 ans de l’attentat de la France contre le Rainbow Warrior, le journaliste néo-zélandais @DavidRobie publie une nouvelle édition de son livre sur le dernier voyage du navire de Greenpeace. Préfacée par Helen Clark, ex-PM de Nouvelle-Zélandehttps://t.co/n1v8Nduel6

— Edwy Plenel (@edwyplenel) July 10, 2025

New Zealand passed its Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament and Arms Control Act in 1987. Since that time, until now, the country has on a largely bipartisan basis maintained its nuclear-free policy as a fundamental tenet of its independent foreign policy. But storm clouds are gathering.

Australia’s decision to enter a nuclear submarine purchase programme with the United States is one of those. There has been much speculation about a potential Pillar Two of the AUKUS agreement which would see others in the region become partners in the development of advanced weaponry. This is occurring in the context of rising tensions between the United States and China.

Many of us share the view that New Zealand should be a voice for deescalation, not for enthusiastic expansion of nuclear submarine fleets in the Pacific and the development of more lethal weaponry.

Nuclear war is an existential threat to humanity. Far from receding, the threat of use of nuclear weapons is ever present. The Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists now sits at 89 seconds to midnight. It references the Ukraine theatre where the use of nuclear weapons has been floated by Russia. The arms control architecture for Europe is unravelling, leaving the continent much less secure. India and Pakistan both have nuclear arsenals. The Middle East is a tinder box with the failure of the Iran nuclear deal and with Israel widely believed to possess nuclear weapons. North Korea continues to develop its nuclear weapons capacity. An outright military conflict between China and the United States would be one between two nuclear powers with serious ramifications for East Asia, South-East Asia, the Pacific, and far beyond.

August 2025 marks the eightieth anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A survivors’ group, Nihon Hidankyo, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year. They bear tragic witness to the horror of the use of nuclear weapons. The world must heed their voice now and at all times.

In the current global turbulence, New Zealand needs to reemphasise the principles and values which drove its nuclear-free legislation and its advocacy for a nuclear-free South Pacific and global nuclear disarmament. New Zealanders were clear — we did not want to be defended by nuclear weapons. We wanted our country to be a force for diplomacy and for dialogue, not for warmongering.

The multilateral system is now in crisis — across all its dimensions. The UN Security Council is paralysed by great power tensions. The United States is unlikely to pay its dues to the UN under the Trump presidency, and others are unlikely to fill the substantial gap which that leaves. Its humanitarian, development, health, human rights, political and peacekeeping, scientific and cultural arms all face fiscal crises.

This is the time for New Zealand to link with the many small and middle powers across regions who have a vision for a world characterised by solidarity and peace and which can rise to the occasion to combat the existential challenges it faces — including of nuclear weapons, climate change, and artificial intelligence. If our independent foreign policy is to mean anything in the mid-2020s, it must be based on concerted diplomacy for peace and sustainable development.

Movement back towards an out-of-date alliance, from which New Zealand disengaged four decades ago, and its current tentacles, offers no safe harbour — on the contrary, these destabilise the region within which we live and the wide trading relationships we have. May this new edition of David Robie’s Eyes of Fire remind us of our nuclear-free journey and its relevance as a lode star in these current challenging times.

• The 40th anniversary edition of Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior by David Robie ($50, Little Island Press) can be purchased from Little Island Press. 

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

Forty years ago today, French secret agents bombed the Greenpeace campaign flagship  Rainbow Warrior in an attempt to stop the environmental organisation’s protest against nuclear testing at Moruroa Atoll in Mā’ohi Nui.

People gathered on board Rainbow Warrior III to remember photographer Fernando Pereira, who was killed in the attack, and to honour the legacy of those who stood up to nuclear testing in the Pacific.

The Rainbow Warrior’s final voyage before the bombing was Operation Exodus, a humanitarian mission to the Marshall Islands. There, Greenpeace helped relocate more than 320 residents of Rongelap Atoll, who had been exposed to radiation from US nuclear testing.

• READ MORE: David Robie: New Zealand must do more for Pacific and confront nuclear powers
• Other Rainbow Warrior reports

The dawn ceremony was hosted by Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei and attended by more than 150 people. Speeches were followed by the laying of a wreath and a moment of silence.

Tui Warmenhoven (Ngāti Porou), the chair of the Greenpeace Aotearoa board, said it was a day to remember for the harm caused by the French state against the people of Mā’ohi Nui.

Warmenhoven worked for 20 years in iwi research and is a grassroots, Ruatoria-based community leader who works to integrate mātauranga Māori with science to address climate change in Te Tai Rāwhiti.

She encouraged Māori to stand united with Greenpeace.

“Ko te mea nui ki a mātou, a Greenpeace Aotearoa, ko te whawhai i ngā mahi tūkino a rātou, te kāwanatanga, ngā rangatōpū, me ngā tāngata whai rawa, e patu ana i a mātou, te iwi Māori, ngā iwi o te ao, me ō mātou mātua, a Ranginui rāua ko Papatūānuku,” e ai ki a Warmenhoven.

A defining moment in Aotearoa’s nuclear-free stand
“The bombing of the Rainbow Warrior was a defining moment for Greenpeace in its willingness to fight for a nuclear-free world,” said Dr Russel Norman, the executive director of Greenpeace Aotearoa.

He noted it was also a defining moment for Aotearoa in the country’s stand against the United States and France, who conducted nuclear tests in the region.

In 1987, the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act officially declared the country a nuclear-free zone.

This move angered the United States, especially due to the ban on nuclear-powered or nuclear-armed ships entering New Zealand ports.

Because the US followed a policy of neither confirming nor denying the presence of nuclear weapons, it saw the ban as breaching the ANZUS Treaty and suspended its security commitments to New Zealand.

The Rainbow Warrior’s final voyage before it was bombed was Operation Exodus, during which the crew helped relocate more than 320 residents of Rongelap Atoll in the Marshall Islands, who had been exposed to radiation from US nuclear testing between 1946 and 1958.

The legacy of Operation Exodus
Between 1946 and 1958, the United States carried out 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands.

For decades, it denied the long-term health impacts, even as cancer rates rose and children were born with severe deformities.

Despite repeated pleas from the people of Rongelap to be evacuated, the US government failed to act until Greenpeace stepped in to help.

“The United States government effectively used them as guinea pigs for nuclear testing and radiation to see what would happen to people, which is obviously outrageous and disgusting,” Dr Norman said.

He said it was important not to see Pacific peoples as victims, as they were powerful campaigners who played a leading role in ending nuclear testing in the region.

Between March and April this year, Rainbow Warrior III returned to the Marshall Islands to conduct independent research into the radiation levels across the islands to see whether it’s safe for the people of Rongelap to return.

What advice do you give to this generation about nuclear issues?
“Kia kotahi ai koutou ki te whai i ngā mahi uaua i mua i a mātou ki te whawhai i a rātou mā, e mahi tūkino ana ki tō mātou ao, ki tō mātou kōkā a Papatūānuku, ki tō mātou taiao,” hei tā Tui Warmenhoven.

A reminder to stay united in the difficult world ahead in the fight against threats to the environment.

Warmenhoven also encouraged Māori to support Greenpeace Aotearoa.

Dr Norman believed the younger generations should be inspired to activism by the bravery of those from the Pacific and Greenpeace who campaigned for a nuclear-free world 40 years ago.

“They were willing to take very significant risks, they sailed their boats into the nuclear test zone to stop those nuclear tests, they were arrested by the French, beaten up by French commandos,” he said.

Republished from Te Ao Māori News with permission.

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

For generations, the Statue of Liberty has stood as a beacon representing the promise of America as a land of freedom and opportunity for immigrants from all over the world. But in 2025, as immigrant communities are being vilified and terrorized across the US, as people of color are being kidnapped off the street by armed, masked agents of the state, as immigrants are kidnapped and disappeared to prisons in foreign countries like El Salvador, as billions of taxpayer dollars are allocated to erect migrant concentration camps and a giant wall on the US-Mexico border, it should be horrifyingly clear that the promised America embodied in the Statue of Liberty is not the America we live in today. TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen about the reality immigrant families face in the US today and about the critical relationship between the rise of authoritarianism at home and the violent expansion of American imperialism abroad.

Guest:

• Viet Thanh Nguyen is a professor of English, American studies and ethnicity, and comparative literature at the University of Southern California. His novel The Sympathizer won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His latest feature piece for The Nation Magazine is titled “Greater America has been exporting disunion for decades”

Additional resources:

• Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Nation, “Greater America has been exporting disunion for decades”
• Michael Fox, The Real News Network, “Families of the detained see echoes of dictatorial past in El Salvador’s gang crackdown”
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “A dangerous myth: The US has never been ‘a nation of immigrants’”

Credits:

• Studio Production: David Hebden
• Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Maximillian Alvarez.

The breaches were linked to two coordinated attacks – one in the summer of 2024 and another in January 2025 – that used malware-laced Telegram messages to infect staff devices, DW Persian reported.

“The use of spyware to harass journalists represents a chilling escalation in Iran’s campaign to intimidate and silence independent media,” said CPJ Regional Director Sara Qudah. “No journalist should be subjected to digital surveillance or coercion. Iran must immediately cease its transnational repression of the press.”

The operation was attributed to Banished Kitten, also known as Storm-0842, Dune, or Hanzaleh, a cyber unit within Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence led by Yahya Hosseini Panjkhi, whose identity was first revealed by the outlet’s reporting. 

Outlets reported that the hacker group Hanzaleh claimed responsibility for the attack. The group has not confirmed the claim on any of its affiliated platforms.

The outlet said it has strengthened digital security and alerted authorities following both attacks.

“We remain resolute in our mission to deliver accurate, uncensored news to our audience, and we will not allow these threats — online or offline — to disrupt our work. These attempts to intimidate us will not succeed,” the channel added.

Separately, Iranian lawmakers are considering a bill that press freedom advocates warn could criminalize independent journalism tied to foreign outlets as it imposes harsh penalties, including death, for alleged collaboration with “hostile” states or media. It would also allow courts to jail journalists and bar them from public service if their reporting is deemed to cause “fear and panic” or harm “national security.”

CPJ’s email to the Iranian mission to the United Nations in New York requesting comment on the cyberattacks and the proposed law did not receive a response.

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

Before long, a maze of makeshift holes revealed shallow puddles along the otherwise arid riverbed. The frantic digging had worked — there was water. There was just one big problem: It wasn’t blue. It was a muddy brown color, and villagers worried that consuming it would make them ill. But as there were scarcely other options, many took their chances with drinking it and bathing with it. 

Almost a year later, the persistent drought has led to a deluge of devastation on the region’s food system. Corn yields dropped 70 percent across the country, causing consumer prices to double. Thousands of cattle were lost to thirst and starvation. A local UNICEF emergency food distribution lost all of the food crops it harvested, which forced the NGO to reduce charitable food provisions from three meals a week to one. Child malnutrition levels in Mudzi doubled, driving up the demand for healthcare, and causing a quarter of healthcare clinics to run out of water reserves. Between January and March, about 6 million people in Zimbabwe faced food insecurity.

According to a new report by the U.S. National Drought Mitigation Center, or NDMC, and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, or UNCCD, the combined effects of global warming, drought, and El Niño have triggered similar crises all over the world, from Mexico City to the Mekong Delta.

Using impact reports alongside government data, scientific and technical research, and media coverage of major drought events, the authors examined case-by-case how droughts compound poverty, hunger, energy insecurity, and ecosystem collapse in climate hotspots around the world. They measured impacts in 2023 and 2024, when the planet saw some of the most widespread and damaging drought events in recorded history. What they found is a lesson and a warning sign: Increasingly severe droughts caused by climate change are laying waste to  ecosystems and economies everywhere. 

“This report is a blistering reminder that climate change and punishing drought are already devastating lives, livelihoods, and food access,” said Million Belay of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, and general coordinator of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, who wasn’t involved in the research. “We need to get serious about resilience and real adaptation.”

Mexico City

A focal point in the analysis is Mexico, where prolonged drought conditions provoked a water crisis that has had repercussions for food affordability and access. 

The situation began to intensify in 2023, when the country entered into a period of historically low rainfall. By June, the bulk of Mexico’s reservoirs dropped below 50 percent capacity. The rainy winter of 2023 brought some relief, but not enough. 

By the next summer, 90 percent of the country was experiencing some level of drought, and Mexico City’s water supply system reached a record low of 39 percent capacity. Abnormally low rainfall and high temperatures, made worse by inefficient water infrastructure and over-extraction of the city’s aquifer, would persist into early 2025. These struggles to obtain water have been further exacerbated by distribution needs as mandated by a water-sharing treaty Mexico has long shared with the United States. 

A severe lack of water has been found to be closely linked with food insecurity, as water scarcity impacts food access through reductions in agricultural production that can fuel food shortages and higher grocery prices. Roughly 42 percent of Mexico’s population was food-insecure in 2021, according to national statistics, with consumer food inflation rates steadily climbing since then. Price hikes were eventually reflected in grocery stores, causing the costs of produce like cilantro to soar by 400 percent, alongside other climbing price tags for goods like onions, broccoli, and avocado. 

“Ripple effects can turn regional droughts into global economic shocks,” said NDMC’s Cody Knutson, who co-authored the report. “No country is immune when critical water-dependent systems start to collapse.” 

Amazon Basin

During those same years, the Amazon River Basin became another drought and hunger hotspot. According to the new report, climate change caused waterways to drop to historically low levels in September of 2023. Drinking water became contaminated by mass die-offs of marine life, and local communities weren’t able to eat the fish they rely on. 

Supply chain transportation was also greatly affected, as the low water levels made it impossible for boats to travel in and out of certain regions. Brazil’s AirForce would be deployed to distribute food and water to several states where river supply routes were impassable. 

Residents in some towns dug wells on their own properties to replace river water they would normally depend on for drinking, cooking, and cleaning, according to the UN-backed report. Others were stuck waiting on government aid. Disruptions to drinking water and food supplies due to low river levels continued through late 2024 as the drought persisted. By September, waterways that had previously been navigable were bone-dry. 

A 2025 report released by the nonprofit ACAPS found that many communities in the Amazon region were already believed to be suffering malnutrition, making them more vulnerable to the emerging health and food insecurity effects of the drought. 

Climate change plays “a critical role in food security,” said FAO economist Jung-eun Sohn, who is unaffiliated with the UNCCD report. He noted that warming not only can impact both availability of and access to food, but that natural hazards are “one of three main risks of food insecurity,” along with conflict and economic risks, in hunger hotspots. 

Mekong Delta 

Though a central contributor to the interconnected water-and-food crisis, climate change isn’t the only factor in many hunger hotspots — failing infrastructure and inefficiencies in water delivery systems have also been flagged as critical contributors to widespread water shortages. The compounding effect of El Niño, or a naturally-occurring weather phenomena that drives above-average global heat and more intense natural disasters in parts of the planet, is another culprit. 

“It’s now abundantly clear that industrial, chemical-intensive agriculture, with its high water demands and uniform crops, is deeply vulnerable to drought and intensifying the crisis,” said Belay, the IPES expert. 

One study found that saltwater intrusion, much like what persistently plagues the Mekong River Delta in Vietnam, also causes a significant reduction in food production. The watershed flows through six Asian countries, and over 20 million people depend on the rice grown in the region, which is Vietnam’s most productive agricultural area. It is also the region of Vietnam that is most vulnerable to hunger, with up to half of its rural households struggling to afford enough food. 

So when an early heatwave struck the Mekong Delta in 2024, and an abnormally long dry spell followed suit, causing canals to dry up, excessive salinity, heat, and water scarcity killed farmers’ catch in droves, reducing what communities were able to supply and sell, which led to shortages that prompted the local government to intervene and help producers quickly sell their wares. As the drought persisted, communities undertook other desperate measures to mitigate losses; renovating ditches, constructing temporary reservoirs, digging wells, and storing fresh water. Even so, according to the report, up to 110,000 hectares of agricultural resources, including fruit crops, rice fields, and aquaculture, have been impacted in the last year by the drought and excess salinity. The situation contributed to rice shortages, prompting a widespread inflationary effect on market prices.

“These instances highlight how interconnected our global economies and food supplies are,” Paula Guastello, NDMC drought impacts researcher and lead author of the report, told Grist. “Drought has widespread implications, especially when it occurs on such a large, intense scale as during the past few years. In today’s global society, it is impossible to ignore the effects of drought occurring in far-off lands.” 

All told, the authors argue that without major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, rising temperatures will lead to more frequent and severe droughts by continuing to inflate heat, evaporation, and volatile precipitation patterns. All the while, urbanization, land use changes, and population growth are expected to continue to strain water resources and influence which assets and areas are most vulnerable to drought impacts. The world’s resilience to those impacts, the report denotes, ultimately depends on the fortification of ecosystems, the adoption of changes to water management, and the pursuit of equitable resource access. 

“Proactive drought management is a matter of climate justice, equitable development, and good governance,” said UNCCD Deputy Executive Secretary Andrea Meza in a statement about the report.

Stronger early warning systems and real-time drought impact monitoring, for example, those that assess conditions known to fuel food and water insecurity, are some of the ways countries can better fortify their systems in preparedness for the next big drought event. Others include watershed restoration, the broad revival of traditional cultivation practices, and the implementation of alternative water supply technologies to help make infrastructure more climate resilient. Adaptation methods, however, must also account for the most vulnerable populations, the authors say, and require global cooperation, particularly along critical food trade routes. 

“Drought is not just a weather event,” said report co-author and NDMC assistant director Kelly Helm Smith. “It can be a social, economic, and environmental emergency. The question is not whether this will happen again, but whether we will be better prepared next time.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Drought is draining water supplies and driving up food costs where you’d least expect on Jul 9, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Ayurella Horn-Muller.

There are less than a hundred members of the Karipuna tribe. They live on their land in the Brazilian state of Rondonia. Their territory is demarcated, which means that it’s legally theirs.

But many outsiders don’t care. Land invaders have been pushing in, hauling off hardwood and big trees and carving out pieces of their land, and dividing them up to sell.

The Karipuna are resisting.

This is episode 56 of Stories of Resistance—a podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange’s Human Rights in Action program. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment, or leave a review. 

And please consider signing up for the Stories of Resistance podcast feed, either in Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Spreaker, or wherever you listen.

You can see exclusive pictures of the Mapuche community playing palín in this story on Michael’s Patreon. Please consider supporting this podcast and Michael Fox’s reporting on his Patreon account.

Written and produced by Michael Fox.

Resources

• Brazil on Fire Episode 6: Amazon up in smoke
• Lula empowers Brazil’s Indigenous peoples with their own ministry. But environmental protection remains a key concern
• For more on protecting the Amazon Rainforest, you can visit Amazon Watch.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Michael Fox.

After being abducted from his New York apartment building by plainclothes agents and locked away in an ICE jail in Louisiana for over 100 days, Mahmoud Khalil has been freed and reunited with his family. A federal judge ruled that Khalil’s detention was unconstitutional and that he was neither a flight risk nor a threat to the public, and the Syrian-born Palestinian activist, husband, father, and former Columbia University graduate student was finally released on June 20, 2025. But the fight for Khalil’s freedom is not over, and we have by no means seen the last of the Trump administration’s authoritarian attacks on immigrants, universities, and the movement to stop Israel’s US-backed genocide of Palestinians. In this exclusive interview, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Amy Greer, an associate attorney at Dratel & Lewis and a member of Mahmoud Khalil’s legal team, about the epic legal battle to free Khalil.

Guest:

• Amy Greer is an associate attorney at Dratel & Lewis, and a member of Mahmoud Khalil’s legal team. Greer is a lawyer and archivist by training, and an advocate and storyteller by nature. As an attorney at Dratel & Lewis, she works on a variety of cases, including international extradition, RICO, terrorism, and drug trafficking. She previously served as an assistant public defender on a remote island in Alaska, defending people charged with misdemeanors, and as a research and writing attorney on capital habeas cases with clients who have been sentenced to death.

Additional resources:

• Mahmoud Khalil arrest video
• ACLU Press Release (June 20, 2025): Mahmoud Khalil to be freed from detention, reunite with wife and son as case proceeds
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “‘A tremendous chilling effect’: Columbia students describe dystopian reality on campus amid Trump attacks”

Credits:

• Studio Production / Post-Production: David Hebden

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Maximillian Alvarez.

On the last voyage of the Rainbow Warrior prior to its sinking by French secret agents in Auckland harbour on 10 July 1985 the ship had evacuated the entire population of 320 from Rongelap in the Marshall Islands.

After conducting dozens of above-ground nuclear explosions, the US government had left the population in conditions that suggested the islanders were being used as guinea pigs to gain knowledge of the effects of radiation.

Cancers, birth defects, and genetic damage ripped through the population; their former fisheries and land are contaminated to this day.

• READ MORE: The Rainbow Warrior saga: 1. French state terrorism and NZ’s end of innocence
• Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior
• Other Rainbow Warrior reports

Denied adequate support from the US – they turned to Greenpeace with an SOS: help us leave our ancestral homeland; it is killing our people. The Rainbow Warrior answered the call.

Human lab rats or our brothers and sisters?
Dr Merrill Eisenbud, a physicist in the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) famously said in 1956 of the Marshall Islanders:  “While it is true that these people do not live, I might say, the way Westerners do, civilised people, it is nevertheless also true that they are more like us than the mice.”

Total US tests equaled more than 7000 Hiroshimas.  The Clinton administration released the aptly-named Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE), report in January 1994 in which it acknowledged:

“What followed was a program by the US government — initially the Navy and then the AEC and its successor agencies — to provide medical care for the exposed population, while at the same time trying to learn as much as possible about the long-term biological effects of radiation exposure. The dual purpose of what is now a DOE medical program has led to a view by the Marshallese that they were being used as ‘guinea pigs’ in a ‘radiation experiment’.

This impression was reinforced by the fact that the islanders were deliberately left in place and then evacuated, having been heavily radiated. Three years later they were told it was “safe to return” despite the lead scientist calling Rongelap “by far the most contaminated place in the world”.

Significant compensation paid by the US to the Marshall Islands has proven inadequate given the scale of the contamination.  To some degree, the US has also used money to achieve capture of elite interest groups and secure ongoing control of the islands.

Entrusted to the US, the Marshall Islanders were treated like the civilians of Nagasaki
The US took the Marshall Islands from Japan in 1944.  The only “right” it has to be there was granted by the United Nations which in 1947 established the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, to be administered by the United States.

What followed was an abuse of trust worse than rapists at a state care facility.  Using the very powers entrusted to it to protect the Marshallese, the US instead used the islands as a nuclear laboratory — violating both the letter and spirit of international law.

Fellow white-dominated countries like Australia and New Zealand couldn’t have cared less and let the indigenous people be irradiated for decades.

The betrayal of trust by the US was comprehensive and remains so to this day:

Under Article 76 of the UN Charter, all trusteeship agreements carried obligations. The administering power was required to:

• Promote the political, economic, social, and educational advancement of the people
• Protect the rights and well-being of the inhabitants
• Help them advance toward self-government or independence.

Under Article VI, the United States solemnly pledged to “Protect the inhabitants against the loss of their lands and resources.”  Very similar to sentiments in New Zealand’s Treaty of Waitangi.  Within a few years the Americans were exploding the biggest nuclear bombs in history over the islands.

Within a year of the US assuming trusteeship of the islands, another pillar of international law came into effect: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) — which affirms the inherent dignity and equal rights of all humans. Exposing colonised peoples to extreme radiation for weapons testing is a racist affront to this.

America has a long history of making treaties and fine speeches and then exploiting indigenous peoples.  Last year, I had the sobering experience of reading American military historian Peter Cozzens’ The Earth is Weeping, a history of the “Indian wars” for the American West.

The past is not dead: the Marshall Islands are a hive of bases, laboratories and missile testing; Americans are also incredibly busy attacking the population in Gaza today.

Eyes of Fire – the last voyage of the Rainbow Warrior
Had the French not sunk the Rainbow Warrior after it reached Auckland from the Rongelap evacuation, it would have led a flotilla to protest nuclear testing at Moruroa in French Polynesia.  So the bookends of this article are the abuse of defenceless people in the charge of one nuclear power — the US —  and the abuse of New Zealand and the peoples of French Polynesia by another nuclear power — France.

This incredible story, and much more, is the subject of David Robie’s outstanding book Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior, published by Little Island Press, which has been relaunched to mark the 40th anniversary of the French terrorist attack.

A new prologue by former prime minister Helen Clark and a preface by Greenpeace’s Bunny McDiarmid, along with an extensive postscript which bring us up to the present day, underline why the past is not dead; it’s with us right now.

Between them, France and the US have exploded more than 300 nuclear bombs in the Pacific. Few people are told this; few people know this.

Today, a matrix of issues combine — the ongoing effects of nuclear contamination, sea rise imperilling Pacific nations, colonialism still posing immense challenges to people in the Marshall Islands, Kanaky New Caledonia and in many parts of our region.

Unsung heroes
Our media never ceases to share the pronouncements of European leaders and news from the US and Europe but the leaders and issues of the Pacific are seldom heard. The heroes of the antinuclear movement should be household names in Australia and New Zealand.

Vanuatu’s great leader Father Walter Lini; Oscar Temaru, Mayor, later President of French Polynesia; Senator Jeton Anjain, Darlene Keju-Johnson and so many others.

Do we know them?  Have we heard their voices?

Jobod Silk, climate activist, said in a speech welcoming the Rainbow Warrior III to Majuro earlier this year:  “Our crusade for nuclear justice intertwines with our fight against the tides.”

Former Tuvalu PM Enele Sapoaga castigated Australia for the AUKUS submarine deal which he said “was crafted in secret by former Prime Minister Scott Morrison with no public discussion.”

He challenged the bigger regional powers, particularly Australia and New Zealand, to remember that the existential threat faced by Pacific nations comes first from climate change, and reminded New Zealanders of the commitment to keeping the South Pacific nuclear-free.

Hinamoeura Cross, a Tahitian anti-nuclear activist and politician, said in a 2019 UN speech: “Today, the damage is done. My people are sick. For 30 years we were the mice in France’s laboratory.”

Until we learn their stories and know their names as well as we know those of Marco Rubio or Keir Starmer, we will remain strangers in our own lands.

The Pacific owes them, along with the people of Greenpeace, a huge debt.  They put their bodies on the line to stop the aggressors. Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira, killed by the French in 1985, was just one of many victims, one of many heroes.

A great way to honour the sacrifice of those who stood up for justice, who stood for peace and a nuclear-free Pacific, and who honoured our own national identity would be to buy David Robie’s excellent book.

You cannot sink a rainbow.

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

Aggression is widely understood as the most serious form of the illegal use of force under international law. At the post–World War II Nuremberg Trials, British Judge Norman Birkett said:

To initiate a war of aggression…is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

UN General Assembly Resolution 3314 lists seven acts that constitute aggression, including:

• The invasion or attack by the armed forces of a state of the territory of another State….
• Bombardment by the armed forces of a state against the territory of another state, or the use of any weapons by a state against the territory of another state.

In a clear instance of such aggression, 125 US military aircraft (along with a submarine) unleashed 75 weapons against Iran on June 21, including 14 GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs), each of which weighs 30,000 pounds (BBC, 6/23/25). The MOPs are the most powerful non-nuclear weapons in the US arsenal (Democracy Now!, 6/23/25).

‘Brilliant military operation’

The New York Times‘ Bret Stephens (6/22/25) acknowledged that US intelligence maintained that “Iran’s leaders had not yet decided to build a bomb”—but he argued that to act “amid uncertainty…is the essence of statesmanship.”

Rather than condemning this blatant violation of international law, US corporate media commentators gushed over what the Boston Globe (6/24/25) called a “brilliant military operation.” The Wall Street Journal (6/22/25) gave President Donald Trump “credit…for meeting the moment.”

To the New York Times’ Bret Stephens (6/22/25), Trump made “a courageous and correct decision that deserves respect.” “The president acted before it was too late,” he wrote. “It is the essence of statesmanship.”

For the Washington Post’s Max Boot (6/25/25), it’s “good news…that both Israel and the United States showed they can bombard Iranian nuclear facilities and other targets at will.”

Rather than toasting aggression, these observers could have used their platforms to try to help foster a political climate that prioritizes peace and the international legal principles that could help create a less violent world.

Meanwhile, some opinion mongers thought the US was at risk of insufficiently violating international law. The Post’s editorial board (6/22/25) said Trump

should ensure that Iran’s nuclear program is demolished, as he appeared to claim it was on Saturday. This would mean the destruction of the targeted sites plus any residual weapons-building capacity.

In other words, the authors are glad that the US bombed Iran in violation of international law, and think it might be best to do more of the same.

A Journal editorial (6/23/25) put forth a similar view, warning that Trump will “squander” any “gains” that the US and Israel may have made against Iran if he “lets Iran take a breather, retain any enriched uranium it has secretly stored, and then rearm. But the last fortnight creates a rare opportunity for a more peaceful Middle East.” I’m not a big Orwell fan, but there’s something to his vision of the propaganda slogan “war is peace.”

Upside-down world

Iran “now knows Mr. Trump isn’t bluffing,” the Wall Street Journal (6/22/25) wrote. Does the paper imagine that Iran thought Trump was “bluffing” when he assassinated Qasem Soleimani, the nation’s top military leader, in 2020?

These celebrations of bomb-dropping occur in an upside-down world, where Iran is an aggressor against the United States. One form of this lie is accusing Iran of wantonly killing Americans or seeking to do so. The Journal (6/22/25) cited “1,000 Americans killed by Iran-supplied roadside bombs and other means”—referring to the dubious claim that Iran is responsible for US soldiers killed during the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq (Progressive, 1/7/20). Thus, to the editors, “Mr. Trump had to act to stop the threat in front of him to protect America.”

For Boot (6/22/25), Iran is a “predator” that the United States and Israel “will still have to deal with…for years to come.”

It would be nice to be able to assess the evidence for these allegations, but the authors don’t so much as hint at any. What is well documented, though, is that the US has been the aggressor in its longrunning war with Iran.

The US ruling class initiated the conflict by overthrowing Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 (NPR, 2/7/19), propping up the Shah’s torture regime for 26 years (BBC, 6/3/16; AP, 2/6/19), sponsoring the Iraqi invasion of Iran and helping Iraq use chemical weapons against Iran (Foreign Policy, 8/26/13), supporting Israel’s years-long campaign of murdering Iranian scientists (Responsible Statecraft, 12/21/20), and asphyxiating Iran’s civilian population through economic sanctions (Human Rights Watch, 10/29/19).

In other words, the US has been prosecuting a war against the Iranian people for more than 70 years, and Iran hasn’t done anything remotely comparable to the US, but the corporate media pretends that the inverse is true.

The consent manufacturers went even further, characterizing Iran as a threat to the world more generally. The Journal (6/22/25) said “Iran has been waging regional and terrorist war for decades,” and that “the world is safer” because the US bombed the country. Stephens proclaimed the Iranian government “the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism,” a claim Boot (6/25/25) echoed, writing that the nation has a “decades-long track record as the No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism.” Sickeningly, Antony Blinken (New York Times, 6/24/25), a leading architect of the genocide of Gaza’s civilian population, called Iran “a leading state sponsor of terrorism; a destructive and destabilizing force via its proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, Yemen and Iraq.”

As usual, none of these writers bothered to say which acts of “terrorism” Iran has backed, never mind provide proof. Of course, if one wanted to make a serious argument that Iran has won the planet’s “state sponsor of terrorism” gold medal, then it would be necessary to show how they trumped, say, US support for Al Qaeda in Syria. For such a case to be convincing, it would furthermore be necessary to assess where bankrolling a genocide ranks in the terror-sponsoring Olympics.

‘A grave nuclear threat’

Max Boot (Washington Post, 6/25/25): “The good news is that both Israel and the United States showed they can bombard Iranian nuclear facilities and other targets at will.”

In the fantasy world where Iran is a grave danger to the US and indeed the world, then wrongly implying that it has or is about to have nuclear weapons packs a heavier punch. The Journal (6/22/25) said, “President Trump’s decision to strike Iran’s three most significant nuclear sites on Saturday helped rid the world of a grave nuclear threat.” The editorial would later add, “Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wanted a bomb more than peace.”

Boot (6/25/25) wrote that “preliminary Israeli intelligence assessments [of the US bombing of Iran] conclude that the damage to the Iranian nuclear weapons program was more extensive—enough to set back the program by several years.” Stephens began his piece:

For decades, a succession of American presidents pledged that they were willing to use force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. But it was President Trump who, by bombing three of Iran’s key nuclear sites on Sunday morning, was willing to demonstrate that those pledges were not hollow and that Tehran could not simply tunnel its way to a bomb because no country other than Israel dared confront it.

As FAIR contributor Bryce Greene (6/23/25) recently demonstrated, there is no proof that Iran has nuclear weapons or is close to having any. Yet the op-ed pages are peppered with insinuations that Iran’s imaginary nukes legitimize the US’s aggression against the country.

A Boston Globe editorial (6/24/25) read:

After years of insisting it would not allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon, Israel followed through by launching a wide-ranging attack earlier this month, assassinating nuclear scientists and military leaders and destroying many sites associated with Iran’s decades-long nuclear program. Trump initially stayed on the sidelines, until Saturday when US bombers delivered the coup de grâce, destroying—or at least heavily damaging—a key underground site that only American bunker-buster bombs could reach….

Stopping Iran, whose unofficial national motto is “Death to America,’’ from gaining a nuclear weapon has rightly been a US priority for decades.

Iran’s nuclear program is now damaged but not destroyed.

What’s missing from this chatter is that, even if we lived in an alternate reality where Iran had nuclear weapons or was hours away from having them, attacking them on these grounds would not be legitimate. After all, international law does not grant states a right to attack each other on a preventive (Conversation, 6/18/25) or pre-emptive basis (Conversation, 6/23/25). This crucial point was entirely absent in the coverage I’ve discussed.

Also overlooked are the 90 nuclear warheads that Israel is believed to have, as well as the more than 5,200 that the US reportedly possesses, none of which apparently constitute “a grave nuclear threat,” even as it’s not Iran but the US and Israel that routinely carry out full-scale invasions and occupations of nations in West Asia.

Whether it’s Iran’s supposed support for terrorism or Iran’s nonexistent and non-imminent nuclear weapons, the propaganda follows the same formula: make an unsubstantiated claim about Iranian malfeasance, and use that as a premise on which to defend Washington openly carrying out acts of aggression, perhaps the gravest violation of international law.

If you want the US and Israel to stop killing and immiserating people in Iran, remember this pattern and get used to debunking it. Because, last week’s ceasefire notwithstanding, the US/Israeli war on Iran isn’t over.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Gregory Shupak.

Traditional conservative parties, the CDU and CSU, while reluctantly distancing themselves from the AfD, have adopted the same Islamophobic stance wrapped in a more ‘respectable’ language. In complete disregard for the lessons etched into their own Grundgesetz, the CSU have declared that Islam has no place in Germany. The CDU, having finally shed their liberal skin, publicly declared any calls for a ‘Free Palestine’ as terrorist sympathies. Their violence is sanitised and bureaucratic as they push legislation to strip dual nationals of citizenship based on their political views. So effortless is their rejection of civil rights that it would send their oligarch friends in the White-house into a jealous frenzy.

A more unexpected xenophobic turn came from the centre-left alliance under former chancellor Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD). After a stabbing incident in Solingen, afraid to lose votes to the anti-immigrant wave sweeping the country, Scholz promised Germany mass deportations. This concession gave the racists all the proof they needed for the otherwise unfounded narrative of ‘the violent immigrant’. Riding this wave into right-wing populism, he promised to strengthen the borders of the fortress Europe – borders which already claim the lives of 8 000 migrants every year. And as if reading from the Trump script, the SPD oversaw the deportation orders for several EU citizens for participating in peaceful demonstrations – no charges, no trial and no global outrage.

Across the German political spectrum, in a mixture of performative Holocaust guilt and opportunism, parties have embraced the settler colonial hierarchy on which Israel was founded, with Arabs and Muslims at the bottom of their order. With revisionist logic and wishful thinking, the Bundestag passed a resolution that frames anti-Semitism as an imported middle-eastern issue. By adopting the fictional IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which includes all criticism of the state of Israel, they got the outcome they were looking for. The resolution was sharply criticised by human rights monitors as antagonistic to Arabs and Muslims and simultaneously anti-Semitic for conflating Judaism with the state of Israel. The resolution was passed with over 95% of votes.

In Germany, to wear a keffiyeh is to risk arrest and deportation. To publicly mourn the Nakba is illegal and yet when the AfD march through immigrant neighbourhoods to intimidate they call it freedom of speech. The message to the Arabs and Muslims of Germany is clear – you are at the bottom of our racial order, our human rights do not apply to you. Germany now records 5 Islamophobic incidents every day.

This perfect storm of Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiment has thrown Europes largest economy back on a path of institutional racism. The wider fallout from alienating 5 million Muslims in Germany from their civil rights will undoubtedly be felt in the coming decades.

But the selective repentance, this weaponisation of Holocaust memory, serves not only to justify the suspension of civil liberties at home. It conveniently forms a theatre of morality to mask ongoing imperialist projects and to evade historical responsibilities. True atonement for the horrors of the Holocaust would include taking responsibility for the over 300 000 Europeans that moved to Palestine after World War Two and the Nakba that followed, displacing 750 000 Palestinians from their land. The victims of German genocides in Africa know not to hold their breath waiting for justice.

Colonial Amnesia

In Namibia, the German legacy of genocide is not forgotten. In a blueprint for the Gaza genocide, the pretext for this genocide was an anti-colonial uprising that killed 100 German settlers. The mass murder that followed wiped out 80% of the Herero and 50% of the Nama people, over 70 000 killed, for daring to resist colonial rule. Germany’s recognition of these atrocities, more than a century later, was embarrassingly absent of any formal reparations or land redistribution. To this day, Namibia remains in an apartheid-like inequality with 48% of Namibia’s land in the hands of just 5000 white settlers – 0.3% of the population.

The suppression of the Maji Maji rebellion in Tanzania reeks of a similar stench. Deliberate starvation was weaponised against the Muslim communities that rebelled against the colonisers. Captain Wangenheim’s words—“Only hunger and want can bring about final submission”—echo in the blockade of Gaza and in Germany’s vetoes in contempt of international law. 300 000 murdered, no reparations on the horizon, no memorial in Berlin.

When Elon Musk, the settler son of apartheid capital, fans the flames of European fascism and demands that Germany “move beyond its past guilt”, what he means is this: that Germany must stop pretending, and embrace its role in the white empire once again. And the disenfranchised Germans are listening.

In defence of genocide

In April 2025, the ICJ announced an extension of Israel’s deadline to submit a defence against the allegations of genocide brought by South Africa and supported by the majority of the world’s countries. Germany as one of the passionate defenders of Israel has been proudly diluting, stalling and vetoing calls for immediate ceasefire and sanctions on Israel. While the ruling is inevitably not going to be in Israels favour, with German sponsorship the killing can continue for another year.

The international order that was implemented after WWII, once meant to protect vulnerable groups, is now being subdued. The right to armed resistance against occupation, the blanket ban on collective punishment and withholding of aid are all conveniently ignored by the German political establishment, left to right. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Euro-Med Monitor are all screaming ‘Genocide in Gaza’ and calling out German complicity. They fell for the theatrics of ‘Nie Wieder’.

At home, repression became policy and civil rights monitors took note. Palestinian flags are banned, solidarity groups outlawed, Jewish activists arrested, Arab youth surveilled. These tactics are not new to us in the Kurdish liberation struggle. The banning of Kurdish resistance symbols and closing of book publishers, what should have triggered a constitutional crisis, was casually gifted by the German state to their friend in Türkiye. Add it to the list of ethnic cleansing campaigns sponsored by Germany.

Germany’s Islamophobic turn cannot be divorced from its colonial past or its present-day imperial commitments. The AfD’s rise, the CDU’s xenophobic mimicry, and the SPD’s repressive populism are symptoms of a deeper pathology: a state apparatus that has never abandoned the hierarchies of race and empire. While the world’s gaze is fixed on the Trump administration, it is time to recognise Germany once again as a powerful xenophobic and authoritarian force in Europe.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kaveh Najafi.

Traditional conservative parties, the CDU and CSU, while reluctantly distancing themselves from the AfD, have adopted the same Islamophobic stance wrapped in a more ‘respectable’ language. In complete disregard for the lessons etched into their own Grundgesetz, the CSU have declared that Islam has no place in Germany. The CDU, having finally shed their liberal skin, publicly declared any calls for a ‘Free Palestine’ as terrorist sympathies. Their violence is sanitised and bureaucratic as they push legislation to strip dual nationals of citizenship based on their political views. So effortless is their rejection of civil rights that it would send their oligarch friends in the White-house into a jealous frenzy.

A more unexpected xenophobic turn came from the centre-left alliance under former chancellor Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD). After a stabbing incident in Solingen, afraid to lose votes to the anti-immigrant wave sweeping the country, Scholz promised Germany mass deportations. This concession gave the racists all the proof they needed for the otherwise unfounded narrative of ‘the violent immigrant’. Riding this wave into right-wing populism, he promised to strengthen the borders of the fortress Europe – borders which already claim the lives of 8 000 migrants every year. And as if reading from the Trump script, the SPD oversaw the deportation orders for several EU citizens for participating in peaceful demonstrations – no charges, no trial and no global outrage.

Across the German political spectrum, in a mixture of performative Holocaust guilt and opportunism, parties have embraced the settler colonial hierarchy on which Israel was founded, with Arabs and Muslims at the bottom of their order. With revisionist logic and wishful thinking, the Bundestag passed a resolution that frames anti-Semitism as an imported middle-eastern issue. By adopting the fictional IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which includes all criticism of the state of Israel, they got the outcome they were looking for. The resolution was sharply criticised by human rights monitors as antagonistic to Arabs and Muslims and simultaneously anti-Semitic for conflating Judaism with the state of Israel. The resolution was passed with over 95% of votes.

In Germany, to wear a keffiyeh is to risk arrest and deportation. To publicly mourn the Nakba is illegal and yet when the AfD march through immigrant neighbourhoods to intimidate they call it freedom of speech. The message to the Arabs and Muslims of Germany is clear – you are at the bottom of our racial order, our human rights do not apply to you. Germany now records 5 Islamophobic incidents every day.

This perfect storm of Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiment has thrown Europes largest economy back on a path of institutional racism. The wider fallout from alienating 5 million Muslims in Germany from their civil rights will undoubtedly be felt in the coming decades.

But the selective repentance, this weaponisation of Holocaust memory, serves not only to justify the suspension of civil liberties at home. It conveniently forms a theatre of morality to mask ongoing imperialist projects and to evade historical responsibilities. True atonement for the horrors of the Holocaust would include taking responsibility for the over 300 000 Europeans that moved to Palestine after World War Two and the Nakba that followed, displacing 750 000 Palestinians from their land. The victims of German genocides in Africa know not to hold their breath waiting for justice.

Colonial Amnesia

In Namibia, the German legacy of genocide is not forgotten. In a blueprint for the Gaza genocide, the pretext for this genocide was an anti-colonial uprising that killed 100 German settlers. The mass murder that followed wiped out 80% of the Herero and 50% of the Nama people, over 70 000 killed, for daring to resist colonial rule. Germany’s recognition of these atrocities, more than a century later, was embarrassingly absent of any formal reparations or land redistribution. To this day, Namibia remains in an apartheid-like inequality with 48% of Namibia’s land in the hands of just 5000 white settlers – 0.3% of the population.

The suppression of the Maji Maji rebellion in Tanzania reeks of a similar stench. Deliberate starvation was weaponised against the Muslim communities that rebelled against the colonisers. Captain Wangenheim’s words—“Only hunger and want can bring about final submission”—echo in the blockade of Gaza and in Germany’s vetoes in contempt of international law. 300 000 murdered, no reparations on the horizon, no memorial in Berlin.

When Elon Musk, the settler son of apartheid capital, fans the flames of European fascism and demands that Germany “move beyond its past guilt”, what he means is this: that Germany must stop pretending, and embrace its role in the white empire once again. And the disenfranchised Germans are listening.

In defence of genocide

In April 2025, the ICJ announced an extension of Israel’s deadline to submit a defence against the allegations of genocide brought by South Africa and supported by the majority of the world’s countries. Germany as one of the passionate defenders of Israel has been proudly diluting, stalling and vetoing calls for immediate ceasefire and sanctions on Israel. While the ruling is inevitably not going to be in Israels favour, with German sponsorship the killing can continue for another year.

The international order that was implemented after WWII, once meant to protect vulnerable groups, is now being subdued. The right to armed resistance against occupation, the blanket ban on collective punishment and withholding of aid are all conveniently ignored by the German political establishment, left to right. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Euro-Med Monitor are all screaming ‘Genocide in Gaza’ and calling out German complicity. They fell for the theatrics of ‘Nie Wieder’.

At home, repression became policy and civil rights monitors took note. Palestinian flags are banned, solidarity groups outlawed, Jewish activists arrested, Arab youth surveilled. These tactics are not new to us in the Kurdish liberation struggle. The banning of Kurdish resistance symbols and closing of book publishers, what should have triggered a constitutional crisis, was casually gifted by the German state to their friend in Türkiye. Add it to the list of ethnic cleansing campaigns sponsored by Germany.

Germany’s Islamophobic turn cannot be divorced from its colonial past or its present-day imperial commitments. The AfD’s rise, the CDU’s xenophobic mimicry, and the SPD’s repressive populism are symptoms of a deeper pathology: a state apparatus that has never abandoned the hierarchies of race and empire. While the world’s gaze is fixed on the Trump administration, it is time to recognise Germany once again as a powerful xenophobic and authoritarian force in Europe.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kaveh Najafi.

In July 1985, Australia’s Pacific territory of Norfolk Island (pop. 2188) became the centre of a real life international spy thriller.

Four French agents sailed there on board the Ouvéa, a yacht from Kanaky New Caledonia, after bombing the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland, killing Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira.

The Rainbow Warrior was the flagship for a protest flotilla due to travel to Moruroa atoll to challenge French nuclear tests.

Australian police took them into custody on behalf of their New Zealand counterparts but then, bafflingly, allowed them to sail away, never to face justice.

• READ MORE: Australia obstructed probe into deadly Rainbow Warrior bombing — Declassified Australia
• Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior
• LISTEN: Richard Baker’s podcast trailer

On the 40th anniversary of the bombing (10 July 2025), award-winning journalist Richard Baker goes on an adventure from Paris to the Pacific to get the real story – and ultimately uncover the role that Australia played in the global headline-making affair.

The programme includes an interview with Pacific journalist David Robie, author of Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior. David’s article about this episode is published at Declassified Australia here.

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

It’s been 55 years since the Ohio National Guard opened fire on students at Kent State University who were protesting the US war in Vietnam. Four students were murdered at the Kent State Massacre: Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Lee Scheuer, and William Schroeder. In this episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with Mike Alewitz, who was a student at Kent State in 1970, about what it was like to witness the massacre firsthand, and about how the true history of this critical moment in US history has been whitewashed ever since.

Guest:

• Mike Alewitz is an internationally renowned muralist and Professor Emeritus of censorship, art, and politics at Central Connecticut State University. Alewitz was the founder and chairman of the Kent Student Mobilization Committee Against the War in Vietnam and an eyewitness to the May 4, 1970, Kent State massacre.

Credits:

• Producer: Rosette Sewali
• Studio Production: David Hebden
• Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich

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

On Friday, June 13, after Israeli airstrikes struck Iran, Iran launched a retaliatory barrage of missiles at Israel, hitting targets in Tel Aviv. Palestinians watched Iran’s bombs fall on Israel from across the militarized border separating the Gaza Strip from Israel. The Real News Network spoke with Palestinians on the ground in Gaza, who continue to endure genocidal violence and forced starvation at the hands of Israel, about their reactions to Iran’s airstrikes.

Credits:
Producers: Belal Awad, Leo Erhardt
Videographers: Ruwaida Amer, Mahmoud Al Mashharawi
Video Editor: Leo Erhardt

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Belal Awad, Leo Erhadt, Ruwaida Amer and Mahmoud Al Mashharawi.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Faramarz Farbod.

Chile’s Indigenous Mapuche people have played their own version of field hockey for countless generations. Roughly 2 million Mapuche Indigenous people live across Chile and Argentina. Many have moved from their ancestral lands to the city. But they have not forgotten their past. They are using their ancestral sport, palín, to breathe life into their culture and traditions. Using their sport as a type of resistance. 

This is episode 54 of Stories of Resistance—a podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange’s Human Rights in Action program. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment, or leave a review. 

And please consider signing up for the Stories of Resistance podcast feed, either in Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Spreaker, or wherever you listen.

You can see exclusive pictures of the Mapuche community playing palín in this story on Michael’s Patreon.

Please consider supporting this podcast and Michael Fox’s reporting on his Patreon account.

Written and produced by Michael Fox.

RESOURCES: 

Mapuche sports help Indigenous Chileans revive culture

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Michael Fox.

Former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark has warned the country needs to maintain its nuclear-free policy as a “fundamental tenet” of its independent foreign policy in the face of gathering global storm clouds.

Writing in a new book being published next week, she says “nuclear war is an existential threat to humanity. Far from receding, the threat of use of nuclear weapons is ever present.

“The Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists now sits at 89 seconds to midnight,” she says in the prologue to journalist and media academic David Robie’s book Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior.

• READ MORE: 40 years on: Reflecting on Rainbow Warrior’s legacy, fight against nuclear colonialism
• Other Eyes of Fire reports

Writing before the US surprise attack with B-2 stealth bombers and “bunker-buster” bombs on three Iranian nuclear facilities on June 22, Clark says “the Middle East is a tinder box with the failure of the Iran nuclear deal and with Israel widely believed to possess nuclear weapons”.

The Doomsday Clock references the Ukraine war theatre where “use of nuclear weapons has been floated by Russia”.

Also, the arms control architecture for Europe is unravelling, leaving the continent much less secure. India and Pakistan both have nuclear arsenals, she says.

“North Korea continues to develop its nuclear weapons capacity.”

‘Serious ramifications’
Clark, who was also United Nations Development Programme administrator from 2009 to 2017, a member of The Elders group of global leaders founded by Nelson Mandela in 2007, and is an advocate for multilateralism and nuclear disarmament, says an outright military conflict between China and the United States “would be one between two nuclear powers with serious ramifications for East Asia, Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and far beyond.”

She advises New Zealand to be wary of Australia’s decision to enter a nuclear submarine purchase programme with the United States.

“There has been much speculation about a potential Pillar Two of the AUKUS agreement which would see others in the region become partners in the development of advanced weaponry,” Clark says.

“This is occurring in the context of rising tensions between the United States and China.

“Many of us share the view that New Zealand should be a voice for de-escalation, not for enthusiastic expansion of nuclear submarine fleets in the Pacific and the development
of more lethal weaponry.”

In the face of the “current global turbulence, New Zealand needs to reemphasise the principles and values which drove its nuclear-free legislation and its advocacy for a nuclear-free South Pacific and global nuclear disarmament.

Clark says that the years 1985 – the Rainbow Warrior was bombed by French secret agents on 10 July 1985 — and 1986 were critical years in the lead up to New Zealand’s nuclear-free legislation in 1987.

“New Zealanders were clear – we did not want to be defended by nuclear weapons. We wanted our country to be a force for diplomacy and for dialogue, not for warmongering.”

Chronicles humanitarian voyage
The book Eyes of Fire chronicles the humanitarian voyage by the Greenpeace flagship to the Marshall Islands to relocate 320 Rongelap Islanders who were suffering serious community health consequences from the US nuclear tests in the 1950s.

The author, Dr David Robie, founder of the Pacific Media Centre at Auckland University of Technology, was the only journalist on board the Rainbow Warrior in the weeks leading up to the bombing.

His book recounts the voyage and nuclear colonialism, and the transition to climate justice as the major challenge facing the Pacific, although the “Indo-Pacific” rivalries between the US, France and China mean that geopolitical tensions are recalling the Cold War era in the Pacific.

Dr Robie is also critical of Indonesian colonialism in the Melanesian region of the Pacific, arguing that a just-outcome for Jakarta-ruled West Papua and also the French territories of Kanaky New Caledonia and “French” Polynesia are vital for peace and stability in the region.

Eyes of Fire is being published by Little Island Press, which also produced one of his earlier books, Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face: Media, Mayhem and Human Rights in the Pacific.

• Greenpeace executive director Dr Russel Norman is launching Eyes of Fire at the Ellen Melville Centre Pioneer Women’s Hall at 6pm on the bombing anniversary day, July 10, following a memorial vigil in the morning on board the current flagship Rainbow Warrior III.
• Eyes of Fire microsite (Little island Press)

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

But those who attended this week’s conference in Bonn, which concluded on Thursday, say that negotiators made only halting progress. While diplomats made headway on measures to help countries adapt to the effects of global warming and prepare their workers for the energy transition, they stalled out on two critical issues that could derail negotiations at COP30, this year’s United Nations climate conference in Belém, Brazil, in November. As a result, there is still little clarity on the path to mobilizing $1.3 trillion in climate-related funding for developing nations, a key promise made at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, last year. Countries also failed to move beyond procedural discussions about how to phase out fossil fuels worldwide, in accordance with an agreement made at the climate talks in Dubai nearly two years ago. 

“I’m not going to sugarcoat it. We have a lot more to do before we meet again in Belém,” said Simon Stiell, executive secretary for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the body which oversees UN climate talks. “There is so much more work to do to keep 1.5 alive, as science demands,” he added, referring to the landmark goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement, itself a result of COP negotiations, to keep planetary warming to under 1.5 degrees Celsius or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit compared to preindustrial levels.

As at past climate summits, the key conflicts in Bonn appeared to be about money. In Baku last year, countries were locked in a protracted debate over how much funding richer, developed nations should provide to help poorer, industrializing nations move away from fossil fuels and adapt to climate change. Although researchers estimated that developing countries need trillions of dollars to do so, wealthy nations only committed to $300 billion in transfers per year by 2035. And while the decision in Baku recognized a larger need by calling on rich countries to help raise $1.3 trillion in global climate investment, it provided no specifics on how this will be accomplished. 

In order to develop a pathway to expand and clarify those financial goals, Brazilian and Azerbaijani climate diplomats began an effort to develop what they called the “Baku to Belém roadmap,” a report intended to lay out how rich nations could mobilize the $1.3 trillion in funding. At Bonn, Brazilian officials were expected to begin finding common ground with other countries to make the roadmap a reality. Instead, however, the meeting began with a contentious debate over whether a provision on climate finance from developed to developing countries should be on the agenda at all. The dispute, which suggested that tensions between developed and developing countries over who would pay for climate action and how have only grown, consumed the first two days of the conference. That left little time to discuss the roadmap.

“Countries are quite uncertain about the roadmap, how it’s going to look, and to what extent it will reflect the views of all countries,” said Sandra Guzmán Luna, who has attended every COP since 2008 and is the general director of the Climate Finance Group for Latin America and the Caribbean, a research and advocacy initiative in the region. “There are more doubts about the roadmap than support.”

The uncertainty around finance has ripple effects on the scale of climate ambition that developing nations are willing to display. Countries are required to submit plans for lowering their greenhouse gas emissions — formally called Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs — every five years. Despite a deadline looming later this year, only two dozen or so countries have submitted updated NDCs. Guzmán Luna said that many developing countries are refusing to submit new NDCs with more ambitious climate goals because of a lack of financial support from wealthy nations. Given that rich, early-industrializing countries caused the lion’s share of global warming so far, the argument goes, it’s only fair that they should shoulder most of the burden of financing the energy transition.

“There is a clear political statement from many developing countries that if there is no money, they are not going to increase ambition,” said Guzmán Luna. “It’s a legitimate point from developing countries to say so — but obviously, it’s a huge risk for climate action.”

These disagreements don’t bode well for negotiations at COP30 in Belém, where world leaders will gather amid mounting frustration over a growing pile of unfulfilled promises from previous COPs.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This year’s UN climate talks are already behind — 5 months before COP30 kicks off in Brazil on Jun 27, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Naveena Sadasivam.

On June 28, 2009, Honduras exploded and the people took to the streets after the president was overthrown in a coup. One radio show followed them, reported from the protests, and became the voice of the resistance: Felix Molina’s Resistencia—Resistance.

This is episode 52 of Stories of Resistance—a podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange’s Human Rights in Action program. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times. If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment, or leave a review. 

And please consider signing up for the Stories of Resistance podcast feed, either in Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Spreaker, or wherever you listen. 

You can see exclusive pictures, videos, and interviews on many of Michael Fox’s stories on his Patreon account: patreon.com/mfox. There you can also follow his reporting and support his work and this podcast. 

Written and produced by Michael Fox. 

Resources

• Under the Shadow Podcast
• Honduras, 2009. La Resistencia | Under the Shadow, Episode 7, Part 1
• Honduras, 2009. Legacy of a coup | Under the Shadow, Episode 7, Part 2
• Jesse Freeston’s documentary “Resistencia: The Fight for the Aguan Valley”

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Michael Fox.

Nearly 1,000 UNESCO chair positions have been established in universities across 120 countries. But only a handful of them — fewer than 10 — have been explicitly dedicated to issues facing Indigenous peoples.

Now, two Indigenous researchers from Canada and India have been tapped to co-chair a new role dedicated to advancing Indigenous rights through strengthening data sovereignty, stemming language loss, and improving research practices. Amy Parent, a member of the Nisga’a Nation in British Colombia, and Sonajharia Minz of the Oraon Tribal Peoples in India have been named co-chairs of the UNESCO Chair in Transforming Indigenous Knowledge Research Governance and Rematriation. 

Indigenous knowledge has long suffered under colonial rule, and now, Indigenous languages and ways of life are increasingly at risk due to climate change. More than half of the world’s 7,000 languages are on track for extinction, an end which could be hastened by the climate crisis. Sea level rise, storms, and rising heat are forcing Indigenous peoples to leave their homelands and making it harder for communities to maintain traditional languages, lifestyles, and cultural practices. Those same extreme weather events are exacerbating existing health risks for elders and other knowledge holders, some of whom are the last in their communities to be native language speakers. At the same time, traditional ecological knowledge, often captured within Indigenous languages, is increasingly seen as a climate solution. 

“When we look at Indigenous knowledge systems, everything’s connected,” Parent said. “Language is connected to land, land is connected with language, it’s connected to thinking, it’s connected to health. It’s connected to how we learn. And so when we start damaging one, we damage everything.” 

Grist spoke with Parent about Indigenous knowledge systems, their connection to climate change, and what she hopes she and Minz can accomplish in this new role. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. One of your goals is help stem the loss of Indigenous languages, which are rapidly disappearing. How would you characterize what’s at stake? 

A. Language is everything. Language teaches us how to think and how to know and how to connect with our land and with all living beings and teaches us our relationships with everything. If the languages continue to be taken, then we lose so much knowledge and so many values and ways of living within the world that can support us in ways where all of humanity can survive. I think we’re in a really critical moment and we need to do everything we can. If we don’t have our languages, they can’t teach us how to live well in the lands and the places where we currently reside.

For example, in my nation, we have five percent of fluent speakers left. And certainly, we are seeing a reawakening of Indigenous languages around the world. But it’s also a pressing priority for us to continue restoring and revitalizing them. So that’s something that we really want to continue in terms of our work supporting the goals of the U.N. decade for Indigenous languages and continuing to work with as many language champions and language educators and teachers as possible. 

Q. Can you share more about the relationship between Indigenous languages, land, and climate? 

A. In a Nisg̱a’a teachings — considered a “total way of life” — our seasonal calendar is more than a way to mark time, it is a governance framework encoded in language. Each month carries a land-based teaching that guides how we relate to land, water, and each other. For example, X̱maay — the month “to eat berries,” aligning with July — signals the time when salmonberries and other plants ripen. But this is not only about harvesting; it’s a land-based teaching that also marks the return of the salmon. The color of the salmonberry is a cue to prepare nets, clean our jars, and get our smokehouse ready. These signals are remembered and passed on through language, linking living ecological cycles to our collective responsibilities.

This is why Indigenous languages are inseparable from land. A single word like X̱maay contains generations of climate knowledge, laws, and cultural practices. When we revitalize our languages, we are not just preserving communication, we are restoring relational systems practiced across generations.

When Indigenous languages are lost, these intergenerational signals  — our original “climate science” — are at risk of vanishing too. But when we respect, revitalize, and uphold Indigenous knowledge systems, we restore these living relationships and the teachings that uphold not only our lifeway but the renewal of Mother Earth. 

Q. What needs to happen to prevent the extinguishing of Indigenous languages? 

A. I think we need to start listening to Indigenous peoples and what’s being said first and foremost about our languages, why they’re important. We need to prioritize them in our education systems. Here in Canada, we have French and English as our dominant languages. When we look at French language funding, it is a healthy, thriving language that is disproportionately funded by the Canadian government compared to Indigenous languages. And I think sometimes as Indigenous peoples, we need to remind our own governments of the importance of our language in terms of priorities. It can be very challenging for our leaders when they’re grappling with funding issues, resource issues, health and healing crises amongst everything, that sometimes our languages get put on the back burner. And so I think it’s really important that we prioritize them in everything that we do.

Q. A decade ago, the United Nations adopted sustainable development goals to address poverty, hunger, climate change, and many other ambitious goals. Yet since then, the situation for Indigenous peoples has worsened, according to the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs. What do you think about its conclusion, and what that says about the relationship between sustainable development goals and Indigenous ways of thinking? 

A. It’s a necessary critique of the work right now. These U.N. bodies are doing their best but that’s a clear example of what happens when we don’t connect these green priorities with Indigenous systems and languages. Ultimately we’re just tapping something onto an existing framework: We’re not changing capitalism or questioning anything. We’re just perpetuating ongoing systems of inequality that keep on impacting the land, the roles of women, our language, and our future generations. 

If you look at the conditions of Indigenous peoples around the world, they’ve gotten worse. That, to me, was more of an impetus for the work that we need to do. We can greenwash anything but we’re not going to change anything. Until we start to recognize the knowledge systems and the languages and the places from where we currently have the opportunity to reside and the privilege to reside, we’re not going to know how to live well within the living systems that we’re a part of and how to protect them and how to preserve them and promote them for future generations.

Q. You mentioned that you adopted the term “rematriation” rather than repatriation in part because the Nisga’a Nation is a matrilineal society. Now rematriation is part of your job as U.N. chair. What does rematriation mean to you? 

A. Repatriation itself is really still about patriarchal authority, it’s still about reinforcing colonial logics, laws, and practices. And if we’re really to honor all of the amazing women that have gotten us to where we are today, then we need to change that term and make it more relevant. Rematriation has other dimensions, but most certainly it has to do with the restoring of our matriarchal authority within our own communities that’s been impacted by colonialism. I think it’s about honoring and recognizing that as Indigenous peoples. What, for me, rematriation represents is a balancing of all the roles in our communities with our men, with two-spirit gender diverse people, with their children, with our elders, with the matriarchs, with their chiefs, and it’s about trying to bring that balance back in that’s been disrupted by colonialism. And so, for me, it’s also a process of healing and restoring and reclaiming what was really never given up. 

Q. How would you describe the significance of your new UNESCO role for Indigenous peoples? 

A. It means that we have another door open to us to be able to talk to some of those who are in power who can make decisions and shape policies to allow us to create the space that we need to support our own languages and cultures. It’s a door that I’m still learning about because I haven’t been in those rooms. But it’s the door to further conversations that can support our people. It’s for everybody and anybody who feels that they’re a rights holder for Indigenous systems and for our ways of knowing, being, and doing. 

Our roles are to keep that door open and to allow as many Indigenous peoples as possible to get into that room.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline UNESCO appoints Indigenous co-chairs to protect languages and knowledge amid climate crisis on Jun 25, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Anita Hofschneider.

This story originally appeared in Mondoweiss on June 21, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

Violence has a paralyzing power. What is the power of the word in the face of the planes that sow destruction and death, and the flying ballistic missiles? When I see people around me paralyzed or going crazy with fear in the face of the destruction that the Iranian missiles have sown, I cannot help but think of the resilience of the residents of Gaza, who go through seven circles of hell every day with no relief in sight.

But the missiles and planes are the continuation of politics by other means. Many words have been spoken, and many agreements have been concluded to create and set in motion the instruments of destruction and death. As far removed from reality as it may seem now, it is important to speak out today in order to understand the roots of the war and how we can resist and stop the looming disasters.

In Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran—it’s the same war

During the first year of the “war,” the Israeli public overwhelmingly supported the genocide in Gaza, with no significant reservations. But in recent months, we have seen doubts and disillusionment on the part of large sections. Now, when we stand in protest vigils demanding an end to the killing, the feeling is that most of the public on the streets of Haifa supports us. More and more Israelis, including established media outlets, former senior politicians, and generals, have begun to speak out about the war crimes that Israel is committing. An Israeli and international consensus has begun to form that the Israeli government deliberately avoids striving to end the war, and is working to expand and perpetuate it, for reasons of narrow political and personal interests or out of messianic extremism.

But suddenly, when Israel initiated the expansion of the war into an all-out attack on Iran, which will inevitably bring further death and destruction in both Iran and Israel, we began to see again the power of violence to take over the human psyche and paralyze thought. Suddenly, the automatic Israeli consensus stiffened again, with the media and the public celebrating the spilled Iranian blood. Even a sinking Europe, which had begun to show remorse in its support of the genocide in Gaza, became enthusiastic again, with Germany, France, and Britain literally begging for their share of the pound of flesh and blood.

The root of the evil here, and the source of all the current wars, is the role that Zionism has assumed as the crushing force of imperialist control in the Middle East. This is the declared strategy of the United States: to ensure Israel’s military superiority over any regional coalition. To secure Israel’s place as a military power that can strike at anyone who threatens American hegemony, the United States must keep Israel in a state of constant conflict and constant danger. 

This strategy paid off on a colossal scale for the United States in the wake of the Six-Day War in 1967, when the crushing Israeli victory over three Arab states led, within a few years, to the collapse of the dreams of independence and Arab socialism of the Nasserists and the left wing of the Ba’ath Party, and the establishment of reactionary and submissive dictatorships.

Since then, much water has flowed through the region’s rivers, hundreds of millions of residents have been added, there has been progress in education and the economy, and the equation that relies on the fortress of Jewish Sparta to maintain imperialist supremacy in the region is becoming less and less sustainable. The United States itself paid a heavy price for its military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq and emerged from them without any real achievement. Israel failed twice in its wars over Lebanon, in the Eighteen Years’ War (1982-2000) and in its brief adventure in the summer of 2006.

Meanwhile, the wider regional picture has also changed. Instead of pro-Western dictatorships in Turkey and Iran, populist Islamist governments have risen in the two regional powers, which are more responsive to public opinion in their countries and tend to identify with Palestinian suffering and resistance and to denounce Israel’s aggression.

For a long time, imperialist politics in the region were based on the principle of “divide and rule.” The main axis of nurtured conflict among the Muslim population was between Sunnis and Shiites. The grand idea was, within the framework of the “Abraham Accords,” to establish a defense alliance under Israeli-American auspices that would protect the oil kings and emirs of the Arabian Peninsula from the “Iranian threat” (and from their own people), in exchange for continued effective American control over the region’s natural resources and economy.

Even as the Palestinians did not receive massive support that would allow them to exercise their human and national rights, the Palestinian struggle was and remains a central axis that challenges the system of imperialist control in the region. The identification with the Palestinians by both Sunnis and Shiites, and, more recently, the shock of the unbridled violence perpetrated by Israel since October 7, and the exposure of the racist Pavlovian instinct of all Western powers in supporting the genocide in Gaza, all of which have changed and are still changing the map of the region for the long term.

Meanwhile, Israel has become embroiled in war on many fronts, struggling to achieve a decisive victory and reap the fruits of its military superiority. In Six Days in 1967, Israel militarily defeated three Arab countries and occupied vast areas. Now, for more than 600 days, it has been unable to defeat Palestinian resistance to the occupation of the Gaza Strip, which had been under a suffocating siege for many years before the current genocidal war. 

The only arena in which Israel has achieved a military and political victory is its struggle against Hezbollah in Lebanon, due to a combination of tactical failures on the part of Hezbollah and the fact that, as a representative of the oppressed Shiite minority, it had no full Lebanese legitimacy to intervene in the war. However, in Lebanon too, Israel’s insistence on continuing to hold occupied territory within Lebanon, with constant offensive military activity all over the country, keeps this front in the context of a violent conflict that has not ended and with no end in sight.

In Yemen, the government that came to power in Sanaa on the waves of the Arab Spring, and survived an all-out war by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the Emirates, continues to try and pressure an end to the attack on Gaza through a naval blockade and repeated attacks. Even before the conflict with Israel, Yemen was the poorest country in the region and is still torn by civil war. Despite its limited capabilities, repeated attacks by a coalition of Western countries led by the United States and Israeli attacks on economic infrastructure have failed to change Yemen’s position.

The expansion of the war into Syria after the fall of the Assad regime adds another layer to the logic of the conflict. The new Syrian regime, which emerged after 14 years of revolution and civil war at the cost of about a million lives and immense destruction, declared from the moment it was established that it was committed to the 1974 armistice agreements and that it did not want conflicts with any neighboring country. Despite this, and despite the military erosion of the multi-front war, Israel decided to open another front against Syria, conquering additional territories (in addition to the Syrian Golan Heights captured in 1967), bombing all over Syria, and threatening the new regime. This completely exposed the logic of the “villa in the jungle”: in order for the villa to remain a villa, it must ensure that the jungle remains a jungle, and any attempt to build a normal society and state in the region is an existential threat to it. 

The attack on Iran took this logic a step further. Israeli strategic superiority must be guaranteed not only against four hundred million Arabs but also against all other countries of the region. The Israeli method of killing Iranian scientists, which did not begin with the latest attack, brutally presents the concept of how the colonialist “local branch of Western culture” will be able to maintain its technological superiority.

On the nuclear question

As a university student, I took a course on “International Relations After World War II,” that is, the Cold War between the Western powers and the Soviet Union. The lecturer always talked about how Western leaders planned to confront “The Soviet Threat.” In “Operation Unthinkable,” which was to begin as early as July 1945, Churchill planned to mobilize the surrendered Wehrmacht troops to attack the Soviet Union and drop (American) atomic bombs on Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kiev. In 1949, the US planned a larger operation (“Operation Dropshot“) that involved the use of 300 atomic bombs and the destruction of 100 cities and towns in the Soviet Union.

In 1949, the Soviet Union conducted its first nuclear weapons test, which cooled America’s enthusiasm for a direct confrontation with it. Following the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, after the Soviet Union had proven that it could create a real nuclear threat to the U.S., talks began between the parties, and the Cold War gradually moved into the “détente” phase.

In my naivete, I asked the lecturer: According to what you taught us, as long as nuclear weapons were only in the hands of the West, we were on the verge of a nuclear war. Only when a “balance of terror” was created did the tension subside. How does this fit in with saying that the problem was “The Soviet Threat”? It seems the opposite is true…

He replied that from the perspective of the sequence of events, what I said made sense, but “no one in political science would agree” with my conclusion…

As far as is known (“according to foreign sources”), Israel possesses a large number of nuclear weapons, which the Western powers helped it develop. To this day, they defend Israel’s “right” to violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in all international forums. Israeli politicians and various experts have said that Israel has already considered using nuclear weapons against Arab countries several times, in moments of crisis. The climax came during the latest attack on Gaza, when lunatic extremist politicians fantasized about using an atomic bomb to annihilate Gaza as “revenge.” And, please, don’t tell me that the lunatic extremist right is far from the center of decision-making in Israel. As long as nuclear weapons are in the hands of one side in the region, there is a temptation to use them, thus creating an existential threat to the residents of the entire region. Clearly, the best situation is to have the entire region free of nuclear weapons. But history has proven that a nuclear balance of terror can also guarantee that nobody uses these weapons.

The West’s position on the Iranian nuclear issue is, on a regional scale, a repetition of its position on the denial of legitimacy of the Palestinian resistance. No matter how much Israel occupies and oppresses Palestinians, robs their land, destroys their homes, and kills them. Israel always “has the right to self-defense” and the Palestinian who defends his rights is always the “terrorist”. The ultimate way to ensure Israel’s “strategic superiority” in the region is to allow it, in a “time of need,” to wipe out millions of the inhabitants of the region using atomic weapons. This is the essence of the “Western Values” that they claim to stand for. 

The Gulf states, which grovel to the rulers of the United States and Europe, thought they were buying their favor, so that they would stop the massacre in Gaza. They also hoped to prevent the war with Iran, which endangers the security of all the countries in the region. Instead, surprise, surprise, it turns out that the money they gave to the U.S. continues to fund the genocide against Palestinians and the bombings of Lebanon and Syria. Furthermore, they are effectively paying the United States for the privilege of being on the receiving end of a future nuclear annihilation.

Where are we going from here?

As the saying goes: It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.

It is difficult to know what will happen, but there are many things that are unlikely not to happen. At the beginning of the current “war” in Gaza, the American administration’s emissaries used to ask Netanyahu what were his plans for “the day after.” What is your end game?

To this day, they have not received an answer, and this is not by chance. Israel lives from war to war and is unable to imagine a different reality, let alone take action to create it. The historical logic was that Israel attacks in order to impose the American “day after” on the Arabs. For this equation to hold, there should be an American administration that is capable and willing to stop Israel’s aggression and force concessions on it. In the meantime, the Americans have fallen in love with Israel’s aggression. Even more importantly, the United States really has nothing to offer the region these days.

We are living at the end of “the American era.” Today, China is the main economic partner for trade and development for the countries of the region, as well as elsewhere. The United States still retains its military superiority, at the price of huge military investment. To benefit from this superiority, it is inclined to militarize international politics, as is evident in Ukraine and East Asia, just like in our region. Israel’s military and political power is a reflection of American superiority. 

The U.S. military advantage is eroding as it loses its economic and technological leadership. When it uses military force to try to preserve or restore its world hegemony, it is not advancing itself but trying to push others backward. Humanity is paying an awful cost, but the U.S. decline is also accelerating.

The current war in the Middle East is part of a desperate effort to preserve the remnants of colonialism and Western superiority over the peoples of the Third World. The Palestinian people are paying a terrible, unbearable price for this. But the future will not be determined by the politicians of the West or the corrupt rulers of the region who grovel to them, but by the peoples who will stand up for their right to determine their own destiny.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Yoav Haifawi.

This action flies in the face of the U.S. government’s lengthy record of humanitarian assistance to people of other nations whose lives had been blighted by war, poverty, and illness. From the Marshall Plan to rebuild war-devastated Europe, to Senator George McGovern’s Food for Peace project to feed the hungry, to massive international public health campaigns to eradicate global diseases, U.S. aid programs have played an important role in alleviating human suffering around the world.

Of course, these actions were not unique. Other wealthy nations also developed overseas humanitarian aid programs. In 2023, when the U.S. government allocated 0.24 percent of its gross national income to humanitarian aid, Britain allocated 0.58 percent and Norway allocated over 1 percent.

Behind the support for the U.S. international aid program lay two key factors―a desire to reduce human misery and a desire to win friends for the United States in foreign lands.

But such concerns were ignored by the Trump administration. On January 20, 2025, the day of his return to the White House, Donald Trump ordered a 90-day freeze on U.S. foreign assistance. Three days later, the State Department issued a “stop work” order while the aid program received what it called a “comprehensive review.”

Elon Musk, the arrogant, eccentric, and drug-addled multibillionaire, took the lead in this review process. Unleashing his DOGE minions on the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which administered most of the federal government’s humanitarian aid programs, Musk proclaimed that the agency was a “viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.” USAID, he announced, “is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.”

Trump apparently shared this warped perspective and, consequently, most of USAID’s vital signs rapidly plummeted. In response to the president’s orders, its staff was decimated, its website was shut down, and its budget was slashed. After USAID’s shattered remains were transferred to the State Department, Secretary of State Marco Rubio cut 83 percent of its international humanitarian programs, reducing them from 6,200 to about 1,000.

As the distinguished historian Alfred McCoy reported this May, when USAID’s “skilled specialists in famine prevention, public health, and governance stopped working, the pain was soon felt around the world, particularly among mothers and children.” In Asia, the end of USAID’s funding forced the World Food Program to cut by half the pathetic food rations it provided to a million Rohingya refugees residing in miserable camps in Bangladesh, with food support shrinking to $6 a month per person.

In Africa, as McCoy noted, departing USAID officials estimated that the aid cuts would likely produce a 30 percent spike in tuberculosis, a disease that kills over a million people worldwide every year, and that 200,000 more children would probably be paralyzed within a decade. In the Congo, 7.8 million war refugees were likely to lose food aid and 2.3 million more children were predicted to suffer from malnutrition. Thanks to cutbacks in USAID health programs, a half-million AIDS patients were projected to die in South Africa, while, in the Congo, an estimated 15,000 could die within a month. In West Africa, the end of USAID’s Malaria Initiative virtually ensured that, within a year, there would be 18 million more malaria infections and 166,000 more likely deaths.

Malnutrition, as journalist Nicholas Kristof recently reported, already “leaves more than one-fifth of children worldwide stunted, countless millions cognitively impaired, and vast numbers … weak from anemia. Malnutrition is a factor in 45 percent of child deaths worldwide.”

Nevertheless, in early June, the Trump administration and its Republican allies took further action toward dismantling U.S. overseas humanitarian aid programs. In response to a request by the President, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted to claw back billions of dollars Congress had already appropriated for such aid. This included $500 million for activities related to infectious diseases and child maternal health, $400 million to address the global HIV epidemic, and $800 million for a program providing emergency shelter, water and sanitation, and family reunification for people forced to flee their countries.

Before the House vote, the president of Oxfam America, a leading humanitarian aid organization, appealed to the assembled legislators, arguing that the measure “would do irreversible harm” to millions of people. “We are already seeing women, children and families left without food, clean water and critical services after earlier aid cuts,” she declared, “and aid organizations can barely keep up with rising needs.” Nevertheless, despite unanimous Democratic opposition, the House Republican leadership pushed the bill through by a vote of 214 to 212.

Applauding GOP passage of the measure, Mike Johnson, the Republican Speaker of the House, promised “more of this in the days to come.” John Thune, the Republican Senate Majority Leader, pledged Senate action on the House bill this July.

As the United States, the world’s wealthiest nation, is the largest financial contributor to the United Nations, the drastic reductions in U.S. humanitarian aid are already having a devastating impact on UN assistance programs that provide life-saving food, medicine, and shelter to the world’s poorest, most desperate people. In mid-June, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said that it was being forced to drastically scale back these programs due to “brutal funding cuts.” The UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief commented gloomily: “We have been forced into a triage of human survival.”

Calling for aid “to help 114 million people facing life-threatening needs across the world,” the UN Office for Humanitarian Affairs said that “this isn’t just an appeal for money―it’s a call for global responsibility, for human solidarity, for a commitment to end the suffering.”

Thus far, there’s no indication that the Trump administration has that commitment.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Lawrence S. Wittner.

On June 16, six members of Jewish Voice for Peace in Chicago—Ash Bohrer, Becca Lubow, Avey Rips, Seph Mozes, Audrey Gladson, and Benjamin Teller—began an indefinite hunger strike to demand an end to the genocide in Gaza, unconditional military aid for Israel, and the blockade of food and medical aid to the 2.3 million Palestinians now living amongst the rubble. In this urgent episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with two of the Chicago hunger strikers, Ash Bohrer and Avey Rips, about their act of protest and how far they’re willing to go to stop Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians.

Guests:

• Ash Bohrer is a scholar-activist based in Chicago. Professionally, Bohrer is currently Assistant Professor of Gender and Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. In addition to their academic work, Ash is deeply involved in social movements for intersectional and anti-capitalist liberation; at the moment, most of that work is centered at Jewish Voice for Peace.
• Avey Rips is a graduate student in English at Northwestern University, where they were arrested for protecting students from the police last spring. They are the child of refugees who fled sectarian violence in Azerbaijan.

Additional resources:

• Shane Burley, In These Times, “Chicago Jewish activists embark on indefinite hunger strike over Gaza”
• Jewish Voice for Peace – Chicago website, Instagram, TikTok

Credits:

• Producer: Rosette Sewali
• Studio Production/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

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

If you walk down the street in Paraguay, you will hear people speaking Spanish, the official language of most of the countries of Latin America. But, particularly if you are in the countryside, you will also hear something else: Guaraní.

It’s one of the most widely spoken Indigenous languages in the Americas. A mother tongue of roughly six and half million people—in particular, in Paraguay. There, most Paraguayans speak Guaraní or a mixture of Guaraní and Spanish, regardless of whether or not they are Indigenous Guaraní, mestizo, or white.

The language has been preserved and passed down from generation to generation. Family to family. Paraguay is the only country in the Americas where a Native American language has resisted assimilation into Spanish or Portuguese, and where its very use was an act of resistance.

From 1864 through 1870, South America was embroiled in the bloodiest war of its history. It was called the Triple Alliance war. Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay duked it out with tiny landlocked Paraguay. Those countries invaded. The fighting raged for years. Hundreds of thousands of Paraguayans were killed. By 1870, roughly two thirds of the Paraguayan population was dead, most of them men.

Guaraní was the language of resistance against the invading forces; against the foreign troops that remained and occupied the country. 

“As a question of survival, the women who were left would only speak Guaraní,” says campesino leader Tomas Zayas. “They passed it on to their children.” And it has continued to be passed on, particularly in the countryside. Until he was in his twenties, Zayas spoke only Guaraní.

“For me, Guaraní is identity,” he says. “It’s happiness. It’s beauty. Because a joke in Spanish isn’t funny at all.”

Guaraní has remained a language of resistance. Under the brutal dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner, which lasted until the late 1980s, Guaraní was banned in Paraguay. Still it survived, spoken in homes and in rural communities. Though it has also been stigmatized as a language of the poor, there are still Guaraní language schools. And it is the language of the heart. The spirit of Paraguay. The language of resistance.

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Hi folks, thanks for listening. I’m your host Michael Fox. I did some reporting about Guaraní in Paraguay for The World last year. I’ll include a link to that story in the show notes.

This is episode 49 of Stories of Resistance—a podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange’s Human Rights in Action program. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times. If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment or leave a review.

As always, you can check out exclusive pictures for many of these stories on my Patreon account: Patreon.com/mfox. There you can also follow my reporting and support my work and this podcast.

Thanks for listening. See you next time.

Sign up for the Stories of Resistance podcast feed, either in Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Spreaker, or wherever you listen.

Visit Michael Fox’s Patreon: patreon.com/mfox. There you can also follow his reporting and support his work and this podcast.

Written and produced by Michael Fox.

Here is Michael Fox’s reporting for The World on Guaraní: https://theworld.org/stories/2024/10/01/guarani-is-identity-how-an-indigenous-paraguayan-language-has-endured-through-the-ages

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Michael Fox.

Reliable left observers like Ann Garrison, writing in Black Agenda Report, have voiced concerns about Chinese investments in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, based on Siddharth Kara’s book, Cobalt Red, How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives. Kara contends that Chinese are engaged in a brutal competition to acquire a raw material essential to battery manufacturing, participating in the highly exploitative practice of artisanal cobalt mining.

More recently, Razan Shawamreh has challenged the PRC’s economic engagement with Israel. Writing in Middle East Eye. Shawamreh cites three different Chinese state-owned companies heavily invested in Israeli firms servicing or operating in illegal settlements — ChemChina, Bright Foods, Fosum Group — that own or have a majority stake in an Israeli corporation. She charges Peoples’ China of hypocritically publicly denouncing Israeli policies while quietly aiding the cause of Israeli settlers.

On May 22, Kim Petersen posted a thoughtful, well reasoned piece on Dissident Voice, entitled “Palestine and the Conscience of China.” Petersen persuasively lauds the many achievements of Peoples’ China. It is easy to forget the century of humiliation that this once proud, advanced society suffered at the hands of European imperialism. After 12 years of fighting Japanese invaders and enduring a bloody civil war costing tens of millions of casualties, China’s advance since — under the leadership of the Communist Party of China — has been truly remarkable.

As Peoples’ China celebrates meeting its goal of becoming a “moderately prosperous” society, it is important to see how far it has come from 1949. When Western apologists for the market economy brag of the aggregate economic gains that global markets have brought to the developing world, they are largely talking about China (and, more recently, Vietnam and India).

By any measure of citizen satisfaction with their government by international surveys, the PRC consistently ranks at or near the top.

At the same time, Petersen raises questions about the seeming inconsistency of the Chinese government’s vocal criticism of Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza and Peoples’ China’s continuing economic engagement with Israel. The PRC accounts for over 20% of Israeli imports.

Petersen quotes Professor T.P. Wilkinson: “Non-interference is China’s top principle — business comes first. If there is any morality it only applies in China.” And it is precisely China’s moral conscience that Petersen finds wanting.

Nick Corbishley, writing on June 6 in Naked Capitalism adds:

However, not everyone is trying — or even pretending — to distance themselves from Tel Aviv right now. The People’s Republic of China, for example, is actually seeking to strengthen its ties with Israel.

After initially siding with Palestine (and Hamas) following October 7, Beijing is now looking to rebuild ties with Israel. Just four days ago, as Israel’s Defence Forces were unleashing coordinated attacks on aid depots, China’s ambassador to Israel Xiao Junzheng discussed “deepening China-Israel economic and trade cooperation” with Israel’s Minister of Economy and Industry, Nir Barkat.

Still others ask why Peoples’ China, a self-described socialist country, has failed to replace the Soviet Union in guaranteeing the economic vitality of tiny socialist Cuba– a country starved by a US blockade and harsh sanctions upon anyone defying that blockade. It is difficult to reconcile the PRC’s modest economic aid to Cuba with China’s $19 billion dollars of annual exports to proscribed Israel.

China’s Foreign Policy in Retrospect

China’s foreign policy is a direct reflection of the political line of the Communist Party of China, a line changing often in the Party’s history. At the 10th National Congress (August, 1973) — the last before Mao’s death — Zhou Enlai delivered the main report. He affirmed that:

In the last fifty years our Party has gone through ten major struggles between the two lines… In the future, even after classes have disappeared… there will still be two-line struggles between the advanced and the backward and between the correct and the erroneous… there is the struggle between the socialist road and the capitalist road, there is the danger of capitalist restoration… The Tenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China (Documents), p. 16 [my emphasis]

Zhou explains that the opposition in the last two Congresses — led by Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao — advocated that the main contradiction facing the party was “not the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, but that ‘between the advanced socialist system and the backward productive forces of society’”. In short, the two lines continually challenging the Party, as explained at the tenth congress, were that of the “productionists” — those giving priority to the development of the productive forces — and that of the class warriors — those giving priority to political struggle.

The CPC’s failure to simultaneously advance the productive forces and, at the same time, carry out a consistent, comprehensive class line accounts for its often inconsistent foreign policy.

Since the “opening” — the Deng reforms, beginning in 1978 — the productionist line has held sway in the Communist Party of China.

From the time of the rebuilding of the Party based on the rural peasantry after the destruction of its urban working-class base in 1927, Mao had sided with the class warriors.

Even in the era of the united front against Japanese aggression, Mao wrote in On New Democracy (1940) of the necessity of a cultural revolution, a focus on political and cultural struggle over other forms:

A cultural revolution is the ideological reflection of the political and economic revolution and is in their service. In China there is a united front in the cultural as in the political revolution… and the cultural campaign resulted in the outbreak of the December 8th Movement of the revolutionary youth in 1935. And the common result of both was the awakening of the people of the whole country… The most amazing thing of all was that the Kuomintang’s cultural “encirclement and suppression” campaign failed completely in the Kuomintang areas as well, although the Communist Party was in an utterly defenceless position in all the cultural and educational institutions there. Why did this happen? Does it not give food for prolonged and deep thought? It was in the very midst of such campaigns of “encirclement and suppression” that Lu Hsun, who believed in communism, became the giant of China’s cultural revolution… New-democratic culture is national. It opposes imperialist oppression and upholds the dignity and independence of the Chinese nation. It belongs to our own nation and bears our own national characteristics… [my emphasis]

The centrality of cultural revolution likely comes from the class base shaping the trajectory of Chinese Communism. Because the Kuomintang wiped out the CPC’s urban working-class centers in 1927, the Party became based in the rural peasantry, as Mao freely concedes in On New Democracy:

This means that the Chinese revolution is essentially a peasant revolution…. Essentially, mass culture means raising the cultural level of the peasants… And essentially it is the peasants who provide everything that sustains the resistance to Japan and keeps us going. By “essentially” we mean basically, not ignoring the other sections of the people, as Stalin himself has explained. As every schoolboy knows, 80 per cent of China’s population are peasants. So the peasant problem becomes the basic problem of the Chinese revolution and the strength of the peasants is the main strength of the Chinese revolution. In the Chinese population the workers rank second to the peasants in number…

On New Democracy suggests that Mao places primacy of place in the struggle for the support of the peasantry, a struggle that is cultural in form and national in scope. While Mao locates the Party’s battles within the world revolutionary process, he doesn’t see it as an immediate fight for socialism, but apart from it, for China’s national liberation:

This is a time … when the proletariat of the capitalist countries is preparing to overthrow capitalism and establish socialism, and when the proletariat, the peasantry, the intelligentsia and other sections of the petty bourgeoisie in China have become a mighty independent political force under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. Situated as we are in this day and age, should we not make the appraisal that the Chinese revolution has taken on still greater world significance? I think we should. The Chinese revolution has become a very important part of the world revolution… [my emphasis]

The separation between the proletariat’s role in the capitalist countries and the Party’s “independent” role in shaping a multi-class force could not be clearer.

Absent from the 1940 statement of Mao’s vision is any endorsement of the Communist International’s broad principles of solidarity. Instead, the Party operated under the Three Principles of the People, the CPC’s revision of Sun-Yat Sen’s original Three Principles. On New Democracy defines them as:

Three Great Policies of alliance with Russia, co-operation with the Communist Party and assistance to the peasants and workers. Without each and every one of these Three Great Policies, the Three People’s Principles become either false or incomplete in the new period…

Thus, “alliance with Russia” (USSR) became central to China’s foreign policy and expanded to alliance with other socialist countries. After liberation in 1949, the PRC practiced that line by aiding the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea, especially in repelling the US and its allies as they invaded DPRK territory. The PRC military fought in the DPRK until the armistice of 1953. Over 183,000 Chinese died resisting the invasion of the North.

The CPC established ties with various liberation movements after the Korean War, with Peoples’ China offering military aid and training to many movements in Asia and Africa. At the same time, the PRC adopted Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence to lead foreign relations: respect for territory and sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference in internal affairs, equality and cooperation for common benefit, and peaceful coexistence.

The Five Principles were strikingly similar to the natural-law doctrines adopted by the early mercantilist theorists of bourgeois international relations; they constituted an even less robust version of the eight points of the 1941 Atlantic Charter crafted by Roosevelt and Churchill. Nonetheless, they were enshrined in the constitution of Peoples’ China:

China pursues an independent foreign policy, observes the five principles of mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, mutual nonaggression, mutual noninterference in internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence, keeps to a path of peaceful development, follows a mutually beneficial strategy of opening up, works to develop diplomatic relations and economic and cultural exchanges with other countries, and promotes the building of a human community with a shared future. [my emphasis]

By the end of the 1950s, The CPC had rejected the first of the “three great policies”: the “alliance with Russia”. The PRC had embarked on a period of bitter conflict with the USSR, culminating with a split in the unity of the World Communist Movement. It is source of great irony that many of the charges the CPC made against the Soviets in the Mao era were and are features of China today that have drawn the same charges from some on the left: The Chinese attacked the Soviet policy of peaceful coexistence with the US, taunting the US as a paper tiger; they accused the Soviets of being “social-imperialist” intent on global hegemony; they claimed a restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union; they accused the Soviet Party of revising Marxism-Leninism. All charges that resonate for some in current policies of Peoples’ China.

It is difficult to reconcile the Five Principles with the PRC support for the US proxies in the former Portuguese African colonies. For over a decade, the PRC sided with South Africa, Israel, the US, and bogus liberation movements in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau, delivering weapons, training, and material support to surrogates fighting the internationally recognized freedom fighters. It was left for thousands of Cuban internationalists to give their lives to finally close the door on this ugly chapter and open the door to the fall of Apartheid.

It is difficult to reconcile the Five Principles with the PRC 1979 invasion of Vietnam, ostensibly in response to Democratic Vietnam’s overthrow of the Khmer Rouge — an intervention, if principally motivated, that cannot be squared with the PRC’s vocal denunciation of the Warsaw alliance’s engagement in Czechoslovakia in 1968.

It is difficult to reconcile the twists and turns of Peoples’ China’s foreign policies with its once radical denouncement of Soviet foreign policy as “social-imperialist.” The late, estimable Al Szymanski– a scrupulous researcher– met those charges in great detail (“Soviet Socialism and Proletarian Internationalism” in The Soviet Union: Socialist or Social-Imperialist?, 1983), showing that Soviet “export of capital” outside of the socialist community was minimal, largely limited to establishing enterprises that expedited trade. Soviet assistance was limited almost entirely to countries outside of or escaping the tyranny of global markets. Soviet trade was minimal — Szymanski argued that it was the world’s most self-sufficient system (no doubt often through forced isolation). Its importing of raw material was minimal: “In short the Soviet economy, unlike those of all Western imperialist countries… has no… need to subordinate less developed countries to obtain raw materials.”

Also, the Soviet Union frequently paid higher prices for imported goods than market prices. Citing Asha Datar, “[O]f the 12 leading export commodities studied…, six were consistently purchased by the USSR at higher than their world prices, three usually purchased at prices higher than those paid by the capitalist countries, and two purchased on a year to year basis sometimes above and sometimes below the world market price.”

Suffice it to say, the Soviet Union substantially subsidized trade with fraternal countries, especially within the socialist community (CMEA), Cuba receiving especially generous terms of exchange.

It would be interesting to compare the PRC’s current foreign policy with the internationalist standards set by the former Soviet Union.

Nonetheless, Peoples’ China — since the victory of the productionist line under Deng’s leadership — has largely been a force for stability in international relations. Over the last thirty or so years, the PRC has sought to maintain a peaceful stage for its trade-based economic expansion while the US and its capitalist allies have engaged in one bloody, imperialist adventure after another. Entry into the global market and acceptance into its market-based institutions has been well served by its Five Principles foreign policy.

But it has been naive to expect capitalist great powers to respect the high-minded, Enlightenment values of the Five Principles and simply stand by while the PRC rises to challenge their dominance of the world economy. Since Engels’ early writings, Marxists have understood that competition is the motor of the commodity-based economy. And since Lenin, Marxists have understood that competition between monopoly capitals and their hosts have spawned aggression and war.

It is equally naive — or disingenuous — to equate the Five Principles with the proletarian internationalism, class solidarity that has been embraced by the international Communist movement throughout the twentieth century. From Comintern activity, to the internationalist sacrifices made for democratic Spain, to the generous support for liberation movements, and the aid to the people of Vietnam, militant, principled internationalism differs fundamentally from the neutrality embodied in the Five Principles. The Five Principles serve a world with no injustice, a world without class struggle, a world without aggression and war.

Indeed, the solidarity advocated in the PRC constitution — “China consistently opposes imperialism, hegemonism and colonialism, works to strengthen its solidarity with the people of all other countries, supports oppressed peoples and other developing countries in their just struggles to win and safeguard their independence and develop their economies, and strives to safeguard world peace and promote the cause of human progress” — is inconsistent with the neutrality and non-intervention of the Five Principles, in any realistic sense.

Where neutrality may have borne few negative consequences during the PRC’s isolation from global markets, China’s profound economic relations with virtually every country in the twenty-first century, do have consequences, consequences of enormous moral impact.

Like other countries that engage economically or refrain from engaging economically (sanctions, tariffs, boycotts, blockades, etc.), the PRC must be judged by that engagement.

With the daily slaughter of Gazan civilians, the brutal actions of Israel cannot be separated from its trading partners: China, the US, Germany, Italy, Turkiye, Russia, France, South Korea, India, and Spain, in descending order of dollar volume of exports to Israel.

And now with the brazen, unprovoked Israeli attack on its putative “friend” Iran, the neutrality of the Five Principles is even less defensible. The “win-win” strategy of many CPC leaders and their allies is a utopian dream that social justice cannot afford.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Godels.

A torrent of water rushes underneath, gray and angry. Wind whips. Thunder rumbles in the distance. Clouds threaten rain. And before you is a bridge.

But it is not just any bridge. It spans from one rocky cliff to the other, and it is strung together by rope and twine, bound and rebound for generations. Eternity. 

This is Q’eswachaka. The last Incan Bridge. It stands over 12,000 feet above sea level and spans 30 meters over the Apurimac River down in a majestic canyon never found by the Spanish.

It was once an important passage along the Qhapaq Ñan, a network of roads stretching more than 2,000 kilometers across the Incan empire, from present day Colombia all the way down to Chile and Argentina.

The bridge has lasted here for more than six centuries. But that is only possible because it is rebuilt every year. 

In early June, the residents of four Quechua communities hold a three-day-long festival, where they rebuild the bridge from scratch. First, they cut down the old one and let it drop into the water below. Then the women beat and work the straw they have brought from the highlands. They begin to weave it. Transform it into the fibers and the rope for the new bridge. The men build the rope flooring and the railings. Slowly, the bridge is built anew.

This is not just a task to be done, but an ancestral ceremony with song and dance, ritual. An ancient art passed down from generation to generation. Their own offering to Pachamama, Madre Tierra—Mother Earth.

The communal building of bridges like this was once cherished and embraced, and carried out by communities across the Incan Empire. But this, they say, is the last. And these communities are holding on, like the very bridge itself.

More than a river crossing, and a connection between two roads, this is a symbol of the community’s connection to their past, to their ancestors, to their culture, their traditions, to the next generations, to the land… and to Mother Earth.

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Hi folks, thanks for listening. I’m your host Michael Fox. 

The Q’eswachaka festival is happening right now in the Peruvian mountains south of Cuzco. 

It was an honor to visit the location earlier this year. 

You can check out some exclusive pictures and drone footage that I shot on my Patreon. That’s patreon.com/mfox. There you can also follow my reporting and support my work and this podcast.

This is Stories of Resistance, a podcast series co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Each week, I bring you stories of resistance and hope like this. Inspiration for dark times. If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment or leave a review.

As always, thanks for listening. See you next time.

Q’eswachaka is the last Incan rope bridge. It’s located down in a valley in the Andes mountains of Peru. And in early June, the residents of four Quechua communities hold a three-day-long festival, where they rebuild the bridge from scratch.

This is not just a task to be done, but an ancestral ceremony. A means of holding on to their traditions and the story—resisting modernity and the passage of time, by preserving this piece of their history and their culture.

The bridge itself is a symbol of the community’s connection to their past, to their ancestors, to the next generations, to the land… and to Mother Earth.

This is episode 48 of Stories of Resistance—a podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange’s Human Rights in Action program. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment, or leave a review. 

And please consider signing up for the Stories of Resistance podcast feed, either in Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Spreaker, or wherever you listen.

To see exclusive pictures and video of the last Incan rope bridge, you can visit Michael Fox’s Patreon: patreon.com/mfox. There you can also follow his reporting and support his work and this podcast.

Written and produced by Michael Fox.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Michael Fox.

The Big Picture Podcast host, New Zealand-Egyptian journalist and author Mohamed Hassan, interviews Middle East Eye editor-in-chief David Hearst about the rapidly unfolding war between Israel and Iran, why the West supports it, and what it threatens to unleash on the global order.

What does Israel really want to achieve, what options does Iran have to deescalate, and will the United States stop the war, or join it as is being hinted?

Hearst says the war is “more dangerous than we imagine” and notes that while most Western leadership still backs Israel, there has been a strong shift in world public opinion against Tel Aviv.

• READ MORE: Israel-Iran attacks continue; Trump demands unconditional surrender
• Iran war: from the Middle East to America, history shows you cannot assassinate your way to peace
• Attack on Iran’s state media – Israel bombs IRIB building in new war crime
• Why Israel’s ‘humane’ propaganda is such a sinister facade
• Other Israeli war on Iran reports

He says Israel has lost most of the world’s support, most of the Global South, most African states, Brazil, South Africa, China and Russia.

Hearst says the world is witnessing the “cynical tailend of the colonial era” among Western states.

The era of peace is over.             Video: Middle East Eye

Iran ‘unlikely to surrender’
Ali Vaez, the Iran project director at the International Crisis Group, says Iran is unlikely to “surrender to American terms” and that there is a risk the war on Iran could “bring the entire region down”.

Vaez told Al Jazeera in an interview that US President Donald Trump “provided the green light for Israel to attack Iran” just two days before the president’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, was due to meet with the Iranians in the Oman capital of Muscat.

Imagine viewing, from the Iranian perspective, Trump giving the go-ahead for the attack while at the same time saying that diplomacy with Tehran was still ongoing, Vaez said.

Now Trump “is asking for Iranian surrender” on his Truth Social platform, he said.

“I think the only thing that is more dangerous than suffering from Israeli and American bombs is actually surrendering to American terms,” Vaez said.

“Because if Iran surrenders on the nuclear issue and on the demands of President Trump, there is no end to the slippery slope, which would eventually result in regime collapse and capitulation anyway.”

pic.twitter.com/QcySkOWWGN

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 17, 2025

Most Americans oppose US involvement
Meanwhile, a new survey has reported that most Americans oppose US military involvement in the conflict.

The survey by YouGov showed that some 60 percent of Americans surveyed thought the US military should not get involved in the ongoing hostilities between Israel and Iran.

Only 16 percent favoured US involvement, while 24 percent said they were not sure.

Among the Democrats, those who opposed US intervention were at 65 percent, and among the Republicans, it was 53 percent. Some 61 percent of independents opposed the move.

The survey also showed that half of Americans viewed Iran as an enemy of the US, while 25 percent said it was “unfriendly”.

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

Raised in an ultra-orthodox Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn, Rabbi Abby Stein has had a long, painful, beautiful journey to coming out as a transgender woman and becoming a fierce opponent of Zionism and Israel’s Occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. In this episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with Rabbi Stein about her journey, and about the need to simultaneously fight Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the right’s fascist assault on the rights of LGBTQ+ people here in the US.

Guest:

• Rabbi Abby Stein is the tenth-generation descendant of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of the Hasidic movement. Raised in an ultra-orthodox Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn, Stein came out as a woman in 2015 and now serves as a rabbi for Congregation Kolot Chayeinu, a progressive synagogue. In 2019, she served on the steering committee for the Women’s March in Washington, DC, and she was named by the Jewish Week as one of the “36 Under 36” Jews who are affecting change in the world. She is the author of Becoming Eve: My Journey from Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi to Transgender Woman.

Additional resources:

• Julia Jacobs, The New York Times, “From Hasidic Brooklyn to Off Broadway: The life of a trans rabbi”
• Abby Stein & Lily Greenberg Call, Autostraddle, “We spoke up for Palestine and got kicked out of the White House Pride party”
• Lisa Francois, ACLU, “The human toll of Trump’s anti-trans crusade”

Credits:

• Studio Production: Cameron Granadino
• Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich

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

This story was originally published by In These Times on June 16, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

The risk of famine increases in Gaza as the Israeli government’s blockade of nearly all aid to Gaza approaches its third month. 

“I felt this almost sense of panic as every day went by without food let in,” Ash Bohrer, a Chicago-based Jewish activist in the Palestinian solidarity movement, told me as she outlined how high the stakes are as the genocide continues in Gaza.

“When I first heard it, my initial thought was … if there is some way I can use my body,” Bohrer said, ​“I am ready and willing to do it, and I think about it as a personal, moral and religious obligation to do so.”

Bohrer is joining five other members of Jewish Voice for Peace, Chicago — Becca Lubow, Avey Rips, Seph Mozes, Audrey Gladson and Benjamin Teller — in a hunger strike to demand an end to the genocide in Gaza, unconditional military aid for Israel and the blockade of food and medical aid to the 2.3 million Palestinians now living amongst the rubble.

Bohrer, who’s also a scholar of social movements at Notre Dame, says she felt the moral and strategic call to use whatever resources or privileges she had to raise the stakes of the Palestinian freedom struggle in the United States as ​“our Palestinian comrades watch their friends and their family and their community members suffer a genocide in real time — starvation of truly epic proportions that comes [after] 19 months of bombing, 20 years of blockade and 78 years of occupation and ethnic cleansing.”

The strike kicked off with an opening rally on Monday, June 16, where a series of political leaders and allies spoke, including Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), one of 18 members of Congress who last week introduced the ​“Block the Bombs” bill in the House to condition aid to Israel.

Organizers have 22 events scheduled over the following 16 days, including Shabbat services, Palestine teach-ins led by a wide range of supportive organizations, vigils and a screening of the popular documentary ​“Israelism.”

Since the beginning of March, Israel has blocked food, fuel and medical aid from entering the Gaza Strip, which has caused what human rights organizations have called a situation of forced starvation. This comes at the end of an unprecedented year and a half of violence in the region, which experts have called a genocide, that has galvanized the Palestine solidarity movement around the world to push for an end to unquestioned U.S. support for Israel’s violence. While these movements have exploded in size, Israel has continued its barrage and is now continuing the attack by preventing basic resources from making it to a population in desperate need of support.

“[These were] images of what hunger looks like. And to see children dying of starvation, the images were seared into my brain,” Teller tells In These Times. ​“When his comrades from JVP Chicago returned from their national gathering with an idea on how to escalate their campaign to end the violence, he was compelled to join them.

“As we confront what it means to starve our own bodies and what happens to the body without adequate nutrition for days and weeks and, in the case of people in Gaza, for months on end — it is not a good way to go,” says Teller. ​“It shouldn’t be happening to anyone.” 

Palestinian partner organizations that JVP had been working with, explains Bohrer, approached JVP activists specifically to ramp up the pressure, with the idea that a hunger strike might draw attention to the starvation that their loved ones are facing in Gaza.

The hunger strike is an escalation tactic, meant to draw waning attention back to the situation in Gaza and utilize the often-privileged position American Jews have in discourse on this issue. Hunger strikes are a form of protest where demonstrators, often lacking other viable tactics, turn their attention to their own body and refuse to eat, often forcing institutions, and the public, to bear witness as their bodies waste away. Because of this, they are often a rare and late-term option for campaigns where other pressure points simply failed to work.

As the death count in Gaza continues to climb, the American Palestine solidarity movement is at a crossroads — forced to acknowledge that while public opinion has shifted, Israeli violence has not. These activists are just a few of the thousands reassessing what tactics are available, or useful, as we enter ever-worsening conditions in one of the most densely populated regions on the planet. By engaging in this very public, and risky, protest tactic, the hunger strikers are picking up on a long tradition of calculated starvation as a method of forcing a public confrontation with crises.

Hunger strikes have a long history of success precisely because they are so dangerous, and because they force the public to watch as they slowly enact violence on their own bodies. They’ve been particularly prevalent for incarcerated activists who, because of confinement, are limited in their tactics. In Palestine hunger strikes go back decades as a method of resistance for the thousands of Palestinians arrested without charge, a policy known as ​“administrative detention.”

When multiple residents of Nahfa prison in Israel went on a hunger strike in 1980, they eventually won some of their demands for things like viable bedding and living spaces. But these victories came at a steep cost when some participants died mysteriously. Some believe it was from force feeding, which involves violently forcing a tube down a restrained striker’s nose and into their stomach, then pumping in a nutrient compound. This became a primary point of contention after a spring 2012 series of hunger strikes where nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners participated. The United Nations has ruled force feeding a form of torture and in violation of the Geneva Convention. The Israeli Medical Association later sided with medical consensus that forced feeding of hunger striking prisoners is ethically unconscionable, though the Israeli Supreme Court upheld the practice.

Hunger strikes can take a massive toll on the body, which is in part what makes them so influential. In 2012, Palestinian activist Khader Adnan was arrested and held in administrative detention. He went on a 66-day hunger strike to protest his imprisonment without trial, triggering international attention, a wave of solidarity protests, mass Palestinian hunger strikes in Israeli prisons and increased calls for prison reform. Adnan ended that strike upon reaching a deal with Israeli authorities for his release, but, after a string of arrests, refused food for 87 days following his final detainment in 2023. He died in his cell. 

Many Palestinian revolutionaries were also influenced by the well-publicized, and sometimes lethal, hunger strikes held by Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) members during their 30-year conflict with Britain and Ulster loyalist paramilitaries, known as the Troubles. Irish Republicans had long used the tactic in their struggle against the British authority, often because they were fighting from within Ulster-controlled territory, where protests were likely to lead to arrest. By 1980, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher refused to view IRA prisoners as prisoners of war, which would have ensured certain rights. Instead she publicly declared them criminals. This led to a series of hunger strikes, most famously including ​“volunteer” Bobby Sands, who ran and won a seat in the British Parliament amidst his 66-day fast behind bars in 1981. But Sands — and nine others, including Irish National Liberation Army prisoners — ultimately died during their protest, and while they won many of the provisions they demanded for IRA prisoners, it came at a grave cost.

But as Nayan Shah, who studies the history of hunger strikes, explains, hunger strikes are not confined to inside prison cells; there are also solidarity strikes, when supporters on the outside take action in solidarity with incarcerated people to raise the stakes. These solidarity strikes, done as part of a larger community struggle against inhumane systems, also have a particularly successful history.

“In the case of a prisoner, you can only hear that prisoner’s voice through intermediaries. In the case of someone who is in public and is hungry, there’s lots of ways you could hear their voice, what they’re feeling and experiencing, [and] why they’re doing it,” says Shah. Whether it’s in partnership with incarcerated hunger strikers or people forced into like situations, it creates a pathway to public recognition of a struggle by creating a volatile stunt that forces the public to confront the causes of such an extreme response. 

And part of that public confrontation is the hope that a public action of this type can inspire others to take action.

“Something that we heard [from other hunger strikers]… if you start, people will come, which I think is really powerful,” says Rips, a 32-year-old Chicago activist whose family emigrated to the United States alongside the wave of Soviet Jews. ​“We’re optimistic that once this strike goes public we will be getting a lot more support.”

Marc Kaplan says he is mobilizing his organization, Northside Action for Justice, to support the launch of the JVP hunger strike, which he says will need outside support. Kaplan was part of a 2015 hunger strike to save Dyett High School in Chicago from former mayor Rahm Emanuel’s massive school closings.

“It’s hard to keep your focus and keep your consciousness and spirit when you’re hungry,” says Kaplan, who lost 20 pounds during the strike. But the action inspired attention and community support and led the campaign to victory.

And the six hunger strikers in Chicago aren’t alone. As the college encampments popped up in 2024, many activists at colleges like the University of Oregon, Stanford and multiple colleges in the California State University system went on hunger strikes. A number of New York City veterans are now in the middle of a 40-day Fast for Gaza, and Friends of Sabeel, an organization pushing for justice and equity in historic Palestine, are also engaged in a fast where strikers are forced to survive on less than 250 calories a day — same limit 25 activists with the Maine Coalition for Palestine set when they announced their strike last month. The Chicago solidarity strikers have been in contact with some of these other strikers, as well as Palestinian partners, to put their tactics into a larger framework of escalating pressure on the state to act.

Many hunger strikes permit some calories or have a set end date, but the JVP activists plan to go a step further by consuming nothing but water and electrolytes until their demands are met.

​​“Fasting is a form of protest, it is a spiritual act in Jewish tradition,” says rabbi and JVP activist Brant Rosen, who will be supporting the hunger strikers and holding a Shabbat service with them on June 20 at Federal Plaza. “[Fasting] is a sign of atonement, of course … but it has also been used as a call to action historically.” In 2015, Rosen formed the country’s first non-Orthodox anti-Zionist synagogue named Tzedek Chicago. 

Jewish organizations, many of which have been publicly supportive of the Israeli government’s war, have a long history of supporting aid to impoverished communities facing food insecurity. 

“Both the bombing campaign and the starvation campaign are coordinated and maintained by the largest transfer of weapons the United States has ever done,” says solidarity striker Becca Lubow. ​“So the immediate call is for the money, the guns, the tanks, the bombs being sent to Israel [to stop]. Israel can no longer have a blank check [from the United States] to use against the Palestinians.”

Lubow works for an established Jewish organization and hopes others will hear the call and join the fight. 

As scholar of the Jewish left Benjamin Balthaser told me, solidarity has been one of the ways radical Jews understood their Jewishness, pointing to Jewish communists organizing with migrant laborers in the Imperial Valley or joining the Civil Rights Movement even when it could cause them material harm. ​“The hunger strike is a way to alert Americans to the desperateness of the situation.”

Shah also points to this history of Jewish activism, including Polish Jewish students using the tactic to win educational opportunities and a 1946 incident where 1,000 Jewish refugees were stuck on a ship bound for Palestine in Italy and needed to put pressure on Britain to let them in. In that case, it was communicating with world Jewry through the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that sparked solidarity fasts in New York and Tel Aviv and won the demand handily.

Religion has been key for these fights, particularly given the moral weight of hunger strikes. In apartheid South Africa, 1989 saw a massive prison hunger strike of more than 600 political prisoners matched by solidarity fasts organized by faith leaders and activists. This raised the profile of the anti-apartheid struggle at the exact moment the media blockade was lifting. 

One of the six hunger strikers in Chicago is not Jewish, but as Gladson, who grew up Catholic, pointed out, Christian Zionism is a significant part of the massive political support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine. And since the U.S. government is using tax dollars to keep Israel’s military stocked with weapons and resources, it is not only American Jews who have a stake.

The hunger strike’s potential success is that it works alongside other escalating tactics. The fight didn’t start with the hunger strike. In recent weeks there was highly publicized flotilla that received international attention as they tried to deliver aid, as well as a march to the Rafah border in Egypt. A hunger strike is a more extreme tactic, but that shift has been determined by the failure of established strategies to halt the violence for good.

This tactic is nothing new for Chicago. In 1994, 10 parents launched a six-day hunger strike to push the Board of Education and Mayor Richard Daley Jr. to abandon the plan to close a school in the Back of the Yards, which itself had a formative role in community organizing as the neighborhood where famed organizer Saul Alinsky once built anti-poverty campaigns. After marches, boycotts and teach-ins failed to stop the school closure, parents camped out in tents adjacent to the school board and refused to eat. Eventually six political leaders, including Congressman Jesús ​“Chuy” García (D-Ill.), initiated negotiations between the parents and the school board that resulted in a series of votes that ultimately ratified the parents’ proposal to build a new school for the neighborhood.

More recently, 12 people followed the parents’ lead and held a 34-day hunger strike in 2015 to save Dyett High School, which had been the target of disinvestment and was set to be shuttered by the school board. Just like their counterparts in 1995, these parents, many of whom were working with the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization (KOCO), spent three years escalating their efforts to save the school.

“It didn’t start with the hunger strike,” says Kaplan, who is also a member of Tzedek Chicago. ​“The struggle for Dyett had been a part of the whole campaign to stop the bleeding of educational institutions in primarily low-income, Black communities and some brown communities.”

But as has been seen historically, bold actions, especially when they expose the gap between a society’s actions and its ideals, can spark moral reflection and even social change. “[These hunger strikes are] happening in states that claim to be democracies,” pointed out Shaw, who noted that most well-known hunger strikes happen inside modern countries that say they are governed by the rule of law. ​“So these are fundamentally crises of democracy.” In other words, hunger strikes, an extreme form of protest, point to a broader failure of political systems to uphold their stated values. 

The list of organizations formally backing the JVP demonstration continues to grow, with groups committing to participate however they can, further amplifying the voices standing in solidarity with Gaza.

But the question remains: Is it enough to push the U.S. government to do what other tactics have failed to achieve?

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Shane Burley.

It was the third United Nations Ocean Conference, a high-level forum meant to advance the U.N.’s sustainable development goal to “conserve and sustainably use the oceans.” This year’s co-hosts, France and Costa Rica, urged other countries to step up marine conservation efforts in light of overlapping ocean crises, from plastic pollution and ocean acidification to rising sea levels that are jeopardizing small island nations. António Guterres, the U.N.’s secretary-general, said in his opening remarks that oceans are “the ultimate shared resource” and that they should foster multilateral cooperation.

Whether the conference was a success depends on whom you ask. The most prominent outcome of the meeting was a flurry of voluntary and rhetorical commitments made by countries to conserve marine resources. Some of these, like France’s pledge to limit a destructive kind of fishing called bottom trawling, were criticized as insufficient. France had also promoted the conference as a sort of deadline for reaching 60 ratifications of the high seas treaty — a threshold needed for it to enter into force — but this didn’t happen, leading to disappointment among ocean advocates

On the other hand, experts said there were real signs of progress. Germany and the European Union pledged hundreds of millions of dollars toward marine conservation, for example, and 11 governments signed a new pledge to safeguard coral reefs. Nearly 20 countries ratified the high seas treaty over just a few days, bringing the total up to 50.

Angelique Pouponneau, the lead ocean negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States, a negotiating bloc of 39 countries, said in a statement that the conference had been “a moment of both progress and reflection.” Former U.S. secretary of state John Kerry, who also served as special envoy on climate under the Biden administration, noted “critical momentum to safeguard our planet.” 

The biggest focus of the U.N. Ocean Conference was the high seas treaty, also known as the agreement on biodiversity beyond national jurisdictions. Adopted by U.N. member states in 2023 after more than 20 years of negotiations, the treaty aims to solve a longstanding problem in marine protection: how to safeguard parts of the ocean that lie outside countries’ “exclusive economic zones,” swaths of water that stretch about 200 nautical miles beyond their coastlines. As of now, countries can unilaterally create marine protected areas within their economic zones. They usually restrict resource extraction and industrial fishing in these areas, often with exceptions for small-scale fishers. Many countries have established such zones, but they need the high seas treaty to create a legal framework for doing the same thing in more distant waters.

France had made it a priority to reach 60 ratifications of the high seas treaty either before or during the third Ocean Conference; doing so would kick off a 120-day countdown for the agreement to enter into force. Not enough countries signed on, though the conference did seem to accelerate the ratification process: At a special event on the conference’s first day, 18 countries announced their ratification, including several small coastal states like Ivory Coast and Vanuatu, bringing the total to 50 (including the European Union, which has ratified it as a bloc). Each country has its own laws and processes for ratifying treaties; upon ratification, it formally lets the U.N. know and agrees to be bound by the terms of the relevant treaty.

France’s special envoy to the talks, Olivier Poivre d’Arvor, wrote on LinkedIn that he expects the remaining ratifications by the next U.N. General Assembly meeting this September. That would still be pretty fast, compared to other multilateral environmental agreements. The U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, for example — the world’s main legal framework for regulating maritime activities like shipping and fishing, and for establishing countries’ exclusive economic zones —— took eight years to reach 60 ratifications. Only a few agreements, like the Paris Agreement to address global warming, were ratified faster.

Rebecca Hubbard, director of a coalition of environmental nonprofits advocating for the high seas treaty called High Seas Alliance, said in a statement that the world was “within striking distance” of the 60th ratification. “The treaty’s entry into force could be triggered in a matter of weeks,” she said.

Several experts Grist spoke with said marine protected areas are essential for advancing the U.N. target to protect 30 percent of Earth’s land and water by 2030. Robert Blasiak, an associate professor of sustainable ocean stewardship at Stockholm University’s Stockholm Resilience Center, estimated that without a high seas treaty, countries would have to designate some 90 percent of their waters as marine protected areas — an unlikely scenario. French Polynesia, however, made a splash at the Ocean Conference by declaring the entirety of its exclusive economic zone — all 1.9 million square miles of it — a marine protected area, making it the largest in the world.

Other declarations and pledges from the U.N. Ocean Conference linked oceans to climate change, plastic pollution, economic inequality, and the erosion of public trust in science. During daily plenaries, many delegates delivered statements about a healthy ocean’s role in mitigating global warming — it absorbs 90 percent of the excess heat generated by the burning of fossil fuels — and some called for nations to “emphasize the essential role of ocean-based solutions”

 in their climate targets under the Paris Agreement, for example by protecting ocean ecosystems like mangroves and coral reefs. Angelika Lātūfuipeka Tukuʻaho, the princess of Tonga, called for whales to be recognized as legal persons — part of a broader movement to establish inherent rights for natural entities.

Leaders from many countries also reiterated calls for a moratorium on deep-sea mining, including French president Emmanuel Macron, who called it “madness” to proceed with mineral extraction from the largely unexplored seafloor. Separately, nearly 100 national representatives released a statement reaffirming their commitment to crafting an “ambitious” U.N. plastics treaty during negotiations that are set to resume this August. And a letter signed by more than 100 scientists, Indigenous leaders, and environmental advocates called for the adoption of an “ocean protection principle” that prioritizes conservation over the “irresponsible and unrestrained pursuit of profit.”

One pledge that was not well received was French president Emmanuel Macron’s promise to “limit” bottom trawling, a type of commercial fishing that involves dragging a heavy net across the bottom of the ocean, kicking up debris and releasing carbon dioxide in the process. Environmental groups lambasted the plan for applying to only 4 percent of French waters — mostly in places where bottom trawling does not occur, according to the international nonprofit Oceana. “These announcements are more symbolic than impactful,” the group’s campaign director, Nicolas Fournier, said in a statement.

Other groups said the conference hadn’t placed enough emphasis on issues such as offshore oil and gas extraction and the rights of fishers. They noted with caution the nonbinding nature of many countries’ pledges and urged world leaders to “turn promises into action.” 

“Ultimately, this summit produced a mere drop in the bucket of what we desperately need to protect the ocean — the lungs of our planet,” Enric Sala, a marine ecologist and National Geographic explorer, said in a statement.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Progress and frustration mark the UN’s third Ocean Conference on Jun 16, 2025.

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

This story originally appeared in Mondoweiss on June 14, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

The war between Israel and Iran marks the culmination of decades of shadow-boxing between Tehran and Tel Aviv. This is a war that has long worn the mask of deniability, played out in assassinations, cyber operations, and various forms of entanglements from Damascus to the Red Sea. Its rules were unwritten but widely understood: escalation without full rupture. But now it’s unfolding in a surprise Israeli intelligence and military attack, which was met with a subsequent Iranian retaliation against Israeli military installations and strategic infrastructure.

While Israel’s capacity for precise targeting — its assassinations of nuclear scientists, the killing of Iranian commanders, and its strikes on enrichment sites — has rarely been in doubt, its broader strategic horizon remains conspicuously blurred. 

Official Israeli communiqués gesture, with ritual ambiguity, toward the language of victory and denying Iran nuclear capability, but the underlying ambition seems at once more elusive and more grandiose: the execution of a blow so decisive it would not only cripple Iran’s nuclear program, but fracture the Islamic Republic’s political resolve altogether. 

This, however, remains far from realized. Iran’s underground facilities remain intact, and its enrichment program, far from being stalled, appears now to be ideologically and politically emboldened. Hesitations around the acquisition of nuclear weapons will probably undergo a review. Iran, while suffering from a direct blow that crippled its chain of command and placed it on the defensive, was able to recuperate and launch several barrages of ballistic misslies into Israel.

And yet, behind this Israeli choreography of operational tenacity lies a quieter, more subterranean logic. It is not only Iran that Israel seeks to provoke, but the United States. If Israel cannot destroy Natanz or Fordow on its own, it may still succeed in creating the conditions under which Washington feels compelled to act in its stead. This, perhaps, is the real gambit: not a direct confrontation with Iran, but the orchestration of an environment of urgency and provocation that makes American intervention — at a minimum — on the table. In other words, Israel’s military theatrics are a trap for the U.S.

Israel isn’t simply assembling a reactive sequence of military gestures; it’s a calibrated strategy of provocations that create the conditions for American leverage. Israel acts; the United States, while nominally uninvolved, capitalizes on the fallout, and even invokes the specter of its own military involvement as both a deterrent and a bargaining chip. 

The strikes are less about immediate tactical gains than they are about constructing a field of pressure. Their strategic ambiguity is weaponized to test red lines and gauge responses.

In this scheme, Washington appears to maintain a distance, but its fingerprints are never entirely absent. The more Israel escalates, the more the U.S. can posture as the moderating force — while simultaneously tightening the screws on Iran through sanctions, backchannel warnings, or displays of force in the Gulf. 

The result is a strategic double-bind: Iran is meant to feel besieged from multiple directions, but never entirely certain where the next blow might come from. 

Will Trump chicken out?

This, at least, is where the United States and Israel seem momentarily aligned. Yet the fault lines in this coordination are already visible. 

On the one hand, the war hawks in Washington will view this as a strategic opening and an opportunity to decisively weaken Iran and redraw the balance of power in the region. They will pressure Trump to act in this direction. 

On the other hand, a full-scale war with Iran, especially one that spills across borders, would ripple through global markets, disrupting trade, oil production, and critical infrastructure. The allure of military advantage is shadowed by the specter of economic upheaval, which is a gamble that even the most hardened strategists can’t ignore. Yemen’s Ansar Allah has already proven the viability of closing trade routes, and Iran is able to do far more.

But the story of “America First” is also approaching an inflection point. Donald Trump’s rhetoric — premised on the prioritization of domestic problems, national interest, and a transactional nationalism hostile to foreign entanglements — now finds itself strained by the prospect, or reality, of a regional war that bears the unmistakable fingerprints of American complicity. The transition (discursively, at least) from a president who vowed to extricate the U.S. from Middle Eastern quagmires to one under whose watch a potentially epochal confrontation is unfolding exposes the fragile coherence of Trump’s strategic identity.

The language of MAGA — no more “blood for sand,” no more American boys dying in foreign deserts, no more open-ended subsidies for unreliable allies — continues to resonate well beyond Trump’s electoral base. It taps into a deeper exhaustion with imperial overreach and a growing conviction that the dividends of global policing no longer justify its mounting costs. 

And yet, even as this fatigue becomes conventional wisdom, the machinery of militarism persists — outsourced to regional proxies, framed in euphemisms, and increasingly waged out of sight. Nowhere is this more evident than in America’s unwavering support for Israel’s campaign in Gaza — a policy that, despite its genocidal overtones, encounters little serious resistance from the political mainstream.

This is the duality that marks the contemporary American strategic imagination, particularly in its Trumpian register. On one hand, there is a professed realism about the limits of military force and the unsustainable burdens of global responsibility; on the other, there is a persistent ambition to reshape the geopolitical architecture of the Middle East by less direct means.

In this schema, force may be held in reserve, but influence is not. The aspiration is to cultivate a calibrated rivalry among regional powers — Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Egypt. The U.S. seeks to tether them, however uneasily, to the gravitational logic of American centrality. If Pax Americana can no longer be imposed, then a managed dissonance among client states may suffice.

In addition, another kind of dissonance marks Trump’s worldview: not merely strategic, but psychological. For all his rhetoric about restraint and national interest, Trump retains a sovereign fantasy of dominance. He does not merely seek balance but craves submission. The belief that an American president can issue diktats to Putin, Zelensky, or Khamenei — and that they will obey — is less a policy than a symptom of an imperial reflex. It continues to linger even as the structure it depends on has been eroding. In these moments, Trump sets aside the logic of multipolar accommodation.

The current war initiated by Israel against Iran is an exemplar of this dissonance. It reflects not only Israel’s increasingly unilateral strategic posture but also the ambivalence that marks American leadership in the Trump era. Despite his anti-interventionist slogans, Trump was never immune to the gravitational pull of escalation, especially when framed as a test of strength or loyalty. 

Indeed, the term coined by his critics — TACO, “Trump Always Chickens Out” — was circulated among financiers and neoconservatives not simply as mockery, but as diagnosis. It captured the oscillation between bluster and retreat, between the rhetoric of dominance and the impulse to recoil when the cost became tangible. 

Such moments expose the uneasy alloy at the heart of Trump’s foreign policy: a mix of instinctual nationalism, imperial nostalgia, and tactical indecision. The result is a posture that often courts confrontation without preparation, and retreats from entanglement without resolution. If Israel’s strike on Iran was meant to provoke, it also tested the elasticity of Trump’s foreign policy instincts — and the contradictions that arise when strategic ambiguity meets theatrical resolve.

Operational success and possible strategic failure

It is undeniable that Israel, with both tacit and overt backing from its allies, succeeded in delivering a serious blow to Iran. The strikes reached deep into the Islamic Republic’s military and security apparatus, targeting logistical infrastructure and key nodes in the command hierarchy. Reports suggest that segments of Iran’s nuclear programme, alongside broader military installations, were damaged or set back. Civilian casualties, though predictable, were duly reported and then quietly folded into the wider logic of strategic necessity.

The initial reaction in Israel to the perceived operational success followed a familiar ritual — an almost theatrical display of militaristic pride and nationalist euphoria. It was less about strategic calculation and more about reaffirming a hardened, jingoistic identity: Look at us—striking deep in Iran, and assassinating leaders and scientists. Each moment of escalation was repackaged as proof of autonomy and power, even when the reality was far more complex. Beneath the exultation lay a quieter unease: that every act of defiance also illuminated vulnerabilities — strategic, diplomatic, and existential. But this euphoria did not last long as Iran regained its military command and initiated its own military operation, striking deep within Israel with ballistic missiles that targeted Israeli infrastructure within cities, with Israelis waking up to scenes of destruction. 

There is a cruel irony at play. A state that has institutionalized the destruction of homes, memories, and lives in Gaza now cries foul. It flagrantly violates every norm — legal, moral, humanitarian — only to invoke those same norms when violence reaches its own doorstep. Overnight, the architecture of impunity that it has constructed becomes the basis for grievance. 

But much of the world sees through this cynical hypocrisy. The exceptionalism, the selective outrage, the performative grief—all ring hollow to those who have watched a society cheer on genocide in real time. The tears fall flat, resonating only with the hardcore Zionist base, the political and media operatives who have long served as enablers, and the Christian Zionists like America’s ambassador in Israel, Mike Huckabee, who have fused theology with militarism.

Israel awoke to a moment of potential reckoning — but history teaches that its military establishment, and the social and affective structures that uphold it, are largely impervious to reflection. In fact, they are actively hostile to the very notion of reckoning. The idea of limits — whether of force, legitimacy, or consequence — sits uncomfortably within a system built on the presumption of impunity and supremacy. 

For years, Israeli propaganda depicted Iran as an irrational, theocratic menace. But what, then, is Israel, if not a society governed by theological messianism armed with cutting-edge surveillance and military technology? The difference is that it is backed uncritically by both liberal and conservative elites across the West, with extensive institutional support in munitions and diplomatic cover.

And of course, it is a nuclear-armed state engaged in genocidal warfare, yet continues to claim moral clarity. The irony is as bitter as it is revealing: the caricature it projected onto Iran has become a mirror to its own reality.

An old adage warns: You can start a war, but you cannot know how it will end. Israel seems determined to test that truth. 

Israel stakes its strategy on American leverage and the possibility of eventual U.S. involvement. What began as a targeted campaign against Iran’s nuclear program has already begun to morph, in both rhetoric and ambition, into something far riskier: regime change. The goalposts are shifting, the stakes escalating — not only for the region, but for Israeli society itself, which simultaneously craves dominance, fears accountability, and deeply distrusts Netanyahu’s judgment. 

Despite that, the war is still ongoing; other Israeli operations against Iran that could induce further shock and awe are in play, while Iran is now using its various military capabilities to damage the sense of confidence in Israel’s missile shield and air defenses.

While the regional war commands headlines, in Gaza, Israel continues its campaign of annihilation — cutting internet lines, bombarding neighborhoods, and flattening what remains of the Strip. The war may be framed as an open-ended contest of force, will, and strategic calculation, but its consequences are brutally inscribed on Palestinian bodies. The horizon of this broader war — however abstract it may appear in policy circles — is being carved, violently and unforgettably, into the lives of Palestinians in Gaza, and increasingly, in the West Bank as well. This is Israel’s current addiction to possibilities opened by war: eliminating the Palestinians, dragging the U.S. into regional war, and waiting for the messiah to redeem it.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Abdaljawad Omar.

By Laura Bergamo in Nice, France

The UN Ocean Conference (UNOC) concluded today with significant progress made towards the ratification of the High Seas Treaty and a strong statement on a new plastics treaty signed by 95 governments.

Once ratified, it will be the only legal tool that can create protected areas in international waters, making it fundamental to protecting 30 percent of the world’s oceans by 2030.

Fifty countries, plus the European Union, have now ratified the Treaty.

• READ MORE: Pacific civil society groups challenge France over hosting UN oceans event as political ‘rebranding’
• Other UNOC reports

New Zealand has signed but is yet to ratify.

Deep sea mining rose up the agenda in the conference debates, demonstrating the urgency of opposing this industry.

The expectation from civil society and a large group of states, including both co-hosts of UNOC, was that governments would make progress towards stopping deep sea mining in Nice.

UN Secretary-General Guterres said the deep sea should not become the “wild west“.

Four new pledges
French President Emmanuel Macron said a deep sea mining moratorium is an international necessity. Four new countries pledged their support for a moratorium at UNOC, bringing the total to 37.

Attention now turns to what actions governments will take in July to stop this industry from starting.

Megan Randles, Greenpeace head of delegation regarding the High Seas Treaty and progress towards stopping deep sea mining, said: “High Seas Treaty ratification is within touching distance, but the progress made here in Nice feels hollow as this UN Ocean Conference ends without more tangible commitments to stopping deep sea mining.

“We’ve heard lots of fine words here in Nice, but these need to turn into tangible action.

“Countries must be brave, stand up for global cooperation and make history by stopping deep sea mining this year.

“They can do this by committing to a moratorium on deep sea mining at next month’s International Seabed Authority meeting.

“We applaud those who have already taken a stand, and urge all others to be on the right side of history by stopping deep sea mining.”

Attention on ISA meeting
Following this UNOC, attention now turns to the International Seabed Authority (ISA) meetings in July. In the face of The Metals Company teaming up with US President Donald Trump to mine the global oceans, the upcoming ISA provides a space where governments can come together to defend the deep ocean by adopting a moratorium to stop this destructive industry.

Negotiations on a Global Plastics Treaty resume in August.

John Hocevar, oceans campaign director, Greenpeace USA said: “The majority of countries have spoken when they signed on to the Nice Call for an Ambitious Plastics Treaty that they want an agreement that will reduce plastic production. Now, as we end the UN Ocean Conference and head on to the Global Plastics Treaty negotiations in Geneva this August, they must act.

“The world cannot afford a weak treaty dictated by oil-soaked obstructionists.

“The ambitious majority must rise to this moment, firmly hold the line and ensure that we will have a Global Plastic Treaty that cuts plastic production, protects human health, and delivers justice for Indigenous Peoples and communities on the frontlines.

“Governments need to show that multilateralism still works for people and the planet, not the profits of a greedy few.”

Driving ecological collapse
Nichanan Thantanwit, project leader, Ocean Justice Project, said: “Coastal and Indigenous communities, including small-scale fishers, have protected the ocean for generations. Now they are being pushed aside by industries driving ecological collapse and human rights violations.

“As the UN Ocean Conference ends, governments must recognise small-scale fishers and Indigenous Peoples as rights-holders, secure their access and role in marine governance, and stop destructive practices such as bottom trawling and harmful aquaculture.

“There is no ocean protection without the people who have protected it all along.”

The anticipated Nice Ocean Action Plan, which consists of a political declaration and a series of voluntary commitments, will be announced later today at the end of the conference.

None will be legally binding, so governments need to act strongly during the next ISA meeting in July and at plastic treaty negotiations in August.

Republished from Greenpeace Aotearoa with permission.

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

The Islamic Council of New Zealand (ICONZ) has protested over Israel’s “unprovoked military strikes” against Iran, killing at least 80 people — 20 of them children, and called on the NZ government to publicly condemn Israeli’s actions.

An open letter to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, read out to a Palestine rally in Henderson yesterday by advocate Dr Adnan Ali, said the attacks — targeting residential areas as well as military and nuclear facilities — represented a “grave escalation in regional tensions and pose a serious threat to global peace and stability”.

“This act of aggression undermines international diplomatic efforts and risks igniting a broader conflict that could engulf the Middle East and beyond,” the letter said.

• READ MORE: Iran, Israel trade missiles; blasts, air raid sirens rock Tehran, Tel Aviv
• Twyford condemns weak action by NZ over Israel’s ‘ruthless’ apartheid
• Other Israeli war on Iran reports

The council’s letter, signed by ICONZ president Dr Muhammad Sajjad Haider Naqvi, said it was “particularly alarmed by the timing of the strikes, which come amid ongoing negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme”.

It said the Israeli attack set a “dangerous precedent” and violated international law and sovereignty.

The council urged the NZ government to:

• Publicly condemn the Israeli government’s actions and call for an immediate cessation of hostilities;
• Engage diplomatically with international partners to de-escalate tensions and promote peaceful resolution;
• Support humanitarian efforts to assist affected civilians in Iran; and
• Reaffirm NZ’s commitment to international law, peace and justice.

The council said New Zealand had “long been a voice of reason and compassion on the global stage” and it hoped that this would guide Luxon’s leadership.

In retaliatory missile attacks by Iran, at least four people have been killed and 200 wounded in Israel.

Meanwhile, Al Jazeera’s Bernard Smith, reporting from Amman, Jordan, because Israel has banned Al Jazeera from reporting on its territory, said attacking Iran allowed Israel to deflect attention away from Gaza.

“Israel says the focus of its military activities is now on Iran and not on Gaza. But it also conveniently allows . . . the focus of attention on what’s happening in Israel to move from Gaza to Iran,” he said.

“Until Israel hit those targets in Iran, it was coming under increasing international scrutiny over the conduct of the war in Gaza.”

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

The Islamic Council of New Zealand (ICONZ) has protested over Israel’s “unprovoked military strikes” against Iran, killing at least 80 people — 20 of them children, and called on the NZ government to publicly condemn Israeli’s actions.

An open letter to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, read out to a Palestine rally in Henderson yesterday by advocate Dr Adnan Ali, said the attacks — targeting residential areas as well as military and nuclear facilities — represented a “grave escalation in regional tensions and pose a serious threat to global peace and stability”.

“This act of aggression undermines international diplomatic efforts and risks igniting a broader conflict that could engulf the Middle East and beyond,” the letter said.

• READ MORE: Iran, Israel trade missiles; blasts, air raid sirens rock Tehran, Tel Aviv
• Twyford condemns weak action by NZ over Israel’s ‘ruthless’ apartheid
• Other Israeli war on Iran reports

The council’s letter, signed by ICONZ president Dr Muhammad Sajjad Haider Naqvi, said it was “particularly alarmed by the timing of the strikes, which come amid ongoing negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme”.

It said the Israeli attack set a “dangerous precedent” and violated international law and sovereignty.

The council urged the NZ government to:

• Publicly condemn the Israeli government’s actions and call for an immediate cessation of hostilities;
• Engage diplomatically with international partners to de-escalate tensions and promote peaceful resolution;
• Support humanitarian efforts to assist affected civilians in Iran; and
• Reaffirm NZ’s commitment to international law, peace and justice.

The council said New Zealand had “long been a voice of reason and compassion on the global stage” and it hoped that this would guide Luxon’s leadership.

In retaliatory missile attacks by Iran, at least four people have been killed and 200 wounded in Israel.

Meanwhile, Al Jazeera’s Bernard Smith, reporting from Amman, Jordan, because Israel has banned Al Jazeera from reporting on its territory, said attacking Iran allowed Israel to deflect attention away from Gaza.

“Israel says the focus of its military activities is now on Iran and not on Gaza. But it also conveniently allows . . . the focus of attention on what’s happening in Israel to move from Gaza to Iran,” he said.

“Until Israel hit those targets in Iran, it was coming under increasing international scrutiny over the conduct of the war in Gaza.”

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

He was not a very likely kid to become an icon for revolutionary change—a beacon for social justice, in defense of the Americas, against imperialism, authoritarianism, and foreign oppression.

But he did anyway.

Ernesto “Che” Guevara was born on June 14, 1928. 

An asthmatic child raised by a well-to-do family in the hills of Argentina, he would study medicine, grow to be a doctor. But Ernesto Guevara heard another calling: humanity. He wanted to heal not just the sick and the tired, but the reason for their oppression, their poverty, the root of their suffering and exploitation.

Ernesto Guevara learned this over time. In his early 20s, he was a traveler. A wanderer. A self-described vagabond, journeying with his doctor friend, Alberto Granado, across South America on the back of their 1939 Norton 500cc motorcycle, “la poderosa.”

He would have many journeys… and through them he could not escape the haunting shadow plaguing the many countries of the Americas. A shadow of poverty, of inequality, of oppression and injustice, where people’s hands toil just to barely survive, and life is worth little alongside the power and the wealth of the foreign mines, and the US banana companies, and the American troops. Where people worked in near-slave conditions for pennies, and if you stood up you were beaten or locked away. The feudal colonial system imposed centuries before to keep the Indigenous peoples down, and the campesinos working the fields, and the riches flowing into the coffers of foreign countries far away was still intact, only with new rulers at the top.

Ernesto Guevara saw it all.

You might think that his resistance came with the Cuban revolution, when he sailed on the yacht known as the Granma, picked up arms, fought alongside Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra and liberated the island of Cuba…

Or when he denounced capitalism at the United Nations…

Or when he helped to lead Cuba and make it self-sufficient, despite the US embargo that still exists today…

Or when he left it all behind to try and spark a revolution in Bolivia.

But Ernesto Guevara’s resistance—Che’s resistance—began long before all of that. It began when he traveled, when he wandered the land, when he saw the unjust global system all around him. A caste system imposed on the countries of Latin America where the wealthy were at the top and everyone else fought over the miserable crumbs. 

And Che Guevara refused to obey. Che vowed to do everything he could to fight it, resist it. And resist he did, with every vein of his existence…

####

Che was born this week, in 1928. 

He was killed on October 9, 1967, in La Higuera, Bolivia, after being captured while trying to spark a revolution there.

###

Hi folks, thanks for listening. I’m your host Michael Fox. 

I had a really hard time with this story. Che is such an revolutionary icon. Larger than life. How do you attempt to do something about his life that does justice and also does not repeat the old tropes? This was my attempt. I hope you liked it. As you probably noticed, I did not even try to get into all of the details of his life, or else this story could easily have been an hour long.

That said, I am developing a future podcast that in a way goes in search of Che, follows some of his footsteps here in Latin America as a young man, and tries to look at who he was and what he means still today. Keep an eye out for that here at The Real News. I hope to have it out later this year.

This is Stories of Resistance, a podcast series co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange’s Human Rights in Action program. Each week, I bring you stories of resistance and hope like this. Inspiration for dark times. If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment or leave a review.

As always, thanks for listening. See you next time.

This is episode 46 of Stories of Resistance—a podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange’s Human Rights in Action program. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment, or leave a review. 

And please consider signing up for the Stories of Resistance podcast feed, either in Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Spreaker, or wherever you listen.

Visit patreon.com/mfox for exclusive pictures, to follow Michael Fox’s reporting and to support his work. 

Written and produced by Michael Fox.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Michael Fox.

This story originally appeared in Mondoweiss on June 13, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

After days of mutual threats, Israel launched an unprecedented series of strikes on Iranian soil early on Friday, targeting Iranian nuclear sites, airports, top military leaders, and nuclear scientists in several locations, including the Iranian capital, Tehran.

At around 3:00 a.m. local time, Iranian news agencies reported several explosions in Tehran, while the Israeli Defense Minister, Israel Katz, declared that Israel had “conducted a preemptive strike against Iran.” Later, Iranian news agency Irna reported that the Israeli strikes had targeted and killed the commander-in-chief of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Hussein Salami, as well as the chief of staff of the Iranian armed forces, the head of the revolutionary guard’s Khatem al-Anbiya military complex, and six Iranian nuclear scientists.

The attack also targeted the Iranian Natanz nuclear facility in the center of the country, as well as other nuclear and military facilities in the west. Later in the morning, new Israeli strikes targeted the Tibriz Airport in the north.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, stated on Friday, following the Israeli attack, that Israel will receive a “hard punishment.” Khamenei also announced the appointment of replacements for the slain military leaders. 

Meanwhile, the Jamqaran mosque in the Islamic holy city of Qom raised the red flag, a Shiite tradition symbolizing coming vengeance. The red flag has been previously raised at Jamqaran before the Iranian response to the assassinations of Quds force general Qasem Suleimani in 2020 and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in 2024. 

Meanwhile, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi urged the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to condemn the Israeli attack.

Israeli military sources later reported that Iran had launched around 100 attack drones toward Israel and that its air defense systems intercepted them above neighboring countries. However, the spokesperson of the Israeli army said in a press statement that Israel was expecting a larger Iranian retaliation, and that the escalation would last for several days, urging Israelis to remain indoors pending further instructions.

The lead-up: U.S.-Iran nuclear talks

The Israeli attack came after five rounds of Iranian negotiations with the U.S. over Iran’s nuclear program in Oman, and two days away from a sixth round scheduled for Sunday. In recent days, the rhetoric between Iran, the U.S., and Israel has escalated as U.S. President Trump repeated that his confidence in reaching a deal with Iran was diminishing. 

The crucial point of difference in the nuclear talks has been U.S. insistence that Iran should not enrich uranium on its soil for its civil nuclear purposes, which Iran considers a non-starter, insisting on maintaining its enrichment capacity.

Earlier in May, CNN announced that the U.S. had gathered intelligence about Israeli preparations for a strike against Iran, while nuclear talks between Iran and the U.S. were ongoing. This came several days after Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, announced that the U.S. “will not allow Iran to enrich uranium.” 

Last Monday, Iran announced that its intelligence services had obtained thousands of secret Israeli nuclear documents and threatened to reveal their contents.

The lead-up to the attack also saw the repatriation of several U.S. diplomats from the Middle East last Wednesday, including the U.S. embassy in Iraq. The following day, the IAEA announced that Iran was in breach of its nuclear non-proliferation obligations. 

Internally, Israel’s decision to attack Iran came in a delicate political moment, following the voting by the Israeli Knesset on a bill to dissolve itself, supported by the Israeli opposition and Orthodox Haredi parties. The motion passed in its first reading and had two more readings to go before taking effect. Had it been passed, the adopted bill would have forced early elections and put an end to the current government coalition led by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Although internal pressure on Netanyahu is unprecedented, it comes at a time when the Knesset is due to go into summer recess in the coming weeks, and will be back in session only in autumn. The state of emergency created by attacking Iran will therefore delay the legal process to dissolve the Knesset, possibly saving Netanyahu’s coalition. 

Already on Friday, several Knesset members who voted in favor of the motion to dissolve the Knesset voiced their support for Netanyahu’s decision to attack Iran.

The Knesset vote came after voices have multiplied in calling for the cessation of Israel’s offensive in Gaza, with some ministers within Netanyahu’s government joining the calls.

Internationally, pressure also continues to mount on Israel to end its onslaught on Gaza, especially after its interception of the Madleen aid boat in international waters last week and its ongoing detainment of several of its passengers, including French European parliament member Rima Hassan. 

Pressure also mounted last week after five European countries, including the UK, imposed sanctions on Israeli far-right ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir.

What the attack on Iran means for Palestinians

In Gaza, the humanitarian situation in Gaza has deteriorated even further after two weeks of food rations being distributed through the Israeli-backed and U.S.-controlled Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), the controversial organization tasked with distributing aid to Palestinians instead of the UN. Israeli forces have committed several aid massacres against starving Gazans at the GHF’s distribution points in southern and central Gaza. The massacres have seen the killing of dozens of civilians at GHF sites on a near-daily basis, often after the Israeli army has opened fire on desperate crowds of civilians.

On Thursday, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution to end the war in Gaza by an overwhelming majority. The vote came almost ten days after the U.S. vetoed a similar resolution at the UN Security Council, sparking widespread criticism.

The international sense of alarm created by the Israeli-made humanitarian crisis in Gaza could only be topped by the new alarming situation created by the Israeli attack on Iran. The expectations of an Iranian response and the risk of an all-out regional war in the Middle East have raised global alarm among world leaders, including British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron, who called for “de-escalation” on Friday.

Meanwhile, Israel’s ongoing offensive on Palestinians in the West Bank, which has already been shaded by regional developments, continues to move further away from the spotlight. Immediately following its attack on Iran, Israel imposed a total closure on the West Bank, closing a number of checkpoints and restricting the circulation of Palestinians. Israel also closed the Allenby Bridge crossing to Jordan, the only way out of the country for West Bank Palestinians.

In recent weeks, Israel ramped up its offensive on the West Bank, adopting new decisions that allowed it to confiscate more Palestinian land and announcing the building of 22 new settlements. This has come amid a widening military crackdown on West Bank towns and cities, most recently when Israeli forces killed two Palestinian brothers and wounded thirty Palestinians in Nablus during a 28-hour raid last Tuesday. Meanwhile, its forces continue to occupy the Jenin and Tulkarem refugee camps, demolishing more homes in the camps and preventing the return of its over 40,000 expelled residents.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Qassam Muaddi.

This story originally appeared in Baltimore Beat on June 12, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

At graduation ceremonies across Baltimore this spring, students turned their moments of celebration into protest — waving Palestinian flags, denouncing their schools’ complicity in Gaza’s devastation, and risking discipline from both their universities and the Trump administration.

“I can’t just walk across the stage and not say anything,” said August, a University of Maryland School of Social Work graduate and member of the Anti-Imperial Movement,  who asked that their full name be withheld out of fear of harassment. “I can’t just sleep well knowing that my tuition money is complicit in this.” 

August was among the students that marked their May 19 commencement ceremony by demanding their school cut ties with Israel. Over a dozen students wore keffiyehs, waved Palestinian flags, covered their hands in blood-red dyed water and signs reading, “Genocide is not a social work value” and “Disclose, Divest from Israel.”

Colleges across the country have cracked down on similar displays: days earlier, at George Washington University, Cecilia Culver was banned from campus after using her graduation speech to declare, “I am ashamed to know my tuition is being used to fund genocide.” At NYU, Logan Rozos’s diploma was withheld after denouncing the “genocide… paid for by our tax dollars and live-streamed to our phones.”

The goal was urgent: to speak out against institutional complicity in Gaza’s humanitarian catastrophe, where the official death toll nears 55,000, hundreds of thousands of people face starvation, and Israel has vowed to enact President Donald Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan for the survivors. 

Protest has become a constant on college campuses since Hamas’s deadly attack on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s genocidal response. Over 19 months, students have staged walkouts, encampments, hunger strikes, and civil disobedience — even as administrators rewrite rules to ban and restrict protests and impose harsh discipline. More than 3,000 protesters across the country have been arrested, with hundreds suspended or expelled. Protestors are routinely accused of antisemitism, their calls for accountability dismissed as hatred rather than outrage over humanitarian law. 

Resistance has grown since this March, when the U.S.-backed Israeli blockade choked off food, water, and medicine to Gaza — and public perception is starting to shift with it. An April Pew survey showed a majority of Americans now view Israel unfavorably for the first time in decades. That finding was confirmed by a May University of Maryland poll that also found more than a third of Americans, including a majority of Democrats, see Israel’s actions in Gaza as war crimes or “akin to genocide.”

“The only way forward is for everyday Americans — not just students or leftists — to speak up,” said August. “Sometimes it feels hopeless, but the data shows we’re not fringe. A lot of people are waking up to what’s happening in Gaza.”

In conversations with more than a dozen local student activists, Baltimore Beat heard that they see their Pro-Palestine advocacy as part of a broader, generational fight against injustice.

As the crisis in Gaza has deepened, so too has the Trump administration’s crackdown on campus activism — framing student protest as antisemitism. Federal investigations are now underway at more than 60 universities, and hundreds of student visas have been revoked. At institutions like Johns Hopkins University, the administration has threatened to pull billions in federal funding unless university leaders suppress dissent. A federal antisemitism task force — backed by Republicans, key Democrats, and major Jewish organizations — has vowed to stamp out what it deems antisemitism at Hopkins and other campuses.

The administration has targeted prominent foreign-born student activists, claiming their advocacy constitutes support for Hamas and antisemitic incitement. In March, Mahmoud Khalil, a prominent organizer at Columbia University and a legal U.S. resident, was detained by ICE, had his green card revoked, and has languished in detention for several months. “As a Palestinian student, I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined — you cannot achieve one without the other,” Khalil told CNN in 2024.

Pro-Palestinian protesters — including many Jewish students — emphasize that their opposition is to Israel’s occupation, not Judaism. They warn that equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism threatens free speech and undermines Jewish safety by turning antisemitism into a political weapon.

Avery Misterka, Jewish student at Towson University and lead organizer of the campus Pro-Palestine movement, has spoken out at multiple protests against Trump administration policies and in defense of targeted student activists. 

“Trump isn’t serious about fighting antisemitism — it’s a weapon for his Christian nationalist project,” said Misterka. He heads the campus chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, the nation’s largest anti-Zionist Jewish organization. Misterka noted that Trump has long-standing ties to antisemitic extremists, including several current White House officials.

“We’ve seen what happens when students speak out — they get punished. But we’re still showing up,” he added.

The protests have persisted even as university responses grow increasingly harsh. In the early hours of May 8, tents sprang up on the Keyser Quad at Johns Hopkins University. Students quickly established a small encampment, renaming it the Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya Liberated Zone, in honor of a Gazan pediatrician abducted by Israeli forces. While last year’s encampment at Hopkins lasted for two weeks, this time it was cleared immediately: more than 30 Hopkins armed private police force and Baltimore police officers swept onto the quad within the hour, tearing down tents and detaining students.

The crackdown at Hopkins — carried out by its newly empowered private police force — sparked swift criticism from students and faculty alike. 

“Campuses have always been strongholds of dissent. Trump knows critical thinking lives here, and his agenda can’t survive it,” said Claude Guillemard, a French professor at Johns Hopkins University, at a recent rally. 

Both students and faculty have led calls for the Baltimore City Council to hold a hearing on the Hopkins Police Department, arguing that the force remains unaccountable to the communities it is supposed to serve. They argue that university leaders are capitulating to a pressure campaign designed to stifle dissent and academic freedom.

At Morgan State University, where student protest played a key role in the civil rights movement, professor Jared Ball sees the pattern repeating: “Faculty in Maryland can’t unionize, governance keeps shrinking, and corporate and military influence keeps growing. Private security is everywhere, yet students still say they don’t feel safe. Administrators confine protests to ‘designated spaces’ and punish anyone who strays — proof that the crackdown on dissent isn’t new, just more aggressive.”

At Towson University, the movement has only broadened. One year after passing a 12-1 divestment resolution, university leaders have rejected calls to divest from Israel as students built an even larger coalition. 

Mina, vice president of Towson’s Muslim Student Association, withheld their last name due to ongoing Islamophobic harassment. Despite administrators rejecting their demands, Mina says they remain undeterred.

“We’ve been here since October 7, and we’re not going anywhere,” Mina said. 

Even after meeting with the president, none of their demands have been met.

“I guess he thought if he met with us, we’d stop — but we haven’t.”

While protesters face arrest, suspension, and expulsion, no U.S. official has been held accountable for violating laws that prohibit aid to governments committing war crimes.

Organizing extends well beyond protests and marches. On a chilly Saturday in April, Red Emma’s became a marketplace of resistance for students’ political art.

Students from area schools shared food and strategies for continued action, including University of Maryland College Park, where in April, students voted to divest from Israel and other countries that fuel human rights abuses, joining Towson and University of Maryland Baltimore County, where student bodies approved divestment resolutions last year. The event, organized by Baltimore Artists Against Apartheid, raised more than $3,600 for Palestinian families. 

“If we let the repression students face stand, artists will be next,” said organizer Nic Koski. “Defending students under attack is inseparable from defending Palestinian rights — and everyone’s rights.”

One of the participating artists was Qamar Hassan, a graduating senior at the Maryland Institute College of Art, who raised over $500 by selling pieces that had been removed from public spaces by campus administrators.

In May, Hassan also took part in a protest during their graduation. “We really wanted to highlight that [MICA was] still actively censoring students,” Hassan said. They coordinated with classmates to disrupt the ceremony with chants for Palestine, and a few walked the stage carrying Palestinian flags, determined to make their message visible even as most held back, fearing repercussions. The school president refused to shake their hand — a small gesture that captured the tension of the moment.

“We wanted to show that even if it’s just a handful of us, we’re not going to let our school go about with a land acknowledgment and then censor students who want to talk about Palestine,” Hassan reflected. 

“It’s important to show others who are scared that you can do these things — and you’ll be okay. You have a voice, and you can use it.” 

In a year defined by fear and repression, even a small act of defiance became an example for others — and a signal to Baltimore that the city’s students, and their movement, aren’t going away.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Jaisal Noor.

Christopher C. Black fought for justice in politically agendized international courts.

International criminal defense attorney and writer Christopher C. Black died suddenly on June 5, 2025. He will be sorely missed. His analysis of the imbalanced scales of international justice and his representation of those wrongly accused should be long remembered and honored.

The height of Black’s career was winning the acquittal of Rwandan General Augustin Ndindiliyimana after a 14-year battle at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda . General Ndindiliyimana was accused of genocide crimes, but he’d actually saved many civilians in Kigali during the final 100 days of the 1990 to 1994 Rwandan war.

Ndindiliyimana’s trial was an important moment in the history of the politically agendized, US-controlled court, which tried only Rwandan Hutus and thereby established the genocide narrative that became so useful to the US and other Western powers, not only in Rwanda and Congo but also in humanitarian interventionist ideology. The US farcically declared “stopping genocide and mass atrocities” to be its official foreign policy, and “stopping the next Rwanda” became Western imperialists’ rallying cry to justify invasions in Libya and Syria. After the US had destroyed Libya and assassinated its leader, Muammar Gaddafi, then UN Ambassador Susan Rice flew first to Libya, then to Rwanda to declare that we got it right this time.

Speaking in 2015 at the annual Rhodes Forum held by the Dialogue of Civilizations think tank, Christopher Black said, “The point of these tribunals, why they were set up, is basically propaganda. That’s their only real role. The propaganda is to put out a story about the war with which they’re concerned, and the propaganda is meant to demonize the government which has been overthrown, and to cover up the real role of the United States and its allies in that war. And that’s the only role these trials really have.”

I spoke to Phil Taylor, former investigator at the ICTR and current host of The Taylor Report on CIUT FM-University of Toronto , about Christopher Black’s life and work.

ANN GARRISON: Phil, can you first tell us how you met and became friends with Christopher Black?

PHIL TAYLOR: Chris and I worked for the same law firm, Roach & Schwartz, headed by a much respected people’s lawyer and a leader in Toronto’s Black community. We worked together on a number of cases before Chris took up an independent practice.

AG: The United Nations created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda , also known as the ICTR, to prosecute crimes committed between January 1 and December 31, 1994. Tell us about your work with him there.

PT: Together with others, particularly ICTR lawyer Tiphaine Dickson , I encouraged Chris to consider defending General Augustin Ndindiliyimana, which he fortunately agreed to do. When he took up the case, I was employed as an investigator by other defendants, but Chris and I interacted regularly to keep abreast of the issues and challenges faced by defendants and defense counsel.

AG: The story of Rwanda and the ICTR has occasioned abundant scholarship, much of it propagandistic, and it will no doubt be studied for years to come. What would you hope to be Christopher Black’s lasting contribution? 

PT:  As Chris said in his talk at the Rhodes Forum , propaganda was the purpose of the court.  It was created to reduce the history of the 1990-1994 Rwandan war and its final 100 days to a Manichean tale of demonic Hutus massacring angelic Tutsis. The reality was far more complex, but the simple Manichean tale served the purposes of its creators, the US and the UN, which was then dominated by the US in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Remember that former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali told Canadian author Robin Philpot that the Americans were largely responsible for the events of 1994.

US leaders wanted their guy, Rwandan Tutsi General Paul Kagame, to seize power in Kigali and become a hero to the international community as the leader who stopped the genocide. Two years later they supported Rwanda and Uganda’s invasion of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which was then Zaire, to topple aging dictator Mobutu Sese Seko and displace France as the dominant power in Central Africa. Newsweek explained this in its May 11, 1997, report “Washington’s Africa Move .”

All the cases adjudicated at the court should be studied in light of this propagandistic narrative that Chris identified as the purpose of the court. Only Hutus were indicted and prosecuted, making it the very definition of victor’s justice, but Chris nevertheless fought like a tiger for his innocent client, General Ndindiliyimana, and eventually won.

AG: The established narrative about the Rwandan Genocide says that the UN simply stood by and allowed it to happen. What role did it actually play, and why did Boutros Boutros-Ghali blame the Americans?

PT: Kagame’s Rwandan Tutsi army was guilty of many civilian massacres, particularly of the majority Hutu population, throughout the four-year Rwandan war.  The infamous “100 days of genocide” began after Kagame ordered the assassination of Rwanda and Burundi’s Hutu presidents by shooting their plane out of the sky over Kigali on April 6, 1994. This panicked the Hutu population, who began massacring Tutsis, while at the same time Kagame’s army began a long-planned offensive to finally seize power in the capital, Kigali. Kagame’s army committed civilian massacres on its way to Kigali and after, but no one has ever been indicted for their crimes.

President Bill Clinton instructed his UN Ambassador Madeline Albright to keep the UN Security Council (UNSC) from sending in troops to stop the killing because they wanted Kagame to come out on top. 

The major “human rights” NGOs worked diligently to demonize the existing Rwandan government, and they had ready access to Bill Clinton’s White House. During ceasefire negotiations, Human Rights Watch, led by Alison des Forges, even tried to have Rwanda’s UN representatives arrested.

AG: Can you talk more about Chris’s defense of General Ndindiliyimana?

PT: Chris found excellent witnesses to testify, most notably Colonel Luc Marchal, who was second-in-command of the UN Peacekeeping Forces and commander of forces in the capital, Kigali. Ndindiliyimana was commander of the gendarmerie, the military police in the capital, so the two of them worked closely together, doing their best to protect civilians.

Colonel Marchal testified to the integrity of General Ndindiliyimana and to the specific actions he took to protect civilians.

Chris diligently exposed the falsehoods and contradictory testimony of the general’s accusers.

In 2014, General Ndindiliyimana was acquitted of all charges in the ICTR Appeals Chamber.  He returned to his family in Belgium shortly thereafter.

*****

Christopher Black’s essays are compiled on the website of New Eastern Outlook . His novel, Beneath the Clouds , is available on Amazon. He is survived by his life companion Gail, son Aidan, and grandson William.

Phil Taylor is a former investigator at the ICTR and current host of The Taylor Report on CIUT FM-University of Toronto.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ann Garrison.

Ortega and Bukele are polar opposites: one invests in dignity and democracy, the other in mass incarceration and imperial alliances.

Opposition media from both Nicaragua and El Salvador, along with the Washington Post, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch, all vilify Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega by equating him with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele. Although Ortega and Bukele are both serving consecutive terms, and a Central American polling firm reports that they enjoy high popularity among their respective populations, the two presidents actually offer a study in contrasts.

Crime and punishment

Bukele is praised for drastically reducing violence in El Salvador, but his political career is actually based on perpetuating it. First, some history. The country’s gang problem originated in the bloody US-supported war of the 1980s, including US and Israeli funding and training of death squads, that forced thousands of young men to escape forced military recruitment by fleeing to the United States. As an underclass of undocumented immigrants, and without the support of their families, many of these young men wound up in gangs on the streets of Los Angeles or in its prisons. In the mid-1990s, thousands of these gang members were deported to El Salvador, bringing violence back to a country that had just lost 75,000 lives in a brutal conflict. As Hillary Goodfriend writes, “the devastated neoliberal economic landscape proved fertile terrain for the US gang culture imported by Salvadoran youth deported from Los Angeles in the mid-1990s.” The right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) governments of the postwar years responded to the gang problem with an iron fist.

Then from 2009-2019, while the former guerrillas (Frente Farabundo Martí de Liberación Nacional—FMLN) were in office, a preventive approach was attempted. Structural problems were addressed with “unprecedented increases in social spending, including critical education, health care, land, infrastructure and agricultural investment.” But these efforts were frustrated by a majority opposition legislature that limited spending on such programs, and USAID funding for a private sector approach that favored the opposition. The FMLN also made its own mistakes, including secret negotiations (along with the Catholic Church) for a gang truce, which was initially successful but politically costly once it fell apart. Still, progress was made as Salvadoran youth found more alternatives.

Nayib Bukele arrived on the national scene as the FMLN candidate for mayor of San Salvador in 2014. There has been suspicion that his political rise was based on secret deals with the gangs, and an increasing number of international media are giving details on how that worked. He is alleged to have bribed the gangs for their loyalty in that mayoral race, outbidding the ARENA candidate by a two to one margin. Bukele soon broke with the FMLN and ran against the party in the 2019 presidential election. MS-13 gang leaders are alleged to have negotiated with him prior to the vote, demanding an end to extraditions to the US, shortened sentences, and control of territory. In return they reduced the homicide rate by hiding their crimes. After Bukele’s election, the official murder rate fell, but disappearances went up. This gang also helped him get out the vote for his legislative supermajority in 2021, sometimes violently. While he colludes with the gangs in secret, the public face of Bukele’s crime policy is a return to the repression of the ARENA years.

In March 2022, Bukele instituted a state of exception which persists to this day and has led to the imprisonment of an additional 85,000 people, giving El Salvador the highest incarceration rate in the world. Several social movement leaders are among those detained without trial. Meanwhile, many Salvadorans enjoy comparative safety in the country’s streets since the gang violence is less visible and small businesses no longer have to make extortion payments. This, along with savvy manipulation of social media, has made the president extremely popular among a segment of the population, particularly voters living in the diaspora. Now Bukele has gleefully agreed to serve as an offshore jailer for Donald Trump, and seems to delight in images of dehumanized inmates in crowded cells, indicating that they will never leave. Conditions are torturous and rehabilitation is non-existent. As Alan MacLeod reports , “cruelty is the point.” And violence persists.

The photos at the top of this article show the stark contrast in attitude towards prisoners in Nicaragua vs. El Salvador. While Bukele serves cruelty and humiliation, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega focuses on human dignity and rehabilitation—particularly through education. A recent article tells of some 8,400 inmates enrolled in university studies, vocational programs, and completing primary and secondary schooling. Inmates are also allowed to work, if they so choose, and their earnings are sent to their families. Sentences are frequently reduced for good behavior. Reconciliation is a hallmark of the Sandinista movement, which abolished the death penalty in 1979. Corporate media stories about “political prisoners” are part of a US-funded propaganda campaign and should be viewed skeptically. This article gives information about the heinous crimes committed by those US media heroes.

In Nicaragua there is minimal gang activity, drug trafficking, and drug abuse. At 6 per 100,000 inhabitants, the country’s homicide rate has been declining since 2007 and is currently just below that of the US. This decrease is thanks to successful implementation of the kinds of social programs the FMLN attempted in El Salvador, which have engaged the youth and greatly reduced poverty. It has been a steady, long-term process that prioritizes the formerly impoverished majority; not an illusion for social media. People are empowered by creative programs that help farmers feed their families and communities, support entrepreneurs in starting a business, promote women’s health and safety, reinstate rights to Afro-descendant and Indigenous peoples, and allow Nicaraguans of all ages to get an education. These are not changes that can easily be turned back, and are the reason that Daniel Ortega keeps getting a larger and larger percentage of the vote in each election.

NGOs

The Washington Post and Amnesty International inaccurately equate El Salvador’s new Foreign Agents Law with Nicaragua’s non-profits law. The Nicaraguan law requires organizations to report payments coming from outside the country and tell how such money is spent, prohibiting the use of foreign monies for political activity. It is meant to curtail foreign interference like the 2018 coup attempt that subjected the Nicaraguan population to three months of politically-motivated terror. This article provides detailed documentation of the extensive flow of USAID regime-change money to Nicaraguan opposition and media outlets before 2022. In a shameless admission that they are still dependent on US funding, the Nicaraguan opposition took to social media at the start of the second Trump administration to decry the crisis they had fallen into because their US funding was cut . Contrary to what the Post and Amnesty would have us believe, media outlets dependent on US government funding are not “independent.” Unfortunately, USAID/NED funding for Nicaraguan opposition media operating outside the country has already been reinstated.

El Salvador has also been targeted by USAID in the past for political purposes, including during the FMLN administrations. US meddling is less likely to target Bukele, given his close alignment with the Trump administration. Criticism of the new law’s provision to charge Salvadoran charities a 30% tax on international donations does seem valid. In Nicaragua, most charitable organizations pay a 1% administrative fee on international donations, while the wealthiest charities pay up to 3%—a far cry from Bukele’s 30% tax.

Treatment of Migrants

Ortega never participated in the schemes the Trump and Biden administrations negotiated with Nicaragua’s northern neighbors to inhibit the flow of migrants; nor did he impose a ‘special fee’ on migrants in transit from Africa , as Bukele did. Nicaragua accepted direct flights from Haiti and Cuba as a humanitarian gesture to ease the crises that US intervention created in those countries. For a period, Nicaragua was a transit country for migrants looking for an inexpensive and safer route to the US that avoided the dangerous Darien Gap. It was rewarded with baseless accusations of “human trafficking” by the US Congress.

Meanwhile, Bukele zealously collaborates with Trump’s mass deportation/incarceration plan for migrants, even refusing to release a wrongfully deported Salvadoran man. Daniel Ortega has adamantly denounced this , demanded the return of the kidnapped Venezuelans held in El Salvador, and pleaded for respect for all migrants. Nicaraguan migrants who are deported home from the US are welcomed with free health check-ups, a meal, transportation to their home communities, and a small stipend to get re-settled.

Handling of the COVID-19 pandemic

El Salvador had one of the most authoritarian responses to the pandemic. The Bukele government shut down the economy,  used military repression to enforce a nationwide quarantine, declared a state of exception, and forced people into COVID detention centers, where many were infected and some died. Bukele tweeted sadistic photos of gang members crowded together like sardines in prisons—bragging about his repressive response with no regard for the danger of spreading the virus.

President Ortega did the exact opposite: the economy and schools remained open, while children continued to receive their daily lunches. The government deployed a massive public health campaign with house-to-house information visits, prepared public hospitals to treat COVID, established a hotline for contact tracing and monitoring of patients, and released some prisoners. No one was jailed or went hungry due to the pandemic; the government did not incur excessive debt; and Nicaragua achieved the highest vaccination rate in Central America.

Nicaragua had one of the lowest excess death rates from the pandemic in the world (292 per 100,000 inhabitants). UNICEF congratulated Nicaragua on its pandemic response because unlike children who faced lockdowns, Nicaraguan youngsters did not experience more health risks, poorer nutrition, decreased vaccination rates, or diminished education outcomes due to the pandemic.

Salvadoran children, unfortunately, faced all the detrimental effects of an extreme lockdown. The country’s democracy suffered, the economy shrank severely, and the government incurred tremendous debt. The excess death rate in El Salvador due to the pandemic was 364 per 100,000 inhabitants.

Israel and Palestine

Historically, Zionist collaboration with right-wing repression in Central America has included the selling of napalm to ARENA governments to use on the Salvadoran people, and aid for Nicaragua’s Somoza dictatorship and contra terrorists.  Now, despite Bukele’s Palestinian heritage, he has clearly allied with Israel. His imports of Israeli weapons and surveillance technology are growing at an alarming rate, and El Salvador is one of the most extensive users of Israel’s Pegasus spyware, reportedly deployed against dozens of Bukele’s critics.

In contrast, Sandinista Nicaragua has a long history of solidarity with the Palestinian people . Since October 7, 2023, Ortega has resolutely supported the Palestinian people’s right to peace and self-determination and the end of Israeli aggression. His was the first nation to join the South Africa suit at the International Court of Justice over Israel’s violations of the Genocide Convention. Nicaragua then filed its own suit against Germany for aiding and abetting genocide, which succeeded in reducing weapons sales to Israel and reinstating German funding to UNRWA. Nicaragua does this despite threats of increased sanctions from the US Congress and Israel.

Government social spending

Since Bukele became president, classic neoliberal policies have cut education, healthcare, and poverty reduction programs introduced by the FMLN governments before him. Schools are being closed and healthcare is increasingly unaffordable. Meanwhile, there are constant increases in spending on the military, policing, and prisons.

Social spending has been a priority for Nicaragua since President Ortega took office in 2007 and now constitutes 60% of the national budget. There have been vast improvements in health, education, nutrition, housing, drinking water, roads, and electricity. The country’s Human Development Index has surpassed El Salvador’s—remarkable since Nicaragua’s per capita GDP (an important component of that score) is half that of El Salvador. And Nicaragua ranks third lowest in the western hemisphere for military spending, even behind Costa Rica which supposedly has no army.

The many differences between the two presidents are best summarized by looking at them in historical perspective. Despite the hype, the young Bukele offers nothing new. He is perpetuating the cycle of physical and structural violence in his country, in collusion with the US government. The elder statesman Ortega, however, is helping his country break free from imperialist violence. That is something new.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jill Clark-Gollub.

Independent journalists are under threat in many parts of the world. Just in Palestine, 184 journalists and media workers have been killed by Israel’s war on Gaza over the last two years.

In dark times, independent journalists are often forced to hold the line—denouncing the violence, uncovering the corruption, shining light on the injustice.

They are truth-tellers who are forced into the front lines, and for this… they are under threat. 

Today, they are holding the line in El Salvador. There, the Nayib Bukele government has unilaterally detained numerous human rights defenders in recent weeks.

Independent journalists are also afraid. Oscar Orellana is the head of ARPAS, an association of 20 different community media groups across El Salvador.

“There’s an atmosphere of fear,” he says. “Of anxiety, insecurity… 

“There’s self-censorship, like people who don’t want to make statements, journalists who prefer not to address these issues. Community leaders who prefer to remain silent. Let’s say that a culture of silence prevails, a culture that responds to this culture of fear.”

###

President Bukele was reelected last year with 85% of the vote.

He has transformed the country. Locked up tens of thousands of suspected gang members. People can leave their homes without fear for their safety. But Bukele has also consolidated power—packed the supreme court, forced his way into Congress. He is now the leading ally of Donald Trump in Latin America, accepting US deportees to be dumped and forgotten in his mega-prisons.