Rep. John Moolenar, Republican chairman of the U.S. House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, and Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, wrote Wednesday to the CEOs of Hilton, Marriott and Hyatt, demanding to know whether they were using the term at Beijing’s request.

(RFA Cantonese)

“Using terminology such as ‘Taiwan, China,’ gives false credence to the PRC’s position of authority and sovereignty over Taiwan and implies that Taiwan is the property of the PRC,” they wrote in the letter, using the initials of the People’s Republic of China.

“Not only does this directly contradict U.S. policy, but it also undermines Taiwan’s democratic system. Other major U.S. companies with an international presence correctly identify Taiwan as an entity separate from that of China, and we urge your companies to follow suit,” they said.

The letter references the Taiwan Relations Act, which since Washington’s formal recognition of the PRC government in Beijing in 1979 has defined the substantial but non-diplomatic ties between the United States and Taiwan.

“This relationship is of the utmost importance to the economic and national security of the United States, and the government and the private sector alike must take steps to bolster and support Taiwan, one of our most important allies in the region,” the letter said.

Radio Free Asia found that a quick search for a hotel in Taiwan on the websites of all three chains turned up results for “Taiwan, China.”

RFA has sought comment from Hilton, Marriott and Hyatt but has yet to receive a response.

China regards Taiwan as part of its territory although the island is self-ruling and has a democratically elected government. The communist government in Beijing has threatened to take the island by force should it declare independence.

Edited by Mat Pennington.

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

In their legal submission, they say “the proscription has hindered the group’s ability to broker a political solution to the conflict, stifled conversations in securing a long-term political settlement, criminalised ordinary Palestinians residing in Gaza, and undermined the possibility of a peaceful settlement”.

They also argue that being branded terrorists infringes fundamental rights and has a disproportionate impact on freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and open debate and political expression, which makes sensible journalism and public discourse on Israel’s actions in Palestine impossible.

Hamas’s submission also points out that Britain’s Terrorism Act “covers all groups and organisations around the world that use violence to achieve political objectives, including the Israeli armed forces, the Ukrainian Army and, indeed, the British armed forces”.

And it claims proscription obstructs humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip because any form of assistance can be labelled “terrorism” if it is “seen as supporting a group that has been labelled a terrorist organisation”.

On the other hand, proscribing Hamas was a clever move because it makes it so much easier for Israel’s stooges at Westminster to avoid having to explain that regime’s far worse war crimes and crimes against humanity. We have to thank Priti Patel who, while International Development Secretary, was so taken-in by Zionist claptrap and so adoring of Israel that, in 2017, she reportedly had around a dozen meetings with Israeli politicians and organisations during a family holiday in Israel without telling the Foreign Office, her civil servants or her boss Theresa May, and without government officials present. This was not only a middle finger to the Ministerial Code of Conduct but a gross breach of security.

She was also said to have tried persuading colleagues to send British taxpayers’ money as aid for an Israeli forces project in the Golan Heights…. and she actually visited the Golan. As everyone and his dog knows, the Golan Heights is Syrian territory stolen in 1967 by the Israelis who have illegally occupied it ever since. Touring it with the thieving occupation army was another serious diplomatic blunder.

Patel’s meetings are said to have been arranged by Lord Polak, an official of the Board of Deputies of British Jews in the 1980s who joined the Conservative Friends of Israel in 1989, and served as its director for 26 years until appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for political service and made a life peer. It’s difficult to see what political service Polak performed for anyone other than the Israeli regime.

Patel was forced to resign but later restored to favour and promoted to Home Secretary. She proscribed Hamas’s political wing in 2021 with hardly a murmur of opposition. There seemed no legitimate reason for doing so unless it was part of the UK/US/Israel axis aim to bring about coercive regime change. But would that be legal? Are the Palestinians to be denied self-determination and the right to choose their own government? Well, yes, so it seems.

What’s to fear from Hamas?

No-one in the UK Government has properly explained, probably because no-one has bothered to sit down and shoot the breeze with them. Instead they eagerly welcome Netanyahu and his thugs with red-carpet hugs, handshakes and vows of affection and endless co-operation, and soak up the nonsense they talk.

And has anyone at Westminster bothered to read Hamas’s 2017 Charter? If so, did they notice Sections 16 and 20? They are reasonably in tune with international law while the Israeli government pursues policies that definitely are not.

16. Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.
17. Hamas believes that no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded, irrespective of the causes, the circumstances and the pressures and no matter how long the occupation lasts. Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea. However, without compromising its rejection of the Zionist entity and without relinquishing any Palestinian rights, Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.

Under international law the correct way to deal with the threat posed by Hamas is (and always has been) by requiring Israel to immediately end its illegal occupation of Palestinian territory and theft of Palestinian resources.

JVP (Jewish Voice for Peace), who claim to be the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world, said of the genocide in Gaza: “We’re organizing a grassroots, multiracial, cross-class, intergenerational movement of US Jews into solidarity with Palestinian freedom struggle.” Here’s an extract from their no-nonsense statement on the hostilities in Palestine.

“The Israeli government may have just declared war, but its war on Palestinians started over 75 years ago. Israeli apartheid and occupation — and United States complicity in that oppression — are the source of all this violence. Reality is shaped by when you start the clock.

For the past year, the most racist, fundamentalist, far-right government in Israeli history has ruthlessly escalated its military occupation over Palestinians in the name of Jewish supremacy with violent expulsions and home demolitions, mass killings, military raids on refugee camps, unrelenting siege and daily humiliation. In recent weeks, Israeli forces repeatedly stormed the holiest Muslim sites in Jerusalem.

For 16 years, the Israeli government has suffocated Palestinians in Gaza under a draconian air, sea and land military blockade, imprisoning and starving two million people and denying them medical aid. The Israeli government routinely massacres Palestinians in Gaza; ten-year-olds who live in Gaza have already been traumatized by seven major bombing campaigns in their short lives.

For 75 years, the Israeli government has maintained a military occupation over Palestinians, operating an apartheid regime. Palestinian children are dragged from their beds in pre-dawn raids by Israeli soldiers and held without charge in Israeli military prisons. Palestinians’ homes are torched by mobs of Israeli settlers, or destroyed by the Israeli army. Entire Palestinian villages are forced to flee, abandoning the homes orchards, and land that were in their family for generations.

The bloodshed of today and the past 75 years traces back directly to US complicity in the oppression and horror caused by Israel’s military occupation. The US government consistently enables Israeli violence and bears blame for this moment. The unchecked military funding, diplomatic cover, and billions of dollars of private money flowing from the US enables and empowers Israel’s apartheid regime.”

The Zionists’ Dalet Plan, or Plan D

It’s not just America’s complicity and Britain’s 110-years of betrayal that have brought us to this appalling situation. Plan D was the Zionists’ terror blueprint for their brutal takeover of the Palestinian homeland drawn up 77 years ago by the Jewish underground militia, the Haganah, at the behest of David Ben-Gurion, then boss of the Jewish Agency, and relentless pursued by the Israeli regime to this day.

Plan D was a carefully thought-out, step-by-step plot choreographed ahead of the British mandate government’s withdrawal and the Zionists’ declaration of Israeli statehood. It correctly assumed that the British authorities would no longer be there.

It’s a sign of the shoddy times we live in that the lawyers involved in the appeal case felt obliged to state that Hamas did not pay them or the experts who provided evidence for their submission, as it is illegal to receive funds from a group designated as a terrorist organisation.

Hopefully their appeal will skewer the Government’s utter hypocrisy and undying support for the real terrorists in the Holy Land. Priti Patel will have to reckon with the consequences of her actions in terms of the huge numbers of innocent lives lost or reduced to unimaginable misery.

I hasten to add that I am no supporter of Hamas. I support truth and justice, simple as that. And of course the Laws of Cricket.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stuart Littlewood.

This album is fraught with a lot of complicated feelings. At the beginning, I went in with so much creative energy and created space for it. I paused my touring, which I’ve never done before, just to finish this album. Once I was in the home stretch, my best friend was diagnosed with cancer, and the album did mean something different. It’s meant something different at different phases of my life over the last year. I came into this album bright-eyed, and then my friend was sick. Upon her diagnosis, I was like, “I am going to drive her to her chemo appointments, play her the album as it’s being made, get her feedback and see what she thinks—use it as a moment to keep her happy and keep the mood light.”

Fast forward maybe just a couple months: her condition changed, her prognosis changed, and her cancer—which was already very aggressive—metastasized. I was notified by my friend’s doctors that she would not have very much time left. This was right when my album was going to come out, maybe two weeks before. We had already announced this massive tour. It was 30 dates, give or take, in the continental U.S. I had to cancel all of that and postpone the album. At that point, the album went from being this new exploration into music, to something I used as comfort to keep my friend in good spirits, to this very important thing I had to push to the side to do something even more important that I wouldn’t be able to ever do again. And that was to take care of my friend and shepherd her into the next life.

There are so many parts of me that didn’t want to see this through… But now this album has become a therapeutic process in my own grieving, and it is triggering, in a way, to constantly talk about my friend dying. Every time I have these conversations, I’m actively very sad. But it’s important. It’s helping me move forward. It’s forcing me not to be stagnant in the sadness I was existing in and still exist in. Life goes forward, and music goes forward, and my music is pulling me and encouraging me to look forward.

I’m sorry for your loss—this is an awful thing to happen. I’m sure the decision to postpone the album’s release was not something you had to think about much, but were there any doubts about how it would impact your career?

Professionally, postponing this album and this tour could [have been] very devastating, because I’d already taken time off from touring. A lot of relevance in the music scene is maintained through active touring, and I would be pushing off all of this for even longer, and in the meantime, everyone could just forget about me. That’s a common thing that musicians have to deal with. If you’re not out in the ether, you’ll disappear into it.

I was concerned, of course, about the repercussions of this decision, but careers come and go. If anything, I could figure out a new job, but I will never get my friend back. It was either: I might lose my job, or my friend is going to die, and she’ll not have me next to her. I chose the latter and chose to take care of my friend so that in her last days she could be surrounded by the people she loved the most, and that was worth everything. To shepherd her on that last journey was really hard. I don’t regret it at all.

[Eternal Reverie] is a testament that it’s okay to put things on pause, even if you think it’s really scary. When you make the right decisions, things will still work out… Life throws a lot of curveballs at you. One of the beautiful things about being human is the ability to somehow pick yourself up and move forward despite all things.

This isn’t a decision anybody should have to make—“Do I go and tend to my friend who’s dying?”—because the answer, on one hand, is always yes. But on the other hand, we live in a society where there is also career to consider.

I feel like, maybe, in certain kinds of more traditional working jobs, there could be a way to be like, “Hey, I need to take a leave of absence,” and you know your job will be like, “Okay, we’ll give you this time. You’ll come back afterward.” The music industry is not like that. One wrong move and you don’t really have a job tomorrow. But music is something I love and I do because I love it, and my friend is someone I love. If I just prioritize love on top of everything, things will work out as they should.

It’s tough. My friend was young, and you don’t expect to lose your friend so soon and so tragically. It’s sobering, and it just shows you how finite life is—to live each day graciously, and to remember that tomorrow’s never guaranteed, so we want to make the decisions that bring us joy as often as possible.

Earlier, you mentioned that when you first were working on Eternal Reverie, you paused your tour to work on it. Are you usually writing songs while you’re on tour? If so, what does that look like for you?

Typically, I’m always working on music while I’m traveling. And it’s so feasible. I have Ableton on my laptop; I have all my sessions on my laptop. I am someone that typically has all my VSTs [Virtual Studio Technologies] and plugins also native on my system, and that gives me the power to make music literally anywhere. Whenever creativity hits, you’ve got to answer the phone. I love the creative and technical climate that we live in where we can do things like that. I can make music out on my patio. I can go on vacation, hotel rooms, airplanes, et cetera.

However, that does mean you’re constantly distracted. Something I’ve never been able to do is to create an album [while] giving it space and just working on the music. That was an experiment I tried out this time, where I took off six months from touring heavily and just made music. It was really liberating, and it was nice and therapeutic. I feel like that bolstered me and my resilience, happiness, and mental health to be able to deal with the rest of the things that happened in the year for me. If I was burnt out from touring and then also had to deal with the loss of my friend and all these other things, I don’t know how I would’ve fared.

When you’re at home, not touring and not in these environments that aren’t your environments per se, do you find that distractions come up? If so, how do you deal with them there?

Oh, so many distractions. I’m in front of my TV. My friends are calling me to go and hang out. There’s all these social events, new restaurants. I want to cook at home. [My] new ADHD hobby I’ve picked up is modeling clay. The distractions exist no matter where I am. The one thing that changes when I work from home is that my environment stays the same, so there’s actually something that stays steady. And even though I’m distracted by things—and I’m very distractible—as soon as I want to make music, I have all my tools around me to make that happen, and there’s less of a barrier of entry. I don’t have to find a table or whatever. Even if I’m distracted, I have many surfaces and areas to create, and there’s the comfort of being in my pajamas and at home.

I’ve never looked at music like a 9-to-5. I’m not the kind of musician that can create like that. Many of my peers set hours for themselves. They wake up at 9:00, they have their coffee, and from 10:00 to 6:00, they just work on music. I am incapable of doing that… If I had a regular job, I would’ve been fired so fast.

When you find yourself working on something for 14 hours, how do you make that happen?

It’s kind of a spark, and it becomes this intense focus. I might be sitting on my sofa and have Ableton open; I’m like, “Oh, I have this tiny idea, let me just get that out.” Well, that tiny idea becomes an even better idea. And then, I start getting excited about the song and keep working on it. I cancel my plans for the evening. And fast forward, it went from being working on my sofa at 4:00, to 2:00 in the morning and I’m still in the dark. I haven’t eaten, drank water, or gone to the bathroom. That intense focus becomes all-encompassing, and it’s all because I’m so excited about what I’m working on.

When I regiment myself into [keeping] a schedule, I can make music, but nine out of 10 times, I am not really happy with what I’m making. I have to let that inspiration feed upon itself and get into those areas where I do want to keep working, and those are the songs I’m the most excited about.

I want to ask you about Young Art Records because it’s been active for about a decade now. How has giving other artists a platform fueled your own creativity? What artistic itches has the record label scratched for you?

It boils down to why I make music. I make music because I love music, and it’s been such a part of my life, even when I was a super young age. The label gives me a way to flex that creative muscle that allows me to pick up artists. Having the label allows me to foster innovative and underrepresented voices… I felt like I had no role models as a musician [growing up].

These people have so much talent, and a lot of the artists I’ve signed may have been on major labels or other labels in the past, but they felt underserved. I want Young Art to be this jumping-off point for these artists. It’s not a huge moneymaker for me. It’s not a big business venture for me. It’s something I do to help uplift musicians I really believe in and to exercise that creative muscle, that part of me that really loves finding amazing music.

Can you talk about collaborating with featured artists to get your songs to a state where you think they’re finished?

I like to use vocals as a layer in the song, and that’s what differentiates a song that’s for me versus a song that’s for someone else. I’ll also produce songs for other artists, but the highlight is really them. In the context of my music, what I want to create is an amazing song, not just an amazing vocal performance. There’s a lot of vocal production that goes into it. Any time I’ve worked with the featured artists, their topline isn’t just on it—I mix them into the production of the track. Their vocals are now a part of the track. [I] create this whole composition that is not just a typical pop song, even if it has elements of that. If you take any of my songs and put them on radio, they might not work because it’s not exactly the correct formula…

In terms of knowing when a song is done, I have a very good sense of completion when I write any song. When I get vocals from an artist, after I have those vocals in hand, that’s when a lot of the magic starts. That’s when I start cutting up the vocals, processing them, changing a little bit of the production, or rearranging the sequence.

At the end of these conversations, I always like to say, if there’s anything more you want to say about creativity or your process, go for it.

Many times, there is a pressure to be a certain way or to stick to a certain thing, especially if you’re an artist that’s known for a certain motif. I believe you should follow your gut. When I started off, people thought my music was really weird. And now, my music has become more conventional because what was left-of-center has now become center… It’s good to be weird and lean into your weirdness, because you’re going to be the one that shapes the landscape of music in the future.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Max Freedman.

This album is fraught with a lot of complicated feelings. At the beginning, I went in with so much creative energy and created space for it. I paused my touring, which I’ve never done before, just to finish this album. Once I was in the home stretch, my best friend was diagnosed with cancer, and the album did mean something different. It’s meant something different at different phases of my life over the last year. I came into this album bright-eyed, and then my friend was sick. Upon her diagnosis, I was like, “I am going to drive her to her chemo appointments, play her the album as it’s being made, get her feedback and see what she thinks—use it as a moment to keep her happy and keep the mood light.”

Fast forward maybe just a couple months: her condition changed, her prognosis changed, and her cancer—which was already very aggressive—metastasized. I was notified by my friend’s doctors that she would not have very much time left. This was right when my album was going to come out, maybe two weeks before. We had already announced this massive tour. It was 30 dates, give or take, in the continental U.S. I had to cancel all of that and postpone the album. At that point, the album went from being this new exploration into music, to something I used as comfort to keep my friend in good spirits, to this very important thing I had to push to the side to do something even more important that I wouldn’t be able to ever do again. And that was to take care of my friend and shepherd her into the next life.

There are so many parts of me that didn’t want to see this through… But now this album has become a therapeutic process in my own grieving, and it is triggering, in a way, to constantly talk about my friend dying. Every time I have these conversations, I’m actively very sad. But it’s important. It’s helping me move forward. It’s forcing me not to be stagnant in the sadness I was existing in and still exist in. Life goes forward, and music goes forward, and my music is pulling me and encouraging me to look forward.

I’m sorry for your loss—this is an awful thing to happen. I’m sure the decision to postpone the album’s release was not something you had to think about much, but were there any doubts about how it would impact your career?

Professionally, postponing this album and this tour could [have been] very devastating, because I’d already taken time off from touring. A lot of relevance in the music scene is maintained through active touring, and I would be pushing off all of this for even longer, and in the meantime, everyone could just forget about me. That’s a common thing that musicians have to deal with. If you’re not out in the ether, you’ll disappear into it.

I was concerned, of course, about the repercussions of this decision, but careers come and go. If anything, I could figure out a new job, but I will never get my friend back. It was either: I might lose my job, or my friend is going to die, and she’ll not have me next to her. I chose the latter and chose to take care of my friend so that in her last days she could be surrounded by the people she loved the most, and that was worth everything. To shepherd her on that last journey was really hard. I don’t regret it at all.

[Eternal Reverie] is a testament that it’s okay to put things on pause, even if you think it’s really scary. When you make the right decisions, things will still work out… Life throws a lot of curveballs at you. One of the beautiful things about being human is the ability to somehow pick yourself up and move forward despite all things.

This isn’t a decision anybody should have to make—“Do I go and tend to my friend who’s dying?”—because the answer, on one hand, is always yes. But on the other hand, we live in a society where there is also career to consider.

I feel like, maybe, in certain kinds of more traditional working jobs, there could be a way to be like, “Hey, I need to take a leave of absence,” and you know your job will be like, “Okay, we’ll give you this time. You’ll come back afterward.” The music industry is not like that. One wrong move and you don’t really have a job tomorrow. But music is something I love and I do because I love it, and my friend is someone I love. If I just prioritize love on top of everything, things will work out as they should.

It’s tough. My friend was young, and you don’t expect to lose your friend so soon and so tragically. It’s sobering, and it just shows you how finite life is—to live each day graciously, and to remember that tomorrow’s never guaranteed, so we want to make the decisions that bring us joy as often as possible.

Earlier, you mentioned that when you first were working on Eternal Reverie, you paused your tour to work on it. Are you usually writing songs while you’re on tour? If so, what does that look like for you?

Typically, I’m always working on music while I’m traveling. And it’s so feasible. I have Ableton on my laptop; I have all my sessions on my laptop. I am someone that typically has all my VSTs [Virtual Studio Technologies] and plugins also native on my system, and that gives me the power to make music literally anywhere. Whenever creativity hits, you’ve got to answer the phone. I love the creative and technical climate that we live in where we can do things like that. I can make music out on my patio. I can go on vacation, hotel rooms, airplanes, et cetera.

However, that does mean you’re constantly distracted. Something I’ve never been able to do is to create an album [while] giving it space and just working on the music. That was an experiment I tried out this time, where I took off six months from touring heavily and just made music. It was really liberating, and it was nice and therapeutic. I feel like that bolstered me and my resilience, happiness, and mental health to be able to deal with the rest of the things that happened in the year for me. If I was burnt out from touring and then also had to deal with the loss of my friend and all these other things, I don’t know how I would’ve fared.

When you’re at home, not touring and not in these environments that aren’t your environments per se, do you find that distractions come up? If so, how do you deal with them there?

Oh, so many distractions. I’m in front of my TV. My friends are calling me to go and hang out. There’s all these social events, new restaurants. I want to cook at home. [My] new ADHD hobby I’ve picked up is modeling clay. The distractions exist no matter where I am. The one thing that changes when I work from home is that my environment stays the same, so there’s actually something that stays steady. And even though I’m distracted by things—and I’m very distractible—as soon as I want to make music, I have all my tools around me to make that happen, and there’s less of a barrier of entry. I don’t have to find a table or whatever. Even if I’m distracted, I have many surfaces and areas to create, and there’s the comfort of being in my pajamas and at home.

I’ve never looked at music like a 9-to-5. I’m not the kind of musician that can create like that. Many of my peers set hours for themselves. They wake up at 9:00, they have their coffee, and from 10:00 to 6:00, they just work on music. I am incapable of doing that… If I had a regular job, I would’ve been fired so fast.

When you find yourself working on something for 14 hours, how do you make that happen?

It’s kind of a spark, and it becomes this intense focus. I might be sitting on my sofa and have Ableton open; I’m like, “Oh, I have this tiny idea, let me just get that out.” Well, that tiny idea becomes an even better idea. And then, I start getting excited about the song and keep working on it. I cancel my plans for the evening. And fast forward, it went from being working on my sofa at 4:00, to 2:00 in the morning and I’m still in the dark. I haven’t eaten, drank water, or gone to the bathroom. That intense focus becomes all-encompassing, and it’s all because I’m so excited about what I’m working on.

When I regiment myself into [keeping] a schedule, I can make music, but nine out of 10 times, I am not really happy with what I’m making. I have to let that inspiration feed upon itself and get into those areas where I do want to keep working, and those are the songs I’m the most excited about.

I want to ask you about Young Art Records because it’s been active for about a decade now. How has giving other artists a platform fueled your own creativity? What artistic itches has the record label scratched for you?

It boils down to why I make music. I make music because I love music, and it’s been such a part of my life, even when I was a super young age. The label gives me a way to flex that creative muscle that allows me to pick up artists. Having the label allows me to foster innovative and underrepresented voices… I felt like I had no role models as a musician [growing up].

These people have so much talent, and a lot of the artists I’ve signed may have been on major labels or other labels in the past, but they felt underserved. I want Young Art to be this jumping-off point for these artists. It’s not a huge moneymaker for me. It’s not a big business venture for me. It’s something I do to help uplift musicians I really believe in and to exercise that creative muscle, that part of me that really loves finding amazing music.

Can you talk about collaborating with featured artists to get your songs to a state where you think they’re finished?

I like to use vocals as a layer in the song, and that’s what differentiates a song that’s for me versus a song that’s for someone else. I’ll also produce songs for other artists, but the highlight is really them. In the context of my music, what I want to create is an amazing song, not just an amazing vocal performance. There’s a lot of vocal production that goes into it. Any time I’ve worked with the featured artists, their topline isn’t just on it—I mix them into the production of the track. Their vocals are now a part of the track. [I] create this whole composition that is not just a typical pop song, even if it has elements of that. If you take any of my songs and put them on radio, they might not work because it’s not exactly the correct formula…

In terms of knowing when a song is done, I have a very good sense of completion when I write any song. When I get vocals from an artist, after I have those vocals in hand, that’s when a lot of the magic starts. That’s when I start cutting up the vocals, processing them, changing a little bit of the production, or rearranging the sequence.

At the end of these conversations, I always like to say, if there’s anything more you want to say about creativity or your process, go for it.

Many times, there is a pressure to be a certain way or to stick to a certain thing, especially if you’re an artist that’s known for a certain motif. I believe you should follow your gut. When I started off, people thought my music was really weird. And now, my music has become more conventional because what was left-of-center has now become center… It’s good to be weird and lean into your weirdness, because you’re going to be the one that shapes the landscape of music in the future.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Max Freedman.

The warning is the linchpin of a bill — HB25-1277 — that narrowly passed the state House on April 2 and is scheduled to be heard in the Senate’s Transportation & Energy Committee this week. Its Democratic sponsors say the bill will raise awareness among consumers that combusting gas in their vehicles creates pollutants that harm their health and trap heat in the atmosphere, leading to more intense and extreme weather, wildfires and drought.

The groundbreaking measure would require retailers to place warning labels printed in black ink on a white background in English and Spanish in no smaller than 16-point type on fuel pumps and “in a conspicuous location” near displays offering petroleum-based goods for sale. 

Proponents compare the stickers to warnings labels on cigarettes that scientific evidence found motivated consumers to reconsider the health impacts of smoking.

The labeling bill is backed by environmental groups, including 350 Colorado and the Sierra Club, and opposed by gas stations, chambers of commerce and energy trade associations. About 136 lobbyist registrations were filed with the secretary of state in the position of support, opposition, or monitoring — a benchmark of the measure’s divisiveness.

“The bill, as you’ve heard, seeks to drive systemic change and to help us meet our greenhouse gas emission goals,” state Rep. Junie Joseph (D-Boulder), a sponsor, testified at a House Energy & Environment Committee hearing on March 6. “Colorado is actively working to reduce emissions to comply with the Clean Air Act and state climate targets.”

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Renewables surged in 2024 — but so did fossil fuels

Matt Simon

Colorado is on track to meet greenhouse gas emissions reductions of 26 percent by 2025 and 50 percent by 2030, over 2005 levels — albeit a year late for each period mandated under state law, according to a November report compiled by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and the Colorado Energy Office.

Yet the state is woefully behind in its compliance with federal air quality standards. Emissions from energy industry operations and gas-powered vehicles are the main drivers of the nine-county metropolitan Denver region’s failure to clean up its air over the last two decades. The state’s largest cities rank among the 25 worst in the nation for lung-damaging ozone pollution.

Several days before the labeling bill passed the House, the state’s health department said it planned to ask the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to downgrade its air quality for the second time in a year. The request is intended to give regulators more time to draw up a plan to reduce pollutants that cause a toxic haze that blurs the Rocky Mountains from May to September.

Colorado repeatedly touts its “nation-leading” greenhouse gas emissions reduction laws targeting oil and gas production, as well as requirements that utilities transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

Yet to make long-term progress toward a state mandate to cut emissions 100 percent by 2050, officials need residents to drive less and carpool and take public transit more. The bill’s sponsors cited a first-in-the-nation labeling law in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, as proof such initiatives work.

The Cambridge City Council enacted its greenhouse gas label law in 2020. City inspectors affix about 116 bright yellow stickers that read: “Warning. Burning Gasoline, Diesel and Ethanol has major consequences on human health and on the environment including contributing to climate change” in pump bays at 19 gas stations annually, along with inspection stickers, Jeremy Warnick, a city spokesman, wrote in an email.

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Early research into the impacts of Cambridge’s labeling law suggest that peer pressure that results from one person seeing a label on a gas pump and telling friends about it at a party can indeed motivate people to reconsider their transportation choices. A measure instituted in Sweden in 2021 that requires labels depicting each fuel grade’s impact on the climate to be installed on gas pumps produced similar results.

The warning stickers communicate to people as they’re pumping gas that others in their community acknowledge petroleum products create emissions that are warming the planet, said Gregg Sparkman, an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Boston College.

Sparkman’s research found Americans function in a state of “pluralistic ignorance,” essentially “walking around thinking others don’t care about climate change.” 

A study he co-authored in Nature in 2022 found that most Americans “underestimate the prevalence of support for climate change mitigation policies.” While 66 percent to 80 percent of people approve of such measures, Americans estimate the prevalence to be between 37 percent and 43 percent, on average, data showed. Warning labels can cut through this apathy, he said.  

“These signs chip away at the mirage — they become one of hopefully many signals that an increasing number of Americans regard this as an emergency that requires urgent action out of government, citizens and everybody,” he said.       

In Colorado, gas station owners, as well as representatives of retail trade organizations and the American Petroleum Institute, among others, testified against the labeling bill at the three-hour March 6 House energy committee hearing, calling the legislation an “unfunded mandate” that would “shame consumers” and target retailers with “exorbitant fines.” Some warned it would make gas prices rise.

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The law would require convenience stores to design, buy and affix the labels and to keep them in good condition. If a consumer reported a defaced decal to the state Attorney General’s Office, a store owner could face a $20,000 penalty per violation — standard for violations under the Consumer Protection Act. An amendment added on the House floor would provide retailers with 45 days to fix a problem with a label.  

“The gas pump itself is already cluttered with words, numbers, prices, colors, buttons and payment mechanisms,” Angie Howes, a lobbyist representing Kum & Go, which owns Maverik convenience stores, testified at the committee hearing. “The message will likely be lost in the noise and we question the impact of such a label toward the proponents’ goals.”

Republican and Democratic committee members alike expressed concern about the fines, asking bill sponsors to consider reducing them.

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, or CDPHE, also opposed the measure, citing the state’s efforts to make it easier and cheaper for Coloradoans to reduce their energy use by taking advantage of electric vehicle and heat pump subsidies, among other voluntary measures.

Colorado is already first in the nation in market share of new EVs, Lindsay Ellis, the agency’s director of legislative affairs, testified.

“This bill presupposes that awareness alone is an effective strategy for changing behavior and does so at the liability and expense of small businesses like gas stations,” she said. “We should continue to focus on solutions with measurable emissions reductions to improve air quality.”

Gov. Jared Polis also appears dubious of the measure’s ability to effect long-term change. When contacted by Capital & Main for comment, spokesperson Eric Maruyama cited legislative and administrative strategies that have “cut hundreds of millions of metric tons of cumulative greenhouse gas emissions since 2010.”

“Like CDPHE, Governor Polis is committed to protecting Colorado’s clean air and reducing pollution through proven strategies that are good for the environment, good for consumers, and that empower Colorado businesses and individuals to take meaningful action that improves public health,” Maruyama wrote in an email. “Governor Polis is skeptical of labeling requirements and will review any legislation that reaches his desk.”

Doctors and scientists who testified at the House energy committee hearing on March 6 disagreed.

“I take care of children living in some of the most polluted zip codes in the country, and I can tell you firsthand that burning fossil fuels is making them sick,” Dr. Clare Burchenal, a Denver pediatrician, told the committee. 

“Warning labels can connect the abstract threat of a climate emergency with fossil fuel use in the here and now — my patients and their families have a right to know how the products they’re using are impacting their health.”

Copyright 2025 Capital & Main

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In Colorado, gas for cars could soon come with a warning label on Apr 19, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jennifer Oldham, Capital and Main.

The London museum’s Silk Roads exhibition opened in late September and ran until last Sunday.

The labels were reviewed in January and updated from “Tibet or Xizang Autonomous Region, China” to “Tibet Autonomous Region, China,” a British Museum spokesperson said in an email to Radio Free Asia on Tuesday. The email did not state when the labels were changed.

Tibetan activists who visited the museum in February confirmed that the wording had indeed been changed.

The term “Xizang” was first used in official Chinese government diplomatic documents in 2023 after Chinese government-backed scholars said would help promote China’s legitimate occupation and rule of Tibet.

Use of the term has generated an uproar among Tibetans living outside the country, who see it as another example of Beijing’s attempts to assimilate Tibetans into Chinese culture and erase Tibetan identity.

Activists reject museum’s initial response

Tibetan groups wrote to the British Museum first on Nov. 25 and again on Dec. 18 citing their concerns over the use of “Xizang.”

One of the objects cited by the Tibetan groups –- which are led by the Global Alliance for Tibet and Persecuted Minorities and the Tibetan Community in Britain –- was a silver vase that was gifted by the 7th-century Tibetan Empire to neighboring Tang China.

(Hollie Adams/Reuters)

The museum’s response in December defended its use of the term Xizang, saying that the labels reflected “the contemporary region.”

Tibetan activists rejected that explanation, saying it ignored the political implications of promoting terminology perpetuated by the Chinese Communist Party.

The Silk Roads exhibition explored the history of the ancient trade route during the key period from 500 to 1000. It featured over 300 objects from the museum’s own collection and those loaned from at least 29 other institutions.

The British Museum will consult with experts on Tibetan history and culture in any future Tibet-related exhibitions, the museum spokesperson said in the email to RFA.

“It has not, nor was it the intention, to replace ‘Tibet’ with the Chinese term ‘Xizang,’” the spokesperson said.

Last year, the French museum Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac also faced criticism for using the term “Xizang” in its exhibit. In October, following weeks of protests and petitions from Tibetans, the museum announced that it would reverse the change in its labeling.

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The museum’s change was “a step forward,” but still short of expectations, said Tsering Passang, founder and chairman of the Global Alliance for Tibet and Persecuted Minorities.

“Beijing’s promoted term ‘Xizang’ should never have been there in the first place,” he told RFA. “We will continue to investigate this further.”

He added that Tibetans in the U.K. have reported a trend in which so-called “Tibetan cultural performances” at universities have been labeled as “South West China.”

Tibetan organizations are preparing to submit a formal complaint about the British Museum exhibit to the Information Commissioner’s Office, an independent governmental body in the U.K., Passang said.

The complaint aims to investigate who could be promoting the use of alternate terms for Tibet and whether they have connections to the Chinese government, he said.

Translated by Khando Yangzom. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

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

It’s sort of like a classic liberal arts degree that you don’t have a real plan for. What I like about art history, even self-taught and my own personal education beyond college, is that it grounds you. There’s an anti-history thing happening right now, where I feel like it’s like let’s throw out the old guard. A lot of it’s with good reason, I get why. The idea of institution, higher education, the idea of cis white male artists being this pedigree. I like that things are being upended. I like seeing how culture moves back and forth.

It’s more about human nature and that a lot of these things that we think are new are not actually new. We think we’re at the precipice of the most dynamic time because there’s more information, more science, more money. People have been dealing with these fears for thousands of years, about government, about taste, and about how to present yourself. There’s so much available now to learn, especially free. It’s great to have a study, whatever that is, that grounds you. It’s a nerve wracking time if you have no basis in history.

People have been stressed about art and money and expression for a long, long time. I think that’s comforting in a weird way. TV was the devil, and maybe still is, but everyone was like, “Oh, the TV viewing public, everyone’s going to be so stupid.” Then that was the internet and then now. You have to remember that we’re part of a bigger continuum. It helps you from getting overwhelmed.

You described the Detroit scene that Ghostly was born out of as ‘serious.’ What stands out?

I never exactly thought of it in that frame. I would maybe have used the word sincere at the time. Even friends of mine and I had a fake manifesto about sincerity, and we were in college. It seems extremely precious now, but the idea was more like, to use your word, “Let’s take it seriously and apply our shared efforts.” Especially now we’re all kind of afraid to be parodies of ourselves and we’re afraid to be overzealous. It’s a weird flip-flop, but there’s an intention that a lot of artists have that I admire.

It doesn’t mean being self-serious. Taking your work seriously is important, even if it’s early. Valuing it even though people around you may not. You have to lean into what you do for someone else to lean into it. That’s a hard line to hit. Wanting to be taken seriously by Detroit, which was and is a very intentional place, people will judge if you don’t come correct which I like about it, but also be okay being yourself. It’s that dance between awareness and self-awareness, intention and sincerity.

It’s interesting how the size of a city can impact this.

That’s why you incubate your own scene too. There’s a macro scene of the city that comes before you, the history of the city, especially in New York and LA. Then there’s the people you communicate with daily that you are doing gigs with. We used to have club nights in Ann Arbor and Detroit. Every week it was a little bit of exercise. I probably didn’t think of it that way, but you’d bring the new MP3 that you just exported, play it, road test it. Obviously if it sucks, you’re not failing, but you’re iterating.

I like the idea of keeping yourself inside of a group of people that you trust that also want it as bad as you do. Then taking that to the stage. You get your butt kicked a lot. A lot of my memories with the label is overreaching too hard on certain projects or being over our heads on certain things where we thought we were ready for something we weren’t. It forces you to reeducate and not be afraid. It is a cliché, but failure really is part of the deal.

Were there non-American labels you saw as templates?

For sure. Historically there’s the DNA labels of indie music culture, Rough Trade, Factory Records and 4AD, the seventies, eighties British thing. In Detroit there were a lot of local labels, still are, that are self-owned, self-financed and self-distributed. It made it seem accessible, back to the DIY aspect of it. Both were templates. One was more majestic or mystical to me. That you could have a band as weird as Joy Division and they could in some form change the world, but then locally have records that were made in a basement, travel the world and change the world too, like a Jeff Mills or an Underground Resistance. They’re lessons in presentation. How do you tell a story? Especially without video, without internet, how do you get a message across? I love the theatrics and the presentation of independent labels as a template. How do you tell a story without tons of capital or access to major marketing? Great record labels have been doing that for decades.

When did you first notice America embracing electronic music? What change did it bring?

It’s not quite as cyclical anymore. I think about the EDM thing a lot, how it was tricky. At the time people were like, “Well, electronic music is blowing up.” Maybe it’s because I’m not the best A&R person, but it’s okay to know that you don’t have to be part of every wave, to use another surfing metaphor. It doesn’t mean it’s bad, it’s just like, “Well, that’s a wave someone else is taking and hopefully it will lift us too.” Some good things came out of that era. We didn’t have a direct line to it, but I do think it led to rising tides raising all boats. Sometimes we forget that not every audience is our audience, and that’s okay. We’re not failing because we’re not reaching every single person who might like electronic music.

What are some of the larger music tech shifts you’ve weathered?

It’s harder as you get older because your risk tolerance changes. Music is still driven by young people, so you want to adhere to that. As an Ann Arbor person, I accept that I’m not going to like everything and nor should I. You bring other people in who have a better sense of it. My attitude has always been, in all of these micro movements, there’s usually something that’s being presented that will benefit our philosophy and the type of artists that we work with.

We came in at the same time as piracy and Napster, Limewire, a big part of how music got to people in a CD era. That benefited a lot of artists, it also created a sense of the idea of taste sharing. That’s why I do my newsletter. The fun of that and the fun of MySpace was, I could look into your crate, so to speak, and see what you’re into. That’s a human instinct that isn’t going to go away. Streaming obviously has detractors, but you’re like, “Okay, how do I reach as many people as possible?” Social media is a double-edged sword, but these are all tools.

You try to have a critical eye of what’s not working. I believe in misusing platforms. Don’t just try to do what the most successful person does, do it the way that’s a little wonky and people will still understand what you’re doing. Our job as creative people is to make the most of the tools that are available and that includes misusing them.

What’s your work-life balance like?

I admire people who have a good demarcation of personal and professional. Integrating fun or habit into your practice. I’m getting better, but it’s hard because it still is a “nine to five” world you have to deal with. You have to make sure people are available, try to make the most of each other’s time. Writing the newsletter is my best effort at something consistent, more for the sense of shipping something that has no business objective. It’s just pleasure, connection and community. You have to schedule everything from my experience. I’m still learning how to do that.

You’ve maintained the newsletter for a few years now, right?

Just about three. It’s almost like having a pen pal. The fact that it’s routine and formalized makes it easy to explain what it is. Whenever people are like, “I want to start a newsletter” I’m like, “What’s the thing you consistently want to do?” Some people can rip a blog post once a week and it’s hot and fresh, but I don’t want to be afraid I’m not going to have an idea or I have to come up with a bad one just to ship. It’s a form of giving flowers and showing appreciation.

What are some of the most important conversations you have with up and coming artists?

We all think we speak the same language and ‘success’ is a weird word because it implies validation financially or people wise. Maybe satisfaction is a better word. It’s like satisfaction is such a big part of creative work, whether you’re releasing it, shepherding it or editing it. Some people just like to be part of the process and help. We’re helping someone see themselves. Great managers do this. Asking what actually is success? Each record, project, book, is like building a statue. I think about mountaineering, you don’t just go up. It’s not a linear thing. It’s important to ask, what do you want out of this? That doesn’t mean the whole artistic move that you’re making. It means this project, what is this? Is it “I want to go on tour”? Okay, let’s put everything towards that energy. I want to stream a lot, I want to license music. People are afraid of setting goals, myself included, because you’re afraid of not getting them, but if you don’t, you’ll end up being like, was that worth my time? That’s the pain of not identifying what the goal is as a group or as an individual.

I’m into the idea of artistic practice. How do you get inspiration? How do you ship, how do you communicate, how do you share? Developing what you see as a practice that’s sustainable. I am very much in favor of when artists can or want to have day jobs. I think it’s a great thing. Put yourself in a position to be able to continue to make work as your best bet to succeed. Creativity is this daring-ness. It’s a lot more about consistency and attentiveness than doing something wild. It’s iteration versus inspiration. It’s a little bit of both.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Jeffrey Silverstein.

In his September 4 speech, Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Stanekzai attacked the independent outlet as an “enemy” for reporting that aid relief sent to the flooded northern province of Baghlan had been allegedly misused. This latest criticism follows the Taliban’s ban in May on journalists and experts from cooperating with Afghanistan International and on people providing facilities for broadcasting the channel in public.

Separately, on September 4, Ministry of Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice officials met with Afghan media executives in the capital Kabul and gave them verbal orders to replace Persian words — which they described as “Iranian” — with the Pashto equivalent in their reporting.

Persian, also known as Farsi, is the most widely spoken language in Afghanistan and in neighboring Iran. But the Taliban mainly speak Pashto and they have removed Persian words from signboards for public institutions and spoken out against the teaching of Persian in universities since their return to power in 2021.

The officials also ordered the journalists to respect Taliban leader Hibatullah Akhundzada.

“The Taliban must immediately halt their campaign of intimidation against Afghanistan International and lift their restrictions on Persian-language reporting,” said CPJ Asia Program Coordinator Beh Lih Yi. “The Taliban’s recent vice and virtue law has already emboldened their notorious morality police to further restrict the media, threatening to annihilate press freedom gains made during the two previous decades of democratic rule in Afghanistan.”

CPJ’s text messages to Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid requesting comment went unanswered.

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

Photograph Source: U.S. Army – Public Domain

“It is time to require a surgeon general’s warning label on social media platforms,” Vivek Murthy writes in a New York Times op-ed, “stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents.”

An incredibly dumb idea, but it enjoys a certain amount of public attention because Vivek Murthy’s day job is with the federal government  as (checks notes) surgeon general.

If Murthy wants a “warning label” on something, why not just order it instead of whining about it in the Times? Two reasons:

The first is that he can’t just order it. The office of surgeon general doesn’t come with a label maker. He only gets one if Congress gives him one.

The other is that his op-ed isn’t about “protecting children” or “the public health.” It’s about grandstanding on a current moral panic so as to associate the name “Vivek Murthy,” in the public consciousness, with “protecting children” and “the public health.”

As his second surgeon general stint likely nears its end, Murthy’s obviously trying to burnish his “public intellectual” credentials for a more successful return to the not-so-private sector. Instead of reprising his previous four years in the TV talking head / non-fiction book authorship (Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World) wilderness between the Obama and Biden administrations, he’s presumably hoping for a steadier gig with a larger paycheck — at MSNBC, perhaps, or CNN.

“Protecting children” and “the public health” are to political demagoguery as Gallagher’s tricycle or Steve Martin’s “arrow through the head” are to stand-up comedy.

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you one looks at it, “warning labels” do little to discourage, and may even encourage, the behaviors they “warn” about.

I started smoking as a teen, a couple of decades after Congress let the surgeon general Luther Terry borrow its label maker for use on cigarettes in 1964. The next person I meet who’s my age and claims to have never taken up smoking because of those warning labels will be the first. Ineffectual.

As for encouragement, anyone paying attention knows that kids actively seek out music, movies, etc. with “mature content” warning labels. Those labels essentially serve as “this is the good stuff” advertising for the products they appear on.

The only valuable prospective use for “warning labels” on social media platforms is as an “I made that happen” item on Murthy’s resume. Kids looking for an “I’m edgy” thrill would treat the “warning labels” as endorsements; parents inclined to panic over their kids’ use of TikTok or Instagram would do so with or without Murthy’s assistance.

In the meantime, there’s that pesky constitutional prohibition on compelled speech. Congress shouldn’t ignore it, but probably will.

The post All Vivek Murthy Wants for Christmas is a Label Maker appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Thomas Knapp.

During a speech at the Supreme People’s Assembly Monday,  Kim articulated the need to revise the North Korean constitution, proposing the idea to include provisions for the “occupation, subjugation, and annexation” of South Korea into North Korea in the event of a conflict on the Korean peninsula. 

“I believe it is right to revise the relevant articles that we will intensify our education and enlightenment efforts to firmly regard the Republic of Korea as the primary and immutable enemy,” Kim said, referring to South Korea’s formal name, as cited by the North’s state-run daily Rodong Sinmun Tuesday.

“Since we have defined the Republic of Korea as a completely separate and hostile nation, abandoning the established notion of it being a partner in reconciliation and reunification, it’s necessary to establish legal measures to precisely define the sovereign territory of our Republic,” Kim said, referring to the North, adding that he no longer sees South Koreans as the same ethnic people.

Hours later, South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol dismissed Kim’s speech, saying that Seoul would “punish” the North if it continues provocations. In a cabinet meeting convened Tuesday, Yoon said that North Korea’s threats are no longer effective, indicating his hardline stance against Pyongyang’s “intimidation.” 

The trade of barbs came as North Korea ramped up tensions on the Korean peninsula over the weekend, firing a hypersonic intermediate-range, solid fuelled, ballistic missile off its eastern coast Sunday.

Pyongyang had already announced that it had developed a new high-output solid fuel engine for its new IRBM in November. The North’s IRBM, including its Musudan missiles, can reach Guam, where United States strategic assets, including B-52 strategic bombers, are located.

North Korea has also been raising tensions in the Yellow Sea, with it firing some 200 artillery shells into waters off its western coast earlier this month at the inter-Korean de facto maritime border of the Northern Limit Line, or NLL. The area is near South Korea’s Baengnyeong and Yeonpyeong islands.

In the latest speech, Kim continued issuing threats in the Yellow Sea and thereby over the South Korea-controlled islands.

“Since our nation’s southern border is clearly defined, we cannot accept any other boundaries, including the Northern Limit Line, as lawful,” Kim said. “If the Republic of Korea encroaches on our territory, airspace, or territorial waters by even 0.001 mm, it will be regarded as an act of war provocation.”

The NLL was established by United Nations Command in 1953 following the Korean Armistice Agreement. North Korea initially did not dispute the decision, but nor did it officially recognize the border. 

Since September 1999, North Korea has claimed a more southerly  “West Sea Military Demarcation Line,” which Pyongyang claims is based on international law delimitation decisions​, and thus the area has been a frequent flashpoint for naval skirmishes between the two Koreas.

On Nov. 23, 2010, for instance, the North shelled Yeonpyeong island, killing four South Korean nationals and injuring 19, while causing severe damage to the entire island. 

Wang Son-taek, director of the Global Policy Center at Seoul-based Han Pyeong Peace Institute, saw Kim’s speech as an expression of dissatisfaction with Seoul’s North Korea policy.

“It appears to be a violent and aggressive complaint about North Korea’s South Korea policy not progressing as desired,” Wang said. “Specifically, North Korea wants South Korea to accept a reunification under the federal system where both governments exist under the banner of ‘one nation but two systems,’ to not label North Korea as the main enemy, and to refrain from attempts of reunification by absorption.”

Failing this, the speech seems to imply an intention to forcefully bring South Korea in line with North Korea’s wishes, Wang added.

“Paradoxically, the speech implies that if South Korea complies with these demands, dialogue and the possibility of restoring the fraternity in inter-Korean relations could still take place. This potential reconciliation, however, is being communicated in a notably harsh manner.”

Last week, North Korea removed the concept of “one people” shared with South Korea from its media outlets, redefining South Korea as a separate entity instead of “the same Koreans.” This change in stance was followed by a complete shutdown of these media outlets shortly thereafter.

Edited by Taejun Kang and Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Lee Jeong-Ho for RFA.

Since October 7, the day the escalation in Israel/Palestine began (FAIR.org, 10/13/23), American media outlets have persistently described the fighting as an “Israel-Hamas war.” From October 7 through midday on December 1, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post have combined to run 565 pieces that use the phrase “Israel-Hamas war.”

This paradigm has been a dominant way of covering the violence, even though Israel has been clear from the start that its assault has not been narrowly aimed at Hamas. At the outset of the Israeli onslaught, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (Times of Israel, 10/9/23) said: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.” Oxfam later said that such restrictions on Palestinians’ ability to eat—which left 2.2 million people “in urgent need of food”—mean that Israel is deploying a policy wherein “starvation is being used as a weapon of war against Gaza civilians.”

A day later, Israeli military spokesperson Adm. Daniel Hagari (Guardian, 10/10/23) said that “hundreds of tons of bombs” had already been dropped on the Gaza Strip, and admitted that “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”

The New York Times‘ label (12/2/23) encourages readers to view Israel’s attacks on a population as really being aimed at a distinct group.

The indiscriminate nature of Israel’s assault is clear. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported on November 24 that “over 1.7 million people in Gaza, or nearly 80% of the population, are estimated to be internally displaced.” On November 25, the Swiss-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor reported that Israel had killed 20,031 Palestinians in Gaza, 18,460 of whom (or 92%) were civilians, since October 7.

Thus, while Israel has openly acknowledged that it is carrying out indiscriminate violence against Palestinians, US media outlets do Israel the favor of presenting its campaign as if it were only aimed at combatants. “Israel-Gaza war” comes closer to capturing the reality that Israel’s offensive is effectively against everyone living in Gaza. Yet “Israel-Gaza war” appears in 265 pieces in the three papers, exactly 300 fewer than the obfuscatory “Israel-Hamas war.”

Consider also the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor finding that Israel has slaughtered 8,176 children. If 41% of all the Palestinians Israel has killed in the first seven weeks of its rampage have been children, and 8% have been combatants, then it is less an “Israel-Hamas war” than an Israeli war on Palestinian children.

Characterizing what has happened since October 7 as an “Israel-Hamas war” fails to adequately capture the scope and the character of Israel’s violence. Describing the bloodbath in Palestine this way obscures that grave violence is being visited upon virtually all Palestinians, whatever their political allegiances and whatever their relation to the fighting.

Cognitive dissonance

Contrary to the implication of NBC‘s headline (12/2/23), the divide in Hollywood is not between supporters of Israel and Hamas, but over the issue of Palestinian human rights.

Corporate media have often stuck to the “Israel-Hamas war” approach even when the information the outlets are reporting shows how inadequate it is to conceive of Israel’s attacks in that way. For instance, the New York Times (10/20/23) ran a story about Israel ordering 1.2 million Gaza residents to evacuate their homes, and still classified the evacuation as part of the “Israel-Hamas war.” The Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ armed wing, is estimated to have 30,000–40,000 fighters (Axios, 10/21/23).

The Wall Street Journal published a short piece (11/6/23) that noted:

The United Nations said that the Israel-Hamas war has killed the highest number of UN workers in any single conflict. The UN said that over 88 workers in its Relief and Works Agency [UNRWA], the largest humanitarian organization in the Gaza Strip, have been killed since October 7.

But UNRWA did not itself use the “Israel-Hamas war” narrative in the report to which the Journal referred, instead opting for “escalation in the Gaza Strip.” Indeed, Israel killing UN workers at a rate of almost three each day would seem to fall outside the bounds of an “Israel-Hamas war,” but that’s how the paper categorizes the violence. (“Israel’s war on the UN” falls well outside the bounds of the ideologically permissible in the corporate media.)

A Washington Post article (11/7/23) titled “Israel’s War in Gaza and the Specter of ‘Genocide'” quoted several experts and political leaders making a credible case that, in the words of Craig Mokhiber, former director of the United Nations’ New York office on human rights, “the term ‘genocide’ needs to be applied” to what Israel is doing in Gaza.

Nevertheless, the article’s author, Ishaan Tharoor, attributed such statements to “critics of Israel’s offensive against the Islamist group Hamas,” and described the violence as “Israel’s overwhelming campaign against Hamas.” Genocide as defined by the UN requires “the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part.” So saying that Israel’s attacks are directed “against Hamas” twice in an article pointing to authorities on genocide invoking the term with reference to Israel’s actions in Gaza ought to generate cognitive dissonance.

Violence on the West Bank

In the first two weeks of fighting, the BBC (10/22/23) reported, Israel killed 89 Palestinians on the West Bank.

Another problem with classifying the bloodshed of the last seven weeks as an “Israel-Hamas war” is that Israel has also enacted brutal violence and repression on the West Bank, which is governed by  the Palestinian Authority, Hamas’ arch rivals; Hamas is mostly confined to Gaza (Electronic Intifada, 10/28/23).

Between October 7 and November 26, Israeli forces killed 222 Palestinians in the West Bank, and Israel’s government-backed settlers killed eight more. In that period, Israel has also repeatedly carried out airstrikes in the West Bank, hitting such targets as the Balata refugee camp (Reuters, 11/18/23) and a mosque in the Jenin refugee camp (BBC, 10/22/23).

Israel has also arrested hundreds of West Bank Palestinians since October 7 (AP, 11/26/23) and attacked a hospital in Jenin, shooting a paramedic while they were inside an ambulance and using military vehicles to block ambulances from entering hospitals.

It would therefore make more sense to speak of an “Israel-Palestine war” than an “Israel-Hamas war,” but the former has been used in just two articles in my dataset.

What the media presents as a war between Israel and an armed Palestinian resistance group is in reality an Israeli war on Palestinians’ physical survival, on their food and clean water supplies, on their homes, healthcare, schools, children and places of worship—a war, in other words, on the Palestinians as a people.

The post ‘Israel-Hamas War’ Label Obscures Israel’s War on Palestinians appeared first on FAIR.

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

Lawmakers voted to make 45-year-old Hun Manet the country’s new prime minister on Aug. 22. King Norodom Sihamoni swore him in at the Royal Palace shortly afterward.

How much the eldest son of a man who for decades ruled Cambodia – sometimes ruthlessly – would wield power on his own has been much discussed. 

On Thursday, Hun Manet marked his first 100 days with a warning message that sounded a lot like his father, Hun Sen, who first became prime minister in 1985.

“I won’t let people accuse the new government of being incapable of maintaining peace for the people, especially because that peace was difficult to attain with great devotion by our nation,” he said at a groundbreaking ceremony for a dam in Koh Kong province.

It’s better for critics to say he’s an authoritarian leader than for people to think he’s incapable of leading the country, he said. 

Such a perception of weakness could plunge Cambodia back into civil war, he said – a reminder of his father’s efforts in the 1990s to bring the remaining Khmer Rouge holdouts under government control.

Hun Sen, 71, resigned as prime minister in August but retains influence as president of the ruling Cambodian People’s Party. He also recently became president of the Senate. 

At a Nov. 23 news conference, government spokesman Pen Bona noted that peace and order have been maintained following the August power transfer.

David Hutt, a research fellow at the Central European Institute of Asian Studies in Prague and a commentary writer for RFA, said this week that “political instability” doesn’t appear to be a factor under Hun Manet.

“He has shown that his administration won’t be worse than his father’s, which isn’t saying much,” he said. “His power appears secure and there’s no sign of internal displeasure about his succession.” 

‘People are over-indebted’

For years, opposition leaders have criticized the CPP for not addressing government corruption and income inequality.

“The pressing issues are that our people are over-indebted and their properties are subject to being seized as they are unable to generate enough income to repay their debts and interest,” said Son Chhay, the deputy president of the opposition Candlelight Party. 

“Hundreds of thousands of our migrant workers go to work in neighboring countries without proper documentation,” he said. “This is an issue that has caused such difficulties for our citizens. Yet he has failed to do anything about it.”

Shortly after taking office, Hun Manet unveiled a 22-page strategy memo outlining the government’s plans for increasing employment, reducing poverty and promoting good governance. 

The goal is to make Cambodia an upper middle-income country by 2030 and a high-income one by 2050, he said. 

In September, he addressed the U.N. General Assembly in New York, insisting that July’s general election was free and fair and “credible and just,” even though the Candlelight Party wasn’t allowed to compete.

He also appeared to address U.S. claims and satellite imagery that may show that China is building a military base in the port of Sihanoukville.

In October, he traveled to Beijing to attend China’s Belt and Road Initiative conference – his second trip to the Chinese capital in 2023. Earlier this year, he and Hun Sen met with President Xi Jinping during an official visit.

And in November, he presided over the annual Government-Private Sector Forum in Phnom Penh, where he announced initiatives aimed at encouraging more foreign investment in property. He also urged microfinance companies to make it easier for homeowners to refinance delinquent mortgages.

‘Backseat driver’

But last week, a man who criticized the ruling CPP on Facebook over its inability to prevent illegal immigration from Vietnam and drug use was sentenced to three years in prison – evidence that the government’s longtime practice of going after critics will continue.

“No one should be expecting any political reform or opening up democratically,” Hutt said. “What will be interesting to watch is how much of a hostage he will be to the private sector, especially the powerful tycoons.”

Pen Bona told reporters that three months “isn’t a long period” to judge a new prime minister.

He pointed toward plans to achieve universal healthcare for all Cambodians, to provide free technical training to 1.5 million Cambodians from poor backgrounds and to put in place a national authority for settling civil disputes outside of the backlogged court system.

But exiled opposition leader Sam Rainsy wrote in The Diplomat on Wednesday that “it’s useless to look for signs of positive change under a ‘new regime’ when a transfer of power has not in fact taken place.”

“There is no evidence that Hun Manet is capable of governing without his father as a backseat driver,” he said.

On Facebook, he wrote that Hun Manet’s first 100 days shouldn’t be marked as a celebration, but rather as a “mourning.” 

“There are more political prisoners, more threats, and more authoritarian rules,” he wrote.

At the Koh Kong groundbreaking, Hun Manet seemed to publicly respond to those comments. 

“Whatever such mourning is, you hold it alone,” he said. “Millions of our people have just enjoyed celebrating the Water Festival. Are they mourning or celebrating?”

Translated by Sovannarith Keo. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

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

At a closed-door hearing on September 15, the Belarusian Supreme Court labeled the Belarusian Investigative Center (BIC), an independent Czech Republic-based investigative media outlet, as “extremist” at the request of the general prosecutor’s office, according to a statement by the office, a report by the Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ), an advocacy and trade group operating from exile, a Telegram post by BIC, and Alesia Rudovich, the center’s grant manager, who spoke to CPJ via email.

In late 2022, authorities had previously labeled BIC’s content and logo as “extremist,” according to media reports and a list of materials deemed extremists by the authorities, which Rudovich shared with CPJ.

“By labeling the Belarusian Investigative Center as ‘extremist,’ the Belarusian authorities are once again seeking to intimidate and obstruct the work of an independent outlet known for its sharp investigations into alleged corruption in the country,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Belarusian authorities should immediately repeal the country’s shameful extremism legislation instead of routinely using it against independent media and members of the press.”

Anyone who distributes extremist materials can be held for up to 15 days, according to the Belarusian rights organization Human Constanta. Organizations classified as extremist are banned from operating in Belarus, according to the Belarusian law. In addition, individual entrepreneurs and legal entities face up to three years in jail for displaying the logo of an organization deemed extremist.

Authorities accused BIC of “inciting social, political, and ideological hostility,” distributing “extremist” materials and so-called “false information about the political, economic, social, military, and international situation in Belarus,” as well as “discrediting government bodies and administration.” The Supreme Court denied BIC’s request to participate in the hearing via videoconference, according to those reports and Rudovich.

“This is an unfortunate attempt by Belarus’ authorities to further repress and intimidate independent media,” BIC head Stanislau Ivashkevich told CPJ via messaging app.

BIC reports on corruption, economics, politics, and the war in Ukraine. In 2022, BIC and banned Poland-based independent broadcaster Belsat TV published a joint investigation into a possible corruption scheme involving the prosecutor general and his brother.

BAJ deputy head Barys Haretski told CPJ via messaging app that BIC was the second media outlet, after the now-defunct independent news website Tut.by, to be labeled an “extremist organization.”

”The fact that BIC is the only active media labeled an extremist organization…shows the importance of our investigators’ work in revealing corruption among Belarus’ political elites and their schemes of sanctions evasion,” Ivashkevich told CPJ.

More than 15 media outlets are labeled as “extremist groups,” Haretski told CPJ, with BAJ having been added to that list in February. Anyone charged with creating or participating in an “extremist” group faces up to 10 years in prison, according to the Belarusian Criminal Code, with potential sentences of up to eight years for financing extremism and up to seven years for facilitating such activity.

CPJ emailed the Belarusian Supreme Court and the general prosecutor’s office for comment but did not receive any reply.

Separately, on September 14, law enforcement officers in Brest, a Belarusian city at the Poland-Belarus border, detained Syarhey Hardzievich, a former correspondent with the independent regional news website Pershy Region, after checking his phone, and took him to a detention center in Brest, according to BAJ. A court in Belarus later ordered Hardzievich to be held for 15 days, BAJ reported.

The journalist was returning from a short personal trip to Poland when he was detained, a BAJ representative told CPJ on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. Authorities allegedly charged the journalist with distributing extremist materials, the source told CPJ.

CPJ is investigating to determine whether Hardzievich’s detention is related to his journalism.

Hardzievich was released from jail in October 2022 after completing a one-and-a-half year prison-sentence on charges of insulting Lukashenko and two police officers, as well as defaming one of those officers.

CPJ emailed the Brest police for comment but did not receive any reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

A global alliance of civil society organisations has protested to Philippine President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr in an open letter over the “judicial harassment” of human rights defenders and the designation of five indigenous rights activists as “terrorists“.

CIVICUS, representing some 15,000 members in 75 countries, says the harassment is putting the defenders “at great risk”.

It has also condemned the “draconian” Republic Act No. 11479 — the Anti-Terrorism Act — for its “weaponisation’ against political dissent and human rights work and advocacy in the Philippines.

• READ MORE: President Marcos marks one year with ‘narrative control’
• Other Philippine human rights reports

The CIVICUS open letter said there were “dire implications on the rights to due process and against warrantless arrests, among others”.

The letter called on the Philippine authorities to:

• Immediately end the judicial harassment against 10 human rights defenders by withdrawing the petition in the Quezon City Regional Trial Court Branch 84;
• Repeal Resolution No. 35 (2022) designating the six human rights defenders as terrorist individuals and unfreeze their property and funds immediately and unconditionally;
• Drop all charges under the ATA against activists in the Southern Tagalog region; and
• Halt all forms of intimidation and attacks on human rights defenders, ensure an enabling environment for human rights defenders and enact a law for their protection.

The full letter states:

President of the Republic of the Philippines
Malacañang Palace Compound
P. Laurel St., San Miguel, Manila
The Philippines.

Dear President Marcos, Jr.,

Philippines: Halt harassment against human rights defenders

CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation is a global alliance of civil society organisations (CSOs) and activists dedicated to strengthening citizen action and civil society worldwide. Founded in 1993, CIVICUS has over 15,000 members in 175 countries.

We are writing to you regarding a number of cases where human rights defenders are facing judicial harassment or have been designated as terrorists, putting them at great risk.

Judicial harassment against previously acquitted human rights defenders
CIVICUS is concerned about renewed judicial harassment against ten human rights defenders that had been previously acquitted for perjury. In March 2023, a petition was filed by prosecutors from the Quezon City Office of the Prosecutor, with General Esperon and current NSA General Eduardo Ano seeking a review of a lower court’s decision against the ten human rights defenders. They include Karapatan National Council members Elisa Tita Lubi, Cristina Palabay, Roneo Clamor, Gabriela Krista Dalena, Dr. Edita Burgos, Jose Mari Callueng and Fr. Wilfredo Ruazol as well as Joan May Salvador and Gertrudes Libang of GABRIELA and Sr Elenita Belardo of the Rural Missionaries of the Philippines (RMP).

The petition also includes the judge that presided over the case Judge Aimee Marie B. Alcera. They alleged that Judge Alcera committed “grave abuse of discretion” in acquitting the defenders. The petition is now pending before the Quezon City Regional Trial Court Branch 84 Presiding Judge Luisito Galvez Cortez, who has asked the respondents to comment on Esperon’s motion this July and has scheduled a hearing on 29 August 2023.

Human rights defenders designated as terrorists
CIVICUS is also concerned that on 7 June 2023, the Anti-Terrorism Council (ATC) signed Resolution No. 41 (2022) designating five indigenous peoples’ leaders and advocates – Sarah Abellon Alikes, Jennifer R. Awingan, Windel Bolinget, Stephen Tauli, and May Casilao – as terrorist individuals. The resolution also freezes their property and funds, including related accounts.

The four indigenous peoples’ human rights defenders – Alikes, Awingan, Bolinget and Tauli — are leaders of the Cordillera People’s Alliance (CPA). May Casilao has been active in Panalipdan! Mindanao (Defend Mindanao), a Mindanao-wide interfaith network of various sectoral organizations and individuals focused on providing education on, and conducting campaigns against, threats to the environment and people of the island, especially the Lumad. Previously, on 7 December 2022, the ATC signed Resolution No. 35 (2022) designating indigenous peoples’ rights defender Ma. Natividad “Doc Naty” Castro, former National Council member of Karapatan and a community-based health worker, as a “terrorist individual.”

The arbitrary and baseless designation of these human rights defenders highlights the concerns of human rights organizations against Republic Act No. 11479 or the Anti-Terrorism Act, particularly on the weaponization of the draconian law against political dissent and human rights work and advocacy in the Philippines and the dire implications on the rights to due process and against warrantless arrests, among others.

Anti-terrorism law deployed against activists in the Southern Tagalog region
We are also concerned about reports that the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) has been deployed to suppress and persecute human rights defenders in the Southern Tagalog region, which has the most number of human rights defenders and other political activists criminalised by this law. As of July 2023, up to 13 human rights defenders from Southern Tagalog face trumped-up criminal complaints citing violations under the ATA. Among those targeted include Rev. Glofie Baluntong, Hailey Pecayo, Kenneth Rementilla and Jasmin Rubio.

International human rights obligations
The Philippines government has made repeated assurances to other states that it will protect human rights defenders including most recently during its Universal Periodic Review in November 2022. However, the cases above highlight that an ongoing and unchanging pattern of the government targeting human rights defenders.

These actions are also inconsistent with Philippines’ international human rights obligations, including those under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) which Philippines ratified in 1986. These include obligations to respect and protect fundamental freedoms which are also guaranteed in the Philippines Constitution. The Philippines government also has an obligation to protect human rights defenders as provided for in the UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders and to prevent any reprisals against them for their activism.

Therefore, we call on the Philippines authorities to:

• Immediately end the judicial harassment against the ten human rights defenders by withdrawing the petition in the Quezon City Regional Trial Court Branch 84;
• Repeal Resolution No. 35 (2022) designating the six human rights defenders as terrorist individuals and unfreeze their property and funds immediately and unconditionally;Drop all charges under the ATA against activists in the Southern Tagalog region;
• Halt all forms of intimidation and attacks on human rights defenders, ensure an enabling environment for human rights defenders and enact a law for their protection.

We urge your government to look into these concerns as a matter of priority and we hope to hear from you regarding our inquiries as soon as possible.

Regards,

Sincerely,

David Kode
Advocacy & Campaigns Lead
CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation

Cc: Eduardo Año, National Security Adviser and Director General of the National Security Council
Jesus Crispin C. Remulla, Secretary, Department of Justice of the Philippines
Atty. Richard Palpal-latoc, Chairperson, Commission on Human Rights of the Philippines

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

“By detaining Infa-Kurier’s journalists, raiding the outlet’s office, and labeling its content ‘extremist,’ Belarusian authorities have effectively driven one of the country’s last independent regional outlets out of operation,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Belarusian authorities should cease using the country’s shameful extremism legislation to suppress independent reporting.”

On March 15, authorities in the central city of Slutsk searched Infa-Kurier’s editorial office, seized technical equipment, and detained four of its journalists. Two of them were released after signing a nondisclosure agreement, while a court ordered chief editor Syarhei Stankevich and deputy editor Aleh Rubchenya to be arrested for 15 days for allegedly disobeying police. Both were released on March 30.

On March 28, a court in the capital, Minsk, labeled six Infa-Kurier articles published in 2020 as “extremist,” according to reports and Zhanna Avdeeva, the publishing editor of Infa-Kurier’s print edition, who communicated with CPJ via messaging app. On April 5, the same court declared all of Infa-Kurier’s content “extremist,” according to news reports and the Belarusian Association of Journalists, an advocacy and trade group operating from exile.

On April 8, Infa-Kurier announced in a statement, which CPJ reviewed, that it was stopping all print and online operations. “We are not ashamed of the 23 (+) years we have lived! Sorry for such a frustrating and unpredictable ending! We didn’t choose it,” the statement said.

Avdeeva told CPJ that the “extremist” label was the “final blow” to the outlet, as they had no intention of stopping their work before the label. Infa-Kurier was not told who initiated the two extremism trials, Avdeeva said, adding, “We were not invited to the court. We don’t know who the judge was; we don’t know who the linguist who identified ‘extremism’ in our materials was.”

“This is a political order,” Avdeeva told CPJ, adding that Infa-Kurier is facing the same degree of rejection by the authorities and has a similar level of influence as leading independent news website Tut.by, albeit “on a local scale.”

Founded in 2001, Infa-Kurier is a newspaper covering history and news in Slutsk, according to the statement. “[Infa-]‘Kurier’ was the region’s brand. It was trusted; it was read [and] respected, even by officials,” Avdeeva told CPJ.

CPJ emailed the Partyzanski District Court of Minsk for comment but did not receive any reply.

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

The surreal artifice of this was one of the truth bombs dropped by Fiame Naomi Mataafa, Samoa’s prime minister, during a plain-talking speech and conversation at a Lowy Institute event in Canberra, the Australian capital, on Monday.

“Everyone talks to us about the ‘Indo-Pacific’ and I think there’s an assumption there that we know what they’re talking about, and actually we don’t. So we’re having to inform ourselves as best we can,” Fiame said. 

“Given that we occupy a very large space of one of those oceans one might have thought that having some input from the Pacific islands might have been a good idea,” she said.

Fiame appeared at the think-tank’s event a week to the day that the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom announced details of the plan for the Australians to acquire nuclear-powered submarines to help America police the Indo-Pacific super region.

The so-called AUKUS security pact between Canberra, Washington and London is one of several moving parts grouped under the “Indo-Pacific,” the U.S. strategic concept of the moment that analysts say aims to contain China. After several decades of rapid growth, the Asian superpower’s economy rivals the United States in size and it is rapidly building up its military arsenal.

Australia’s ambition to have its own nuclear-propelled submarines was first announced in late 2021 and provoked anxiety among some countries in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Under the plans announced last week, Australia will buy up to five U.S. nuclear submarines from early next decade and also build its own using British and American technology.

Pacific island countries reacted to the latest details with a mixture of support, resignation and disquiet, reflecting diverse interests in the vast ocean region. 

A spokesman for David Panuelo, president of the Federated States of Micronesia, said the U.S.-allied north Pacific country “trusts that AUKUS is in the region's security interests and trusts that Australia will continue to adhere to regional and international best practices on nuclear non-proliferation.”

The comments from Fiame, who also said she understood Australia’s reasons for acquiring nuclear submarines, underline the challenges for Pacific island nations at a time when their region is increasingly a focal point of the U.S.-China rivalry.

Some nations have benefited from China’s interest in the Pacific through aid and infrastructure, and they also hope to gain from renewed U.S. attention. At the same time, they are also being swept up by the agendas of large powers.

“We are faced with the perplexities of varying versions of the Indo-Pacific strategies,” said Fiame, Samoa’s first female prime minister.

“The underlying lack of understanding of the Pacific countries of how and when the two large ocean spaces morphed into the Indo-Pacific and the rationale behind the concept” is in part the fault of development partners, she said, referring to countries such as Australia, Japan, the United States and New Zealand. 

In the Pacific, she added, “we feel our partners have fallen short of acknowledging the integrity of Pacific leadership and the responsibility they carry for every decision made as a collective and individually.”

According to the Observer Research Foundation, a think-tank based in New Delhi, the Indo-Pacific as a concept has its origins with a German scholar in the 1920s and was given prominence in recent times by a Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, in a 2007 speech to India’s parliament. 

The phrase “free and open Indo-Pacific” then began to appear in Japanese government statements and, by late last decade, was moving to the center of U.S. foreign policy. 

The widespread adoption of the concept of a super region, the foundation said in a 2021 article, reflects the shift in global power to east from west. Its “seeming lack of rationality” shows that regional boundaries reflect political interests rather than geography or logic, the foundation said.

Worries about nukes

Since the 2021 announcement of AUKUS, officials from Australia, the United Kingdom and United States have worked to allay anxiety about the nuclear subs deal including emphasizing the submarines will not pack nuclear weapons.

A Pacific nation official, who did not want to be identified, told BenarNews that their government had received six face-to-face briefings about AUKUS as well as formal diplomatic communications. 

Eleven Pacific island nations, as well as Australia and New Zealand, are signatories to the 1986 Rarotonga Treaty, which declared the South Pacific to be a nuclear-free zone.

The treaty was partly a response to the legacy of nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific. Between 1946 and 1966, the United States, France and the United Kingdom carried out some 300 nuclear detonations in the Pacific.

The foreign minister of Tuvalu, a group of low-lying atolls that are home to 12,000 people, directly criticized the AUKUS plan.

“The 2011 Fukushima disaster highlighted the danger of nuclear power to human health and the environment,” Foreign Minister Simon Kofe said on Twitter. 

“As we discuss nuclear-powered submarines in the Pacific, we must also address concerns about increased militarization of the region,” he said in his tweet. It was responding directly to Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong by encapsulating her own tweet applauding the nuclear subs agreement.

Justin Tkatchenko, Papua New Guinea’s minister of foreign affairs, did not directly comment on AUKUS when asked about the three-nation submarine deal at a press conference earlier this week.

Instead, he pointed out that Papua New Guinea was working toward ratifying the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

“It’s now in NEC [National Executive Council] for final approval to go to the floor of parliament to be ratified so that Papua New Guinea is totally against any nuclear weapon in PNG or in the Pacific region,” he said. 

BenarNews, an online news services affiliated with Radio Free Asia (RFA), produced this report.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Stephen Wright for BenarNews.

“By labeling the Belarusian Association of Journalists as ‘extremist,’ Belarusian authorities are doing nothing but lashing out at an organization that has already been forced from the country in retaliation for its fight for journalists’ rights,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Authorities must stop obstructing BAJ and the Brestskaya Gazeta newspaper’s work and cease using extremism legislation to silence independent journalism.”

The KGB decisions on both cases were issued February 28 and made public this week, according to those reports and a statement BAJ deputy head Barys Haretski sent to CPJ. Anyone charged with creating or participating in a group that has been labeled as extremist faces up to 10 years in prison, according to the Belarusian Criminal code.

“Under the current conditions, no one in Belarus should publicly call themselves a BAJ representative,” Haretski told the Poland-based outlet Belsat TV.

Haretski’s statement said that the group will continue its work from exile and considered the decision “absurd” and “a new manifestation of the authorities’ pressure on Belarusian media outlets and journalists.” Founded in 1995, the association documents press freedom violations, provides support for journalists in trouble, and has more than 1,300 members. Belarusian authorities have repeatedly obstructed BAJ’s work, raided its offices, and in 2021 dissolved the organization.

In July 2021, authorities raided Brestskaya Gazeta’s office. When authorities declared that its website featured extremist content in November 2021, the outlet said it considered its persecution “politically motivated” and would continue its work. Brestskaya Gazeta’s website is continuing to publish as of Tuesday.

CPJ emailed the KGB for comment but did not receive any replies.

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

I’m always restless. I feel like restlessness leads to productivity because I never want to sit; that’s when the demons come out, when your brain starts going to crazy places. I feel like giving myself tasks and having a goal, or just something to occupy my brain space, makes everything flow easier. Being restless is one of my least favorite feelings, so I always try to counteract that with something I can get lost in.

It sounds like creativity has always been that thing for you.

Yeah. I’ve always loved making things, making little videos. Even when I was little, I’d make little videos with my siblings, making songs just so we would stay out of trouble. It’s evolved from something that I’ve done since I was very little.

You rap, you sing, you produce, and you play drums. How does learning actual music skills help you address your restlessness? How does it benefit your creative process?

My friend from Barcelona was visiting me a couple of days ago, and we were talking about pursuing passions, and pursuing things because you enjoy them, as being the primary reason you should pursue art. She was like, “That’s such an American way of thinking,” which I thought was very funny but also kind of true.

My family is Nigerian, so I’m first-generation, and the concept of following your passions just because it’s something you enjoy is not a thing that many other countries have. People want to do things they enjoy, but it’s not the main source of happiness.

You can do things you don’t enjoy, you can do things you don’t want to do, and the outcome is still happiness. It doesn’t have to be 24/7 enjoyment. And with learning music, that’s how it is. The majority of people learning music don’t love learning scales. But once you know your scales, you can make so much more. You can be more expressive after you learn the basics of music theory and stuff like that.

I’m curious to hear more about this being such an American notion.

I think in every culture, people believe you should do that. But in America and Western culture, it’s prioritized as the most important thing over consistency. In other cultures, earlier on, you get to know the importance of being consistent in your work, and repetition, and that you’ll have to do things that aren’t enjoyable to get where you want to go. If you want to do something great, if you want to do big things, you have to make sacrifices.

You’re somebody whom people often describe as having a singular, out-there musical vision. How much does others’ perception of you factor into your creative process?

It’s just always wrong. How can other people have this perception of me when I’m constantly evolving? There’s no way you can know what’s going to happen or what the vision is going to be like. Hopefully, it’s always unique and, hopefully, it’s always organic.

People’s perception of me doesn’t really come into account during my artistic creations. If someone was like, “Yo, he makes this type of thing or makes this type of art,” it just wouldn’t make sense to me because I don’t even know what I’m going to do next time. It’s just based off the feeling, the time, and the environment, and those things always change.

It sounds like there’s an element of unpredictability to it, but in a good way. Is there anything concrete that you have in front of you mentally when you’re in creative mode? Any idea or concept or goal?

Yeah, it can be as simple as, “Oh, I saw a cool plant today. I’m going to go write about this feeling the plant gave me or write about the plant.” It could be a conversation you have with a friend that inspires some more in-depth thought on a topic. It always starts from somewhere.

Sometimes, I’ll just force myself and be like, “You have to write a song a day for this month.” Sometimes, I’ll just force it, because that’s the consistency, that’s the practice. If you keep practicing it, then the creativity will flow at times, and you’ll have less writer’s block, which I don’t really believe in.

Consistency is always more important than talent. You can be so talented, but at a certain point, you’re not going to get better if you’re not consistently working on it. The people that work every day are going to surpass you 99% of the time.

You said you don’t believe in writer’s block. I would love to hear more about why you feel that way.

I believe that you write some things that are better or worse. But I don’t think that there are no ideas at all. I think you just have shitty ideas sometimes. And sometimes, you have decent ideas, and sometimes, you have great ideas. I don’t think there’s a block. I guess what maybe some people consider a block is when they’re writing ideas they don’t love. But I feel like that’s all part of the process.

Although you’re not cracking jokes in your music most of the time, it always feels like there’s a sense of humor to it. I’m curious about the value of humor in your creative process.

Life is funny. I was thinking the other day just about the idea of drums. You just have these tubes with plastic on them and you’re flailing sticks around. For some reason, just thinking about that made me laugh for a long time, just how primitive and silly things are and the things we take so seriously.

There’s underlying humor to just existing. A lot of times, it feels like a practical joke or a prank played by the universe. And I think there’s joy and fun in everything. I think a lot of people don’t like humor in music or silly music, but it’s there. It’s a part of life.

I was watching pop punk videos with the sound off the other day, just watching the people strum power chords in unison and their arms and their shoulders going up and down. Music is inherently funny but also beautiful at the same time. It’s all those things. It’s not just one thing.

Since you were just on a video set yesterday, I have to ask if any of this has influenced your music videos.

My go-to thing visually, or the thing that brings me the most joy in a show or a movie, are dark comedies. I love the humor aspect of it, but I like the unsettling feeling sometimes. I like sometimes when there’s no resolution and you’re just left out there lingering in some awkwardness. In my visuals, I go in that direction a lot…it’s such a unique feeling of, “Oh, it’s kind of silly.” It’s like, “Oh, I feel a little bit strange.” That’s my favorite genre visually.

You started Sooper Records with Sen Morimoto and Glenn Curran, so I’m curious how the quote-unquote business side of things ties into your creative vision.

With Sooper, it’s all about boosting other people. For me, it’s all about trying to get other people to my level, or greater than my level, [and] being a springboard for artists. In Chicago, there’s not really the infrastructure for a lot of those things or people looking for local musicians. They’re like, “I want to go on tour. I want to put out a record, but I don’t know how to do these things,” but they’re still working very hard. That’s what I was doing.

Before I knew a lot of this stuff [and] how it worked, I would just be making things and booking my own tours. I booked my first tour through MySpace, which is very funny, old man. [Sooper Records is for] noticing those things in other people and trying to boost them if I see that they’re passionate and really want to do this thing. For me, it’s still very creative. It still has to do with people being unique or special.

The goal is to just boost people in the direction they want to go. If they want to tour the world, it’s like, how can we get them in that direction? If their goal is to just put out a few really good records and have neat visuals that they have a specific vision for, how do we make that happen?

It’s fun to do it for other people because I feel like, when I’m doing it for myself, I’m so in my head and so absorbed that I can’t take a step back and see some things critically because I’m still in it in every aspect of it. It gives me the opportunity to look at creating things through a broader lens. And it’s great because Glenn does more of the emailing work and all of that stuff, and sometimes I help with other things, but I’m not good at that. It’s great that we have three people that have unique ideas and traits.

What does collaboration do for your creative process?

For my solo music, I haven’t been that collaborative. It’s really been 90 percent me, or I’ll do everything and then be like, “Hey, you come put a verse on this part,” or, “Hey, I wrote this chorus, can you sing it?” The reason I make solo music is so I can have complete control because I’m a control freak. Not really, but I’ve been in bands since high school, and being in a band is very different.

I do love collaborating. I love hearing ideas evolve through other people. Someone suggests something and then someone is like, “What if we add this?” And they’re like, “Ooh, it gets better.” You come up with ideas you would never come up with on your own. That’s just going to happen when you have different personalities working together.

That’s such a beautiful thing because you can create something that everyone involved with loves, but no singular person could have made it. But in my solo music, I haven’t dived into that as much. I think on future albums, I’ll be more open to working with other people. But it’s such a meditation, a therapeutic thing for me to be in the studio by myself and be making stuff. It’s so therapeutic that I’ll always be doing that.

What are some of the reasons you’re now more open to having collaborators on your solo albums?

Just because you can make something amazing and at the end of the day, no one gives a shit if you do everything by yourself. They just care if it’s good. You know what I mean?

How do you know when someone would be a good collaborator for you? What do you look for in a collaborator?

Immediate vibes. We have to have good energy when we talk and hang together. It’s really more, if I don’t want to be around the person, I’m not going to hang or make music with them, even if I like their music.

It would sour for me if I met someone I really wanted to work with and they were shitty. I wouldn’t work with them. It’s really just energy. I like people who have their own freaky ideas, who think outside of the box but want to try things.

I think the worst thing that can happen is being in a studio with people [who] shut down your ideas and not even consider them or give you a reason. I’ve seen that happen in studios with people and it’s just like, well, this is not collaboration. This is that person’s project and they’re shutting you down without even being like, “No, I don’t think we should do this, because this would sound better.” They’re just like, “No, that’s dumb.” I’m like, “Oh, okay.”

Some creative folks have told me that some collaborations feel more transactional where it’s one-and-done, but the collaborations they love the most build out long-term friendships, people you can come to time and again with ideas. How much does that sound true for you?

Sen is one of those people where we’re going to make stuff in the future, and we’ve done a few things that haven’t come out. Any time we get together and are having a fun time, sometimes, we make some music together, but it’s never forced. I do understand the appeal of some business-transaction collaborations too because…if Drake was like, “Yo, let me get a verse,” I’d be like, “Absolutely.” But I don’t think I’m going to be chilling with Drake.

It just sounds like you and Sen are hanging out and it’s not even like you’re intending to do something creative. It just happens.

Yeah, it’s just naturally what happens because we all do it all the time. A lot of my friends are always making music. So you show up and they’re like, “Oh, you want to put guitar on this? Or you want to do some vocals?”

That was everything I wanted to ask you today. But if there were any questions I asked and there were things you wanted to say that you didn’t get to mention, or just anything else you wanted to say about creativity, go for it.

There’s no gatekeeping on art. You don’t have to have a huge background. You don’t have to be musically trained to start making art. If you want to make art and you make it, then you’re an artist. If you want to make music and you go and make some music, you’re a musician.

Everyone that is passionate about making any music or art should make some time to do it. If you enjoy it, it can turn into a passionate thing. It can turn into a career just off something that was your passion or a hobby. Everyone should pursue the arts they’re drawn to.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Max Freedman.

I’m always restless. I feel like restlessness leads to productivity because I never want to sit; that’s when the demons come out, when your brain starts going to crazy places. I feel like giving myself tasks and having a goal, or just something to occupy my brain space, makes everything flow easier. Being restless is one of my least favorite feelings, so I always try to counteract that with something I can get lost in.

It sounds like creativity has always been that thing for you.

Yeah. I’ve always loved making things, making little videos. Even when I was little, I’d make little videos with my siblings, making songs just so we would stay out of trouble. It’s evolved from something that I’ve done since I was very little.

You rap, you sing, you produce, and you play drums. How does learning actual music skills help you address your restlessness? How does it benefit your creative process?

My friend from Barcelona was visiting me a couple of days ago, and we were talking about pursuing passions, and pursuing things because you enjoy them, as being the primary reason you should pursue art. She was like, “That’s such an American way of thinking,” which I thought was very funny but also kind of true.

My family is Nigerian, so I’m first-generation, and the concept of following your passions just because it’s something you enjoy is not a thing that many other countries have. People want to do things they enjoy, but it’s not the main source of happiness.

You can do things you don’t enjoy, you can do things you don’t want to do, and the outcome is still happiness. It doesn’t have to be 24/7 enjoyment. And with learning music, that’s how it is. The majority of people learning music don’t love learning scales. But once you know your scales, you can make so much more. You can be more expressive after you learn the basics of music theory and stuff like that.

I’m curious to hear more about this being such an American notion.

I think in every culture, people believe you should do that. But in America and Western culture, it’s prioritized as the most important thing over consistency. In other cultures, earlier on, you get to know the importance of being consistent in your work, and repetition, and that you’ll have to do things that aren’t enjoyable to get where you want to go. If you want to do something great, if you want to do big things, you have to make sacrifices.

You’re somebody whom people often describe as having a singular, out-there musical vision. How much does others’ perception of you factor into your creative process?

It’s just always wrong. How can other people have this perception of me when I’m constantly evolving? There’s no way you can know what’s going to happen or what the vision is going to be like. Hopefully, it’s always unique and, hopefully, it’s always organic.

People’s perception of me doesn’t really come into account during my artistic creations. If someone was like, “Yo, he makes this type of thing or makes this type of art,” it just wouldn’t make sense to me because I don’t even know what I’m going to do next time. It’s just based off the feeling, the time, and the environment, and those things always change.

It sounds like there’s an element of unpredictability to it, but in a good way. Is there anything concrete that you have in front of you mentally when you’re in creative mode? Any idea or concept or goal?

Yeah, it can be as simple as, “Oh, I saw a cool plant today. I’m going to go write about this feeling the plant gave me or write about the plant.” It could be a conversation you have with a friend that inspires some more in-depth thought on a topic. It always starts from somewhere.

Sometimes, I’ll just force myself and be like, “You have to write a song a day for this month.” Sometimes, I’ll just force it, because that’s the consistency, that’s the practice. If you keep practicing it, then the creativity will flow at times, and you’ll have less writer’s block, which I don’t really believe in.

Consistency is always more important than talent. You can be so talented, but at a certain point, you’re not going to get better if you’re not consistently working on it. The people that work every day are going to surpass you 99% of the time.

You said you don’t believe in writer’s block. I would love to hear more about why you feel that way.

I believe that you write some things that are better or worse. But I don’t think that there are no ideas at all. I think you just have shitty ideas sometimes. And sometimes, you have decent ideas, and sometimes, you have great ideas. I don’t think there’s a block. I guess what maybe some people consider a block is when they’re writing ideas they don’t love. But I feel like that’s all part of the process.

Although you’re not cracking jokes in your music most of the time, it always feels like there’s a sense of humor to it. I’m curious about the value of humor in your creative process.

Life is funny. I was thinking the other day just about the idea of drums. You just have these tubes with plastic on them and you’re flailing sticks around. For some reason, just thinking about that made me laugh for a long time, just how primitive and silly things are and the things we take so seriously.

There’s underlying humor to just existing. A lot of times, it feels like a practical joke or a prank played by the universe. And I think there’s joy and fun in everything. I think a lot of people don’t like humor in music or silly music, but it’s there. It’s a part of life.

I was watching pop punk videos with the sound off the other day, just watching the people strum power chords in unison and their arms and their shoulders going up and down. Music is inherently funny but also beautiful at the same time. It’s all those things. It’s not just one thing.

Since you were just on a video set yesterday, I have to ask if any of this has influenced your music videos.

My go-to thing visually, or the thing that brings me the most joy in a show or a movie, are dark comedies. I love the humor aspect of it, but I like the unsettling feeling sometimes. I like sometimes when there’s no resolution and you’re just left out there lingering in some awkwardness. In my visuals, I go in that direction a lot…it’s such a unique feeling of, “Oh, it’s kind of silly.” It’s like, “Oh, I feel a little bit strange.” That’s my favorite genre visually.

You started Sooper Records with Sen Morimoto and Glenn Curran, so I’m curious how the quote-unquote business side of things ties into your creative vision.

With Sooper, it’s all about boosting other people. For me, it’s all about trying to get other people to my level, or greater than my level, [and] being a springboard for artists. In Chicago, there’s not really the infrastructure for a lot of those things or people looking for local musicians. They’re like, “I want to go on tour. I want to put out a record, but I don’t know how to do these things,” but they’re still working very hard. That’s what I was doing.

Before I knew a lot of this stuff [and] how it worked, I would just be making things and booking my own tours. I booked my first tour through MySpace, which is very funny, old man. [Sooper Records is for] noticing those things in other people and trying to boost them if I see that they’re passionate and really want to do this thing. For me, it’s still very creative. It still has to do with people being unique or special.

The goal is to just boost people in the direction they want to go. If they want to tour the world, it’s like, how can we get them in that direction? If their goal is to just put out a few really good records and have neat visuals that they have a specific vision for, how do we make that happen?

It’s fun to do it for other people because I feel like, when I’m doing it for myself, I’m so in my head and so absorbed that I can’t take a step back and see some things critically because I’m still in it in every aspect of it. It gives me the opportunity to look at creating things through a broader lens. And it’s great because Glenn does more of the emailing work and all of that stuff, and sometimes I help with other things, but I’m not good at that. It’s great that we have three people that have unique ideas and traits.

What does collaboration do for your creative process?

For my solo music, I haven’t been that collaborative. It’s really been 90 percent me, or I’ll do everything and then be like, “Hey, you come put a verse on this part,” or, “Hey, I wrote this chorus, can you sing it?” The reason I make solo music is so I can have complete control because I’m a control freak. Not really, but I’ve been in bands since high school, and being in a band is very different.

I do love collaborating. I love hearing ideas evolve through other people. Someone suggests something and then someone is like, “What if we add this?” And they’re like, “Ooh, it gets better.” You come up with ideas you would never come up with on your own. That’s just going to happen when you have different personalities working together.

That’s such a beautiful thing because you can create something that everyone involved with loves, but no singular person could have made it. But in my solo music, I haven’t dived into that as much. I think on future albums, I’ll be more open to working with other people. But it’s such a meditation, a therapeutic thing for me to be in the studio by myself and be making stuff. It’s so therapeutic that I’ll always be doing that.

What are some of the reasons you’re now more open to having collaborators on your solo albums?

Just because you can make something amazing and at the end of the day, no one gives a shit if you do everything by yourself. They just care if it’s good. You know what I mean?

How do you know when someone would be a good collaborator for you? What do you look for in a collaborator?

Immediate vibes. We have to have good energy when we talk and hang together. It’s really more, if I don’t want to be around the person, I’m not going to hang or make music with them, even if I like their music.

It would sour for me if I met someone I really wanted to work with and they were shitty. I wouldn’t work with them. It’s really just energy. I like people who have their own freaky ideas, who think outside of the box but want to try things.

I think the worst thing that can happen is being in a studio with people [who] shut down your ideas and not even consider them or give you a reason. I’ve seen that happen in studios with people and it’s just like, well, this is not collaboration. This is that person’s project and they’re shutting you down without even being like, “No, I don’t think we should do this, because this would sound better.” They’re just like, “No, that’s dumb.” I’m like, “Oh, okay.”

Some creative folks have told me that some collaborations feel more transactional where it’s one-and-done, but the collaborations they love the most build out long-term friendships, people you can come to time and again with ideas. How much does that sound true for you?

Sen is one of those people where we’re going to make stuff in the future, and we’ve done a few things that haven’t come out. Any time we get together and are having a fun time, sometimes, we make some music together, but it’s never forced. I do understand the appeal of some business-transaction collaborations too because…if Drake was like, “Yo, let me get a verse,” I’d be like, “Absolutely.” But I don’t think I’m going to be chilling with Drake.

It just sounds like you and Sen are hanging out and it’s not even like you’re intending to do something creative. It just happens.

Yeah, it’s just naturally what happens because we all do it all the time. A lot of my friends are always making music. So you show up and they’re like, “Oh, you want to put guitar on this? Or you want to do some vocals?”

That was everything I wanted to ask you today. But if there were any questions I asked and there were things you wanted to say that you didn’t get to mention, or just anything else you wanted to say about creativity, go for it.

There’s no gatekeeping on art. You don’t have to have a huge background. You don’t have to be musically trained to start making art. If you want to make art and you make it, then you’re an artist. If you want to make music and you go and make some music, you’re a musician.

Everyone that is passionate about making any music or art should make some time to do it. If you enjoy it, it can turn into a passionate thing. It can turn into a career just off something that was your passion or a hobby. Everyone should pursue the arts they’re drawn to.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Max Freedman.

Lots of labels are thrown around to define or tag political opponents. Proponents embrace other labels as a badge of honor. And a few labels are so controversial, like Christian Nationalist or Communist, that even those in sympathy with those beliefs shy away from them.

However, the label reactionary is missing in the current political vocabulary. Whether politicians, media outlets, journalists, or political activists, both from the left and right. Conservative and Liberal are the two leading and enduring labels. Depending on your orientation, adjectives are used to acclaim or shackle them. Advocates self-identify as progressive liberals or very conservative. For critics, liberals turn into radical liberals or far-left radicals, while conservatives become far-right or radical-right.

The easiest way to note the relative absence of using “reactionary” would be to watch liberal or conservative-oriented media. Think about how often you hear the word “reactionary” from news analysts and commentators on CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News describe politicians, policies, or organizations. It would fall into the range of seldom to almost never.

In literature, this shortage can be measured by looking at the titles of best-selling books. The New York Times Best Sellers list would be the best single source, however, finding a comprehensive list outside of NYT’s closed offices is a daunting challenge.

Amazon Best Sellers ranking provides a quicker, although not as accurate, measurement of book sales. Nevertheless, since Amazon has 65 percent of the online book market share, it’s a decent sampling. Even better, it ranks non-fiction books within categories of interest, such as Political Conservatism & Liberalism.

I reviewed that category’s top twelve sellers from October 21, 2022. The top-ranking list changes daily. Consequently, this list is just a snapshot. Checking three days later, only four of the books surveyed remained in the top 12. On both dates, no book contained the word reactionary in the title. However, the political orientation of almost all the books on both dates reflected a conservative or reactionary point of view, except for either one progressive professor or one liberal journalist

The October 21 book titles contained these words:

+ Four books with communism, communist, socialism, or Marxism

+ Three books with Liberals, liberalism, or Democrat

+ Two books with conservatism

+ One book with Radical Right

+ One book with fascism

What would make a book have a reactionary perspective? As an adjective, according to the New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, the word reactionary describes points of view and policies meant to restore a past status quo ante. For example, Mark Lilla’s s The Shipwrecked Mind sees reactionary as attempting to change the existing socio-economic structure and political order with the intent to oppose liberal policies promoting the social transformation of society. In contrast, Conservatives oppose those same liberal policies but are willing to work within the existing political, economic, and social (PES) infrastructure to change those policies.

All philosophies drift from erudite definitions to widespread usage over time. In that journey, a gap grows between them in how to achieve objectives. However, the core reactionary belief has remained constant, believing that the existing society has become unstable or corrupted through liberal changes over time. The only solution to that dangerous condition is to return to a prior order. That order will provide more security, freedoms, community, or whatever is seen as lacking in the current order.

By applying that definition to reactionary thought, the one-day sampling of Amazon’s listed books reveals considerable popularity in accepting that view. The writers may be deemed dreadfully wrong in their reasoning and their books full of misinformation, but the attractiveness of their vision cannot be denied.

Look at most of the top-selling books listed on Amazon from October 21.

American Marxism by Mark R. Levin, a prominent Fox News Commentator, is typical of others who are very conservative or perhaps reactionary. While not proclaiming themselves reactionary, they emphasize protecting an individual’s freedom to use and accumulate personal property without interference from a larger community impacted by that freedom.

The government is seen as more than a nuisance but a potentially destructive force to individual rights. Levin, like other authors, sees core elements of Marxist ideology cloaked in deceptive labels like “progressivism,” “democratic socialism,” and “social activism.” These movements lead to a Big Government that extinguishes the free market, economic motivation, and individual freedoms.

The UnCommunist Manifesto by Aleksandar Svetski and Mark Moss also identifies liberal changes with Marxism. The authors want to change the debate from a class struggle to “individual autonomy, sovereignty, and responsibility versus the collectivist tendency toward group identity politics, rights, entitlements, and co-dependencies.” It’s not clear how far back they would go in time to get to the right balance, but they don’t fear what they see happening now.

Five other authors noted below were from Amazon’s biggest sellers list on October 21. They blame liberals and the Democrats for ruining our nation’s social fabric and ushering in the loss of liberties; one even sees liberals bringing about a new emergent Fascism. However, none of them embrace or reference the word reactionary.

Candace Owens, in Blackout, says it’s time for a major black exodus from the shackles of the Democratic Party, which has promoted their dependency and miseducation. The Great Reset: Joe Biden and the Rise of Twenty-First-Century Fascism by Glenn Beck and Justin Trask Haskins argues that there is an international conspiracy between powerful bankers, business leaders, and government officials to give them more money and power. 

In Defeating Big Government Socialism: Saving America’s Future, Newt Gingrich sees big government socialists entrenched “throughout our systems of government, society, culture, and business, resulting in vaccine mandates, tax increases, rising inflation,” and just about every ill he could think of. In Race Marxism: The Truth About Critical Race Theory and Praxis, James Lindsay calls CRT Race Marxism, using race “as the central construct for understanding inequality” rather than relying on class conflict arising from capitalism.

Lastly, Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick J. Deneen criticizes American liberalism, whether it be “libertarianism” or “progressive/modern liberalism,” AKA “liberal,” as allowing the growth of the “most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history.” In other words, converting America’s democratic republic into a statist country.

Are these authors promoting reactionary beliefs? None of the authors identify what era they would like the nation to return to. Nor are they insurrectionists. They are not tearing down the republic and do not go beyond exposing the liberal menace and promoting policies that would stop its growth.

Underlying all their books, however, is a concept that Christopher Parker and Matt Barreto studied in their book, Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America. It was published a couple of years before Trump started the reactionary MAGA movement.

Parker and Barreto show how the Tea Party was a reemergence of a reactionary movement in American politics that was like the right-wing reactionary movements of the past, including the Know Nothing Party, the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, and the John Birch Society. They all fueled a fear that America had changed for the worse. Its members are “reactionary conservatives: people who fear change of any kind—especially if it threatens to undermine their way of life.”

These two authors do “make clear, reactionary conservatives differ in a number of ways from more conventional conservatives.” The latter “realize incremental, evolutionary change is sometimes necessary as a means of preventing revolutionary change. The reactionary conservative doesn’t want to stop at the prevention of change: he prefers to reverse whatever progress has been made to that point.”

That definition is a dividing line between conservative and reactionary. In American Conservatism: Reclaiming an Intellectual Tradition, Andrew J. Bacevich seems to agree with Parker and Barreto in seeing a distinction between conservativism and reactionary thought. He writes that conservativism is not a “reactionary yearning for an irremediably lost past” – it “is not antirational.” Instead, it operates “upon the foundation of the tradition of civilization,” which is “the basis of the accumulated reason, experience, and wisdom of past generations.” In other words, returning to the distant past is not critical to conservativism. However, this view is a core element of reactionary beliefs that energies the MAGA movement to eliminate the last hundred years of unacceptable liberal laws. The MAGA adherents openly advocate that objective. They are not part of a secret movement, so they should openly and honestly identify as reactionaries.

Examples abound of reactionary policies being pushed by conservative Republican candidates this fall. They want to turn back the clock to a time untouched by liberal reforms. They would retreat to a time when there was less fear of being displaced by immigrants or having to live with people who didn’t conform to their moral code or when religion-based laws didn’t have to rely on scientific evidence to justify imposing them on others.

Kari Lake, the Republican Candidate for Arizona Governor, accuses immigrants crossing the Mexican border of bringing drugs and crime into the US, plus they are rapists. Once becoming governor, she would legally declare their increased presence as an invasion. That would allow her to have state law enforcement and military detain, arrest, and return illegal migrants to Mexico. In effect, her orientation leans into reviving the federal quota system that was dropped in 1965. From 1924 to then, immigration quotas severely immigrants from outside Western Europe.

Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance advocates eliminating no-fault divorce laws, which allow people to end a marriage without proving wrongdoing by their partner, including abuse or desertion. Vance equates this policy, enacted in California more than fifty years ago, as abandoning the morality of keeping families whole. Laws should not allow marriages to be dissolved if one spouse is beaten without proving it. The burden is on the victim. This approach returns to a time when women were morally bound to their husbands regardless of their treatment.

North Carolina’s Republican Candidate for the Senate race is Ted Budd, who has expressed support for Texas’ six-week abortion ban. The law makes no exceptions for cases of rape or incest and forbids abortion when a “heartbeat” can be heard, which is where the six-week ban comes from. Budd’s position will play well with 35% of the state’s population, who are very religious Protestant Evangelicals. But his stance is not based on reason or science. The medical profession disputes that the heart is beating after about six weeks of pregnancy. Instead, a developed heart forms later in pregnancy. But when laws must conform to religious beliefs, science is the enemy. And that is a long step back in time to take.

None of the above actions are in the conservative tradition of basing decisions on past generations’ reason, experience, and wisdom. Instead, they represent a yearning for an irremediably lost past. Moreover, they result from politics, augmented by immense wealth, influencing the public to turn the clock back.

Liberals should not naively describe these policies and their proponents as just conservative or even very conservative. They are not. They are reactionary. And the proponents of these measures should proudly declare their political agenda as reactionary.

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

Most commonly, these symbols appear with a number — 1 through 7 — that identifies the type of plastic resin a product is made of. A number 1, for instance, corresponds to polyethylene terephthalate, or PET — the stuff that makes up water bottles. Number 6 is for polystyrene, used in foam cups and trays. The plastics industry insists these icons were never meant to indicate a product’s recyclability, even though that is how they are often perceived by consumers.

In fact, most plastics are not recyclable, largely because there is no market for materials labeled 3 through 7. But that hasn’t stopped the widespread use of the chasing arrows.

With no federal program to evaluate products’ recyclability and issue labels for them, third-party organizations have stepped in to play this role instead. One organization in particular, How2Recycle, has devised an elaborate hierarchy with several versions of its own recycling symbol, which it sells to hundreds of companies ranging from Lowe’s to Beyond Meat. 

The organization, whose parent nonprofit is based in Virginia, says it analyzes waste management systems nationwide to figure out whether companies’ products and packaging are recyclable and then issues a corresponding label. It’s ostensibly an attempt to clear up confusion among consumers about what should and shouldn’t go into the blue bin. The group describes its markers as “recycling labels that make sense.” 

This summer, How2Recycle declared a big victory for the companies it sells labels to: It now considers a wide set of products made from polypropylene, or PP — the resin corresponding to the number 5 — to be “widely recyclable,” meaning the organization thinks that more than 60 percent of Americans have access to a curbside or drop-off recycling program that accepts them. Polypropylene accounts for about 14 percent of the U.S.’s plastic production.

The announcement makes polypropylene tubs, bottles, and jars — things like yogurt containers and ketchup bottles — eligible for How2Recycle’s top-tier recycling label: a chasing arrows symbol with no qualifications. 

But industry experts and environmental advocates have raised their eyebrows. Based on federal recycling data, independent national waste management surveys, and firsthand accounts from material sorting facilities, polypropylene recycling isn’t nearly as widespread as How2Recycle’s labeling implies. Even if PP products were technically accepted by facilities that serve a majority of Americans — which researchers say they are not — polypropylene is much more commonly landfilled or incinerated than turned into new products. This is because it is often filled with toxic chemical additives or contaminated with food waste, both of which make it difficult to turn it into new products. It’s usually less economical to sort out polypropylene for recycling than to simply discard it and make new products from virgin material.

“Post-consumer PP packaging and products have never been recyclable or recycled … above a few percent,” said Jan Dell, an independent chemical engineer and founder of the advocacy group The Last Beach Cleanup. Through How2Recycle, she said, plastic and packaging companies are “creating their own non-verified data” and ignoring key provisions of the Federal Trade Commission’s Green Guides, a set of requirements meant to prevent companies from making deceptive claims about the environmental benefits of their products. 

As a result, Dell said, the industry has been allowed to deepen the public’s confusion about recycling, gulling people and policymakers into thinking that it will be able to keep pace with plastic manufacturers’ plans to dramatically scale up production. 

How2Recycle is part of a labyrinth of organizations and industry membership programs that promote “sustainable materials management.” When it officially launched in 2012, the organization branded itself as an attempt to clear up confusion among consumers about what they could recycle. Many companies — including Yoplait, Costco, REI, and Microsoft — were quick to sign on, eager to affix How2Recycle’s labels to their products.

The program took the onus off of individual companies for claims about recyclability. How2Recycle would do all the necessary research into specific products’ recycling rates and community access to recycling programs, allowing participants to rest assured that their recycling labels were compliant with federal law. Today, more than 400 companies pay annual membership fees to place How2Recycle labels on their packages, including Amazon, Clif Bar, Walmart, Johnson & Johnson, and Starbucks.

At the top of How2Recycle’s labeling hierarchy is a simple “chasing arrows” recycling symbol, which the organization gives to products that it says are accepted by curbside or drop-off recycling programs that serve at least 60 percent of the American population. This is the label that How2Recycle said in late July some polypropylene products would now be eligible for. Previously, in 2020, the organization had downgraded PP products from the unqualified chasing arrows to a “Check Locally” label that instructed consumers to verify whether their community’s recycling program would accept them.

“As rigid polypropylene access, sortation, and end markets are on an upward trend across the U.S., we are excited to upgrade this packaging format,” Caroline Cox, How2Recycle’s director, said in a press release this summer.

However, other sources paint a very different picture of the United States’ plastic recycling landscape — especially for polypropylene, which is far more difficult to turn into new products than How2Recycle’s labels make it seem. “It is not possible that 60 percent of Americans have access to established recycling systems that accept PP packaging of any type,” Dell, of The Last Beach Cleanup, said. 

First, she explained, industry data suggests that only 60 percent of Americans have access to any recycling program, let alone one that accepts polypropylene containers. Most facilities only accept plastics that are easier to recycle, such as bottles made of PET. And additional data that Dell is compiling for 2022 shows that only half of the country’s 373 material recovery facilities, or MRFs — specialized plants that process and sort all the items people toss in their blue bins — say they accept polypropylene tubs, one of the most recyclable PP products out there (think margarine containers and cottage cheese cups). As a result, only 28 percent of Americans have access to recycling programs that accept these polypropylene containers.

“Overall accessibility for plastic recycling has dropped, if anything,” said John Hocevar, Greenpeace’s oceans campaign director. In recent years, labor shortages and high prices for recycled materials have caused cuts in curbside recycling programs, and many MRFs have stopped accepting most plastic resins. 

What’s more, Hocevar and others argue that the accessibility of recycling programs is a distraction from a more important metric: the real recycling rate. Just because polypropylene is collected doesn’t mean it will ultimately be recycled. According to the most recent available data from the Environmental Protection Agency, only 2.7 percent of polypropylene “containers and packaging” were recycled in 2018. If you include all forms of polypropylene, that number falls to just 0.6 percent.

One reason PP is difficult to recycle is that it’s not as clean or pure as other kinds of plastic. Unlike products made from PET or high-density polyethylene (HDPE) — labeled with the numbers 1 and 2, respectively — polypropylene products, labeled with the number 5, often contain toxic additives that make it difficult to turn them back into usable items. Another reason is that PP is typically collected in bales of mixed plastic that include a variety of resins labeled with the numbers 3 through 7.

In order to be recycled, PP must be picked out of these bales and then sold to an extremely limited number of facilities that will actually accept that plastic. (​​In 2020, Greenpeace estimated that the U.S. only had enough processing capacity to recycle less than 5 percent of its PP waste.) The whole process is prohibitively expensive, especially since the final product must be competitively priced against virgin plastics. According to the EPA, the U.S. generated more than 8 million tons of polypropylene waste in 2018, the most recent year for which data are available.

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Jeff Donlevy, a member of California’s Statewide Commission on Recycling Markets and Curbside Recycling and general manager of Ming’s Recycling, a company based in northern California, said that many facilities continue to accept polypropylene — even if they have no intention of recycling it — because of outdated, 10-or-more-year contracts with cities. At the time when many of these contracts were signed, MRFs said they would accept polypropylene because they could send mixed plastic bales to China for sorting and recycling. But in 2018, when China enacted its “National Sword” policy and closed its borders to most plastic waste imports, U.S. MRFs were saddled with a glut of resins that are uneconomical and logistically difficult to turn into new products.

Of the roughly 80 MRFs in California, Donlevy said the vast majority are not recycling plastics made of resins labeled number 3 and above. This includes polypropylene, number 5. Most facilities are “just landfilling whatever number 5 they get,” he said. 

How2Recycle says on its website that it takes four factors into account when determining a product’s recyclability — collection, sortation, reprocessing, and end markets — but it is not transparent about the exact methodology it uses to evaluate these criteria. Much of its data comes from an industry report conducted by How2Recycle’s parent organization that looks at a “non-random” sample of large recycling programs throughout the U.S., along with a random sample of recycling programs in smaller communities. In the most recent edition of the report, these censuses consisted of web searches for each recycling program to determine what kinds of plastic they accept. 

Environmental advocates question the results of these analyses, but they say the larger issue is that How2Recycle fails to say anything about the real recycling rate of PP products. Again, the “widely recyclable” label is only supposed to reflect a material’s acceptance by curbside and drop-off recycling programs. But this information is not printed on the organization’s unconditional recycling labels. Donlevy said this oversight “misleads the public.” 

It may also contravene sustainable packaging guidelines from the Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, a government agency that promotes consumer protection. By slapping recycling labels without qualifiers onto polypropylene tubs and other containers, How2Recycle appears to be ignoring key provisions of the FTC’s Green Guides, a set of detailed but nonbinding requirements for claims about products’ environmental benefits. The U.S. government does not have a program to issue or approve recycling labels, so this is the primary check for labels created by private groups.

At the broadest level, the FTC says it is deceptive to “misrepresent, directly or by implication, that a product or package is recyclable.” This means that companies should not use a recycling label without qualifiers — like How2Recycle’s gold standard chasing arrows symbol — unless they can prove that recycling facilities for their labeled products are available to at least 60 percent of consumers. Critically, the commission also calls on companies to substantiate that these facilities “will actually recycle, not accept and ultimately discard” labeled products. 

Marketers “should not assume that consumers or communities have access to a particular recycling program merely because the program will accept a product,” the FTC says in the Green Guides’ statement of basis and purpose. Although the guides aren’t legally binding, activity that is inconsistent with them can be used as evidence of a violation of the FTC Act’s provisions on “Unfair or Deceptive Acts or Practices” and can result in fines or additional rulemaking. State governments can also cite the Green Guides when building false advertising or consumer protection cases.

Dell lamented that the FTC has never, to her knowledge, taken action to stop a company from misusing an unqualified recycling label. But courts have. Take, for example, a 2018 lawsuit filed by a consumer against Keurig over claims that the company’s polypropylene coffee pods were “recyclable.” Keurig argued that its labels were consistent with the Green Guides, but a U.S. District Court in California disagreed and refused to dismiss the case. The court said that even if the coffee pods were technically collected by municipal recycling programs, they were not in practice being recycled. Keurig settled the case this year for $10 million and has changed the labels on its coffee pods.

Greenpeace argues that How2Recycle is using similar sleight with its own labels, claiming recyclability with insufficient substantiation. “Polypropylene does not come close to meeting the requirements” for recycling labels laid out by the FTC, the organization said in a press release. It is neither accepted at recycling facilities that serve 60 percent of the population nor actually recycled at a significant rate. 

In response to Grist’s request for comment, Paul Nowak — executive director of How2Recycle’s parent organization, GreenBlue — said that How2Recycle’s labels not only satisfy the Green Guides’ requirements but “go beyond them.” Although How2Recycle does not have internal data on the real recycling rate for polypropylene, Nowak said How2Recycle has reviewed “letters of support” from MRFs saying that they plan to expand their recycling capacity for polypropylene. Nowak declined to share these letters with Grist.

How2Recycle’s website offers some clarification. Although the organization claims to consider “sortation” and “reprocessing” for products that will feature its labels, How2Recycle explains online that it ultimately does not take into account the real-world recycling rate when evaluating a product’s recyclability — in contrast to definitions of recyclability from other organizations, like the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, an international nonprofit that advocates for a circular economy.

Nowak insists that How2Recycle spent “several months” verifying data on the increased recyclability of polypropylene. But Dell thinks there’s an irresolvable conflict of interest at play, since How2Recycle and the organizations whose data it cites are run and funded by companies that make and sell plastics. “We’ve got all these front groups funded by the plastics and products industry to create and perpetuate the myth that plastics are recyclable,” she said.

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The recent push to make polypropylene “widely recyclable” started outside How2Recycle, with a separate industry group called the Recycling Partnership — a nonprofit whose board of directors includes executives for major brands and plastic industry groups: Keurig Dr. Pepper, Nestlé, the Association of Plastic Recyclers, and the American Beverage Association, among others. The organization lists roughly 80 “funding partners” on its website, including two of North America’s main petrochemical industry trade groups, the American Chemistry Council and the Plastics Industry Association.

In 2020, a few months after How2Recycle downgraded PP products to only be eligible for the “Check Locally” label, the Recycling Partnership launched a new initiative — directly funded by many plastic brands and industry trade groups — to “ensure the long-term viability of polypropylene.”

The Recycling Partnership claims it contributed to a spike in polypropylene recycling over the past two years through a series of 24 grants worth $6.7 million. The group did not respond to Grist’s request for more information, but a press release notes that the funding helped “support sorting improvements and community education across the U.S.” According to the Recycling Partnership, these grants increased the amount of polypropylene recovered by 25 million pounds annually. Now, the group says its proprietary “National Recycling Database” shows 65 percent of Americans having access to PP recycling.

According to Nowak, the Recycling Partnership approached How2Recycle with this data in early 2022, requesting that How2Recycle reevaluate its labeling for polypropylene. After what Nowak described as a lengthy evaluation process, he said the data matched what he was seeing with How2Recycle’s own analysis, as well as information provided by an outside consulting firm. In response to Grist’s request for comment, the consulting firm said it provided How2Recycle with access-to-recycling data and “end market” research to show there is a market for polypropylene that ultimately does get recycled. The firm did not share data on polypropylene’s real recycling rate and told Grist to reach out to the Recycling Partnership.

How2Recycle, meanwhile, has its own web of connections to big brands and the plastics industry. The group’s parent organization, the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, is an industry working group whose members include Procter and Gamble, Coca-Cola, and the ExxonMobil Chemical Company, as well as a host of other plastic makers. GreenBlue, the umbrella organization that houses How2Recycle and the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, has a board of directors that includes executives from the Dow Chemical Company, Mars, the packaging companies Printpack and Westrock, and more.

Nowak said he is aware of concerns over potential conflicts of interest, but that How2Recycle’s parent organizations are “very careful about who we start to work with.” At How2Recycle, he added, “we stay neutral in all that.”

Dell has often spoken of the plastic labeling landscape as the “wild, wild West,” with “no sheriff in town” to protect consumers from deceptive recycling claims. The FTC, whose Green Guides may soon be updated for the first time since 2012, declined to comment on How2Recycle’s labeling system, and environmental advocates have expressed frustration that the commission hasn’t done more to enforce the guidelines.

Without stronger government regulation, Dell said, “How2Recycle and the product companies have filled the void to become the deciders” of what should and shouldn’t bear the recycling label.

But states are catching on. California passed nation-leading legislation last year making it illegal for companies to use the chasing arrows on products that are not actually being turned into new products. (In this case the state, rather than How2Recycle, will determine recyclability, and it will take into account both collection and the real recycling rate.) The law is expected to eliminate recycling symbols on virtually all plastic packaging that isn’t made of number 1 or number 2 resins, since those are the only kinds of plastic currently being recycled with significant regularity. It could have an impact on other states, too — if plastic manufacturers decide it is too cumbersome to create new product lines for the California market, they could decide to remove recycling symbols for the whole country.

Hocevar of Greenpeace said the California bill is an important step in the right direction and called on other states to adopt similar policies. Environmental advocates have also cheered a separate effort from the California attorney general’s office, which announced in April that it was launching an investigation into the petrochemical industry’s “aggressive campaign to deceive the public” about the feasibility of recycling.

To truly address the plastic pollution crisis, Hocevar and others say that the top priority should be turning off the tap — limiting the production of plastic that ultimately has to be dealt with. In the U.S., perhaps the most promising move in this direction is the proposed Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, a far-reaching federal bill that would ban carryout plastic bags and other single-use plastic products, require plastics companies to launch and finance programs to manage the waste they produce, and place a moratorium on new petrochemical facilities until the EPA can undertake a comprehensive assessment of the industry’s environmental impact.

In the meantime, Donlevy said that companies should stop trying to trick consumers into feeling good about their plastic consumption. “Producers have to realize they’re using plastic for their benefit and for the consumers’ benefit, which is fine,” he said. “But to put a recycling symbol and say that that cottage cheese or cream cheese or sour cream container is recyclable? You don’t need to do that, that’s not a part of the sales pitch. … The only plastics that are really getting recycled in the U.S. are number 1 and number 2 bottles.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Inside the industry push to label your yogurt cup ‘recyclable’ on Oct 13, 2022.

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

The classic Sacred Bones template was really important to the label in the very beginning. I still think it’s incredibly effective, and I always encourage people to use it, especially when it’s a new signing, because it signals to people that this is something to pay attention to, and that was the whole point when starting the label.

Creating this template came from working at record stores for many years and seeing how well that kind of thing works. When you walk into a store and you see a record on the wall, on impulse, you’re like, … “Oh, I don’t know that one. I’ll check it out,” and that was the thinking behind the template. But it got to the point where many of our artists don’t need that anymore and can stand on their own. It’s now more of a choice than something we enforce.

When you talk about it as a choice, it makes me wonder, have you ever heard from artists that including the logo and branding helps them with the creative aspects of putting together the artwork?

I always try to encourage people to get creative with the template, to really try and make it part of the design. My favorites are the records that Institute designed with that in mind. Crystal Stilts did one that was really interesting. There’s a new Thou record coming out later this year that made the template part of the art. Those are the most successful versions of that idea.

As a label head, you’re collaborating with everybody else who works at the label, and you’re collaborating with the artists, and you’ve talked about only signing artists that you personally connect with so that you’re basically working with friends. How do you know someone will be such a good collaborator that they become family? How do you build trust and safety with them?

Just like any relationship, you can’t guarantee that things are going to go smoothly. Just like any relationship, if you treat it with love, kindness, and understanding, you can overcome some dark moments.

We’re happy to be involved as much as the artist wants to be, but we like to step aside and let their process happen. Our involvement comes after the fact. It’s really about trying to take this thing that has been created and plant it and see it grow, and that’s where there needs to be a lot of trust from the artist. They really need to trust us. Being honest and open, and all of the things that make any relationship work, are equally important in a relationship with an artist.

Some of what you said also made me think about the intersection between running a label as a business and as a creative endeavor. If you have any thoughts on that, I’d love to hear them.

It is a business, too. I mean, it has to be. We have a staff who pays their rent every month, and…it’s important that we make money, because we live in a capitalist society and everyone needs to do that. But I think that if we are doing our jobs right, both as a label and an artist making good art we are able to make money. After doing this for 15 years, I think we’ve created enough of a community and gained the trust of music listeners to be successful if we’re doing our job right.

You’ve previously said that most of the time, you do 50/50 splits with artists, and the goal is for artists to survive off their music without having other jobs. Can you talk about the value of being able to focus solely on one’s creative practice, both for you as a label head and for your musicians?

Being able to do art full-time gives you a level of confidence that maybe isn’t always the case when you’re still hustling and working a bunch of different jobs. I think that confidence is such a huge part of any success. If you believe that something is amazing, then it’s likely that everyone else will.

What does success mean to you?

Success is being happy with what you’ve done or what you’ve made. Any other definition doesn’t make sense to me. There’s so much weight on making money, and I don’t think that’s a form of success.

The biggest success for me is when we’re able to help an artist make a living. When an artist is able to make art full-time, to me, that’s success, for sure. That’s the goal, to help lift artists up and give them a platform to do what we believe they can do.

Your work puts you close to art all the time, but I suppose you could argue that running a label is not itself art, or maybe you could argue that it is. I’m wondering where you fall on this.

There are a lot of creative aspects [to running] a label. There’s the creative aspect of, what bands do you work with and how they interact with each other on an aesthetic level for the audience. I think there’s an art to that for sure. I think A&R is a real art. Marketing is an art. It’s a very creative process. It’s just a different form of creativity.

I’m curious how you balance your creative needs as a label head with the need to make money.

I have a lot of fun making merch, and all the branding stuff for the label is really fun for me, and that’s a big creative outlet for me personally. I really enjoy figuring out ways to make cool products for the records, interesting ways to present the music, and interesting events for bands to play. Things of that nature are creatively rewarding for me.

Do you have any guiding philosophies behind that, beyond just the ouroboros and the triangle and the branding?

It’s all about making sure that every little aspect of the finished record is good, really paying attention to the details, making sure the finish on the jacket itself is the right finish for the art, making sure the hype sticker looks good. All those things are really important.

Reissues are a big part of the Sacred Bones story, and the fact that your reissues are primarily from filmmakers like David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, and John Carpenter—whom you could argue are an order of magnitude better-known than even the most prominent Sacred Bones musician—is interesting to me. I’m wondering how working with legends like these helps you refine or expand the creative practice of running the label.

Those experiences have been super important to the growth of the label. Just being associated with artists of that magnitude carries a lot of weight. When people are thinking about working with us, sometimes, they go like, “Wow, David Lynch works with them. They must be pretty good.” I do think it’s really opened some doors for us, and it’s just been a dream for me. These are people that I grew up admiring.

How have you applied the lessons you’ve learned from working alongside these established figures to working with smaller or newer artists, or even lesser-known veterans?

Oftentimes, working with a newer artist can be more difficult than working with a seasoned person who has just done it. The seasoned person has done it all, and they know how it goes, and they’re not really fussed about much. As long as it’s getting done, everything is good, whereas with a newer artist, you have to be much more patient, because this is all brand new to them. Every little thing is new. It’s like anything else. You’re learning something for the first time, so it’s scary. You don’t know if you’re making the right decisions. Once you’ve done it a bunch of times, it’s easier.

I would love to hear more about what it’s like to collaborate with somebody like Lynch or Jarmusch or John Carpenter with whom you can be very hands-off.

For the most part, those guys do the work, they turn it in, and they’re very collaborative on certain aspects. John is very open when it comes to artwork. For the most part, we handle all that stuff in-house and present him with options, and he’s usually quite easy. He’s mostly just interested in making the music, whereas someone like David Lynch really wants to have his touch on everything. He does it all, and we’re there just to support and help him out in whatever way we can. With Sqürl and the Jarmusch projects, it’s somewhere in between. He’s super collaborative. There’s a new record in the works, and we’ve been suggesting the collaborators and producers.

I feel like Sacred Bones is the only label that would put out an album by a baby still inside the womb. How does turning your love for music into a business you own and manage let you pursue unorthodox creative endeavors like that?

That is absolutely a direct benefit of having run a record label and created a platform where people can just experiment. Some things work, and some things don’t work, and it’s okay. It’s cool to be in a position where you can just take chances and let your collaborators run a little wild.

With musicians, if they put out an album people don’t like, it could end their career or at least slow down their momentum, but with a label, I suppose that’s not necessarily true.

Definitely, and I think about that a lot, and I feel really grateful. As a label, you can take chances and put out things that don’t hit the way that you want them to, and you get more chances to do that. It’s much harder for artists to do that. Especially with the press machine and all of that, it can be hard.

You have a cult audience, in a way. Do you find your audience discoursing about what you’re releasing in a way that people discourse about a musician’s latest album or latest single?

I don’t know. In my dreams, I suppose, sure. There are people who…have their Reddit chats or whatever talking about it, but I’m not sure. I don’t search that out. I hope that people are able to see the amount of effort and love that we put into running the record label and get as excited about it as we do. That’s the dream.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Max Freedman.

Climate advocates responded with outrage to the European Parliament's vote Wednesday to classify fossil gas and nuclear projects as "green," an official designation that will allow them to access additional taxpayer subsidies and private capital despite their destructive environmental impacts.

Members of the European Parliament voted 328 to 278 to kill a motion that would have blocked the European Commission's so-called "taxonomy" plan, clearing the way for the proposal to become law as demonstrators inside the parliament building in Strasbourg, France voiced their objections.

"Betrayal!" protesters yelled as an official announced the outcome of the lawmakers' vote.

Politico explains that under the proposed rules, "new gas-fired plants built through 2030 will be recognized as a transitional energy source as long as they replace a coal- or fuel oil-fired plant, switch to a low-carbon gas like hydrogen by 2035, and stay under a maximum emissions cap over 20 years."

"Existing nuclear plants will receive a green label," the outlet added, "if they pledge to switch to so-called 'accident-tolerant fuels' beginning in 2025 and detail plans for final storage of radioactive waste in 2050."

Marie Toussaint, a member of parliament with the Greens, condemned the plan as "an odious greenwashing attempt" and a "failure for Europe and the climate."

In a series of tweets on Wednesday, Toussaint wrote that "with this taxonomy, billions of euros normally devoted to the energy transition will be captured by nuclear energy and gas, dirty, dangerous, and too-expensive energies."

"It's also a huge giveaway for [Russian President Vladimir] Putin," Toussaint argued. "According to Greenpeace E.U., 4 billion euros per year will go to Putin's Russia via new gas projects, for a total of 32 billion euros by 2030."

Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, a co-founder of Progressive International, offered a similar assessment in a video posted to social media Wednesday:

Almost immediately following Wednesday's vote, Greenpeace E.U. vowed to take legal action against the European Commission over the taxonomy, arguing that "it's dirty politics and it's an outrageous outcome to label gas and nuclear as green and keep more money flowing to Putin's war chest."

"The E.U. Commission's shameful backroom dealing on behalf of the fossil fuel and nuclear industries won't help," said Ariadna Rodrigo, Greenpeace E.U.'s sustainable finance campaigner. "We're inspired by the climate activists here in Strasbourg this week and are confident that the courts will strike down this politically motivated greenwashing as clearly in breach of E.U. law."

As the New York Times notes, a "green" label for gas and nuclear projects "provides financial incentives for European countries and companies to invest in those energy sources, and, critics say, would delay fully switching to renewable sources that are much better for the environment, such as wind and solar energy."

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg was among those expressing that concern Wednesday, warning that the European Commission rules "will delay a desperately needed real sustainable transition and deepen our dependency on Russian fuels."

"The hypocrisy is striking," she added, "but unfortunately not surprising."

The Not My Taxonomy campaign, which mobilized against the European Commission proposal, said that Wednesday's vote "is not the end."

"This is a step backwards in the fight against greenwashing and a step away from the sustainable future the E.U. has promised, but we are not defeated," the campaigners said. "The movement will continue to fight for our collective future."

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

I started to really think about it and learn more in hindsight in the process of writing this book. But before that, as a kid, I didn’t connect it much to the fact that I played drums from birth. My uncle bought me a drum set when I was two…in my head, I was always like, “Well, my father’s a musician, so it makes sense that I’m into music and I play music,”…but I paid a lot less attention to the fact that my mom is a dancer who was super into music, who played music around me constantly. Every memory I have, there’s music playing, and she would talk about what it is and why it’s important and all that stuff.

It sounds like your family was taking you to do things they were interested in more than trying to force a creative practice on you.

Right, totally, yeah. It wasn’t like, “Go do [something]”…to the degree that, by the time I decided to take lessons when I was about 10, it was really hard because all I’d done was spend eight years playing along to records and doing what I wanted with zero discipline or practice. To suddenly have someone be like, “Here’s how you play these rudiments and parallels,” I was just like, “I don’t even know what you’re talking about, and why would I want to do that? I can already play along with my Def Leppard songs.” It almost inhibited any kind of traditional disciplined practice. I prefer the way that it happened, but it made it really hard. I was never good at lessons, and [I’m] still scared of them.

How has your perspective on lessons influenced your creative practice?

In a good way. My writing is a very new thing. I loved writing in college but never took it that seriously. Five or six years ago, I just got into it and thought, “Well, I went to college, but I don’t have any formal training per se. I took some writing classes, but I have thoughts and stories. And I just want to start writing them for some reason.” There was some internal pull that just said, “It’s time to start doing this.” It might have just been that I was old enough and could remember everything so well still and liked telling stories. I just started doing it for no reason and with no goal.

It felt so safe to just type whatever I wanted. I wasn’t trying to publish anything. No one knew I was doing it. I was just doing it for myself. There’s this incredible safety and comfort in that. It really allowed me to take risks and write about, and think about, things that were harder than if someone had said, “Hey, will you write something and we’re going to publish it.” There’s no way I would’ve immediately jumped into the things that I’m into now. It took these kinds of steps. I think that sort of undisciplined, figure it out, trust yourself thing that I had with music applied directly to the writing practice as well.

What are some of the disadvantages of going into writing without any formal training?

The disadvantage, of course, is all the self-doubt that I think everyone experiences…working on something, writing something for two hours and being like, “This is shit, it’s written like shit, this story is shit, who would ever want to read this? I don’t even want to read this.” That feeling, that’s really hard.

I know everybody has that experience, but a lot of people who have that experience can then talk to their writer friend, their former teacher, their mentor, their boss or whatever, and say, “Hey, I’ve been working on this thing. It’s been really hard. What do you do when you get in this situation?” And because I was sort of doing it—I don’t want to say in secret, because it wasn’t in secret, but on my own—I didn’t have the confidence to tell people, even my friends, “Hey, I’ve been writing some stuff.” So there’s no one to look to in those situations, except that I was in my 40s and had been through that with music and work and was at least able to apply other situations to that.

It’s good when that happens and I go away and come back or approach it from a different angle. … It would’ve been nice to have people to talk to about it, but now thinking about it, I absolutely did have those people. I was just afraid to introduce the fact that I was working on it.

On a more practical level, I’m curious how you balance managing a prominent label group [Beggars Group US] with occasionally writing.

In January, I left 4AD and I now run Beggars US. It was crazy timing. It was the same week I announced the book. For a while, [balancing my job and writing] was absolutely no problem because I would just write [on] mornings and weekends. It was a hobby. It was something I did in my free time.

Once I started to publish some things, I started to think about it more. It didn’t start to take any more time, and I would publish, in a great year, four or five pieces. It wasn’t taking a ton of time. It was taking a lot of my free time because I loved it, but it wasn’t taking away from anything else in my life. But that’s when I started to at least think, “I wonder what my coworkers think. I wonder what the bands I work with think now,” especially when it’s published in Pitchfork.

I would worry that people are going to see me sort of invading a world that I’m not supposed to be on that side of, writing about music. And I don’t write about that much music, and even the times I have, I still don’t feel like that’s what I’m doing. I wrote a Pitchfork Sunday review for a Bad Brains album, which is very much an album review, but to me, it was still more about the context of that album and, in a way, how it applied to my life and what it did for me. It’s still a bit more memoir-ish than music reporting. But I definitely started to think about that [sense of invading a world], but everyone was really supportive and said nice things. There’s never [been] a moment where people thought or said, “What are you doing? This is getting in the way.”

I’ve also been careful to not talk about or write about work stuff, partially because it’s not interesting to me in that way. I love my job and I love the work, but I don’t want to write about streaming rates and profit-share deals with bands.

I’m wondering if all the numbers and whatnot are less interesting to you because you have a background as a musician yourself.

Sort of. … I’ve always been interested in the business part, and there are a lot of weird little parts in the book about this where I didn’t realize it while it was happening. When I was seven years old, I tried to put on a show with my friends in our living room, and we charged a dollar, and at the end, we had $10, and we sat around and we split the money. I put up posters for the show the day before because I knew that’s how you would get people to come. I’m not sure where or how I figured out how to do that when I was seven, but I knew that was a thing to do, and it worked, and then we split the money and it felt great. So it wasn’t just, “Ah, I just played drums. That was so fun.” I always recognize the two sides to it. I’m still in the same place.

I’m curious if you could talk about the creative aspects of running a label.

One of the 4AD band managers who I talk to all the time, who I consider a friend, has been very interested in the book. We were just talking anecdotally about all this stuff, and I was telling him, “This is just so stressful, and I wonder if I’m going to get this review or be able to do this thing, and I’m thinking about it. It’s keeping me up at night.”

He was like, “This is great. Everyone who works in the music business or on the business side of any creative business should have to do some kind of creative endeavor on their own every 10 years…just to learn or to remember…what it [feels] like to be in a band.” He said, “Everyone should have to feel like you do, to be more sympathetic or empathetic to understand more what’s going on in these artists’ heads every day.” Which I think is true. And it’s definitely not something I’ve lost sight of, but it’s something I feel a lot more connected to right now. It’s so similar.

The funnest stuff, the best album campaigns come from when an artist has an idea and we bring in people and ideas, try to improve it, spend money on it, bring in partners, and try to amplify the artist’s vision. That’s what we’re really good at. And I think that’s a big part of what labels, whether they’re one-person operations or massive major labels, should do.

I love being in the room when those things are happening. My favorite thing is actually contributing to what an artist wants to do and improving the idea or building on it, which always feels creative to me. The best, most exciting parts are when there are four or 10 or 20 of us in the room and an idea happens, and someone else adds to it, and someone else adds to it, and then it changes. And then suddenly, in five minutes, there’s actually this thing, and we do it, and it’s really cool. Those are the times that are like, alright, that’s why we’re here. That’s why there’s a benefit to this group of people and the setup. And that’s really exciting.

I take it that you aren’t really doing much of your own music these days, whether writing music or playing music. I’m curious how you know when a creative endeavor has run its course with you.

There was definitely a moment. I was in a band called The Long Winters when I lived in Seattle. I joined the band in 2005. We put out an album in 2006. That band toured a lot, especially for guys in our 30s, which seemed old at the time. We toured for two big U.S. tours, two big European tours, and lots of other one-offs and fly-outs. And then, that was kind of winding down, and we were talking about making a new album.

That’s when I was thinking about moving to New York, because I was really having fun and success with my own label, The Control Group, which I started in 2000. … [When I chose to focus on the label], it wasn’t, “I’m quitting playing music,” but it was definitely, “I’m setting myself up to finally focus 100% on the business side.” It wasn’t actually quitting music in my head, but it was definitely taking a year off, establishing the business. Even though I wasn’t quitting music, it was a conscious moment to finally, after juggling these three things, to say, “This is the one I’m working on. This is the one I’m choosing.” The creative pursuit that’s been calling my name since that show, when I was seven years old, it was finally time to focus on that part of it.

It really wasn’t, “I’m sick of touring or sick of being in the band,” because I was sick of that stuff when I was 22, but you just keep doing it because it’s awesome. And the hard parts are brutal every day. It’s so terrible, but it’s also so great and so fun. And when you’re not doing it, you miss it. And when you’re doing it, you kind of hate it. I don’t think it was, “I’m at an age where I need to stop doing this.” It was, “I’m at an age where I need to start doing the other thing and take it more seriously if I want this to be part of it.”

That was everything I wanted to ask you, but if you had anything you forgot to say to any of the questions earlier that’s been in your head like, “I need to get this out,” I’ll leave the floor open to you.

I still want to start a band. I think about it all the time. I don’t actually want to do it, but I think about it all the time. And it makes me happy and excited that, now that I’m 50 and have a book coming out and I’m the president of a record company, I still want to do the thing that got me excited about all of it in the first place because that’s still really fun. And I miss playing drums every day.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Max Freedman.

Jessica Reznicek sits at the entrance to the drilling site in Sandusky, Iowa, where the Dakota Access pipeline goes under the Mississippi River on Aug. 10, 2016.

Photo: Courtesy of Joshua Smith

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Determinations over which actions are labeled “terrorism” are always political.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Natasha Lennard.

NBC (4/6/22) referred to making charges against Russia for which there is “no evidence” as having “blunted and defused the disinformation weaponry of the Kremlin.”

Disinformation has become a central tool in the United States and Russia’s expanding information war. US officials have openly admitted to “using information as a weapon even when the confidence and accuracy of the information wasn’t high,” with corporate media eager to assist Washington in its strategy to “pre-empt and disrupt the Kremlin’s tactics, complicate its military campaign” (NBC, 4/6/22).

In defense of the US narrative, corporate media have increasingly taken to branding realities inconvenient to US information goals as “disinformation” spread by Russia or its proxies.

The New York Times (1/25/22) reported that Russian disinformation doesn’t only take the form of patently false assertions, but also those which are “true but tangential to current events”—a convenient definition, in that it allows accurate facts to be dismissed as “disinformation.” But who determines what is “tangential” and what is relevant, and what are the guiding principles to make such a determination? In this assessment, Western audiences are too fickle to be trusted with making up their own mind.

There’s no denying that Russia’s disinformation campaign is key to justifying its war on Ukraine. But instead of uncritically outsourcing these decisions to Western intelligence officials and weapons manufacturers, and as a result erasing realities key to a political settlement, the media’s ultimate guiding principle for what information is “tangential” should be whether it is relevant to preventing the further suffering of Ukrainian civilians—and reducing tensions between the world’s two largest nuclear powers.

For Western audiences, and US citizens in particular, labeling or otherwise marginalizing inconvenient realities as “disinformation” prevents a clear understanding of how their government helped escalate tensions in the region, continues to obstruct the possibility of peace talks, and is prepared to, as retired senior US diplomat Chas Freeman describes it, “fight to the last Ukrainian” in a bid to weaken Russia.

Coup ‘conspiracy theory’

The New York Times (4/11/22) drew a red line through Benjamin Norton for advancing the “conspiracy theory” that  “US officials had installed the leaders of the current Ukrainian government.” Eight years ago, the Times (2/6/14) reported as straight news the fact that US “diplomats candidly discussed the composition of a possible new government to replace the pro-Russian cabinet of Ukraine’s president.”

For example, the New York Times (4/11/22) claimed that US support for the 2014 “Maidan Revolution” that ousted Ukraine’s democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych was a “conspiracy theory” being peddled by the Chinese government in support of Russia. The article featured an image with a red line crossing out the face of journalist Benjamin Norton, who was appearing on a Chinese news channel to discuss how the US helped orchestrate the coup. (Norton wrote for FAIR.org frequently from 2015–18.) The evidence he presented—a leaked call initially reported by the BBC in which then–State Department official Victoria Nuland appears to select opposition leader Arseniy Yatsenyuk to be Ukraine’s new prime minister—is something, he noted, that the Times itself has reported on multiple times (2/6/14, 2/7/14).

Not having been asked for comment by the Times, Norton responded in a piece of his own (Multipolarista, 4/14/22), claiming that the newspaper was “acting as a tool of US government information warfare.”

Beyond Nuland’s apparent coup-plotting, the US campaign to destabilize Ukraine stretched back over a decade. Seeking to isolate Russia and open up Ukraine to Western capital, the US had long been “fueling anti-government sentiment through mechanisms like USAID and National Endowment for Democracy (NED)” (FAIR.org, 1/28/22). High-profile US officials like Sen. John McCain even went so far as to rally protesters in the midst of the Maidan uprising.

In the wake of the far right–led and constitutionally dubious overthrow, Russia illegally annexed the Crimean Peninsula and supported a secession movement in the eastern Donbass region, prompting a repressive response from Ukraine’s new US-backed government. Eight years later, the civil war has killed more than 14,000. Of those deaths, 3,400 were civilian casualties, which were disproportionately in separatist-controlled territories, UN data shows. Opinions on remaining in Ukraine vary within the Donbass.

When the Times covered the Russian annexation of Crimea, it acknowledged that the predominantly ethnic Russian population there viewed “the Ukrainian government installed after the ouster last weekend of Mr. Yanukovych as the illegitimate result of a fascist coup.” But now the newspaper of record is using allegations of disinformation to change the record.

To discredit evidence of US involvement in Ukraine’s 2014 regime change hides crucial facts that could potentially support a political solution to this crisis. When the crisis is reduced merely to the context of Russian aggression, a peace deal that includes, for example, a referendum on increased autonomy for the Donbass seems like an outrageous thing for Ukraine to have to agree to. But in the context of a civil war brought on by a US-backed coup—a context the Times is eager to erase—it may appear a more palatable solution.

More broadly, Western audiences that are aware of their own government’s role in sparking tensions may have more skepticism of Washington’s aims and an increased appetite for peace negotiations.

Normalizing neo-Nazis

In 2018, the Atlantic Council (6/20/18) wrote that the Ukraine government “tacitly accepting or even encouraging the increasing lawlessness of far-right groups” “sounds like the stuff of Kremlin propaganda, but it’s not.”

The outsized influence of neo-Nazi groups in Ukrainian society (Human Rights Watch, 6/14/18)—including the the Azov Regiment, the explicitly neo-Nazi branch of Ukraine’s National Guard—is another fact that has been dismissed as disinformation.

Western outlets once understood far-right extremism as a festering issue (Haaretz, 12/27/18) that Ukraine’s government “underplayed” (BBC, 12/13/14). In a piece called “Ukraine’s Got a Real Problem with Far-Right Violence (and No, RT Didn’t Write This Headline),” the Atlantic Council (UkraineAlert, 6/20/18) wrote:

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Freedom House and Front Line Defenders warned in a letter that radical groups acting under “a veneer of patriotism” and “traditional values” were allowed to operate under an “atmosphere of near total impunity that cannot but embolden these groups to commit more attacks.”

To be clear, far-right parties like Svoboda perform poorly in Ukraine’s polls and elections, and Ukrainians evince no desire to be ruled by them. But this argument is a bit of “red herring.” It’s not extremists’ electoral prospects that should concern Ukraine’s friends, but rather the state’s unwillingness or inability to confront violent groups and end their impunity.

Three years later, the Atlantic Council (6/19/21) was dismissing “the idea of Ukraine as a hotbed of right-wing extremism” as “rooted in Soviet-era propaganda.”

But now Western media attempt to diminish those groups’ significance, arguing that singling out a vocal but insignificant far right only benefits Russia’s disinformation campaign (New Statesman, 4/12/22). Almost exactly three years after warning about Ukraine’s “real problem” with the far right, the Atlantic Council (UkraineAlert, 6/19/21) ran a piece entitled “The Dangers of Echoing Russian Disinformation on Ukraine,” in which it seemingly forgot that arguments about the electoral marginalization of Ukraine’s right wing are a “red herring”:

In reality, Ukraine’s nationalist parties enjoy less support than similar political parties in a host of EU member states. Notably, in the two Ukrainian parliamentary elections held since the outbreak of hostilities with Russia in 2014, nationalist parties have failed miserably and fallen short of the 5% threshold to enter Ukrainian parliament.

‘Lead[ing] the white races’

Contrary to the Financial Times’ headline (3/29/22), the accompanying article seems to encourage readers to mistake Nazism for patriotism.

Russian propaganda does overstate the power of Nazi elements in Ukraine’s government—which it refers to as “fascist”—to justify its illegal aggression, but seizing on this propaganda to in turn downplay the influence and radicalism of these elements (e.g., USA Today, 3/30/22; Welt, 4/22/22) only prevents an important debate on how prolonged US and NATO military aid may empower these groups.

The Financial Times (3/29/22) and London Times (3/30/22) attempted to rehabilitate the Azov regiment’s reputation, using the disinformation label to downplay the influence of extremism in the national guard unit. Quoting Azov’s founder Andriy Biletsky as well as an unnamed Azov commander, the Financial Times cast Azov’s members as “patriots” who “shrug off the neo-Nazi label as ‘Russian propaganda.’” Alex Kovzhun, a “consultant” who helped draft the political program of the National Corps, Azov’s political wing, added a lighthearted human interest perspective, saying Azov was “made up of historians, football hooligans and men with military experience.”

That the Financial Times would take Biletsky at his word on the issue of Azov’s Nazi-free character, a man who once declared that the National Corps would “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade…against Semite-led Untermenschen [subhumans]” (Guardian, 3/13/18), is a prime example of how Western media have engaged in information war at the expense of their most basic journalistic duties and ethics.

Azov has opened its ranks to a flood of volunteers, the Financial Times continued, diluting its connection to Ukraine’s far-right movement, a movement that has “never proved popular at the ballot box” anyways. BBC (3/26/22) also cited electoral marginalization in its dismissal of claims about Ukraine’s far right as “a mix of falsehoods and distortions.” Putin’s distortions require debunking, but neither outlet acknowledged that these groups’ outsized influence comes more from their capacity for political violence than from their electoral participation (Hromadske, 10/13/16; Responsible Statecraft, 3/25/22).

London Times (3/30/22): You’d have to live in a “warped, strange world” to think that these gentlemen wearing SS-derived shoulder patches were Nazis.

In the London Times piece, Azov commander Yevgenii Vradnik dismissed the neo-Nazi characterization as Russian disinformation: “Perhaps [Putin] really believes it,” as he “lives in a strange, warped world. We are patriots but we are not Nazis.” Sure, the article reports, “Azov has its fair share of football hooligans and ultranationalists,” but it also includes “scholars like Zaikovsky, who worked as a translator and book editor.”

To support such “patriots,” the West should fulfill their “urgent plea” for more weapons. “To retake our regions, we need vehicle-mounted anti-aircraft weapons from NATO,” Vradnik said. Thus Western media use the “Russian disinformation” label to not only downplay the threat of Ukraine’s far right, but even to encourage the West to arm them.

Responsible Statecraft (3/25/22) pushed back on the media’s dismissiveness, warning that “Russian propaganda has colossally exaggerated the contemporary strength of Ukrainian extreme nationalist groups,” but

because these groups have been integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard yet retain their autonomous identities and command structures, over the course of an extended war they could amass a formidable fifth column that would radicalize Ukraine’s postwar political dynamic.

To ignore the fact that prolonged military aid could reshape Ukraine’s politics in favor of neo-Nazi groups prevents an understanding of the threats posed to Ukrainian democracy and civil society.

Shielding NATO from blame

Ilya Yaboklov (New York Times, 4/25/22): “NATO is the subject of some of the regime’s most persistent conspiracy theories, which see the organization’s hand behind popular uprisings around the world.”

Much like with the Maidan coup, the corporate media’s insistence on viewing Russian aggression as unconnected to US imperial expansion has led it to cast any blame placed on NATO policy as Russian disinformation.

In “The Five Conspiracy Theories That Putin Has Weaponized,” New York Times (4/25/22), historian and author Ilya Yaboklov listed the Kremlin’s most prominent “disinformation” narratives. High on his list was the idea that “NATO has turned Ukraine into a military camp.”

Without mentioning that NATO, a remnant of the Cold War, is explicitly hostile to Russia, the Times piece portrayed Putin’s disdain for NATO as a paranoia that is convenient for Russian propaganda:

NATO is Mr. Putin’s worst nightmare: Its military operations in Serbia, Iraq and Libya have planted the fear that Russia will be the military alliance’s next target. It’s also a convenient boogeyman that animates the anti-Western element of Mr. Putin’s electorate. In his rhetoric, NATO is synonymous with the United States, the military hand of “the collective West” that will suffocate Russia whenever it becomes weak.

The New York Times is not the only outlet to dismiss claims that NATO’s militarization of Ukraine has contributed to regional tensions. Jessica Brandt of the Brookings Institute claimed on CNN Newsroom (4/8/22): “There’s two places where I have seen China carry Russia’s water. The first is, starting long before the invasion, casting blame at the foot of the United States and NATO.” The Washington Post editorial board (4/11/22) argued much to the same effect that Chinese “disinformation” included arguing “NATO is to blame for the fighting.” Newsweek (4/13/22) stated that Chinese disinformation “blames the US military/industrial complex for the chaos in Ukraine and other parts of the world,” and falsely claims that “Washington ‘squeezed Russia’s security space.’”

Characterizing claims that NATO’s militarization of Russia’s neighbors was a hostile act as “paranoia” or “disinformation” ignores the decades of warnings from top US diplomats and anti-war dissidents alike that NATO expansionism into former Warsaw Pact countries would lead to conflict with Russia.

Jack F. Matlock Jr, the former ambassador to the USSR warned the US Senate as early as 1997 that NATO expansion would threaten a renewal of Cold War hostilities (Responsible Statecraft, 2/15/22):

I consider the administration’s recommendation to take new members into NATO at this time misguided. If it should be approved by the United States Senate, it may well go down in history as the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War. Far from improving the security of the United States, its Allies, and the nations that wish to enter the Alliance, it could well encourage a chain of events that could produce the most serious security threat to this nation since the Soviet Union collapsed.

Weakening Russia

The US War College’s John Deni (Foreign Policy, 5/4/22) argues that NATO expansion is not to blame for Russian insecurity, because “over the centuries…Russia has experienced military invasions across every frontier,” and so it was going to “demonize the West” regardless.

These “disinformation” claims also ignore the more contemporary evidence that Western officials have an explicit agenda of weakening Russia and even ending the Putin regime. According to Ukrainska Pravda (5/5/22; Intercept, 5/10/22), in his recent trip to Kyiv, UK prime minister Boris Johnson told Volodymyr Zelensky that regardless of a peace agreement being reached between Ukraine and Russia, the United States would remain intent on confronting Russia.

The evidence doesn’t stop there. In the past months, Joe Biden let slip his desire that Putin “cannot remain in power,” and US officials’ have become more open about their objectives to weaken Russia (Democracy Now!, 5/9/22; Wall Street Journal, 4/25/22). Corporate media have cheered on these developments, running op-eds in support of policies that go beyond a defense of Ukraine to an attack on Russia (Foreign Policy, 5/4/22; Washington Post, 4/28/22), even expressing hope for a “palace coup” there (The Lead, 4/19/22; CNN Newsroom, 3/4/22).

As famed dissident Noam Chomsky said in a discussion with the Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill (4/14/22):

We can see that our explicit policy—explicit—is rejection of any form of negotiations. The explicit policy goes way back, but it was given a definitive form in September 2021 in the September 1 joint policy statement that was then reiterated and expanded in the November 10 charter of agreement….

What it says is it calls for Ukraine to move towards what they called an enhanced program for entering NATO, which kills negotiations.

When the media denies NATO’s culpability in stoking the flames of war in Ukraine, Americans are left unaware of their most effective tool in preventing further catastrophe: pressuring their own government to stop undermining negotiations and to join the negotiating table. Dismissing these realities threatens to prolong the war in Ukraine indefinitely.

Squelching dissent

Alan MacLeod (Mint Press, 4/25/22): “These new rules will not be applied to corporate media downplaying or justifying US aggression abroad, denying American war crimes, or blaming oppressed peoples…for their own condition, but instead will be used as excuses to derank, demote, delist or even delete voices critical of war and imperialism.”

As the Biden administration launches a new Disinformation Governance Board aimed at policing online discourse, it is clear that the trend of silencing those who speak out against official US narratives is going to get worse.

Outlets like Russia Today, MintPress News and Consortium News have been banned or demonetized by platforms like Google and its subsidiary YouTube, or services like PayPal. MintPress News (4/25/22) reported YouTube had “permanently banned more than a thousand channels and 15,000 videos,” on the grounds that they were “denying, minimizing or trivializing well-documented violent events.” At the same time, platforms are loosening the restrictions on praising Ukraine’s far right or calling for the death of Russians (Reuters, 3/11/22). These policies of asymmetric censorship aid US propaganda and squelch dissent.

After receiving a barrage of complaints from the outlet’s supporters, PayPal seemingly reversed its ban of Consortium News’ account, only to state later on that this reversal was “mistaken,” and that Consortium was in fact permanently banned. The outlet’s editor-in-chief Joe Lauria (5/4/22) responded to PayPal’s ban:

Given the political climate it is reasonable to conclude that PayPal was reacting to Consortium News’ coverage of the war in Ukraine, which is not in line with the dominant narrative that is being increasingly enforced.

As Western outlets embrace the framing of a new Cold War, so too have they embraced the Cold War’s McCarthyite tactics that rooted out dissent in the United States. With great-power conflict on the rise, it is all the more important that US audiences understand the media’s increasing repression of debate in defense of the “dominant narrative.” In the words of Chomsky:

There’s a long record in the United States of censorship, not official censorship, just devices, to make sure that, what intellectuals call the “bewildered herd,” the “rabble,” the population, don’t get misled. You have to control them. And that’s happening right now.

The post ‘Disinformation’ Label Serves to Marginalize Crucial Ukraine Facts appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Luca GoldMansour.

On March 3, the Savetski District Court in Minsk sentenced Hruzdzilovich to a year and a half in prison for alleged participation in three protests in 2020, according to the Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ), an independent trade and advocacy group, and a report by Radio Svaboda.

Hruzdzilovich denied the charges, saying he was working as an accredited correspondent with Radio Svaboda and wearing a press jacket during the first protest, according to those reports. After authorities revoked the accreditation of Radio Svaboda journalists in August 2020, he covered the other two protests for independent newspaper Narodnaya Volya, as the newspaper’s chief editor testified in court.

Authorities in Belarus launched an unprecedented wave of repression against media outlets and journalists following popular protests against the disputed presidential election in August 2020, as CPJ has documented. The designations of DW and Regionalnaya Gazeta as extremist takes the number of media outlets labelled as such to 20, which include major outlets such as Radio Svaboda, Belarus’s largest news agency BelaPAN, the country’s most popular news website Tut.by and its mirror site Zerkalo.io, and broadcasters Belsat and Euroradio, according to a list sent to CPJ by BAJ and CPJ reporting.

“The label ‘extremist’ in Belarus has long become a synonym for anyone, especially media outlets, who dares to offer an independent picture of the violence President Aleksandr Lukashenko has unleashed against his own people over the past 18 months,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Authorities in Belarus must immediately remove the work of Deutsche Welle, Regiyanalnaya Gazeta, Yury Dud, and all other news outlets from their register of extremist materials and stop using the country’s extremism legislation to silence independent journalism.”

“We call on Belarusian authorities to immediately release journalist Aleh Hruzdzilovich, drop all charges again him, and stop prosecuting members of the press for their coverage of important news events,” Said added.

On January 20, a court in the Maladzechna district near the Belarusian capital Minsk declared the website and Telegram channel of local independent news outlet Regiyanalnaya Gazeta extremist, according to news reports and a report by BAJ, and on February 24, the court declared 15 of the outlet’s articles from 2020 extremist, the BAJ report stated.

Regiyanalnaya Gazeta closely covered the 2020 protests and subsequent trials of protesters in the Maladzechna district and seven other nearby districts, according to an interview with the outlet’s chief editor Alyaksandr Mantsevich by Radio Svaboda from 2021. CPJ was unable to open Regiyanalnaya Gazeta’s website.

On Wednesday, March 9, the Central District Court in Minsk declared all “information products” by DW extremist, effectively banning the broadcaster in the country, according to news reports and a Telegram announcement by the Main Directorate for Combatting Organized Crime and Corruption (MDCOCC) of the Interior Ministry of Belarus, on whose application the case was heard.

Under the ruling, all media produced by DW and its Belarusian Telegram channel and chat group, including the “DW” logo, are to be recognized as “extremist,” these reports stated. DW has been blocked in Belarus since October 2021, according to those news reports.

Anyone convicted of producing, storing, or spreading materials designated extremist can be fined up to 960 rubles (US$290) or detained for up to 15 days, according to the administrative code of Belarus; legal entities will be subject to a fine of up to 16,000 rubles (US$4,844) for the same offenses.

Despite the designation, DW intends to continue its reporting on Belarus as normal, according to an announcement on the broadcaster’s Belarusian Telegram channel. CPJ emailed DW for comment but did not receive a reply.

In a statement released Thursday, March 10, the broadcaster’s Director General Peter Limbourg denounced the designations, describing them as “cheap tricks to create pseudo-legal grounds to take action against people who make use of their right to free speech,” adding that the criminalization of the DW logo “proves how nervous the regime [in Belarus] is.”

As in previous such instances, the MDCOCC announcement about DW warned of prosecution even for subscribing to Telegram channels and chats of outlets designated as extremist. Aleh Aheyeu, Deputy Director of BAJ, told CPJ by messaging app that he is not aware of anyone who has been prosecuted for this offense alone; however, any material downloaded, even automatically, from apps such as Telegram could be prosecuted as storing extremist material, according to a report on the association’s website.

Separately, the MDCOCC announced Thursday, March 10, that the Central District Court had declared three videos published by popular Russian blogger Yury Dud, who has almost 10 million subscribers on his YouTube channel vDud, as extremist. The videos, which have over 30 million views, report on a Belarusian stand-up comic who fled the country and performs anti-Lukashenko material, ordinary Belarusians who have also been forced to flee, and the Telegram channel NEXTA, whose founder Raman Pratasevich was arrested after Belarusian authorities downed a commercial flight specifically to detain him.

CPJ called the Ministry of Interior’s press service for comment, but no one answered.

On June 19, 2021, law enforcement officers raided Regiyanalnaya Gazeta’s office and Mantsevich’s home, confiscating equipment, following which the outlet ceased publication in paper format, according to reports and BAJ.

Authorities previously jailed Hruzdzilovich for 15 days in 2020 for participating in another protest that he was covering as a journalist and detained him for 10 days without charge following a raid on Radio Svaboda’s Minsk office in July 2021, the Radio Svaboda report stated.

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

Despite promising to fight climate misinformation, Facebook is failing to flag over half of the misleading articles shared by prominent climate change deniers, according to a new analysis out Wednesday.

"Big Tech has friended Big Oil and does its dirty work of enabling the spread of disinformation about climate science."

Facebook announced last year that it would begin attaching "informational labels" to some posts about climate change, directing users to the platform's new "Climate Science Information Center."

But researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) found that more often than not, Facebook is failing to label content from the leading publishers of climate misinformation, echoing previous studies of the social media giant's massive failure to combat climate lies.

In a November report titled The Toxic Ten, CCDH identified the top 10 digital publishers of misinformation about the life-threatening reality of the fossil fuel-driven planetary emergency, which includes Breitbart, the Federalist Papers, Daily Wire, and Russian state media. These 10 outlets alone are responsible for nearly 70% of Facebook interactions with climate denial articles.

Using the social analytics tool NewsWhip, CCDH researchers analyzed 184 articles containing climate denial published by the "toxic 10" since May 19, 2021, when Facebook said that it would step up its efforts to fight climate misinformation. This sample of articles received more than one million likes, comments, or shares on Facebook.

Then, using the CrowdTangle tool provided by Meta—the parent company of Facebook and Instagram—researchers identified the top public Facebook post for each of the 184 articles under scrutiny, documented whether it had been given an "informational label," and recorded the number of interactions it had accumulated.

According to CCDH, "50.5% (93) of the most popular posts associated with articles in the sample carried no information label. The 93 articles without labels had 541,877 Facebook interactions, equating to 53% of total interactions with articles in the sample."

Posts that were not flagged included:

• A Breitbart article claiming that global warming is a "hoax";

• A Washington Times article claiming that "Covid-19 and climate change are being used to steal our liberties";

• A NewsBusters article referring to so-called "alarmist climate propaganda";

• A Daily Wire article claiming "the Left Is Spreading Global Warming Alarmism"; and

• A Breitbart article branding a leading climate scientist a "climate alarmist."

"By failing to do even the bare minimum to address the spread of climate denial information, Meta is exacerbating the climate crisis," CCDH executive director Imran Ahmed said in a statement. "Climate change denial—designed to fracture our resolve and impede meaningful action to mitigate climate change—flows unabated on Facebook and Instagram."

"Meta keeps claiming it cares about climate change but they have failed to stop the spread of misinformation about climate change on their platform," said Ahmed. "They have failed even to consistently apply measures that they themselves admit are of limited efficacy, such as labeling."

In a video shared on Twitter, CCDH drew attention to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's stated approach to curbing misinformation and exposed its inadequacy.

"We divide the misinformation into things that could cause imminent physical harm, and we take down that content," said Zuckerberg. "And then other misinformation or things that are false but may not lead to imminent physical harm, we label and reduce their distribution, but leave them up."

"Facebook should not be trusted and must be regulated, especially as they attempt to escape to the metaverse."

Not only did Zuckerberg lie about labeling and limiting the spread of climate denial articles, said CCDH, but an estimated 150,000 people die each year as a result of the climate crisis, according to the World Health Organization—a clear refutation of Facebook's attempt to classify climate misinformation as something that doesn't jeopardize physical well-being and thus warrant swift removal.

"The price of Mark Zuckerberg's failure to deal with his platforms' pollution of the information ecosystem," said Ahmed, "is catastrophic damage to our physical ecosystem—including climate change, forced migration, drought, and famine."

Emphasizing that "Facebook's toxic algorithms need to be reined in," Alaphia Zoyab, director of Reset, a progressive digital media reform group, said that CCDH's latest research "shows how Big Tech has friended Big Oil and does its dirty work of enabling the spread of disinformation about climate science."

Michael Khoo, co-chair of the Climate Disinformation Coalition at Friends of the Earth, noted that "Facebook has consistently shown they can't be trusted. Facebook needs to open the books and lawmakers must step in to require full transparency from them and other social media platforms."

Praising CCDH's "strong research" and connecting it to the exposés of whistleblower Frances Haugen and others, Khoo said that "Facebook will say one thing and yet do another."

"Facebook," he added, "should not be trusted and must be regulated, especially as they attempt to escape to the metaverse."

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

It happens today, too, even though the World Health Organization advises against naming pathogens for places to “minimize unnecessary negative effects on nations, economies and people.” By Feb. 11, 2020, the WHO had announced that the official name for the novel coronavirus just starting its spread around the world would be severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 – or SARS-CoV-2. The illness it caused would be called COVID-19, short for Coronavirus Disease of 2019.

Yet some politicians, conservative journalists and otherspersisted in calling the COVID-19 virus the “Chinese virus,” or some variant of this term, such as the “China virus,” “Wuhan virus” (after the Chinese city that first reported the virus), “Chinese flu” and “Kung flu.”

Does it matter?

Hateful behavior against Asians in the U.S. and many other countries rose after the start of the pandemic. According to the FBI, anti-Asian hate crimes increased by 73% in 2020.

Social scientists like me are investigating the kinds of repercussions racialized framing – like calling the coronavirus “Chinese” – can have.

Reading just one article had an impact

The way media frame, depict and describe events can have a profound influence on the public’s perception of those events. Researchers have found that audiences are prone to interpret media stories in the context of their biases, especially in relation to racial groups.

My colleagues Lanier Frush Holt, Sophie Kjærvik and I found that simply reading one media article calling the coronavirus the “Chinese virus” made people more likely to blame China for the pandemic.

We randomly split a diverse sample of 614 American adults into two groups. One read a fabricated news article that labeled the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus.” The other read an identical article except for labeling the coronavirus as the “COVID-19 virus.”

There were important differences in how the articles were perceived. For instance, Democrats and more liberal individuals judged the “Chinese virus” article much more negatively than did Republicans and more conservative individuals. But overall, we found that participants who read the “Chinese virus” article were 8.5% more likely to agree with the statement “China is responsible for the current global pandemic” than were those who read the “COVID-19 virus” article.

The effect of reading that one article with “Chinese virus” language was not huge, and we wouldn’t expect it to be. The attitudes and beliefs that people brought with them before they read the story had a greater influence on their likelihood to blame China for the pandemic than did the framing language. But the fact that reading a single “Chinese virus” article did have an impact on readers with a range of political leanings shows the power of labeling a disease for a geographic region.

Naming does the framing

Other researchers have also found connections between the “Chinese virus” label and anti-Asian sentiments.

One study linked then-president Donald Trump’s tweet on March 16, 2020, that referred to “the Chinese Virus” with a rise in anti-Asian hashtags.

When pressed on his repeated use of the term “Chinese virus,” Trump told reporters at a news briefing: “It’s not racist at all. … It’s from China. That’s why. It comes from China. I want to be accurate.”

When researchers studied 1.2 million hashtags on Twitter in March 2020, they found that approximately 1 in 5 hashtags used in tweets along with #covid19 were anti-Asian, whereas half of the hashtags used alongside #chinesevirus were. “Chinese virus” wasn’t just an innocent statement of reality, as Trump seemed to contend. It was often paired with racist sentiment.

As racially stigmatizing language like “Chinese virus” increased in the media in March 2020, so did the belief that Asian Americans are less “American” than their white counterparts.

Another study found that exposure to conspiracy theories and misinformation linking China to the spread and creation of the coronavirus was correlated with an increase in anti-Chinese sentiment and xenophobia.

Use of terms like “Chinese virus” by the media and political leaders is unlikely to change a person’s beliefs or attitudes. But it can trigger negative stereotypes that can heighten prejudice and possibly even incite incidents of hate.

Just as biomedical researchers try to understand how pathogens spread through a population, social scientists are working to understand the spread of hate and prejudice. Unfortunately, in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic and anti-Asian bias, only a brief exposure to racially charged language can have negative impacts.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. 

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Brad Bushman.