lay – Radio Free

2 Cambodian journalists detained over cyberscam torture video

Committee to Protect Journalists — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 11:52:57 +0000

Bangkok, February 3, 2025—Cambodia should release journalists Duong Akhara and Lay Socheat, both of whom have been arrested and detained for incitement after publishing a video allegedly showing a man being tortured in a cyberscam center, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Monday.

Local S.A. TVHD Online’s Akhara and Cambodia Star Daily News 24/24’s Socheat were detained on January 21 after their outlets shared the video that was allegedly filmed at a cyberscam compound in the capital Phnom Penh, according to news reports and local rights group Licadho.

Phnom Penh police issued a statement accusing the journalists of spreading false information that caused social chaos, jeopardized national security, and affected the dignity of national leaders. Both have apologized for publishing the video, according to S.A. TVHD Online, which posted copies of their apology letters to Prime Minister Hun Manet on its Facebook page.

“Cambodian authorities must drop the incitement charges against journalists Duong Akhara and Lay Socheat and free them immediately,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative. “Journalists should never be imprisoned for merely doing their jobs of reporting the news.”

The journalists face charges of incitement to commit a felony under Article 495 of the Criminal Code, which carries a maximum penalty of two years in prison, a Licadho representative told CPJ on condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal. The journalists are being detained at Phnom Penh’s Correctional Center 1 prison, the Licadho source said.

Journalists who have reported on Cambodia’s criminal cyberscam centers — where workers are often trafficked, held by force, and forced to defraud their online victims — have faced threats and reprisals, according to news reports and CPJ reporting.

Neither news outlet immediately replied to CPJ’s emailed request for comment. Cambodia’s Ministry of Information did not reply to CPJ’s emailed request for comment.

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

North Koreans lay flowers on 13th anniversary of Kim Jong Il’s death

Radio Free Asia — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 02:15:00 +0000

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

"I didn’t think the military would lay mines in my house"

Human Rights Watch — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 09:00:27 +0000

This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.

“They need a show like yours to lay it out.”

VICE News — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 15:55:22 +0000

This content originally appeared on VICE News and was authored by VICE News.

Prosecutors lay out new evidence of crimes in Trump election case – October 2, 2024

KPFA — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 18:00:00 +0000

Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.

Prosecutors laid out new evidence in Trump election case, accuse him of having ‘resorted to crimes.’
UN Security Council held an emergency meeting as Israeli troops clashed with Hezbollah and Israel responded to an Iranian missile attack.
Ukraine’s military said its forces are withdrawing from strategically important front-line town of Vuhledar after two-year battle.
Rising sea levels pushing underground water into dangerous chemicals, experts tell California Assembly committee.
San Francisco transportation board approved new plan to tow oversized RVs parked overnight in restricted areas.
Homeless advocates and supporters of a Venezuelan immigrant who said she contracted meningitis in a San Francisco homeless shelter earlier this year rallied outside the San Francisco Department of Housing, urging the city to provide her permanent shelter and draw attention to the ongoing housing crisis.

The post Prosecutors lay out new evidence of crimes in Trump election case – October 2, 2024 appeared first on KPFA.

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

As I Lay Coughing: Watching the DNC With Covid and Faulkner

Jeffrey St. Clair — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 06:00:58 +0000

Detail from the Penguin Modern Classics cover of As I Lay Dying.

“When something is new and hard and bright, there ought to be something a little better for it than just being safe, since the safe things are just the things that folks have been doing so long they have worn the edges off and there’s nothing to the doing of them that leaves a man to say, That was not done before and it cannot be done again.”

– William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

Usually, when I get sick, I wake up that way, as if legions of infectious bugs had secretly invaded my defenses at night. Not this time. This time I fell apart in the afternoon. All at once. While watching Wolf Blitzer. It hit me like an ambush. Suddenly, everything hurt: joints, neck, tongue, back, toenails, head. Even my eyeballs. Especially them.

My throat was raw, my lungs had filled with green gunk, and my ears were clogged so thick with oozing wax that I couldn’t hear myself scream at the screen, the way I normally do this time of day. The light of August grew dim, as my eyes crusted over. I had COVID for the second time. The FLiRT variant, which was supposed to be mild, flirtatious even, had knocked me on my ass.

I spent the next four days in bed, wheezing, hacking, and feeling like Aqualung on a bender. I was judiciously locked in a bedroom so as not to spread my contagion among the household. Food, pills and water were slipped into my cell twice a day. Other than the nightly monotony of the Democratic National Convention, my only distraction was a battered copy of As I Lay Dying that I hadn’t read in 45 years. Though a fan of Faulkner, I hadn’t much cared for this fractured southern gothic back in my 20s, when I presumed myself immune to such intimations of mortality. But now on the edge of the grim abyss, it called my name.

“It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end.”

I remembered that a professor of mine had considered this slim novel Faulkner’s version of Joyce’s Ulysses, only shorter and not as dirty, though there’s plenty of dirt if you know where to look. So I dove in looking for the dirty parts and soon found myself caked in Mississippi mud, which was a relief given that my skin felt aflame.

Faulkner cribbed the title from a passage in the Odyssey when Odysseus entered the Underworld. I guess everyone should visit Hell at least once before they take up permanent residence, even if resembles a convention center in Chicago. Faulkner cribbed a lot, but broke it up and put it back together in ways most nobody recognized. Kind of like ChatGPT but in reverse.

As Odysseus is doing field recordings with some of the luminaries of Hades, who should show up but the rapist of Troy, Agamemnon himself, a new arrival to the Underworld, who was shivved shortly after coming home to Mycenea from his Middle East war. Agamemnon warns Odysseus against the evils of women, saying his own wife struck the fatal blow, as he lay dying from her lover’s sword, and then she even refused to close his eyes: “So true is it that there is nothing more dread or more shameless than a woman who puts into her heart such deeds, even as she too devised a monstrous thing, contriving death for her wedded husband. Verily I thought that I should come home welcome to my children and to my slaves; but she, with her heart set on utter wickedness, has shed shame on herself and on women yet to be, even upon her that doeth uprightly.” Which reads like a manifesto of the New Masculinity movement led by the likes of JD Vance, Andrew Tate and Matthew Walsh. Semper Fi, dudes.

Agamemnon didn’t mention what exactly set Clytemenstra off. What she’d been brooding about for more than ten years. Odysseus knew. He was there. He might even have been complicit. But he doesn’t say either. He doesn’t mention that Agamemnon had slit the throat of his own daughter to summon the winds that would blow him to Troy, where he could loot their gold and rape their women. Sometimes stories are told like that, leaving off the key parts, that you have to fill in for yourselves, if you can. That’s politics, even in the afterlife.

Of course, Faulkner doesn’t tell this story straight. He might not even tell it right. A lot of folks don’t seem to get it and I’m not sure I do, because my mind is befogged by Covid. But it seems to be about the dynamics of the American family under capitalism, a story that starts out as a tragic thing and becomes a comic thing, even though a lot of bad things happen to good people and good things to bad people along the way.

“It’s like a man that’s let everything slide all his life to get set on something that will make the most trouble for everybody he knows.”

Of course, if Faulkner had told this story straight what he called his “tour de force” would have been purged off the shelves in schools and libraries from Tallahassee to Tulsa. He understood that America holds itself in too high regard to talk straight about the things that matter most: the harm you suffer and the harm you cause, the deaths that afflict you and the deaths you inflict. This is even truer in politics than it is in literature.

Faulkner has 15 people tell how Addie Bundren died and her family tried for 9 days to find a place to bury her. Some of them might not tell it true, which can often be the truest way to tell a story, especially in America. One of the people ain’t even alive when she starts her telling, but since most of the story is about being dead or getting there, she speaks with more authority than many of the others, especially her husband Anse who can barely speak at all, intelligibly, anyhow, which is often the case with husbands.

“A man ain’t so different from a horse or a mule, come long come short, except a mule or a horse has got a little more sense.”

As with the DNC, it’s sometimes hard to tell who to believe the most or disbelieve the least. The most rational storyteller in As I Lay Dying will prove to be insane. Or at least deemed as such by his own father, brother and sister and thrown into an asylum. There’s probably a difference. I don’t know whether he runs into Hannibal Lechter there or not. Typically, the reticent Faulkner doesn’t say.

“It’s like there was a fellow in every man that’s done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment.”

Over the interminable sleepless nights, the speeches in Chicago and the run-on sentences of the novel seemed to blend together and it became increasingly difficult to tease out one from the other and which one was written by Faulkner or Jon Meachem, which is why I finally flicked the mute button on the DNC convention and watched it with the sound off, for the spectacle alone.

“How often have Ι lain beneath rain on a strange roof thinking of home.”

It’s July in Mississippi and it’s hot. Not as hot as it is now. But it’s getting there or starting to. Faulkner wrote this book in six weeks on an overturned wheelbarrow in the middle of the night at the power station on the campus of the University of Mississippi, where he worked shoveling coal into the furnace. So he helped, damn him.

There’s no air conditioning, as Addie sits by the window during her last night on earth, watching her firstborn son Cash build a coffin. Her coffin. Addie’s dying. We don’t know from what. Having so many children or being married to Anse or the unforgiving heat. She may be old for her age, but she’s still dying young, which was then and is now the American way of death, by which I mean premature. So premature in Addie’s case that she hasn’t performed her post-menopausal duty of caring for the grandchildren, because there ain’t any. Not yet anyway, though one may be coming, wanted or not.

“That’s the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.”

Addie doesn’t speak until she’s dead. And then what she says doesn’t make much sense at the time she’s saying it but does later when some, but not all, of the blanks have been filled in. But what she says is that she doesn’t want to be buried here on Anse’s farm, in this patch of bad earth that like as not killed her, in spirit if not in body. In this book, as in history, the dead make more sense than the living. Addie wants to be buried with her kinfolk, even though we know she was abused by them, thirty miles away in Jefferson, which those of us in the know understand is actually Oxford.

“I learned that words were no good; that words don’t even fit what they’re trying to say at it.”

This is a story about poor people who become poorer when things they can’t control make them do things they can’t afford, like bury a wife and mother. It’s 30 miles to Jefferson but the Bundrens take 9 days to get there. They spend much of that time going back and forth over the same ground, reversing the progress they’d made the day before, a kind of incrementalism most Americans are familiar with in the time of neoliberalism. This morbid odyssey leads to all sorts of misery and mayhem: two drowned mules, a busted leg set in cement, a burned barn, a stolen horse, a lost fish who transforms into a corpse, a botched abortion and a question of paternity.

“It’s like it ain’t so much what a fellow does, but it’s the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.”

Everything the Bundrens own is mortgaged, even the tools they use to pay back the banks and loan sharks. For them and most of the rest of us the promise of America is a promissory note. The family is so destitute that two of Addie’s sons, Darl and Jewel, take off to work on a neighbor’s farm while Cash saws and planes the boards for their mother’s coffin. They return with $3 between them for two day’s hard labor, which was considered an honest wage 100 years ago and slowly inflated to $7.50 an hour and remains so today.

“Those rich town ladies can change their minds. Poor folks can’t.”

The problem is that Addie died while they toiled and their wages can’t get them to Jefferson. Not after the heavens opened and a thousand-year flood that happens once a decade now came down to swell the rivers and wash away the bridges. It’s easy to die, but hard to be buried in an economic system where the only cash you have is a son who’s good with tools.

“Life wasn’t made to be easy on folks: they wouldn’t ever have any reason to be good and die.”

Jewell will nearly get stabbed outside Jefferson, after he called a white man he mistook for a black man a “son of a bitch.” Jewell said this after he had begun to “turn black” himself, charred by the barn fire his brother Darl had set. Cash was also turning black, after his father had insisted on setting his broken leg–fractured while trying took take the corpse-laden wagon across a flooded ford in the raging river–in concrete because he couldn’t afford a doctor. The makeshift cast cut off the flow of blood to his leg and foot. Nearly everybody in this book begins to turn black eventually. Just like Kamala in Donald Trump’s imagination.

“Once I waked with a black void rushing under me.”

I’m not sure how old Addie’s daughter Daisy Dell is. But she’s old enough to fool around or be fooled around with. So she’s probably at least 14. And she does so with predictable consequences that are just as predictable in at least 27 states today. Daisy Dell is pregnant and wants an abortion and can’t get one. This isn’t obvious in the beginning but becomes clearer as the funeral cortege makes its circuitous way to Jefferson.

“Then it wasn’t and she was, and now it is and she wasn’t.”

There’s another son named Vardaman, just a boy of five or six. Vardaman sees events metaphorically. He sees the meaning of things that others miss, because the roughness of the world has worn away that kind of insight. I begin to see the novel and the convention through Vardaman’s eyes. Vardaman doesn’t think his mother died. There was no reason for her to die. She was too young to die. So he drills holes into the coffin to let whatever’s in there breathe. Then everybody else begins to breathe the air of decay.

“Because a fellow can see every now and then that children have more sense than him. But he don’t like to admit it to them until they have beards.”

Vardaman thinks his mother is a fish and Jewell’s mother is a horse, even though they have the same mother, as far as we know, but not the same father, which we don’t know at the beginning but find out near the end. Like many American kids, Jewell’s father turns out to be the local preacher, Reverend Whitfield. Praise the lord.

“If there is a God what the hell is He for?”

Events get a little hazy in my mind now.

People take different turns sitting on the coffin. First, there was Cash with his broken leg, set in concrete and turning black. Then Miss Hillary, dressed in white, waving her arms like Bill’s pants were on fire. Again. Then the buzzards landed. Up in the rafters near the MSNBC booth. Nancy Pelosi didn’t sit on the coffin, even though she drew up some of the plans for it. They say Joe don’t cotton to her anymore. And a cat, but Vardaman chased it away, thinking it might eat the fish, which was his mother. Every party needs a cat and cat lady, I reckon. Then Obama sat on it for a while and preened. Obama thinks his mother is Ronald Reagan. Or Nancy. I can’t remember which. Then Michelle chased him off, saying his yacht was waiting on the Gold Coast of Lake Michigan, and he was late. Given her convention speech, AOC must think her mother is Hillary Clinton. Nobody inside seemed to mind the smell. Or even notice it. Not the smell of the casket or the smell outside, which nearly everyone else was gagging from.

“It was as though, so long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice, since all people are cowards and naturally prefer any kind of treachery because it has a bland outside.”

Kamala has a daddy who she doesn’t mention for reasons most everybody knows but can’t say. But her daddy is tonight Joe Biden, though it used to be Willie Brown. And her momma is Nancy Pelosi. And Biden and Pelosi fight. So they can’t be together in the same room. Kamala isn’t Daisy Dell. But she might have been once, no one’s quite sure. FoxNews is trying to find out. Now she’s nobody’s mother, which makes her suspect for many. An unproductive grifter, I guess, who won’t have any function at all in her post-menopausal years, which are fast approaching, if they haven’t yet arrived. Watch those nuclear codes.

“She has had a hard life, but so does every woman.”

Daisy Dell’s lover is Lafe (or Laugh). Lafe gives Daisy $10 to abort the fetus he has planted in her. He tells her she can get abortion pills at the pharmacy. Two months later pills. The first druggist she finds threatens to call the police. The next one swindles her. He gives her a glass of turpentine water and a box of talcum powder pills and then takes her down into the cellar and does something unspeakable to her, which JD Vance might call an “inconvenience.”

“I think that if nothing but being married will help a man, he’s durn nigh hopeless.”

When the shattered Daisy finally emerges from the cellar, she encounters her father Anse, who swipes her $10 and buys himself a shiny white pair of dentures, because Medicare didn’t cover dental. Still don’t. And with those teeth, Anse got him a new wife, too. A new Mrs. Bundren or is it Harris? Cause a family without a wife, just ain’t a family. Is it JD?

“Why do you laugh? Is it because you hate the sound of laughing?”

That’s pretty much the end, though something is missing from this story. Something that’s there because it’s not. If you’ve read Faulkner you might know what it is. There are no Native Americans in As I Lay Dying, not even a mention of them in passing, I suspect because the culture in his mind has already been killed off and died out and even their ghosts, the ghosts of Sam Fathers and Ikkemotubbe, who in The Sound and the Fury Faulkner described as “a dispossessed American king,” have begun to fade. Their absence seems to pervade and haunt the story as the odyssey of the Bundrens and the casket and the body of Addie wander across the rivers and fields and woods of the Chickasaw and Choctaw. Death is in the air, even if no one wants to talk about it. The way another expanding absence, unmentioned by general agreement, envelops the United Center in Chicago, where anyone impolite enough to point it out is deemed crazy and hauled away to god knows where like brother Darl.

“The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true: is that it? But you know it is true now.”

We don’t know until the end, and even then it’s just a hint, which is, of course, the strongest kind of revelation, that Darl had been in the war and didn’t come back from France the same. Maybe that’s why he saw things clearer than the others and had to be locked away. Because whatever was in the casket that the Bundrens were trying to keep a lid on was more than just the decaying corpse of Addie Bundren, rotting in the July heat like the fish Vardaman is sure she’s been transformed into. It’s a burden of history, a burden of those lost in war, a burden of an economy that works for the owners and the confidence artists but works almost everybody else to an early grave, even if some of them can afford a scrap of earth to be planted in.

“Any old fool should be able to dig a hole.”

The question for America is: When do you stop digging? When have you dug yourself in so deep that you can’t dig yourself out?

The post As I Lay Coughing: Watching the DNC With Covid and Faulkner appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.

‘Texas Is Fighting for Its Right to Lay Concertina Wire’ – CounterSpin interview with Aron Thorn on Texas border standoff

Janine Jackson — Wed, 07 Feb 2024 23:01:33 +0000

Janine Jackson interviewed the Texas Civil Rights Project’s Aron Thorn about the Texas border standoff for the February 2, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin240202Thorn.mp3

New York Times (7/26/23)

Janine Jackson: Many see a looming constitutional crisis in Texas, where, as the New York Times put it, Gov. Greg Abbott has been “testing the legal limits of what a state can do to enforce immigration law,” with things like installing razor wire along the banks of the Rio Grande, and physically barring border patrol agents from responding to reports of migrants in distress—in one case, two weeks ago, of a woman and two children who subsequently drowned.

The tone of much corporate news reporting, outside of gleefully racist outlets like Fox, is critical of Texas’ defiance of federal law, but conveys an idea that, yes, there’s a crisis at the border, but this isn’t the way to handle it.

But what if their definition of crisis employs some of the same assumptions and frameworks that drive Abbott’s actions? Precisely how big a leap is it from Biden’s promise that, if he gets a deal for money to Ukraine, he would “shut down the border right now and fix it quickly,” to razor wire in the Rio Grande?

Defining a crisis shapes the ideas of appropriate response. So, is there a crisis at the US Southern border, and for whom?

We’re joined now by Aron Thorn. He’s senior staff attorney at the Beyond Borders program of the Texas Civil Rights Project. He joins us now by phone from the Rio Grande Valley. Welcome to CounterSpin, Aron Thorn.

Aron Thorn: Thank you.

JJ: I want to ask about US immigration policy broadly, but all eyes are on Texas now for a reason. And from a distance, it just looks wild. As an attorney, as a Texan, what are the legal stakes that you see here? It feels a little bit like uncharted territory, even if it has historical echoes, but how alarmed should we be, legally, about what’s happening right now?

Texas Tribune (3/30/22)

AT: Yeah, I think that is the billion-dollar question for all of us seeing this issue bubble up from the ground, frankly, as a slow boil from a couple of years ago, when Governor Abbott began to establish the Operation Lone Star program, in which he spent billions of Texas taxpayer money to send troops, and put a ton of resources into this state hardening of the US/Mexico border.

We’ve seen an increasing, frankly, level of aggression of the state, towards not only migrants, who are the ones who are caught in the day-to-day violence of being caught up in the razor wire, being met with officers, things like that. But the aggression from the state to the federal government has increased intensely over the last year or so. It is difficult to say that this constitutional crisis, between what a state and the federal government can do, it’s hard to say that that is overblown.

I would say that Texas is absolutely challenging the limits of federalism, to see just how far it can go. And immigration is a perfect vehicle for this kind of test. How far can I push the federal government to act the way that I want the federal government to, on things like immigration, on any other sort of federal issue where the feds are the ones who are responsible under our system? How far can I go?

Immigration is controversial. It’s very sensitive to a lot of folks. A lot of folks do not know a lot about it, and so the images that come out, as you mentioned, they seem chaotic, but this has ramifications for something much beyond immigration.

So when I think of the constitutional crisis, I think about it in this larger sense of, what does this really mean for federalism in this country, right? If the federal government is not able to stand up and assert its dominion over anything—immigration is just the hot topic now—what does that say for the government of our country? And the next time another state doesn’t like what the United States does on, say, environmental regulations, or other things that are cross-border or national, how far can that state take their agenda?

These are questions baked into our political system, they don’t have any solid answers, and Texas is running into that gap to assert that the state, at the end of the day, can assert itself over the federal government when it wants to.

JJ: So it’s important to stay on top of, but for a lot of folks, it’s just kind of a story in the paper. It’s about feds versus states, and it’s kind of about red states and blue states, and I think it’s a little bit abstract—but it’s not abstract or potential or theoretical. There are communities of human beings, as you’ve pointed out, not just at the border, but elsewhere that are being impacted. And I just wonder, how would you maybe have us redefine the scope of impact, so that folks could understand that we’re not talking about a few border communities?

Texan (1/24/24)

AT: Yeah, absolutely. I think one angle of this story that we don’t always see, it’s been heartbreaking to see, for example, the state’s rhetoric of “come and cut it,” be very aggressive, “we have a right to defend ourselves,” etc., etc. The, in my opinion, overblown claims about just how many cartel members are among people, just how many drugs they’re finding on people, for example.

The very vast majority of folks who are showing up to the US/Mexico border are folks who are in need of protection, they’re in need of safety, they’re in need of stability. That is the very vast majority of people.

And so something that does not often show up in these stories that is particularly pertinent right now is, let’s be clear, Texas is fighting for its right to lay concertina wire so that people can get caught in it for hours, and get injured and languish there as punishment for trying to seek safety.

And what they want to do is push people back into Mexico where they are kidnapped, assaulted, raped, worse, as punishment for wanting to seek safety. That is what Texas is asserting its right to do. That’s what the Trump administration’s primary goal was on the US/Mexico border. That’s what Greg Abbott’s primary goal is at the US/Mexico border. And we don’t talk about that, as a country, of what that actually looks like every day, what that looks like on the ground.

What we talk about are US communities, we talk about people “taking our jobs,” we talk about the fentanyl that’s coming in—all real issues that are not touched, not controlled, by people who are desperate and are trying to seek safety. So to me, that is one of the biggest holes that I always see in these stories, that we don’t really take: our right to defend our border, but from what?

As a Texan, I don’t think what Texas is doing on the border day-to-day will actually improve the lives of Texans. We are spending billions of dollars of our own tax money for this political ploy that we are improving the lives of Texans, while we are stripping Texans off of Medicaid faster than any other state in the country. Texans are very strapped in an economy where inflation is still an issue, and nothing that we’re doing at our border is going to affect that.

So we don’t talk about where the rubber meets the road for basically anybody in this story. It’s just simply in the political cacophony.

ABC News (12/19/23)

JJ: When you were on ABC News in December, talking about SB4, which you can talk about, the setup talked about a “tidal wave” of people coming over the southern border—let’s be clear, we’re talking about the southern border, right—the strain on US resources being “unprecedented,” and all of these people were crossing the border “illegally.” And that was the intro for you. And in media, generally, migration itself is sort of pre-framed as a problem, as a crisis; but we haven’t always seen it that way, and we don’t have to see it that way, do we? We kind of need a paradigm shift, it seems like here.

AT: I think you’re absolutely right, and one thing that I sometimes will tell people is, take a step back and really think about it. Migration is one of the most constant things in the entirety of human existence. This is one of the most fundamentally human things that someone can do. If you are suffering in one place for whatever reason, X number of reasons, throughout literal human history, you migrate to a place where you will do better.

Aron Thorn: “We will continue down this really ugly road of, how violent are we willing to get with people? That’s the question we’re at in 2024.” (image: ABC News)

Let’s not let the federal government get off the hook. The idea that you can law-enforce your way out of human instinct and human behavior is absurd, and it’s been very present in, obviously, Texas, but the federal government’s policies on the US/Mexico border, for at least 30 years, since at least the early ’90s. This idea that there is such a strain on resources, but yet we have a blank check for enforcement-only policies, that if we are just a little more violent and a little more aggressive towards people trying to come in to get more stability in their lives, then we can prevent something that is a fundamentally human behavior, is absurd.

And we need to have more of a discussion about why we’re sitting here, 30 years later, and we’re at a point where if we lay a hundred more yards of concertina wire, and we cut up a few more women and children, they will stop coming. That is the argument we’re having now, and it’s absurd.

So I absolutely agree that without this paradigm shift of: what are we doing? we will continue down this really ugly road of, how violent are we willing to get with people? That’s the question we’re at in 2024.

JJ: Yeah, I harbor hatred for corporate media for many reasons, but one of them is this PBS NewsHour, real politic for the smart people, that I saw recently, which basically said, calm down, Biden is just “seeking to disarm criticism of his handling of migration at the border as immigration becomes an increasing matter of concern to Americans in the lead up to the presidential election.”

So we’re supposed to just think of it as part of a chess game, and I guess ignore the actual human impact of what these moves are going to be. But I just really resent this media coverage that says, “This is just shadows on the cave wall; it’s really about the election, you don’t really need to worry about it.” I just wonder what you would like to see news media, well, I guess I’m saying do less of, but what could they do more of that would move this issue forward in a humane way?

PBS NewsHour (1/29/24)

AT: Yeah, I mean, hearkening back to the last question about a paradigm shift, I think as somebody who has done this work on the ground for many years, started doing this in the middle of the Trump administration, now has seen this through the Biden administration, something that we often remark to each other on the ground is that so much of the Biden administration’s policies have the exact same effect as what the Trump administration was doing, just in a less visceral way.

And so when that is raised to folks—he’s having the same exact effect on the daily lives of migrants—people who would be outraged and out in the streets to protest against Donald Trump, look at the Biden administration having the exact same effect, saying, “Well, he’s trying his best.”

So the idea that it still boils down to the politics of it all: “I just don’t like this person who’s in office, and so anything that he does, if he breathes wrong, I’m going to criticize him,” but yet somebody who has the same effect… It really brings to bear how many folks in this country, this is a theoretical issue for them. When the rubber meets the road, we don’t have a great track record of being truly empathetic and truly smart on migration. “It’s a political football in the right hands, and so I’m going to just agree with whatever the administration does, and I’m certainly not going to critique him,” is not the way that we really get to actual solutions on immigration in this country.

JJ: Are there any policies that are in the works, or about to be in the works? Is there anything that folks can be pulling for, either in Texas or nationally?

AT: That is also a really complicated answer. But one thing I will say, I always raise for folks to think about the guest worker program in this country, and it’s complicated to say in a soundbite type of answer, because labor has its own issues, right? Labor is very exploited in the United States, and so sometimes I don’t want to have this discussion about bringing migrants here just to be exploited by abusive employers, right? That’s not the answer.

However, it is true that economics is one of the biggest drivers of migration trends over the last couple of centuries that we can see, right? Bad economies in other parts of the world encourage people to migrate to the US, and a bad economy in the US actually encourages people to go home. The numbers are there.

And so that is actually true, that a lot of people are coming to seek stability in their lives, or in the lives of people who are still at home. And yet the United States has done everything in its power to either gum up the works of its guest worker program—slashing visas, making things more difficult for whatever reasons—and we are still sitting here with the reality that a significant slice of people would love to come to the United States, make money and go home.

To me, that seems like a no-brainer that both parties could get behind, of “let’s confront that reality,” and if we do not want to absorb these people into our society, let’s allow people to come in, benefit us, benefit themselves, and then return.

There is a significant slice of people who would like to do that, and we do have a guest worker visa program, but every year we make it more difficult, or we don’t want to expand it. An expanded guest worker program, I think, is a step in the right direction, if we don’t want so many people showing up at the US/Mexico border saying, “OK, I have no other viable options. Let me take the way that I need to to protect myself and my family.”

FAIR.org (1/9/24)

JJ: Ari Paul wrote for FAIR.org recently about how news media—he was writing about the New York Times, but they weren’t alone—make this fake consensus. They had a front-page piece that said, “Biden Faces Pressure on Immigration, and Not Just From Republicans.” And it was the idea that even Democratic mayors and leaders are agreeing: Too many South Americans are trying to get into this land of milk and honey. And what that reporting involves is manipulating statements of local officials who are saying, “We want to welcome immigrants, but we don’t have the resources,” and turning that into, “Nobody wants immigrants in their community.”

And I guess my big beef, among others, with that is that media do us a disservice, confusing people about what we believe and what we are capable of and what we really think. And it just kind of breaks my heart, because it tells people their neighbors think differently than they do. It misleads us about public opinion about the welcoming of immigrants.

And I guess I should have put a question on that, but I can’t think of one, except to say that when communities say, “We need more resources to address this,” that is not the same as them saying, “Migrants out.”

AT: Having worked in immigration now for many years, immigration is such a difficult topic, because underneath the banner of immigration are so many other debates, about US society and culture and race, class, our place in the world, right, foreign policy—the list goes on and on and on. Immigration hits on so many of those realities.

And it hearkens back to, many other different types of groups of folks can tell you about—people of color, for example—having white colleagues who say prejudiced things until they know a person of color, or they say xenophobic things until they know an immigrant.

And I think that this is so deeply challenging because people are stepping to this without having any actual access, easy access, to folks who have gone through this process, and specifically on class, and also on the way that the United States government works, right? I don’t know the exact figure, but DHS’s budget is colossal, and Texas is spending billions of dollars with its own money.

And so everybody’s stepping to this debate of whether this person should “have not broken the law.” But we have gotten to this place by spending all of this money we could use welcoming people, putting welcoming infrastructure in place, we’re using it on enforcement. No wonder we don’t have any money to welcome people into our communities, and that’s frustrating and hurtful to you. And then also you’re stepping with all of these biases, because that’s a real challenge we have in our society.

Yeah, no wonder, it’s very easy to point fingers at that person. It is the culmination of all of these other real societal ills that we grapple with every single day. No other issue hits on so many at the same time.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Aron Thorn; he’s senior staff attorney at the Beyond Borders program at the Texas Civil Rights Project. Aron Thorn, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

AT: Yes, thank you.

The post ‘Texas Is Fighting for Its Right to Lay Concertina Wire’ appeared first on FAIR.

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

‘We Lay Mines For Them, They Lay Mines For Us’: Ukrainian Sappers Focus On Frontline Roads

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 07:43:03 +0000

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

Scientists lay out a sweeping roadmap for transitioning the US off fossil fuels

Tik Root — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 15:12:05 +0000

Meeting the Biden administration’s goal for the United States to be a net-zero greenhouse gas emitter by 2050 is a monumental challenge that must be tackled at an even more daunting pace. But the nation’s top scientists envisioned that future and laid out a plan for realizing it in a report released on Tuesday.

In a sweeping 637-page document, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine made 80 recommendations for how the United States can justly and equitably pursue decarbonization policies. It includes recommendations for everything from establishing a carbon tax to phasing out subsidies for high-emissions animal agriculture and codifying environmental justice goals.

“This report addresses how the nation can best overcome the barriers that will slow or prevent a just energy transition,” said Stephen Pacala, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University and chair of the committee that authored the latest findings, which build on an earlier report released in 2021. He added that only about a quarter of the recommendations require congressional action, with many being targets at private institutions and federal agencies. There is also a recognition that some changes are unlikely to happen immediately.

“Do we think Congress will go out and pass this? No,” he said. “But maybe a future Congress will.”

The hope is that these recommendations can eventually help further solidify the impacts that legislation such as last year’s Inflation Reduction Act and the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law are expected to have.

Greens lay down NZ climate change election challenge to other parties

APR editor — Sun, 19 Mar 2023 08:22:03 +0000

RNZ News

New Zealand’s Green Party has told other parties to come to the table with faster, bolder climate action if they want their support at the election later this year.

The Greens gathered in Auckland for the party’s “State of the Planet” speech.

Co-leader James Shaw — who is also the Climate Change Minister outside cabinet — said the 2023 election would be a climate election.

READ MORE: Other NZ climate reports

“I am proud of what we have achieved with the governments we have been given. I am proud that over the last five years we have taken more action on climate change than the past 30 years of governments combined,” he said.

“But it’s not enough. I do not want another generation to have to bear the burden of slow progress.”

The speech came at the end of a week which started with the government dumping or deferring a number of emissions reduction-focused policies, including the clean car upgrade scheme and the container return scheme.

While Prime Minister Chris Hipkins gave the Greens a heads up, he did not consult with them, breaching the co-operation agreement. Te Pāti Māori also called for Shaw to stand down over the policy purge.

Cutting climate pollution
Shaw said the Greens would set out a plan to cut climate pollution over the next few months, and are planning to get Green ministers into cabinet.

“To any political party that wants the Green Party’s support to form a government after the election, let us put it as simply as we can: The Green Party will not accept anything less than the strongest possible climate action.

“The stakes are too high, the consequences of failure too great.”

Co-leader Marama Davidson said many people were struggling to put food on the table and pay the bills.

“We can address climate change and inequality at the same time.”

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

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

Villagers in the dark even as preparations start for building the Pak Lay Dam in Laos

By RFA Lao — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 00:19:21 +0000

Villagers in western Laos woke up in a panic last week to the sound of workers blasting rock to prepare for the building of a dam that would submerge their homes on the Mekong River.

They were distressed because the government has not clarified its relocation plans for them, or offered specific compensation.

“The authorities haven’t said anything about the relocation or the compensation, but I see [Chinese workers] are working in the water, blasting rock in the river,” one resident of the district, called Pak Lay in Xayaburi province, near the Thai border, said Thursday.

“I think that they’re building a bridge across the Mekong River,” he said, asking not to be identified for security reasons. “Because of the construction, we can’t fish anymore and boats can’t pass through anymore either.”

The problem is a typical one in Laos. As the country seeks to develop, build roads and dams and harness the mighty Mekong for hydroelectric power, authorities tend to neglect the needs and livelihoods of people who will be directly affected, as well as the environmental impact.

Local communities as well as environmental and humanitarian groups have said the Pak Lay Dam is expected to force the relocation of some 1,000 families from 20 villages and harm the surrounding ecosystem.

Still the Lao government appears dead set on proceeding with the US$2 billion Chinese-led project, which it hopes will bring the impoverished country closer to its goal of becoming the battery of Southeast Asia.

Green light

The residents’ comments came on the same day that an official with the Lao Ministry of Energy and Mines told Radio Free Asia that employees with China’s Sinohydro Corp. had begun building infrastructure for the Pak Lay Dam.

“The government has given the green light to the Chinese company to begin the construction of the basic infrastructure, including an access road and a bridge this year,” said the official, who declined to be named as he was not authorized to speak to the media.

“According to the plan, the company is going to start building the actual dam early next year” and complete it in 2029, he said.

Work has begun at the Pak Lay Dam site on the Mekong River in Laos, seen in this undated photo. Credit: Citizen journalist

Local residents decried the community’s lack of say in the decision-making process, and expressed concern about what kind of impact the dam will have on their lives.

“We villagers have no choice but to comply with the policy of the [ruling Communist] party and government,” said another villager from Pak Lay. “We want to oppose the project, but we can’t … fight against the party and government.”

“Of course we’re concerned about the relocation, the compensation and our [future] living conditions,” he said. ”We don’t know how much [the authorities] will pay for our losses and we don’t know whether our living conditions will be better or worse after the dam.”

Relocation before compensation

Laos has a grand plan to build dozens of hydroelectric dams along the Mekong and its tributaries and sell around 20,000 megawatts of electricity – enough to power nearly 2,800 U.S. homes for one year – to neighboring countries by 2030.

The Pak Lay Dam, expected to generate 770 megawatts, and the Pak Beng Dam in northern Oudomxay province, are two of the newest. The latter is expected to displace around 6,700 people living in 25 villages.

In November 2021, Thai power authorities agreed to purchase power generated by the two dams, both located 60-80 kilometers (35-50 miles) from the Thai border, and by the Nam Gneum 3 Dam on Nam River.

The Lao Ministry of Energy and Mines official told RFA last week that while the power purchase agreement for Pak Lay Dam has yet to be finalized by the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand, the Lao government wants Sinohydro Corp. “to be prepared for the construction of the dam as soon as the [agreement] is signed.”

Villagers fear being shortchanged in the compensation they receive for their losses, as have other Laotians affected by hydropower dam projects.

An official with Xayaburi’s Natural Resources and Environment Department told RFA last week that his agency is still in the process of locating farmland for the residents who will be displaced. Once a site is procured, the government will begin building new homes for those affected, he said.

“When the relocation is complete the dam construction will begin, and only then can we talk about the compensation and the social and environmental impact – that’s the government’s policy,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The Xayaburi official said that the government is obligated to inform the community about the potential impact of the dam “in order to avoid conflict later,” although it was not immediately clear how much information had been provided to the Pak Lay villagers.

“If the dam is going to be built, we as local authorities will have to do our job according to the plan, which will include clearing land, building resettlement villages and improving living conditions for the affected villagers,” he said.

The official did not provide details of how the government plans to compensate the villagers or give a timeframe for the process.

Status of agreement uncertain

In the meantime, the Thai government has yet to confirm to members of the country’s NGO community whether it will proceed with an agreement to purchase electricity from the Pak Lay project, according to Hannarong Yaowalers, chairman of the Integration Water Management Foundation in Thailand.

“However, in general, I think that if the Lao government is moving this project forward, [the Lao government and investors] may have gotten the necessary funding for the construction,” he said. “They are unlikely to care about complaints [about the impact on the environment and fish population] previously lodged by the NGOs.”

Translated by Max Avary. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

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

Experts Lay Out Proactive Measures to Defend World Against Future Pandemics

Andrea Germanos — Thu, 12 May 2022 13:14:53 +0000

A relatively small investment of $20 billion annually, say researchers, must be "compared with the millions of lives lost and trillions of dollars spent in the Covid-19 pandemic."

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

Marcus Rediker on History from Below, Anti-Slavery Resistance, and the Fearless Benjamin Lay

CP+ Video — Sat, 26 Mar 2022 18:06:45 +0000

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The post Marcus Rediker on History from Below, Anti-Slavery Resistance, and the Fearless Benjamin Lay appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by CP+ Video.

Ariel Dorfman: young President Boric must lay Chile’s ghosts

Ariel Dorfman — Mon, 14 Mar 2022 11:33:24 +0000

Oppressive conservative forces are still strong in Chile and Gabriel Boric’s supporters are impatient for change. Can he fulfil his promise?

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Ariel Dorfman.

‘We Will Not Lay Down Any Weapons’: Ukraine Resists as Kyiv Under Attack

Kenny Stancil — Sat, 26 Feb 2022 12:03:31 +0000

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy implored people in the capital of Kyiv to brace for an all-out Russian assault overnight, and as a result of intense resistance from the Ukrainian military and civilians alike, they were able to fend off the invading army, though fighting continues throughout the country on Saturday morning.

"The invaders wanted to block the center of our state and put their puppets here... We broke their plan."

Just after midnight, Zelenskyy warned that Russian President Vladimir Putin's forces would storm Kyiv in "vile, cruel, and inhuman" fashion, according to a translation by Max Seddon, the Moscow bureau chief at Financial Times.

"We have to persevere tonight," said Zelenskyy. "The fate of Ukraine is being decided right now. The night will be hard, very hard, but there will be a morning."

After another excruciating night spent in bomb shelters, basements, and subway stations, the residents of Kyiv awoke with the city still in the hands of mayor Vitali Klitschko and the Ukrainian government still under Zelenskyy's control.

Several apartment units were destroyed by Russian missiles, and at least 35 people, including two children, had been wounded as of 6:00 a.m. local time, according to Klitschko.

Rescue workers evacuate a wounded person after a missile struck a residential building during Russia's military assault on Kyiv, Ukraine on February 26, 2022. (Photo: Ukraine Emergency Service/Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

The mayor added that while "there are no Russian troops in the city," people should remain underground as additional air attacks are expected. He has imposed a curfew from 5 p.m. local time Saturday until 8 a.m. on Monday amid ongoing street fighting in the capital.

As the BBC reported:

According to a report by the Interfax-Ukraine news agency, Kyiv officials put out a statement asking people to stay in shelters and to stay away from windows if they were at home.
But Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council Oleksiy Danilov told Ukrainian news site Lb.ua that the army was "in control" of the situation.
"We are stopping the horde using all means available. The army servicemen and citizens are in control of Kyiv," said Mr. Danilov.

According to BBC correspondent Paul Adams, "The Ukrainian army said it had repelled an attack along one of the main roads in the west, early [Saturday] morning. And it says it's managed to prevent a Russian attempt to land airborne troops at an airport south of Kyiv—even saying a large plane carrying troops had been shot down."

In a video recorded Saturday morning from the empty streets of Kyiv's government district and shared on Twitter, Zelenskyy countered rumors that he had directed the army to surrender to Russian troops.

"I'm here. We will not lay down any weapons. We will defend our state," he said.

According to the New York Times, "Reports on Friday from the Ukrainian military and the United States and its allies indicated that Ukrainian troops were fighting fiercely, slowing the Russian advance."

"Civilians were also volunteering to defend the country," added the newspaper, which interviewed several residents who have taken up arms.

In an address to Ukrainians on Saturday morning, Zelenskyy said that "we are defending the country, the land of our future children."

"Kyiv and key cities around the capital are controlled precisely by our army," the president added. "The invaders wanted to block the center of our state and put their puppets here like in Donetsk. We broke their plan."

Meanwhile, fighting continues throughout Ukraine, where Russia is being condemned for alleged war crimes.

The U.S. and its Western allies have moved to impose harsher sanctions on Russia—including directly targeting the assets of Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov—but Zelenskyy continues to urge all European Union members, including current holdouts Germany and Hungary, to disconnect Russia from the SWIFT international banking system.

As of Saturday afternoon, Germany had reportedly expressed its willingness to restrict Russia's use of the global financial transactions network, though officials in the country advocated for "targeted" measures to "limit the collateral damage" they say is likely to ensue.

For the first time in history, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on Friday activated parts of its Response Force, and Western governments have also vowed to increase weapons shipments to Ukraine.

Viktor Liashko, Ukraine's health minister, said Saturday morning that 198 Ukrainians, including three children, have been killed so far, and more than 1,100 people, including 33 children, have been wounded.

United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees, Kelly Clements, told CNN on Saturday morning that more than 120,000 people had fled Ukraine "to all of the neighboring countries," though the U.N.'s estimate quickly increased to more than 150,000 refugees displaced since Thursday.

"The reception that they are receiving from local communities, from local authorities, is tremendous," said Clements. "But it's a dynamic situation, we're really quite devastated obviously with what's to come, and we would say that up to four million people could actually cross borders, if things continue to deteriorate, which they have until now."

This post has been updated with details about Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko's curfew order, Germany's shifting position on restricting Russia's access to the SWIFT interbank payment system, and a new estimate of the number of Ukrainian refugees.

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

President Trump doubles down his power to reopen economy, then backtracks; West coast governors lay out guidelines for reopening economy; Despite funding, Alameda County homeless not receiving housing – April 14, 2020

KPFA — Tue, 14 Apr 2020 18:00:00 +0000

Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.

President Donald Trump reiterates his power to reopen economy, then backtracks.
President Trump meets with survivors of coronavirus and touts untested drug.
Governors outline criteria for reopening economy.
Proposal to keep postal service afloat would add baking service.
Former President Barak Obama endorses Joe Biden for president.
Contra Costa County moves to enact rent moratorium during COVID-19 pandemic.
Despite $58 billion airline industry bailout, contract workers say they’re not seeing it.
Despite funding, homeless in Alameda County still not receiving housing.

The post President Trump doubles down his power to reopen economy, then backtracks; West coast governors lay out guidelines for reopening economy; Despite funding, Alameda County homeless not receiving housing – April 14, 2020 appeared first on KPFA.

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