Ben Camacho, freelance reporter for LA nonprofit The Southlander

You were injured while covering protests on June 7 at the Paramount Home Depot, the site where one of the initial immigration raids that spurred the protests occurred. What happened in the lead-up to your injury?

Pretty much the whole day, pepper balls were being shot by the sheriffs towards the protesters. I was keeping an eye out for those all day. But they were also throwing stingers, which is like a flashbang. They were definitely being thrown directly at people at some point, which is extremely dangerous. And rubber bullets, of course, were kind of flying as well. Some protesters were throwing their plastic water bottles or maybe fist-sized pieces of concrete. It seemed like most of them just kind of fell short of their target.

I had on a gas mask and half-face, ballistic-rated goggles, and a press pass. Mind you, the National Guard, like the military, had not been deployed yet.

Before I was shot, I was in an area where people were peacefully protesting. I was keeping an eye on my co-reporter, who was getting video. That’s when I saw a projectile go straight into the area where he was, and that’s when I saw Nick Stern [a British photojournalist] get shot.

I ended up going over and helping him get away. As I went back toward the protest area, pain hit me in the kneecap. I started screaming. I had never felt that type of pain before. I started to turn around to try to walk away, and the pain got worse.

Someone came up to me and helped me walk away. Then I was shot again, this time in my right elbow. It was excruciating at this point. I was yelling at the top of my lungs. I was in such a weird, shocked state of mind.

The next day, I went to Urgent Care to get checked out. Thankfully, my injuries are just serious, nasty bruises and a nasty cut. I’ve been home since, making sure these minor injuries don’t become worse.

Could you have imagined this happening in Los Angeles?

The police violence this time around feels much, much higher than any protests in the past few years. I also covered the 2020 uprising [the Black Lives Matter protests] and, yes, there was extreme police violence back then too.

This time, police action feels a lot more indiscriminate and a lot stronger, and that’s just from [what I experienced with] the Los Angeles authorities.

How has being a person of color shaped your reporting experience?

I am from these communities that people are being taken from. My hometown, just outside of LA, is also rising up against this. And I have a significant audience on my reporting platforms. And because I’m not out there, that’s a voice lost. 

Abraham Márquez, investigative journalist for The Southlander

While covering protests, you were hit by less lethal munitions fired by law enforcement on June 6, and then by what seemed to have been the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department on June 7. Could you have expected this in your hometown?

You know, it’s not my first rodeo. I’ve never seen them [law enforcement in Los Angeles] be careful with the press in the years that I’ve been documenting protests here.  I don’t think I’ve ever experienced them telling the press, “Hey, go on this side, you’ll be safe here,” or them holding back from not attacking.

I think at this point, Los Angeles’ law enforcement feels somewhat empowered because their actions will be backed up by the federal government, if they do something wrong.LA is heavily policed right now — we’ve got sheriffs out; we’ve got CHP [California Highway Patrol] out; cops from other cities are here; we’re going to have the Marines and the National Guard. It feels like they can do whatever they want and get away with it.

What’s at stake when journalists are attacked?

Reporters are on the front lines trying to document the reality of what it is to live in this country. We’re trying to document that people are being arrested and deported without due process. Police officers are brutalizing people who are exercising their First Amendment right to protest and to assemble peacefully.

What has it been like emotionally covering this?

I haven’t had a chance to really sit back, zoom out, and really let this process. My phone’s been blowing up this whole week with alerts of potential ICE raids, or information about where people are, where they’re getting arrested. I’m just trying to prepare and get ready, and make sure that I’m ready for the next day.

Mekahlo Medina, anchor and reporter for NBC4 News

What has surprised you most about the nature of the recent protests and the response from law enforcement?  

LA is the epicenter of immigration. We have the most undocumented people in the entire country — I think just under a million in LA County, a population of 10 million. Immigration is a national issue, and I think we fully expected some sort of reaction once it came to our doorstep. We just didn’t know what that was going to be.

What has surprised me the most has been the federal response. I thought, maybe, we would see them as part of ICE operations, but not at the protests in the way that we have.

You and your news crew were fired on with pellet projectiles by federal agents while covering June 7 protests. Did you ever think this would happen in Los Angeles? 

I’ve covered many protests in the 20 years I’ve been here, and we have a very good relationship with LAPD [Los Angeles Police Department] around our coverage of the protests, and what we’re supposed to do and not supposed to do.

I felt going into protest situations last weekend [June 6- 8] that we would be fine. And then when we got shot by federal agents, I think we were all taken aback. I can’t say it was targeted toward me. But what I can say is, most of the protesters had already left. We had large cameras; I had “Press” on my vest. We were all clearly identified.

What worries you about the situation in Los Angeles going forward?

I’m concerned that the non-lethal munitions might actually hurt somebody to a degree where they could lose an eye or something else along those lines. That worries me a lot.

Television crews have had some of our equipment and trucks attacked or destroyed — without anyone in them — by protesters, but I would say most journalists are concerned about all the agents and what they’re firing.

In this country, for the most part, journalism and journalists have been respected. It’s part of our constitution — freedom of press. It’s embedded in who we are every day from day one. The government is trying to keep us [journalists] from doing our job. I think it should be a red flag for a lot of people.

Ryanne Mena, crime and public safety reporter for the Southern California News Group

You were hit twice with less-lethal munitions on June 6 and then again on June 7, resulting in a concussion. Could you have imagined this happening in your home community? 

After Trump was elected, I was really nervous for what would come in Los Angeles, because I know Los Angeles, and people show up for protests. But I didn’t think that I would be doing a job that would involve federal agents shooting at me.

Do you plan to continue covering this story?

Yes. I was born and raised in Los Angeles, and I have a very deep connection to the city and immigrant rights. I think it is so important to document why people are taking to the streets, and also to document the community that has been forming with all this anger.

It is an honor to be one of the reporters out there recording the first draft of history. This is history that we’re living through.

What do you want people outside of Los Angeles to understand about what’s happening now?

Seemingly, journalists are being targeted. There have been many of us who have been injured in the last several days, at least once on live TV with an Australian reporter. There are so many of us who have been injured by federal agents, by local law enforcement, and it’s all unacceptable. Every single agency that has been involved in harming journalists should be condemned and should be investigated, I believe.

Other journalists should get ready to get ready because I feel like Los Angeles is just the first place where this kind of violence against journalists, or similar things, might happen. This is only the beginning.

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

People around the world celebrated May Day, International Workers’ Day, on Thursday, including hundreds of thousands in the United States. Unions and immigrant rights groups led rallies from coast to coast, in every state, with much of their anger directed at the Trump administration.

Workers and activists in New York demanded workers’ rights, freedom for Palestine and protections for immigrants. Democracy Now!’s María Inés Taracena spoke to some of the marchers as they took to the streets.

“It’s just giving me a huge boost of hope that we’re going to get over this authoritarian scheme and we’ll come out on top,” said Barry Knittle, a protester in New York.

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

Striking senior New Zealand doctors have hit back at the Health Minister’s attack on their union for “forcing” patients to wait longer for surgery and appointments, due to their 24-hour industrial action.

Respiratory and sleep physician Dr Andrew Davies, who was on the picketline outside Wellington Regional Hospital, said for him and his colleagues, it was “not about the money” — it was about the inability to recruit.

“We’ve got vacant jobs that we’re not allowed to advertise,” he said. “It’s lies that they’re not getting rid of frontline staff.

• READ MORE: Gallery: Doctors, health workers challenge NZ government over national crisis

“The job is technically there on paper, but if you’re not going to advertise for the job, you’re not going to fill it.

“In our department, we’ve waited months and months and months to fill some jobs, and you don’t just get a doctor next week. It takes six months for them to come.”

Dr Davies said no-one wanted to strike and have their patients miss out on care, but thousands of patients were already missing out on care every day, due to staff shortages.

“Every week, we’ve got empty clinics,” he said. “There is space in the clinics that’s not being used, because there’s not a doctor in the chair there.

“While, today, that’s 20 percent of the work of the week gone, because we’re on strike, in some departments, it’s 20 percent every week.

“Every day of the week, there’s a 20 percent deficit in the number of patients people are seeing.”

5500 doctors on strike
Nationwide, about 5500 members of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists are on strike until 11:59pm today, causing the cancellation of about 4300 planned procedures and specialist appointments.

In a social media post, Health Minister Simeon Brown blamed the union for the disruption, saying an updated offer last week — including a $25,000 bonus for those moving to “hard-to-staff regions” — was rejected by the union, before members even saw it.

Union executive director Sarah Dalton said she would be very happy to facilitate a meeting between doctors and the minister — or he could accept the invitation to attend its national conference.

“They would love to feel like someone up there was listening,” she said. “They don’t at the moment.

“We need to move away from rhetoric, and actually have some time and space for meaningful discussion.

“That’s one of the reasons we’re on strike today. After eight months of negotiating, there was nothing on the table from the employer.

“It was only after we called for strike action that anything changed, so let’s do better.”

Critical workforce shortages were undermining patient care and the current pay offer, which amounted to an increase of less than one percent a year for most doctors, would do nothing to fix that, Dalton said.

“How do you tackle vacancies? You put more time and effort in good terms and conditions for your permanent workforce, and you stop spending spending $380 million a year on locums and temps.

“We shouldn’t have that heavy reliance on those people, so we’ve got to change it.”

NZ training doctors for Australia
After many years of study subsidised by the New Zealand taxpayer, Maeve Hume-Nixon recently qualified as a public health specialist, but may yet end up going overseas.

“I actually thought last year that I would have to go to Australia, where I would be paid another $100,000 minimum, because there were no jobs for me here, basically.

“In the end, I managed to get an emergency extension to my contract and this has continued, but I don’t have security and it’s a pretty frustrating position to be in.”

Neurologist Dr Maas Mollenhauer said he was not able to access the tests he needed to provide care for his patients.

“I’ve seen patients that I have sent for urgent imaging, but they didn’t receive it, and then I got an email from one of my colleagues who was on call, telling me that patient had rocked up to the Emergency Department and, basically, the front half of their skull was full of brain tumour.”

Cancer patients waiting too long
Medical oncologist Dr Sharon Pattison said the health system had reached the point where it was so starved of people and resources, it had become “inefficient”.

“Everyone is waiting for everything, so everything takes longer, and we are waiting until people get seriously ill, before we do anything about it.”

The government’s “faster cancer treatment time” target — 90 percent of patients receiving cancer management within 31 days of the decision to treat — would not give the true picture of what was happening for patients, she said.

“For instance, if I have someone with a potential diagnosis of cancer, there are so many points at which they are waiting — waiting for scan, waiting for a biopsy, waiting for a radiologist to report the scan to show us where to get the biopsy.

“That radiologist may be overseas, so if I want to talk to that specialist I can’t do that. Then the wait for a pathologist to report on the biopsy can now take up to 6-8 weeks.

“We know that, for some people with cancer, if you wait for that long before we can even make your treatment plan, we’re going to make your outcomes worse.

“The whole system is at the point where we are making people more unwell, because we can’t do what we should be doing for them in the framework that we need to.”

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.

Stand Up America’s Executive Director, Christina Harvey, issued the following statement on the vote:

“Federal judges are the first line of defense against Donald Trump's attempts to cut essential services and attack our freedoms. In response to legal rulings that haven’t gone Trump’s way, House Republicans want to make it harder for federal courts to serve as a check on Trump’s lawlessness and overreach.

“But that’s not how our democracy works. Trump is a president bound by the checks and balances of our constitution, not a king with unlimited power.

“Senate leaders must uphold their oath and block any attempt to weaken the federal courts – anything less would be walking away from their constitutional duties.”

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

Indivisible’s co-executive director Leah Greenberg shared the following statement:

“When we look back on the fight against the American fascist movement, people will talk about this as an inflection point. This was the first mass public demonstration of resistance to this administration, and it demonstrated the eye-popping strength and reach. The goal of these mobilizations was to bust through the myth that opposition was impossible or irrelevant in this new era. Thousands of people, like the Indivisible leaders around the country, have already been organizing this year, and this weekend, thousands more got organized too. Millionsof people made new connections, started new group chats, found new friends, signed up for new mailing lists, and asked ‘what’s next?’”

Indivisible’s co-executive director Ezra Levin shared the following statement:

“Fascists want people to fear them. Fear is contagious and they want it to spread. But courage is contagious too. The only solution to creeping authoritarianism is organized, courageous people power. And we saw an historic level of it across every state and many countries on Saturday.

Elon Musk is clinging to this galaxy-brained idea that the millions of people who rallied this weekend were paid protesters. This isn’t some ‘opp.’ This is literally what democracy looks like. Indivisible and our partners across the ecosystem provided the infrastructure and support to make this possible, from online maps to de-escalation trainings. But it’s ordinary people who put those 1,300 events on the map, and turned them into a history-making day of action. Musk and Trump may be trying to intimidate us, but it’s not coming from a place of strength. It’s coming from a place of weakness, because they know their agenda is unpopular and unsustainable.

“We hope our Democratic leaders were watching, too. For too long, Democrats like Chuck Schumer have denied we’re in a crisis and have embraced the James Carville ‘roll over and play dead” strategy.’ Those days should be over. The people are demanding Democrats find their spines, stand up straight, and fight back. Smart Democratic electeds will read the room, adapt, and lead. Cory Booker said that he heard from his own constituents that they want to see him fight back. We need more Bookers and fewer Schumers. And the people, their constituents, are demanding it”

“Indivisible has been organizing for the better part of a decade, and we’re not stopping. The fight just continues. The next congressional recess is on April 11th. Musk and Trump are up against forces they cannot intimidate into submission.”

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

• The vast majority of respondents (89 percent) believe that Schumer should step aside as Senate Minority Leader
• Should Schumer refuse to step down, 86 percent of those surveyed support efforts to oust him from his leadership role
• 86 percent of respondents also indicated their support for a primary challenge to the Senate’s top Democrat

Beyond cratering support for Schumer from rank-in-file Democratic Party activists and base voters, the survey also found that:

• A strong majority of respondents (83 percent) support primary challengers against all ten Democratic senators who voted for the GOP funding bill
• An overwhelming 96 percent think that Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, head of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, should recruit better candidates willing to stand up to Trump and Elon Musk
• Nearly all those surveyed (99 percent) indicated that they want to see Democrats do more to resist Trump and Musk

“These survey results point to an undeniable crisis of confidence in Chuck Schumer and Democratic leadership at a time of unprecedented executive overreach and corporate takeover of the American federal government,” said Our Revolution Executive Director Joseph Geevarghese. “As Trump and Musk are actively dismantling the federal civil service and vital social safety net programs that millions of Americans rely on for survival, it is an utter disgrace that Schumer and other top Democrats cannot muster up the courage to actively resist. It’s time to step up or step down.”

When given the opportunity to provide open-ended responses at the end of the survey, respondents submitted over 5,000 comments, adding depth to the survey data and illustrating the broader crisis of confidence in Democratic leadership. A selection of these comments includes:

• “Schumer has been an embarrassment for years. We need an opposition party, the Democrats are anything but!”
• “I’m a lifelong Democrat, but I’m so frustrated and discouraged that I’m thinking of becoming an Independent.”
• “I changed my voter registration to ‘None. No Party.’ The Dems need to fight harder/more viciously.”
• “Wildly frustrated and defeated. The GOP has been playing dirty for over 10 years. Why do the Dems keep rolling over and letting them win every time? Now it's reached a point where we may not come back from this. You're failing all of us.”

Joseph Geevarghese, Executive Director of Our Revolution, is available to discuss the survey findings and the growing crisis of confidence in Democratic leadership among grassroots voters. To schedule an interview, contact: media@ourrevolution.com.

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

Asbestos fibers. Photograph Source: Aram Dulyan (User:Aramgutang) – Public Domain

In 1922, the U.S. Navy identified the naturally occurring asbestos mineral as the most efficient and cost-effective insulation, gaskets, and shipbuilding material. During World War II, asbestos was critical to the U.S. military, especially the Navy and the Air Force. Shipping and shipbuilding were essential, and parts of military aircraft and incendiary bombs also contained asbestos.

Even as demand exceeded supply, in 1942, a presidential order banned the use of asbestos for non-military purposes until 1945. The application of asbestos-based material by the military and most U.S. industries continued to increase until the 1970s, when its carcinogenic nature came to light. The use of asbestos started to be regulated but was not banned.

The extensive application of asbestos by the U.S. armed forces led to asbestos-caused conditions, such as mesothelioma, asbestosis, and lung cancer, among veterans who were exposed to asbestos dust during their service years. As asbestos-related malignant illnesses can take between 20 and 50 years to start showing symptoms, the number of asbestos-caused deaths in the U.S. has been increasing in the past decades, and veterans are disproportionately affected. This is well illustrated by medical reports, which show that about one-third of mesothelioma patients are veterans.

Mesothelioma is a deadly and aggressive cancer that is exclusively caused by asbestos exposure. Timely and appropriate diagnoses are the only option to find suitable treatment, alleviate symptoms, and prolong life expectancy when it comes to conditions caused by asbestos contamination. Unfortunately, the misdiagnosis of asbestos illnesses, especially mesothelioma, is far too common in the U.S. According to a medical study, about 14 to 50 percent of mesothelioma diagnoses are incorrect.

The problem could be alleviated by having a national database enlisting military members with known and suspected asbestos exposure during their service years. Such a database would be an excellent tool for veterans’ referrals to regular and specialized medical check-ups. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the Department of Defense (DOD) need to consider setting up such a registry.

Early Detection Is Crucial

Mesothelioma and asbestosis are exclusively caused by asbestos exposure when people inhale airborne asbestos fibers. The microscopic mineral particles attack the lungs and the membranes around them in the first place, causing permanent damage and, eventually, cancer. While asbestosis is a type of pulmonary fibrosis, the scarring of lung tissues, mesothelioma is a cancer that develops in the membrane around the lungs, abdomen, heart, or reproductive organs. Mesothelioma poses a significant challenge to the medical community.

It is hard to diagnose because its initial symptoms resemble more common lung diseases. Moreover, it progresses rapidly after the first symptoms appear, which happen at a later stage of the cancer. Medical studies show that exposure to all types of asbestos increases the risk of lung cancer, the second most common cancer in the U.S. Similar to mesothelioma, its symptoms do not appear before the cancer is already at an advanced stage. However, if it is detected early, it can be treated successfully.

The VA urges veterans to get tested for asbestos-related diseases, especially mesothelioma. However, a more systematic approach is needed because many veterans might not even be aware that their health is deteriorating due to exposure, which happened decades ago. Based on a national asbestos-exposure registry, veterans could be regularly reminded and called for specialized health check-ups, such as chest X-rays, CT scans, and pulmonary function (breathing) tests to reveal any damage caused by inhaled asbestos particles.

The number of U.S. veterans has been declining and continues to do so. For example, in 1980, about 18 percent of the adult population were veterans, but by 2022, their proportion was only 6 percent. The decline in the number of veterans is primarily due to the overall veteran population aging, and many passing away. Illnesses, such as respiratory conditions and cancers, contribute to this process.

Asbestos Takes Many Veteran Lives in All U.S. States

While the number of asbestos-caused deaths has been increasing nationwide, some states are affected more than others. California is among the top three states with the largest veteran population in the U.S., with over 1.48 million veterans in 2023. California also has the most military installations in the country, with the Navy having a strong presence in the coastal state.

Considering the military’s decades-long extensive use of toxic asbestos, it is not surprising that California had 27,080 asbestos-caused deaths between 1999 and 2017, which is the most in the country. Many of these people whose lives were taken by asbestos-related illnesses were veterans.

California used to mine and produce large amounts of asbestos, which was then used at its military bases. For instance, the former Mare Island Naval Shipyard, located northeast of San Francisco, was the first Navy base on the West Coast. During WWII, it was one of the busiest naval shipyards in the world. Over 500 naval vessels were constructed, and thousands were overhauled at the Mare Island yard while it operated. Los Angeles County had the most asbestos-related deaths between 1999 and 2017 (around 4,979 victims). The County was home to Long Beach Naval Shipyard (1943-1997), an important site for maintaining U.S. Navy surface ships.

As of 2023, Texas had the highest veteran population in the country, with more than 1.5 million. Between 1999 and 2017, Texas was also among the top three states with the most asbestos-related deaths, with 15,348 individuals. Currently, the state is home to 15 active military installations, some of which are among the largest military facilities in the U.S. Approximately half of the Navy’s strike pilots are trained in Texas at Naval Air Station Kingsville and Naval Air Station Corpus Christi.

Veterans Should Know About Existing VA Support

The military, as well as manufacturers, were aware of the hazards posed by asbestos years before its use started to be regulated and still exposed millions of veterans to its danger. Policymakers and some manufacturers have been trying to compensate for the harm caused by setting up asbestos trust funds and VA disability benefits and health care for veterans diagnosed with asbestos-linked conditions.

The disability compensation application process with the VA has been more straightforward since 2022 when Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson’s Honoring our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act (PACT Act) was passed. Asbestos and asbestos illnesses have been added to the list of presumptive conditions, and more than 1.4 million veterans have been approved for benefits nationwide thanks to the Act.

Having a national asbestos-exposure registry to rely on would significantly improve not only the diagnostic outcomes, but also more veterans could receive the well-earned benefits. Having a disability, especially at an older age, is an enormous burden, not only mentally and physically, but financially, too. Veterans should claim what is rightfully theirs and offered by the VA and the trust funds. Our veterans who sacrificed so much for our country deserve all the effort and support they can get.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

The post A National Asbestos-Exposure Registry of Veterans Could Combat Misdiagnosis in Mesothelioma Cases Nationwide​​​​​ appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jonathan Sharp.

• Deportation flight takes 250 people to El Salvador after federal judge had ordered halt, White House claims it did not violate court order
• Thousands protest at Tesla facilities in California, nationwide protests planned for April 19, as Tesla stocks fall and Musk’s politics drive boycotts
• States of California and Sonora Mexico sign agreement to strengthen climate and economic ties
• Trump orders air strikes against Yemen, United Nations warns more escalations could raise regional tensions, fuel cycles of retaliation, worsen Yemen’s dire humanitarian situation
• UN says aid dwindling in Gaza after 2 weeks of Israeli blockade of supplies

The post Deportation flight lands in El Salvador as Trump administration claims did not violate court order; thousands protest at Tesla facilities, nationwide actions planned for April 19 – March 17, 2025 appeared first on KPFA.

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

Scientists rallied nationwide last Friday in opposition to the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts for scientific research and mass layoffs impacting numerous agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service. Thousands gathered at Stand Up for Science protests in over two dozen other cities. We air remarks from speakers in Washington, D.C., including former USAID official Dr. Atul Gawande and Dr. Francis Collins, who led the Human Genome Project and the National Institutes of Health.

“I study women’s health, and right now you’re not able to really put into proposals that you are studying women,” says Emma Courtney, Ph.D. candidate at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and co-organizer of Stand Up for Science. She tells Democracy Now! it’s critical for federal policy to be “informed by science and rooted in evidence.”

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

Today federal workers nationwide are calling for support for a “Save Our Services Day of Action” mobilizing nationwide in opposition to Elon Musk’s efforts to dismantle government agencies through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Workers plan to protest outside of federal buildings and Tesla dealerships to show support for the work of federal agencies. “It’s not just about federal workers,” says Eric Blanc, author and assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers University. “If they take out the federal unions, that’s our best block right now against Trump’s authoritarian power grab.” This comes as Musk has gained access to the sensitive information of millions of Americans, all the while laying off government workers en masse. The layoffs have affected the FAA, NIH, IRS and more.

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

A “special task force” arrested the writers after they published on the Taiwan-based adult fiction website Haitang Literature, Hong Kong’s Sing Tao Daily News and Taiwan’s Pacific Daily newspapers reported.

The task force started with distributors of online erotic fiction, then moved on to target writers who had earned at least 300,000 yuan (US$41,000) from their work, according to posts to the gaming bulletin board NGA cited by the AO3 fan-fiction site on Reddit.

Online fiction, including fan fiction and erotic fiction, has mushroomed in China in recent years, according to a survey by government-backed news outlet The Paper in March.

By the end of 2023, readers in China could choose from among nearly 35 million works of online fiction, with some work already adapted into movies and TV shows, the report said.

Last year, the Chinese online fiction market was worth around 40 billion yuan (US$5.48 billion), according to Statistica.com, with daily life, science fiction, fantasy and history topping the list of most popular genres.

“One of my friends is an author, who was released on bail, called me from a new phone and told us to be prepared,” the NGA user wrote in a post dating back to June, before the story appeared in the newspapers.

“Later, others also reported that their friends had been affected,” the post said. “We compared details and confirmed that this is a nationwide crackdown. Moreover, the website’s [Chinese] distributor is indeed in trouble and can’t be reached.”

Haitang writers

In the months that followed this post, social media reports have been emerging of authors arrested for publishing erotic fiction.

Top Haitang Literature author Yuan Shang Bai Yun Jian, a pen-name, was sentenced to four years and six months' imprisonment, according to a Dec. 17 post on the WeChat account Age of Aquarius, Singapore’s Lianhua Zaobao reported.

Another Haitang author with the pen name Yi Xie was handed a one-year, five-month suspended sentence, while a writer with the pen name Ci Xi was jailed for five years and six months.

The reports said some writers had been given harsher sentences because they had been unable to return the money they had earned from their writings.

(David Gray/Reuters)

While details of the charges haven’t been made public in every case, many of the writers were contributors to Haitang Literature, and were widely assumed to be targeted for “disseminating obscene electronic messages,” which carries harsher penalties, the more a person is judged to have earned from their online activities.

China’s state-controlled media haven’t reported on the arrests, and details have mostly emerged in social media posts, sometimes from family members of those detained, or from the authors themselves who have taken to Weibo to try to crowd-fund the money to pay their fines to avoid a harsher penalty.

Chinese online fiction platform Jinjiang Literature City recently also reported that it had been summoned by consumer protection officials in the eastern province of Zhejiang, but said it had refused to turn up, accusing the authorities of “fishing,” the Lianhua Zaobao reported.

‘Profiting from obscene material’

Celebrity lawyers have been warning their followers via livestream that “profiting from the distribution of obscene material” is a crime that can extend even to writers who share their work for no fee.

The crackdown has prompted online writers to rush to delete or hide their work from other online fiction platforms, including Feiwen and PO18, according to the Reddit post.

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“Online literature has become hugely popular because the barrier to entry is low,” Si Yueshu, who has been writing fan fiction in Chinese since high school, told RFA Mandarin in a recent interview. “Anyone could do it. All they needed was to want to.”

Si has had her own battle with censorship over the years, including having her work suddenly deleted without warning.

One of the biggest difficulties is that the lines keep shifting.

“You can’t actually know what you’re allowed to write and what you’re not allowed to write,” she said, adding that she only publishes on overseas platforms now, to try to evade censorship. “And something that was allowed before could stop being permissible at any time.”

A long-time online fiction fan who gave only the pseudonym Li Hua for fear of reprisals told RFA that many authors write erotic content because that’s what drives traffic, and gets them into a highly competitive industry.

“Authors who make a living from online writing are very hard-working,” Li said. “Very successful authors usually upload three chapters a day, or more than 10,000 words, and the most they can make is around 20,000 yuan (US$2,740) a month.”

And for many writers, it’s more of a labor of love.

“A huge number of authors don’t actually make much at all -- I’ve seen some authors who make 0.10 yuan (US$0.13) a day,” she said.

Nothing ‘below the neck’

Nowadays, it’s even harder to get traffic, as explicitly erotic content is banned.

“You used to be able to get away with [euphemisms like] ‘they went 100 rounds,’ or ‘they found perfect harmony’, but even that’s not allowed these day,” Li said. “You can’t write about anything below the neck.”

That’s why the authorities are arresting writers who post on Haiting Literature, which is based in democratic Taiwan.

The Chinese equivalent, Jinjiang Literature, has been reduced to censoring anything considered remotely erotic or even politically sensitive with AI-generated blank boxes in lieu of Chinese characters, with often hilarious results, according to Li.

For example, a sentence containing the words “down” or “lower” and “body” will generate blanks even if the overall meaning is very far from erotic.

Likewise, phrases referencing love and nature will be censored because the two words mean “sex” when combined a certain way.

The censorship is also spilling over into other forms of fiction.

(China Stringer Network/Reuters)

As online commentator Xiao Wu points out, plenty of Chinese contemporary and classic literary fiction gets sexy at times.

“Romance novels will inevitably involve some kind of erotic content,” he said, citing explicit content in Nobel literature laureate Mo Yan’s Big Breasts, Wide Hips, Chen Zhongshi’s White Deer Plain and the novels of Jia Pingwa.

Meanwhile, demand for even erotic-adjacent (known as “borderline” content) continues to rise, said Xiao Wu, who has been approached by editors luring him with the prospect of writing something that pays much better than op-ed pieces.

“There’s a pretty low barrier to entry for reading this stuff for ordinary Chinese people who just want to relax,” he said. “Anyone with a cellphone and internet connection can enjoy it for a few yuan (around a dollar), while going out to sing karaoke with their friends could cost them hundreds of yuan (tens of U.S. dollars).”

“There aren’t many ways to let off steam in this highly repressive society, so this is a fairly low-cost route to happiness,” Xiao Wu said.

Li Hua agreed.

“Sometimes all I want is pure, sensory stimulation, and it’s only around 100 yuan (US$13) a year,” she said. “I think it’s just human nature.”

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Joshua Lipes.

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

We speak with The Nation's John Nichols in Wisconsin, where Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are spending a lot of their time in the closing days of the election in a tight battle for the state's 10 Electoral College votes. Nichols also discusses the battle for the Senate, with key races in Wisconsin and Nebraska; how New York races could tip control of the House to Democrats; and why Kamala Harris needs to expand her message beyond the threat of Trump’s authoritarianism. “At the doors, people want to talk about economics,” says Nichols.

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

The announcement came as Dhaka and other cities braced for more violence as thousands of anti-government demonstrators defied a curfew and marched despite the heavy presence of government troops and police officers on the streets.

“Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has already resigned and we are working to form an interim government,” Gen. Waker-uz-Zaman, the army chief, told reporters at a press conference in front of his cantonment office in Dhaka.

Late-breaking international news reports said Hasina had left Bangladesh, with one report from India saying she had arrived in the neighboring country by helicopter earlier in the day.

Hasina resigned a day after Bangladesh was plunged into the single deadliest day of violence in recent weeks of political tumult. As many as 98 people were killed across the country on Sunday, as students and protesters took to the streets and launched a civil disobedience campaign to demand that Hasina and her government resign over the killings of at least 200 demonstrators during a first phase of protests in July.

“I take all responsibility ... justice [is] to be ensured for every killing and other misconducts,” the army chief said.

Gen. Waker-uz-Zaman said he had “ordered the police and army not to open fire,” at the thousands of people out on the streets on Monday.

He said the decision to form an interim administration was taken after discussions with the representatives of major political parties and civil society, although no members from Hasina’s Awami League party were present at the meeting.

“At the meeting, representatives from BNP [Bangladesh Nationalist Party], Jamaat-e-Islami, Jatiya Party were present while no Awami League people attended.

“I will meet the president as soon as possible and will try to form an interim administration. It might take one or two days ... please cooperate with us,” the general said.

The protesters were demanding justice for the 212 people who lost their lives during the earlier wave of civil unrest last month, when students staged protests against a quota system for government jobs. It was heavily weighted in favor of children and grandchildren of war veterans who had fought for Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan in 1971.

As a result of those protests, the Supreme Court’s appellate division slashed quotas for select groups to 7% from 56%, paving the way to make most government jobs merit-based in the country with a high unemployment rate among young people.

Hasina, who had held power uninterrupted since 2009, and her government were reelected in January in national polls that were widely criticized as tainted. In the months leading up to the general election, the opposition BNP had staged massive street protests in 2023 calling on her government to make way for a neutral caretaker administration to run the country during the election transition, but she refused to step down.

On the eve of her departure from office, the 76-year-old PM and daughter of the country’s founding leader, presided over a meeting of the national security council and appeared to order the armed forces and police to come down hard in stopping the protesters from spreading “anarchy.”

“No one of those who now are carrying out violence is a student. They are terrorists,” A.B.M. Sarwer-E-Alam Sarker, the prime minister’s assistant press secretary, quoted Hasina as saying, according to the state-run Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha (BSS) news service.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news outlet.

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

The announcement came as Dhaka and other cities braced for more violence as thousands of anti-government demonstrators defied a curfew and marched despite the heavy presence of government troops and police officers on the streets.

“Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has already resigned and we are working to form an interim government,” Gen. Waker-uz-Zaman, the army chief, told reporters at a press conference in front of his cantonment office in Dhaka.

Late-breaking international news reports said Hasina had left Bangladesh, with one report from India saying she had arrived in the neighboring country by helicopter earlier in the day.

Hasina resigned a day after Bangladesh was plunged into the single deadliest day of violence in recent weeks of political tumult. As many as 98 people were killed across the country on Sunday, as students and protesters took to the streets and launched a civil disobedience campaign to demand that Hasina and her government resign over the killings of at least 200 demonstrators during a first phase of protests in July.

“I take all responsibility ... justice [is] to be ensured for every killing and other misconducts,” the army chief said.

Gen. Waker-uz-Zaman said he had “ordered the police and army not to open fire,” at the thousands of people out on the streets on Monday.

He said the decision to form an interim administration was taken after discussions with the representatives of major political parties and civil society, although no members from Hasina’s Awami League party were present at the meeting.

“At the meeting, representatives from BNP [Bangladesh Nationalist Party], Jamaat-e-Islami, Jatiya Party were present while no Awami League people attended.

“I will meet the president as soon as possible and will try to form an interim administration. It might take one or two days ... please cooperate with us,” the general said.

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The protesters were demanding justice for the 212 people who lost their lives during the earlier wave of civil unrest last month, when students staged protests against a quota system for government jobs. It was heavily weighted in favor of children and grandchildren of war veterans who had fought for Bangladesh's independence from Pakistan in 1971.

As a result of those protests, the Supreme Court’s appellate division slashed quotas for select groups to 7% from 56%, paving the way to make most government jobs merit-based in the country with a high unemployment rate among young people.

Hasina, who had held power uninterrupted since 2009, and her government were reelected in January in national polls that were widely criticized as tainted. In the months leading up to the general election, the opposition BNP had staged massive street protests in 2023 calling on her government to make way for a neutral caretaker administration to run the country during the election transition, but she refused to step down.

On the eve of her departure from office, the 76-year-old PM and daughter of the country’s founding leader, presided over a meeting of the national security council and appeared to order the armed forces and police to come down hard in stopping the protesters from spreading “anarchy.”

"No one of those who now are carrying out violence is a student. They are terrorists," A.B.M. Sarwer-E-Alam Sarker, the prime minister's assistant press secretary, quoted Hasina as saying, according to the state-run Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha (BSS) news service.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news outlet.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Ahammad Foyez, Kamran Reza Chowdhury, Jesmin Papri and Sharifuzzaman Pintu for BenarNews.

The city of Hyesan, in the north on the Chinese border, herded more than 80,000 residents into a stadium and forced them to chant slogans against America and listen to speeches decrying Washington for four hours, a resident there told RFA Korean on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

“The anti-American mass rally held today to commemorate the 6.25 War was larger than any mass rally I have ever seen in my life,” she said, referring to the war by the date of its start, as is customary in the Korean language when referring to important events. She said that the rally started at 8 a.m. and went until noon.

Following the event the crowd split into three groups and headed for different parts of the town, shouting anti-American slogans and parading through the streets, she said.

“At 3 p.m., a ‘War Veterans Reunion Meeting’ was held at the Hyesan Movie Theater, attended by members of the Socialist Patriotic Youth League and Socialist Women's Union of Korea,” she said.

Hyesan has a listed population of 250,000, but many registered there are either connected with the military or have been assigned to the city from elsewhere to work, meaning the actual population of the city is only about 140,000, the resident said.

This means that more than half of the population was in the stadium on Tuesday.

The resident said orders were given for “everyone from elementary school students to war veterans, who could walk” to be mobilized for the rally.

“This 6.25 War-related event was not held only today but has been taking place every day since the 23rd, starting with the Socialist Patriotic Youth League and the Socialist Women's Union of Korea,” she said. “This will also be the first time that this kind of event lasted three straight days.”

A different take

In North Korea, the war is officially called the “Great Fatherland Liberation War,” even though most historians agree that in the early hours of June 25, 1950, it was the North that crossed the 38th parallel that divided the peninsula to invade the South.

Fighting ended in 1953 with an armistice, not a treaty, meaning the war is technically still ongoing.  North Korea claims that it was victorious against the United States and its allies in the war, even though 2.5 million Koreans died – fighting on both sides – and North Korea ended up controlling slightly less territory than it had before the war.

On a national scale, Tuesday’s rallies, held all over the country are the largest ever held to commemorate the war, an official from Hyesan’s surrounding Ryanggang province told RFA Korean on condition of anonymity to speak freely.

“Today’s mass rally was prepared nationwide from June 16 in accordance with (national leader) Kim Jong Un’s direction on June 13,” he said.

June 25 kicks off an entire “anti-American struggle” month that ends on July 27, the anniversary of the signing of the armistice, which North Korea calls “Victory Day.”

He said that Kim Jong Un ordered that this year’s anti-American struggle month be filled with events commemorating the war to whip up an anti-American atmosphere.

“Each party and labor group will continue to hold gatherings on stories related to the 6.25 War, watch movies and visit the anti-espionage struggle exhibition hall and the class education center until July 27, which is the Day of Victory in the Great Fatherland Liberation War,” he said, adding that students will participate in Korean War-themed writing and art contests.

The event for the 73rd anniversary of the Korean War last year was only one hour long, so people are complaining that they had to do so much this year, the official said.

For years, authorities promised that once North Korea had nuclear capabilities, a “flowery path will unfold, and tailwinds will blow for our people’s future,” he said. 

Now that North Korea has nuclear weapons, though, the narrative has shifted. It’s the fault of Washington that living standards in North Korea are still so low.

“Residents are complaining that they are talking about the U.S. and its imperialist plans these days,” he said.

Translated by Claire S. Lee and Leejin J. Chung. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Moon Sung Hui and Jamin Anderson for RFA Korean..

• Senate Republicans block bill that would have protected contraceptive access nationwide.
• Georgia appeals court pauses Trump election interference trial to review lower court ruling allowing DA Fani Willis to remain on case.
• President Biden in France to commemorate 80th anniversary of D-Day landings with other Western leaders.
• UN aid official for Haiti delivers stark assessment of food insecurity situation.
• Police clear Stanford Pro-Palestinian demonstrators from building they had occupied, 13 arrested.
• Pro-Palestinian protesters greet Vice President Harris at two Bay Area fundraising events.
• South Africa’s ANC falls short of majority in national elections.

The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – June 5, 2024 Senate Republicans block bill that would have protected contraceptive access nationwide. appeared first on KPFA.

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

• Senate Republicans block bill that would have protected contraceptive access nationwide.
• Georgia appeals court pauses Trump election interference trial to review lower court ruling allowing DA Fani Willis to remain on case.
• President Biden in France to commemorate 80th anniversary of D-Day landings with other Western leaders.
• UN aid official for Haiti delivers stark assessment of food insecurity situation.
• Police clear Stanford Pro-Palestinian demonstrators from building they had occupied, 13 arrested.
• Pro-Palestinian protesters greet Vice President Harris at two Bay Area fundraising events.
• South Africa’s ANC falls short of majority in national elections.

The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – June 5, 2024 Senate Republicans block bill that would have protected contraceptive access nationwide. appeared first on KPFA.

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

Palestinian solidarity protests and encampments are appearing on college campuses from Massachusetts to California to protest Israel’s attacks on Gaza and to call for divestment from Israeli apartheid. This week, police have raided encampments and arrested students at Yale and New York University. Palestinian American scholar and New York University professor Helga Tawil-Souri describes forming a faculty buffer to protect students, negotiating with police, and the ensuing crackdown that led to over 100 arrests Monday night. Uptown in New York City, the encampment at Columbia University is entering its seventh day despite mass arrests of protesters last week. “In my opinion, the NYPD were called in under false pretenses by the president of the university,” says Joseph Slaughter, professor at Columbia University. “The university is being run as a sort of ad-hocracy at this point, the senior administration making up policies and procedures and prohibitions on the fly, changing them in the middle of the night.”

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

ST. JAMES, La. — For a little while, it seemed like Cancer Alley would finally get justice.

The infamous 85-mile stretch between Baton Rouge and New Orleans is one of the nation’s most polluted corners; residents here have spent decades fighting for clean air and water. That fight escalated in 2022, when local environmental justice groups filed complaints with the Environmental Protection Agency, alleging that the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality had engaged in racial discrimination under the Civil Rights Act. In a watershed moment, the EPA opened a civil rights investigation into Louisiana’s permitting practices. 

But just when the EPA appeared poised to force the LDEQ to make meaningful changes, Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry — now the state’s governor — sued. Landry’s suit challenges a key piece of the agency’s regulatory authority: the disparate impact standard, which says that policies that cause disproportionate harm to people of color are in violation of the Civil Rights Act. This enables the EPA to argue that it’s discriminatory for state agencies to keep greenlighting contaminating facilities in communities of color already overburdened by pollution — such as in Cancer Alley — even if official policies do not announce discrimination as their intent. 

Five weeks after Landry filed his suit, the EPA dropped its investigation, effectively leaving Cancer Alley residents to continue the struggle on their own.

“It was devastating,” recalled Sharon Lavigne, founder of the grassroots organization Rise St. James. For her work spearheading the fight to stop polluters in Cancer Alley, Lavigne is regarded as a figurehead of the environmental justice movement. Now, it appears that Landry’s suit could have a reverberating impact far from her hometown, as the EPA backs down from environmental justice cases across the country.

In Flint, Michigan, advocates say that Landry’s suit has already led to the collapse of their own chance at justice. This month, the EPA dropped a Houston case in the same way, without mandating any sweeping reforms. Attorneys told The Intercept they are concerned about the possibility of similarly disappointing outcomes in Detroit, St. Louis, eastern North Carolina, and elsewhere.

Experts say that the EPA appears to be shying away from certain Civil Rights Act investigations in states that are hostile to environmental justice, due to fears that Landry’s suit or similar efforts could make their way to the conservative Supreme Court. If that happened, the court appears ready to rule against the EPA — a verdict that could not only undermine the agency’s authority, but also significantly limit the ability of all federal agencies to enforce civil rights law.

“The lawsuit does not just challenge the EPA’s investigation and potential result of our complaint,” said Lisa Jordan, an attorney who helped file the Cancer Alley complaint. “It challenges the entire regulatory program.”

Sharon Lavigne, founder of the grassroots organization Rise St. James, poses for a photo.

“Dystopian Nightmare”

The EPA is tasked with ensuring that its programs act in accordance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits recipients of federal funds from employing discriminatory methods and practices. The agency has never actually withheld funding due to discrimination, but by 2021, a change seemed to be in the air: Under President Joe Biden’s administration, the EPA began to process and pursue over a dozen Title VI environmental justice cases in at least nine states, including Louisiana. 

In October 2022, the EPA issued a letter detailing evidence of racial discrimination in the Louisiana DEQ’s practices, signaling the agency was prepared to issue its second-ever finding of discrimination. A few months later, after more than a year of negotiations, the EPA released a draft agreement that contained landmark reforms. Among other changes, the reforms would’ve required the LDEQ to analyze whether pollution would disproportionately affect people of color when making permit decisions.

Lavigne said she hoped the EPA would “protect us more than our local officials.” EPA Administrator Michael Regan even visited Cancer Alley himself.

Then Landry sued. Referring to the EPA’s pursuit of environmental justice as a “dystopian nightmare,” Landry’s suit argues that the EPA can only enforce the Civil Rights Act in cases where state policies are explicitly racist — and that imposing the disparate impact standard merely ensures that “emissions are affecting the ‘right’ racial groups.” The suit decries the EPA as “social justice warriors fixated on race.”

Governor Landry’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. An EPA spokesperson said they could not grant interviews about the Landry suit since the litigation is still pending, but that the “EPA remains committed to strengthening our civil rights compliance work and to vigorous enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.”

Lavigne said she received a phone call from Regan’s staff the day after the EPA backed down and withdrew the draft of the negotiated agreement. They told her the EPA dropped the case “because they were trying to protect the Title VI program.” That response supports previous reporting suggesting that the EPA worried Landry’s suit could wind its way to the Supreme Court, prompting a devastating verdict.

The conservative Supreme Court has already greatly curtailed the EPA’s regulatory authority in recent cases over greenhouse gases and wetlands. And the EPA dropped its case the same week that the Supreme Court gutted affirmative action — a ruling that signaled the court’s antipathy toward the consideration of race by federal agencies. As no state has policies that explicitly announce discriminatory intent, virtually all the EPA’s Title VI cases rely on the disparate impact standard. If a conservative Supreme Court threw out that standard, it would crush the EPA’s ability to pursue environmental justice. 

Jordan, the attorney, told The Intercept she worries the EPA will now only conduct investigations in states that are “relatively friendly” to environmental justice and are unlikely to sue the agency, effectively abandoning the communities that need federal protections the most.

“Other states, like Louisiana and Texas, that are known to be discriminatory in their environmental programs, are the ones that would sue,” said Jordan. The EPA, she added, is “throwing Louisiana communities under the Title VI bus.”

And the EPA’s reversal still might not work in its favor. At a motion hearing on January 9, the EPA said it dropped its investigation due to procedural deadlines, not Landry’s suit. Still, the agency argued that the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana should dismiss the case in light of the dropped investigation. 

“It’s cheaper to move the people.”

Judge James D. Cain Jr., appointed by former President Donald Trump, will soon decide whether the case can continue. During the hearing, he made several statements that showed sympathy to Landry’s arguments. 

“It’s cheaper to move the people,” said Cain, according to a transcript of the hearing reviewed by The Intercept. “Why don’t the EPA just move the people? You’re going to shut the facilities down? I mean.”

Cain continued: “My last check, pollution doesn’t really discriminate based on race.”

A cemetery in St. James Parish, the heart of “Cancer Alley” across from oil and gas infrastructure in Louisiana.

“A Slap in the Face”

Whether or not Landry’s suit moves forward, environmental justice advocates are already seeing ripple effects. In August, the EPA abruptly backed down from another investigation — this time near Flint.

Flint’s case was strikingly similar: Plaintiffs alleged the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, or EGLE, had violated Title VI by issuing air pollution permits to an asphalt plant in a low-income Black community. Residents of the area were already experiencing high rates of hospitalization for asthma when the permit was granted, and air pollution from asphalt plants has been associated with increased risk of asthma attacks.

After months of negotiations and weekly meetings between the EPA, EGLE, and the advocates who filed the complaint, the EPA seemed to be thinking about “a transformational framework for addressing environmental justice issues,” recalled Nick Leonard, executive director of the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center, which co-filed the complaint with Earthjustice on behalf of residents.

But then, the EPA suddenly withdrew the draft of the negotiated agreement, instead signing a watered-down version that appeared to rubber-stamp EGLE’s policies. In the new draft, EGLE agreed to minor adjustments, such as providing a single air sensor to the community and updating its public outreach materials. The agreement does not require EGLE to conduct cumulative impact analyses, which means the agency still does not have to consider whether it’s issuing permits to polluters in already-polluted areas.

The reversal was crushing to those involved in the case. Nayyirah Shariff, director of the organizing coalition Flint Rising, said that “six months of our life and hundreds of hours” were essentially wasted when the negotiations were torpedoed. Having had childhood asthma herself while growing up in the Flint neighborhood, they called the EPA’s abandonment “a slap in the face.” A letter to EGLE co-written by Shariff and others called the new agreement “unjust and damaging” and warned that “Michigan certainly should not be following Louisiana’s lead.”

Though the EPA’s new agreement with EGLE was not made public until August 10, Shariff and Leonard told The Intercept that the EPA changed course at the end of June, within days of the EPA dropping its Cancer Alley investigation. As with the Louisiana case, the EPA didn’t provide a clear reason for its decision.

Leonard believes the EPA is specifically nervous about taking up litigation that would force state agencies to adopt rules around disparate cumulative impacts. The EPA will likely keep pursuing simpler procedural points, he said, like ensuring easier access to public meetings and translation services. But he fears they’ll no longer pursue more sweeping reforms.

“We were sort of just blindsided by how the conversation changed right around the time the Louisiana case came out,” said Leonard. 

When asked about the EPA’s choice to reverse course on the Flint case and other Title VI investigations in the wake of Landry’s suit, an EPA spokesperson wrote that the circumstances of the Louisiana investigation “do not apply to other pending EPA Title VI complaints.” The spokesperson added, “EPA is moving urgently, with an unprecedented commitment to advancing environmental justice. … The lived experiences of impacted communities must be central in EPA decision-making.”

Ted Zahrfeld, board chair of the St. Francis Prayer Center, one of the groups that sued EGLE and participated in ensuing negotiations, dubbed the neighborhood on Flint’s outskirts “Asthma Alley.”

“This Louisiana decision — or catastrophe, I would call it — happened, and within a few days, the EPA told us: ‘Well, there’s going to be a new agreement,’” said Zahrfeld. St. Francis Prayer Center sits directly across from the asphalt plant and has long been a source of refuge for the community. Now, in light of the EPA’s reversal, Zahrfeld wonders what he will say to people who come through the center’s doors. “What do I tell those parents? What do I tell that kid? The EPA is supposed to be protecting them — what are they doing?”

An animal waste pond behind a hog farm in Sampson County, N.C., where the EPA opened a civil rights investigation over such ponds disproportionately polluting Black and Latinx communities.

“A Chilling Effect”

Participants in environmental justice cases in Texas, Tennessee, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Missouri all expressed concerns that Landry’s lawsuit had left them vulnerable.

Blakely Hildebrand, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, called Landry’s arguments against disparate cumulative impact “extremely concerning.” Hildebrand spearheaded a complaint around hog operations in Duplin County, North Carolina, which aimed to call the EPA’s attention to biogas, a fuel sourced from hog and other animal waste that pollutes surrounding air and water.

Hildebrand noted that Duplin is “located in the Black Belt, where formerly enslaved people settled — that’s where the industry chose to consolidate its operations.” Some of those breathing the polluted air in Duplin, she added, “have had their land passed down generation to generation, dating back to when their ancestors were emancipated.” This parallels Cancer Alley, where petrochemical plants sit in the footprint of plantations. Now, Hildebrand is not only worried for the Duplin case, but also for “environmental justice work throughout the southeast.”

“There are absolutely concerns based on what we saw in Louisiana,” Chris Menefee, attorney general of Harris County, Texas, told The Intercept. Menefee has been part of a Title VI investigation into the growing number of concrete batch plants in Harris County’s Black and Latino neighborhoods, where Black residents are 40 percent more likely to die of cancer than the average Texan.

“When you’re in a red state like Texas, where the state environmental regulatory body has pretty much allowed industry to have free rein …we’re incredibly vulnerable,” said Menefee. “That last line of protection is going to be the EPA.” In November, he told the Houston Chronicle he hoped the EPA “would put the hammer down.”

But on January 2, after nearly a year of negotiations, the EPA announced they were closing the Texas case too. Just like in the Landry suit, the Texas Commission on Environment Quality accused the EPA of overreach, and the case was closed without any changes requiring the state to account for cumulative disparate impacts.

Menefee noted that the Texas regulatory agency recently approved another concrete crushing plant, this time across from a hospital, and again near neighborhoods of color already polluted by concrete plants. He said the agency told hundreds of objecting residents it was “not taking into account race.”

Leonard, of the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center, noted that while the EPA’s fears of a Supreme Court decision undermining their authority are well-founded, advocates and attorneys have always known that the agency would face pushback, should it decide to take more forceful action on civil rights enforcement. “They seem to not have been prepared for that inevitability,” he said.

Andre Segura, vice president of litigation for Earthjustice, attended the motion hearing for Landry’s suit on January 9. He said he had the impression that “the Department of Justice is treating this case very seriously,” but like Leonard, he noted that the pushback against the EPA’s efforts should be no surprise. “They’re going to challenge these fundamental tools” of civil rights enforcement, Segura said, referring to industry and political actors. “This is expected.” 

To Shariff of Flint Rising, Cancer Alley is emblematic of environmental justice struggles nationwide, as “a community that has been marginalized and abused for decades.”

“If they can’t get justice? Then it’s just a chilling effect for every other environmental justice community across the country,” they said.

Nevertheless, residents of sacrifice zones say that in the face of the EPA’s absence, they’ll continue the fight on their own.

When Lavigne, of Rise St. James, told EPA staff at the end of June that her community was upset, she was told they’d come down to give an explanation. That meeting never happened. But she did recently get a call from EPA head Regan — to alert her that, despite her objections, the EPA had decided to hand more authority to LDEQ. In the final days of 2023, the EPA announced that Louisiana will now be allowed to issue permits for wells that inject carbon underground, something she and her organization strongly oppose.

Still, Lavigne said she’ll ensure “the community gets what they need,” regardless of the EPA’s inaction. “We’re all we’ve got.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Delaney Nolan.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on January 17, Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba called on Ukraine's Western backers to provide advanced weaponry, including long-range missiles and F-16 fighter jets, to help Kyiv "throw Russia out of the sky."

Ukraine has been subjected to a series of unusually intense Russian air strikes since the start of the year that has put its air defenses under massive pressure amid dwindling stocks of ammunition and equipment.

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine

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"In 2024, of course the priority is to throw Russia from the skies," Kuleba said during a panel discussion. "Because the one who controls the skies will define when and how the war will end."

Kuleba's comments echoed remarks by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who said a day earlier at the forum that his country “must gain air superiority.”

"Just as we gained superiority in the Black Sea, we can do it. This will allow progress on the ground.... Partners know what is needed and in what quantity," Zelenskiy said.

Russian missiles later on January 17 struck a town outside Ukraine's second-largest city, Kharkiv, killing one person and damaging an educational institution, the regional governor and the military said.

Governor Oleh Synyehubov said on Telegram there were two strikes on the town of Chuhuyev. A female employee of a heating and power plant was killed and another person was injured. A military source, also reporting on Telegram, said the attack involved S-300 missiles.

Russian troops attacked Kharkiv with two S-300 missiles on January 16, wounding 17 people, including 14 who have been hospitalized.

The Ukrainian military also said it destroyed six Iranian-made Shahed drones over the Sumy and Dnipropetrovsk regions late on January 17.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on January 17 said the Biden administration was "working very hard" to secure additional funding for Ukraine from Congress, warning that failure to do so would be a "real problem."

"If we don't get that money, it's a real problem. It's a real problem for Ukraine. I think it's a problem for us and our leadership around the world," he said.

President Joe Biden convened top congressional leaders at the White House to underscore Ukraine's security needs.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (Republican-Louisiana) and other Republicans used the meeting with Biden to push for tougher border security measures.

"We understand that there's concern about the safety, security, and sovereignty of Ukraine," Johnson told reporters after the meeting "But the American people have those same concerns about our own domestic sovereignty and our safety and our security."

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (Democrat-New York) stressed that Biden had repeatedly said he is willing to compromise on certain border measures. He told reporters that there was a "large amount of agreement around the table" on both funding for Ukraine and border security.

The German parliament meanwhile rejected a motion put forward by the conservative opposition that called for the government to send long-range Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine. Nearly all lawmakers from the three-party governing coalition -- Chancellor Olaf Scholz's Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens, and the Free Democrats (FDP) -- opposed to the motion on January 17.

The Greens and the FDP have been pushing Scholz for months to send the missiles, but lawmakers from the two parties said they voted against the proposal because the conservative opposition had linked it to a debate on the annual report on Germany’s military.

As Kuleba made his comments in the Swiss ski resort, Ukrainian authorities were declaring an air-raid alert for the whole country.

The Ukrainian Air Force warned on Telegram that a Russian MiG-31 fighter jet had taken off from the Mozdok airfield in Russia's North Ossetia, while Telegram monitoring channels reported that an Il-78M refueling plane was also airborne.

Earlier on January 17, a Russian drone attack on Odesa wounded three people and caused damage to civilian residential infrastructure, prompting the evacuation of 130 people, regional Governor Oleh Kiper said on Telegram.

The Defense Forces of Southern Ukraine said separately that it shot down 11 Iranian-made drones during the attack on Odesa, with the vast majority of the debris falling into the sea.

"Air-defense units worked for almost three hours.... The main efforts of the enemy were concentrated on attacks on Odesa," the military said in a statement.

The latest Russian attacks came as the United Nations said the past several weeks have seen a steep increase in civilian victims in Ukraine due to unusually intense missile and drone strikes.

In December alone, 101 Ukrainian civilians were killed and 491 were wounded in Russian strikes, amounting a 26.5 percent month-to- month increase in verified casualties, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine said in a report published on January 16.

In Brussels, the chairman of the NATO Military Committee, Bob Bauer, said on January 17 that the alliance would keep supporting Ukraine for as long as it takes.

Russia launched a late-night attack on January 16 that struck the city center of Kharkiv in northeast Ukraine, as well as the Black Sea port of Odesa early on January 17, wounding civilians and causing widespread destruction to residential buildings.

“Today is the 693rd day of what Russia thought would be a three-day war. Ukraine will have our support for every day that is to come because the outcome of this war will determine the fate of the world,” Bauer said at the start of a two-day meeting of NATO defense ministers.

“This war has never been about any real security threat to Russia coming from either Ukraine or NATO,” Bauer added. “This war is about Russia fearing something much more powerful than any physical weapon on Earth: democracy. If people in Ukraine can have democratic rights, then people in Russia will soon crave them too.”

Bauer also urged a fundamental overhaul in the conflict readiness of the 31-member alliance.

“In order to be fully effective, also in the future, we need a war-fighting transformation of NATO,” he said.

With reporting by Reuters and AP

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

According to one analysis, the series of tax cuts approved under former Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump have added $10 trillion to the debt since their enactment and are responsible for the bulk of the increase in the debt ratio since 2001.

Social Security, by contrast, is not a driver of federal deficits.

"If we want to ensure long-term solvency [for Social Security], there are two choices: Some on the other side think we should cut benefits, I think we should ask the ultra-rich to pay their fair share. We don't need a commission to tell us that," McGovern said during his testimony. "And my fear is that a commission would be used by some as an excuse to slash Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal anti-poverty programs."

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), a member of the House Budget Committee who served on the infamous Bowles-Simpson commission that proposed deep cuts to Social Security, expressed similar concerns during Wednesday's hearing.

Schakowsky said she was "happy" the Bowles-Simpson proposals—which she vocally opposed at the time—weren't adopted and warned that a fiscal commission of the kind backed by Republicans and right-wing Democrats is "a way for members of Congress to get out from under having to take the blame for the kinds of cuts that may be presented."

In an op-ed for Common Dreams on Wednesday, Schakowsky wrote that "if Republicans cared about improving our fiscal position, they would demand the rich pay their fair share."

"If Republicans wanted to actually solve our budget challenges, they would robustly fund tax enforcement to ensure corporations are complying with laws already on the books," she added. "But Republicans aren't serious about the deficit. They aren't even serious about governing. They are serious about only one thing, and that's ripping away Social Security from seniors behind closed doors."

Wednesday's hearing examined three pieces of legislation put forth by bipartisan groups of lawmakers in the House and Senate.

A bill introduced earlier this month by Sens. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.)—both of whom testified at Wednesday's hearing—would form a 16-member bipartisan, bicameral fiscal commission comprised of 12 elected officials and four outside experts tasked with crafting legislation to "improve solvency of federal trust funds over a 75-year period."

If approved by the commission, the legislation would be put on a fast track in the House and Senate.

Romney insisted during his testimony Wednesday that he doesn't know of a single Republican or Democrat who wants to cut Social Security and said benefit reductions should be off the table.

But Social Security Works, a progressive advocacy group, pointed out that a proposal released earlier this year by the Republican Study Committee (RSC)—a panel comprised of 175 House Republicans—called for raising the Social Security retirement age, which would de facto cut benefits across the board.

Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), who presided over Wednesday's hearing, is a member of the RSC. During his opening remarks, Arrington described efforts to prevent what he called a "sovereign debt crisis" as "our generation's World War."

Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works, told Common Dreams that "at today's hearing, Republicans made the true purpose of their 'fiscal commission' crystal clear: demolish Social Security and Medicare behind closed doors, while avoiding accountability from voters."

"Chairman Jodey Arrington referred to the commission's supporters as 'partners in crime,'" Lawson added. "That's exactly what they are: criminals who are plotting to reach into our pockets and steal our earned benefits."

"It should be a national scandal that middle- and working-class families have to pay Social Security taxes on all of their income but millionaires and billionaires do not."

Instead of taking the deeply unpopular step of slashing benefits, Democrats who spoke at the budget committee hearing argued that Congress should pass legislation requiring the rich to contribute more to Social Security. This year, because of the payroll tax cap, millionaires stopped paying into the program in late February.

"It should be a national scandal that middle- and working-class families have to pay Social Security taxes on all of their income but millionaires and billionaires do not," said McGovern.

Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, said at Wednesday's hearing that Congress could extend Social Security's solvency through the end of the century by requiring the rich to pay more in taxes.

"I think that is fair. I think that is appropriate," said Boyle. "And for those who disagree, I would be very interested in seeing what their plan is and their alternative."

Following the hearing, Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) delivered a speech on the House floor condemning Republicans for working to "establish a death panel commission to gut earned benefits" and described the effort as part of a "cycle" that must be opposed.

"First, Republicans pass tax handouts for their filthy rich donors, promising a trickle-down miracle that never has and will never happen—from Reaganomics to Trump's tax scam," said Lee. "Then, when their tax scam causes the economy to slow and deficits to grow, they refuse to correct their mistake. Instead they blame immigrants, poor folks, Black folks, and brown folks."

"Then they repeat the cycle," she continued, "hoping enough of us will forgive or forget their scheme to tear away Medicare and Social Security and believe their lie that they were 'only after' food assistance, healthcare, and housing for poor folks—not your earned benefits—when the truth is that they always were and always will be after it all."

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

In front of Columbia University’s Low Memorial Library, seven infant-sized bundles of white cloth rested on the steps, splattered with red paint. Behind the swaddles, plywood boards read “10,600 lives slaughtered,” “4,412 children,” and “let Gaza live,” alongside images of Palestinian flags and olive trees.

This was the scene where Columbia students gathered last Thursday for a “peaceful protest art installation” and demonstration organized by the campus chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine. Hundreds of students demanded that Columbia publicly call for a ceasefire in Gaza, divest its endowment from corporations complicit in Israeli apartheid, and end its academic programs in Tel Aviv.

The next day, Gerald Rosberg, chair of the Special Committee on Campus Safety, announced Columbia had suspended its chapters of JVP and SJP through the end of the semester, citing an “unauthorized event” that “included threatening rhetoric and intimidation.” The announcement quickly drew widespread criticism, including from hundreds of Jewish faculty who denounced the “vague allegations” that served as grounds for the suspensions.

But amid the backlash, StandWithUs, a self-described “non-partisan Israel education organization,” lauded Columbia’s decision. “StandWithUs sent several legal letters to universities like @Columbia, urging them to immediately hold these groups accountable for the hate, fear, and harassment they incite on campus,” the group wrote on social media. “We hope more universities will follow suit.” 

Alongside Israel advocacy groups like the Brandeis Center, the International Legal Forum, and the David Horowitz Freedom Center, StandWithUs has spent years trying to shut down criticism of Israel on college campuses, often by weaponizing civil rights law. The groups allege that, while the political speech may be protected by the First Amendment, it fosters a campus climate of antisemitism in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits federally funded programs from discriminating on the basis of race, color, or national origin. As students have ramped up pro-Palestinian demonstrations over the past month, Israel advocacy groups have escalated a pressure campaign of their own. 

Earlier this month, StandWithUs sent an open letter to thousands of universities addressed to the general counsel and vice president of student affairs, outlining actions colleges could take to ensure compliance with Title VI. The group’s recommendations include requiring student identification cards at protests, monitoring university communication channels for “biased statements about Israel,” and investigating student groups for ties to Hamas. The group has also sent a surge of direct letters urging administrators to clamp down on specific Palestine solidarity campus events. Meanwhile, on November 9, the Brandeis Center filed two Title VI complaints with the Department of Education against the University of Pennsylvania and Wellesley College. (The Brandeis Center also joined forces with the Anti-Defamation League to call on the presidents of nearly 200 universities to investigate their SJP chapters, alleging they could have ties to Hamas that would constitute “materially supporting a foreign terrorist organization.”)

“If you can’t win the debate because the facts aren’t in your favor, it’s pretty sensible to try to stop it altogether.”

According to Dylan Saba, a staff attorney at Palestine Legal, the groups tend to target “pretty mundane examples of pro-Palestine expression … because that’s precisely what these organizations are trying to get rid of.” But as Israel’s military assault over the past month has become “increasingly indefensible for the pro-Israel forces,” it’s spurred a new wave of Title VI threats.

“That’s what’s motivating the strategy to try to raise the stakes of Palestinian expression and organizing by getting universities to try to crack down on it,” said Saba. “If you can’t win the debate because the facts aren’t in your favor, it’s pretty sensible to try to stop it altogether.”

Crackdown at Columbia

The Title VI crusade adds even more fuel to the recent punitive actions against Palestine solidarity student groups. 

Since the start of Israel’s bombing of Gaza, students at Columbia have organized numerous protests, vigils, and rallies in a show of support for civilians in Gaza. As part of a nationwide “Shut it Down for Palestine” walkout on November 9, SJP and JVP arranged an art installation and rally.

One day later, the groups were suspended for the unauthorized event and “threatening rhetoric and intimidation,” making them ineligible to hold campus events or receive school funding for the remainder of the term. 

While university policy requires students to obtain a permit 10 days before an event, violations of policy usually result in a disciplinary proceeding against individual students, not an outright suspension of an entire organization, according to Katherine Franke, a law professor at Columbia University who has been serving as a faculty advocate for the sanctioned students. 

Franke noted that the organizations were suspended by a newly formed group, the Special Committee on Campus Safety, which was created with no advance notice and did not go through the standard University Senate Executive Committee approval process. Columbia’s website does not contain any mention of the Special Committee before the November 10 announcement, which did not elaborate on the new committee’s members or purview. 

“We don’t know who’s on it, who created it, what its authority is, under what rules is it operating.”

“We don’t know who’s on it, who created it, what its authority is, under what rules is it operating,” said Franke. Franke has asked Rosberg, the chair of the Special Committee, for more information about the new group and the specific rhetoric that led to SJP and JVP’s sanctioning. She says she has not received a response. 

Additionally, internet archives show Columbia quietly updated its student group event policy some time between June 12 and October 20 to include new language around the sanctioning of student organizations “for failure to obtain event approval and/or not abiding by terms of an approved event.”

“They edited the student conduct rules without any consultation with the groups that normally are required to be consulted,” said Franke. 

Columbia University did not respond to a request for comment.

During her 25-year tenure, Franke noted she’s seen “a lot of demonstrations,” from the Iraq War to 9/11. “All manner of things have been debated, protested, and the university’s structure was able to handle it,” she said. “But somehow, they had to create — without any consultation with any of the responsible governing bodies — a whole new way of dealing with these issues.”

Columbia is one of three private universities that have now sanctioned their SJP chapters in an unprecedented cascade of crackdowns on student organizing around Palestine solidarity. 

Earlier this month, Brandeis University announced an outright and total ban on its SJP chapter, claiming the group “openly supports Hamas.” On Tuesday, George Washington University suspended its SJP chapter from hosting on-campus events for three months.

Roz Rothstein, co-founder and CEO of StandWithUs, wrote in a statement to The Intercept that after the group sent letters to thousands of universities, “many responded privately thanking us for the letter or, in the days after receiving it, taking concrete action on their campuses, such as Columbia, Brandeis, and GWU banning SJP for the rest of the semester.” 

She added, “Other schools have notified us that they have launched independent investigations or task forces to address antisemitism. We look forward to seeing the results of those inquiries.”

Demonstrators rally at a “All Out for Gaza” protest at Columbia University in New York on Nov. 15, 2023.

Changing Standards

At Pomona College in Claremont, California, student organizers have also been challenged by a shifting web of guidelines. Samson Zhang, an editor of a student publication focused on leftist campus organizing called Claremont Undercurrents, noted that new policies seemed to arise in direct response to specific Palestine solidarity campus actions. 

In one instance, 150 students attended a vigil at the student services center. “It was very intentionally organized so that no club claimed it, and the messaging was that it was organized by everybody and nobody,” said Zhang. “That happened Friday, and by Monday they sent out an email with a new demonstration policy that an event is only compliant with the student code of conduct if there’s a specific student club that it’s registered under.” 

And, on November 7 — the day before a planned divestment protest — Pomona President Gabi Starr sent a letter to students and alumni with a reminder of campus demonstration rules. Claremont Undercurrents reported that one day before Starr’s email blast, StandWithUs sent her a letter expressing concern over the event. The letter urged the administration to take immediate action “to prevent discriminatory treatment of Jewish and Israeli students” and specifically noted that the administration has “the right to prohibit masks worn for the purpose of concealing identity.” Starr’s email similarly states that “masks that prevent recognition of individuals pose a challenge to the ability to maintain campus codes of conduct,” adding that students may be asked to remove them. 

In response to inquiries from The Student Life, a campus newspaper, Pomona’s spokesperson said Starr’s mention of masks “was in response to significant concerns related to our own campus — not in response to any outside organization.”

StandWithUs has targeted Pomona before. In April 2021, the Associated Students of Pomona College voted to ban the use of student government funds on items or companies that “knowingly support the Israeli occupation of Palestine” — a move that triggered a swift condemnation from Starr. That same day, StandWithUs sent a letter praising Starr for her statement and calling on her to use “whatever means at your disposal to invalidate this resolution.” Every student government representative that voted in favor of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions resolution that year was then doxxed on Canary Mission, a secretive website that posts public blacklists of Palestinian rights organizers.

One year prior, in February 2020, the David Horowitz Freedom Center wrote to Starr and Pitzer College President Melvin Oliver, claiming that the colleges had violated Title VI by fostering “pervasive, college-sponsored anti-semitism.” The Southern Policy Law Center has classified Horowitz as an extremist, noting that “the Freedom Center has launched a network of projects giving anti-Muslim voices and radical ideologies a platform to project hate and misinformation.” 

“Political Cudgel”

A core ask from groups like the David Horowitz Freedom Center and StandWithUs is that university policies adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Association, or IHRA, working definition of antisemitism, which critics say falsely equates broad criticism of Israel with antisemitism. The IHRA definition found new footing in 2019, when then-President Donald Trump signed an executive order instructing federal agencies to “consider” the IHRA definition in Title VI enforcement. 

“IHRA expressly recognizes that criticism of Israel, similar to criticism of other countries, is not antisemitic,” wrote Rothstein of StandWithUs. “And it recognizes that some rhetoric and actions related to Israel do cross the line into bigotry.”

By eliding meaningful differences between critique of Israel and Jewish discrimination, said Saba of Palestine Legal, the groups warp claims of antisemitism into a “political cudgel” to be wielded against students voicing solidarity with Palestine.

The Brandeis Center’s recent Title VI complaint against the University of Pennsylvania conflates disparate events as uniform examples of campus antisemitism. The letter notes recent disturbing attacks against Hillel, a Jewish student organization, including bomb threats and an instance in which a Penn student vandalized the Hillel building and yelled “fuck the Jews.” But the letter also highlights Penn’s “Palestine Writes” literature festival, condemning the September event’s inclusion of speakers “known for their aggressive stance against the Jewish State.”

In November 2022, the International Legal Forum, an Israel-based organization dedicated to “fighting legal battles against terror, antisemitism, and de-legitimization of Israel,” filed a Title VI complaint against the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, after nine student groups banned supporters of Zionism from speaking at their events. In its complaint, the group wrote, “Zionism is an integral and indispensable part of Jewish identity.”

Since its founding in 2001, StandWithUs, which is registered as a nonprofit under the name “Israel Emergency Alliance,” has launched efforts to oppose “anti-Israel bias” in libraries, supported anti-BDS laws, and encouraged supporters to buy Caterpillar stock amid scrutiny over the construction company’s role in Israel’s demolition of Palestinian homes. The group recruits annual student fellows to serve as pro-Israel activists on American campuses nationwide and once invited Elvis Costello on a VIP trip in an attempt to convince the singer to change his mind about canceling concerts in Israel.

Last year, StandWithUs filed a Title VI complaint against George Washington University, after assistant professor of clinical psychology Lara Sheehi hosted a brown-bag lunch with a Palestinian professor, leading to a pressure campaign and an internal investigation that turned up nothing. “Many of the statements the complaint alleges were made by Dr. Sheehi were, according to those who heard them, either inaccurate or taken out of context and misrepresented,” the university said in a summary of its findings at the time, adding that Sheehi had “denounced antisemitism as a real and present danger” in classroom discussion. StandWithUs refuted this characterization. In February, Palestine Legal filed its own Title VI complaint against GWU for a “hostile environment of anti-Palestinian racism,” which cites the Sheehi case among others.

“The byproduct of all of this is that you have now a lot of obfuscation about what the meaning of antisemitism is and what constitutes antisemitism, which is very dangerous for Jewish students on campus,” said Saba. “It makes it much more difficult to be able to identify and work to eliminate real instances of antisemitism and threats to Jewish students, which tend to come from the political right.”

“It makes it much more difficult to be able to identify and work to eliminate real instances of antisemitism and threats to Jewish students.”

Meanwhile, many members of the Jewish community are resisting these groups’ efforts to conflate Judaism and Zionism, noting that their faith inspires resistance to injustice, not blanket support for a regime. 

“A lot of institutions across the country, and also at the university, have pushed this idea of a hegemonic Jewish community that all shares the same political beliefs,” said Rafi Ash, a Brown University sophomore who was one of 20 Jewish students arrested during a November sit-in at an administrative building organized by BrownU Jews for Ceasefire Now. “We all have been kind of disturbed by the ways in which a Jewish identity has been twisted in a way that makes it political.”

While the Department of Education is expected to field a new influx of Title VI complaints from organizations representing Jewish students, Saba noted that groups like Palestine Legal have also filed complaints regarding instances of anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and Islamophobic discrimination on campuses. The Department of Education has never made a finding of antisemitic or anti-Palestinian discrimination in any of its investigations so far, though that could soon change as the Israel–Hamas war puts Title VI in the limelight. The American Civil Liberties Union has begun to take legal action over the First Amendment rights of Palestinian solidarity protesters.

“We are in touch with many, many, many student groups across the country, and we are seeing a pattern of heightened scrutiny and suppression,” said Saba. “Fortunately, despite the mass suppressive effort, students are continuing to organize, continuing to speak out, and are refusing to be silenced. We’re seeing one of the largest upsurges in pro-Palestine organizing and demonstration that we’ve ever seen.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Schuyler Mitchell.

"The wounded who need an ICU bed now have no place to be admitted," the Palestinian Health Ministry said, noting that hospitals have been forced to place injured patients in corridors due to a lack of space.

Further straining Gaza's health system is Israel's total siege of the territory, which has cut off the supply of electricity, fuel, food, and other key supplies. On Wednesday, Gaza's lone power plant shut down after running out of fuel.

Adnan Abu Hasna, media adviser for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), told the Financial Times that hospitals are using generators, "but this is very dangerous because they can't operate them 24 hours a day."

"They also have limited supplies of fuel that will run out soon," he added. "Whole districts have been bombed and their residents displaced... we're talking about 500,000 people. There are some 250,000 in UNRWA schools and the rest sheltering in other locations. The situation is catastrophic."

Fabrizio Carboni, regional director for the Near and Middle East for the International Committee of the Red Cross, issued a stark warning about the consequences of widespread power loss in the besieged enclave, which is home to 2.3 million people.

"As Gaza loses power, hospitals lose power, putting newborns in incubators and elderly patients on oxygen at risk," Carboni said in a statement. "Kidney dialysis stops, and X-rays can't be taken. Without electricity, hospitals risk turning into morgues."

"Our teams are witnessing a level of destruction that may already exceed previous escalations."

The appalling and increasingly dire situation on the ground in Gaza has heightened calls for, at minimum, a temporary cease-fire to allow humanitarian aid to enter the occupied strip.

"We call for the international community to press for a temporary humanitarian cease-fire for 24 hours in Gaza to avert an impending major disaster," the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor wrote in a social media post on Thursday. "Gaza is running out of drinking water, electricity, and food supplies. Health sector is collapsing. Every minute counts."

The social justice group Right Livelihood also called for a cease-fire and denounced Israel's "indiscriminate airstrikes on residential buildings, schools, and hospitals across the Gaza Strip."

"We strongly condemn the crimes committed since October 7 and call on all parties to abide by international humanitarian law and international human rights law," the group added. "The deliberate targeting of civilians is illegal, inhumane, and immoral."

Israel has thus far provided no indication that it plans to ease its assault on Gaza any time soon. Over the past several days, Israel has amassed troops along its southern border structure in preparation for a large-scale ground invasion of Gaza, which observers warn will only exacerbate civilian suffering.

Israel has also pledged to not lift its devastating blockade of Gaza until Hamas frees all hostages.

With the siege in place and bombs continuing to fall for the sixth consecutive day, humanitarian workers say they're having an extremely difficult time operating in Gaza.

Doctors Without Borders, which is running a makeshift clinic in downtown Gaza City, said Thursday that members of its staff have been "unable to obtain safe passage to support Palestinian medical colleagues working day and night to treat the injured." The group said it has received reports from Gaza medical officials that they are running out of key supplies, including painkillers and anesthetics.

"People playing no role in the hostilities do not have a safe haven to go to," the group added. "Our teams are witnessing a level of destruction that may already exceed previous escalations."

Aid workers in Gaza have also accused Israeli forces of intentionally targeting medical personnel and facilities. At least 13 healthcare facilities in Gaza have been damaged by Israeli bombing, according to the World Health Organization.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) said that Israeli airstrikes killed four of its paramedics "in less than half an hour" on Wednesday "despite prior coordination."

"PRCS demands accountability for this war crime, urging immediate investigation and justice for the victims," the group said in a statement. "Targeting medical personnel is a grave breach to international humanitarian law and to humanity."

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

Raging flood waters ravaged the mountain county of 28,000 last year, sweeping away homes and killing at least three people. The underfunded local government has been able to recover only with help from Washington, which promised about $3.7 million to repair roads and buy out flooded homeowners.

Last month, after the county had spent $2 million of its own money on recovery efforts, County Executive Scott Alexander received a concerning letter from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. The agency was running low on money, the letter said, and it was pausing the reimbursements it had promised. Not only would the county not be paid back for its road repairs, it also wouldn’t receive money for home buyouts. The projects would be suspended until Congress gave FEMA more cash. That’s left homeowners in limbo, and the county with a fiscal hole that’s equivalent to 10 percent of its annual budget.

“It’s huge, and it’s crippled us right now,” Alexander said. “It really puts a hardship on us, and it will be hard for all smaller communities going forward. We want to do [the buyouts] as quickly as possible for the homeowners so they can get on with rebuilding their lives.” 

Many, many more communities and homeowners face similar situations. Even as the nation veers toward the first government shutdown since late 2018, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is in a desperate financial state. Despite repeated requests for more funding, Congress has let the agency’s all-important disaster relief fund empty out, imperiling its ability to respond to devastating floods, fires, and other catastrophes.

As the agency tries to save cash, it has paused $2.8 billion in funding for thousands of disaster recovery projects across the country. A list of interrupted projects reviewed by Grist shows that the hiatus has affected everything from post-hurricane school construction in Florida to road repairs in Colorado, plus hundreds of millions of dollars in reimbursements for pandemic response. 

If the looming government shutdown delays lawmakers’ efforts to pass legislation to fund the government, this suspension could last for weeks, straining the nation’s long-term recovery from Hurricane Idalia, the fires on Maui, summer floods in Vermont, and other recent disasters.

“We’re talking about an agency that is understaffed, that’s dealing with a disaster declaration on average every three days, and now we’re in this dysfunctional state of Congress where they can’t seem to get done the basic job of refilling the Disaster Relief Fund,” said Shana Udvardy, a policy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists who studies disaster response. “It’s stressing communities who can’t actually implement these projects that have been in the tunnel for quite some time.”

The pot of money that FEMA uses to fund disaster relief has been running low for months as the agency fights a series of expensive climate disasters and the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Deanne Criswell, the agency’s top official, warned lawmakers as early as April that it might have to constrain disaster response efforts if Congress didn’t provide more money. FEMA often has to ask for additional funding during bad years, but lawmakers let the fund run dry this year as they bickered over whether to couple disaster spending with Ukraine aid. 

“We’re seeing politics at its worst,” Udvardy told Grist.

A summer of heavy spending on disasters like the Maui wildfires brought the fund down to around $4 billion in August, leaving FEMA with just 20 percent of the money it had at the start of the year. Criswell on August 29 halted all spending except for “immediate needs,” which included response to new disasters such as the Maui fires and Hurricane Idalia. The agency says it has enough money left to carry it through October, but it’s one big disaster away from hitting zero.

According to the most recent rundown of funding cuts, the areas most impacted as of September 22 are Florida, Louisiana, and Puerto Rico, all of which have dealt with major hurricanes in recent years. FEMA has frozen more than $560 million in funding for Hurricane Ian recovery in Florida and almost $250 million in funding for Puerto Rico’s response to hurricanes Maria and Fiona.

While almost all the paused money supports long-term recovery, around $108 million in grants for climate resilience are also in jeopardy. These subsidies are designed to help communities prepare for future disasters. The suspended projects include a buyout program for flood-prone homes in Kentucky and a $4.7 million water infrastructure project in eastern Puerto Rico. 

Two years ago, the remnants of Hurricane Ida flooded a public housing complex owned by the Englewood Housing Authority in Englewood, New Jersey. The inundation destroyed 22 of the building’s 150 apartments and the authority’s headquarters. The agency is now ready to begin repairs, and has cleared the permits necessary to do so, but can’t proceed until FEMA sends the $8 million it promised. 

“Unfortunately, due to all the natural disasters throughout the U.S., FEMA needs to wait … to fund the rebuild,” said Samuel Lee, the commissioner of the housing authority. He said construction “will hopefully occur later this year.”

For some local governments without deep financial reserves, the funding pause has prompted a cash crisis. Municipal leaders in Garnett, Kansas, spent $3 million over the past year fixing an aging reservoir spillway, bolstering the town’s protection against heavy rains. The city expected to FEMA to cover the bill, but the money hasn’t arrived.

“ The funding pause has caused some headaches here,” City Manager Travis Wilson told Grist. “We have yet to see a reimbursement, my reserve is depleted, and I’m having to borrow from other utility reserves to continue to pay for the project. It truly is a domino effect.” A prior storm in 2019 caused significant damage to the reservoir spillway, and Wilson is worried about future flooding if the repairs don’t happen soon.

The Washington Post reported an earlier version of the list, which was accurate as of September 15. In a statement to Grist, FEMA said it  could continue to provide emergency disaster aid and support victims of recent disasters. The agency also called on Congress to refill the relief fund.

The prospect of a government shutdown is bad enough for FEMA on its own. Craig Fugate, a former agency administrator under President Obama, told the Washington Post this week that shutdowns can hamper the agency’s coordination efforts and the government’s two-week closure in 2013 left him with a “skeleton crew.” The agency can still deploy emergency responders to floods and fires under such circumstances, for example, but its command center in Washington, DC shuts down, making nationwide communication and coordination almost impossible.

It will take a big infusion of money for FEMA to resume normal operations. According to the agency’s most recent report, it expects to end this month with just $556 million in the bank, down from $4 billion last month. The most recent stopgap funding bill under consideration in the Senate would give the agency only $6 billion in direct funding, which would likely only last for a few months.

In a statement on Thursday, the White House excoriated House Republicans for what it called financial brinkmanship, highlighting the delays that resulted from FEMA’s funding shortfall.

“Extreme House Republicans are playing partisan games with peoples’ lives,” the statement said, “including delaying long-term disaster recovery and undermining preparedness in communities across the country.”

Those partisan games have Michael Heinen, the CEO of the Jeff Davis Electrical Cooperative, pondering his next move. The co-op is erecting wind-resistant power lines to replace those that collapsed during hurricanes Laura and Delta in 2020, leaving customers to rely on generators. The work was possible only because the Federal Emergency Management Agency provided more than $30 million in grants to support the state’s hurricane recovery.

He already knew that money would be a little late in arriving; FEMA told him that weeks ago, saying it was pausing payments even though he’d already hired contractors, secured permits for the project and had enough money to start construction. With FEMA subsequently freezing funding, he isn’t sure what to do.

“It’s a concern, it’s one of those things that keep you up at night,” said Heinen. “It affects the timeline on trying to get that done, but I’m cautiously optimistic that it’s going to be temporary.” 

Even so, he was caught off guard by the funding freeze — he hadn’t even heard which projects FEMA is suspending until Grist told him on Thursday.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Disaster recovery projects stall nationwide as FEMA runs out of money on Sep 29, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

“Wildfires, hurricanes, thunderstorms, and flash floods have wreaked havoc across the U.S. this year, and after each disaster, homeowners have looked to their insurance providers to defray their losses. More and more often, those companies have packed up and moved on, leaving homeowners fewer and fewer options for insurance.

“The growing insurance crisis illustrates the vital importance of seeing climate change as a risk to the entire financial system. Year-after-year, disasters with multi-billion dollar price tags have struck around the globe.

“While much of today’s hearing will look at the impacts of the climate crisis on insurance, it will be incomplete without looking at the damage these companies have done by insuring and investing in fossil fuels. While these companies flee states at the highest risk for disaster, the insurance industry continues to prop up the companies directly causing climate change. The Senate should hold these companies accountable for profiting from a crisis they so willingly insure.”

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

The Karen National Union, the political wing of the Karen National Liberation Army that represents ethnic Karen people in eastern Myanmar’s Kayin state, was one of the eight original ethnic army signatories of the accord in October 2015, aimed at ending the country’s long-running armed conflicts. 

Two other rebel groups signed the agreement in 2018, bringing the number 10.

The KNU and other ethnic armed organizations want a national military that cannot participate in politics and the formation of a federal democratic union in Myanmar.

The peace process was killed off when the Myanmar military seized power from the elected civilian-led government in a February 2021 coup, sparking new waves of violence with ethnic armies joining forces with anti-junta resistance fighters and engaging in insurgency and heavy clashes across the country.  

Through fighting, the junta forces have violated terms of the nationwide cease-fire agreement, or NCA, so that it no longer exists, said KNU General Secretary Pado Saw Tado Muh during an online press conference on Thursday to mark the 100th day after the KNU’s 17th Congress. 

“There is no more reason to follow the NCA because the military has trampled on Chapter 1 of the agreement, which is the heart of the whole NCA,” he said, referring to the part of the pact on basic principles to which the signatories agreed. 

Key areas of the accord cover military codes of conduct, the protection of civilians, the provision of humanitarian assistance, a political roadmap, interim arrangements, the establishment of a Joint Ceasefire Monitoring Committee, and the adoption of a Framework for Political Dialogue for peacefully resolving differeences.  

The KNU said on July 9 that it had engaged in nearly 2,500 armed clashes with junta troops during the first half of the year in KNU-controlled territory in Kayin and Mon states and in Tanintharyi and Bago regions.

Junta leader Sr. Gen. Min Aung Hlaing said Tuesday that the NCA should not be ignored and that the military is working hard to adhere to its terms.

His comments came days after Min Aung Hlaing extended emergency rule in Myanmar for another six months on July 31, thereby delaying the date by which elections must be held according to the country’s constitution. The junta previously pledged to hold elections in August.

Pado Saw Tado Muh said he would not accept any elections based on the 2008 constitution, drafted by a previous military junta that ruled Myanmar.

“We will not accept the junta’s election, [and] we should not hold any new election based on the 2008 constitution as it will lead to more harm than good and will make it more difficult to solve the political problems of Myanmar,” he said.

"Therefore, we would like to tell you not to support any movement based on the election that will perpetuate the military dictatorship."

After the coup, the KNU and its armed wing — one of Myanmar’s largest ethnic armies —  took a more aggressive stance to the military and offered sanctuary to lawmakers, protesters, striking workers and others who faced abuse and attacks by the junta.

KNLA forces have conducted deadly ambushes, captured military bases, and trained resistance fighters, including members of the anti-regime People's Defense Forces, as junta forces ramped up attacks on KNU-controlled territory.

KNLA commander Brigadier General Saw Tar Malar Thaw said the junta is now on the defensive.

“Tactically, they cannot open offensive attacks, but instead have to use only heavy artillery and airplanes,” he said. “In many cases, such attacks target civilians."

RFA could not reach Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun, the junta's spokesman, for comment on the KNU’s statements.

Translated by Myo Min Aung for RFA Burmese. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Matt Reed.

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

Saturday marked the anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that saw the conservative majority overturn Roe v. Wade and end the federal right to abortion. Abortion rights activists rallied in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere across the country to demand access to reproductive healthcare. In the year since the ruling, more than a dozen states have passed new abortion bans, and about 25 million women of childbearing age now live under tighter restrictions than before the court intervened. However, thanks to grassroots organizing efforts and underground abortion networks, “Abortions are still happening in every state in the country every day,” says Amy Littlefield, abortion access correspondent for The Nation. Littlefield discusses how abortion activists are working to continue providing care, as well as what to expect from the anti-abortion movement as it seeks to further restrict reproductive rights.

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

As legal fights raise concerns about the future accessibility of the abortion medication mifepristone, reproductive rights supporters on Saturday rallied outside the U.S. Supreme Court and in cities across the country.

The demonstrations came a day after the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily blocked a recent ruling by Texas-based federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, an appointee of former President Donald Trump who struck down the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's 2000 approval of mifepristone, one of two drugs often taken in tandem for abortions.

However, the high court's decision last year in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which reversed Roe v. Wade and overturned a half-century of abortion rights, is fueling fears of what the future holds, as Republican-controlled states across the country continue passing legislation to further limit the choices of pregnant people.

Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington, D.C. president and CEO Laura Meyers, who spoke at the rally in the nation's capital, noted the Dobbs decision and, referring to Kacsmaryk's ruling earlier this month, said that "now we have judges who are not medical doctors making decisions that affect millions of people's lives."

"I am outraged," Meyers told The Washington Post. "I hope that the court relies on science, and not just junk and ideology. I hope that the court understands that the overwhelming vast majority of Americans do not want to see restrictions on abortion. Americans do not want judges and politicians interfering with our healthcare decisions."

ACLU of D.C. policy counsel Melissa Wasser, who also spoke at the rally, stressed that the long-term risks of rulings like Kacsmaryk's go far beyond abortion rights, saying: "Today it's mifepristone. Tomorrow it could be a vaccine."

"It could be another medication or lifesaving treatment," Wasser warned. "And that means that every fringe group can just go pick a judge, and with the stroke of a pen, millions of people will not get the lifesaving healthcare that they need."

Brittany House, a Washington, D.C. resident, shared with the crowd that when she had just graduated from university in 2012, "abortion gave me freedom," adding that as a 21-year-old, she "wouldn't have been able to support my child."

According toAgence France-Presse:

Many septuagenarians were also marching in front of the Supreme Court, outraged to see restrictions piling up in the country, 50 years after having fought for the right to an abortion.

An abortion "saved my life," said Barbara Kraft, who had an abortion in the late 1970s after serious complications during her pregnancy.

"I feel so strongly that women have to have the right to make that decision for themselves," she said.

"The ACLU and Planned Parenthood and several other national partner organizations have been following this case out of Texas for months and we organized and coordinated to host rallies on the same day across the country," Samantha Chapman, the advocacy manager for the ACLU of South Dakota, told a local news outlet.

"Self-managed abortion is safe and it is essential healthcare. I've done it," said Chapman. "People who support abortion access are never going to go away. We will continue to take care of ourselves and take care of our communities."

The Seattle Timesreported that in the Washington city, protesters marched down Pine Street through Capitol Hill and into the downtown area, where they blocked an intersection, while chanting, "Fascist judges make us ill, hands off the abortion pill," and "Abortion pills are under attack, we won't go back."

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, demonstrators in the Illinois city delivered speeches at Federal Plaza before marching through the Loop and Millennium Park, and similarly chanted, "Red state, blue state, you can't hide, the war on abortion is nationwide," and "Fascist judges make me ill, hands off the abortion pill."

Since the Dobbs ruling, Illinois has been inundated with "abortion refugees" who can't get healthcare in surrounding states.

Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights organizer Jay Becker warned that "we are facing the greatest threat to women's lives and freedoms since last summer when the Supreme Court decided women are second-class citizens."

"To revoke the approval of mifepristone is a major step toward banning abortion nationwide," Becker added. "This is all about female enslavement and whether women will be treated as full human beings or not."

Floridians gathered in West Palm Beach on Saturday to protest not only attacks on reproductive rights across the country but also a six-week abortion ban signed into law this week by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, a presumed 2024 presidential candidate.

"We need to get mad and we need to show we're mad and this is going to change the whole country," said Ellen Baker, a board member of the Democratic Women's Club of Palm Beach County, which organized the rally. "I was in high school when Roe v. Wade was passed and so for me, it's, how can we go backward? How can my grandkids have fewer rights than me?"

The rally in Los Angeles, California featured a speech from Vice President Kamala Harris, who declared: "This is a moment that history will show required each of us, based on our collective love of our country, to stand up and fight for and protect our ideals. That's what this moment is."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

A week after six people including three 9-year-old children were shot dead in a Nashville elementary school and two days before planned nationwide protests, thousands of students walked out of classrooms across the Tennesee capital on Monday to demand gun control laws.

The advocacy group March for Our Lives (MFOL)—founded after the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre in Parkland, Florida—organized Monday's protest to urge state lawmakers pass gun control legislation including better background checks and a ban assault weapons.

"The purpose of the rally is to show that the community has had enough and we are demanding change from the Tennessee Legislature," MFOL national organizer Ezri Tyler explained to WKRN.

"It's not drag queens. It's not books. Children are dying because of guns."

"The message overall is we know that right now, Tennessee is engaging in this culture war, where they're harming our communities by banning drag, by banning books, banning gender-affirming care," Tyler added. "But if they actually cared about protecting kids, as they claimed they would address what kills every single day, which is guns."

Gun violence is the leading cause of death for U.S. children.

MFOL organizer Brynn Jones toldWKRN that "it hits closer and closer, the longer and longer that you're, you know, hearing these stories just being like that it's the same story over and over again.

"But then hearing it on Monday that it was in Tennessee, it was in Nashville, 20 minutes from where I grew up, 20 minutes from where I go to school, hit incredibly close to home and felt personal in a way that it usually doesn't," Jones added.

Thousands of students marched to Legislative Plaza near the Tennessee State Capitol chanting "stop gun violence, we will not be silenced" and other slogans. Video recorded inside the Capitol showed demonstrators confronting state Rep. William Lamberth (R-44) and asking him why lawmakers won't "ban assault rifles."

The LGBTQ+ advocacy group GLAAD tweeted: "It's not drag queens. It's not books. Children are dying because of guns. GLAAD stands with all of the students during today's walkout at the Tennessee State Capitol. Ban assault weapons—not drag performers, books, or lifesaving care for trans people."

However, Tennessee's Republican-controlled Legislature and GOP Gov. Bill Lee have gone in the opposite direction.

As The Associated Pressreports:

Already this year, Republican lawmakers have introduced bills that would make it easier to arm teachers and allow college students to carry weapons on campus. Democratic-led efforts to strengthen gun safety measures have faltered. On Tuesday, lawmakers delayed taking up any of the contentious gun-related bills, saying they wanted to offer respect to the community.

The most significant movement involves the state’s permitless carry law. In 2021, Lee led the charge to allow most adults 21 and older to carry handguns without first obtaining a permit that requires clearing a state background check and training. Thereafter, gun manufacturer Smith & Wesson announced plans to relocate its headquarters to Tennessee due to the state's "support for the 2nd Amendment."

Tennessee state Rep. Justin Jones (D-52) said that three Democratic lawmakers were kicked off their committees and threatened with expulsion for standing with their constituents and demanding gun control legislation.

Monday's protest in Nashville came before another youth-led gun control group, Students Demand Action, is set to lead nationwide student walkouts on Wednesday.

"Being a student shouldn't be a death sentence but once again, gun violence has forced its way into our schools, leaving nothing but pain, trauma, and tragedy in its wake," the group said in a preview of Wednesday's action. "We need more than thoughts and prayers. We demand action from our lawmakers now."

Students Demand Action continued:

School shootings like this are not acts of nature—no other peer nation allows students to be shot and killed in schools like this. And it's not just gun violence in our schools. In America and in Tennessee, guns are the number one killer of American youth, and Tennessee lawmakers have done nothing but gut gun safety laws, putting gun industry profits ahead of the safety of our children.

"We won't accept a country where gunfire can ring out at any moment, whether it's while grocery shopping at a supermarket, hanging out at a park in your community, attending a party, or going to a restaurant for dinner," Students Demand Action added. "We deserve more."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

A federal Judge in Texas on Thursday blocked the Affordable Care Act mandate for health insurance companies to provide preventive care. We speak with Elie Mystal, justice correspondent for The Nation, about his piece, “The GOP’s War on Obamacare Is Screwing Up Its War on Abortion,” and how the Republican Party opposes access to abortion but will not require insurance companies to cover basic prenatal care.

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

In the wake of the mass shooting at a private Christian elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Wednesday Republicans “want to see all the facts” before proposing any new gun legislation. Just last week, Manuel Oliver, father of one of 17 people killed in the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, was arrested in the Republican-controlled House after he and his wife Patricia spoke out during a subcommittee hearing on the Second Amendment. He joins us to call for a national education strike to push for action on the U.S. gun violence epidemic. His new op-ed for The Daily Beast is “Arrest Gun-Loving Members of Congress—Not Grieving Fathers.”

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

• Nashville Police Chief says shooter legally bought guns used in yesterday’s school massacre
• Idaho lawmakers give near final approval to bill criminalizing gender affirming care for transgender kids
• Federal Reserve bank supervisors say they warned Silicon Valley Bank in fall of 2021 against risky practices
• French police clash with protesters as hundreds of thousands demonstrate against pension changes
• Tenants shine the light on practices of corporate landlord Blackstone
• Governor Newsom signs first in the nation law aimed at halting oil company price gouging

Image from Moms Demand Action

The post Nashville shooter legally bought guns used to kill six at Christian school; Governor Newsom signs groundbreaking law aimed at stemming gasoline price gouging; Nationwide demonstrations and strikes against pension reforms in France: ; Evening News March 28 2023 appeared first on KPFA.

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

Amid an ongoing unionization wave, Starbucks workers across the United States are holding a national day of action on Wednesday to demand a living wage, consistent scheduling, safe working conditions, and the right to organize free from fear and intimidation.

Baristas plan to strike at more than 100 of the coffee giant's shops from coast to coast, including at cafes in Seattle, New York, Los Angeles, Memphis, and other cities. In Seattle, where Starbucks was founded and is headquartered, a major protest is planned—one day before shareholders vote on an assessment of workers' rights at the corporation's annual meeting.

At 12:00 pm PT, workers will march outside Starbucks' headquarters, declaring that the company's illegal union-busting won't stop their fight for higher wages, better benefits, and democratic workplaces.

Since December 2021, when baristas in Buffalo made history by forming the first unionized Starbucks in the U.S., more than 7,500 workers at over 280 of the coffee chain's locations nationwide have voted to unionize. Organizers have won more than 80% of their campaigns despite the company's unlawful intimidation and retaliation tactics.

According to Starbucks Workers United:

In this same time period, the NLRB's [National Labor Relations Board] regional offices have issued more than 80 official complaints against Starbucks, prosecuting the company for over 1,400 specific alleged violations of federal labor law, including accusations that former CEO Howard Schultz personally threatened a worker who expressed support for organizing.

To date, NLRB administrative law judges have issued nine decisions, eight of which collectively found that the company has committed 130 violations, including illegally monitoring and firing organizers, calling the police on workers, and outright closing a store that recently attempted to organize.

Due to Starbucks' refusal to bargain in good faith, none of the locations that voted to unionize have reached a contract.

With his unlawful crackdown on organizing coming under increased scrutiny, Schultz moved up his resignation from April 1 to March 20. Schultz is still scheduled to testify at next Wednesday's hearing convened by Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. He only agreed to do so under threat of subpoena.

Sarah Pappin, a Seattle Starbucks worker and member of Starbucks Workers United, said Wednesday in a statement: "Baristas like me are the ones who keep our stores running. We remember our customers' regular orders, make the lattes, clean up spills, and are often the bright spot of our customers' days. We are the heart and soul of Starbucks."

"Instead of celebrating the law-breaking former CEO hell-bent on silencing us, Starbucks should respect our right to organize and meet us at the bargaining table," said Pappin. "We are Starbucks, and we deserve better."

Starbucks Workers United said that "Wednesday's day of action will also serve to welcome the company's new chief executive, Laxman Narasimhan, and send him a message that the transition in the C-suite provides an opportunity for the company to stop its unprecedented campaign of union-busting and instead partner with its workers and our union to build a company that truly lives up to its stated progressive values."

Earlier this month, Starbucks Workers United sent a letter to shareholders urging them to vote for a third-party evaluation of Starbucks' purported commitment to affirming workers' rights, arguing that the corporation's anti-union actions are inconsistent with its International Labor Organization commitments.

According to the union, "Two proxy advisory firms, International Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis, have already recommended Starbucks shareholders vote in favor of the proposal from Trillium Asset Management, the New York City Pension Funds, and other investors."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

At least tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of cities and towns across Greece Thursday to protest the government's handling of last month's Tempi railway disaster and the capitalist system that puts profits before people.

The general strike—which was called by the General Confederation of Greek Workers and public sector workers umbrella organization ADEDY—crippled transportation on land, in the air, and at sea. In the capital Athens, metro services and the tram network were shut down. Many flights were canceled due to a work stoppage by air traffic controllers, and many ferries remained docked.

In addition to Athens, demonstrations took place in Thessaloniki, Patras, and elsewhere—including in Tempi, site of the February 28 head-on collision between a freight train and a high-speed inter-city passenger train carrying 350 people. Fifty-seven people died and 85 others were injured in the crash.

"Had this been a serious country, everybody at the transport ministry would be in handcuffs."

Much of the Greek left blames the disaster on railway staffing cuts, outdated technology, and infrastructure neglect and degradation caused by years of severe fiscal austerity measures.

Rallying under the slogan "this crime will not be forgotten; we will be the voice of all the dead," demonstrators shouted "murderers" and "the tears have dried up and turned into rage" as they marched in central Athens.

"This was mass murder," Pavlos Aslanidis, the father of one of the passengers killed in the crash, toldAlphaTV. "Had this been a serious country, everybody at the transport ministry would be in handcuffs."

According toWorld Socialist Web Site:

Demonstrations were replete with anti-government slogans and chants rejecting the initial claims of New Democracy Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis that the disaster was the result of the errors of a single station master in Larissa—the passenger train's last stop before the crash. Some banners in Syntagma Square outside Parliament read, "It was no human error, it was a crime" and "Our dead, your profits."

"Two weeks have passed since the crime in Tempi, Larissa and the country is shaking with anger and daily struggle," the All-Workers Militant Front (PAME), which backed the strike, said in a statement. "It is the debt of every worker, every youth, to continue to demand the obvious: This crime must not be covered up!"

PAME accused the government of trying "to block people's participation to the strike by... spreading fake news about the legality of the strike in the public sector and on the day of the strike, ordering the closing of Athens central Metro stations, so as to block people from reaching Athens center and participating in the rallies."

"At the same time, a series of photos and videos on social media and news sites show unprovoked police violence and also persons with civilian clothes, black hoods, and covered faces sitting side by side with the riot police forces," the leftist confederation added.

Video footage posted on social media showed what appeared to be unprovoked attacks by police on demonstrators. Other footage showed people throwing Molotov cocktails and projectiles at police.

Among those participating in Thursday's demonstrations was Yanis Varoufakis, the leftist lawmaker and former finance minister who is recovering from a brutal assault last Friday.

"The masterminds of the austerity and dogmatic privatization that led us to disaster were international institutions: the IMF, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission—the so-called Troika," the Varoufakis-led MeRA25 party said in a statement before Thursday's strike, referring to the International Monetary Fund.

"Their reach is global, and the victims of their inane policies are spread from Argentina to Greece and beyond," the leftist party added. "The fight against them is something that must unite all progressive forces."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

We look at today’s hearing by a federal judge in Texas who could restrict medication abortions throughout the United States and revoke the Food and Drug Administration’s two-decade-old approval of mifepristone, the abortion medication used in a majority of pregnancy terminations across the country. The Trump-appointed judge has ruled against the Biden administration in numerous cases and is widely expected to favor the anti-abortion side in the case, though an appeal of any ruling is all but certain. Amy Littlefield, The Nation's abortion access correspondent, says that while medication abortions are still possible without mifepristone, it can be less effective and more painful. “We're talking about imposing suffering on medication abortion patients across the country,” Littlefield says.

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

At least 150 bills have been filed by Republican lawmakers across the United States that target transgender people, with at least seven states enacting bans on gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youth. Other bills have targeted drag performers, doctors and trans adults seeking transition-related care. For more on growing conservative attacks on transgender people and the LGBTQ+ community, we speak to Chase Strangio, deputy director for trans justice with the ACLU LGBTQ & HIV Project, who says the backlash “at its core has always been about pushing trans people out of public life and eradicating transness.”

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

The Hill (10/10/22) reported that DeSantis “has surged in recent national polls, propelled by his willingness to position himself at the epicenter of the culture wars.”

One reason why Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is a hot contender (CBS, 2/27/23; SunSentinel, 2/27/23; AP, 2/27/23) for the Republican presidential nomination is his constant war with the media, framing himself as an everyman trying to fix the state’s problems against elite critics who stymie him at every turn. He has also gained a reputation as a bully who wants to use his political might to silence criticism of his administration in the press.

Twitter suspended the governor’s press secretary for “violating rules on ‘abusive behavior’” after the AP (8/20/21) said the official’s “conduct led to [an AP] reporter receiving threats and other online abuse.” Last year, DeSantis displayed his combativeness when he accused a reporter of creating “false narratives” when he was questioned about his anti-gay speech codes during a press conference (Twitter, 3/7/22).

He told a local right-wing website (Florida Voice, 10/4/22; quoted in The Hill, 10/10/22) that “regime media”—a funny term coming from the head of a state “regime”—were cheering for Hurricane Ian to destroy Florida:

They don’t care about the people of this state. They don’t care about this community. They want to use storms and destruction from storms as a way to advance their agenda.

In Ian’s aftermath, DeSantis bit back at a CNN reporter who questioned his storm response policies (Fox News, 10/2/22).

Most recently, his office (Independent, 2/23/23) said his staff “will not take questions from NBC News or MSNBC until host Andrea Mitchell apologizes for misrepresenting [the governor’s] bans on books about Black history.” Rupert Murdoch’s media empire (New York Post, 12/15/22, 2/2/23, 2/15/23; Fox News, 1/27/23, 2/22/23, 2/23/23) has been eager to cheer on DeSantis’ war against the press.

Making journalists easier to sue

A proposed Florida bill (Politico, 2/23/23) would, among other things, declare that “comments made by anonymous sources are presumed false for the purposes of defamation lawsuits”—and remove protections from journalists who decline to reveal their sources.

The trick of executives projecting their policy mishaps on the press is as old as politics itself. But DeSantis is far more dangerous than your average governor, not just because he is seeking the presidency, but because he is actively trying to legally neuter the free press in the same way he is trying to destroy academic freedom and freedom of speech in his own state. And he could win, because he has much of the conservative movement behind him.

The Florida state legislature is considering a bill that seeks “sweeping changes to Florida’s libel and defamation law,” the Orlando Sentinel (2/21/23) reported. It would presume “information from anonymous sources to be false and removes protections that allow journalists to shield the identity of sources if they are sued.” And the bill “limits the definition of who would qualify as a public figure,” which means that more people would be able to sue news outlets without having to show that the outlets displayed a reckless disregard for the truth.

Politico (2/23/23) noted that “beyond making it easier to sue journalists, the proposal is also being positioned to spark a larger legal battle with the goal of eventually overturning New York Times v. Sullivan,” the 1964 Supreme Court decision “that limits public officials’ ability to sue publishers for defamation.”

DeSantis expressed his disdain for the Sullivan standard at a round-table discussion about the media in February (2/7/23): “When the media attacks me, I have a platform to fight back. When they attack everyday citizens, these individuals don’t have the adequate recourse to fight back.” Telegraphing his legislative ambitions, he added, “In Florida, we want to stand up for the little guy against these massive media conglomerates.”

This is absolutely backward. The Sullivan rule doesn’t offer the media protection against lawsuits from Joe Taxpayer, but it does offer protection from partisan leaders, as the Sullivan standard forces public figures to show a court that a publisher acted with “actual malice” in order for a libel suit to stand (Washington Post, 2/15/23). Eliminating Sullivan doesn’t offer the “little guy” anything.

And while he targets “massive media conglomerates,” ending the Sullivan standard would be especially harmful for local and independent media. The New York Times (3/1/22) has a legal team that can combat defamation suits , but do smaller outlets like Common Dreams or Hell Gate stand a chance?

Conservative quarry

The American Conservative (9/9/22) argues that “the public needs accurate information about the candidates for public office”—and therefore government officials need to be able to sue reporters if they don’t like how they’re being depicted in the press.

Two years ago, I warned FAIR’s audience (3/26/21) about the conservative movement’s targeting of Sullivan, as late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia—as well as current Justice Clarence Thomas and the US Court of Appeals’ Lawrence Silberman—expressed their hostility to the Sullivan standard. Surely, if this bill is passed and signed into law in Florida, it will face a legal challenge; if that challenge goes to the Supreme Court, there’s very little reason to think that the 6–3 conservative majority that just struck down Roe v. Wade thinks striking down Sullivan is a bridge too far.

The threat against Sullivan has intensified since my 2021 warning. At the February round-table discussion, Carson Holloway of the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life said:

The thumb seems to be on the scale for the media in these lawsuits, and that’s because of what the Supreme Court did in New York Times v. Sullivan back in 1964. That case changed the standards under which libel cases are heard in modern America…. If we go back to the Founders, we are reminded that people have a right to their reputation. Reputation is a right as precious as one’s property, one’s life, one’s liberty, so another fundamental purpose of American law is to protect rights. The actual malice standard is an invention of the Supreme Court inconsistent with the way the Founders thought about libel and freedom of speech.

The American Conservative (9/9/22) also called for the high court to overturn Sullivan, as it is “a typical product of the Warren Court—probably the most activist and least originalist Court in the nation’s history.” This is a swipe at the one era of the court’s history, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, marked by progress for civil rights and civil liberties, with decisions like Brown v. Board of Education and Loving v. Virginia. The magazine complained, “It is nearly impossible to prove actual malice.”

Most ominously, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch (New York Times, 7/2/21) said the Court must revisit the doctrine, “suggesting that the actual malice doctrine might have made more sense” in 1964, “when there were fewer and more reliable sources of news.”

In other words, DeSantis is flanked by conservative legal theorists, activists and sitting jurists who are licking their chops at the prospect of cutting down Sullivan. This would be catastrophic for free expression. Corporate tycoons and politicians could use lawsuits to bankrupt and cripple news outlets with costly litigation, and editors would constantly think twice about publishing critical reporting on powerful people out of fear of litigation. Government figures and big business would essentially have more control over what can be printed or aired.

War on academia

Keith Whittington (Chronicle of Higher Education, 2/27/23): “Florida is breaking new ground in insisting that state universities convey the government’s favored message in its classes.”

In taking on Sullivan, DeSantis is opening a new front in a culture war he has long waged against academics in his state. The state has “deployed a controversial survey on campus ideological diversity to public college and university students, faculty and staff members,” a move some faculty have called “a political litmus test since it was first proposed” (Inside Higher Ed, 4/5/22).

DeSantis has asked “state universities for the number and ages of their students who sought gender dysphoria treatment, including sex reassignment surgery and hormone prescriptions” (AP, 1/18/23).

A new Florida bill would bar “funds from being used for diversity, equity and inclusion programs, as well as critical race theory–related programs, on college campuses,” and “would also remove diversity, equity and inclusion efforts or policies that impact hiring practices” (ABC, 2/23/23). Even sillier, one Florida proposal would “ban ‘unproven’ or ‘theoretical’ content from general-education courses, which might banish Plato and Albert Einstein to elective courses.” according to the Chronicle for Higher Education (2/27/23), which added that Florida is a trailblazer for “higher-education reforms,” while “Republican-leaning states are likely to follow its lead.”

For DeSantis and a great deal of the American right, academics and journalists are partners in the same ideological war: They make up a disloyal intelligentsia that uses professional stature to sow doubt about the political establishment, challenge traditional cultural orders and threaten the power of big business. If DeSantis has come this far waging a war against academia in his own state, there is no reason why he wouldn’t take this war to the Miami Herald and the Tampa Bay Times.

Sullivan and civil rights

The Supreme Court ruled in Sullivan v. New York Times that a Montgomery, Alabama, police official could not sue over minor inaccuracies in an advertisement that asserted that “Southern violators have answered Dr. King’s peaceful protests with intimidation and violence.”

It should not be forgotten, also, that Sullivan was a civil rights case: an Alabama police commander had brought a libel suit against the Times for an advertisement by civil rights activists that mischaracterized the role of his officers. Samantha Barbas—a professor at SUNY Buffalo’s School of Law and author of Actual Malice, a book about the Sullivan case—wrote (UC Press Blog, 12/20/22):

In the 1960s, segregationist officials in the South weaponized libel law in a campaign to undermine liberal Northern newspapers that criticized segregation. Their objective was to halt coverage of the civil rights movement, reporting that would prove crucial to forging national support for desegregation and civil rights.

DeSantis’ war on press freedom—in the context of his campaign to censor Black authors (PEN America, 2/13/23) and attacks on “wokeness” (Guardian, 2/5/23), a word that has its origins in Black awareness of racial injustice—is the living legacy of Jim Crow–era Southern governors who did everything they could to maintain racial apartheid.

As faculty and students fight Florida’s war on campuses, journalists who value their freedom to report and opine must also oppose this assault on media. If DeSantis wins, it won’t just impact Florida, it will impact the whole country.

The post DeSantis’ War on Florida’s Press Is Designed to Hit Nationwide appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

Puma Energy has shut down its operations nationwide in Papua New Guinea while Prime Minister James Marape leaves overseas again to Fiji as the nation is left scraping for what is left in the oil tanks of its ailing economy.

The country will be on total shut down today.

Assuring the country that a solution would be found soon for the fuel saga in his response in Parliament last month, Prime Minister Marape’s promise has not materialised.

• READ MORE: Other Puma Energy reports

The much talked about K13 billion (US$5.3bn) in foreign reserve did niot amount to anything as the country’s entire fuel supplies ceased from yesterday.

Puma Energy has confirmed with the PNG Post-Courier that none of its orders had been satisfied and agreements made in Singapore have not come to fruition.

The fuel refiner needs an urgent US$100 million in foreign exchange orders from the country’s Central Bank to trade and replenish all pumps.

They need at least US$80 million a month to trade and operate.

No immediate solution
Prime Minister Marape stated in Parliament last month that he had told Puma Energy bluntly in Singapore on Sunday, January 8, 2023, that he did not “tolerate the country being held to ransom”.

But it seems the government and the Central Bank are holding the nation to ransom with no clear immediate solution in place with the issue still persisting.

Puma Energy country general manager Hulala Tokome said that what was discussed and agreed upon in Singapore by the government had not been honoured.

“We are going to go for total shut down by close of business today [Sunday],” Tokome said.

“It’s going to impact [on] the communications as well because they run on fuel, repeater stations. You know, it will take us more than one month to replenish our stock.

“The root cause of the problem is we just need the bank of PNG to approve our FX orders.”

The Post-Courier checked with the aviation industry and there has been no indication of immediate interruptions to flights as of last night.

FX orders ‘blocked’
In July 2022, when the same problem escalated, Puma Energy wrote to Marape and the government over the treatment of the company under BPNG Special Purpose Audit (SPA) and removal of access to FX markets.

“As per our conversation, the Puma Energy group of companies in PNG is currently undergoing a SPA with the BPNG.

“Our FX orders have been restricted or blocked by the Bank of PNG, which is limiting our ability to operate and ensure supply of product into the country. As discussed, this will impact the availability of fuel if our FX orders aren’t settled.

“Today, we need a minimum of US$40 million in FX orders to ensure continuity of supply into PNG,” the company wrote to Marape in July 2022.

Yesterday Tokome said: “For the FX orders, for now we would need at least, US$100 million to trade, if they had allowed us to trade, we would have been at least be able to get the commercial flows, or we would not have this happening . . . we have been for the last seven weeks not been able to trade and therefore, we going to need at least another US$100 million to get us to operate, and we talking about two months now.

“If we continue to be cut off from the FX markets we will be unable to purchase replacement cargoes of crude oil and refined products in order to supply the country.

“This will unfortunately result in a product stock out and place security of supply of the country at risks — a scenario we are working hard to avoid.

Foreign reserves questions
“Given the lead time for cargo procurement and the corresponding payment obligations we will need to incur, we must have certainty on our ability to receive FX in order to secure supply.”

As Puma shut down its operations on Sunday, many asked where were the K13 billion in foreign reserves at the Bank of PNG that the government announced recently?

Today aviation, commercial, mining, schools, hospitals and other businesses will face the full brunt of reality as petrol and diesel is not supplied.

Expected power and communication cuts will all but see the country held to ransom as the capital of Port Moresby — the engine room of PNG — shuts down operations.

Yesterday, only three major fuel depots in the nation’s capital were open for three hours, allowing only K20 cash and K50 bank cards for vehicles to refuel.

Republished from the PNG Post-Courier with permission.

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

A federal judge issued a nationwide order late Friday barring Starbucks from firing union organizers—a ruling that affirmed a long-established law which workers say the coffee chain has violated hundreds of times since unionizing efforts were first launched in Buffalo, New York in 2021.

U.S. District Judge Mark Goldsmith ruled in Michigan that former shift supervisor Hannah Whitbeck must be reinstated in her position, which she was fired from in April 2022.

Whitbeck and National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) Detroit Regional Director Elizabeth Kerwin argued that she had been fired because of her involvement in union organizing at the store where she worked in Ann Arbor—one of 366 Starbucks stores across the U.S. where employees have organized to create bargaining units. Nearly 300 stores have won union elections so far.

Starbucks Workers United, the employees' union, has accused the company of firing more than 200 employees in illegal retaliation for organizing.

The company claimed Whitbeck was fired for leaving 20 to 30 minutes early a single time without finding someone to fill in for her, but Kerwin argued that would have been a violation of Starbucks' own policy of issuing a warning for such an incident. Kerwin also noted that Starbucks was aware Whitbeck was involved in unionization efforts.

Jennifer Abruzzo, general counsel for the NLRB, said the nationwide order was significant.

"The district court's ruling confirms that Starbucks continues to violate the law in egregious ways, thus requiring a nationwide cease and desist order," Abruzzo toldBloomberg.

The NLRB has issued 75 complaints against Starbucks for unfair labor practices, including intimidating and retaliating against workers who are organizing.

"Firing workers for organizing is already illegal, of course," said Starbucks Workers United, the employees' union, of Goldsmith's order. "But this decision is HUGE for getting speedy justice for those retaliated against."

Goldsmith ordered Starbucks to post physical copies of the order at the Ann Arbor store and to read it at a mandatory meeting. The company was given 21 days to file an affidavit declaring it had complied.

Starbucks reported a 31% annual growth in profits in 2021, the year workers began unionizing, as well as $8.1 billion just in the fourth quarter of that year. Still, the company has aggressively fought union efforts by holding captive-audience meetings with CEO Howard Schultz and threatening the rights of workers who get involved in organizing efforts. This past week, Starbucks refused to send Schultz to testify before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee on the company's conduct.

Goldsmith's ruling showed that the company "can't just fire" its way out of listening to workers, said economic justice group Fight for $15.

"Love to see the NLRB push back against Starbucks' intimidation tactics," said the group. "Unionizing is a right!"

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

Abortion rights advocates are "watching and hoping that evidence-based care will prevail" in a federal court case in Texas, said one physician this week as a judge appointed by former President Donald Trump is expected to rule as soon as Friday on the Food and Drug Administration's authority to approve one of two drugs commonly used for medication abortions.

In a lawsuit filed by the right-wing Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk will review the final arguments on Friday, and is expected to soon rule on whether the FDA's approval of mifepristone should be revered more than two decades after the drug was first made legal.

Less than a year after the right-wing majority of the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and cleared the way for at least 13 states to impose bans on abortion care, a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs would cause fresh "chaos" in the reproductive care landscape, according to abortion provider Dr. Kristyn Brandi. If Kacsmaryk rules in favor of the right-wing group, mifepristone would be banned even in states where abortion remains legal.

"A court case in Texas could easily turn into a nationwide ban on the most commonly prescribed medication abortion in the coming weeks through underhanded judicial tactics."

More than 3.7 million people have used mifepristone, which is taken alongside misoprostol in order to induce an abortion, since it was approved in the United States. Medication abortions now account for 53% of abortions in the U.S., and the FDA in recent years has made them more accessible by allowing patients to obtain the pills at telehealth visits and to get them through the mail and, last month, by allowing certified pharmacies to dispense the medication.

Alliance Defending Freedom and other pro-forced pregnancy groups have claimed the FDA was careless with patients' health when it approved mifepristone, even as clinical trials have shown it to be safer than penicillin, Viagra, and Tylenol.

Advocates say the reversal of the FDA's approval would endanger millions of people who need abortions, as many would be left with only the option of a surgical abortion in clinics, which have become overburdened as people travel from states that have banned or severely restricted access.

"This ruling could be devastating for abortion care," Andrea Miller, president of the National Institute for Reproductive Health, toldThe Guardian on Thursday. "Cutting off critical access to abortion medication—which is the preferred method for more than half of abortion patients in the country—would cause significant harm, especially at a time when Dobbs has made it difficult or impossible for many to get care at clinics."

Some clinics have begun mobilizing to prepare healthcare workers to provide misoprostol-only medication abortions.

"No matter the case outcome, Planned Parenthood health centers will remain committed to doing whatever possible to ensure patients can choose the method of abortion that is best for their circumstances, including medication abortion," Danika Severino Wynn, vice president of abortion access at Planned Parenthood, told Jezebel on Tuesday.

Taking only misoprostol to induce an abortion has a lower success rate than taking the combination of pills—88% compared to 98%—and misoprostol-only abortions carry a greater risk of side effects. Both factors could complicate matters for people who live in states with abortion bans and decide to travel out-of-state to receive care to avoid potential prosecution. As The 19threported on Tuesday:

Some patients will have to decide if they want to take the pills in their home state, where it is outlawed, or if they want to take them before traveling home, navigating severe cramps and even vomiting while making an hours-long drive or flight.

And because misoprostol only has a higher failure rate, patients traveling out of state could face other risks. If they return home and learn the abortion has failed, multiple experts said, patients may not know where or how to find safe care in their home states, or may need to make another expensive trip across state lines.

"It's really hard as a provider to know there's a medication that works better than other options and not be able to offer that because of politics," Brandi, who chairs the board of the advocacy group Physicians for Reproductive Health, told The 19th.

Greer Donley, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh Law School, noted that in addition to harming pregnant people, a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs would have "serious and broad implications" for all drugs approved by the FDA and for the agency's authority.

Rights advocates this week noted that Kacsmaryk recently ruled against a federal program that allows teenagers in Texas to access birth control without their parents' permission.

Rights groups Women's March and UltraViolet on Thursday announced plans for a rally and march on Saturday in Amarillo, Texas, where the ruling will be handed down.

"A court case in Texas could easily turn into a nationwide ban on the most commonly prescribed medication abortion in the coming weeks through underhanded judicial tactics," said Rachel Carmona, executive director of Women's March. "This isn't about what the overwhelming majority of Americans want; it's about a small group of people who want control over women’s freedom to choose, and will seek any means to achieve it."

"This fight is bigger than Roe," she added. "This is about freedom, democracy, and fundamental human rights.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Wednesday said two pro-forced pregnancy proposals put forward by House Republicans would be "doomed" in the upper chamber of Congress, as advocates warned that even though the bills stand no chance currently of being passed into law, the misinformation contained in the legislation will still endanger pregnant people and providers.

The Republicans introduced one resolution to condemn acts of violence against "crisis pregnancy centers" and other facilities where pregnant people are pressured out of seeking abortion care—but not abortion clinics, where dozens of bombings, acts of arson, and assaults have taken place since 1977, according to the National Abortion Federation.

"The GOP is using these dangerous lies to try to pass anti-choice bills that harm pregnant people and their families."

Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D-Fla.) said on social media Wednesday that he was "heading to the House floor right now to debate an anti-choice bill that fails to condemn violence against abortion clinics, providers, staff, and patients."

To counter the proposed resolution, Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) introduced a resolution condemning all acts of political violence, warning that singling out attacks on anti-abortion facilities sends "a very dangerous signal to extremists across this country" and "will only embolden those who are spreading the hate-filled rhetoric that's tearing this country apart."

The second Republican proposal will also endanger medical providers and pregnant people across the U.S., said advocates as they spoke out against the so-called "Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act," which was first introduced in early 2019.

The proposal would threaten medical providers with up to five years in prison if they are accused of failing to try to save infants who continue to live outside the womb after an abortion that takes place later in pregnancy—which make up roughly 1% of abortions in the U.S. and are often administered in cases involving fetal anomalies and endangerment of the pregnant patient's life.

When the bill was first introduced on the House floor in 2019, Robin Marty, author of The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America, wrote that Republicans' rhetoric regarding the proposal made it seem "like the most serious threat facing the nation is a rampage of violent and unethical medical professionals pressuring pregnant people into post-viability abortions, mismanaging the process, and then murdering those now-delivered infants with the express permission of the new parents."

"The 'Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act' isn't just an unnecessary and burdensome answer to a fictitious scenario that has no bearing in the way abortion has been provided for the last three decades," she added. "It's a political tool meant to keep the Republican Party in power after the 2020 elections."

Now, said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), Republicans' goal in introducing the bill is to begin "a march towards criminalizing abortion care, a nationwide ban."

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, denounced the bill as "absurd," noting, "it is obviously ALREADY illegal to kill a baby."

"For years the anti-choice movement has spread disinformation—including wild lies about abortion—as part of their campaign to curtail and ultimately end access," said NARAL Pro-Choice America. "Now, the GOP is using these dangerous lies to try to pass anti-choice bills that harm pregnant people and their families."

The GOP proposed the legislation less than two months after the midterm elections, in which Americans across the country resoundingly rejected attacks on abortion rights. In Montana, more than 52% of voters rejected a ballot measure similar to the federal "Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act."

"Just months after a historically disappointing midterm election, the MAGA Republican-controlled House is putting on full display their truly extreme views on women's health with legislation that does not have the support of the American people," Schumer (D-N.Y.) said. "Once again, Republicans are proving how dangerously out of touch they are with mainstream America."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

Revelers on Hongdaoyuan Square in Henan's Luyi County "deliberately vandalized a police car ... causing chaos at the scene," police said in a statement on the standoff, which it said took place at around 11.00 p.m. local time on Jan. 2. Six people were arrested.

Several video clips of the incident were uploaded to social media that showed people jumping onto a police car and another man in a Balenciaga jacket displaying the police car license plate he had ripped from the vehicle to the surrounding crowd.

The incident was sparked by police trying to enforce a fireworks ban, which led some in the crowd to prevent the police car from leaving and others to throw drinks and start smashing it, before the most visible protesters jumped onto the car and removed its license plates.

A later video clip showed the police car overturned, according to the Twitter account "Mr Li is not your teacher," which curates and reposts video footage from incidents in mainland China to Twitter, on the assumption that they will be deleted or blocked by Chinese social media platforms.

Emboldened

Jia Lingmin, a resident of Henan's provincial capital Zhengzhou, said fireworks have been banned until Lunar New Year, which starts later this month, but that there were plenty going off around the city on the New Year’s weekend.

"There have been sporadic fireworks going off in my neighborhood, and the surrounding area," Jia said. "[The ban] will be lifted at some point during Lunar New Year."

Fireworks set off in defiance of the ban were also reported in Guangxi, Shandong, and Chongqing, according to social media posts.

Political commentator Wang Jian said the fireworks were a deliberate act to defy the ban, and came after people saw the government's response to the "white paper" movement in late November against strict anti-virus measures.

"People across the country are violating the ban," Wang said. "Fireworks are banned in all cities, but are being set off everywhere."

Spontaneous street protests across China in late November saw some people holding up blank sheets of printer paper and others repeating slogans calling for an end to the zero-COVID policy, and for Xi Jinping and the ruling Communist Party to step down and call elections, while others held vigils for the victims of a lockdown fire in Xinjiang's regional capital Urumqi.

"It's another revolution, or at least passing on the torch [lit by the white paper movement]," Wang said. "The Chinese have learned that they can use protest to get what they want, which is a huge improvement on the way things were."

Letting off steam 

In another clip posted to Twitter by constitutional scholar Zhang Lifan, a young woman is shown setting off rockets using a launch tube in the northern port city of Tianjin.

A #Chinese police car was overturned by a crowd protesting the New Year's Eve fireworks ban in China. pic.twitter.com/jdXltJqsOV

— Daily Turkic (@DailyTurkic) January 3, 2023

"The police came to stop them, but they didn’t listen, and everyone set them off," Zhang commented.

“So are you going to do anything?" reads the text added to the video. "No, because you can't do anything. There are fireworks going off everywhere."

Henan current affairs commentator Li Fatian said Henan is a part of China that likes traditional celebrations, and were likely letting off steam after three years of rolling lockdowns, mass tracking and compulsory testing under Communist Party leader Xi Jinping's zero-COVID policy.

"Zero-COVID went on for three years, so it's ... pretty clear that the lockdowns across the country, large-scale unemployment and the inhumane enforcement methods of recent years have caused a lot of anxiety and shortness of temper," Li said. "There's a lot of hostility in society."

"Now, the government suddenly removes all restrictions and people still fear dying from this virus, so maybe they need to do this as a way of venting," he said, adding that more protests are likely in the coming year.

"We've reached what you might call a tipping point," Li said.

Balloons

In Nanjing, people let fly balloons in the eastern city of Nanjing on New Year's Eve, where a large crowd gathered around the bronze statue of 1911 revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen to release balloons in honor of his memory.

While Sun is revered in mainland China as the revolutionary leader who toppled the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), mass public honoring of that revolution is largely discouraged by Beijing, as it is too closely associated with the Kuomintang nationalist government who were defeated by Mao Zedong’s communists during the civil war (1946-1949).

Video clips showed eyewitnesses exclaiming at the size of the crowd, which effectively shut down nearby streets, blocking traffic, as they poured into the area to pay tribute to Sun, who has been dubbed the father of modern China.

"There has been a sea change in people's hearts, with this commemoration of Sun Yat-sen," former Communist Party school lecturer Cai Xia tweeted of the scenes. "This event is deeply meaningful."

Wang agreed with Li that more protests look likely in 2023.

"When the Chinese Communist Party can no longer guarantee that everyone's life will improve, nor guarantee a livelihood to many people, then people will start to challenge it, because what right does it have to remove your political rights?" Wang said.

"The Communist Party has broken the social contract, so they don't have to obey it any more."

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

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

Progressive Democrats of America on Monday announced plans to hold rallies across the nation on Friday, the second anniversary of the January 6, 2021 insurrection, to call on lawmakers to do everything in their power to protect the U.S. from attacks on democracy, including the gutting of voting rights protections and threats to election officials.

The rallies are set to be held two weeks after the U.S. House select committee on the January 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol released its final report on an 18-month investigation into the insurrection and former President Donald Trump's role in planning and orchestrating the attempt to stop lawmakers from certifying the 2020 presidential election.

The report showed that Trump was the driving force behind the insurrection, and the committee recommended that the former Republican president—who announced his 2024 presidential candidacy in November—be barred from ever holding public office again.

Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) said Monday that Americans must speak out about ongoing threats posed by the Republican Party and Trump supporters, regardless of whether Trump runs for office again.

Republicans "are working to sabotage future elections by changing state laws, threatening election officials, and packing election administration offices so that they can have the final say over election results—even when they lose," said PDA. "We cannot be complacent; we are calling for an end to the ongoing violent and criminal attacks on our freedoms. We must stand up for our elections by protecting voters, election officials, and a free and fair process for all Americans."

At the rallies planned for Friday, organizers plan to express support for the ongoing investigations into the former president, including the U.S. Justice Department's probe into his retention of classified documents after he left office and a criminal investigation into election interference by Trump's allies in Georgia.

They will also "call upon local, state, and federal legislators to defend our freedom to vote by passing legislation to take down barriers to voting and protect election officials and voters."

More than 170 Republicans who deny President Joe Biden won the 2020 election are returning to or taking public office on Tuesday, and at least seven states passed at least 10 laws last year making it more difficult to vote.

As the federal government continues to investigate Trump's role in the January 6 insurrection, said PDA, "it's our time to stand strong for justice and democracy."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

On Nov. 2, Chheang Srey Oun, a 22-year-old factory worker, underwent an operation at the Doeum Angkorng Maternity Clinic to remove a five-month-old fetus that had died in her womb, leaving her lower intestine severely damaged. 

A preliminary investigation found that she had been operated on by a licensed midwife named Ung Thearin, who had never been trained to perform an abortion.

Chheang Srey Oun is now being monitored at Calmette Hospital in Phnom Penh, where she remains in critical condition. Cambodia’s Ministry of Health has temporarily closed the Doeum Angkorng Maternity Clinic pending further investigation.

News of the case has received national attention after the woman used Facebook to appeal for help, saying she is in need of urgent treatment. 

Speaking to RFA Khmer from Calmette Hospital on Thursday, Chheang Srey Oun's husband Pheng Voeun confirmed that a criminal complaint had been filed in his wife’s case. He called on the courts and relevant institutions to help bring justice to his wife.

He said he has been receiving assistance from the Red Cross to pay for his wife’s treatment.

In a statement on Thursday, Health Minister Mam Bun Heng said that the Doeum Angkorng Maternity Clinic had acted recklessly for allowing an untrained midwife to perform an abortion on Chheang Srey Oun.

The clinic must “face the consequences” of its actions according to the law, he said, adding that Ung Thearin’s license had been suspended for two years. The midwife has so far failed to cooperate with the investigation and is currently on the run from authorities.

He also ordered a probe of all private clinics and other facilities, adding that those found to perform abortions illegally will be punished accordingly.

The President of the Cambodian Trade Union Confederation, Rong Chhun, told RFA that the Ministry of Health needs to present a clear explanation for what happened to Chheang Srey Oun because it affects the lives of all Cambodians.

"The midwife must be held responsible for the cost [of her treatment], according to the law,” he said.

According to the latest figures from the World Bank, Cambodia’s maternal mortality rate was 160 for every 100,000 live births in 2017, a 4.76% decline from 2016. The mortality rate had declined for three consecutive years from 189 in 2014.

Translated by Samean Yun. Written in English by Joshua LIpes.

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

The situation in Iran is “critical” as authorities tighten their crackdown on the continuing anti-government protests after the September death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of the so-called morality police. United Nations human rights officials report Iranian security forces in Kurdish cities killed dozens of protesters this week alone, with each funeral turning into a mass rally against the central government. “The defiance has been astounding,” says Middle East studies professor Nahid Siamdoust, who reported for years from Iran, including during the 2009 Green Movement, and calls the protests a “nationwide revolution.”

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

The situation in Iran is “critical” as authorities tighten their crackdown on the continuing anti-government protests after the September death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of the so-called morality police. United Nations human rights officials report Iranian security forces in Kurdish cities killed dozens of protesters this week alone, with each funeral turning into a mass rally against the central government. “The defiance has been astounding,” says Middle East studies professor Nahid Siamdoust, who reported for years from Iran, including during the 2009 Green Movement, and calls the protests a “nationwide revolution.”

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

The National Labor Relations Board on Tuesday asked a federal court in Michigan for a "nationwide cease and desist order" prohibiting Starbucks from firing workers for union organizing.

Federal prosecutors also asked the court to reinstate and reimburse a pro-union worker who was fired from one of the coffee giant's Ann Arbor stores and to require a high-ranking Starbucks official to publicly inform the store's employees of their rights under the National Labor Relations Act to pursue representation and collectively bargain for better conditions without fear of retaliation.

As Law360 reported:

Starbucks managers fired Hannah Whitbeck on April 11, days after Michigan news outlet MLive published an article about Starbucks workers' nationwide organizing campaign that quoted Whitbeck multiple times, according to the preliminary injunction motion filed by NLRB Region 7 prosecutors.

The firing also came months after Whitbeck reached out to Workers United—the union behind the organizing push—wore a button bearing the union's name to work, spoke to co-workers about the campaign, and posted about her support for discharged Starbucks employees in Memphis, Tennessee, the filing said.

The same day Whitbeck was fired, Workers United filed an unfair labor practice charge against Starbucks to challenge the move. The NLRB's general counsel later consolidated the case with another unfair labor practice charge against the company, and on October 7, NLRB Administrative Law Judge Geoffrey Carter found Starbucks unlawfully fired Whitbeck for participating in union activity.

Employees at the Starbucks location that discharged Whitbeck voted to be represented by Workers United on June 15, but after Whitbeck and other employees left, the union had trouble finding out who the new employees were, prosecutors said.

"Starbucks will achieve its unlawful goals of purging the Ann Arbor store of the union's leadership and crushing employee activism in Michigan and nationwide," the prosecutors wrote. "In the process, Starbucks will irreparably harm the statutory rights of its employees, frustrating the board's remedial power, and thwarting the intent of Congress."

In a Tuesday statement, NLRB Region 7 Director Elizabeth Kerwin said, "We are asking the court to swiftly grant the injunction so that the employee Starbucks unlawfully fired can return to work and all Starbucks employees nationally can effectively exercise their right to engage in union activities."

The new petition marks the fourth time this year that the NLRB has sought a preliminary injunction against Starbucks. Prosecutors previously asked courts to mandate that the corporation rehire pro-union workers who were terminated from stores in Memphis, Phoenix, and Buffalo, and halt unfair labor practices.

But as VICE reported Wednesday, "[R]equesting a national prohibition on firing employees for supporting union efforts marks a significant escalation in the labor board's attempts to rein in Starbucks' alleged union-busting."

Starbucks Workers United called the request for a nationwide injunction a "huge victory for workers."

According to the union, the coffee chain has illegally terminated more than 150 workers in retaliation for organizing.

Starbucks "has repeatedly and consistently denied those claims," VICE noted, but "a former Starbucks manager in the Buffalo area testified under oath in August that he was encouraged by higher-ups to scrutinize the record of a longtime pro-union employee to find 'something in there we can use against her,' and to ensure a manager was always working and able to discourage employees from talking about the union."

A federal judge in Tennessee recently ordered Starbucks to reinstate seven pro-union baristas who were fired in Memphis. That ruling came several weeks after an Arizona judge dismissed the NLRB's request for injunctive relief in Phoenix. In Buffalo, meanwhile, litigation has been paused since last month, when a New York judge permitted Workers United to appeal his contentious ruling allowing Starbucks to subpoena the union and employees.

The NLRB has also accused Starbucks of unlawfully withholding raises and benefits from thousands of workers at unionized and unionizing shops in an effort to repress a nationwide organizing campaign. In addition, the company has completely shut down some unionized shops, including as recently as Tuesday in Portland, Maine.

U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) blasted Starbucks for "blatantly union-busting at one of the busiest stores in my district." Describing the move as "despicable," Pingree called for a "full NLRB investigation now."

Baristas at 264 of the coffee giant's roughly 9,000 locations have voted to join Workers United since December, when an initial victory was claimed in Buffalo. Fewer than 60 stores have lost an election.

But interim CEO Howard Schultz has openly refused to work in good faith with the union and largely prevented collective bargaining from moving forward. Of the 264 shops that have voted to unionize in 36 states since late 2021, just three started contract negotiations with Starbucks prior to October, though more meetings were expected to start last month.

The NLRB has issued dozens of formal complaints against Starbucks in the past year, encompassing hundreds of allegations of labor law violations.

Earlier this year, House Labor Caucus co-chair Donald Norcross (D-N.J.) said that "Starbucks—a multi-billion dollar corporation—is squeezing its workers to stop them from exercising their legally protected rights."

"This is worker intimidation at its worst," he added. "We must pass the No Tax Breaks for Union Busting Act and fully fund the NLRB."

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

In the past two months, North Korea returned to its brinkmanship strategy of repeated provocations by introducing a law that allows for preemptive nuclear strikes, test launching a series of missiles, including one that flew over Japan, and Pyongyang is widely believed to be preparing for another nuclear test, which would be its first since 2017.

Though state media waxes poetic about the necessity of such actions to deal with threats from abroad, orders from the top say that local authorities need to get their houses in order and eliminate all potential threats to the leadership from within, a judicial source in the northeastern province of North Hamgyong told RFA’s Korean Service on Oct. 17 on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

“On October 12, the Ministry of Social Security sent down a project agenda for protecting the safety of the Chief of the Revolution,” he said, using an honorific to describe Kim Jong Un. “This is in response to the recent increase in political tensions upsetting social stability.

“Police were ordered to find and eliminate factors that could be maneuvered by impure hostiles among the residents … in their jurisdiction within this month,” said the source. Impure hostiles are people who waver in their loyalty, who might influence others to do the same.

The Ministry of Social Security ordered that the police and social safety agencies create a tight surveillance network to identify problematic people and keep tabs on them, the source said.

“They ordered that the police must remove all subjects who have illegally entered their jurisdiction and return them to their place of origin as soon as possible … and prevent problematic subjects in their jurisdiction from leaving to other areas,”  he said.

In North Korea, people cannot freely move about the country and settle where they please without permission. Once they are in a new area they must also register with the local authorities. Living outside of the area one is registered is technically illegal.  

“Search and patrol checks for problematic subjects should be conducted at least once each day in cooperation with security forces, special agencies, and the Worker-Peasant Red Guards,” he said. The Worker-Peasant Red Guards are a paramilitary militia, and the largest civil defense force in the country.

In addition to keeping tabs on people, police must check the performance of their personnel and review the status of their security-related equipment, a judicial source in the northwestern province of North Pyongan told RFA on condition of anonymity to speak freely.

“From Nov. 1, encrypted terms and documents must be used in the process of implementing and directing escort projects,” he said, referring to times important leaders require a security detail when visiting or moving through an area.

“[Police] must also make trips to the railways and roads by the end of this month to assess risk factors and reflect on security plans for escort projects. Authorities instructed the ministries to build an operation plan and mobilize personnel at a random time for a No. 1 escort operation drill before the 20th,” he said. No. 1 events are those that involve Kim Jong Un. 

While implementing the orders, police are also supposed to take extra precaution to prevent the spread of rumors.

“They must thoroughly control and report on the trends and public sentiments of the residents under the pretext of recent political tensions,” he said.

“But these days, the officials are complaining of fatigue as they work late into the night to deal with the huge pile of orders coming from the top,” the second source said. “Some of the officials complain that the central party’s orders ignore the reality of provincial areas and they keep sending more and more.”  

Translated by Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee and Leejin J. Chung. Written in English by Eugene Whong. 

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Myung Chul Lee for RFA Korean.

Progressives on Wednesday warned that one Texas woman's harrowing near-death experience after she had a complication when she was 18 weeks pregnant encompasses the Republican Party's vision for women across the U.S., as the party pledges to pass a 15-week nationwide abortion ban if they win control of Congress in November.

The advocacy group Obstetricians for Reproductive Justice (ORJ) began traveling the country in September to meet people who have been personally impacted by abortion bans that have now been passed in at least 13 states following the U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade in June.

One of the people they spoke to, Amanda Zurawski of Austin, told the doctors about the serious pregnancy complication she suffered just weeks earlier in August, after which her physician explained the only options available to her: waiting to go into labor naturally and delivering a stillborn baby or a child who would die soon after birth, waiting for her baby's heartbeat to stop and then having an abortion, or developing an infection severe enough to put her life in peril—which would allow doctors to end her pregnancy.

"Not until one of those things happened would a single medical professional in the state of Texas legally be allowed to act," wrote Zurawski in an essay at The Meteor on Tuesday. "It was a waiting game, the most horrific version of a staring contest: Whose life would end first? Mine, or my daughter’s?

As Drs. Jenn Conti, Heather Irobunda, and Jennifer Lincoln of ORJ told The Meteor, Zurawski suffered from cervical insufficiency, meaning her cervix dilated months before her pregnancy reached term. Her amniotic sac then ruptured, putting her at risk for sepsis, which can rapidly become life-threatening.

"The longer that person remains pregnant, number one, it increases the risk of bad outcomes in terms of things like infection, sepsis, bleeding, and hemorrhage," said Irobunda. "But it also does a lot mentally to that patient and the family, just knowing that this pregnancy is a miscarriage and that it is not going to end well. We need to minimize the suffering of those involved. It's not right."

In states where abortion remains legal, Irobunda said, doctors would have used medication to induce a miscarriage in a hospital or performed a dilation and evacuation. But with Texas banning abortion care at any stage of pregnancy, making a vague exception for only an unspecified "medical emergency," the ethics board at the hospital where Zurawski was would not allow doctors to end the pregnancy until her conditioned worsened over three days:

It took three days at home until I became sick "enough" that the ethics board at our hospital agreed we could legally begin medical treatment; three days until my life was considered at-risk "enough" for the inevitable premature delivery of my daughter to be performed; three days until the doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals were allowed to do their jobs.

By the time I was permitted to deliver, a rapidly spreading infection had already claimed my daughter's life and was in the process of claiming mine.

I developed a raging fever and dangerously low blood pressure and was rushed to the ICU with sepsis. Tests found both my blood and my placenta teeming with bacteria that had multiplied, probably as a result of the wait. I would stay in the ICU for three more days as medical professionals battled to save my life.

Zurawski's story—just the latest account of a pregnant person who was denied critical healthcare due to abortion bans—is "what the Republican Party hopes to see nationwide," said New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie.

Zurawski's life-threatening experience took place exactly three weeks before Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) introduced his proposal for a federal ban on abortion ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy at a press conference where he dismissed a woman's question about pregnancies in which complications develop after 15 weeks, as they did in Zurawski's case.

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden warned in a speech that "if Republicans get their way with a national ban, it won't matter where you live in America," adding that if Democrats maintain control of the U.S. House and Senate, "the first bill that I will send to the Congress will be to codify Roe v. Wade."

As Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tweeted, Democrats need to gain two seats in the Senate and maintain control of the House to eliminate the filibuster and pass the legislation.

Recent polls show that Democrats' chances of maintaining control of Congress are narrowing, and they are unlikely to win a majority that would allow them to pass the Women's Health Protection Act (WHPA), which would codify Roe, without reforming the filibuster.

Biden did not mention the filibuster, which requires at least 60 votes to pass legislation instead of a simple majority, in his speech Tuesday, but progressive organizer Kai Newkirk suggested the Democrats would reform the legislative maneuver to allow the passage of the WHPA.

"It's this simple: If anti-choice Republicans win control of Congress, they will pass a national ban on abortion," said Mini Timmaraju, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America. "If Democrats win, they will defend Roe and the president will sign the Women's Health Protection Act. Extremist GOP lawmakers are the number one threat to our reproductive freedom, and they aim to take us back in time."

In addition to banning abortion care across the country—a move that one analysis showed could increase the United States' maternal mortality rate by 24%—Republicans have been explicit about their plans to cut Medicare and Social Security benefits, block any funding related to the coronavirus pandemic, and push for a permanent extension of Trump-era tax cuts, the majority of which went to the wealthiest 1% of Americans.

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

Dozens of people in Iran have been killed in a series of escalating women-led protests demanding justice for Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman who died in the custody of the so-called morality police. Amini was detained on September 13 for allegedly leaving some of her hair visible in violation of Iran’s hijab law. Iranian American writer Hoda Katebi calls the protests “exciting and beautiful,” bringing together women from across economic and ethnic backgrounds and opening up conversations about the policing of women’s bodies. She says the government is using the protests to “advance nationalist ideas,” crack down on Kurdish communities and propel a false narrative of an uprising against Islam. Katebi’s recent piece for the Los Angeles Times is titled “Iranian women are rising up to demand freedom. Are we listening?”

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

“Iranian authorities should be ashamed of themselves for orchestrating this brutal crackdown. They have proved their failure to grasp that suppressing dissenting voices only compounds dissent,” CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa program coordinator Sherif Mansour said Monday. “Authorities must stop arresting those covering the protests and immediately release those in custody.” 

CPJ has documented the arrests of at least 20 journalists as clashes between security forces and protesters left dozens dead during nationwide protests over the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini. Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi warned on Saturday that the government would “deal decisively” with protesters.  

CPJ emailed requests for comment on the arrests to the Iran missions based in Geneva, Switzerland, and at the United Nations headquarters in New York, but did not receive a response.

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

Hundreds of thousands took to the streets in over 450 protests across the country Saturday demanding lawmakers take action on gun control laws in the wake of recent mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, New York. March for Our Lives, the youth-led organization created by students who survived the mass shooting at Parkland's Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, organized Saturday's rallies.

"Avoid attending school if your leaders fail to do the job and keep us safe from gun violence."

Patricia and Manuel Oliver, whose son, Joaquin, was among those killed in Parkland, addressed the Washington, DC crowd announcing a new campaign called I Will Avoid.  “Our elected officials have betrayed us and avoid the responsibility to end gun violence…Today we announce a new call to action, because I think it's time to bring a consequence to their inaction."

Manuel said, "If lawmakers who have the power to keep us safe from gun violence are going to avoid taking action," then he's calling for a nationwide strike of schools, from elementary to college.

"Avoid attending school if your leaders fail … to keep us safe," he said. "Avoid going back to school if President Biden fails to open a White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention so that we can finally give this issue the attention that it deserves."

He added, “If lawmakers who have the power to keep us safe from gun violence are going to avoid taking action that will save our lives, then young people across this country, everyone else who can hear my voice should also avoid. Avoid attending school if your leaders fail to do the job and keep us safe from gun violence.”

Manuel echoed a call published last month in The Atlantic magazine "Students Should Refuse to Go Back to School" as reported by Common Dreams.

“What I say here today is mostly directed at Congress...I have reached my fucking limit! - X Gonzalez”

Parkland shooting survivor and activist X Gonzalez also spoke at the Washington rally: “What I say here today is mostly directed at Congress. I’ve spent these past four years doing my best to keep my rage in check, to keep my profanity at a minimum so that everyone can understand and appreciate the arguments I’m trying to make, but I have reached my fucking limit!”

Gonzalez drew loud cheers from the crowd. “We are being murdered. Cursing will not rob us of our innocence. You say that children are the future, and you never fucking listen to what we say once we’re old enough to disagree with you, you decaying degenerates! You really want to protect children? Pass some fucking gun laws!”

In Portland, Maine, hundreds rallied in a park outside the courthouse before they marched through the Old Port and gathered outside of City Hall. As they marched, they chanted, “Hey, hey, hey, NRA, how many kids have to die today.”

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

Four years, over 100 school shootings, and more than 170,000 U.S. firearm deaths after the first March For Our Lives rallies in 2018, the student-led gun control advocacy group announced Wednesday that it would stage a new nationwide day of protest on June 11 following Tuesday's Robb Elementary School massacre in Texas.

"You can't stop a bullet with thoughts and prayers. To honor those lost and save countless lives, we need action. We're dying while we wait for it."

"Together, we rose up four years ago. One million of us demanded change. We built a movement. We voted for new leaders. And the gun deaths increased," March For Our Lives tweeted. "Now is the moment we march again."

Responding to Tuesday's school shooting in Uvalde, Texas—in which 19 children and two adults were murdered—March For Our Lives asked, "Do our lives mean fucking nothing?"

"Here we are again, saying the same thing," the group continued, "the disgusting and shameful fact in America is that another shooting like this was just a matter of time because of our political leaders' breathtaking disregard for our lives. We are enraged at politicians who stand in the way of lifesaving change on both sides of the aisle."

"You can't stop a bullet with thoughts and prayers," March For Our Lives added. "To honor those lost and save countless lives, we need action. We're dying while we wait for it."

As students across the United States walked out of their classrooms Thursday to protest gun violence and decades of politicians' inaction, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators met to discuss gun control. Right-wing Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virgina—who last year opposed a bill passed by the House that would require background checks on all firearm purchases—this time signaled a possible change of heart.

"I can't get my grandchildren out of my mind. It could have been them," he said, referring to the Texas shooting.

Manchin added that he would do "anything I can" to advance "common sense" firearms legislation. Anything, critics noted, except end the filibuster, which Republican lawmakers have repeatedly used to stymie their opponents' progressive agenda.

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans on Thursday blocked legislation aimed at combating the growing threat posed by neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and other domestic extremists, less than two weeks after a white supremacist murdered 10 people, most of them Black, in a Buffalo, New York supermarket. The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed the measure just five days after the Buffalo shooting.

At least one million and perhaps twice that many people in the United States and around the world took part in the March 24, 2018 March For Our Lives, including up to 800,000 demonstrators in Washington, D.C. The massive demonstrations occurred weeks after 17 people were murdered at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

Prominent participants in the protest included Parkland survivor David Hogg, who was subsequently mocked and harassed by future Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who called the massacre and other school shootings false-flag operations orchestrated by Democrats pushing gun control legislation.

According to Education Week—which began tracking U.S. school shootings two weeks before Parkland—there have been 119 such incidents, with 88 deaths and 229 injuries, since February 2018.

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

People across the United States are planning to take to the streets on Saturday, May 14 to protest right-wing attacks on abortion rights, including the looming reversal of Roe v. Wade.

Pro-choice groups—including Planned Parenthood organizations, Liberate Abortion, MoveOn, Service Employees International Union, UltraViolet, and Women's March—are putting together marches, rallies, and other events for the "Bans Off Our Bodies" day of action.

A searchable list of events is available at BansOff.org.

In addition to five anchor demonstrations planned in Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, and Washington, D.C., more than 200 events are scheduled to "demonstrate the massive support for abortion rights nationwide, and make clear to the public just how serious the threat to those rights is in this moment," according to Planned Parenthood Action Fund.

Senate Republicans and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) on Wednesday blocked a final vote on the Women's Health Protection Act (WHPA), which would affirm abortion rights at the federal level. Calls for passing the bill have built up since a draft U.S. Supreme Court opinion leaked last week.

As the Center for Reproductive Rights explained:

The rallies are in response to the publishing by Politico of a draft Supreme Court opinion in the center's case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, that would overrule Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey and rule there is no constitutional right to abortion. Such a ruling would mark the first time in history that the U.S. Supreme Court has taken away a fundamental right.

Chief Justice John Roberts has confirmed that the draft was authentic, but that it is not the final opinion of the court. The final opinion is expected before the end of the court's term at the end of June.

If the high court does reverse Roe and Casey, abortion could be banned in over half the country due to "trigger" laws and other legislation, according to the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute.

"Either abortion will be outlawed in your state or your state will become a state that needs to start providing abortions to people who are coming from out of state. So this will have an impact on every single person in this country," Kimberly Inez McGuire, executive director of URGE: Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity, recently told Glamour.

After the WHPA vote this week, Planned Parenthood Action Fund president Alexis McGill Johnson said that "politicians opposed to abortion rights are not stopping here—they have made it clear that their ultimate goal is to ban abortion nationwide."

"With the Supreme Court planning to overturn Roe v. Wade, we are at a tipping point in the fight to be able to make decisions about our own bodies, lives, and futures," she added. "We will not back down, and we will not forget those who put politics over our health and rights."

As part of Planned Parenthood's #BansOffOurBodies campaign, more than 160 young celebrities signed their names to a full-page New York Times advertisement that ran on Friday to promote the weekend protests. Their message on abortion rights was that "we will not go back—and we will not back down."

Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights, which has held actions throughout the week in response to Justice Samuel Alito's draft opinion, also has dozens of U.S. events planned for Saturday. Protest leaders from the group said Friday that "the end of Roe v. Wade would be one of the most significant reversals of a fundamental human and civil right in this country's history."

"If you care about women and girls… if you refuse to inherit, or pass on, a world that is hurtling backwards," they continued, "get organized and connect with us. Spread the word to friends, family, and other networks. NOW is the time to rise up, together, as if our lives depend upon it—for, in fact, they do."

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

College and high school students from coast to coast walked out of classrooms and off campuses on Thursday to defend reproductive freedom in the wake of this week's revelation that the U.S. Supreme Court is set to overturn Roe v. Wade in what would arguably be the biggest rights rollback in American history.

"We call on all working-class, oppressed, and progressive people to take to the streets and fight for our lives."

"I'm very terrified," said Josie Whitmore, a freshman at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. "It starts with one thing being overturned and we're going to keep being oppressed. The laws are not working in our favor. They're working against us at this point."

Nicolas Cardona, another Amherst student, said, "The right of abortion is a fundamental human right and it has historically been won by a very militant struggle."

"This is affecting the world," Cardona added. "Working-class women are organizing themselves and fighting in the streets for this right, and the working-class women in this country want to do the same."

Students at Stony Brook University on Long Island said they organized a demonstration to mobilize outrage "into productive action to draw greater attention to the perilous position that our reproductive rights are in" and to urge the school to "improve the accessibility and availability of contraceptives on campus."

In New York City, 15-year-old protester Anna Hunt told Reuters that "my rights are being threatened, and I came here because I'm hoping to not allow these government officials, who think they have control over my body, to do what they're doing and take us back 50 years."

Jean Remarque, a young LGBTQ+ Black man protesting in New York, told Reuters that "the woman has the right to make choices and decisions for her body. No one should... tell a woman what they can and cannot do."

Protesters at Edward Little High School in Auburn, Maine, said the opinions of young people should be taken seriously.

"People might look at us like we're young, but I genuinely feel like we can make the most change," student Cassie Gamache told WGME. "Most of us are voting next year or this year."

Addressing a crowd of 150 students and staff attending a protest at the College of Wooster in Ohio, transgender student Cody Clark told anti-choice forces to "keep your policies off of women's bodies."

"I have a friend who would have died without an abortion," Clark added. "I'm here out of righteous anger, but am I also here out of love for everyone here and for myself."

Hundreds of students at three Louisville, Kentucky high schools—including the alma mater of staunchly anti-choice Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)—walked out of their classrooms at noon.

Thursday's student walkouts follow nationwide demonstrations on Wednesday evening involving thousands of reproductive rights defenders angry over a leaked Supreme Court draft opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by four of the court's right-wing justices that declares Roe v. Wade "egregiously wrong from the start."

"We therefore hold that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion," wrote Alito for the majority, "...and the authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives."

Speaking at Kent State University in northeastern Ohio, Fiona Fisher, an organizer with Students for a Democratic Society, noted that "if Roe is overturned, 26 U.S. states will likely enact bans on abortion."

"We call on all working-class, oppressed, and progressive people to take to the streets and fight for our lives," she added, "in some cases literally."

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

On Friday, April 1, the Sri Lankan government declared the emergency, which allows authorities to conduct warrantless arrests, and imposed a curfew to contain protests after violent demonstrations over the country’s economic crisis erupted last week, according to news reports.

On the evening of March 31, Sri Lankan police and security forces arrested at least six journalists covering a protest outside President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s private residence in the Mirihana district of the capital Colombo, according to a report by Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka (JDS), a local press freedom group; a statement by the Federation of Media Employees Trade Union (FMETU), a local network of trade unions for journalists and media workers; news reports; and a JDS representative, who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity due to fear of government reprisal.

Police arrested over 50 people at the protest, used tear gas and water cannons to disperse the demonstrators, and filed a complaint against over 50 individuals, including the six journalists. According to the JDS representative, the six have been accused of violating Section 120 of the penal code, which makes it an offense to “excite feelings of disaffection” against the president or government. If convicted, the journalists could face up to two years in prison.

“Sri Lanka must not use the state of emergency as a pretext to muzzle press freedom during this critical moment in the country’s history, when access to information is vital for all citizens,” said Steven Butler, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator, in Washington, D.C. “Authorities must cease detaining and harassing journalists, allow the media to report safely and independently, and ensure unrestricted access to social media and communication platforms.”

The Gangodawila Magistrates’ Court in the Nugegoda municipality, a suburb of Colombo, granted bail for the six journalists on April 1, according to the JDS representative.

On Sunday, April 3, authorities restricted access to a number of social media and communication platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Viber, and YouTube, which was largely restored after 16 hours, according to NetBlocks, a watchdog organization that monitors internet censorship.

CPJ was unable to immediately identify contact details for the six journalists and confirm their exact job titles due to country-wide power shortages caused by the ongoing economic turmoil. CPJ is continuing to investigate the circumstances surrounding the arrests and detention of the six journalists.

The following six journalists were detained while covering the protest, according to the FMETU and JDS:

1. Chatura Deshan, who was reporting for the privately owned Sinhala-language television network Sirasa TV.
2. Sumedha Sanjeewa Gallage, who was reporting for the privately owned Sinhala-language television network Derana TV, was seen being escorted into a police vehicle in a Facebook Live video taken by a bystander circulated on social media on April 1. Gallage told Sri Lanka’s  Sunday Times that he was assaulted by officers with the Special Task Force, an elite paramilitary unit of the Sri Lankan police, at the protest after repeatedly identifying himself as a journalist and showing his media identification card. He appeared to have sustained significant bruising to his face and his shirt appeared to be covered in blood in a photo circulated on social media. Gallage said he was assaulted by another unidentified individual before he was taken to the Mirihana police station and received medical treatment at a hospital after he was released on bail, according to The Sunday Times. Gallage says he lost partial vision in his right eye due to the assault and will require further medical treatment.
3. Awanka Kumara, who was reporting for Sirasa TV. Kumara’s video camera was smashed during a police baton charge, according to JDS. “I never thought that journalists would be assaulted in such a manner because they know us. We have been reporting on these events for a long time,” Kumara told LankaFiles.
4. Waruna Wanniarachchi, who was reporting for the privately owned Sinhala-language daily newspaper Lankādeepa.
5. Nishshanka Werapitiya, who was reporting for Derana TV, appeared to have sustained bruising to his face in a photo shared by JDS on Twitter.
6. Pradeep Wickramasinghe, who was reporting for Derana TV, appeared to have sustained several bruises to his right arm in a photo shared by JDS on Twitter.

CPJ is investigating reports that Nisal Baduge, who was reporting for the privately owned English-language daily newspaper Daily Mirror, and Lahiru Chamara, who was reporting for Derana TV, were also assaulted while covering the March 31 protest.

On Sunday, April 3, 2022, the Tamil National People’s Front, a political alliance representing the ethnic Tamil minority, reported that police stopped journalists from entering its office in the Kokkuvil suburb of the northern city of Jaffna, where they arrived to cover its media conference, harassed them, and turned them away after registering their names. CPJ was unable to immediately confirm the identities of those journalists.

CPJ is also investigating reports that a group of individuals who presented themselves as members of the president’s media division threatened and intimidated Tharindu Jayawardena, editor-in-chief of the privately owned news website medialk.com. Jayawardena lodged a complaint at the Mirihana police station in response to the incident, according to the FMETU.

In July 2021, a collective of media organizations wrote a letter to Chandana Wickramaratne, inspector-general of the Sri Lankan Police, after Deshabandu Tennakoon, senior deputy inspector-general of the western province of Sri Lanka, threatened Jayawardena for “publishing fabricated news items” after the journalist shared a medialk.com article on Facebook, which reported that Tennakoon had received a salary increase following the 2019 Easter bombings.

Sri Lanka police spokesperson Nihal Thalduwa did not respond to CPJ’s request for comment sent via messaging app. The office of President Rajapaksa did not respond to CPJ’s emailed request for comment.

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

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

• NAACP and Mississippi Democrat, Bennie Thompson, sue Donald Trump for inciting U.S. capitol attack.
• White House announces another increase in coronavirus vaccines to states.
• California Governor Gavin unveils mass vaccination site in Los Angeles.
• California teachers union says not ready to return to school, as Governor to weigh in with a plan soon.
• Nationwide strike for fast food and retail worker protections and $15 minimum wage.
• At least 16 dead from massive storm system spanning from Canada to Mexico.

Photo by Fight for $15

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• Electoral college votes for President-elect Democrat Joe Biden, securing his presidency.
• Pfizer/BioNTech Coronavirus vaccine rolled out in nationwide vaccination push.
• Health care workers in California first to receive COVID-19 vaccine, amidst infection surge.
• California Attorney General sues Amazon for information about worker COVID-19 infections.
• Two bipartisan coronavirus relief bills unveiled in the senate.
• United Nations holds virtual climate summit, delivers dire warning to world leaders.

Photo by, Kaiser Permanente Southern California.

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• Joe Biden says victory is near; President Trump sues to challenge vote counts.
• Republicans keep control of the senate.
• Democrats maintain control of the house, but lose at least 7 seats to Republicans.
• California progressives lose on several state propositions.
• Thousands rally in Bay Area as part of nationwide protests to count every vote.

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• Uproar after President Donald Trump refuses to commit to peaceful transition of power after election.
• President Trump peddles health care plan to supporters in North Carolina.
• Nationwide protests, two police shot, and plea for peace after officers not charged for Breonna Taylor’s death.
• Black women in Oakland rally after officers not charged for Breonna Taylor’s death.
• Hundreds of city officials urge Governor Newsom to declare a climate emergency.

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