“The violence against journalists in Sweida — including injuries, intimidation, and the ransacking of media offices — along with the attack on a media outlet in Damascus, signals a dangerous escalation in threats to Syria’s press,” said CPJ Regional Director Sara Qudah. “Authorities must investigate these incidents and ensure accountability. Journalists should not face violence or obstruction for doing their work.”

Fighting in Sweida governorate began on July 13, 2025, after a Druze merchant was assaulted by Bedouin tribesmen. The confrontation escalated into armed clashes between Druze groups and Bedouin fighters, drawing in Syrian government forces. Israeli airstrikes on July 15 and 16 followed in Sweida and Damascus, with Israel citing the protection of Druze communities. A U.S.-brokered truce temporarily halted fighting, but conditions on the ground remained unstable.

• On July 15, Nadim al-Nabulsi, a reporter for Ahrar Horan, a local media collective, sustained minor injuries while covering events in Sweida after an Israeli drone strike. “I was reporting near the entrance of the city, following a [Syrian government] General Security Forces vehicle on my motorcycle,” al-Nabulsi told CPJ. “The vehicle was hit by drone-dropped explosives. I was around 25 meters (82 feet) behind and tried to hide, but some shrapnel hit my lower back.” He said he was wearing a “Press” vest at the time.

• Also on July 15, freelance journalist Muhannad Abu Zaid was wounded during clashes. He said he was following a General Security Forces convoy into Sweida when gunfire broke out. “I took cover and started filming, but a sniper fired and hit my hand,” he told CPJ. “I think the bullet was meant for my chest, but a car shielded me.”

• On July 16, an Israeli airstrike In Damascus, targeting the Syrian army’s general staff headquarters damaged Al-Hadath TV’s office. According to a video posted by the channel on X, no one was injured.

• On July 19, four journalists wearing “Press” vests — freelance photographer Ali Haj Suleiman, a Getty Images contributor; photographer Bakr Alkasem, who contributes to Agence France-Presse; NoonPost reporter Hamza Abbas; and NoonPost camera operator Qusay Abdulbari — were beside their car in Sweida when it was struck by bullets. “We were covering events in Sweida, entering at the Omran roundabout,” Haj Suleiman told CPJ. “Druze armed factions appeared to counterattack, and gunfire came from three directions. We took cover behind our car as snipers and RPGs fired. After 10 minutes, the shooting stopped.”

• Also on July 19, Karam Nachar, editor-in-chief of the privately owned outlet Al-Jumhuriya, posted that one of the outlet’s journalists, who asked not to be named for his own safety, was robbed and threatened in his home in Sweida by what the journalist said “appeared to be newly recruited members of the ministry of defense.” CPJ spoke with the journalist and confirmed that he is now safe in Damascus. “The four gunmen took $1,600 in cash, my phone, and a camera worth around $2,000,” he said, adding that he managed to escape the raid after another journalist intervened.

CPJ contacted Mohammad Al-Saleh, the Syrian ministry of information’s spokesperson, via messaging app. He said authorities had not blocked journalists from working but warned them that Druze snipers were active in the area, and advised them to evacuate to avoid kidnapping or crossfire. Al-Saleh said the government holds its institutions accountable for any misconduct but currently lacks the means to pursue armed groups operating outside the law — “though that time will come.”

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

“The violence against journalists in Sweida — including injuries, intimidation, and the ransacking of media offices — along with the attack on a media outlet in Damascus, signals a dangerous escalation in threats to Syria’s press,” said CPJ Regional Director Sara Qudah. “Authorities must investigate these incidents and ensure accountability. Journalists should not face violence or obstruction for doing their work.”

Fighting in Sweida governorate began on July 13, 2025, after a Druze merchant was assaulted by Bedouin tribesmen. The confrontation escalated into armed clashes between Druze groups and Bedouin fighters, drawing in Syrian government forces. Israeli airstrikes on July 15 and 16 followed in Sweida and Damascus, with Israel citing the protection of Druze communities. A U.S.-brokered truce temporarily halted fighting, but conditions on the ground remained unstable.

• On July 15, Nadim al-Nabulsi, a reporter for Ahrar Horan, a local media collective, sustained minor injuries while covering events in Sweida after an Israeli drone strike. “I was reporting near the entrance of the city, following a [Syrian government] General Security Forces vehicle on my motorcycle,” al-Nabulsi told CPJ. “The vehicle was hit by drone-dropped explosives. I was around 25 meters (82 feet) behind and tried to hide, but some shrapnel hit my lower back.” He said he was wearing a “Press” vest at the time.

• Also on July 15, freelance journalist Muhannad Abu Zaid was wounded during clashes. He said he was following a General Security Forces convoy into Sweida when gunfire broke out. “I took cover and started filming, but a sniper fired and hit my hand,” he told CPJ. “I think the bullet was meant for my chest, but a car shielded me.”

• On July 16, an Israeli airstrike In Damascus, targeting the Syrian army’s general staff headquarters damaged Al-Hadath TV’s office. According to a video posted by the channel on X, no one was injured.

• On July 19, four journalists wearing “Press” vests — freelance photographer Ali Haj Suleiman, a Getty Images contributor; photographer Bakr Alkasem, who contributes to Agence France-Presse; NoonPost reporter Hamza Abbas; and NoonPost camera operator Qusay Abdulbari — were beside their car in Sweida when it was struck by bullets. “We were covering events in Sweida, entering at the Omran roundabout,” Haj Suleiman told CPJ. “Druze armed factions appeared to counterattack, and gunfire came from three directions. We took cover behind our car as snipers and RPGs fired. After 10 minutes, the shooting stopped.”

• Also on July 19, Karam Nachar, editor-in-chief of the privately owned outlet Al-Jumhuriya, posted that one of the outlet’s journalists, who asked not to be named for his own safety, was robbed and threatened in his home in Sweida by what the journalist said “appeared to be newly recruited members of the ministry of defense.” CPJ spoke with the journalist and confirmed that he is now safe in Damascus. “The four gunmen took $1,600 in cash, my phone, and a camera worth around $2,000,” he said, adding that he managed to escape the raid after another journalist intervened.

CPJ contacted Mohammad Al-Saleh, the Syrian ministry of information’s spokesperson, via messaging app. He said authorities had not blocked journalists from working but warned them that Druze snipers were active in the area, and advised them to evacuate to avoid kidnapping or crossfire. Al-Saleh said the government holds its institutions accountable for any misconduct but currently lacks the means to pursue armed groups operating outside the law — “though that time will come.”

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

The decision came directly on the heels of a Supreme Court order that greenlit the Trump administration’s efforts to downsize and restructure the federal government. 

With approximately 1,115 employees — just 7 percent of the EPA’s headcount at the start of President Donald Trump’s second term — the research office has played an outsized role in helping the agency fulfill its legal mandate to use the “best available science” in its mission to protect human health and the environment. ORD science has underpinned many of the EPA’s restrictions on contaminants in air, water, and soil, and formed the basis for regulations on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, PFAS or “forever chemicals,” in drinking water, deadly fine particulate matter in air, carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere, and chemicals and metals like asbestos and lead.

“Without a research arm, it will be very difficult for EPA to issue new standards for air or water pollutants, toxic chemicals, pesticides, or other hazards,” said Michael Gerrard, faculty director of the Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. 

ORD, which works with states, local governments, and tribes in addition to its federal work, has six national research programs, each one focused on a different aspect of health and the environment. Research being undertaken at those centers included studying how to safeguard water systems from terrorist attacks, understanding the impacts of extreme weather on human health, and modeling the economic benefits of reducing air pollution.

The EPA said it is moving some of ORD staff into other parts of the EPA, including into its air, water, and chemical offices and a new Office of Applied Science and Environmental Solutions within EPA administrator Lee Zeldin’s office. The agency said the moves will save taxpayers nearly $750 million, and produce an agency that closely resembles the shrunken version of the agency that existed under President Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s. The aim, the agency said, is to “prioritize research and science more than ever before.” 

In an email to Grist, an agency spokesperson called media reports about the disbanding of ORD “biased” and denied that the changes will affect the quality of EPA science. “Friday’s announcement is not an elimination of science and research,” the agency said. 

But former EPA employees and environmental advocates say disbanding ORD will both weaken the EPA’s research capabilities and put its scientific independence at risk of political interference.

“Part of the reason why ORD is a separate office is to preserve scientific integrity,” said Chris Frey, an associate dean at North Carolina State University who worked in the office on and off from 1992 to 2024, most recently as its Assistant Administrator under former President Joe Biden. “From a societal perspective, it’s a huge win for the public that those decisions be based on evidence and not just opinions of stakeholders to have a vested interest in an outcome.” The EPA hasn’t said how many ORD scientists will be allowed to continue working at the agency. 

Already, the U.S. regulatory system gives chemical companies like 3M and DuPont a large degree of influence over how the chemicals they produce are controlled, a strategy that has been known to fail. Under the Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA, the EPA has 90 days to assess a chemical’s risks before it hits the market. 

The EPA’s decision to dissolve ORD and integrate a portion of its scientists into the agency’s policymaking infrastructure stands to benefit chemical companies and industrial polluters by rubbing away the boundaries between science and politics, science advocates argue. Research conducted at ORD not only grounded new EPA regulations, it also provided the scientific basis for TSCA enforcement. 

“There’s lots of ways that ORD speaking truth about impacts of pollutants was inconvenient for regulated industry,” said Gretchen Goldman, president of the nonprofit science advocacy organization the Union of Concerned Scientists. “They’re probably celebrating over this.” 

Despite recent wins, industry trade and lobby groups are pushing for even more freedom. Last week, on the same day the EPA announced it was disbanding ORD and a day after the EPA separately exempted dozens of chemical factories and power plants from Biden-era air pollution and emissions rules, the American Chemistry Council’s President and CEO Chris Jahn floated the idea of making changes to the Toxic Substances Control Act in an interview with The Washington Examiner. 

“EPA Administrator Zeldin, the White House, Congress are all looking at this right now,” he said, “to potentially make some updates to TSCA to make it work more effectively for the long run.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This EPA research office safeguarded Americans’ health. Trump just eliminated it. on Jul 21, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Zoya Teirstein.

The Trump administration has shuttered the Environmental Protection Agency’s scientific arm, the EPA Office of Research and Development. Hundreds of chemists, biologists, toxicologists and other scientists will lose their jobs under the administration’s plan to aggressively tear down environmental regulations and defund the EPA. Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta, a former top administrator in the Office of Research and Development, says the loss of the division means the loss of essential services like air and water quality monitoring that protects public health. “We are losing a treasure trove of historical knowledge, of scientific expertise, and really it’s going to limit what information, what science would be available for the agency to consider in protecting our health and our environment,” she says.

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

Cameroon is consistently among Africa’s worst jailers of journalists, with five journalists—Amadou Vamoulke, Manch Bibixy, Thomas Awah Junior, Tsi Conrad, and Kingsley Fomunyuy Njoka—currently behind bars in violation of international law, according to CPJ’s annual prison census. 

To meet AGOA eligibility requirements, reviewed by the Office of the United States Trade Representative, sub-Saharan countries must meet statutorily defined criteria, several of which relate to human rights. Given the ongoing detention of the journalists and the country’s poor press freedom record, CPJ and Freedom House said that Cameroon does not fully meet these criteria.

Read a copy of the comment in English here.

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

These days, it doesn’t take much to antagonize MAGA, and James Gunn, the director of the new Superman film, scheduled to be released on July 11,  has set off another outrage cycle.

“I mean, Superman is the story of America,” Gunn said in an interview with the Times of London, “An immigrant that came from other places […] but for me it is mostly a story that says basic human kindness is a value and is something we have lost.”

Amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, mass deportation plans, and creation of concentration camps like Alligator Alcatraz, Gunn also noted that his film leans into the character’s well-known backstory as an otherworldly refugee, a plot point that has been explored in Superman comics over the years.

MAGA influencers jumped on Gunn speedier than longtime Superman antagonist Lex Luther, General Zod, and Mister Mxyzptlk.  Fox News host Laura Ingraham dismissed the film entirely, declaring it as “another film we won’t be seeing.”

“He’s creating a moat of woke, enlightened opinion around him. He’s got a woke shield,” Fox News host Greg Gutfeld said as an on-screen graphic blared that the “Superwoke” movie embraced “pro-immigrant themes.”

“I’m going to skip seeing Superman now. Director is an absolute moron to say this publicly the week before release,” conservative radio host and OutKick founder Clay Travis complained.

“I can’t believe that we’ve come down to that,” she complained. “We don’t go to the movie theater to be lectured to and to have somebody throw their ideology onto us. I wonder if it will be successful.” MAGA-boosting Fox News host Jesse Watters, meanwhile, followed up by joking that Superman’s cape is now emblazoned with “MS-13.”

The Daily Dot’s Anna Good reported that “Gunn’s version of Superman focuses on empathy, morality, and alienation. These themes have been embedded in the character since his 1938 debut in the first issue of Action Comics. In his interview, Gunn acknowledged that the movie might be received differently in liberal vs. conservative parts of the country.”

Gunn’s take on aligns with the character’s Jewish roots. Created in the 1930s by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, sons of Jewish immigrants who fled the European pogroms, Superman was born of a need for hope during a time of rising anti-Semitism.

“Yes, it’s about politics,” Gunn told The Times of London. “But on another level it’s about morality. Do you never kill no matter what — which is what Superman believes — or do you have some balance, as Lois believes? It’s really about their relationship and the way different opinions on basic moral beliefs can tear two people apart.”

Gunn pointed out that “I’m telling a story about a guy who is uniquely good, and that feels needed now because there is a meanness that has emerged due to cultural figures being mean online.”

“My reaction to [the backlash] is that it is exactly what the movie is about,” he declared. “We support our people, you know? We love our immigrants. Yes, Superman is an immigrant, and yes, the people that we support in this country are immigrants and if you don’t like that, you’re not American. People who say no to immigrants are against the American way.”

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

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Anchorage Daily News. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

Anchorage Mayor Suzanne LaFrance said this week that the city has hired a full roster of prosecutors and is no longer dropping criminal charges due to short staffing. The announcement comes nine months after the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica reported the mass dismissals.

“Public safety begins with accountability — and we cannot hold people accountable if we don’t have prosecutors in court,” LaFrance said in a news release, announcing that Alaska’s largest city has filled all “frontline” prosecutor jobs for the first time since 2020. “This was about more than filling positions. It was about rebuilding the systems that keep Anchorage safe.”

An investigation by the newsrooms, published in October, found that city prosecutors dropped hundreds of misdemeanor cases because there weren’t enough attorneys on the payroll. Between May 1 and Oct. 2 of last year, the city dropped more than 250 domestic violence assault cases and more than 270 drunken driving cases due to an inability to meet the 120-day deadline Alaska sets for upholding a defendant’s right to a speedy trial.

Days after the investigation came out, the state of Alaska announced it would help prosecute city cases to avoid speedy-trial dismissals.

But those state prosecutors are no longer needed. According to the city, the municipal prosecutor’s office now has a full staff of 12 “frontline” prosecutors who take cases to trial, plus a supervisor and an attorney who files motions and appeals. The only vacancy, they said, is a supervisory role: deputy municipal prosecutor.

That amounts to a vacancy rate of about 7% in the prosecutor’s office. In contrast, more than 40% of city prosecutor positions were vacant as of mid-2024, according to a city spokesperson.

At a Wednesday “trial call” hearing at downtown Anchorage’s Boney Courthouse, Assistant Municipal Prosecutor Andy Garbe announced the city was ready to go to trial in case after case, including a drunken driving arrest, weapons charges and domestic violence assaults. It was a far different scene from September, when prosecutors were routinely forced to drop charges in cases nearing the speedy-trial deadline.

“We’re not in the position we were last fall,” Garbe said, referring to the forced dismissals. “That’s not happening anymore.”

City prosecutors said they are still dismissing cases for reasons other than speedy-trial deadlines. For example, on Wednesday, Garbe moved to dismiss two cases, including a domestic violence assault, citing factors such as the weakness of the case and unavailable witnesses. A defense attorney had warned the cases were nearing the 120-day speedy-trial deadline, but Garbe said the timing was not the reason for the dismissals.

In Anchorage, city prosecutors handle misdemeanor cases while state attorneys generally prosecute felonies.

With the most serious felonies, the state has long dealt with problems apart from Anchorage’s mass dismissals. The newsrooms reported in January that some of those cases are delayed as long as a decade before reaching trial. In March, the Alaska Supreme Court issued a series of orders aimed at reducing delays.

District Court Judge Brian Clark cited the Supreme Court orders on Wednesday when asking attorneys if they were ready to go to trial, noting the pending deadline.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News.

Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi and Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir announced Friday that broadcasting from those locations without advance, written permission, would be a criminal offense, as Israel seeks to control reporting about its week-old conflict with Iran.

“We are deeply concerned by the Israeli authorities’ escalating efforts to suppress press freedom through censorship and intimidation,” said CPJ Regional Director Sara Qudah. “Journalists must be allowed to report on the Iran-Israel conflict without obstruction or fear of retaliation. Silencing the press deprives the world of a clear, unfiltered view of the reality unfolding in the region.”

On Thursday, Israeli police said they stopped international media transmitting live broadcasts from missile landing sites, which revealed their exact locations, including “news agencies through which Al Jazeera was illegally broadcasting.” That same day, the Government Press Office banned live broadcasts from crash sites.

The Union of Journalists in Israel denounced the move and said there were no teams filming in Israel for Al Jazeera, which purchases live broadcasts from other international networks operating legally in Israel. Israel banned Al Jazeera’s operations in the country in May, citing security concerns.

On June 18, IDF military censors issued an order, which CPJ reviewed, requiring anyone seeking to broadcast, including via social media, the aftermath of Iranian rocket and drone attacks on Israel’s military sites to obtain prior approval from the army.

On June 16, Israeli police raided a hotel in the northern port city of Haifa where Palestinian journalists were covering the attacks, confiscated their equipment, and launched an investigation.

CPJ emailed the police, the IDF’s North America Media Desk, and the government spokesperson requesting comment but did not immediately receive a response.

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

Ponsonby’s post office is shutting shop next month despite push back from the local community.

A sign on the storefront, which is at the College Hill end of Ponsonby Road, said the closure would take place on 4 July but the post boxes would be “staying put”.

Ponsonby local and author John Harris said New Zealand Post’s decision to close the store was “ill-considered” and it should “try harder” to cater for the people who use the shop’s services.

• READ MORE: Ponsonby community up in arms over impending post office closure
• New Zealand Post to close 79 shops: ‘I do have concerns’ – PM

“They’ve got to be mindful of the vital role that post shops like this one play in glueing the community together,” Harris said.

“If you go down to the post shop you’ll see it’s buzzing with activity; people popping in to post parcels or to get forms filled out and so forth . . .  they’ve got to think about the effect on small communities and this is like gutting the Ponsonby community.”

Viv Rosenberg, a spokesperson for the Ponsonby Business Association, said the group is saddened by the decision to close the shop.

”Our local post office has been part of the fabric of our community in Three Lamps for several years and we regard the team there as part of our Ponsonby family. We are working alongside others to try and keep it open.”

Plan but no timeframe
In 2018, NZ Post announced its plan to close its remaining 79 standalone post offices but did not give a timeframe on when the final store would be shut.

NZ Post general manager consumer Sarah Sandoval said customer data and service patterns were analysed to determine where NZ Post services were best placed.

“The Ponsonby area is well serviced by existing postal outlets, and to remove duplications of services, we’ve decided to make this change.”

She also said that there were nearby options available, including on Hardinge Street 1.4km away, and NZ Post Herne Bay, 1km away.

The NZ Post website said “store closures are given very careful consideration”.

“[Reasons for closure] can include a decline in customer numbers or services which significantly affect the economic viability of the store,” NZ Post said.

Harris emailed NZ Post CEO David Walsh expressing his disapproval of the decision to close the shop and requesting it be reconsidered.

He said a response by the NZ Post general manager consumer stated the closure followed a close look at customer data and that there were other stores serving the Ponsonby community, which was an unsustainable way for the business to operate.

“Herne Bay, Hardinge Street and Wellesley Street are either a challenging walk or you hop in the car and add to the grid,” Harris said.

“They’re only thinking about the sustainability of the New Zealand Post itself not the community.”

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.

Ponsonby’s post office is shutting shop next month despite push back from the local community.

A sign on the storefront, which is at the College Hill end of Ponsonby Road, said the closure would take place on 4 July but the post boxes would be “staying put”.

Ponsonby local and author John Harris said New Zealand Post’s decision to close the store was “ill-considered” and it should “try harder” to cater for the people who use the shop’s services.

• READ MORE: Ponsonby community up in arms over impending post office closure
• New Zealand Post to close 79 shops: ‘I do have concerns’ – PM

“They’ve got to be mindful of the vital role that post shops like this one play in glueing the community together,” Harris said.

“If you go down to the post shop you’ll see it’s buzzing with activity; people popping in to post parcels or to get forms filled out and so forth . . .  they’ve got to think about the effect on small communities and this is like gutting the Ponsonby community.”

Viv Rosenberg, a spokesperson for the Ponsonby Business Association, said the group is saddened by the decision to close the shop.

”Our local post office has been part of the fabric of our community in Three Lamps for several years and we regard the team there as part of our Ponsonby family. We are working alongside others to try and keep it open.”

Plan but no timeframe
In 2018, NZ Post announced its plan to close its remaining 79 standalone post offices but did not give a timeframe on when the final store would be shut.

NZ Post general manager consumer Sarah Sandoval said customer data and service patterns were analysed to determine where NZ Post services were best placed.

“The Ponsonby area is well serviced by existing postal outlets, and to remove duplications of services, we’ve decided to make this change.”

She also said that there were nearby options available, including on Hardinge Street 1.4km away, and NZ Post Herne Bay, 1km away.

The NZ Post website said “store closures are given very careful consideration”.

“[Reasons for closure] can include a decline in customer numbers or services which significantly affect the economic viability of the store,” NZ Post said.

Harris emailed NZ Post CEO David Walsh expressing his disapproval of the decision to close the shop and requesting it be reconsidered.

He said a response by the NZ Post general manager consumer stated the closure followed a close look at customer data and that there were other stores serving the Ponsonby community, which was an unsustainable way for the business to operate.

“Herne Bay, Hardinge Street and Wellesley Street are either a challenging walk or you hop in the car and add to the grid,” Harris said.

“They’re only thinking about the sustainability of the New Zealand Post itself not the community.”

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.

The community is up in arms over another local post office in Aotearoa New Zealand about to be closed down, this time in the iconic and historic Auckland inner city suburb of Ponsonby.

A local author and founder of Greenstone Pictures, John Harris, has led a pushback against plans to close the Ponsonby post office branch in Three Lamps next month with an undated open letter to the chief executive David Walsh.

Saying he was “surprised and dismayed” to see the “closing soon but staying put” sign in the Ponsonby NZ Post shop, Harris pointed out that the small office gave “great service to dozens of businesses” in the area, and hundreds of residents.

• READ MORE: New Zealand Post to close 79 shops: ‘I do have concerns’ – PM

“It is misleading on your poster to claim that people will be able to obtain the same services at nearby post shops like that in Jervois Road,” Harris said.

“Will they be able to pay their bills and car registration there? Collect mail and parcels? Buy courier bags and send mail and parcels?

“And do you expect them to walk there?  It is not helpful to say this closure ‘might mean a few minutes extra drive’.

This assumed that all clients were using a car, not elderly or young who were on foot.

Parking in busy streets
“And people are expected to try and find parking on other busy streets — Jervois Road, Karangahape Road, Wellesley Street.”

Harris said: “The Ponsonby post shop is a vital part of the network that binds the community together.

“To close it is like removing part of the community’s nervous system:  an ill-considered stab at the heart of a community which has always been vibrant, socially aware and productive.”

The NZ Post website proclaims that “we provide customers with the solutions and products to help them communicate and do business.”

However, said Harris, this planned closure for July 4 did not match those promises.

Harris also pointed out that NZ Post made a $16 million operating profit for the last six months of 2024.

“Congratulations. I’m pleased you are keeping NZ Post viable. But it shows there is a bit of ‘wriggle room’ to keep the Ponsonby store open.”

Digital services use
In response to the call to reconsider the decision, a customer services officer replied on June 6 on behalf of chief executive Walsh, saying that the NZ Post Office needed to “ensure our physical locations are in the right places and operating efficiently” in an age where more people used digital services.

“In some areas, including Ponsonby, we’ve had more than one store serving the same neighbourhood. That’s not a sustainable way for us to operate, so we’ve had to make some changes.”

However, critics of the decision to close the Ponsonby store say the reasoning  was “not credible”, stressing that all claimed alternative postal stores are several kilometres away.

A year after chief executive Walsh was appointed in 2017, it was announced that NZ Post would close almost 80 local post offices across the country and replace some of them with franchises.

Harris, a children’s author with a strong association with the local community stretching back to the 1970s and a former editor of West End News in Freemans Bay, acknowledged that the Ponsonby  PO boxes lobby was being kept open, “but what about the ordinary rank-and-file residents and small business owners who value the other everyday services offered at the store?”

He said he had written to local MP, Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick and the Ponsonby Business Association seeking their support.

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

Expressing concerns over Congress’s perceived alignment with Turkey in light of recent geopolitical developments, especially since Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan openly supported Pakistan, Goswami called it an issue of national integrity. “A friend of the enemy is an enemy,” he said, urging viewers to boycott the Congress party and clamouring for a ban.

Calls to boycott Turkey have been on the rise in India after the recent conflict with Pakistan. The Indian armed forces explicitly said that Pakistan used weaponry supplied by China and Turkey to target military posts and civilian habitations in the recent conflict. Additionally, after India launched Operation Sindoor targeting terror bases in Pakistan in the aftermath of the Pahalgam massacre, where 26 civilians were shot dead, Turkey called the strikes “provocative”. Since then, Indians have cancelled trips en masse, travel businesses have stopped their offerings and institutions such as Jawaharlal Nehru University, IIT-Bombay and Jamia Millia Islamia have suspended their partnerships with Turkish universities.

Coming back to the Congress and their Turkey office, BJP’s IT cell chief Amit Malviya shared the Republic segment on May 17, asking Rahul Gandhi why it needed to make this “move.” (Archive)

Did you know that the Congress Party has a registered office in Turkey? Can Rahul Gandhi explain what necessitated this move? This is bizarre and inexplicable on multiple levels. India deserves to know.

Remember: the enemy’s friend is an enemy too. pic.twitter.com/lOnPrS5SpY

— Amit Malviya (@amitmalviya) May 17, 2025

Social media user Rishi Bagree (@rishibagree), shared the same video on X and questioned why the Congress felt the need to have an office there when only 300 Indians were living there. He added, “Is Erdogan the new Caliph of Congress, orchestrating its blatant Islamization?” (archive)

Even though the Indian population in Turkey is only around 300, the Congress party has an office there. What is the reason for this?

Is Erdogan the new Caliph of Congress, orchestrating its blatant Islamization?pic.twitter.com/jYRR1pltyv

— Rishi Bagree (@rishibagree) May 18, 2025

Another X user, Jaipur Dialogues (@JaipurDialogues), also shared the same video wondering why the party had an office in that country. (archive)

Why does Congress has a registered office in Turkey?pic.twitter.com/k3fpyWU6Ed

— The Jaipur Dialogues (@JaipurDialogues) May 18, 2025

Note that @JaipurDialogues has been fact checked by Alt News several times for amplifying misinformation.

Fact Check

The building shown in the Republic segment, which has been referred to as the registered office of the Indian National Congress in Turkey, is actually the Istanbul Congress Center. It is a convention centre located in the Harbiye neighbourhood of Sisli district in Istanbul, Turkey. It was inaugurated on October 17, 2009, and is owned by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality.

This Congress has nothing to do with the Indian National Congress, which is a political party.

However, in November 2019, the Indian National Congress had announced that it planned to establish an overseas office in Istanbul. According to the party’s statement, Mohammad Yusuf Khan was appointed to lead the Indian Overseas Congress (IOC) in Turkey. But since the announcement, there have been no updates on whether an actual office was set up because the IOC website mentions the countries where it has a presence, where Turkey is not featured.

The Indian Overseas Congress functions as a global network of Congress supporters and advocates, working to promote the party’s ideology and interests abroad. Sam Pitroda is the chairman of the Indian Overseas Congress. But this is nothing unusual because several parties do have units or centres overseas.

Malviya’s X post, in this context, seems unusual because even the BJP has a units outside of India, including in Turkey. The Overseas Friends of BJP (OFBJP) has established centres in the United Kingdom, the United States, the Netherlands and other countries. Several news reports and articles indicate OFBJP has a presence in Turkey. These reports named a Dipankar Ganguly as the convenor from Turkey.

In August 2018, Vijay Jolly, then senior BJP leader and the global convener of OFBJP had even met Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Ankara and offered him a scarf with the BJP’s lotus symbol.

On May 20, news channel Republic issued a correction, admitting they used the wrong image to depict the Congress office in Turkey in their news segment.

Republic Corrigendum pic.twitter.com/dIkaH4Z6JE

— Republic (@republic) May 20, 2025

To sum up, the picture of the building that many called a Congress office in Istanbul is actually the Istanbul Convention Center, a property owned by a municipal body in Turkey. It is unrelated to the Congress party. And while the Congress did announce plans of having an office in Turkey in 2019, no news reports or information on their website corroborate that they actually established one. Also, having an international presence is not unusual for political parties to garner support and the BJP too has an overseas wing in Turkey.

The post Republic uses unrelated image of Istanbul Congress Center as Congress party’s Turkey office, stirs political storm appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Ankita Mahalanobish.

As the conflict chugs along in pools of blood and bountiful gore, the confused shape of Israel’s intentions continues in all its glorious nebulousness.  Pretend moderation clouds murderous desire.  There is no sense that those unfortunate Israeli hostages captured by Hamas in its assault on October 7, 2023, matter anymore, being merely decorative for the imminent slaughter.  There is even less sense that Hamas will be cleansed and removed from the strip, however attractive this idea continues to be.

Such evident limits have not discouraged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, who have decided that more force, that old province of the unimaginative, is the answer.  According to the PM, the cabinet had agreed on a “forceful operation” to eliminate Hamas and salvage what is left of the hostage situation.

A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces, Brigadier-General Effie Defrin, has explained on Israeli radio that the offensive will apparently ensure the return of the hostages.  What follows will be “the collapse of the Hamas regime, its defeat, its submission”.  Anywhere up to two million Palestinian civilians in Gaza will be herded into the ruins of the south.  Humanitarian aid will be arranged by the Israeli forces to be possibly distributed through approved contractors.

The IDF chief of staff, Lt. General Eyal Zamir, confirmed that the approved plan will involve “the capture of the Strip and holding the territories, moving the Gazan population south for its defence, denying Hamas the ability to distribute humanitarian supplies, and powerful attacks against Hamas.”

Within the Israeli cabinet, ethnocentric and religious fires burn with bright fanaticism.  The Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich remains a figure who ignores floral subtlety in favour of the blood-stained sledgehammer.  He remains that coherent link between cruel lawmaking and baffling violence.  “Within a few months,” he boasts, “we will be able to declare that we have won.  Gaza will be totally destroyed.”  With pompous certitude, he also claimed that the next six months would see Hamas cease to exist.

Such opinions, expressed at the “Settlements Conference” organised by the Makor Rishon newspaper in Ofra, a West Bank settlement, give a sense of the flavour.  Palestinians are to be “concentrated” on land located between the Egyptian border and the arbitrarily designated Morag Corridor.  As with any potential abuser keen to violate his vulnerable charges while justifying it, Smotrich tried to impress with the idea that this was a “humanitarian” zone that would be free of “Hamas and terrorism”.

The program here is clear in its chilling crudeness.  Expulsion, relocation, transfer.  These are the words famously used to move on populations of a sizeable number in history, often at enormous cost.  That this should involve lawmakers of the Jewish state adds a stunning, if perverse, poignancy to this.  They, the moved on in history, the expelled and the condemned wanderers, shall expel others and condemn them in turn.  Smotrich also points the finger at desperation and hopelessness, the biting incentives that propel migration.  The Palestinians will feel blessed in their banishment.  “They will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.”

Impossible to ignore in Smotrich’s steaming bile against the Palestinians is the broader view that no Palestinian state can arise, necessitating urgent, preventative poisoning.  In addition to the eventual depopulation of Gaza, plans to reconstitute the contours of the West Bank, ensuring that Israeli and Palestinian traffic are separated to enable building and construction for settlements as a prelude to annexation, are to be implemented.

The issue of twisting and mangling humanitarian aid in favour of Israel’s territorial lust has raised some tart commentary.  A statement from the Humanitarian Country Team of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, a forum led by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), does not shy away from the realities on the ground.  All supplies, including those vital to survival, have been blocked for nine weeks.  Bakeries and community kitchens have closed, while warehouses are empty.  Hunger, notably among children, is rampant.  Israel’s plan, as presented, “will mean that large parts of Gaza, including the less mobile and most vulnerable people, will continue to go without supplies.”

The UN Secretary General and the Emergency Relief Coordinator have confirmed that they will not cooperate in the scheme, as it “does not adhere to the global humanitarian principles of humanity, impartiality, independence, and neutrality.”

The foreign ministers of the United Kingdom, France, and Germany have made the same point.  Despite all being solid allies of Israel, they have warned that violations of international law are taking place.  “Humanitarian aid must never be used as a political tool and a Palestinian territory must not be reduced nor subjected to any demographic change”.

To date, a promise lingers that the offensive will only commence once US President Donald Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar takes place.  But no ongoing savaging of Gaza with some crude effort at occupation will solve the historical vortex that continues to drag the Jewish state to risk and oblivion.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

The pattern of institutional response is a well-rehearsed one. First came the official claim that the troops only opened fire because the convoy approached them “suspiciously”, enshrouded in darkness, with no headlights or evidence of flashing lights. The movement of the convoy had not, it was said, been cleared and coordinated with the IDF, which had been alerted by operators of an overhead UAV. Soldiers had previously fired on a car containing, according to the Israeli account, three Hamas members. When that vehicle was approached by the ambulances, IDF personnel assumed they were threatened, despite lacking any evidence that the emergency workers were armed. On exiting the vehicles, gunfire ensues. Radwan’s final words: “The Israelis are coming, the Israeli soldiers are coming.”

Then comes the qualification, the “hand in the cookie jar” retort. With the video now very public, the IDF was forced to admit that they had been mistaken in the initial assessment that the lights of the ambulance convoy had been switched off, blaming it on the sketchy testimony of soldiers. Also evident are clear markings on the vehicles, with the paramedics wearing hi-vis uniforms.

After being shot, the bodies of the 15 dead workers were unceremoniously buried in sand (“in a brutal and disregarding manner that violates human dignity,” according to the Red Crescent) – supposedly to protect them from the ravages of wildlife – with the vehicles crushed by an armoured D9 bulldozer to clear the road. Allegations have been made that some of the bodies had their hands tied and were shot at close range, suggesting a willingness on the part of the military to conceal their misdeeds. The IDF has countered by claiming that the UN was informed on the location of the bodies.

The Palestinian Red Crescent society is adamant: the paramedics were shot with the clear intention of slaying them. “We cannot disclose everything we know,” stated Dr. Younis Al-Khatib, president of the Red Crescent in the West Bank, “but I will say that all the martyrs were shot in the upper part of their bodies, with the intent to kill.”

The IDF, after a breezy inquiry, claimed that it “revealed that the force opened fire due to a sense of threat following a previous exchange of fire in the area. Also, six Hamas terrorists were identified among those killed in the incident.” This hardly dispels the reality that those shot were unarmed and showed no hostile intent. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and Palestinian rescuers have offered a breakdown of those killed: eight staff members from the Red Crescent, six from the Palestinian Civil Defence, and one employee from the UN agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA.

The OCHA insists that the first team comprised rescuers rather than Hamas operatives. On being sought by additional paramedic and emergency personnel, they, too, were attacked by the IDF.

The findings of the probe into the killings were presented on April 7 to the IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir by the chief of the Southern Command, Maj. Gen. Yaniv Asor. On doing so, Zamir then ordered that the General Staff Fact-Finding Assessment Mechanism be used to “deepen and complete” the effort. That particular fact-finding body is risibly described as independent, despite being an extension of the IDF. Self-investigation remains a standard norm for allegations of impropriety.

Since October 7, 2023, the death toll of health workers in the Gaza Strip has been impressively grim, reaching 1,060. Health facilities have been destroyed, with hundreds of attacks launched on health services. The World Health Organization update in February found that a mere 50% of hospitals were partially functional. Primary health care facilities were found to be 41% functional. Medical personnel have been harassed, arbitrarily detained and subjected to mistreatment. A report from Healthcare Workers Watch published in February identified 384 cases of unlawful detention since October 7, 2023, with 339 coming from the Gaza Strip and 45 from the West Bank.

In the opinion of the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories since 1967, Francesca Albanese, “This is part of a pattern by Israel to continuously bombard, destroy and fully annihilate the realisation of the right to health in Gaza.”

The IDF, which claims to be fastidious in observing the canons of international law, continues to dispel such notions in killing civilians and health workers. It also continues to insist that its soldiers could never be guilty of a conscious massacre, culpable for a blatant crime. The bodies of fifteen health workers suggest otherwise.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Yoon was impeached by the opposition-controlled National Assembly in mid-December on charges of violating the constitution and other laws by declaring martial law on Dec. 3. He ordered troops to the National Assembly to stop lawmakers from voting against the martial law decree and the arrest of politicians, evoking an earlier era of authoritarianism in South Korea.

At that time, Yoon defended the move as a necessary act of governance. He cited threats from North Korea and purported “anti-state activities” by the domestic political opposition.

He called the martial law declaration a “highly calibrated political judgment” aimed at protecting the nation and restoring the normal functioning of the state, which he said had been paralyzed by the opposition.

The Constitutional Court’s ruling means a snap presidential election will be held within two months.

The possible dates are between May 24 and June 3 because the law also requires 50 days advance notice of a presidential election. Analysts expect the vote would take place on the last day of that window.

Lee Jae-myung, leader of South Korea’s Democratic Party, or DP, is regarded as the top contender to succeed Yoon. The veteran politician lost to Yoon in the 2022 presidential election by the slimmest margin in South Korea’s democratic history.

Lee has offered limited details on his foreign policy agenda, but in recent media interviews he has advocated for a more balanced and pragmatic approach in managing South Korea’s relations with North Korea and with global powers, particularly the U.S., China and Japan.

(Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP)

On North Korea, Lee said he believed the current strategy has tipped too far toward confrontation. Relations between the two countries since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War have waxed and waned for decades between unremitting hostility and attempts at rapprochement.

While acknowledging the “hostile” nature of current inter-Korean relations, he argued in multiple media interviews that South Korea’s strong military and alliances – particularly with the U.S. and Japan – already provide sufficient deterrence.

Instead, he insisted on “communication and engagement” with the North, signaling a return to the approach of previous DP governments.

Yoon, who began his career as a prosecutor in 1994 and rose to become South Korea’s Prosecutor General in 2019, was elected president in 2022.

Throughout his term, he prioritized strengthening alliances with democratic nations, particularly the U.S. and Japan, while adopting a hard-line stance toward North Korea.

Under Yoon’s administration, South Korea imposed more than 10 sets of sanctions on North Korea and vowed to “punish and retaliate” decisively against any acts of aggression from the North.

He garnered significant support from conservative factions in South Korea, particularly among people concerned about national security threats from North Korea and China.

Critics of Lee, meanwhile, have accused him of adopting a “subservient” stance toward China.

Lee stirred controversy during his 2022 campaign by saying: “Why do we care what happens to the Taiwan Strait? Shouldn’t we just take care of ourselves?”

He later clarified that his point was about diplomatic pragmatism and that South Korea should avoid worsening relations with China.

Hanging over Lee is his indictment on charges of orchestrating unauthorized remittances to North Korea.

Prosecutors allege that between 2019 and 2020, during his tenure as governor of Gyeonggi Province, Lee directed the Ssangbangwool Group to transfer US$8 million to North Korea, including US$5 million intended for a smart farm project and US$3 million to facilitate a prospective visit by Lee to Pyongyang.

Lee’s former deputy governor, Lee Hwa-young, was convicted and sentenced to nine and a half years in prison for his involvement in the scheme, which encompassed bribery and unauthorized fund transfers to North Korea.

Lee denies any wrongdoing and says the charges are politically motivated. He contends that the prosecution’s case lacks merit and is an attempt to undermine his political career. The case is ongoing.

Edited by Stephen Wright.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Taejun Kang for RFA.

The post Big Cuts at the Education Department’s Civil Rights Office Will Affect Vulnerable Students for Years to Come appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Erica Frankenberg – Maithreyi Gopalan.

Below is a statement by Chitra Kumar, the managing director of the Climate and Energy Program at UCS.

“It would be extremely difficult to set protective health standards without the EPA’s Office of Research and Development, and I think that’s exactly what this administration is aiming for. I am not sure how the EPA could fulfill its legal mandate of public health protection if this plan goes forward.

“The scientists and experts in this office conduct and review the best available science to set limits on pollution and regulate hazardous chemicals to keep the public safe. We’re talking about soot that worsens asthma and heart disease, carcinogenic ‘forever chemicals’ in drinking water, and heat-trapping emissions driving climate change. The administration knows, and history shows, that industry will not regulate itself.

“The EPA is claiming that this is not a done deal yet, so it’s paramount that the administration hear: This is not acceptable. Everyone, including President Trump and his cabinet’s children and grandchildren, would feel the consequences of this move, not to mention the most polluted communities, predominantly Black, Brown and low income, who would bear the brunt. Is the administration’s ideology and pledge to industries that strong that they are willing to put their own loved ones at risk?”

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

I can well understand the feelings of many patriotic Ukrainians on fighting back. And I can empathize with Americans and all the others who were appalled at the conduct of that dangerous clown Trump and his sidekick at their meeting with Zelenskyy, a meeting which looked carefully prepared.

Yes, one could certainly feel scorn for Trump at that moment and sympathize with poor Zelenskyy. And yet, such sympathy has limits. I can neither forget nor forgive him for leading the cheers for old Yaroslav Hunka in the Canadian Parliament in September 2023. Few Canadians may have known it, but Zelenskyy knew full well that Hunka had once volunteered for the Ukrainian Division of the Nazi SS in World War II. At the same time American and Canadian troops were fighting on Normandy beaches in 1944 their Red Army allies, in a huge, bitter battle in Ukrainian Brody, were defeating a major Nazi army which included Hunka’s unit, with its mass killers of Russian, Polish and especially Jewish civilians. I have never heard a word of regret from such veterans, or from Hunka. Or Zelenskyy.  

Nor can I forget how Andrij Melnyk, then Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, when presented by a journalist with a wartime leaflet of Ukraine’s legendary hero Stepan Bandera, saying “Moscovites, Poles, Hungarians and Jews are your enemies. Destroy them!” first tried vainly to deny the validity of the leaflet but then snapped back, “I will not say today that I distance myself from it. And that’s that!”

That was too embarrassing; Melnyk had to be withdrawn from Berlin. After a brief stay out of the limelight as ambassador to Brazil he is now due to become Ukraine’s UN ambassador!

It is absurd to call Zelenskyy a fascist. But what about all too many of those around him?

This same Melnyk also mixed directly in German politics – like Elon Musk. “Personally I trust Friedrich Merz, whom I know well,” he said. “Merz could advance an ambitious European defense program if he can find coalition partners who support the same plans.”

Merz found them – and will soon be Germany’s new chancellor. Dictatorial, widely unpopular, some refer to him as “Dr. Blackrock”. While his moderate nemesis Angela Merkel led his party (and the government) he took a break from direct politics, became a millionaire lobbyist and, from 2016 to 2020, headed the German section of BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, which holds key financial assets in Lockheed Martin ($9.7 bl), Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman and holds second place financially in Germany’s main arms company, Rheinmetall. Even a hint of peace in any conflict zone is followed by a slump in those companies’ shares values. When Merz stated “Freedom is more important for us than peace. You can find peace in every graveyard” it is easy to understand what he, or Blackrock, mean with “freedom”!

Merz often expresses such principles: “We must do everything to support the Ukraine in its struggle against the Russian aggressor…in order to defend its freedom but also our own. Because their commitment is part of the commitment of all of us for a world of freedom and justice.” He also extends such longings elsewhere: “A government led by me will strengthen our relations with Israel.“

The new government now shaping up in Berlin will be based on all such commitments. The ill-starred Greens, most bellicose of all parties, cannot become junior partners of Merz’s CDU-CSU; they lost too many Bundestag seats to be useful. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which won a frightening second place, is still taboo (for now). Only the Social Democrats remain. Their election results were the worst in their entire history but still supply just enough deputy seats to permit a joint government – after they hastily eliminated the few courageous but weak voices in their ranks who had spoken up for peace, including Olaf Scholz, who had see-sawed on such issues, opposed giving giant Taurus missiles to Kyiv and was not a gung-ho vanguard crusader. In his stead, the Social Democrat most likely to keep his job as Minister of Defense is Boris Pistorius, loudest of all in demanding more and more billions for Ukraine and “to defend” Germany from that imminent danger he is constantly warning about. Russia, of course, although the two countries have no mutual borders, any Russian idea of attacking Germany, or any NATO member, would amount to total insanity – and would be a total reversal of over 200 years of historic invasions.

Few Americans can have an idea of the current militarist build-up in Germany, based on the mass media’s constant attempts to spread fear. Test alarms, talk of air-raid cellars, growing pressure for conscription, male and female, and a military expense account zooming down like a typhoon, more and more hundreds of billions, to the joy of giants like Rheinmetall and the fears of those low on the economic ladder, for it is they who will pay for it. Echoes of past hubris grow ever louder; the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm, of Adolf Hitler, of Konrad Adenauer, the constant talk of “defense,” a thin camouflage for growing projects of eastward expansion, already encompassing German troops stationed in Lithuania, naval bases in the Baltic and war games in Poland, strengthening those rail lines, highways and ports which are suitable for heavy clanking tanks and artillery, and more swift aircraft for carrying Hiroshima¹⁰ bombs – plus calls for a German share in atomic weapon decisions. With Trump seeming to back away from Europe, hitherto less open calls for a strong European army, led by its strongest member, Germany, are now loud and frequent; we can almost hear the clicking of military heels and shouts of “Achtung”!

As for freedom, its defense always seemed to require a diabolic Beelzebub to arouse popular rage, if possible an easy target for media caricaturists. No matter whether he was truly evil, truly good, or some mixture, for anyone in the way the spiked tail and horns were ready at hand: Stalin, Fidel, Gaddafi, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Assad – and since about 2000 “Vlad.”  

How many know that Putin and his diplomats had warned since 2008 that, in spite of US and German promises that “if Germany is united NATO will not move an one inch eastward” NATO did advance more than inches; it was country by country right up to the Russian borders. Disarmament agreements were abandoned (always blaming Russia), Russian pleas for negotiations to avoid confrontation were rejected in December 2021 as “no-starters.” As for the promising peace agreement at Minsk, ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel later revealed (in “Die Zeit”) that it had been a NATO ruse, “an attempt to buy time for the Ukraine to build up military strength.” In Istanbul, a cease-fire and agreement to negotiate were almost ready for signing when UK’s Boris Johnson flew in to stymie them.

The whole tragedy can best be understood by reading the confidential State Department cable titled “Nyet Means Nyet: Russia’s NATO Enlargement Redlines,” sent in 2008 to Washington from Moscow by then US Ambassador William Burns (who later became CIA boss). Here is an official summary:

“Following a muted first reaction to Ukraine’s intent to seek a NATO Membership Action Plan at the Bucharest summit, Foreign Minister Lavrov and other senior officials have reiterated strong opposition, stressing that Russia would view further eastward expansion as a potential military threat. NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains ‘an emotional and neuralgic’ issue for Russia, but strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. In Ukraine, these include fears that the issue could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene. Additionally, the Russian experts continue to claim that Ukrainian NATO membership would have a major impact on Russia’s defense industry, Russian-Ukrainian family connections, and bilateral relations generally. In Georgia, the Russian government fears continued instability and “provocative acts” in the separatist regions.” (MFA: NATO Enlargement “Potential Military Threat to Russia” )

And that is exactly what happened. As Putin saw it, “Nobody planned to live up to these Minsk agreements… They lied to us, and the only reason for these processes was to pump Ukraine up with weapons and get it ready for military action.”

These facts do not exculpate Putin from the tank invasion of February 2022, nor of the shelling and bombing in the terrible months since then. But they might balance the picture presented by US and German media and politicians. The destruction and death of civilians in the Ukraine hardly compares with the nearly total destruction of housing and calculated killing of 70,000, perhaps far more civilians, the destruction of schools, universities, hospitals and mosques in Gaza. But any condemnation of that is denounced as “anti-Semitic” and can cost one’s job.

As for the abduction of Ukrainian children; the Russians say these were mostly orphans, lost or abandoned children. True or not, should one forget the ten thousands of Native American children forcibly abducted until the 1960s to schools where they were miserably treated, sexually abused, robbed of their language and often allowed to die and be buried in unmarked graves?

Should we forget three million Koreans killed by American bombers, two to three million Vietnamese, hundreds of thousands of Guatemalan Indios and Iraqis, thousands in all of Central America? Or the CIA’s ”black sites,“ from Afghanistan and Poland to Thailand and Guantanamo, where “enhanced interrogation techniques” were described in a US Senate report as “a euphemism for torture, including such abuses as waterboarding, sleep deprivation, keeping prisoners in small boxes for up to 18 hours, stress positions, forced nudity, sexual threats, and so-called “rectal rehydration.” Have any US presidents ever been called to accounts for those crimes?  

For me the demand to protect freedom and democracy, so often repeated when alluding to Ukraine, seems pure hypocrisy when I think of US and German support for apartheid, for Saudi boss Mohammed bin Salman, for 32 years with kleptomaniac dictator Mobutu in Congo, Papa and Baby Doc in Haiti, Scheich Hamad in Bahrein, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Pinochet in Chile and so many others. And the stress on Putin’s scorn for international law regarding borders and national sovereignty in Crimea or Donbas raises questions on double standards when recalling Croatian and Slovenian breakaway from Yugoslavia, Kosovo’s break away from Serbia, (or, further back, the seizure of half of Mexico, of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam and Hawai’i. Or the illegal blockade of Cuba, despite the condemnation of all UN members except for USA and Israel. Or the seizure of all of Jerusalem and all of Palestine despite repeated UN resolutions. Few idealistic words seem to hold water these days.

Is it possible that Putin recalled the fates of any leaders who rejected US hegemony? Allende, in his bombed residential palace, Lumumba, tortured, dismembered and dissolved in acid, Saddam Hussein hanged, Ghaddafi, sodomized with a bayonet, Mohammad Najibullah, castrated and  dragged by a truck through the streets of Kabul, Osama bin Laden, shot down in his home and thrown into the ocean. (But despite countless attempts, Fidel escaped such a fate.)

The man in the White House represents a giant danger to all Americans except for the wealthiest at the top, now often at his side (even literally). But even at the rude Oval Room bullying session, one question stuck out, despite the rubbish: Trump’s words to Zelenskyy: “You’re gambling with World War III!”

Aside from all questions as to who bears the most blame, those who did the provoking or the side which felt provoked and sent in the tanks – like a cornered bear, surrounded by a narrowing circle of snarling dogs, being the first to slash out first a heavy-clawed paw. I see a continuation of the war as only bringing misery to all those affected and a course which can lead only to more deaths – and explosion. In Germany it has already led to almost total rule of the “Deutschland über alles” crusaders, with France and Britain rivaling for second place. They all want to regain past strength and glory, and stay in office. In Bibi’s related war against Palestine even more is at stake: Keep on killing or “go directly to jail.”

Marco Rubio added later: “I think both sides must come to an understanding; there can be no military solution …The Russians can’t conquer all of Ukraine, and obviously it will be very difficult for Ukraine in any reasonable period to force the Russians all the way back to where they were in 2014.”

Indeed, the only remaining routes I can see are either more weapons, more countries involved, more death and destruction, leading almost unavoidably to escalation and all too possibly to annihilation! Or the other route: No more weapons! Cease fire combined with negotiation! Peace!

Why has Trump opened a door to peace? I don’t know. Maybe to get at those mineral riches. Maybe to clear things with Russia so as to move on to China, after splitting the two adversaries. Maybe this guy, in his twisted thinking (and seemingly total ignorance of the world outside his golden towers), actually prefers peace to war. Anything is possible with him. All of it bad, indeed evil – with that one possible exception! Every day the scene changes, the odds seem to roller-coaster – even with news just heard a few hours ago? Will Putin meet Trump? Will Russia agree to a cease fire? Is it – this time – a meaningful offer? Will they move towards peace? Both sides are unpredictable. But hope remains – for good people everywhere! And the need for popular pressure!

At least one thing was clear. The prospect of possible peace scared the daylights out of war-lovers on both sides of the Atlantic, especially the bosses of Rheinmetall, Lockheed Martin and their like, who rejoice at shoveling in billions but salivate for more! Assisting them are those crusading pundits who roundly condemn all of Trump’s sins but never forget to include his alleged kowtowing to Putin. They often dig up “appeasement,” misusing the story of Hitler and Chamberlain at Munich in 1938 to accelerate their rush to get more armament billions approved before peace negotiations can undermine their phony alarm calls. 600 billion may soon get the OK of the new government, plus the Greens. (At Munich in 1938 Britain and France willingly agreed to let Hitler move German regiments closer to Russian borders. They knew why! Are there perhaps current analogies after all?)

So the politicians and pundits debate on how the Ukraine can be kept fighting, no matter what it costs, with Honor and Freedom their words of choice! And some quite good folks, also old friends, still support the war and denigrate anyone calling for peace. Some are even within the LINKE party, which was always proud to be the “Peace Party.” Luckily their positions do not go unchallenged.

But for US Americans a major dilemma arises: it is vitally necessary to fight back against Trump’s terrible threats in every field: union rights, defense of immigrants, schools, environment, science, racism, LGBTQ rights, even Greenland and Panama. But with one exception, at least for now. Any potential move to achieve peace, no matter how motivated, must not be attacked – but supported! War or peace; this remains, by far, the most crucial question of all in today’s threatened world.

The post The Oval Office, Kyiv and the Kremlin appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Victor Grossman.

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The Trump administration has shut down a unit of the Department of Veterans Affairs created under President Joe Biden to address disparities in how the federal government provides disability compensation to military service members.

The closure of the Veterans Benefits Administration’s Office of Equity Assurance effectively hobbles internal efforts at the VA to investigate and eliminate long-standing racial inequities the department itself has acknowledged.

The office was eliminated as part of the Trump administration’s purge of programs broadly aimed at addressing diversity, equity or inclusion, according to emails obtained by ProPublica. But several VA sources said that the office was not exclusively focused on race, and that it takes on cases for a range of veterans to ensure no one is denied proper benefits — including for reasons of age, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation and geographic location.

Rep. Mark Takano, a California Democrat, criticized the Trump administration’s action as “excessive” and “reckless.”

“The closure of the OEA will undoubtedly have disastrous effects on the care we offer veterans,” Takano, former chair and now ranking member of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, said in a statement to ProPublica. “This office was making it easier for minority veterans to access care and benefits. Its closure will directly impact the care and benefits received by minority veterans.”

Richard Brookshire, co-founder of the Black Veterans Project, a nonprofit focused on rectifying discrimination faced by Black veterans, echoed Takano’s concerns.

“It’s a first step toward gutting the second-largest agency in our federal government,” he said. “The consequences will be dire, wide-reaching and deadly.”

VA spokesperson Peter Kasperowicz declined to say whether the agency would continue to study racial disparities. But he emphasized in a statement that newly installed VA Secretary Douglas Collins “treats all veterans and beneficiaries fairly and equally, so the Office of Equity Assurance is no longer needed.”

He added: “The money saved by closing the office will be redirected to improve health care, benefits and services for Veterans, all of whom we treat fairly and equally. VA will always fulfill its duty to provide veterans, families, caregivers and survivors the health care and benefits they have earned. That is a promise.”

The VA grew significantly under the Biden administration, with tens of thousands of employees added to beef up capacity in conjunction with the passage of the PACT Act. The 2022 law expanded health care and benefits for an estimated 3.5 million veterans exposed to toxic substances from burn pits and other chemicals.

The Biden administration also created the OEA and several other initiatives to help analyze and rectify discrimination in the delivery of health care, benefits and other services. Those moves were seen as a direct response to long-standing complaints by minority veterans.

The closure of the OEA is just one of several disruptive staff cuts at the VA in recent weeks. Around 2,400 VA employees have lost their positions since the Trump administration began slashing the federal workforce, with significantly more firings to come.

The department currently employs around 470,000 workers. Kasperowicz said that the administration plans would shed nearly 15% of its workforce, dropping the total to roughly 398,000.

Workers assigned to the OEA were informed on Feb. 14 via email that their positions were terminated immediately and that the office was being “liquidated.” The notices were sent to nearly all of the office’s employees, effectively dissolving the unit, sources familiar with the firings told ProPublica.

The administration reversed at least some of the terminations later that month, according to correspondence obtained by ProPublica. Workers who were attached to the OEA have now been placed on administrative leave pending a possible reassignment within the VA or another federal department, according to sources familiar with the department who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

“But even if they are reassigned, it won’t be to the OEA,” said one official familiar with the moves. “It’s definitely gone.”

Black veterans and their advocates have long complained of a divide in how claims are handled. An ongoing suit filed by the National Veterans Council for Legal Redress against the government gave the suspicions new life.

The group’s case was bolstered by data unearthed through Freedom of Information Act requests from the Black Veterans Project, which found that the VA was far more likely to reject applications for service-related disabilities by Black veterans than their white counterparts.

Attorneys for the federal government asked the judge overseeing the suit to dismiss the claims, stating that only the VA secretary has jurisdiction to decide disputes over award benefits and that the court lacks the jurisdiction to hear them.

A 2023 U.S. Government Accountability Office report also concluded that there were disparities. It found that the department approved compensation applications for service-related disabilities like hearing loss, impaired limb movement and post-traumatic stress by Black veterans at lower rates than veterans of other races.

The report found that between 2010 and 2020 the approval rate for benefit applications made by White male veterans was 3% to 22% higher than Black male veterans for the selected medical conditions.

The OEA’s demise is just one part of an ongoing rollback of the racial equity programs the Trump administration has called “radical and wasteful.”

Since Trump entered office, a webpage detailing the VA’s work to address equity and diversity appears to have been scrubbed from its website. In January, the administration fired the heads of internal advisory groups formed to address the concerns and needs of minority and female veterans.

One of those groups, the Center for Minority Veterans, worked in conjunction with the OEA to address racial disparities in disability compensation. Between 2013 and 2018, the advisory group raised its concerns over the Black veterans’ lower rate of claims approval to VA leadership five times, according to the National Veterans Council for Legal Redress suit.

Mariela Roca, a former Republican congressional hopeful, took over as director of the advisory group last week. It’s unclear what specific strategies the group will pursue to advance the needs and concerns of minority veterans under new leadership. Roca did not respond to a request for comment.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Vernal Coleman.

Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

At the abrupt end of an intended photo-op meeting, Trump noted, “This is going to be great television.”

Was there some irony in this statement? Both Trump and Zelensky became famous as TV actors; Zelensky played a fictitious president, and Trump played himself as a company president. Then, they shared the Oval Office in front of the world in a riveting one-act skit.

It was good television, but politics was bad for both. Trump lost his hoped-for victory celebration for ending the war between Russia and Ukraine. Zelensky lost an agreement tying American military support to investing in Ukraine.

During the meeting, Trump demanded that Zelensky talk only about achieving peace by rapidly ending the war and not raising doubts about Russia’s starting the war again. Zelensky pushed back, citing Russia’s past broken promises. As soon as the TV cameras went dead, their dinner was canceled, and Zelensky was ushered out of the White House.

Within a week, Trump cut off military support and intelligence sharing with Ukraine, saying they would only be reinstated if Zelensky followed Trump’s directive.

The transcript shows Trump criticized Zelensky first. 

The exchange among Trump, Zelensky, and Vance reveals that Trump initiated deprecating statements about Zelensky when he responded to a reporter who asked how he saw himself aligning with both Zelensky and Putin. His response was if “I didn’t align myself with both of them, you’d never have a deal. You want me to say really terrible things about Putin and then say, ‘Hi, Vladimir. How are we doing on the deal?’”

Trump firmly stated he would not offend Putin. Then Trump attacked Zelensky as a person filled with hate, not reason. “He’s got tremendous hatred. You see, the hatred he’s [Zelensky] got for Putin, it’s very tough for me to make a deal with that kind of hate.” Zelensky had not criticized Putin in the meeting before Trump made these accusations.

Vance also jumped to respond to this question, ‘The path to peace and prosperity is maybe engaging in diplomacy.” Vance did acknowledge that “Putin invaded Ukraine and destroyed a significant chunk of the country.”

Zelensky replied to both of their comments by relating how Putin, from 2014 to 2022, during the terms of Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden, was killing Ukrainians, and nobody stopped him. “And God bless President Trump will stop him.”

He reminded them how Putin broke a signed ceasefire deal with Ukraine in 2019, which included an exchange of prisoners, which he did not complete. Exasperated, Zelensky asked Vance, “What kind of diplomacy, JD, are you talking about?”

Zelensky put Vance on the spot and challenged him to recognize Putin’s past actions as casting doubt on his trustworthiness in promising not to invade Ukraine in the future. It was the kind of question that should have been dealt with in private, not televised.

Vance just jabbed back at Zelensky, accusing him of being disrespectful “to come to the Oval Office to try to litigate this in front of the American media.”

Then Vance did some litigation arguing that Ukraine had very big problems recruiting soldiers. Vance switched to asking Zelensky if he thought that it was “respectful to come to the Oval Office to attack the administration that is trying to prevent the destruction of your country?”

Zelensky said, “During the war, everybody has problems … you have a nice ocean buffering America, and you don’t feel Russia’s aggression, “but you will feel it in the future.”

Trump couldn’t ignore that taunt: “Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel. We’re trying to solve a problem.”

The exchange was raw, rough, honest, and disastrous for both parties. Trump did his usual slightly off-hand blustering about how great he is. But Zelensky is a serious person, seeing his country being destroyed daily by Russian bombing.

You could see how annoyed he felt being scolded by those who had not visited his war-torn country, but Vance said he felt satisfied seeing it on TV.

Was this a David versus Goliath battle? 

Although Trump could physically loom over Zelensky, with Trump standing at 6′ 3″ and Zelensky at 5′ 7″, the difference in the economic and military resources between Ukraine and the U.S. is astronomical.

The U.S.’s GDP is 164 times larger than Ukraine’s, and the U.S. spends more on defense than the following nine countries combined. While the U.S. spends 3.4% of its GDP on defense, Ukraine spends 37%.

Trump summed up Zelensky’s position, with Vice President J.D. Vance sitting beside him and Cabinet members in a small circle around them. He bluntly told Zelensky, “You don’t have the cards. You’re buried there. You people are dying.”

Trump proclaimed that Zelensky had no option but to acknowledge America’s power. It was a classic battle tactic: pick the ground to fight on and surround your enemy, then ask them to surrender peaceably or face annihilation.

Afterward, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick attended the meeting and appeared on news shows praising Trump and ridiculing the Ukrainian President for not thanking Trump.

Democrats accused Trump of setting up a trap for Zelensky to fail in their meeting. That’s not likely, given that it would significantly damage Trump’s chances of receiving a Nobel Peace award, which he has been yearning to receive if the agreement was signed leading to an immediate cessation of the war.

Trump thought he deserved a Nobel Prize in 2019, saying he should get one “for a lot of things, if they gave it out fairly—which they don’t.” Norway’s parliament appoints the awards, and Trump has been nominated for a Nobel several times during his presidency.

Nevertheless, Trump has complained that they gave President Obama a Nobel shortly after he became president without him earning it.

Trump’s script for clobbering a competitor didn’t play out as planned. Since Zelensky is like Trump, he doesn’t like being lectured. Unlike other Republican politicians, including his Vice President, past critics have succumbed to Trump’s leadership and apologized for being mean or discourteous to him.

Secretary of State Mark Rubio, the most obsequious cabinet member, claimed that Trump was the only person in the world “who has any chance” of bringing Russian President Putin to the negotiating table.

World leaders, from the United Kingdom and France, are careful not to ruffle Trump in public. Zelensky ignored that strategy, cautioning Trump on dealing with Putin. And Zelensky paid the price for such independence.

Zelensky can still protect Ukraine’s future as an independent nation.

Zelensky now understands that he should have let Trump blow his horn and then sign the proposed mineral-rights deal as they had planned. Zelensky called the heated meeting with Trump ‘regrettable’ and posted on X that he would sign the deal. Yes, Trump would have beat his chest and declared he was a mastermind negotiator.

However, as the agreement is written, the negotiations would not be in the Oval Office; they would happen elsewhere, and Zelensky would have much more leverage to determine the final document’s contents.

While the main media outlets focused on this brawl, they didn’t dive into the proposed document that Trump and Zelensky were to sign. It was not a giveaway to American interests and presented Zelensky with significant leverage in negotiating the final agreement.

Zelensky could use the additional time needed to reach a final agreement to shore up his European financial and military commitments. Zelensky and European leaders know that Trump would walk away from the final deal, blaming Ukraine for the loss if he didn’t like it. In the meantime, Ukraine would continue receiving military assistance and time to stock up supplies.

Here are six key sections within the Ukraine—US Minerals Agreement that provide Zelensky leverage to achieve an acceptable final agreement, formally identified as the Bilateral Agreement Establishing Terms and Conditions for a Reconstruction Investment Fund.

1.) Ukraine’s primary legal obligation is to begin negotiations, not to sign one with the US.  It will not be formed if there is no agreement on a more detailed description of the “Reconstruction Investment Fund” activities.

2.) Neither Participant, i.e., America or Ukraine, will sell, transfer, or otherwise dispose of any portion of its interest in the Fund without the prior written consent of the other Participant. This allows the Ukrainian government to stop any action that does not benefit Ukraine.

3.) The Ukrainian government will contribute 50 percent of all revenues earned from the future monetization of all relevant Ukrainian Government-owned natural resource assets to the Fund, as agreed by both Participants. Ukraine has the power of veto over these decisions. The revenues as described do not include the current sources of revenues, which are already part of Ukraine’s general budget revenues. Consequently, Ukraine forfeits future revenues that do not currently exist and are uncertain and a ways off from being available. It is expected to take years to identify the exact locations of the key minerals and extract and transport them.

4.) Contributions made to the Fund will be reinvested at least annually in Ukraine to promote the safety, security, and prosperity of Ukraine, to be further defined in the Fund Agreement. If the size or percentage of those contributions is unacceptable to Ukraine, they do not have to sign the agreement.

5.) The Government of the United States of America supports Ukraine’s efforts to obtain security guarantees needed to establish lasting peace. Participants will seek to identify any necessary steps to protect mutual investments, as defined in the Fund Agreement. This is the weakest part of the proposal since there is no specific commitment to providing any type of resources. As noted in this proposal, those specifics still need to be defined. If they remain unsatisfactory to Ukraine, then the agreement will not proceed.

6.) The Parliament of Ukraine shall ratify the Fund Agreement. This is the most crucial element of the proposal because it allows Zelensky to adjust his negotiations to reflect the needs expressed by the government’s legislative branch. It also provides an opportunity to mobilize the Ukrainian population to support the agreement. It also offers Congressional supporters time to argue for its acceptance so that the decision goes beyond the two presidents’ agreeing.

One last thought: Zelensky can exploit two of Trump’s weaknesses.

First, Trump has a narcissist’s grandiose sense of self  (Trump’s Personality Will Deliver a Perilous Second Term – for Everyone) where he knows how to solve problems that no one else can. For instance, he suggested that had he been president, he could have avoided the unnecessary, bloody Civil War through “negotiation.” The American public must see that Trump’s reasoning would have led to the end of the U.S. by allowing the South to succeed. And he is asking for the same for Ukraine.

Trump’s second weakness is openly admiring authoritarian governments (Trump is not a Tyrant – he just admires them). After the first 100 days in his first term as president, he described our constitutional checks and balances as “an archaic system … It’s really a bad thing for the country.” Trump wants to replace Zelensky, who became president by a far more significant margin than Trump. He would prefer to negotiate with a Russian-approved Ukrainian president who will ignore the tedium of a democratic process.

Zelensky can highlight these traits without directly attacking Trump. By doing so, it frames a message that Trump’s self-interests do not secure a safe future for Ukraine. If the deal falls apart, Zelensky’s record of cooperation will bolster most European governments and American citizens to oppose Trump’s abandoning Ukraine to an authoritarian Russia.

The post Trump’s Oval Office Blowup: a Clashing of Personalities for Resources appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

The Trump administration is planning to shutter the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights at the Environmental Protection Agency and has placed nearly 170 employees on administrative leave. “I’m very concerned about the deregulation and the focus on corporate profits,” says Mustafa Santiago Ali, the former head of the environmental justice program at the EPA. He resigned in 2017 to protest a Trump administration proposal to severely scale back the size and work of the agency. “Any time that we place profit over people, then we are putting a crosshair on our most vulnerable, our most marginalized,” says Ali.

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

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A longtime immigration enforcement official has been tapped to run the agency responsible for managing unaccompanied migrant children, in a move that has alarmed experts and advocates who are concerned that information about children and their families will be shared for arrests and deportations.

For the past two decades, an office within the Department of Health and Human Services has supervised children who cross the border without a parent or legal guardian. The government handed this duty to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, not its immigration enforcement agency, underscoring that the process shouldn’t be punitive but instead is meant to help safely place children with sponsors living in the United States.

That wall eroded during President Donald Trump’s first administration, when the ORR began to share identifying information about unaccompanied children and their potential sponsors with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, presaging a wave of arrests. Congress put limits on this sharing and President Joe Biden stopped the practice — but a new hire in Trump’s second administration has advocates and experts worried the separation between the agencies is once again breaking down.

Mellissa Harper, a veteran immigration enforcement officer at ICE, has been tapped to lead the ORR, according to three current and former government officials, and oversee the care of unaccompanied migrant children. The officials requested anonymity to discuss government operations. Her position is a federal detail, according to a federal employee directory, which allows career government employees to transfer between agencies for temporary roles.

This appears to be the first time an ICE official has been hired to lead the refugee resettlement office, former administration officials told ProPublica. Harper’s experience mostly comprises immigration enforcement. A former ICE official said Harper has a good reputation inside the agency and expertise dealing with issues involving minors across the government.

A review of legal documents shows that her tenure has been marked with litigation alleging violations of immigration law. While she was leading the unit within ICE overseeing minors and families, the agency was subject to a 2018 class-action lawsuit that challenged the transfer of teenagers into adult detention facilities on their 18th birthdays.

She led the family unit in 2018, when the administration implemented its “zero tolerance” immigration policy and separated thousands of migrant children from their parents. The former ICE official said that, during zero tolerance, the unit was not making separation decisions but did have a role providing transportation of minors and coordination of their immigration cases.

HHS, under which the refugee office sits, did not respond to ProPublica’s emailed questions, citing “a pause on mass communications and public appearances that are not directly related to emergencies or critical to preserving health.”

Harper did not respond to ProPublica’s emailed questions. The Trump administration and ICE also did not respond to requests for comment.

Harper has worked at ICE since 2007, most recently leading the enforcement and removal operations field office in New Orleans.

Her new role appears to be a part of the administration’s “desire to ensure enforcement against both unaccompanied kids and their sponsors,” said Scott Shuchart, who served at ICE as a political appointee during the Biden administration.

In the past, he said, some smugglers have encouraged migrants to send their children across the border alone — knowing that, under U.S. law, they have to be taken into ORR custody and released to sponsors. That scenario pushed up the number of kids arriving by themselves, he said. Once released, they can apply for asylum and other immigration relief in the U.S., a process that can take months or years to resolve.

Cases have emerged of children who have ended up working illegally, sometimes in dangerous jobs, after being released from ORR custody to sponsors. In one high-profile 2015 case, unaccompanied minors from Guatemala were allegedly trafficked to work on an Ohio egg farm.

Republicans have called out the agency for not providing adequate protections to prevent those types of cases. Amid a flurry of executive orders Trump issued after taking office on Jan. 20, one administration directive said HHS should share “any information necessary” to stop trafficking and smuggling of migrant children.

During the first Trump administration, the ORR drew scrutiny after it started to share information with ICE about children and their adult sponsors in 2018. Using this information, the immigration enforcement agency arrested around 300 people, which led many sponsors to fear interaction with the refugee agency and contributed to many children staying in custody for longer.

Congress put limits on the information sharing and Biden revoked the practice. Last December, his administration issued a notice stating “ORR is not an immigration enforcement agency and does not maintain records for immigration enforcement purposes."

Harper’s appointment comes after the authors of Project 2025, the playbook developed by conservative groups to serve as a policy blueprint for the Trump administration, recommended transferring the welfare unit under the authority of the Department of Homeland Security and eliminating a key legal settlement that established standards for the treatment of detained immigrant children.

Harper’s direction of the Juvenile and Family Residential Management Unit within ICE had previously come under scrutiny.

In March 2018, the immigration agency faced a class-action lawsuit from a group of teenagers who were transferred out of ORR custody on their 18th birthdays into adult ICE detention facilities. The plaintiffs alleged they had been illegally transferred without consideration of less restrictive placements, in violation of federal law.

Two years later, U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras determined that ICE had violated the law. In his 180-page statement of findings, he referenced Harper — or her testimony on how she ran her unit — more than 160 times.

The court issued a five-year permanent injunction, requiring the immigration agency to comply with federal law by considering the placement of these teenagers in less restrictive settings than detention facilities. The court also mandated the agency retrain its officers and revise its policies on how they determine custody for children when they turn 18.

In October 2022, one month after the judge approved a final settlement agreement in the class-action case, Harper became the director of the ICE field office in New Orleans, according to her LinkedIn profile.

The year the case was filed, an ICE spokesperson told a reporter that the agency was in compliance with legal standards and agency policy. Neither ICE nor Harper responded to ProPublica’s questions regarding the case or its settlement.

Now, advocates question whether such issues will resurface.

“When Congress decided over 20 years ago to move unaccompanied children out of the custody of the enforcement side of federal immigration, it did so with the clear intention to prioritize child welfare principles,” said Neha Desai, a senior director of immigration at the National Center for Youth Law.

“Unaccompanied children are uniquely vulnerable and should be treated as children, not Criminals.”

Do You Work for the Federal Government? ProPublica Wants to Hear From You.

Pratheek Rebala contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Annie Waldman and Mica Rosenberg.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

A longtime immigration enforcement official has been tapped to run the agency responsible for managing unaccompanied migrant children, in a move that has alarmed experts and advocates who are concerned that information about children and their families will be shared for arrests and deportations.

For the past two decades, an office within the Department of Health and Human Services has supervised children who cross the border without a parent or legal guardian. The government handed this duty to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, not its immigration enforcement agency, underscoring that the process shouldn’t be punitive but instead is meant to help safely place children with sponsors living in the United States.

That wall eroded during President Donald Trump’s first administration, when the ORR began to share identifying information about unaccompanied children and their potential sponsors with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, presaging a wave of arrests. Congress put limits on this sharing and President Joe Biden stopped the practice — but a new hire in Trump’s second administration has advocates and experts worried the separation between the agencies is once again breaking down.

Mellissa Harper, a veteran immigration enforcement officer at ICE, has been tapped to lead the ORR, according to three current and former government officials, and oversee the care of unaccompanied migrant children. The officials requested anonymity to discuss government operations. Her position is a federal detail, according to a federal employee directory, which allows career government employees to transfer between agencies for temporary roles.

This appears to be the first time an ICE official has been hired to lead the refugee resettlement office, former administration officials told ProPublica. Harper’s experience mostly comprises immigration enforcement. A former ICE official said Harper has a good reputation inside the agency and expertise dealing with issues involving minors across the government.

A review of legal documents shows that her tenure has been marked with litigation alleging violations of immigration law. While she was leading the unit within ICE overseeing minors and families, the agency was subject to a 2018 class-action lawsuit that challenged the transfer of teenagers into adult detention facilities on their 18th birthdays.

She led the family unit in 2018, when the administration implemented its “zero tolerance” immigration policy and separated thousands of migrant children from their parents. The former ICE official said that, during zero tolerance, the unit was not making separation decisions but did have a role providing transportation of minors and coordination of their immigration cases.

HHS, under which the refugee office sits, did not respond to ProPublica’s emailed questions, citing “a pause on mass communications and public appearances that are not directly related to emergencies or critical to preserving health.”

Harper did not respond to ProPublica’s emailed questions. The Trump administration and ICE also did not respond to requests for comment.

Harper has worked at ICE since 2007, most recently leading the enforcement and removal operations field office in New Orleans.

Her new role appears to be a part of the administration’s “desire to ensure enforcement against both unaccompanied kids and their sponsors,” said Scott Shuchart, who served at ICE as a political appointee during the Biden administration.

In the past, he said, some smugglers have encouraged migrants to send their children across the border alone — knowing that, under U.S. law, they have to be taken into ORR custody and released to sponsors. That scenario pushed up the number of kids arriving by themselves, he said. Once released, they can apply for asylum and other immigration relief in the U.S., a process that can take months or years to resolve.

Cases have emerged of children who have ended up working illegally, sometimes in dangerous jobs, after being released from ORR custody to sponsors. In one high-profile 2015 case, unaccompanied minors from Guatemala were allegedly trafficked to work on an Ohio egg farm.

Republicans have called out the agency for not providing adequate protections to prevent those types of cases. Amid a flurry of executive orders Trump issued after taking office on Jan. 20, one administration directive said HHS should share “any information necessary” to stop trafficking and smuggling of migrant children.

During the first Trump administration, the ORR drew scrutiny after it started to share information with ICE about children and their adult sponsors in 2018. Using this information, the immigration enforcement agency arrested around 300 people, which led many sponsors to fear interaction with the refugee agency and contributed to many children staying in custody for longer.

Congress put limits on the information sharing and Biden revoked the practice. Last December, his administration issued a notice stating “ORR is not an immigration enforcement agency and does not maintain records for immigration enforcement purposes."

Harper’s appointment comes after the authors of Project 2025, the playbook developed by conservative groups to serve as a policy blueprint for the Trump administration, recommended transferring the welfare unit under the authority of the Department of Homeland Security and eliminating a key legal settlement that established standards for the treatment of detained immigrant children.

Harper’s direction of the Juvenile and Family Residential Management Unit within ICE had previously come under scrutiny.

In March 2018, the immigration agency faced a class-action lawsuit from a group of teenagers who were transferred out of ORR custody on their 18th birthdays into adult ICE detention facilities. The plaintiffs alleged they had been illegally transferred without consideration of less restrictive placements, in violation of federal law.

Two years later, U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras determined that ICE had violated the law. In his 180-page statement of findings, he referenced Harper — or her testimony on how she ran her unit — more than 160 times.

The court issued a five-year permanent injunction, requiring the immigration agency to comply with federal law by considering the placement of these teenagers in less restrictive settings than detention facilities. The court also mandated the agency retrain its officers and revise its policies on how they determine custody for children when they turn 18.

In October 2022, one month after the judge approved a final settlement agreement in the class-action case, Harper became the director of the ICE field office in New Orleans, according to her LinkedIn profile.

The year the case was filed, an ICE spokesperson told a reporter that the agency was in compliance with legal standards and agency policy. Neither ICE nor Harper responded to ProPublica’s questions regarding the case or its settlement.

Now, advocates question whether such issues will resurface.

“When Congress decided over 20 years ago to move unaccompanied children out of the custody of the enforcement side of federal immigration, it did so with the clear intention to prioritize child welfare principles,” said Neha Desai, a senior director of immigration at the National Center for Youth Law.

“Unaccompanied children are uniquely vulnerable and should be treated as children, not Criminals.”

Do You Work for the Federal Government? ProPublica Wants to Hear From You.

Pratheek Rebala contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Annie Waldman and Mica Rosenberg.

In the first weeks of President Donald Trump’s second term, his appointees and allies in Congress took steps to punish and intimidate news outlets that have covered him and his administration unfavorably.

Congresswoman threatens PBS funding

On Jan. 20, 2025, just hours after Trump’s swearing-in, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene took to social media to attack PBS News for reporting that Trump appointee Elon Musk gave what appeared to be a fascist salute while speaking at the official post-inauguration celebration in Washington, D.C.

“As the Chairwoman of the Oversight Subcommittee on DOGE (Department of Government Oversight), I look forward to PBS @NewsHour coming before my committee and explaining why lying and spreading propaganda to serve the Democrat party and attack Republicans is a good use of taxpayer funds,” Greene posted. “We will be in touch soon.”

Congress provides indirect grant support to PBS, as well as NPR, through funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, appropriating $535 million for 2025. Trump’s first administration proposed eliminating all federal funding for PBS, and Trump made similar calls on social media in the lead-up to the 2024 election.

FCC chair reinstates, initiates complaints

Trump, through both his digital platforms and legal actions, targeted news outlets leading up to and in the wake of the election for reporting he argued was biased and aimed at swaying favor toward his opponent.

Now with Trump again in office, one of his appointees — Brendan Carr at the Federal Communications Commission — has picked up the baton.

NPR reported that, shortly before leaving office, then-FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel dismissed complaints about Kamala Harris’ appearances on CBS’s “60 Minutes” and NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” and about how ABC News moderated the debate between Trump and former President Joe Biden.

“We don’t have the luxury of doing anything other than making very, very clear that this agency and its licensing authority should not be weaponized in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment,” Rosenworcel said. “This agency should not be the president’s speech police and this agency shouldn’t be journalism’s censor-in-chief.”

Rosenworcel also dismissed a complaint against a Philadelphia Fox station for allegedly promoting lies about election fraud in the 2020 election.

Carr, the new FCC chair, reinstated the complaints against ABC, CBS and NBC on Jan. 22. In a statement, the agency said that the complaints had been dismissed “prematurely based on an insufficient investigatory record,” according to The Guardian.

Carr had previously demonstrated his willingness to target news outlets based on alleged bias, and he has supported Trump’s calls for NBC, CBS and ABC to lose their broadcast licenses over their alleged mistreatment of him, NPR reported.

On Jan. 29, Carr also informed NPR and PBS that he had initiated an investigation into the news outlets, suggesting that they may have violated federal law by airing commercial advertisements. A copy of the letter was also shared with members of Congress, Carr wrote, because of its potential relevance to ongoing debates.

“In particular, Congress is actively considering whether to stop requiring taxpayers to subsidize NPR and PBS programming,” the letter read. “For my own part, I do not see a reason why Congress should continue sending taxpayer dollars to NPR and PBS given the changes in the media marketplace since the passage of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967.”

Press secretary echoes media lie accusations

While Trump, in one of his first executive orders, extolled the importance of “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship,” an attitude of hostility toward the press was also perpetuated by the White House itself.

Karoline Leavitt, in her first briefing as press secretary Jan. 28, pushed Trump’s allegations that outlets had deliberately lied in order to hurt his campaign and administration.

“We know for a fact that there have been lies that have been pushed by many legacy media outlets in this country about this president, about his family, and we will not accept that. We will call you out when we feel that your reporting is wrong, or there is misinformation about this White House,” Leavitt said. “So yes, I will hold myself to the truth and I expect everyone in this room to do the same.”

Leavitt also told reporters, “All of you once again have access to the most transparent and accessible president in American history.” But in what appears to be a snub to mainstream media, hard passes and access to the briefing room will also be extended to members of the “new media” — who Leavitt described as “independent journalists, podcasters, social media influencers and content creators” — as long as they are producing “legitimate news content.”

Leavitt did not respond directly to a question about how often she will be giving news briefings, which Trump halted during the second half of his first term, citing unfair media treatment.

“The president is the best spokesperson that this White House has,” Leavitt said, “and I can assure you that you will be hearing from both him and me as much as possible.”

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

The Myanmar military killed 19 people including 14 members of an insurgent militia in an air attack on a rebel position, the militia said, as the junta presses on with operations aimed at recovering territory it lost last year.

The attack was near an office in Sin Gut village, in central Myanmar’s Myingyan township, occupied by members of a pro-democracy People’s Defense Force, or PDF, groups of fighters that sprang up across the country after the military overthrew an elected government in early 2021.

PDFs and allied ethnic minority insurgent groups made stunning gains last year but the junta has vowed to recapture territory and defeat the PDFs while trying to coax the ethnic minority insurgent into peace talks.

A representative of the PDF in Myingyan, which is in the Mandalay region, said the Sunday air raid lasted for more than 20 minutes.

“First, they shot with a fighter jet. Then they came firing with machine guns from an Mi-35 helicopter,” said the militia member, who declined to be identified for safety reasons.

RFA tried to telephone the Mandalay region’s junta spokesperson, Thein Htay, for comment on the attack but he did not answer.

(Mandalay Free Press)

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A Myingyan PDF leader was among those killed, the PDF official said, adding that two children were among five civilians killed.

Bodies of the dead were so badly mutilated it was not possible to identify them before they were cremated, said a resident of the area who also declined to be identified.

Eight people were wounded in the attack, the PDF official said.

There had not been any fighting recently in the Myingyan area, which is about 90 kilometers (55 miles) southwest of Mandalay city, unlike places to the north of the city, so the attack was a surprise, the resident said.

The military has made advances in recent days in its operations in the Mandalay region after anti-junta fighters last year took positions on the approaches to Myanmar’s second-biggest city.

There is no precise death toll for Myanmar’s war but U.N. experts said last month that more than 6,000 civilians had been killed.

“Thousands of lives have been cut short in indiscriminate attacks by the military, which often targets civilian homes and infrastructure. Unlawful killings by junta forces are common and are characterized by their brutality and inhumanity,” U.N. experts said in a report.

Translated by Kiana Duncan. Edited by RFA Staff.

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

The South Korean military said it detected the launch, the North’s second missile test this year, from the Ganggye area in the North’s Jagang province, the news agency reported, citing the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff, or JCS.

The missiles flew up to 250 kilometers (155 miles) before falling into the sea, Reuters cited the South Korean military as saying.

“In preparation against additional launches, our military has strengthened our monitoring and vigilance, while closely sharing information on the North Korean missile with the U.S. and Japanese sides and maintaining a full readiness posture,” the JCS said.

On Jan. 6, North Korea tested a suspected mid-range ballistic missile as out-going U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in the South Korean capital for talks.

Addressing North Korea’s development of missiles and nuclear weapons in violation of U.N. resolutions, and its hostility towards the United States and its allies including South Korea, is a top priority for all U.S. administrations.

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Blinken, in his talks in Seoul with Acting President Choi Sang-mok, last week stressed an “unwavering” U.S. security commitment to South Korea and said their alliance remained “more essential than ever.”

Choi denounced the latest test, saying it was a clear violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions, Yonghap reported. He vowed a strong response based on his country’s alliance with the U.S.

Trump, who will take office on Monday, spearheaded an unprecedented diplomatic push on North Korea during his first term as president, meeting leader Kim Jong Un three times but making no progress on efforts to get him to abandon his nuclear and missile programs.

Trump raised his engagement with North Korea during his election campaign suggesting he might have an eye on reviving the effort.

Edited by Mike Firn

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

Fiji’s Office of the President has confirmed that the Tribunal’s report on allegations of misconduct against suspended Director of Public Prosecutions Christopher Pryde does not need to be made public at this stage.

The tribunal, chaired by Justice Anare Tuilevuka with Justices Chaitanya Lakshman and Samuela Qica, has completed its inquiry and submitted its findings to the President, Ratu Naiqama Lalabalavu.

The President will review the report, conduct consultations, and seek necessary advice before releasing it.

• READ MORE: Suspended Fiji chief prosecutor demands release of findings

Due to holiday leave, this process will continue in the New Year.

“It is acknowledged that the Report does not need to be made public as required in section 112(6) of the Constitution, and His Excellency will do so as soon as he has properly considered it.”

New Zealander Pryde had formally written to the Office of the President, requesting that a copy of the report be made available to him.

Position and pay ‘in limbo’
An earlier Fiji Times report by Shal Devi said Pryde had written to the Office of the President to request an urgent conclusion of the matter that had left his position and pay in limbo.

Pryde was suspended in April 2023 because of allegations of misbehaviour, which were linked to him being photographed with former attorney-general Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum — who was under investigation at the time — at a diplomatic gathering.

Earlier this week, Pryde made public the letter he had written to the Office of the President.

“I have been informed that the tribunal report into allegations of misbehaviour against me was provided to His Excellency, the President, on Monday the 23rd December 2024,” he wrote.

“I have written to the tribunal for a copy of the report, and they have advised me to contact the President’s office directly. I am therefore formally requesting that a copy of the report is provided to me.”

Pryde cited section 112 (6) of the Constitution, which states that the report shall be made public. Pryde said this was a mandatory provision and was not subject to discretion.

“I also note that section 112 (3) (c) of the Constitution provides that the President must act on the advice of the tribunal and that section 112 (5) provides that the suspension shall cease if the President determines that the judicial officer should not be removed.

“In other words, if the report advises that there is insufficient evidence of misbehaviour, then the suspension should be lifted immediately and I should be reinstated to my position as the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP).”

Pryde said it had been close to 21 months since he was suspended as the DPP, and nearly six months since his salary was suspended, which had caused him great financial hardship.

“It is a matter of urgency that this matter is brought to a final conclusion since the tribunal has now completed its task.

“I am therefore kindly requesting that His Excellency (i) advise me of the outcome of the report, (ii) provide me a copy of the report and allow it to be published, and (iii), if there is no evidence or insufficient evidence to support the allegations of misbehaviour, lift my suspension as is required under the Constitution and immediately reinstate my salary and entitlements.”

Republished from The Fiji Times with permission.

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

The Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department is counting on a new ally in the fight to persuade Taiwan’s 23 million people to give up their democratic way of life to be ruled by Beijing -- Cheng Huang, the god of cities.

Officials in the southeastern province of Fujian, just across the Taiwan Strait from self-ruled Taiwan, invited hundreds of Taoists, temple representatives, scholars and experts to a lavish cultural exchange event last month, according to the provincial government’s official website.

The event included seminars on Cheng Huang temples across Fujian as well as beliefs around the god in Taiwan, particularly in smaller towns on the island, the Nov. 14 report said.

Cheng Huang isn’t the first supernatural being to be enlisted by the Chinese Communist Party in pursuit of its political goals, in this case, to control Taiwan, whether by soft power and propaganda or by military force if necessary.

China has already tried to co-opt the sea goddess Matsu, widely revered in Taiwan, as part of a United Front operation targeting millions of voters.

And it has also encouraged the worship of the controversial Tibetan dharma protector Shugden, a move at loggerheads with the Tibetan Buddhist Gelugpa sect of the exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

(Sam Yeh/AFP)

The United Front is a shadowy government agency in charge of seeking Chinese influence outside the country through individuals and often innocuous-sounding organizations.

The Chinese Communist Party embraces atheism and exercises tight controls over any form of religious practice among its citizens, requiring them to join government-backed governing bodies and to display the Chinese flag, along with other demonstrations of loyalty to Beijing.

But apparently it isn’t opposed to using religion to further its political objectives.

Religious cross-straits links

Cheng Huang emerged in Chinese folk belief as a spirit protector of city walls and moats, and later diversified into a more complex deity with his own following and underworld bureaucracy mirroring structures found in the land of the living.

“Cheng Huang culture is one of the important links connecting compatriots on both sides of the Taiwan Strait,” the report quoted Cheng Ming-hui of Taiwan’s Wuji Sanching Temple as saying.

“I hope we can to hold more such activities in the future to further enhance the understanding and friendship between believers on both sides of the Taiwan Strait,” Cheng said.

(Pichi Chuang/Reuters)

Taiwan has never been ruled by Beijing and is formally governed by the Republic of China government, formed after the 1911 fall of the Qing Dynasty under Sun Yat-sen, that later fled to Taipei after losing the civil war in 1949 to Mao Zedong’s communists on the mainland.

While China insists on eventual “unification” with Taiwan, by armed invasion if necessary, the majority of Taiwan’s 23 million people have no wish to give up their democratic way of life to submit to Chinese rule.

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Ho Cheng-Hui, who heads Taiwanese civil defense organization the Kuma Academy, said China likes to cash in politically on religious devotion of any kind, citing its involvement in the cult of Matsu as an example.

“They are catering to the customs of the Taiwanese people, but with other motives behind it,” Ho said. “They call it religious exchange, but actually it’s a United Front operation -- scholars have defined it as the warfare of influence in recent years.”

“Some Taiwanese take part in these so-called exchanges because of their religious feeling, or sense of the historical origins [of their beliefs],” he said. “But that’s not what’s happening here.”

He called on religious believers in Taiwan to become more aware of China’s motives, “so as not to be used” by Beijing.

‘Living chess pieces’

Wu Se-Chih, a researcher at Taiwan’s Cross-Straits Policy Association, agreed.

“There is also a certain degree of United Front motivation,” he said. “China will always try to leverage any United Front gains from the people of Taiwan.”

Wu said the “deep connection between folk beliefs and local politics” in Taiwan also offers a channel for funds to flow into -- and influence -- the island’s messily democratic political life.

The Chinese government has acquired a number of local temples in Taiwan in recent years, which he described as “living chess pieces” in Beijing’s hands, to boost its influence in Taiwanese politics at a local level.

“These interest groups haven’t been subjected to enough supervision,” Wu said. “That’s the main reason the Chinese Communist Party targets local temples.”

And there are also personal risks involved for any religious believers traveling to China, according to Wu, who cited the recent detention of three elderly Taiwanese members of the I-Kuan Tao religion in Zhongshan city.

“Sometimes the red lines aren’t very clear ... so people need to think twice and be vigilant, which is the best way to protect themselves,” Wu said.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

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

New Zealand’s Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) says impending bad weather for Port Vila is now the most significant post-quake hazard.

A tropical low in the Coral Sea is expected to move into Vanuatu waters, bringing heavy rainfall.

Authorities have issued warnings to people living near landslide-prone areas around the Vanuatu capital.

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People living near low lying areas or rivers have also been told to move, should water levels rise.

The heavy rain may also cause flash flooding.

USAR team leader Ken Cooper said last Tuesday’s 7.3 earthquake caused significant landslides.

“With the weather system that’s coming in, there is a high likelihood that the landslides continue and we need to ensure that there’s no life risks if those landslides should move further,” Cooper said.

Death toll now 12
Aftershocks have continued, and early this morning, the US Geological Survey recorded a magnitude 6.1 quake, at a depth of 40km west of Port Vila.

New Zealand and Vanuatu engineers were assessing prioritised areas in the capital, and a decision would then be made as to whether a community needed to be evacuated, Cooper said.

Since the team had been in Vanuatu, it had taken damage assessments of buildings and infrastructure, with the Vanuatu government, allowing them to prioritise the biggest risks and to assist the community in recovering more quickly, he said.

The official death toll from Vanuatu’s 7.3 magnitude quake is now 12 according to the Vanuatu Disaster Management office.

This has been confirmed by the Vila Central Hospital.

Earlier unofficial reports had placed the death toll at 16.

The team had completed almost 1000 assessments, alongside the Australia USAR team, which was a significant task, Cooper said.

Both teams shared common tools and practices, which had allowed them to work simultaneously and helped the teams to quickly carry out the assessments, he said.

“When we undertake the assessments that really gives us a clear picture of what should be prioritised and we work with the [Vanuatu] government and their infrastructure cluster, and some of the priorities we have looked at are bridges, [the] airport, the port, and also landslides,” he said.

Resilience shown by locals
The deployment lead for New Zealand in Vanuatu praised the resilience of the Ni-Vanuatu people following the 7.3 earthquake.

Thousands of people had been affected by the disaster but the response effort was being hampered by damage to core infrastructure including the country’s telecommunications network.

Emma Dunlop-Bennett said the New Zealand teams on the ground were working in partnership with the Vanuatu government.

She said she was in awe of the strength of locals after the disaster.

“As we go out into communities, working . . .  with the government, people are out there, getting up and doing what they can to get themselves into business as usual, life as usual. I am really in awe and humbled.

The purpose of the New Zealand team being in Vanuatu was three-fold: To provide urgent and critical humanitarian assistance, a response for consular need to New Zealanders, and to support a smooth transition from relief, response to recovery, Dunlop-Bennett said.

Then to business as usual, working along side the priority need identified by the Vanuatu government, she added.

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.

Now the office, which offers financing to clean energy technologies that struggle to borrow from banks and received a huge boost of money from the Inflation Reduction Act, is rushing to do just that before President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January. The incoming president, flanked by Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress, is expected to target unspent funds under the IRA, including LPO programs — putting at risk billions of loan dollars yet to be granted or finalized.

With Inauguration Day looming, the office has increased its activity in recent weeks. Since last Monday alone, the LPO announced four new conditional commitments for loans and loan guarantees and finalized a pending offer.

On Tuesday, long-duration energy storage company Eos closed a $303.5 million DOE loan guarantee to help it scale production. The day before, the DOE stated it planned to lend up to $7.5 billion to finance two electric vehicle battery manufacturing plants in Kokomo, Indiana. And one week earlier, the agency announced a conditional loan guarantee of nearly $5 billion to finance Grain Belt Express Phase 1, an interregional transmission line that will run between Ford County, Kansas, and Callaway County, Missouri.

Last Monday, the agency also announced conditional commitments for a direct loan of $6.6 billion to Rivian to build an EV manufacturing plant in Stanton Springs North, Georgia, and a loan guarantee of $290 million to Sunwealth to deploy up to 1,000 solar PV systems and battery energy storage systems across 27 states.

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Under the Biden administration, LPO has so far doled out just under $55 billion in funding across 32 deals for battery and EV manufacturing, nuclear reactors, ​“clean” hydrogen facilities, virtual power plants, and critical minerals projects. The majority of the LPO’s investments have gone to Republican districts, according to a Politico analysis.

Most of the financing deals LPO has announced — about $41 billion worth — remain conditional, meaning the loans or loan guarantees are not yet finalized and depend on the companies meeting certain benchmarks.

Legal experts say that while the LPO’s 14 closed loans, which total more than $13 billion in investments, should remain safe from Republican backlash, delaying or undoing conditional funds could be much easier. ​“Immediately following inauguration of the new president, there is likely to be a period of inaction on financial assistance awards that are in negotiation and on announced funding opportunities,” wrote Hogan Lovells attorney, Mary Anne Sullivan.

A Republican-majority Congress could potentially roll back not-yet-obligated funding in order to help offset the costs of a likely extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which are estimated to add $4.6 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.

As of November 30, the office had 212 outstanding applications with a total of $324 billion in loans requested. In November, LPO raised its estimated remaining loan authority to nearly $400 billion.

The LPO was created in 2005 to support innovative clean energy projects — or in Shah’s words, to ​“build a bridge to bankability” for technologies that haven’t yet reached the at-scale deployment needed to attract commercial lenders. The Inflation Reduction Act supercharged the office’s lending authority, taking it from $40 billion to more than $400 billion.

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It’s unclear what will end up happening to the loan program with a Republican trifecta in office. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the next Republican president, proposes eliminating the LPO altogether. Billionaires Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, who have been tasked by Trump to lead a new task force called the Department of Government Efficiency, may also target the office in their sweeping proposals to slash federal programs and personnel. (Musk’s EV company, Tesla, received a $465 million loan from the office in 2010.)

Other lawmakers have suggested that the LPO could be reformed to finance more energy sources favored by Republicans and Trump’s pick for Energy secretary, fracking company CEO Chris Wright, such as nuclear and geothermal. ​“The LPO needs to have all energy, if we go forward with it at all,” Representative Brett Guthrie, a Republican from Kentucky, told Politico’s E&E News.

DOE officials noted that local economic growth and jobs could be jeopardized should LPO investments be curtailed.

“There is steel in the ground and job openings at new or expanded facilities around the country,” a DOE spokesperson said in a statement. ​“It would be irresponsible for any government to turn its back on private sector partners, states, and communities that are benefiting from lower energy costs and new economic opportunities spurred by LPO’s investments.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Biden’s Energy Department races to get cleantech money out before Trump takes office on Dec 8, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Akielly Hu.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

In the strongest rebuke yet of Illinois school districts that ask police to ticket misbehaving students, the state attorney general has declared that the practice — still being used across the state — is illegal and should stop.

The attorney general’s office, which had been investigating student ticketing in one of Illinois’ largest high school districts, found that Township High School District 211 in Palatine broke the law when administrators directed police to fine its students for school-based conduct, and that the practice had an “unjustified disparate impact” on Black and Latino students.

“We strongly encourage other districts and police departments to review their policies and practices,” the office told ProPublica.

But the attorney general’s office did not alert other districts of its findings, which came in July, and did not issue guidance that the common practice violates the law. That means its findings against the suburban Chicago district could have a narrow effect.

The office also said that it is not investigating other districts for similar civil rights violations.

In 2022, a ProPublica and Chicago Tribune investigation, “The Price Kids Pay,” revealed how local police officers were writing students tickets that resulted in fines of up to $750. The tickets, for violating local ordinances, are considered noncriminal offenses and can be punishable only by a fine. The misbehavior included having vape pens, missing class, and participating in verbal or minor physical altercations.

In response, Gov. JB Pritzker and two state superintendents of education said schools should not rely on police to handle student misconduct.

State lawmakers have tried several times to pass legislation intended to stop the practice by specifically prohibiting schools from involving police in minor disciplinary matters. But the bills have stalled. School officials have argued ticketing is a necessary tool to manage student behavior, and some lawmakers worried that limiting officers’ role in schools could lead to unsafe conditions.

Rep. La Shawn Ford, a Democrat from Chicago, told ProPublica this month that he plans to try again next year. “We don’t want police doing schools’ work,” Ford said.

He said revised legislation will aim to address school officials’ concerns and will make clear that school employees can still involve police in criminal matters.

“What will really address this is a state law that would have an impact on all Illinois schools. That is the only possible way I see because it is so pervasive across Illinois,” said Angie Jiménez, an attorney at the National Center for Youth Law, which has pushed for reforms in Illinois law.

Jimenez said fining students as discipline should have stopped more than nine years ago when state law banned doing so. “It is really shocking to me to see that less than a decade later, you are having this issue and we are still trying to come to the table to reach an agreement,” she said. “Meanwhile, our students and families are the ones that are being sacrificed in this process.”

Illinois State Board of Education spokesperson Lindsay Record said the agency continues to oppose the practice of issuing tickets to students. “ISBE is evaluating potential policy solutions for the issue,” Record said, though she did not elaborate on what those might be. Pritzker’s office did not respond to questions from ProPublica.

The attorney general’s office decided to focus its investigation on District 211 after officials reviewed a first-of-its-kind database published by ProPublica and the Tribune. The database documented nearly 12,000 tickets issued in dozens of districts over three school years, the reasons police ticketed students and, when available, the racial breakdown of students who received tickets.

The state investigation of District 211, which lasted two years, focused on the district’s two high schools in Palatine, a suburb northwest of Chicago. From 2018 through 2022, Palatine police ticketed students nearly 400 times, mostly at Palatine High School. Black and Latino students sometimes received tickets when white students were given lesser punishments or even offered help to cope with substance use, the investigation found. Palatine police ticketed Fremd High School students, too, but much less frequently.

“Police reports show that, typically, District administrators conducted the initial investigation, then called the school resource officer for service and directed the officer to issue a ticket to the student,” according to a letter Attorney General Kwame Raoul sent to the district in late July after his office concluded its investigation. Officers ticketed students even when police hadn’t witnessed the alleged misconduct, investigators found.

The attorney general’s office told District 211 that it should make it clear in school handbooks and agreements with local police that school administrators are prohibited from directing or asking police to issue tickets to students as a form of discipline, including for disorderly conduct or having tobacco or vaping products. District policies also should make clear that the preference is for alternative approaches, such as a substance abuse program.

Raoul’s letter noted that since the 2022-23 school year, the district and police department have “drastically reduced” the use of school-based ticketing.

The district, which enrolls nearly 12,000 students across three suburbs, has denied wrongdoing since the investigation began. A district spokesperson declined to answer questions from ProPublica and instead provided a letter an attorney for the district wrote to the attorney general’s office criticizing the findings.

“None of the administrators interviewed indicated that they ‘directed’ the School Resource Officers or other police officials to issue tickets or make arrests,” the attorney wrote, adding that only police have the authority to issue tickets. The letter said that school officials are required to report to law enforcement certain offenses, such as those involving weapons or drugs. In those serious matters, however, police can and do arrest students — not ticket them. The district’s response letter says it will review its student handbooks and policies. However, current high school handbooks still state that students can be sent to police for having vaping products.

The district’s records cited in the attorney general’s findings showed that in the 2021-22 school year, Black and Hispanic students received about 68% of the tickets issued at school, even though they accounted for only about 33% of district enrollment. White students made up 42% of district enrollment, but they received only 24% of the tickets.

The state investigators attributed that, in part, to school administrators choosing not to involve police in white students’ behavioral issues, offering them therapies instead of punishment.

The mother of a student ticketed in 2022 said that while she hopes district officials stop involving police in school conduct, she also thinks there should be a remedy for students ticketed in the past. Her son, who is Black, was a 16-year-old sophomore at Palatine High School when he received a $200 ticket for damaging a fence near the school. ProPublica reporters met the family when the teen and his mother attended a hearing to fight the ticket; it was dismissed after another student acknowledged he had caused the damage.

“I would hope that if they know they were doing it illegally, they would wipe all the tickets out. That is what they should do. If anyone had to pay fines, they should be reimbursed,” said the mother, who asked not to be identified to protect the privacy of her son, who graduated from high school in the spring and is now in college.

The attorney general’s office also focused on the village of Palatine, and investigators found that it, too, had violated the law. Palatine police issued truancy tickets to students for missing a single day of school or less, even though state law prohibits that as punishment. The village also set the fine at $200, even though the maximum amount permitted by state law is $100, investigators found.

The attorney general’s office recommended that the village change or repeal its ordinance. The village manager and the chief of the Palatine Police Department did not respond to questions from reporters.

While some schools have stopped involving police in minor student discipline matters in recent years, others have continued. ProPublica obtained new records from several districts in different parts of the state that had been spotlighted in “The Price Kids Pay.”

At Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School southwest of Chicago, police have issued more than 60 tickets to students since the start of the 2023-24 school year for disorderly conduct, possession of tobacco or cannabis, and consumption of alcohol. The fines are as much as $175, and the school superintendent said the district is focused on providing a safe environment.

Officers in northwest suburban Carpentersville wrote dozens of tickets last school year at Dundee-Crown High School and at Carpentersville Middle School and have ticketed this year, too. A district spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

At East Peoria Community High School, in central Illinois, students continue to get tickets that cost from $75 to $450 for fighting and possession of tobacco or cannabis. Students as young as 12 at the nearby junior high school also have been issued tickets.

East Peoria High School Superintendent Marjorie Greuter said students no longer are ticketed for truancy and officers based at the school decide when to ticket students for other misconduct. She wrote in an email that if students could be ticketed outside of school for violating a local ordinance, “it is still our opinion that not doing so inside the building presents a safety concern.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards.

While Biden attempted to cast his foreign policy actions as defending “democracy” against “authoritarianism,” this framing is a lie. The real motive force behind the Biden administration’s bloody foreign policy is a fear of waning hegemony – of losing the benefits the US economy derives from political and economic domination of the global majority.

In that vein, the US is still trying to suffocate the model of socialist Latin American integration forwarded by Cuba and Venezuela. Washington is still arming the Israeli genocide in Palestine, the invasion of Lebanon, and other Israeli aggressions against “Axis of Resistance” forces in the region, namely Iran. On top of this, the US is still supporting or carrying out airstrikes against Yemen and Syria, still hoping to bleed Russia dry in Ukraine, still backing a Pakistani military dictatorship imposed with US backing, still engineering the re-invasion of Haiti, and still plotting an economic war (and perhaps a hot one) against China.

The Biden administration genuinely believed it could remake the world in its vision, and particularly the Middle East à la the neoconservatives of the George W. Bush administration. A Nation article by Aída Chávez laid out Biden’s disturbing plan for the Middle East and wider world, a plan that relies on Israel successfully carrying out the ethnic cleansing of Palestine:

One goal of the “Biden doctrine,” as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman called it, is to achieve the “global legitimacy” necessary to “take on Iran in a more aggressive manner.” With Hamas out of the picture and a demilitarized Palestinian state under the influence of the Gulf regimes, the thinking goes, the US will have Arab cover in the region to be able to counter Iran – and the cheap drones they’re worried about – and then put all of its energy toward a confrontation with China.

Following Israel’s killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, US officials jumped at the chance to push “a much wider agenda – including an opening for the next stage of America’s geopolitical ambitions.” This “next stage” includes the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the signing of a US-Saudi defence treaty, and the Gulf monarchies leading Gaza’s so-called “reconstruction” as a pro-US “emirate,” in the words of Republican Senator Lindsey Graham.

Following the killing of Sinwar, Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal stated, “After recent conversations w/leaders of Israel, Saudi Arabia & UAE, I have real hope that Sinwar’s death creates truly historic opportunities for Israel’s security, cessation of fighting & regional peace & stability through normalization of relations. The moment must be seized.” Lindsey Graham elaborated on the “historic opportunities” of which Washington hopes to take advantage. “MBS and MBZ at the UAE will come in and rebuild Gaza,” he said in a recent interview. “[They will] create an enclave in the Palestine.”

According to Bob Woodward’s new book War, Graham reportedly told Biden, “It’s going to take a Democratic president to convince Democrats to vote to go to war for Saudi Arabia.” To which Biden responded, “Let’s do it.”

While Washington aims to violently remake the Middle East to serve its geopolitical aims – a stark contrast to China’s recent peacemaking between Saudi Arabia and Iran – other targets of imperialism continue to suffer as well.

In April 2022, the Biden administration helped engineer the removal of popular Pakistani president Imran Khan from office. The US wanted Khan ousted because he entertained positive relations with China and Russia, two powers that Washington views as a threat to its hegemony. As Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu stated in a now infamous cypher to the Pakistani military, “if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington.”

Since the US-backed coup against Khan, the Pakistani military has taken extreme measures to prevent the ousted president’s return to power, including legal onslaughts, the arrest of thousands of supporters, crackdowns on social media activists, the imprisonment and torture of independent journalists such as Imran Riaz Khan, the decimation of Khan’s party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), and the rigging of an election earlier this year.

In other words, a de facto military junta has seized total power in Pakistan, and Washington backs them because they have reversed Khan’s non-aligned position and returned the country to the US orbit.

Meanwhile, Haiti has become a target of Washington once more. Earlier this year, the Biden administration courted Kenya’s President William Ruto to lead a US-funded invasion force into Haiti, which is wracked by violence after over a century of exploitation and underdevelopment by the US and allies, including Canada. The mission’s ostensible goal is to free Haiti from warring paramilitary gangs – however, the invasion force and its backers ignore the reality that the paramilitaries are a consequence of the brutally unequal political, economic, and social hierarchies imposed on Haiti by Global North powers. In reality, Haiti requires sovereignty and respect, not a new spiral of bloodshed and misery.

Haiti’s Caribbean neighbours, Cuba and Venezuela, have also endured immense suffering due to Biden’s imperialist policies. Cuba and Venezuela have long been targets of US imperialism – Cuba for over sixty years, Venezuela for twenty-five – and the Biden era continued this brutal interventionism. In the case of Cuba, Biden kept in place the hundreds of additional sanctions and the egregious “state sponsor of terrorism” designation imposed by Donald Trump. The Trump-Biden sanctions are harsher than any previous president’s, depriving the small Caribbean nation of billions of dollars per year. “The sanctions today,” says political scientist William LeoGrande, “have a greater impact on the Cuban people than ever before.” People are going hungry, hundreds of thousands hope to migrate, and most recently, the country’s power grid collapsed under the weight of Biden’s coercive measures.

As Drop Site news contributor Ed Augustin wrote in early October:

Government food rations [in Cuba] – a lifeline for the country’s poor – are fraying. Domestic agriculture, which has always been weak, has cratered in recent years for lack of seeds, fertilizer, and petrol, forcing the state to import 100 percent of the basic subsidized goods. But there’s not enough money to do that. Last year the government eliminated chicken from the basic food basket most adults receive. Last month, the daily ration of bread available to all Cubans was cut by a quarter. Even vital staples like rice and beans now arrive late. Food insecurity on the island is rising, according to a recent report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Vulnerable groups – older people, pregnant women, children and people with chronic illnesses – are most affected by the knock-on effects of US policy.

In all the cases described above, the Biden administration has taken extreme measures to snuff out challenges to its imperialist hegemony – measures that manifest first and foremost in the physical destruction of Palestinians and Lebanese by US-made weapons, the imposition of hunger, desperation, and migration crises on Cuba and Venezuela, the US-backed occupation of Haiti, the violent repression of Pakistanis’ desire for sovereignty and non-alignment, and more. Meanwhile, one-third of the world’s nations – and 60 percent of poor countries – face some type of US sanctions for having displeased the imperial hegemon.

The prevailing world system, a system defined by US imperialism and the imposition of the neoliberal Washington Consensus around the globe, is facing an array of challenges, from Latin America and the Caribbean to Palestine to East Asia.

How is Washington responding? Through the economic strangulation of countries like Cuba and Venezuela that present an alternative model; through a “day after” plan in the Middle East that would reduce Gaza to a neocolony of Washington and the Gulf monarchies; through coups against popular non-aligned leaders like Imran Khan; through the re-invasion of Haiti, a nation whose sovereignty has long been subverted by imperialism; through pressuring the Ukrainian government to lower the draft age so Kyiv can continue sending its young people into the meat grinder on behalf of Washington’s geopolitical aims; and through continuing to trudge the path toward war with China.

Ironically, the US empire’s violent response to its waning hegemony is expediting the emergence of an alternative world order, one marked by the de-dollarization and South-South cooperation of the BRICS group. As Biden leaves office and Trump returns to the White House, we can safely assume that the violence of imperialism will continue, perhaps intensify, and at the same time, the global majority will continue its efforts to forge new relationships outside the umbrella of US unilateralism.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Owen Schalk.

Myanmar’s junta has announced that passports renewed “illegally” in South Korea would be canceled, the latest step in its efforts to crack down on its opponents abroad and to force citizens to return home, where they are liable to be conscripted into the military.

At the heart of the wrangle over passports is the question of who has the legitimacy to represent Myanmar – the deeply unpopular military that seized power in a 2021 coup, or members of the elected government it ousted who have set up a shadow administration in exile.

Radio Free Asia’s Burmese service reported on Tuesday that there has been an increasing number of Myanmar citizens renewing their passports in the South Korean capital at the representative office of the government-in-exile, the National Unity Government, or NUG.

But the junta-appointed Myanmar embassy in Seoul warned that passports renewed that way would be canceled and their bearers would be blacklisted.

“We are taking action against those who renewed their passports with illegal stamps, in accordance with South Korean law,” said the embassy.

“The embassy is discussing the issue with the South Korea government ministries concerned to take action,” it added.

South Korea’s foreign ministry said it is aware of the matter and was checking the facts and legal aspects.

“If necessary, appropriate measures will be reviewed in consultation with relevant ministries,” the ministry told RFA on Wednesday.

RFA contacted the junta’s main spokesperson, Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun, for comment but did not receive a reply by publication time.

Myanmar has been in turmoil since the military ousted a government led by democracy champion Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021, ending a decade of gradual reforms that had raised hopes for an end to decades of poverty and repression under the military.

People of all ages and walks of life took to the streets across the country to protest against the coup.

The military responded with bullets and large numbers of people fled to places such as Thailand, Malaysia, Japan and South Korea, either in fear of prison or looking for opportunities as the upheaval crippled the economy.

More fled military conscription enforced this year as junta forces struggled against ethnic minority insurgents and their new pro-democracy allies.

Thousands hope for new passports

Many of those who fled are now holding passports that are expiring, which junta-controlled embassies often refuse to renew, or only do so after detailed family background checks and if applicants sign pledges not to participate in politics.

Those without valid passports find it nearly impossible to renew visas to stay on in the countries where they are living.

So instead of relying on embassies, an increasing number of people in South Korea are turning to the NUG for passport renewals, a source close to the shadow government’s office in Seoul said.

“More than 500 people from Myanmar have renewed their passports through the NUG office. The number is expected to reach into the thousands,” said the source who declined to be identified given the sensitivity of the issue.

“More people are contacting the NUG office every day to prepare their documents for passport renewal. The number of applicants is growing steadily.”

In the weeks after Myanmar’s coup, South Korea created what is known as the G1-99 visa, allowing Myanmar people to stay on humanitarian grounds. But the Myanmar embassy initially refused to renew passports with that visa, said one Myanmar national in Soul.

“Later, they accepted this visa for an extension but applicants need to sign a pledge (not to engage in politics) to get the passport. So we opted for NUG’s passport renewal service,” said the Myanmar citizen who declined to be identified.

The NUG office in Seoul said on Sunday that it was protecting Myanmar citizens who opposed the junta as much as it could, in addition to working for the release of Myanmar people arrested in South Korea for violating visa rules.

The office said the passports it renewed were only valid to stay in South Korea.

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Those facing no option but to go home, or being deported back, risk being forced into the military, numerous people have reported.

A Yangon-based job agent helping workers go to South Korea told RFA that the NUG’s passport renewal would only be a temporary fix and anyone hoping to return to Myanmar would face problems.

“The NUG passport will not be accepted by the junta. Having said that, it depends if individuals are staying long-term in South Korea,” he said.

“Those holding NUG passports can’t legally return home, as long as we’re under the military regime, but they can stay overseas.”

More than 70,000 Myanmar citizens are in South Korea under labor agreements between the two countries, according to media reports.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Kiana Duncan and Taejun Kang.

RFA Korean’s Lee Jeongeun contributed to this report.

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

Top U.N. officials are again warning that the entire Palestinian population in north Gaza is “at imminent risk of dying from disease, famine and violence.” At least 1,800 Palestinians have been killed, many of them children, since October, when Israel imposed a draconian siege and began an intensified campaign of ethnic cleansing on northern Gaza. Jan Egeland of the Norwegian Refugee Council recently spent several days in Gaza. He describes what he saw as “devastation beyond belief,” as Palestinians face “the most intense and most indiscriminate bombardment anywhere in the world in recent memory,” coupled with the utter depletion of aid. Egeland pleads for the United States, the largest supplier of military funding and equipment to Israel, to condition its weapons to Israel, enforce the provision of aid and commit to ending Israel’s assault. “It’s not in Israel’s interest to destroy its neighborhood in Gaza and in Lebanon. It will create new generations of hatred,” Egeland says.

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

“The brazen shooting at the offices of El Debate not only underscores the ongoing crisis of violence against the press in Mexico but is a stark reminder of the urgent need for the recently appointed government of President Claudia Sheinbaum to investigate this attack and take all appropriate steps to provide El Debate’s staff with protection,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “As long as authorities continue to stand by, impunity in crimes against the press will continue to be the norm, and any pretense of respect for press freedom will ring hollow.”

El Debate is one of Culiacán’s oldest and most widely circulated regional dailies and has extensively reported on the rising criminal violence in the state. 

The Institute for Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists, which operates under supervision of the Sinaloa state government, and Sinaloa Governor Rubén Rocha Moya condemned the attack in separate statements on Friday. Moya also ordered an investigation. 

CPJ’s several calls to El Debate and the state public prosecutor’s office (FGE) requesting comment about the investigation were not answered. 

An official who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity, as they are not authorized to speak publicly on the matter, said the Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists, which operates under supervision of the federal Interior Ministry in Mexico City, is establishing contact with the newspaper and Sinaloa state authorities to evaluate the need for state-sponsored protection.

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

Ramón Barthelemy, a physics and astronomy education researcher at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, was pursuing a seat in the Utah House of Representatives to represent District 24. He challenged 15-year incumbent and fellow Democrat Joel Briscoe for the opportunity to represent more than 43,000 residents of Salt Lake City.

More than 200 STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) professionals like Barthelemy are running for office at the state and municipal level this year, more than ever before. Though races at the top of the ticket rightly receive a lot of attention, the results of down-ballot races determine many of the policies that affect people’s daily lives, including how federal policies are implemented at the local or state level.

Barthelemy’s campaign targeted the value of science education and literacy in his district, and he believed his background as a scientist could help increase access to STEM education, improve local air quality, and encourage local students to pursue STEM careers at nearby tech companies.

“I think it is critical, now more than ever, that we have scientists engaged in the political process,” Barthelemy said. “The challenges we are faced with — not just as a state, not just as a country, but as a species — are technical and scientific, and we need technical expertise in order to solve them.”

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Climate change, pollution, ethical technology development, energy independence, the space race, public health: Solving these problems requires a partnership between scientists, who have the expertise to understand these issues, and politicians, who have the resources and influence to enact solutions.

More and more, scientists are choosing to engage more deeply in the political process and run for office themselves.

Though science-based facts are not the be-all, end-all when crafting policy, this engagement brings scientific knowledge and problem-solving skills into legislative chambers at all levels of governance and gives science and its practitioners a greater voice in the political process.

“So many of the big issues that we face as a nation, communities, and world have science at their core.…For us to not be part of [solving these issues] is a huge mistake,” said Kristopher Larsen, who helps manage data collection for Mars missions at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and is a former mayor of Nederland, Colorado.

Why jump in?

Scientists run for office for reasons as varied and individual as the scientists themselves. Some have always felt called to public service and see governance as a way to give back to their communities. Some become concerned that officials have failed to act on climate change or other issues with science-based solutions.

“Whether you care about our nuclear policy, or climate change, or health care, or education, we benefit by having scientists as part of those discussions,” said Shaughnessy Naughton, founder and president of 314 Action, a political action fund that helps scientists run for office in the United States. “Any issue benefits by having scientists at the governing table,” she said.

Still others, including Barthelemy, have grown concerned with rising anti-science and anti-education sentiment in the United States and feel they are in a unique position to combat it. They chose to fight back on politicians’ turf.

“There are a lot of people who believe that science can help us live better lives and that science really does need to be front and center when we’re making public policy,” said Jess Phoenix, a volcanologist, science advocate, and former candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives. “We have to step up and say, ‘This is wrong. This is right. We have evidence and data to support that,’” Phoenix said. “There’s a whole group of people who really value science, and science needs champions.”

The perceived lack of action to address climate change was one of the issues that drove Naughton, a former chemist, to campaign to represent Pennsylvania’s 8th District in the U.S. House in 2014. Naughton had also grown alarmed by attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act and the failure to combat gun violence — or even collect data on it — after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.

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Evidence-based solutions exist to stop climate change, reduce gun violence, and secure health care, so she felt that the lack of progress on these issues “wasn’t a problem with the science. This was a problem with policymakers. And the only way to fix that was to run for Congress,” she said, and champion science-based solutions in the halls of governance.

The election of Donald Trump and his administration’s perceived efforts to undermine science were what prompted Phoenix to consider a run for office. “When Trump was elected,” she said, “it was a shock to the science ecosystem.” She was alarmed that the Trump administration was not just ignoring the best available science when it came to issues like climate change but also appearing to work counter to the best interests of both the public and the environment.

“That really motivated me to step up and say, ‘Why can’t scientists run for office?’” Phoenix remembered. She announced her candidacy for a seat in the U.S. House representing what is now California’s 27th district at the 2017 March for Science. Although her campaign was unsuccessful — today, the district is represented by Mike Garcia (R-Santa Clarita) — she has continued her science advocacy by becoming an ambassador for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“People who represent us in government, especially at the federal level, are supposed to be drawn from a wide array of backgrounds,” Phoenix said, “but it’s mainly lawyers and career politicians, and you aren’t seeing janitors and nurses and scientists.”

Larsen, who served as Nederland’s mayor between 2016 and 2022 and is currently a town trustee, took an early interest in politics and got involved in his community while working as a postdoc. He started by joining an advisory board that helps preserve open space and trails, which spoke to his love for skiing, mountain biking, and hiking. “This was my way to get to know how the town works,” he said.

Nederland’s mayor and trustees oversee zoning issues, public works, community engagement, emergency service access, and sustainability efforts. In his small town (population: 1,500), “the politics we do doesn’t end up on the front page of the paper,” he said. Only occasionally do larger crises, like a wildfire or an attempted bombing in town, break the mold.

Facing a divided nation

From the new space race to climate change to COVID-19, science has become more politicized than ever. Some scientist-candidates say their research-based approach is a strength when addressing issues both inside and outside the sphere of science.

When Ben Dewell, a meteorologist and a director of the Stallion Springs Community Service District, first moved into California’s 20th District in 2015, “I didn’t make it known that I was a scientist.” The historically red district was represented by then-Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield). Dewell strongly objected to what he felt was McCarthy putting his loyalty to former President Trump over the interests of his constituents.

Dewell initially ran for office in 2022 to unseat McCarthy, first as a Democrat and then again as a No Party candidate. With the encouragement of his neighbors, he organized a campaign on his own without the assistance of local organizing groups or political action committees. “I was less than grassroots, and to this day, it’s still less than grassroots,” he joked about his campaign. “It’s not even a seedling.”

Although his congressional campaign was unsuccessful, Dewell still feels that his scientific, data-driven way of looking at issues is an asset in his hyperpartisan district, today represented by Vince Fong (R-Bakersfield).

“A lot of people who have come up to me [have] said, ‘I didn’t know you were a scientist. What do you do?’” Dewell said. “And I’ve explained it to them, and they’ve smiled” encouragingly. Dewell also serves on the board of the Eastern Kern Air Pollution Control District that monitors the district’s air quality and is currently running for a seat on the Kern County Board of Supervisors in a November special election.

“It would have been inconsistent for me not to run in service to the same constituency still in need of a logical, rational, nonpartisan voice,” he said. “My ballot designation still includes ‘scientist.’”

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Brianna Titone (D), a geochemist who flipped her Colorado district from red to blue in 2018, felt that her background as a scientist was a real asset to her campaign.

“My district has a lot of engineers and a lot of scientists,” she said. Colorado House of Representatives District 27 represents thousands of people who work at scientific institutions, including the Colorado School of Mines, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and a U.S. Geological Survey center.

But as a first-time candidate, a Democrat, and a trans woman running in a red district, Titone was at a disadvantage when pitted against the incumbent GOP candidate. Her experience as a consultant on groundwater flow for the mining industry and a geology software engineer provided a way for her to engage with constituents on familiar ground. “I really relied a lot on my scientific background to talk to my voters,” she said. However, she also acknowledged that public trust of science was greater when she was elected than it is now.

“There is a subset of the population that is distrustful,” Phoenix said. “But what we have found among swing voters is that there is a lot of trust of science, scientists, and expertise in general. And that really bodes well for our country’s future and for scientific candidates.” Although the number has declined since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, 73 percent of Americans still have confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests.

“For a lot of voters, as crazy as it sounds, [being a scientist] is almost a value statement,” Phoenix explained. “Because people look at scientists as truth tellers, as honest brokers, and that’s really what they want from their elected leaders.”

The scientific consensus

The scientific community has expressed mixed reactions to scientists entering the political arena. Many scientist-candidates recall receiving relieved looks, at best, or negative pushback, at worst, from their fellow scientists.

The feelings of relief sometimes come from scientists who want to have a greater voice in government but are not in a position to run for office themselves, Phoenix explained. Running a campaign for federal office, for instance, requires a significant investment of time and money, and actually holding that office is a full-time career. Running for a local position is less expensive but can be just as time-consuming, and though these positions are often part-time, their lower pay often necessitates holding a second job.

As such, the responsibilities of running for and holding office can discourage scientists (and those in most professional communities) who are early in their career, are seeking tenure, are the primary earner in their household, have family caregiving responsibilities, or experience bias because of their identity.

“Admittedly, I was pretty naive about the process,” Naughton said. Although her congressional campaign was unsuccessful, it led her to found 314 Action, which has helped elect more than 400 scientists to public office at all levels of governance. She wanted to provide scientists with the tools, resources, and knowledge base that she lacked when she first ran for office.

When you want to run for office but lack the privilege, Phoenix said, seeing someone else step up can be a relief.

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“When I tell other scientists I’m running for office,” Barthelemy said, “their eyes get wide, and they’re just like, ‘Oh, I’m so glad you’re doing that. I could never do that. Good luck!’”

Naughton said she sees a generational divide in how scientists react to their colleagues running for office. “Especially among the younger generation, there’s a strong appetite for getting involved in politics,” she said. Among the older generation of scientists, the feeling seemed to be “science is above politics, and therefore, scientists shouldn’t be involved in politics.”

There is some historical basis for that opinion. The U.S. public has not always looked kindly on scientists who have become the face of a scientific issue, whether willingly or not. Consider J. Robert Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb or Michael Mann and climate change or Anthony Fauci and COVID-19. Scientists have seen many examples where politicians and the public have turned on outspoken colleagues, and some advise students to “stay in their lane,” Naughton said.

“That model has failed us,” Naughton continued, because whereas scientists may be hesitant to enter the political arena, “politicians are unembarrassed and unafraid to meddle in science.”

“Yes, it would be great if we could just be in our bubble doing our work,” Phoenix added, “but unfortunately, that is not the case.”

Entering the arena

Say you’re a scientist with an interest in politics and you care about a particular issue in your community. Is running for office necessarily the answer?

“I’m going to say, flatly, ‘no’ to all scientists,” Dewell said. “I would like to see more pure scientists in there… I would say they should run if they feel like they can make a difference” while remaining objective.

Whether or not a scientist should run for office “would depend on whether I felt that scientist was going to do a good job in the political arena,” said Samuel Bell, a planetary geologist at the Planetary Science Institute and a Rhode Island state senator. What drove Bell (D) into politics was a desire to see the Democratic party fight harder for science funding and use science-based decision-making to craft laws.

Scientists are not a monolith. A scientific background is no guarantee that a person would make a good legislator or be a good advocate for their community or for science. Instead of seeking to become policymakers, many scientists apply their expertise in advisory positions, working in government agencies, or through science advocacy groups to serve their communities. Being elected to office is not the only way a scientist can effect change.

What’s more, politics, just like geoscience, is a specialized field that requires specialized training. Such training programs exist, as do organizations like 314 Action that help scientists overcome barriers to entering politics.

Naughton urged scientists not to be discouraged by the challenges of running for office. “We are trying to normalize the idea of public service with science,” she said.

“There are ways to serve your community that don’t require giving up your career or taking a pay cut,” she continued. “A lot of municipal and even state legislative positions are part-time and are meant to be served part-time while you continue with your career.”

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Larsen, too, encouraged scientists to participate more directly in politics. “If you’re not involved, you don’t have a voice,” he said. “Then we’re just leaving it to people who don’t understand science at all to make the decisions for science.”

Still, Bell feels that there’s a lot of overlap in what it takes to be a scientist and what it takes to be a politician. “Politics is very high stakes, just like the sciences, and it’s very competitive, just like sciences,” he said. Neither career pays the most or has the most job security. “It’s important for you to have the [conviction] in what you’re fighting for, in what’s right, the same way as in science,” he said.

But just as a scientist shouldn’t jump blithely into a new research area without doing a literature review, they should do their research before entering politics, Titone advised.

“Don’t set foot in city hall or the state house for the first time after you win an election,” she said. “You should set foot in those places well before that so you have an understanding of what the process is like, how people speak to each other, what some of the topics are, and how they cover them.”

“Then,” she added, “if you have a specific expertise on a specific topic, think about what things that you bring to the table that you can do to help solve some of the problems that are facing your area.”

Science in the governing chambers

But how does being a scientist actually help with being a lawmaker? For most geoscientists, their specific research topic is rarely, if ever, relevant.

Bell, who researches planetary impacts, joked that “there have not been major [impactors] that have struck the state of Rhode Island. And I really hope that that will continue to be the case!”

However, he recalled using his scientific expertise to advocate for a constituent whose home had been damaged by roadwork-driven seismicity. “The unique geology of the neighborhood in which she lived led to a much greater risk of seismic damage than would normally be the case,” he said.

Instead, scientists have found that the generalized skills developed when earning a science degree —critical thinking, asking tough questions, independent learning, collaboration, and teaching others — have served them the most when in office.

Larsen recalled that during his time as Nederland’s mayor, he ran on and spent time in office pushing for wildfire and climate resilience. These were issues in which, as a Mars researcher, he did not have direct scientific expertise but were critically important to the town’s residents. Larsen’s attention to those issues gained him recognition from Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign. He served briefly as a climate adviser for the campaign.

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Bell, too, said that his general scientific training really helped him to understand issues specific to his constituency. His skills allowed him “to punch through and question a lot of the industry propaganda,” for example, when it came to the physics involved in a proposed expansion of a natural gas pipeline in Rhode Island.

A lot of the information about the pipeline was “quite shockingly wrong,” Bell said. “And when it’s dressed up in fancy language from official reports, a lot of people won’t know the difference between totally garbage science and reasonable science.” His research skills helped him ask industry representatives piercing questions, though ultimately, the pipeline expansion was approved.

After several years in office, Titone found that her analytical approach to science-related legislation led her to “really earn the trust of my colleagues because they know that I know technology. I know the lingo. I understand some of the nuance and math,” she said. “Those skills have really helped me explain to people something that’s complex in a way that they can understand it.”

In fact, being a generalist is critical when it comes to making science- and data-driven decisions.

“As senators, we’re called on to legislate on everything under the Sun,” U.S. Senator John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), wrote in a statement to Eos. “We cover so much, so quickly, it helps to have some prior knowledge you bring to the table to understand the topics a little deeper.” Hickenlooper, a former geologist with a master’s degree in Earth and environmental sciences, is the only Earth scientist currently serving in the U.S. Senate.

“A facts-first approach is also something every senator should be using,” Hickenlooper wrote. “More scientists in government would help defuse the tensions and partisanship on many issues.”

But gathering facts and following logic are only the first steps to solving problems. Despite dreaming of purely science-based lawmaking, many scientists-turned-politicians have found that they need to balance other factors such as equity and cost when crafting even technical policies. A science-based solution to a problem might be cut and dry (for example, cutting carbon emissions to stop climate change); implementing that solution is often far from straightforward. Incremental progress is often more feasible, if a bit less palatable to a novice politician.

Public office is about doing what’s best for your community, Larsen said, and that means collaboration and cooperation, two critical skills for a scientist. “In mainstream news, politics is laid out as a very adversarial thing. It’s always red versus blue, right versus left. Pick your dichotomy,” he said. “But when you actually are in it and trying to get things done, it’s finding the compromise and finding the ways to do something that’s going to work for as many people as possible and make progress.”

“Fighting is the first thing I had to unlearn,” he added.

Eos repeatedly reached out to several GOP politicians with STEM backgrounds for this article but did not receive any replies.

Science’s champions

Though Barthelemy lost his June 25 primary challenge, he reflected that the process gave him a new stage to talk to people about STEM education, air quality in Salt Lake City, and the drying of the Great Salt Lake. Despite the election’s outcome, he found it to be a valuable experience.

“I think it’s critical to just even be part of the conversation so we can increase the discourse on the importance of science and also the importance of scientific literacy amongst the population,” Barthelemy said.

Regardless of your scientific background or political leanings, “when you get elected, you have to represent everyone, even the people who disagree with you,” Phoenix said. “And if you’re a scientist, that means people who think that what you work on is baloney.”

“Political parties are not mentioned anywhere in the U.S. Constitution,” Dewell noted. “Science is.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline From the lab to the legislature: STEM professionals run for political office on Oct 12, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Kimberly M. S. Cartier, Eos.

Ri Jong Ho was a senior economic official who served under all three generations of North Korea’s Kim Dynasty. In his most recent post, he was stationed in China to lead a trading corporation under the control of Office 39, a clandestine group formed in the 1970s to manage slush funds for the North Korean leadership. 

But in 2014, shortly after the current leader Kim Jong Un began purging his political rivals, including his own uncle Jang Song Thaek, Ri decided to defect to South Korea, taking his family with him. After two years there, they moved to the United States and currently reside in Virginia. 

Ri is now a contributor to a weekly radio program for RFA Korean. In an interview with RFA Korean’s Noh Jung Min, he revealed some of the inner workings of Office 39, including how the organization is able to get around international sanctions aimed at depriving Pyongyang of cash and resources that could be funneled into its nuclear and missile programs. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

RFA: Mr. Ri, You were a high-ranking official in North Korea. Could you briefly tell us what you did in North Korea and why you left?

Ri: Yes, I worked in North Korea’s central agency for about 30 years. In the meantime, I founded the Daehung Shipping Company and served as the president of the company. I also served as director of trade management of the Daehung General Bureau, North Korea’s largest trade agency. For this, I received the Hero of Labor award. 

Then, in 2013 and 2014, my thoughts changed 180 degrees as I witnessed the horrific barbarities committed by the young dictator Kim Jong Un, who took power and brutally executed his uncle, Jang Song Thaek, and hundreds of other senior officials. At that time, Pyongyang turned into a city of bloody fear. I had to witness the brutal execution of my close colleagues. North Korea was no longer a safe land for me, and my patriotism turned into hatred. I decided that this oppressive system must be changed, so in October 2014, I went into asylum with my family.

RFA: North Korea’s state-run media revealed a uranium enrichment facility for the first time on Sept. 13. Then a short-range ballistic missile was launched on Sept. 18. North Korea’s development of nuclear missiles and provocations continue despite the international community’s sanctions against it. Now that the pandemic is over, the government’s ability to generate foreign currency income is not the same as before, so I am curious about where the funds for nuclear development are coming from.

 Ri: The strong sanctions against North Korea by the United Nations and the United States are believed to have effectively blocked North Korea’s major exports such as coal, minerals and textile products. However, China and Russia did not properly implement sanctions against North Korea regarding the income earned by approximately 100,000 workers and thousands of IT technicians dispatched overseas. 

The uranium enrichment facility was completed in the early 2000s by (Kim Jong Un’s father and predecessor) Kim Jong Il, who received support from the South Korean government and invested that support intensively by importing centrifuges and other special equipment. At that time, North Korea also imported a lot of cutting-edge computer systems. I know this because my colleagues at that time worked on importing them. 

In October 2002, North Korea disclosed the operation of the uranium enrichment program during a visit by James A. Kelly, assistant U.S. secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. I believe the facility has been in operation since then. Since North Korea was not subject to strong sanctions until 2016, it steadily strengthened the material and technological foundation of its nuclear missile production base since the Kim Jong Il era up until then. In other words, I believe that the uranium enrichment facility did not suddenly appear but was completed beforehand.

RFA: Renovation is still going on at the sites of these nuclear facilities, and an astronomical amount of money continues to be spent to maintain them and manufacture and launch missiles. Is there a department responsible for this cost? How do they raise funds?

Ri: No specific department in Office 39 is responsible for costs. Many organizations are mobilized to make money, and the money is collected in the finance department of Office 39. Then, Kim Jong Un can spend it as he pleases. The Kim Jong Un regime secures funds through domestic resource development, including gold production. 

Also, the net profit earned by the 100,000 workers overseas and the thousands of IT technicians is estimated to be about US$300 million every year. I know this well because I have been calculating how much the overseas workers earn each month and how much the country collected during the time I was in North Korea.

Most of this money is deposited into Kim Jong Un’s revolutionary fund and is used by him to develop nuclear missiles or to purchase luxury goods. Also, it is used to provide a luxurious lifestyle for him and his family. There are rumors that the country is strengthening its nuclear force with the money it earned through selling weapons to Russia.

RFA: Could you be more specific about the breakdown to get to the $300 million figure?

 Ri: The monthly salary of workers dispatched to China is around 2,000 to 2,500 Chinese yuan. That is about $300. $200 of that is paid to the government and the remaining $100 is paid to workers. However, managers sometimes give the workers less. So that would come out to $240 to $250 million. There are about 2,000 to 3,000 IT engineers working in China and Russia. They reportedly earn between $50 to 100 million every year. I think this number is relatively accurate. American experts even told me the numbers were probably correct. The person who oversees all  this is Jo Yong Won, secretary for organizational affairs. He is close to Kim Jong Un.

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RFA Insider Podcast episode 14a (Timecode 7:17) -Hyunseung and Seohyun Lee, the children of Ri Jong Ho, discuss their father's former position and Office 39.

RFA: After sanctions against North Korea and the coronavirus pandemic, North Korea’s foreign currency earnings are way down. Circumstances have been detected in which North Korea is committing various illegal acts to raise funds. For example, through cyber hacking. Are there many concerns within North Korea about raising funds like this?

Ri: North Korea has always made detours when faced with sanctions. When the international community comes up with a policy toward North Korea, North Korea comes up with a plan. Since 2017, when Kim Jong Un’s money flow was blocked due to sanctions, he (ordered) cyber hacking crimes targeting the international financial system and cryptocurrency exchanges, stealing hundreds of millions of dollars every year. This is an important source of funds for the Kim Jong Un regime, which goes into its nuclear and missile programs.

North Korea’s hacker group is a state-level criminal force that targets financial networks and cryptocurrency exchanges around the world like a pirate group under the direct instruction of Kim Jong Un. They hack the financial system using professional and meticulous tactics and steal large amounts of funds.  The anonymity of cryptocurrencies is being used to launder and move funds around global financial watchdogs. I think we need a strong response to this and the sanctions against the Kim Jong Un regime should be increased further.

RFA: Do you think the international community’s sanctions against North Korea are effective?

Ri: There were reports that the Mercedes-Benz Maybach luxury car used by Kim Jong Un was imported into North Korea despite sanctions. This leads some to question their effectiveness. Electronic equipment used in missiles and parts for mobile missile launch vehicles are also smuggled into North Korea. I believe this is because China has relaxed (enforcement of) sanctions. 

Luxury goods can be transported ship-to-ship at sea, as they move in a few containers. I’ve seen this before. Unless the Chinese customs authorities monitor closely, it is difficult to crack down on it. Nevertheless, the effects of sanctions cannot be ignored. They cause difficulties for North Korea and isolate it internationally.

The effect of the UN sanctions announced against North Korea in 2017 was enormous. It included a complete ban on North Korea’s major exports of coal, minerals, marine products and textiles, and a ban on joint ventures with North Korea. These sanctions are still strong. I looked at the data, North Korea’s exports amount in 2013 was $4.1 billion, but the export amount in 2023 was only $290 million. 

As the coronavirus broke out, the order for all U.N. member states to repatriate North Korean workers to their home country was not carried out well. Many of these people remain abroad even five years later, and I believe this is becoming a major source of income flowing into Kim Jong Un’s slush fund.

RFA: We often hear from our sources in North Korea that residents express their dissatisfaction, with resources being diverted to the nuclear program. They say things like, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if the money used to develop nuclear missiles was used to buy food?’ Are the high-ranking officials aware of these complaints from residents?

Ri: Of course. Wouldn’t it be great if the money used for nuclear development were used to purchase food for North Korean residents? Regarding nuclear development, North Korean officials also had a strong opinion that economic development should be a priority, with the second nuclear test in 2009. 

Jang Song Thaek also opposed the third nuclear test in 2012 and said, “Let’s focus on the economy,” then he fell out with Kim Jong Un. In 2014, an official stationed overseas expressed dissatisfaction, saying ‘Food does not come from nuclear weapons, so why are we subjecting ourselves to sanctions by conducting nuclear tests and not developing the economy?’ This is the feeling of most North Korean officials. 

In 2014, a Cabinet official complained to me, saying, “If the money spent on national defense were used to import fertilizers, we wouldn’t have to worry about farming.” As he said, I believe that if Kim Jong Un had used the money spent on building up nuclear weapons for purchasing food and fertilizer, the North Korean people would be free from hunger and suffering.

In 2013, when Kim Jong Un was in the early days of taking power, he said, “If we have nuclear weapons, we can protect peace, the prosperity of the country, and the happy lives of the people.” 

However, the more that North Korea’s nuclear capabilities increased, the more severe that sanctions against the country became. The deepening international isolation caused the economy to collapse and the lives of the people to become even more difficult. Even now, there are many people dying of starvation in North Korea, just like during the (1990s famine). Nowadays, no one believes that having nuclear weapons will lead to a better life. The people are being sacrificed for Kim Jong Un’s personal maintenance of power and stability.

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

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Noh Jung Min for RFA Korean.

“CPJ is deeply alarmed by Israel’s closure of Al Jazeera’s office in the occupied West Bank, just months after it shuttered Al Jazeera’s operations in Israel after deeming it a threat to national security,” said CPJ’s program director, Carlos Martínez de la Serna, in New York. “Israel’s efforts to censor Al Jazeera severely undermine the public’s right to information on a war that has upended so many lives in the region. Al Jazeera’s journalists must be allowed to report at this critical time, and always.”

Al Jazeera aired footage of the raid, during which soldiers confiscated documents and equipment from the office. Soldiers seized the microphone from Al Jazeera’s West Bank bureau chief Walid al-Omari while he was live on air with correspondent Givara Budeiri outside the building. Al Jazeera said the forces also removed a poster of Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian American correspondent murdered by Israeli forces in 2022, from the building.  

The September 22 military order accused the broadcast’s West Bank operations of “incitement to and support of terrorism.” Israeli communications minister Shlomo Karhi confirmed the raid in a statement to Reuters, calling Al Jazeera a “mouthpiece” for Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. “We will continue to fight the enemy channels and ensure the safety of our heroic fighters,” he said.

CPJ’s headquarters in New York emailed the Israel Defense Forces’ North America desk for comment on the raid and closure but received no immediate response.

“This is part of a larger campaign against the Palestinian outlets and media in general aimed at erasing the truth,” al-Omari said in an interview with Al Araby Al Jadeed. “We’ve been under increasing incitement since the beginning of the war.”  

In May, the Israeli cabinet voted to ban Al Jazeera’s operations in Israel after the country’s parliament passed a law authorizing the shutdown of foreign channels’ broadcasts if the content was deemed to be a threat to the country’s security during the ongoing war. Until Sunday the broadcaster had continued to operate from Ramallah, a Palestinian city in the West Bank under Israeli military occupation; it still operates in Gaza, where the Israeli military has killed numerous Al Jazeera staff and freelancers since the start of the Israel-Gaza war in October 2023.

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

The International Press Institute (IPI) has strongly condemned the Israeli government’s recent decision to revoke the press passes of Al Jazeera journalists, months after the global news outlet was banned in the country.

“The Israeli government’s decision to revoke Al Jazeera press passes highlights a broader and deeply alarming pattern of harassment of journalists and attacks on press freedom in Israel and the region,” IPI interim executive director Scott Griffen said.

The Israeli government announced it will be revoking all press passes previously issued to Al Jazeera journalists.

• READ MORE: Hezbollah blames Israel after Lebanon pager blasts killed at least 9 and wounded 2750 across Lebanon and Syria
• UN General Assembly debates end to Israeli occupation of Palestine
• Beyond Gaza: The terror in the West Bank

Nitzan Chen, director of Israel’s Government Press Office (GPO), announced the decision via X on Thursday, accusing Al Jazeera of spreading “false content” and “incitement against Israelis”.

Use of press office cards in the course of the journalists’ work could in itself “jeopardise state security at this time”, claimed Chen.

The journalists affected by the decision would be given a hearing before their passes are officially revoked.

While the GPO press card is not mandatory, without it a journalist in Israel will not be able to access Parliament, Israeli government ministries, or military infrastructure.

Only Israeli recognised pass
It is also the only card recognised at Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank.

Griffen said the move was indicative of a “systematic effort” by Israeli authorities to “expand its control over media reporting about Israel, including reporting on and from Gaza”.

He added: “We strongly urge Israel to respect freedom of the press and access to information, which are fundamental human rights that all democracies must respect and protect.”

In May, Israel’s cabinet unanimously voted to shut down Al Jazeera in the country, immediately ordering the closure of its offices and a ban on the company’s broadcasts.

At the time, Al Jazeera described it as a “criminal act” and warned that Israel’s suppression of the free press “stands in contravention of international and humanitarian law”.

GPO Director Nitzan Chen: “Al Jazeera disseminates false content, which includes incitement against Israelis and Jews and constitutes a threat to IDF soldiers. Use of GPO cards in the course of the journalists’ work could in itself jeopardize state security at this time”.
(2/3)

— Gov’t Press Office (@GPOIsrael) September 12, 2024

Al Jazeera is widely regarded as the most balanced global news network covering the war on Gaza in contrast to many Western news services perceived as biased in favour of Israel.

Media freedom petition rejected
A petition for military authorities to allow foreign journalists to report inside Gaza was rejected by the Israeli Supreme Court in January 2024.

IPI and other media watchdogs have repeatedly called on Israel to allow international media access to Gaza and ensure the safety of journalists.

At least 173 Palestinian journalists are reported to have been killed in Israel’s war on Gaza with the latest killing of reporter Abdullah Shakshak, who was shot by an Israeli military quadcopter in Rafah in southern Gaza.

UN General Assembly debates end to Israeli occupation of Palestine.    Video: Al Jazeera

Deadly pager attack
Meanwhile, the deadly en masse explosion of pagers in Lebanon and Syria killing 11 and wounding almost 3000 people that has widely been attributed to Israel raises questions about what the end game may be, amid rising tensions in the region, say analysts.

Mairav Zonszein, a senior Israeli analyst at the International Crisis Group, told Al Jazeera that the attack was something that Israel had had in the works for several months and risked losing if Hezbollah became suspicious.

This concern may have led the Israeli army to trigger the blasts, but Israel’s strategy overall remains unclear.

“Where is Israel going to go from here? This question still hasn’t been answered,” Zonszein said.

“Without a ceasefire in Gaza, it’s unclear how Israel plans to de-escalate, or if Netanyahu is in fact trying to spark a broader war,” the analyst added, noting that more Israeli troops were now stationed in the West Bank and along the northern border than in the Gaza Strip.

In a historic moment, Palestine, newly promoted to observer status at the UN General Assembly (UNGA), has submitted a draft resolution at the body demanding an end to Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories.

Building on a recent International Court of Justice ruling, the resolution calls for Israel to withdraw its troops, halt settlement expansion, and return land taken since 1967 within 12 months.

While the US opposes the resolution, it has no veto power in the UNGA, and the body has previously supported Palestinian recognition.

The resolution, which will be voted on by UNGA members today, is not legally binding, but reflects global opinion as leaders gather for high-level UN meetings next week.

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

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The Dane County Sheriff’s Office in Wisconsin has agreed to make a series of reforms meant to ensure that residents who speak little or no English can get the services they need.

The agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice resolves a civil rights inquiry that followed ProPublica reporting last year on how the sheriff’s office had mistakenly blamed an immigrant worker for his son’s 2019 death on a dairy farm. The reporting revealed that a language barrier between the worker and a sheriff’s deputy had led to the misunderstanding.

Under the Civil Rights Act, agencies that receive federal funding, such as the sheriff’s office in Dane County, cannot discriminate against people because of their country of origin or ability to speak English. The Justice Department said that there was no finding of discrimination against the sheriff’s office and that it “fully cooperated” with the inquiry.

As part of the agreement, which was signed over the past week, Dane County says it will finalize a language access policy that includes staff training, quality controls and outreach initiatives, and will undergo a period of departmental monitoring. The new policy — which has been in progress for months — will set standards on when deputies can use children, bystanders and tools such as Google Translate to communicate with non-English speakers. It also creates a process to ensure that, after an emergency situation is over, deputies can confirm the accuracy of information that was gathered via unqualified interpreters.

José María Rodríguez Uriarte, the father of the dead boy, said he was relieved to learn of the agreement.

“I think this will really put pressure on police to obtain clearer translations when they can’t understand a person,” he told ProPublica in Spanish. “A lot of us get into a panic when we’re pulled over by the police or when something happens because of the language issue; we don’t know if officers are truly there to help us or, on the contrary, to harm us. So this is a good thing.”

ProPublica’s reporting had found that a different worker had accidentally killed Rodríguez’s son, a precocious 8-year-old named Jefferson. That worker told ProPublica that it was his first day on the job and that he’d received little training before operating a skid steer, a large piece of equipment used on the farm to scrape up cow manure; he said he wasn’t aware the boy was behind him when he put the machine in reverse.

Deputies never interviewed the man, who like the boy’s father was a recent immigrant from Nicaragua and didn’t speak English. A deputy on the scene who considered herself proficient in Spanish interviewed Rodríguez, but she made a grammatical mistake that led her to misunderstand his account of what actually happened.

In a statement, Dane County Sheriff Kalvin Barrett said his office is committed to equality and inclusion. “By proactively addressing language barriers, we are fostering a more connected community where everyone can fully participate,” he said. Last week, the department posted a page on its website about its efforts to improve language access and included the material in six languages, including English, Spanish and Hmong.

The agreement is part of a Justice Department initiative intended to help law enforcement agencies overcome language barriers to better serve communities and keep officers safe.

“To serve and protect all communities in the United States, our state and local law enforcement agencies must be able to communicate effectively with crime victims, witnesses, and other members of the public who do not speak fluent English,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement.

The story of what happened to Jefferson brought unprecedented attention to the plight of the mostly undocumented immigrant workers who milk cows and shovel manure in America’s Dairyland. Local and state officials began calling for reforms. In the months after ProPublica’s investigation was published, county officials allocated $8 million to create new housing for farmworkers and established a countywide coordinator position to help all departments implement language access plans and engage community members with limited English proficiency. Jefferson’s parents also reached a settlement with the farm where he died and its insurance company, neither of which admitted wrongdoing. The case had been scheduled for trial but was resolved weeks after the story was published.

Since his son’s death, Rodríguez has been working on another dairy farm in the area. He said he hopes to return to Nicaragua in December to be reunited with his remaining son, Jefferson’s younger brother, Yefari. The boy is now one year older than Jefferson was when he died.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jameel.

They held banners saying, “Vance Profits, We Pay The Price,” “Billionaires Own JD Vance” and “Vance Stop Killing Green Jobs”. Young people denounced JD Vance’s plans to kill green jobs by dismantling policies like the Inflation Reduction Act, which provided $500 million to upgrade a steel plant in Vance’s hometown. That grant created jobs and helped keep the plant open. This was the first protest at J.D. Vance’s office since he became the Vice Presidential nominee.

“I was willing to get arrested today because my future and our country shouldn’t be for sale,” said Takeira Bell, 21. “JD Vance is willing to sell our futures to the highest bidder. He will kill green jobs, give tax breaks to billionaires, and deny that there is a climate crisis just to keep the campaign contributions flowing. Today, we showed up to tell him, ‘We won’t let you sell out our families to the highest bidder.”

As recently as 2020, Vance spoke about climate change as a serious threat, even saying natural gas “isn’t exactly the sort of thing that’s gonna take us to a clean energy future.” Since running for Senate and receiving nearly $300,000 during his 2022 campaign from oil and gas-linked PACs and donors, he’s made a 180 on his climate positions.

“JD Vance says he is a champion of the working class. In practice, he’s a champion of whoever wrote him the biggest check.” said Sunrise Executive Director Aru Shiney-Ajay. “He used to talk about how we were facing a climate crisis. Then oil and gas donors and Donald Trump offered him hundreds of thousands of dollars and a chance to be Vice President, and he totally changed his tune. Who knows what JD Vance will support the next time a billionaire comes knocking.”

“As a young person who grew up in Montana, I am deeply passionate about pursuing a career in wildland firefighting so I can actively serve my community and ecosystems. To hear that JD Vance wants to cut green jobs like these that are already underfunded is a direct attack on working class front line workers and an insult to my generation” said Carly Bryant, 18.

This protest comes as Sunrise members prepare to go to the DNC Headquarters in DC later in the day to urge VP Harris to put forward a plan to fight for young, working class people that can confront the false promises from right-wing politicians like Vance.

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

"Starting from August 1, all businesses except the U.S. Consulate will be closed," an employee who answered the phone at Shanghai's Westgate Mall said when contacted by Radio Free Asia on July 24.

The U.S. Consulate said it would continue to run its visa and immigration services from the 9th floor of the mall, on Shanghai's Nanjing Road shopping street.

"Please note, due to a planned renovation, other businesses and stores in Westgate Mall will cease operation beginning Aug. 1, 2024," the Consulate said in a notice on its official website, adding: "The Non-Immigrant Visa and American Citizen Services units will continue to operate."

The closures come amid an economic downturn that has seen nearly 7,000 retail outlets closed down in China during the first six months of this year despite ongoing efforts by the ruling Chinese Communist Party to boost economic growth by encouraging consumption.

One of the biggest tenants of the mall, Shanghai Westgate Isetan Department Store shut down at the end of June after its lease expired.

A resident of Shanghai who gave only the surname Hu for fear of reprisals said businesses are closing down all over the city, citing a recent trip to a building at the intersection of Nanjing Road and Tibet Road, where he said some two thirds of the restaurants had shut down.

"Nanjing Road is the top shopping street in the whole of China, maybe first or second in the whole of Asia," Hu said. 

"There used to be a lot of foreigners around there, but there's hardly anyone in the malls these days -- they're dead," Hu said.

No money to spend

Chen Soong-hsing, an adjunct professor in China Studies at Taiwan's Chinese Culture University who lived and worked in Shanghai for three years, said the economic downturn has hit the city hard.

"To start with, we were worried about foreign capital leaving, but even Chinese companies can't stay in operation, and are moving overseas," Chen said.

"The rich are voting with their feet, and Shanghai was where the richest people in China were concentrated," he said.

The investment community platform PEDaily.com quoted incomplete statistics from Yilan Business as saying that in the first half of 2024, at least 6,882 stores in China announced they would close, including some in major chains like Walmart and Alibaba's Freshippo.

The 2024 China Consumer Trends Survey from international consulting firm McKinsey cited worries about unemployment or income instability, asset depreciation and debt as contributing to the dearth of consumer demand.

"Ordinary people just don't have any money to spend," Hu said. "Even some people in Shanghai who have some money daren't spend recklessly, and are dialing back their consumption."

Chen said that if the downturn is so clearly visible in Shanghai, a top-tier city, then the situation must be far worse in smaller cities across China.

He said the current leadership under Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping has done little to assuage people's fears.

"The current group of leaders have no idea about how to deal with our current economic difficulties, so they continue to cut interest rates and stimulate liquidity," Chen said.

Hong Kong also hit

China announced unexpectedly on Thursday that its central bank would cut its one-year medium term policy loan lending rate by 20 basis points to 2.3%, the biggest rate cut since the ending of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions in 2022.

Meanwhile, a brief survey by RFA Cantonese found empty offices and piled up utility bills throughout a US$7 billion skyscraper in Hong Kong called The Center.

Several units were vacant when visited on July 24, with large numbers of unopened bills for water and other letters piling up outside the doors to individual units.

A notice posted on the door of one shuttered office once occupied by the asset management group Sanne Group Asia said the company had moved.

An office worker who gave only the surname Lee for fear of reprisals said the city's government is struggling to rekindle economic confidence.

"They're trying to find foreign investors who want to come back, but it's not easy," Lee said. "There is around 20% to 30% less [foreign investment] than before."

An IT worker in the same building who gave only the surname Tang for fear of reprisals said there are also fewer people in Hong Kong, following a mass exodus of middle-class families amid an ongoing crackdown on peaceful protest and political dissent.

"We have some vacancies in my office because some of our colleagues have emigrated," Tang said. "There are around 20 less of us than before."

Asked if he was worried, Tang replied: "Yes, we are, a bit, because it's affecting the economy."

"Everyone is a little worried about their future prospects," he said.

Downsizing

At the end of 2023, offices in The Center were renting for around HK$28,000 per square foot for a full-floor office in the middle levels of the building.

Similar spaces cost around HK$50,000 per square foot in September 2018, according to figures from the real estate company Centaline.

Simon Lee, an honorary teaching and research fellow at the Chinese University of Hong Kong Business School, said that while The Center alone may not be enough of a bellwether for the city's economy, he believes the current situation in Hong Kong is "somewhat unfortunate."

"Foreign investors are downsizing and in some cases withdrawing altogether," Lee said. "Chinese capital should be the main thing that is supporting the office market, but some Chinese investors have run into difficulties, and some haven't done a good job of managing risk."

"If Hong Kong were to get back its former economic momentum and go back to the situation we had in 2018, I think office buildings would be in huge demand again," he said. "But when will that day come?"

Translated by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Huang Chun-mei for RFA Mandarin, Wei Sze and Matthew Leung for RFA Cantonese.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This article is a partnership between ProPublica, where Pamela Colloff is a senior reporter, and The New York Times Magazine, where she is a staff writer.

Sunny Eaton never imagined herself working at the district attorney’s office. A former public defender, she once represented Nashville, Tennessee’s least powerful people, and she liked being the only person in a room willing to stand by someone when no one else would. She spent a decade building her own private practice, but in 2020, she took an unusual job as the director of the conviction-review unit in the Nashville DA’s office. Her assignment was to investigate past cases her office had prosecuted and identify convictions for which there was new evidence of innocence.

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The enormousness of the task struck her on her first day on the job, when she stood in the unit’s storage room and took in the view: Three-ring binders, each holding a case flagged for evaluation, stretched from floor to ceiling. The sheer number of cases reflected how much the world had changed over the previous 30 years. DNA analysis and scientific research had exposed the deficiencies of evidence that had, for decades, helped prosecutors win convictions. Many forensic disciplines — from hair and fiber comparison to the analysis of blood spatter, bite marks, burn patterns, shoe and tire impressions and handwriting — were revealed to lack a strong scientific foundation, with some amounting to quackery. Eyewitness identification turned out to be unreliable. Confessions could be elicited from innocent people.

Puzzling out which cases to pursue was not easy, but Eaton did her best work when she treaded into uncertain territory. Early in her career, as she learned her way around the courthouse, she felt, she says, like “an outsider in every way — a queer Puerto Rican woman with no name and no connections.” That outsider sensibility never completely left her, and it served her well at the DA’s office, where she was armed with a mandate that required her to be independent of any institutional loyalties. She saw her job as a chance to change the system from within. Beneath the water-stained ceiling of her new office, she hung a framed Toni Morrison quote on the wall: “The function of freedom is to free someone else.”

If Eaton concluded that a conviction was no longer supported by the evidence, she was expected to go back to court and try to undo that conviction. The advent of DNA analysis, and the revelations that followed, did not automatically free people who were convicted on debunked evidence or discredited forensics. Many remain locked up, stuck in a system that gives them limited grounds for appeal. In the absence of any broad, national effort to rectify these convictions, the work of unwinding them has fallen to a patchwork of law-school clinics, innocence projects and, increasingly, conviction-review units in reform-minded offices like Nashville’s. Working with only one other full-time attorney, Anna Hamilton, Eaton proceeded at a ferocious pace, recruiting law students and cajoling a rotating cast of colleagues to help her.

By early 2023, her team had persuaded local judges to overturn five murder convictions. Still, each case they took on was a gamble; a full reinvestigation of a single innocence claim could span years, with no guarantee of clarity at the end — or any certainty, even if she found exculpatory evidence, that she could spur the courts to act. One afternoon, as she weighed the risks of delving into a case she had spent months poring over, State of Tennessee v. Russell Lee Maze, she reached for a document that Hamilton wanted her to read: a copy of the journal that the defendant’s wife, Kaye Maze, wrote about the events at the heart of the case.

The journal began a quarter-century earlier with Kaye’s unexpected but much wanted pregnancy in the fall of 1998. Then 34 and the manager of the jewelry department at a local Walmart, Kaye had been unable to conceive in a previous marriage, and she was elated to be pregnant. Her husband, who shared in her excitement, accompanied her to every prenatal visit. But early on, there were signs of trouble, and Kaye was told she might miscarry. “I found out at four weeks that I was pregnant,” she wrote. “I was in the hospital two days later with cramping and bleeding.” The bleeding continued intermittently throughout her pregnancy, and she suffered from intense, at times unrelenting nausea and vomiting. She was put on bed rest, and Russell cared for her while also working the overnight shift at a trucking company. For the next six months, they hoped and waited, while Kaye remained in a state of suspended animation.

Eaton noted dates and details as she read. “After developing gestational diabetes, pregnancy-induced hypertension and having low amniotic fluid, it was decided to induce labor at 34 weeks,” Kaye wrote. When she gave birth to her son, Alex, on March 25, 1999, he weighed 3 pounds, 12 ounces.

Alex spent the first 13 days of his life in the neonatal intensive care unit. Kaye and Russell roomed with him before he was discharged, taking classes on preemie care and infant CPR. Because he had been diagnosed with supraventricular tachycardia, or an unusually rapid heart rhythm, they were provided a heart monitor and taught to count his heart rate. The Mazes were attentive parents, Eaton could see. In the three weeks that followed his release from the hospital, they took him to doctors and medical facilities seven different times. When they took him to an after-hours clinic on April 18 to report that he was grunting and seemed to be struggling to breathe, a physician dismissed their concerns. “We were told that as long as we were able to console Alex, there was nothing wrong with him, except he was spoiled,” Kaye wrote. The doctor advised them, she continued, “that we, as new and anxious parents, needed to learn what was normal.”

It was the admonition — that they were too vigilant — that discouraged them from seeking medical attention when a bruise emerged on their son’s left temple and then his right temple. Another bruise appeared on his stomach. Russell worried that the tummy massage he had given his son to relieve a bout of painful constipation was to blame. “We are concerned,” Kaye wrote, “but trying not to jump at shadows.”

On May 3, Kaye left their apartment to buy formula. Half an hour later, Russell placed a frantic phone call to 911 to report that Alex had stopped breathing. He performed CPR until paramedics arrived. The baby was rushed to the hospital, where doctors discovered he had a subdural hematoma and retinal hemorrhaging; blood had collected under the membrane that encased his brain and behind his eyes. Preliminary medical tests turned up no obvious signs of infection or illness. With bruising visible on both his forehead and his abdomen, suspicion quickly fell on the Mazes. “We were told Alex had injuries that you only see with shaken baby syndrome,” Kaye wrote. A doctor who was called in to examine the 5-week-old for signs of abuse “told me she thought Russell hurt Alex.”

Eaton read the journal knowing that in the years since the infant was taken to the emergency room, shaken baby syndrome has come under increasing scrutiny. A growing body of research has demonstrated that the triad of symptoms doctors traditionally used to diagnose the syndrome — brain swelling and bleeding around the brain and behind the eyes — are not necessarily produced by shaking; a range of natural and accidental causes can generate the same symptoms. Nevertheless, shaken baby syndrome and its presumption of abuse have served, and continue to serve, as the rationale for separating children from their parents and for sending mothers, fathers and caretakers to prison. It’s impossible to quantify the total number of Americans convicted on the basis of the diagnosis — only the slim fraction of cases that meet the legal bar to appeal and lead to a published appellate decision. Still, an analysis of these rulings from 2008 to 2018 found 1,431 such criminal convictions.

When Alex was discharged from the hospital three weeks later, he had been removed from his parents’ custody and placed in special-needs foster care. The DA’s office charged Russell with aggravated child abuse. He was jailed that June and found guilty by a jury the following February.

Alex’s health continued to deteriorate, and on Oct. 25, 2000, over the Mazes’ emphatic objections, he was taken off life support. When Russell’s conviction was later vacated on a technicality, prosecutors charged him again, this time with murder. He was found guilty in 2004 and sentenced to life in prison. By the time Eaton examined the case, he had been behind bars for nearly a quarter-century.

She turned to the journal’s final entry. “My beautiful baby took 20 minutes to leave us,” Kaye wrote about the day of Alex’s death, when she was permitted to cradle him in the presence of his foster parents. “I held him in my arms, rocked him and sang him into Heaven. This is the most horrific thing for any mother to have to endure. The agony that my husband felt at not being allowed to be there is an agony no father should have to endure. What the state of Tennessee has taken from us can never be replaced or forgiven.”

Eaton understood that if she decided to take on the Maze case and concluded that Russell did not abuse his son, she was still looking at long odds. She would have to go before the original trial judge — a defendant with an innocence claim typically starts with the court where the case was first heard — to argue that the police, prosecutors and jurors got it wrong. That judge, Steve Dozier, was a no-nonsense former prosecutor and the son of a veteran police officer, who might be disinclined to disturb the jury’s verdict. But it was still early in Eaton’s investigation, and she did not know what she would find — only that she needed to first understand what persuaded jurors of Russell’s guilt.

That evidence included testimony from the diagnosing doctor, Suzanne Starling, who told jurors that the bleeding around Alex’s brain and eyes indicated that he endured a ferocious act of violence by shaking. “You would be appalled at what this looked like,” she testified at Russell’s first trial. So forceful was the shaking, she added, that “children who fall from three or four floors onto concrete will get a similar brain injury.” Eaton also needed to make sense of a set of X-rays suggesting that Alex’s left clavicle had been fractured and a recording of an interrogation that prosecutors characterized as an admission of guilt.

When Eaton listened to the scratchy audio of Russell’s interrogation, she could hear the insistent voice of a police detective, Ron Carter, posing a series of increasingly combative questions. The investigator’s confrontational style had been considered good police work, Eaton recognized, but she observed that Carter would not take no for an answer when Russell denied hurting his child. Carter was mirroring what Starling told investigators; informed that the baby had been shaken, Carter predicated his questions on that seemingly incontrovertible fact. “You had to have shaken the child,” he told Russell. “That’s the only way it could’ve happened.” The detective repeated this idea more than a dozen times. Russell was already in a state of distress; he had just withstood four previous rounds of questioning at the hospital — from the treating physicians, Starling, another detective and a child welfare investigator — and he did not know if his son was going to live or die.

As Eaton studied the interview, she could see that Russell consistently denied harming his son. But he never asked for an attorney, and in unguarded comments, he sought to help the detective fill in the blanks of a situation that he himself did not seem to understand. He agreed that it was “possible” that while picking up Alex or putting Alex in a car seat, he had accidentally jostled the baby. “But as far as physically shaking him to the point of causing injury, no,” he said. Carter warned him that he was getting “deeper and deeper and deeper in trouble” and that his baby boy was “lying up there, and it’s for something that you caused.” The detective continued to insist that Russell was not telling the truth and that only he or Kaye could be to blame because they were Alex’s sole caretakers. Worn down, Russell finally hypothesized that he might have jostled, or even shaken, his son to try to revive him after finding him unresponsive. “I guess I could,” Russell said, sounding bewildered. “It’s possible.”

To Eaton’s ears, this did not amount to a confession. As she understood it, Russell was pressured to either accept blame or point the finger at his wife. He had remained steadfast that he did nothing to cause Alex to become unresponsive but found the baby that way.

The case did not look like the abuse cases she saw as a public defender; rather than hiding their son away, the Mazes put him in front of doctors again and again. But Eaton knew that once investigators and then prosecutors settle on the theory of a case, the state’s narrative calcifies, and DAs will go to great lengths to defend it. DA’s offices often reflexively reject innocence claims and even block defendants’ efforts to have the courts consider potentially exonerating evidence. Their faith in the underlying police work, and their certainty about a defendant’s guilt, can make prosecutors resist acknowledging a mistake. So, too, can the political pressure to protect the office’s record and to appear tough on crime. “It’s ingrained in some prosecutors to fight for the sake of fighting,” says Jason Gichner, the Tennessee Innocence Project’s deputy director, who now represents Russell Maze.

When Nashville created a conviction-review unit to try to disrupt this prosecutorial mindset, it was following the earlier lead of another reform-minded DA’s office. In 2007, Dallas’ newly elected district attorney, Craig Watkins, established what he called the conviction-integrity unit. The office he inherited had a long and ugly history of tipping the scales of justice against Black citizens, and Watkins wanted to harness the power of an innovative technology, DNA analysis, to see if he could undo some of the harms of that legacy. The unit reviewed hundreds of convictions in which defendants’ requests for testing had been denied. “When a plane crashes, we investigate,” Watkins told the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2012 when he testified about wrongful convictions. “We do not pretend that it did not happen; we do not falsely promise that it will not happen again; but we learn from it, and we make necessary adjustments so it won’t happen again.” By the time he left office in 2015, his conviction-integrity unit had exonerated 24 people, nearly all of them Black men. Since then the office has secured nine more exonerations.

Watkins’ vision for changing the system from inside inspired prosecutors in cities across the country to form their own conviction-review units. But because unraveling complex, long-ago criminal cases is labor-intensive, conviction-review units are unheard-of in the smaller, resource-strapped DA’s offices that dot rural America. Of some 2,300 prosecutors’ offices nationwide, just around 100 have them. In jurisdictions that have the funding and the political will for them — and where they are staffed not with career prosecutors but with attorneys who have defense experience — they can be powerful tools. According to data collected by the National Registry of Exonerations, these units have helped clear more than 750 people. Last year, they played a role in nearly 40% of the nation’s exonerations.

In the years that followed Russell’s murder conviction, doctors who challenged the notion that shaken baby syndrome’s symptoms were always evidence of abuse faced resistance from prosecutors. Brian Holmgren, who led the Nashville DA office’s child-abuse unit until 2015, and who tried the Maze case, built a national profile as one of the most strident critics. While a prosecutor, he served on the international advisory board for the National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome, a nonprofit advocacy group, and he lectured around the country about how to conduct shaken baby prosecutions. He also was a co-author of two 2013 law-review articles, which lambasted doctors who testified for the defense in such cases as unethical and mercenary, suggesting that they were willing to offer unscientific testimony for the right price.

Holmgren made no secret of his disdain for these doctors when he delivered a keynote presentation at a National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome conference in Atlanta in 2010. Standing before an image of Pinocchio, he read from the testimony of physicians who had refuted shaken baby diagnoses, the puppet’s nose growing longer with each quote. He concluded his talk by inviting a guitar-playing pediatrician to lead the audience in a sing-along to the tune of “If I Only Had a Brain” from “The Wizard of Oz”:

I will say there is no basis for the claims in shaking cases,

My opinion’s in demand.

Though my theories are outrageous, I’ll work hard to earn my wages

If I only get 10 grand.

Holmgren’s impassioned advocacy on behalf of child victims made him a polarizing figure in Nashville. In 2015, The Tennessean ran a front-page article revealing that he told a public defender he would not offer a plea deal in a child-neglect case unless her client, who was mentally ill (she had stabbed herself in the stomach during one pregnancy), agreed to be sterilized.

His dismissal soon after was part of a sea change at the DA’s office that began in 2014, when voters elected Glenn Funk, a longtime defense lawyer, to be the city’s top prosecutor. As a sign of his commitment to reform, Funk created the conviction-review unit in late 2016, when CRUs were virtually nonexistent in the South. But for the first three years, it was by all measures a failure. Hamstrung by its own bureaucratic rules — a panel of seven prosecutors had to agree before any formal investigation could occur — the unit had yet to reopen a case. In 2020, Funk persuaded Eaton to come run the unit with assurances that she would not have to contend with the panel of prosecutors and that she would answer only to him.

Eaton needed qualified medical experts to evaluate the evidence in the Maze case, but she thought the public vilification of doctors might still give pause to one she wanted to talk to: Dr. Michael Laposata, who previously served as chief pathologist at Vanderbilt University Hospital in Nashville.

Laposata had spent much of his career recommending that physicians rigorously search for underlying diseases when evaluating children who are bruised or bleeding internally, rather than leaping to a determination of abuse. His body of work has shown that the symptoms of certain blood disorders can mimic — and be almost indistinguishable from — those of trauma. In 2005, he and a co-author wrote a seminal paper for The American Journal of Clinical Pathology, which acknowledged at the outset that child abuse too often goes undetected. But the fear among clinicians that they might inadvertently overlook a child’s suffering “has produced a high zeal for identifying cases of child abuse,” and that zeal, the paper argued, combined with a lack of expertise in blood disorders, had led to catastrophic mistakes. “It is very easy for a health care worker to presume that bruising and bleeding is associated with trauma because the coagulopathies” — disorders of blood coagulation — “that may explain the findings are often poorly understood.” Such a misinterpretation, the paper cautioned, could result in the false conclusion that a child had been abused.

Now the chief of pathology at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, Laposata was initially guarded when the conviction-review unit asked if he would assess the Maze case, explaining that he was already overcommitted. He agreed to look at Alex’s lab reports and Kaye’s prenatal and birth records, but he made no promises that he could do more. His hesitance fell away after he reviewed the material. One fact leapt out at him immediately: Alex’s blood work was not normal. The infant’s hematocrit, or concentration of red blood cells, was not only extremely low; the size and shape of those cells were also atypical. This suggested a problem with red blood cell production that would have taken time to evolve, making it inconsistent with acute trauma. He put this into simpler language when he spoke with Eaton and her team, and she wrote down and underlined his words: “Abnormal red blood cells are not created from child abuse.” These abnormalities raised the suspicion of an undiagnosed blood disorder.

The pathologist also zeroed in on Kaye’s prenatal history. In addition to the health issues she enumerated in her journal, Laposata noticed a positive result for an antinuclear antibody test, commonly associated with an autoimmune disorder. Pregnant women with such disorders often develop antibodies and can pass them to the fetus, he explained. Those antibodies can remain in their infants’ systems for months and may lead to the formation of blood clots. He could see that the treating physicians did not conduct all the necessary tests to determine if Alex carried antibodies that would have predisposed him to clotting abnormalities. “It is surprising that these tests were never performed on the child given the extreme circumstances and the clinical implications of having a clot in the brain,” Laposata later wrote.

The likelihood that Alex suffered from an undiagnosed health condition raised serious questions about the prosecution’s case, and from that point on, Eaton did not look back; this was the conviction on which her team would focus. That there was a plausible medical explanation for Alex’s bruises also had profound implications for Kaye. Prosecutors had pointed to them as evidence that Kaye should have known her husband was abusing their son, and for failing to protect him, they charged her in June 1999 with aggravated assault. After she was told that having an open criminal case would make it harder to regain custody, Kaye took an Alford plea to a reduced felony charge — a plea that allows defendants to accept punishment while maintaining their innocence. She received a two-year suspended sentence and never regained her parental rights.

Eaton often thought about Kaye as she sifted through the case file. If Kaye had been willing to testify against her husband, she might have won back custody of her son, and in return for her cooperation, her criminal charge could have been reduced or dropped. Yet she always stood by Russell. She was unequivocal when she testified at his murder trial, insisting that he was not capable of hurting their child. She moved to rural East Tennessee after he was incarcerated there, so she could visit him as often as possible. She never abandoned their marriage. Eaton knew that such loyalty was rare; long prison sentences often lead to divorce, and the more time a person remains locked up, the more likely the marriage is to fall apart. Kaye’s resolute belief in her husband was not the kind of hard evidence Eaton was seeking, but she filed it away, another data point to consider.

Eaton had noticed a detail in the trial transcripts that she found telling: A police officer named Robert Anderson testified that when he arrived at the apartment as paramedics worked to revive Alex, he saw Russell looking on, impassive. He was acting “rather calmly, just kind of watching,” Anderson told the jury. “He didn’t appear upset, no, not from the outside.” The inference was that Russell was callous, even cold-blooded.

Eaton, having followed the emerging research on trauma, saw something different in his emotionlessness. The encounter with police came just after Russell struggled to resuscitate his son, who had turned blue and gone into cardiac arrest. She was struck by how little the investigators who first interacted with the Mazes understood acute stress and how much that lack of knowledge shaped the investigation that followed.

Eaton had educated herself about the effects of trauma because it had altered not only the lives of her defense clients but also her own. She arrived in Nashville during a tumultuous adolescence, after running away from home in Clarksville, Tennessee, at the age of 16. “I’d experienced a significant trauma, and I didn’t know how to ask for help,” she told me. She was from a peripatetic military family that was not equipped to give her the intensive support she needed. In a Nashville phone booth, Eaton spotted a sticker that read, IF YOU ARE A TEENAGER AND YOU NEED HELP, CALL THIS NUMBER. She dialed the number and, weeping into the receiver, said she had nowhere else to turn.

That phone call, Eaton believes, saved her life. It led her to an emergency shelter for teenagers, where she found counselors who were trained in crisis intervention, and after receiving daily therapy, she returned to Clarksville to finish high school. From that point forward, she knew she wanted to go into a helping profession — a journey that led her first to psychology and then to the law. She was drawn to representing defendants, whom she saw as survivors of trauma too. “No 5-year-old dreams of growing up to become a felon,” she told me. She joined the public defender’s office in 2007, and squaring off against the DA’s office day after day, she proved to be both quick on her feet and tenacious. Three years later, she started her own private practice.

Funk, the district attorney, had always regarded her as one of the brightest stars in Nashville’s criminal defense bar, and as his conviction-review unit foundered, he began talking to her in 2019 about taking the helm. He knew that if he wanted to make the unit effective, he had to put someone with her singular focus and defense experience in charge. Nashville’s CRU was not the only one to fall short of expectations; many conviction-review units have not produced an exoneration. Some are simply overburdened and underfunded, while others have met resistance from local judges. But underperforming conviction-review units have also given rise to suspicion, among defense attorneys, that there is a more cynical calculus at work; they see DAs who want to signal their commitment to justice reform without actually doing the hard work of challenging fellow prosecutors and local police officers.

“The C.R.U., as presently constituted, is a complete and utter sham,” the defense lawyer Daniel Horwitz wrote in 2018, when the Nashville DA’s office declined to act on new information that his client, convicted of murder, was the wrong man.

In Funk’s willingness to try to do better, Eaton saw an opportunity to give defendants with credible innocence claims a fair hearing, while using the resources of the state to investigate. The first case she took on, in the summer of 2020, was Horwitz’s client, Joseph Webster. Tennessee law does not give prosecutors any clear mechanism to get back into court if they uncover a potential wrongful conviction. Eaton coordinated with Horwitz, who had already obtained DNA testing of the murder weapon and tracked down eyewitnesses to the killing whom the police had ignored. After conducting her own independent investigation, which built on two years of work by her predecessor, she went to court to jointly argue with the defense that Webster should walk free. His conviction was vacated, and he was released, having served nearly 15 years of a life sentence.

This became the template for how Eaton worked. Conducting her own parallel investigations alongside the Tennessee Innocence Project, she probed more troubled cases. Of the five convictions she helped undo, three relied on forensic findings that are now seen as flawed.

One of those defendants, Claude Garrett, had already spent nearly 28 years in prison when Eaton began looking at his case in 2020. He survived a 1992 house fire only to be charged with murder after fire investigators determined that the blaze, which claimed the life of his fiancée, was intentionally set. He was locked up when his daughter was 5 years old. In the intervening years, many once-accepted tenets of arson science were debunked. The “pour patterns,” or burn marks, that arson investigators saw as proof that someone poured an accelerant around the house had come to be understood as a natural byproduct of fast-burning fires. Several nationally recognized fire experts who reviewed the case testified that there was no evidence the fire was intentionally set. “When stripped of demonstrably unreliable testimony, faulty investigative methods and baseless speculation,” Eaton wrote to the court, “the case against Garrett is nonexistent.”

Garrett’s conviction was vacated, and he was released in May 2022 at the age of 65. He died suddenly, five months later, of heart failure. “When we have advancements in science, why don’t we look at every single case in which that science convicted someone and see whether the evidence still stands up?” his daughter, Deana Watson, says. “People are going to die in prison who don’t belong there — human beings who literally have no reason to be there, who are stuck there based on what we thought was true 30 years ago.”

Claude Garrett’s death would always hang over Eaton — a nagging reminder, as she worked on the Maze case, that there was no time to spare. She and Hamilton, who was a former federal defender, threw themselves into their reinvestigation. The lawyers learned about blood disorders and genetic diseases, poring over medical journals and buttonholing doctors. They spoke to experts about police interrogation techniques and the effects of emotional trauma on suspects. They visited the Mazes’ former apartment complex to visualize the sequence of events. They conferred with lawyers at the Tennessee Innocence Project, who were talking to other medical experts around the country. Still, the question remained: What had happened to Alex?

Eaton wanted to stay focused on the specifics of Alex’s case and not get lost in the controversy over shaken baby syndrome. While there is no disagreement that the violent shaking of an infant causes harm, there is fierce dissent over whether the symptoms associated with the diagnosis can be taken as proof that abuse has occurred. (“Few pediatric diagnoses have engendered as much debate,” the American Academy of Pediatrics acknowledged in a 2020 policy statement.) This has left both doctors and the courts divided. Over the past four years, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, nine people whose convictions rested on the diagnosis — five parents and four caregivers — have been exonerated. Last year, a New Jersey appellate court backed a lower-court judge who pronounced the diagnosis “akin to junk science.” But appellate judges in recent years have also upheld shaken baby convictions, including that of a man on death row in Texas, Robert Roberson, whose execution date is set for October.

Eaton reached out to experts in the fields of pathology, radiology, neonatology, genetics and ophthalmology, and over the spring and summer and then fall of 2023, physicians who looked at the medical records independently of one another came to the same conclusion: Alex’s symptoms were not consistent with abuse. They observed that the bleeding in his brain and around his eyes continued to progress during his hospitalization. Such ongoing hemorrhaging “suggests a mechanism other than abusive trauma,” explained Dr. Franco Recchia, an ophthalmology specialist. So, too, did the increased bleeding around Alex’s brain. The doctors were in agreement: This progression of symptoms pointed to an undiagnosed, underlying condition — like a metabolic disease or blood disorder — which most likely resulted in a stroke. After reviewing the autopsy slides and other medical records, Dr. Darinka Mileusnic-Polchan, the chief medical examiner in Knox and Anderson counties, determined that Alex “had a systemic disorder that was never properly worked up due to the early fixation on the alleged nonaccidental head trauma.”

The doctors noted the absence of obvious evidence of violence; Alex had no neck injuries, broken ribs, limb fractures or skull trauma. They also zeroed in on what Eaton and Hamilton found noteworthy in Alex’s hospital records: Starling rendered her diagnosis within hours of Alex’s arrival at the ER, before receiving all the results of blood work and other testing. And she did not consult his pediatrician’s records, which documented a sudden increase in his head circumference weeks before he arrived at the emergency room. (Starling did not respond to requests for comment.)

But it was the analysis of one last piece of evidence, a set of X-rays known as a skeletal survey, that helped Eaton understand something that she had been trying to make sense of, but that had remained stubbornly perplexing: the clavicle fracture. A close examination of the medical records showed that chest X-rays, performed when Alex was first admitted to the emergency room, did not detect any breaks. Only after he was diagnosed with shaken baby syndrome was a fracture identified on the skeletal survey, on his second day in the hospital.

Interpreting radiological images like a skeletal survey can be subjective, and when evaluating a curved bone like the clavicle, radiologists may disagree about whether a tiny abnormality is a fracture or not. When Dr. Julie Mack, a Harvard-trained radiologist, reviewed the images last fall for the Tennessee Innocence Project, she said she saw no evidence of a bone break. She left open the possibility that a slender hairline fracture was present, which she could not detect in her copy of the original images. But, she explained, “He underwent CPR, which, if a clavicle fracture was present, is a sufficient explanation for such a fracture.” Mack’s review of the records, which included several CT scans and an MRI of Alex’s brain, led her to conclude that the infant had suffered not from abuse but rather from “an ongoing, abnormal, natural disease process.”

In coordination with the conviction-review unit, Russell’s attorneys filed a motion in state court in December, seeking to reopen State of Tennessee v. Russell Lee Maze. “Physicians who suspect abusive head trauma can no longer stop their analysis with the identification of the shaken baby syndrome triad,” it read. “Instead, they must seriously consider all other etiologies that may plausibly explain the constellation of symptoms and eliminate them as causes.” Horwitz — the attorney who once called the CRU a sham — and one of his law partners, Melissa Dix, also filed a motion on behalf of Kaye, petitioning the court to vacate her felony conviction. The decision about whether to reopen the case was in the hands of the judge, Dozier; he had been on the bench since 1997, having won reelection or run unopposed in every election since his appointment.

Eaton walked over to the courthouse that day with Hamilton to file the unit’s 71-page report, which detailed their investigation. Eaton and her team wrote a report each time they went before a judge to ask that a conviction be overturned. It was imperative, she believed, to establish trust with judges before asking them to take the weighty, and sometimes politically perilous, step of tossing out a jury’s verdict, and to signal that they had the full backing of the DA’s office. “While it was reasonable for the treating doctors to consider abuse,” the report read, “every other medical possibility was either overlooked or completely ignored. Law-enforcement officers blindly followed the course set out by Dr. Starling and failed to consider any other explanation for Alex’s condition. After an investigation comprised of a hasty medical determination, an interrogation of traumatized parents and little else, the case was considered closed.”

The lawyers recommended that the court vacate Russell’s and Kaye’s convictions. “The tragedies in this case cannot be overstated,” they concluded. “What every single expert the C.R.U. consulted with agrees upon is that Alex Maze did not die from abuse.”

Shortly after they filed their report, Dozier agreed to set a hearing so that he could evaluate the findings from the state’s and defense’s expert witnesses.

When Russell was led in handcuffs into the courtroom on a drizzly morning this past March, he bore little resemblance to the ruddy-cheeked new father paramedics found in 1999, struggling to revive his infant son. At 58, his careworn face was framed by thick, prison-issued glasses. He walked with a cane, which he had to maneuver with both hands manacled together, and as he took his seat at the defense table, he winced. Beside him sat Kaye, her expression guarded, her shoulder-length hair shot through with gray. The husband and wife, who last lived together when Bill Clinton was president, were instructed not to have physical contact. Wordlessly, they gazed out at the courtroom and waited for the hearing to begin.

Eaton had not slept well. She knew that the experts who were slated to testify would be good witnesses, but she worried that their testimony would not be enough to satisfy Dozier. It was Dozier who signed off on Kaye’s plea deal and Dozier who presided over not only Russell’s trials but also his appeals and postconviction proceedings. It was Dozier who sentenced Russell to life in prison.

She studied him as he sat on the dais before them, quietly conferring with his clerk, and tried to read his mood. Eaton appeared before him when she was a public defender, and she was well aware of how tough he could be. But some of her biggest victories came in his courtroom, including the Joseph Webster case, her first exoneration. That case had included the persuasive power of DNA evidence, something she was painfully aware, at that moment, that the Maze case lacked.

The state’s opening statement would be delivered by Funk. District attorneys seldom appear in court to throw their weight behind their prosecutors, but both Funk and Eaton thought it would send the right message to Dozier. Funk struck a note of deference as he underscored his support of the CRU’s findings, playing not to the local TV news cameras in the courtroom but to an audience of one. “Every single medical expert, using current science, confirms that Russell and Kaye Maze are actually innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted,” he told the judge. “It is my duty as district attorney to ask the court to vacate these convictions.”

But Dozier appeared unreceptive from the start. When Russell’s lead attorney, Jason Gichner, gave his opening statement outlining the defense experts’ findings, Dozier grew impatient, interjecting, “Do they factor in that there’s a history of a statement that the child was jostled?” When it was time for the physicians to testify, he remained obstinate. He grilled them about granular aspects of their testimony, repeatedly breaking in to interrogate them and questioning whether their opinions were grounded in any kind of new scientific thinking. He wondered aloud if different experts, evaluating the same evidence, might reach a completely different conclusion. Even when he said nothing, he radiated disapproval; he arched his eyebrows, pursed his lips and shot exasperated glares at whoever was sitting in the witness box. He grew more skeptical as the hearing went on, accusing Russell’s attorneys of only presenting experts who had been “picked and chosen” to best suit the defense’s narrative.

During breaks, the lawyers conferred with one another, unsure how to interpret the judge’s intransigence. Dozier was always prickly, and in the absence of an adversarial party, he seemed to have decided to take on the role of adversary himself. Perhaps the judge was just putting them through their paces, pushing back on them to elicit answers that would only strengthen their arguments. Or maybe, Eaton feared, they had lost him. For months, her team worried that Dozier would balk at the fact that their experts had not coalesced around a single diagnosis that could explain all of Alex’s symptoms, and yet without new blood and tissue samples to test, it was all but impossible to agree upon a definitive cause of death. When she called Dr. Carla Sandler-Wilson, a neonatologist, to the stand on the second day of the hearing, she had the doctor inform the court that newborn screening tests — which can identify genetic, blood and metabolic abnormalities — were so limited at the time of Alex’s birth that he was screened for just four disorders. “There are over 50 tests on the Tennessee State Newborn Screen now,” Sandler-Wilson explained.

The Mazes remained composed throughout hours of graphic testimony about the condition of their son’s body and the details of his autopsy. All told, seven experts from around the country took the stand to attest to the fact that Alex’s symptoms resulted from natural causes, not trauma.

In the weeks leading up to the hearing, Eaton had written and rewritten her closing argument. She paced her house for hours, practicing until she could recite it from memory. She rehearsed it in the shower, and in her car, and in the quiet of her home office. She delivered it for friends and colleagues so she could gauge whether the most important lines were resonating, and she recited it to her therapist. Her closing argument was a very different narrative from the one prosecutors presented at trial. “If Alex Maze could speak to us,” the argument she had prepared began, “he would tell us his parents loved him, cared for him and, to his last breath, did not give up on him.”

As Eaton watched Gichner deliver his closing argument, which Dozier cut into with rapid-fire questions, she realized that she needed to change course. An emotional plea was not going to win the judge over. She set aside the speech she knew by heart. She would have to improvise.

When her turn came to speak, Eaton rose and walked across the courtroom to face the judge. Gripping the lectern, her face rigid with concentration, she tried to find the right words. “Our office receives hundreds of applications for review per year,” she began. “Out of those hundreds, we take on less than 5%. And of that 5%, sometimes we have to ask experts to review the information in the case.” She continued: “We’ve had experts look at cases and tell us, ‘No, you got this right — this was trauma, this was abuse.’ And we turn down those cases. But sometimes, your honor, a case is different.”

She spoke quickly, as if by racing forward, she could prevent the judge from interrupting her. “Over the last two years, this unit has analyzed every detail of this case,” she said. “We’ve read every record. Every line of testimony. We’ve consulted expert after expert. And we did not just rely on the petitioner’s experts. We got baby Alex his own independent experts, including the chief medical examiner for Knox and Anderson county, who more typically testifies for the state. Including a local practitioner trained at Vanderbilt, who we trust with our babies every single day. Including the former chief pathologist for Vanderbilt University. And one by one, expert after expert, told us this was not abuse —”

Dozier leaned forward in his high-backed chair. He wanted to know about the doctor who had diagnosed Alex with shaken baby syndrome, Starling, and whether she had been consulted. “But she wasn’t?” he asked sharply.

Eaton was startled by the question because it showed a fundamental misunderstanding of the work that the conviction-review unit did. Her duty was not to double-down on the state’s original trial theory but rather to investigate whether there was new evidence to consider, and whether that evidence was consequential enough that it should change the outcome of the case. Just as she did not ask the original prosecutors to evaluate the soundness of the conviction, so she did not ask Starling to review the accuracy of her diagnosis. Eaton had sought out physicians who did not have a record to defend.

“No, she was not,” Eaton said. “But we consulted experts in every possible field that could be relevant to this case. And one by one, they told us that the science presented to this court was outdated. One by one, they told us that our understanding of things has changed. And one by one, they told us that Russell and Kaye Maze did not abuse their son, and they did not cause his death.” She looked directly at the Mazes as she spoke. Then she turned to the judge and raised her voice to signal the importance of the point she wanted to make, drawing out each word: “The state got this wrong.”

When she finished, Dozier offered no reaction as he looked down from the dais. “All right,” he said flatly. “I will take this under advisement.” Court was adjourned for an indeterminate period of time — as long as it took for him to make his ruling. There was nothing more to do but wait.

A few days after the conclusion of the hearing, the two prosecutors who originally tried the case wrote to the court voicing their opposition to the effort to clear Russell Maze. Brian Holmgren and Katrin Miller expressed outrage that they had learned of the hearing only from local media coverage, and they pushed back against the notion that the science behind shaken baby syndrome had grown weaker in recent years. That idea had been promulgated, they asserted, by a “small cadre of medical witnesses” and shaken baby “denialists.” They went on to suggest that the push to exonerate Russell was part of a concerted, nationwide campaign to discredit the diagnosis. The hearing, they wrote, had given “denialist medical witnesses another opportunity to publicize their false scientific claims.”

Dozier informed the two lawyers that they could not insert themselves into the proceeding, and he denied them the opportunity to file a brief with the court that would have formalized their opposition. He did not, however, hand down his ruling. One week passed, then two. A third week came and went without any word. As the days dragged on, Eaton had trouble focusing. Briefly, she entertained a bit of magical thinking; maybe the judge was drafting such a sweeping ruling in the Mazes’ favor that it was just taking him a little extra time. She stared at her phone, checking her messages again and again. “I’m worried,” she told me on April 23. “I’m worried for Russell. I’m worried for Kaye. I’m worried for the morale of my team and worried that if we lose this case, it will make it a million times more difficult to help anyone else.”

Two days later, Eaton was working on her laptop when she spotted an email from the court. She could see that it landed in her inbox a half-hour earlier. The silence of her phone — no calls, no texts — signaled bad news.

The decision leaned heavily on the findings at Russell’s preceding trials. “Substantial evidence presented at two trials is not sufficiently overridden by the new scientific evidence,” it read. Dozier did not give the witnesses’ testimony at the hearing any more weight than the original testimony of witnesses like Starling. The present-day testimony did not represent a new scientific consensus; in the judge’s estimation, it was nothing more than “new ammunition in a ‘battle of the experts.’” He went on to find fault with the hearing itself, which he criticized for lacking “the adversarial role of the prosecutor” — a weakness, in his eyes, that rendered experts’ testimony less credible. With no opposing counsel to cross-examine the witnesses, he argued, “fresh opinions were offered but not probed.” Ultimately, Dozier wrote, “The court does not find an injustice nor that the petitioner is actually innocent based on new scientific evidence.”

Bewildered, Eaton tried to grasp what she had just read: The judge was penalizing them because everyone — the state, the defense, the witnesses — agreed that the Mazes committed no crime. As she wrestled with the implications of the ruling over the days that followed, she began to ask herself increasingly absurd questions. By the judge’s logic, should she have been performatively combative with the defense’s witnesses? Would Russell have stood a better chance if the DA’s office had fought the defense’s efforts to prove his innocence? Did the “adversarial role of the prosecutor” leave no room for the state to right a wrong — or worse, did it require prosecutors to uphold a bad conviction? Dozier’s ruling went to the heart of what a conviction-review unit is supposed to do, and it seemed to eviscerate it.

Never had there been a day, since taking on the Maze case, when Eaton did not know that losing was a possibility. But the implications of Dozier’s ruling made her worry for the future — both for the chilling effect it might have on other judges at the courthouse and, more broadly, for the system as a whole. Her own office filed the original criminal charges against the Mazes, but the same office could not undo them. If the DA’s office could not fix this, who could?

Russell remains one of many defendants who have been behind bars for decades based on the testimony of expert witnesses who believed in the inviolability of shaken baby syndrome. In April, Starling — who, by her own account, has testified in court more than 100 times — was a state witness at a hearing for a case in Atlanta that was similar to Russell’s. Danyel Smith, who was convicted in 2003 of the shaking death of his 2-month-old son, was asking for a new trial, asserting that the infant died from trauma sustained during childbirth. Starling, who was not involved in the original prosecution, testified that the only explanation for the baby’s symptoms was abuse. During cross-examination, Starling was asked about Tennessee v. Maze. “I’m not familiar with this case,” she told Smith’s attorney. The lawyer then produced hundreds of pages of testimony bearing her name. “That does prove that I was there,” she allowed. But the facts of the case had escaped her, she said. “If you say he was convicted, then I will take you at your word.”

“He has served 25 years in prison?” the lawyer pressed.

“Again, not in my personal knowledge,” she replied.

Russell’s case is currently before the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals, which must decide whether to grant him permission to appeal the ruling. “The Tennessee Innocence Project fully believes in Russell’s innocence, and we will not stop fighting until he is released from prison,” Gichner told me. (Kaye’s appeal to vacate her felony conviction will proceed separately.) The case now faces a new challenge: Lawyers working for Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti of Tennessee, a conservative Republican, are handling the appeal. That office is often at odds with Funk’s; in late June, it called on the appellate court to deny Russell permission to appeal.

Russell is now back at Trousdale Turner Correctional Center, a notoriously rough private prison northeast of Nashville, where five men were stabbed in the course of three weeks earlier this year. Kaye has returned to her home in the mountains of East Tennessee, where she moved when Russell was incarcerated nearby, before his transfer to Trousdale. She lives alone, her brief time with her son preserved in photos that stand alongside her collection of framed family portraits. Her, beaming, with Alex in her arms; him, wearing tiny overalls, his gaze unfocused.

Eaton’s powerlessness, as an assistant DA, to rectify what she sees as a wrongful conviction felt more crushing than any failure, as a public defender, to prevent a client from facing an unjust punishment. “The weight is heavier because we did this,” she says. She wakes up in the night thinking about the Mazes — of how Kaye stepped out one afternoon to buy baby formula and returned home to find her life irrevocably broken. Of how Russell, as of this June, has endured 25 years of imprisonment. Of how the Mazes lost their son and then each other. And she agonizes over whether her decision to take on the case caused them harm. “We gave them a whole fresh set of trauma, and I’m haunted by that,” she says. “Before we got involved, I imagine Russell was trying to make peace with his situation and live the best life he could behind bars. He and Kaye had their visits together. And then we came along and disrupted all that. Teams of lawyers! Doctors! The elected DA! More than losing, what is weighing on me is that we gave them hope.”

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This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Pamela Colloff, photography by Stacy Kranitz.

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A West Texas pastor who used his parish’s resources to campaign for office and several pastors from other churches who donated to him were fined after the state’s ethics commission determined that each violated election law.

The fines, some of which were issued last month, are the latest sanction from the commission following reporting from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, which revealed that three churches donated to the campaign of Scott Beard, founding pastor at Fountaingate Fellowship church, despite state and federal prohibitions on such activity.

Beard, who was fined $3,500, showed a “lack of good faith” in accepting the donations and in posting campaign signs on church property for his unsuccessful Abilene City Council race despite the commission’s warnings against doing so, it found.

“Because the respondent committed extensive corporate contribution violations in defiance of the applicable law, a substantial penalty is required,” the commission wrote about Beard. He did not respond to a request for comment.

The commission separately fined the pastor of Hope 4 Life Church, Bruce Tentzer, $200. Tentzer purchased a ticket to Beard’s fundraising dinner with funds from the parish, also known as Hope Chapel Foursquare Church. He told the commission the money was drawn from a special church fund set aside for his personal use.

Those actions come after the ethics commission on Dec. 21, 2023, ordered Dewey Hall, pastor of Fountaingate Merkel Church, to pay $400 for donating from church coffers to Beard’s campaign. In an interview, Hall said that he does not believe in the separation of church and state, but that his church would not donate to a political candidate again. No fines appear on the commission’s website related to Remnant Church, the third parish to give Beard campaign money. Remnant representatives did not respond to a request for comment.

Kristin Postell, an Abilene attorney who filed a complaint with the commission about Beard’s actions, said she was pleased with the fines levied against him. Given the severity of his actions, she believed the churches should pay less than him. But Postell said such low fines are not sufficient deterrents for violators.

“I don’t think anybody is going to be super cautious about following the rules unless there is a real financial burden to breaking them,” Postell said.

Under state law, violations are punishable by up to $5,000, or triple the amount at issue, whichever is greater, and a third-degree felony charge. (No criminal charges were brought in these cases.) J.R. Johnson, the commission’s executive director, declined to comment and did not answer questions about whether the fines were sufficient.

Roger Borgelt, an Austin lawyer who provides ethics advice to political candidates, said the stigma of being found in violation of the law is often a bigger deterrent than the fines themselves.

“The ethics commission, in terms of its practical function, as a deterrent, has been more to provide campaign fodder than anything else,” he said.

It’s unclear if Beard or the churches will face any additional sanctions. Abilene residents filed complaints with the IRS accusing Beard’s church of illegally campaigning. An IRS spokesperson declined to comment, saying that federal law prohibits the agency from confirming or denying investigations.

The federal agency can strip churches of their tax-exempt status for violating a federal law banning all nonprofits from engaging in political activity, but there has been only one public example of such a revocation.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jessica Priest.

The joint statement urged the European Commission and EU Member States to take immediate and decisive action to protect NGOs and independent journalists in Hungary.

On June 26, Hungary’s Sovereignty Protection Office announced that it had  launched an investigation into the Hungarian branch of the anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International and Átlátszó, an investigative journalism outlet that focuses on corruption. The office was established last year as a government authority with broad powers to investigate foreign interference in public life.

The bill creating the office “bears the hallmarks of a Russian-style foreign agent law” and it “could bring a new level of state-sanctioned pressure and chill independent reporting,” CPJ said in a statement last year.

Read the full statement of solidarity here.

Disclaimer: CPJ’s Europe representative Atilla Mong is a former investigative journalist for Átlátszó, currently serving as a member of its supervisory board.

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

We support Count Me In 2024. It is an important national census event for Papua New Guinea. It is supported by the government. And the people support it too.

The National Census will provide us with up-to-date live data on our population which is needed for planning now and into the next decade.

However, we are amazed that despite the public holiday yesterday, which was announced by Prime Minister James Marape to allow the public servants to have the day off so they can be counted, has become a failure.

• READ MORE: Other PNG National Census reports

Why? Because most of the provinces including four heavily populated areas have yet to receive their full counting materials.

This amounts to poor planning, poor vision, and poor foresight on the part of the holiday-happy PM and his Administrative Minister Richard Masere.

They did not see that Count Me In is in for a long count when the material is late, training not completed, and the technology and gadgets don’t add up for this very important national event.

Meanwhile, taxpayers will pick up the cost of the extra holiday that Marape ubiquitously granted to his public servants yesterday.

Out in the field, members of the public noted that the tablets supplied for enumerators were not used. The counters were asked why. They responded that the tablets did not have the applications necessary for them to compile the information collated.

This is despite a K17 million (NZ$7 million) contract to Indian firm Max Industrials whose CEO Max Pandey said he has paid for and delivered 22,000 tablets to the National Statistical Office to carry out the work.

If the tablets were delivered, then why are these gadgets inoperable? What type of gadgets are these, where were these manufactured, were these tablets tested, and have they ever been used before in a census?

Are they from a recognised brand? This is a national census and we cannot afford to get it wrong. We have waited 14 years to hold this event.

It is therefore interesting to note that the contract for the supply of tablets was signed last week for a major event that started on Sunday this week.

Just like everybody, we are curious about this fiasco, why materials are late and tablets are not functioning?

The progress of events doesn’t make sense. Despite the Secretary for Finance and the Minister for Administrative Service giving their assurance that all processes were followed, it just does not add up.

We all want to be counted. We all want to be visible. We all want to be recognised as citizens of Papua New Guinea.

The population count has been outstanding since the last one in 2011. More babies have arrived, more heads, more mouths to feed in a country with rising costs of living, and extra turnover of migratory people of all walks of life, national and trans-national all over the country.

We hope that Count Me In will be concluded successfully, given the country’s rugged terrain and challenges, the far-flung coral islands and the lack of national road links.

We hope, we just hope we might all get numbered!

PNG Post-Courier editorial published 19 June 2024 under the headline “Counting fiasco”. Published with permission.

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

Photograph Source: SWinxy – CC BY 4.0

As practically everyone on planet Earth must now know, Donald Trump has become the first former US president to be convicted of felonies after leaving office. The response to the outcome of the trial from Democrats and Republicans has been predictably binary. Democrats have been reveling in the outcome and seem to think that the trial’s conclusion has delivered a final blow to Trump’s credibility and, in turn, his chances of winning the upcoming election. Trump’s supporters, on the other hand, are largely condemning the trial as politically motivated “lawfare” waged by the “radical left” in order to derail Trump’s chances of winning the upcoming election, which might end up galvanizing his base.

For those of us on the independent left, however, focusing on whether Trump is guilty in this case or whether the trial was politically motivated misses a much bigger point. Either way, the crimes he has been convicted of are small fry compared to the crimes of state that he committed while in office. And these crimes are, at most, only marginally worse than those committed by every US president in living memory, irrespective of which of the two major parties they have belonged to. And the fact that he, all his recent predecessors and, indeed, his successor to the White House, have committed these crimes in an atmosphere of complete impunity is the real issue that the public should be focusing on.

Of course, documenting the crimes of state committed by Trump and all of his predecessors in the White House would take up volumes. But surveying just his most recent four predecessors shows a consistent record of creating chaos, destruction and lawlessness across the world for the sole purpose of advancing Washington’s geostrategic and economic interests.

Foreign policy: Illegal wars, self-interested interventions, and support for destabilizing coups

In terms of foreign policy, Trump’s crimes of state include launching a coup attempt in Venezuela that drastically destabilized the country and exacerbated an economic crisis that itself had been caused in large part by Washington-imposed sanctions. During Trump’s time in office, Washington also increased sanctions against Nicaragua, added new sanctions to the economic blockade against Cuba, and reimposed sanctions on Iran by unilaterally withdrawing from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (known colloquially as the ‘Iran Nuclear Deal’). These unilateral sanctions are illegal under international law and have overwhelmingly had the effect of harming these countries’ civilian populations.

But Trump’s predecessors were hardly much better. His immediate predecessor, Barack Obama, for example, failed to end the war in Afghanistan and increased Bush’s drone assassination program by a factor of ten. The Obama administration also played a hand in the illegal coup against the democratically elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, and intervened in Libya, which turned the once-stable North African nation into a medieval throwback with slave markets operating out in the open.

Readers will hardly need to be reminded of George W. Bush’s own foreign policy antics. In addition to launching the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush administration also played a hand in the 2001 coup attempt against Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and hypocritically imposed sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program – in spite of scant evidence that Iran seeks nuclear weapons and even though Israel, the US’s major ally in the Middle East, already holds such weapons in violation of non-proliferation treaties.

As for Bill Clinton, his administration bombed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan and launched a disastrous intervention in the Balkans. George H. W. Bush, meanwhile, invaded Panama, launched the First Gulf War, and began expanding NATO ominously close to Russia’s borders – a process that ultimately became a major factor in the outbreak of hostilities between Russia and Ukraine in 2022.

Israel: Only marginally worse servility to the US’s Middle East proxy state

With respect to the conflict in Palestine, Trump did take US toadying to the Zionist state to previously unseen heights, in particular with his administration’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and legitimization of Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan Heights. But again, previous administrations were hardly much better.

Obama, for instance, failed to issue any punitive measure against Israel during the three major massacres that it committed in Gaza during his time in office (Operation Cast Lead in 2008 and 2009, Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012, and Operation Protective Edge in 2014). On the contrary, throughout this time the US continued supplying Israel with weapons via lucrative arms contracts.

Needless to say, as Israel’s military operations in Gaza have unfolded since the October 7^th attack, Trump’s successor in the White House (who, of course, served as Obama’s vice president) has taken US enabling of Israel’s crimes to a new low of outright complicity in genocide. Current US President Joe Biden also failed to take any action against Israel following its storming of the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in May 2021 and subsequent brutality against Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza.

George W. Bush’s policy toward Palestine included enabling Israel’s human rights abuses throughout the Second Intifada and during its reckless war against Lebanon in 2006. The Bush administration also played a hand in Hamas’s eclipsing of Fatah in Gaza by insisting that the election go ahead, and that the Islamist group participate as part of its policy of so-called “democracy promotion.”

During Bill Clinton’s time in the White House, he launched the shambolic Camp David summit, which culminated in no agreement whatsoever between the two sides and whose failure was a factor in the outbreak of the Second Intifada. While George H. W. Bush was slightly better on policy toward Israel than his successors by imposing consequenceson Israel for bad behavior, he nonetheless oversaw the Madrid Conference and subsequent signing of the first Oslo Accord, which has had the effect of subcontracting out the Israeli occupation of the West Bank to a collaborationist Palestinian Authority.

And of course, just as during Trump’s time in office, throughout the Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush administrations as well, Washington has continually used its veto power at the UN to block resolutions that condemn, let alone take meaningful action against, Israel’s crimes.

Civil Liberties: Bipartisan support for authoritarianism and trampling over legal norms

After leaving the White House, Obama publicly denounced Trump for his authoritarian tendencies. But while Obama didn’t engage in the brazen authoritarianism of Trump – such as threatening the press, pledging to jail political opponents, airing the idea of delaying elections, or stating he is “not going to be beholden to courts” – Obama was hardly a paragon of civil liberties during his time in office either. A 2013 Washington Post exposé, for example, documented the National Security Agency’s repeated abuses of power under Obama’s watch, including deliberate interception of emails and phone calls as well as illegal surveillance of both foreign and domestic intelligence targets.

Despite promises to shut it down during his presidential campaign, Obama also failed to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center, where torture, rendition and indefinite incarceration (in flagrant breach of international law) continue to this day. While president, Obama also declined to repeal the Patriot Act (again, after promising to do so as a presidential candidate) and even renewed some of the law’s major provisions, such as roving wire taps.

It was, of course, his predecessor, George W. Bush, who first introduced the Patriot Act – which has undermined some of the most core modern legal principles such as habeas corpus – and opened the Guantanamo Bay detention center in 2002 as part of his so-called “War on Terror.” Since then, nine detainees have died while incarcerated there and an unknown number have been subjected to so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” – known in common parlance as torture.

During Clinton’s time in the White House, he signed the so-called ‘Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996,’, which like the Patriot Act also undermines the legal principle of habeas corpus.

George H. W. Bush, meanwhile, in the 1970s served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), an organization that is notorious for its civil liberties violations including wiretapping, illegally monitoring postal correspondence, and interrogating people against their will. At that time, it was notorious for its role in Operation Condor in which right-wing governments throughout South America engaged in political repression campaigns against perceived enemies. Bush remained close to the CIA as vice president in the Reagan administration in the 1980s, when it became embroiled in the Iran-Contra Affair, and as president in the early 1990s, when it faced accusations of involvement in drug trafficking.

Time to stop singularizing Trump as uniquely evil

Clearly, it is time we take a step back from the narrow focus on Trump’s latest legal wranglings. Focusing on his shady business dealings committed when out of office obscures the fact that, if there were any justice in this world, Trump as well as all his recent predecessors would be tried for much bigger crimes of state that dwarf in severity anything about hush money payments or falsifying business records.

The post Trump’s Conviction Papers Over Much Bigger Crimes that He (and Every Other Recent US President) Have Committed While in Office appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Peter Bolton.

For those of us on the independent left, however, focusing on whether Trump is guilty in this case or whether the trial was politically motivated misses a much bigger point. Either way, the crimes he has been convicted of are small fry compared to the crimes of state that he committed while in office. And these crimes are, at most, only marginally worse than those committed by every US president in living memory, irrespective of which of the two major parties they have belonged to. And the fact that he, all his recent predecessors and, indeed, his successor to the White House, have committed these crimes in an atmosphere of complete impunity is the real issue that the public should be focusing on.

Of course, documenting the crimes of state committed by Trump and all of his predecessors in the White House would take up volumes. But surveying just his most recent four predecessors shows a consistent record of creating chaos, destruction and lawlessness across the world for the sole purpose of advancing Washington’s geostrategic and economic interests.

Foreign policy: Illegal wars, self-interested interventions, and support for destabilizing coups

In terms of foreign policy, Trump’s crimes of state include launching a coup attempt in Venezuela that drastically destabilized the country and exacerbated an economic crisis that itself had been caused in large part by Washington-imposed sanctions. During Trump’s time in office, Washington also increased sanctions against Nicaragua, added new sanctions to the economic blockade against Cuba, and reimposed sanctions on Iran by unilaterally withdrawing from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (known colloquially as the ‘Iran Nuclear Deal’). These unilateral sanctions are illegal under international law and have overwhelmingly had the effect of harming these countries’ civilian populations.

But Trump’s predecessors were hardly much better. His immediate predecessor, Barack Obama, for example, failed to end the war in Afghanistan and increased Bush’s drone assassination program by a factor of ten. The Obama administration also played a hand in the illegal coup against the democratically elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, and intervened in Libya, which turned the once-stable North African nation into a medieval throwback with slave markets operating out in the open.

Readers will hardly need to be reminded of George W. Bush’s own foreign policy antics. In addition to launching the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush administration also played a hand in the 2001 coup attempt against Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and hypocritically imposed sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program – in spite of scant evidence that Iran seeks nuclear weapons and even though Israel, the US’s major ally in the Middle East, already holds such weapons in violation of non-proliferation treaties.

As for Bill Clinton, his administration bombed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan and launched a disastrous intervention in the Balkans. George H. W. Bush, meanwhile, invaded Panama, launched the First Gulf War, and began expanding NATO ominously close to Russia’s borders – a process that ultimately became a major factor in the outbreak of hostilities between Russia and Ukraine in 2022.

Israel: Only marginally worse servility to the US’s Middle East proxy state

With respect to the conflict in Palestine, Trump did take US toadying to the Zionist state to previously unseen heights, in particular with his administration’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and legitimization of Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan Heights. But again, previous administrations were hardly much better.

Obama, for instance, failed to issue any punitive measure against Israel during the three major massacres that it committed in Gaza during his time in office (Operation Cast Lead in 2008 and 2009, Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012, and Operation Protective Edge in 2014). On the contrary, throughout this time the US continued supplying Israel with weapons via lucrative arms contracts.

Needless to say, as Israel’s military operations in Gaza have unfolded since the October 7 attack, Trump’s successor in the White House (who, of course, served as Obama’s vice president) has taken US enabling of Israel’s crimes to a new low of outright complicity in genocide. Current US President Joe Biden also failed to take any action against Israel following its storming of the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in May 2021 and subsequent brutality against Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza.

George W. Bush’s policy toward Palestine included enabling Israel’s human rights abuses throughout the Second Intifada and during its reckless war against Lebanon in 2006. The Bush administration also played a hand in Hamas’s eclipsing of Fatah in Gaza by insisting that the election go ahead, and that the Islamist group participate as part of its policy of so-called “democracy promotion.”

During Bill Clinton’s time in the White House, he launched the shambolic Camp David summit, which culminated in no agreement whatsoever between the two sides and whose failure was a factor in the outbreak of the Second Intifada. While George H. W. Bush was slightly better on policy toward Israel than his successors by imposing consequences on Israel for bad behavior, he nonetheless oversaw the Madrid Conference and subsequent signing of the first Oslo Accord, which has had the effect of subcontracting out the Israeli occupation of the West Bank to a collaborationist Palestinian Authority.

And of course, just as during Trump’s time in office, throughout the Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush administrations as well, Washington has continually used its veto power at the UN to block resolutions that condemn, let alone take meaningful action against, Israel’s crimes.

Civil Liberties: Bipartisan support for authoritarianism and trampling over legal norms

After leaving the White House, Obama publicly denounced Trump for his authoritarian tendencies. But while Obama didn’t engage in the brazen authoritarianism of Trump – such as threatening the press, pledging to jail political opponents, airing the idea of delaying elections, or stating he is “not going to be beholden to courts” – Obama was hardly a paragon of civil liberties during his time in office either. A 2013 Washington Post exposé, for example, documented the National Security Agency’s repeated abuses of power under Obama’s watch, including deliberate interception of emails and phone calls as well as illegal surveillance of both foreign and domestic intelligence targets.

Despite promises to shut it down during his presidential campaign, Obama also failed to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center, where torture, rendition and indefinite incarceration (in flagrant breach of international law) continue to this day. While president, Obama also declined to repeal the Patriot Act (again, after promising to do so as a presidential candidate) and even renewed some of the law’s major provisions, such as roving wire taps.

It was, of course, his predecessor, George W. Bush, who first introduced the Patriot Act – which has undermined some of the most core modern legal principles such as habeas corpus – and opened the Guantanamo Bay detention center in 2002 as part of his so-called “War on Terror.” Since then, nine detainees have died while incarcerated there and an unknown number have been subjected to so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” – known in common parlance as torture.

During Clinton’s time in the White House, he signed the so-called ‘Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996,’, which like the Patriot Act also undermines the legal principle of habeas corpus.

George H. W. Bush, meanwhile, in the 1970s served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), an organization that is notorious for its civil liberties violations including wiretapping, illegally monitoring postal correspondence, and interrogating people against their will. At that time, it was notorious for its role in Operation Condor in which right-wing governments throughout South America engaged in political repression campaigns against perceived enemies. Bush remained close to the CIA as vice president in the Reagan administration in the 1980s, when it became embroiled in the Iran-Contra Affair, and as president in the early 1990s, when it faced accusations of involvement in drug trafficking.

Time to stop singularizing Trump as uniquely evil

Clearly, it is time we take a step back from the narrow focus on Trump’s latest legal wranglings. Focusing on his shady business dealings committed when out of office obscures the fact that, if there were any justice in this world, Trump as well as all his recent predecessors would be tried for much bigger crimes of state that dwarf in severity anything about hush money payments or falsifying business records.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Peter Bolton.

But the claim is false. U.S. lawmakers proposed a bill to close HKETO offices in the United States but it has not been passed. Keyword searches found no credible statements or reports to back the claim. 

The claim was shared on X, formerly known as Twitter, on May 13, 2024.

“The Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in the United States has officially closed its doors. The bridge and link between China and the world has collapsed, and an era has come to an end,” the post reads in part.  

HKETOs promote Hong Kong’s trade outside the territory. There are 14 such offices across the world with three in the U.S.

Hong Kong has full autonomy in the conduct of its external commercial relations. The city’s Basic Law, which is often referred to as its constitution,  provides that it shall be a separate customs territory and may, using the name “Hong Kong, China”, participate in relevant international organisations and international trade agreements, such as the World Trade Organization.

Similar claims have been shared on X here and here as well as some media outlets as seen here.

However, the claim is false.

The U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs introduced the HKETO Certification Act in November 2023 calling for the removal of privileges and the potential closure for all HKETO offices in the U.S. 

But the bill has not been passed. 

An AFCL journalist visited the HKETO branch in Washington and found it was open as normal. 

Keyword searches found no credible statements or reports to back the claim.

Translated by Shen Ke. Edited by Shen Ke and Taejun Kang.

Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) was established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. We publish fact-checks, media-watches and in-depth reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of current affairs and public issues. If you like our content, you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Zhuang Jing and Rita Cheng for Asia Fact Check Lab.

More than 2000 people were buried alive in the huge landslide which hit Papua New Guinea on Friday, the National Disaster Centre has now confirmed.

An entire community living at the foot of a mountain in the remote Enga Province were buried in their sleep about 3am.

Earlier reports suggested 670 people died and 150 homes flattened.

• READ MORE: PNG landslide: Couple pulled alive from rubble as 690 feared dead
• PNG landslide: Survivors of highlands disaster desperately seeking help
• Hundreds feared dead after huge landslide in Papua New Guinea
• Local officials fear fate of 300 missing people in remote PNG landslide
• Other Engan landslide reports

It is the largest landslide since the 7.5 magnitude earthquake hit Hela Province in 2018.

Yambali villagers are using their bare hands to dig out the buried bodies of family members while they wait for more help to arrive.

So far only three people have survived the catastrophic landslide, and only four bodies have been recovered.

The Provincial Emergency Response Team is working with the United Nations on the ground, while the rest of the victims lay under boulders and six to eight metres of dirt and debris.

Excavator donated
A local businessman donated an excavator which has been used to dig up bodies but wet conditions and moving terrain has meant engineers have had limited access to the site.

Community leader Miok Michael has visited the site and said it was heartbreaking.

“People are still crying for help as hundreds, if not thousands of bodies are still scattered.”

RNZ Pacific correspondent Scott Waide said that “many people have accepted their loved ones are dead. But in PNG there needs to be closure so a lot of people will want to dig up the bodies for closure”.

Police station commander Martin Kelei said the situation was slow-moving.

“It is not gravel you can easily remove. They are under very big boulders of rock.”

The government has set aside 500,000 kina (NZ$210,000) for relief aid.

The Disaster Management Team have assessed the damage.

Joint statement
A joint statement has been provided following the assessment official of damage on behalf of acting director Lusete Laso Mana along with Defence Minister Dr Billy Joseph, Defence Secretary Hari John Akipe, Government Chief Secretary Ivan Pomaleu and Defence Force Chief commodore Philip Polewara.

“The disaster committee determined that the damages are extensive and require immediate and collaborative actions from all players including DMT, PNGDF, NDC and Enga PDC to effectively contain the situation.

“The landslide buried more than 2000 people alive and caused major destruction to buildings, food gardens and caused major impact on the economic lifeline of the country.”

The number of residents in the village is much higher than previously thought.

CARE PNG country director Justine McMahon said 2022 data estimated 4000 people lived in the area, not including children or people who flocked there after being displaced by tribal violence.

Many challenges remain including removing boulders that block the main highway to Porgera Mine.

The situation remains unstable as the landslip continues to shift slowly, posing ongoing danger to rescue teams and survivors.

Tribal fighting
There is also tribal fighting in the area, something which Enga province is notorious for.

UN International Organisation for Migration representative Sehran Aktoprak said that as the death toll mounted, 250 homes nearby had been evacuated.

He was also concerned over tribal fighting that had “flared up between two clans halfway between the capital of the province Wabag and the disaster site”.

He said about eight people had been killed, and five businesses, shops and 30 houses had been burnt down as a result.

Aktoprak said the IOM humanitarian convoy witnessed “many houses still burning” on the way through to the Yambali disaster site.

“Women and children seem to be displaced. Whereas men and youth in the area seem to be carrying bush knives, standing on alert. It is such a dangerous place. The convoy can’t stop to observe their needs. The only way the transport corridor can remain open is thanks to security escorts.”

Tough conditions
World Vision PNG representative Chris Jensen said rainfall and tough conditions on the ground may cause aid delays.

“There’s a huge amount of challenges in getting to such a remote location,” he said.

“we also have continuing landslides that do create a problem as well as the tribal fighting so this does inhibit our ability in the international community to move quickly but we’re doing all we can and help will be there as soon as possible.”

Although the call for help from international partners has been made, the political focus has now shifted from the disaster in Enga province to the capital Port Moresby, for a vote of no confidence against the nation’s Prime Minister James Marape.

New Zealand and Australian governments are on standby to help.

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

At the same session, lawmakers voted to relieve Lam, 66, of the post of minister of public security, which he had held since 2016. Lam has replaced Vo Van Thuong, who was forced to step down after just one year in office.

As minister of public security, Lam played a leading role in a sweeping anti-corruption campaign, seen by critics as a political tool for factions in the Communist Party to eliminate competitors. His promotion as president means he is no longer in charge of the powerful ministry, and so may have lose some influence over it.

In his acceptance speech, Lam vowed to prioritize Vietnam’s independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity, as well as national interests, in his work.

The new president emphasized that, together with other leaders, he would “continue to strengthen the party’s capabilities, its ruling power and combat prowess.”

Lam, in his televised, seven-minute speech, also mentioned Vietnam’s “bamboo diplomacy”, which he said he was committed to following. 

This approach in foreign policy has allowed Vietnam to establish comprehensive strategic partnerships with some of the world’s major powers including the United States, Japan, China and Russia.

On Monday, Tran Thanh Man took office as the new National Assembly chairman amid an unprecedented reshuffle of the ruling party’s leadership.

The appointments of Lam and Man have restored the Communist Party’s top quartet, known in Vietnam as “the four pillars”, namely the general secretary of the Communist Party, the prime minister, the president and the National Assembly chairman. 

This quartet had earlier been halved after the resignations of President Vo Van Thuong and National Assembly Chairman Vuong Dinh Hue in March and May, respectively.

Chinese President Xi Jinping congratulated Lam on becoming president, China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency reported, the first foreign leader to do so.

Candidates for the top job

The position of general secretary is the highest in the  party hierarchy. The incumbent party chief, Nguyen Phu Trong, 80, is expected to step down at the 14th national party congress in January 2026, or even earlier.

Lam and the prime minister, Pham Minh Chinh, are the only two eligible candidates to succeed him after a number of possible  contenders lost their jobs during an anti-corruption campaign dubbed the “blazing furnace.”  

Lam joined the public security service in 1974 and rose through the ranks to become a general in 2019. He was deputy minister for six years before becoming minister in April 2016. 

During his career, Lam’s main focus was security in connection with internal politics and counter-intelligence.

The general was accused of involvement in the kidnapping of Trinh Xuan Thanh, a fugitive oil executive and former provincial official, in Berlin in 2017 and Thanh’s return to Hanoi through Slovakia. The Hanoi government denied kidnapping but the case led to a temporary rift in diplomatic relations between Germany and Vietnam.

In 2021, Lam was involved in another controversy after he was caught on video eating a piece of gold-plated steak at a luxury restaurant in London. A video clip of the general being fed by celebrity chef Salt Bae went viral, causing a public outcry at home. 

Edited by Taejun Kang.

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

Jo Chol Su, who previously served as director-general of international organizations at North Korea’s foreign ministry, presented his credentials to the U.N. Office at Geneva on Friday, it said.

The new envoy has “extensive experience” working with the U.N., including as first secretary at the North Korean U.N. mission in Geneva and as a national staff member for the World Food Program and United Nations Development Program delegations in Pyongyang, the U.N. added on its website. 

Graduating from the prestigious Pyongyang University of Foreign Studies in 1993, Jo is a career diplomat who has held various senior positions in North Korea’s foreign ministry, including in the North America department, handling negotiations over the country’s nuclear weapons program.

The appointment comes five months after Jo’s predecessor, Han Tae Song, returned to the North amid allegations of his involvement in ivory smuggling.

In December last year, reports emerged that North Korea decided to recall Han as both the panel of experts of the U.N. Security Council Sanctions Committee on North Korea and Swiss officials were investigating his purported involvement in ivory trafficking in Africa. 

Botswana, along with South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique, had been investigating a North Korean-affiliated ivory and rhino horn smuggling operation for over a year.

The ring was accused of pilfering at least 19 elephant tusks and 18 rhino horns from Botswana on two occasions in 2022 and 2023 and then channeling them through South Africa and Zimbabwe to Mozambican buyers linked to North Korea.

The investigation discovered two buyers from North Korea were central to a major smuggling operation involving wildlife products. One of these individuals, Yi Kang Dae, confirmed as an intelligence official in North Korea’s state security, collaborated with the former ambassador, Han. 

At that time, a security source in Zimbabwe told media outlets that there was a big chance that Han may have revived a smuggling network he ran while posted in the country in the 1990s.

Edited by Mike Firn. 

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Taejun Kang for RFA.

When office workers stopped working in offices in 2020, trading their cubicles for living room couches during COVID-19 lockdowns, many began questioning those hours they had spent commuting to work. All those rushed mornings stuck in traffic could have been spent getting things done? Life was often lonely for those stuck in their homes, but people found something to appreciate when birdsong rang through the quiet streets. And the temporary dip in travel had the side effect of cutting global carbon emissions by 7 percent in 2020 — a blip of good news in an otherwise miserable year.

Emissions bounced back in 2021, when people started resuming some of their normal activities, but offices have never been the same. While remote work was rare before the pandemic, today, 28 percent of Americans are working a “hybrid” schedule, going into the office some days, and 13 percent are working remotely full-time.

Recent data suggest that remote work could speed along companies’ plans to zero out their carbon emissions, but businesses don’t seem to be considering climate change in their decisions about the future of office work. “In the U.S., I’m sad to say it’s just not high on the priority list,” said Kate Lister, the founder of the consulting firm Global Workplace Analytics. “It gets up there, and then it drops again for the next shiny object.” Commuter travel falls under a company’s so-called “Scope 3” emissions, the indirect sources that routinely get ignored, but represent, on average, three-quarters of the business world’s emissions. 

A 10 percent increase in people working remotely could reduce carbon emissions by 192 million metric tons a year, according to a study published in the journal Nature Cities earlier this month. That would cut emissions from the country’s most polluting sector, transportation, by 10 percent. Those findings align with other peer-reviewed research: Switching to remote work instead of going into the office can cut a person’s carbon footprint by 54 percent, according to a study published in the journal PNAS last fall, even when accounting for non-commute travel and residential energy use.

“It seems like a very obvious solution to a very pressing and real problem,” said Curtis Sparrer, a principal and co-founder of the PR agency Bospar, a San Francisco-based company where employees have been working remotely since it started in 2015. “And I am concerned that this whole ‘return to office’ thing is getting in the way.”

Many companies are mandating their employees show up for in-person work regularly. Last year, big tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Meta told employees that they had to come back to the office three days a week or face consequences, like a lower chance of getting promoted. Even Zoom, the company that became a household name during the pandemic for its videoconferencing platform, is making employees who live within 50 miles of the office commute two days a week. 

Of course, there are many benefits that come with heading into the office to work alongside other humans. Interacting with your coworkers in person gives you a social boost (without the awkward pauses in Zoom meetings) and a compelling reason to change out of your sweatpants in the morning. From a climate change standpoint, the problem is that most Americans tend to jump in their cars to commute, instead of biking or hopping on the bus. A recent poll from Bospar found that two-thirds of Americans are driving to work — and they’re mostly in gas-powered cars. Even though purchases of electric vehicles are rising, they still make up roughly 1 percent of the cars on the road.

The climate benefits start falling off quickly when people are summoned into the office. Working from home two to four days a week cut emissions by between 11 and 29 percent compared with full-time office work, according to the study in PNAS by researchers at Cornell University and Microsoft. If you only work remotely one day a week, those emissions were only trimmed by 2 percent. Another big factor is that maintaining physical office space sucks up a lot of energy, since it needs to be heated and cooled.

So should companies be allowed to claim they’re going green when they’re forcing employees to commute? Many Americans don’t think so, according to Bospar’s survey. Well over half of Millennials and Gen Zers said it’s hypocritical for companies to observe Earth Day while requiring employees to attend work in-person. 

Sparrer points to Disney, which celebrated Earth Month in April with a campaign to promote its environmental efforts but ordered workers to come into the office four days a week last year. Nike, meanwhile, promoted its Earth Day collection of “sustainable” leather shoes while its CEO, John Donahoe, argued that remote work stifled creativity. “In hindsight, it turns out, it’s really hard to do bold, disruptive innovation, to develop a boldly disruptive shoe on Zoom,” he told CNBC earlier this month.

“We are entering a time of magical thinking, where people seem to think that this is enough, and it’s not,” Sparrer said. “And the frustration I have is that we all got to experience what it’s like to work from home, and we know how it works, and we know how it can be improved.”

Working from home, though, could present some environmental challenges. Recent research that looked at trends before the pandemic found that if 10 percent of the workforce started working remotely, transit systems in the U.S. would lose $3.7 billion every year, a 27 percent drop in fare revenue, according to the study in Nature Cities, conducted by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Florida, and Peking University in Beijing. Some experts worry that remote work could push people into the suburbs, where carbon footprints tend to be higher than in cities.

Right now, there are many employees who want to work at home full-time but are forced to go into the office, Lister said. She sees the return-to-office mandates as a result of corporate leadership that wants to go back to how things used to be. “As that generation retires,” she said, “I think that a lot of these conversations will go away.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The problem with forcing people back to the office? All the carbon emissions. on Apr 30, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Kate Yoder.

The race to form the next government of Solomon Islands could be a tight one, with no single party emerging from the election with enough seats to govern.

Caretaker prime minister Manasseh Sogavare’s Our Party did the best, securing 15 out of the 50 seats in the House.

The former opposition leader Matthew Wale’s Democratic Party is first runner-up with 11 MPs, which is also equal to the number of independent MPs which have been elected.

• READ MORE: Other Solomon islands election reports

As for the rest of the field, the United Party secured six seats, the People’s First Party won three, and the remaining four minor parties won a seat each.

So what happens now?
The Governor-General of Solomon Islands, Sir David Vunagi, will only call a meeting to elect the country’s prime minister once official results have been gazetted and Parliament informs him that all elected members have returned from the provinces to the capital Honiara.

This was confirmed by the Governor-General’s private secretary, Rawcliffe Ziza, who also sought to refute some misinformation about the election of the prime minister — which said it would only be called once a party or a coalition of parties had secured the numbers to form government.

As political parties lobby to secure the numbers to rule, local media will be providing blow-by-blow accounts and social media feeds are awash with coalition predictions.

But the reality is things will remain fluid right up until and including when the elected members meet in parliament to cast secret ballots to elect the country’s prime minister.

There are also rumours of MPs defecting from or joining different groupings.

But the Office of the Registrar of Political Parties has confirmed to RNZ Pacific it has not received applications of either kind, and so as of Friday, party numbers remain true to the final election results below.

Solomon Islands final election results by party:

• Our Party — 15 MPs
• Solomon Islands Democratic Party — 11
• Independents — 11
• Solomon Islands United Party — 6
• Solomon Islands People’s First Party — 3
• Umi For Change Party — 1
• Kadere Party — 1
• Democratic Alliance Party — 1
• Solomon Islands Party for Rural Advancement — 1

According to Government House, most of the newly elected members of Parliament are already in the capital.

But the Governor-General will wait until next week to consider a date for the election of the prime minister, to allow time for members from more remote constituencies to make their way back to Honiara and for the official election results to be gazetted.

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.

Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Chang Yen-ting said that, according to Ministry of National Defense’s data, on Apr. 21, two Chinese fighter jets were spotted 41 nautical miles (76 kilometers) away from Keelung, a port city just 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) north of Taipei.

“That means they would need only around five minutes to reach the Presidential Office,” Chang told Radio Free Asia.

Taiwan’s military jets would take at least six minutes to take off in order to intercept the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) aircraft, the retired general turned military expert said.

“The Taiwanese air force won’t be able to deal with it effectively,” Chang added.

According to Taiwan defense ministry’s daily reports, Chinese warplanes and vessels are now crossing the median line of the Taiwan Strait – which serves as the de-facto boundary between Taiwan and mainland China – on a daily basis.

Experts say Beijing has established a “new normal” in the Strait to exert pressure on Taipei.

Responding to the general’s warning, Taiwan’s defense minister Chiu Kuo-cheng was quoted by the official Central News Agency as saying that the Taiwanese military has a regular intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance system in place precisely for the purpose of preventing such scenarios from happening. He did not elaborate further.

President-elect Lai Ching-te announced Thursday the names of ministers of defense and foreign affairs among new posts in his cabinet. Lai will be sworn in officially on May 20 after winning the election in January.

His party – the Democratic Progressive Party – has been in power since 2016 and before that, between 2000-2008.

The current National Security Council (NSC) Secretary-General Wellington Koo, a former lawyer, will replace Chiu Kuo-cheng as minister of national defense.

Former Taichung Mayor Lin Chia-lung will become foreign minister, replacing Joseph Wu, who has been appointed NSC secretary-general.

Edited by Taejun Kang and Mike Firn.

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

Two commercial banks, Premier Bank and Dahabshil Bank International told the Somali Journalists Syndicate (SJS) on April 13 and April 17, respectively, that they had suspended the organization’s accounts on orders from the Banadir Regional Court, whose jurisdiction includes the Somali capital Mogadishu, according to copies of the banks’ emails reviewed by CPJ.

On April 15, IBS Bank orally informed SJS officials in Mogadishu that it had suspended the organization’s accounts, also citing court orders, according to Abdalle Ahmed Mumin, the syndicate’s secretary general, who spoke to CPJ via email and messaging app.  

Abdalle told CPJ, that as of April 19, SJS and its lawyers have not officially received copies of the court’s suspension orders. However, Abdalle said the organization independently acquired, through its sources, a copy of the court’s directive to Premier Bank. In the April 9 letter, which SJS republished with a statement on April 14, the court said that the suspension order was in response to a report submitted by Somalia’s Office of the Attorney General, alleging that Abdalle and “his media organization used a fake media license to open the account and conduct illegal press activities while the organization named Somali Journalists Syndicate (SJS) is not registered.” The letter also authorized the attorney general to investigate SJS on these allegations and asked the banks to cooperate with this inquiry.

In an April 16  statement published on Facebook, Somalia’s Office of the Attorney General confirmed that it had submitted a report to the court, reiterated the allegations that SJS registered its accounts with “fake documents,” and said that the organization had breached sections of Somalia’s penal code that criminalize defamation, without specifying whom the organization was accused of defaming. The statement said that the attorney general would file charges against SJS once the investigations were concluded.

“The investigations into the allegations of criminal offenses by SJS are apparent acts of retaliation and the latest attacks on an organization that has been staunchly vocal about Somalia’s poor press freedom record,” said CPJ Africa Program Coordinator, Muthoki Mumo, in Nairobi. “Somali authorities should stop the legal harassment of the syndicate and reform the country’s laws to scrap criminal defamation, in line with international and regional standards on freedom of expression.”

SJS is under investigation for allegedly breaching sections of the penal code that punish the falsification of documents and certificates with up to 64 months in prison and impose a prison term of up to three years for defamation convictions, according to the statement by the attorney general, which does not state whether any specific SJS official would be criminally liable for these offenses. The organization is also accused of contravening sections of Somalia’s press law that require media outlets and training organizations to register with the ministry of information or face fines and prosecutions.

Abdalle said that the freeze on the SJS bank accounts was already having a “significant impact” on SJS’ work, but the organization remains “committed to advocating for press freedom, the safety of journalists, and human rights.”

He added, “We are actively engaging our legal team to address this matter, but our efforts can only succeed if the rule of law is upheld.”

CPJ has documented previous incidents targeting the organization, including  the arbitrary detention of the Syndicate’s staff, including Abdalle, and the organization’s human rights secretary Mohamed Ibrahim Osman Bulbul. In September 2023, cyberattacks temporarily knocked the organization’s website offline.

The office of the attorney general did not respond to CPJ’s queries sent via email; and Attorney General Sulayman Mohamed Mohamoud did not respond to requests for comment sent via messaging application or answer CPJ’s calls.

In their emails responding to CPJ’s queries, Premier Bank Head of Operations, Mahad Ahmed Mohamed, and Dahabshil Bank International’s Head of Operations, Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamoud, declined to comment on the account suspensions.

Mahad said that Premier Bank is restricted from disclosing client information by “strict privacy laws and ethical banking standards.” Mohamed told CPJ to consult the bank’s email to SJS for detailed information.

IBS Bank did not immediately respond to an email from CPJ requesting comment.

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

Urban Special Force, a Yangon-based group opposing the military that seized power in a 2021 coup, took responsibility for shooting long-range shock missiles. 

The group shot at the Office of the Chief of Military Security Affairs on Saturday night because it was an important military target, the official said. 

"Things seized from the people who participated in the Spring Revolution were kept in that office. Then the [junta] resold those objects as military’s property,” he said, declining to be named for fear of reprisals.

An administrator from Yangon’s North Okkalapa township, south of the blast site in Mingaladon township, confirmed the attack took place near his residence. 

"The office was attacked on the night of the sixth. The junta has tried to hide this news,” he said, declining to be named for security reasons. “From that night until the next day, all roads near the office were closed and checked.”

RFA contacted Yangon region’s junta spokesperson Htay Aung for more information on the extent of the damage, but he did not respond by the time of publication. 

Urban Special Forces previously attacked the junta's air force housing in Yangon’s Insein township on March 8. 

Since the military seized power in 2021, urban guerilla-style militia groups have proliferated in Yangon, many aligning themselves with the shadow National Unity Government. 

Junta soldiers have tightened security in Yangon region after a series of bomb blasts in some townships since the end of March, according to residents.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Kiana Duncan and Mike Firn. 

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

Senegal has inaugurated the youngest elected president in Africa. Newly elected President Bassirou Diomaye Faye nominated Ousmane Sonko to be his prime minister this week, capping a remarkable three-week period that saw the two opposition figures go from prison to ruling Senegal, vowing to fight poverty, injustice and corruption. Faye and Sonko were released from prison in mid-March after previous President Macky Sall had attempted to delay the vote, sparking fears of an anti-democratic election process. Faye’s ultimate triumph, running on a platform of pan-Africanism and reform, has been a cause for celebration among many Senegalese, including former Prime Minister Aminata Touré, who says “democracy prevailed,” giving the country’s younger generation a long-awaited opportunity to “shake up the system,” adds the Senegalese lawyer and political analyst Ibrahima Kane. Both join the show from Senegal’s capital Dakar.

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

Papua New Guinea’s Defence Minister and minister responsible for the National Disaster Centre Dr Billy Joseph confirmed today that the government — with coordinated support from all stakeholder agencies and development partners — was responding appropriately to the natural disasters that has hit many parts of the country.

The National Disaster Center (NDC) is the national coordinating agency and is working with provincial governments and district development authorities (DDAs) as well as the Department of Works and Highways, PNG Defence Force and other stakeholders to coordinate and respond promptly.

The East Sepik provincial earthquake on Sunday left at least three dead and more than 1000 homes collapsed.

• READ MORE: Three people reported dead, 1000 homes destroyed by PNG earthquake

The US Geological Survey said it was magnitude 6.9 and just over 40 km deep.

King tides and heavy flooding
The minister confirmed that about 10 provinces are getting the necessary assistance from the National Disaster Center, including Goroka/EHP which was not included in the initial report provided to his office.

PNG Defence Force troops are working closely with the Simbu Provincial Government and Gumine DDA and their respective leaderships as Simbu was one of the worst affected provinces.

7 people missing off the coast of New Ireland Province
Nine people boarded a banana boat at Kavieng for Emirau Island but did not make it due to heavy weather conditions when the boat capsized.

Two of the young men swam to the island to look for help while seven others made a makeshift raft and floated awaiting assistance.

“As of today, seven people are still missing and our search is still active — if we don’t find them after 72 hours, we will declare them lost and the search will be discontinued,” Minister Joseph said.

The Australian Defence Force has provided a C27 aircraft to conduct low aerial surveillance of the subject areas.

A PNGDF Navy Patrol Boat has also been deployed to the area but no sightings have been reported.

The Search and Rescue operations are being coordinated by the National Maritime Safety Authority with oversight provided by the PNG Defence Force.

East Sepik Province earthquake
NDC is working very closely with the leaders of East Sepik, including the provincial government, to ensure much needed help reach the people that need it.

An emergency allocation of K200,000 (about NZ$90,000) has been made available for food, water, shelter and medicines etc as seen appropriate by the Provincial Disaster Committee.

It is at their disposal. A commercial helicopter is now in Wewak to assist in the relief operations and the PNDF military helicopter will join shortly.

“We are also mobilising support from our bilateral partners to assist but the challenge is now for the Provincial Disaster Center to provide reports to NDC so we define and coordinate what kind of emergency assistance is required,” Minister Joseph said.

Minister Joseph further warned Papua New Guineans to take precautions and not take risks, especially at sea, as the country’s emergency services are stretched and rescue efforts may not happen in time.

Miriam Zarriga is a PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.

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

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Akela Lacy.

Rana was held in jail for a week after police arrested the journalist on March 5. Rana, who works for the Bangla-language newspaper Desh Rupantor, was arrested at a local government office in the northern Sherpur district after he filed a right to information (RTI) application regarding a government-run development program, according to news reports, the local press freedom group Bangladeshi Journalists in International Media, and Mustafa Mamun, acting editor of Desh Rupantor.

Later that day, an assistant land commissioner, who is also an executive magistrate, sentenced the journalist to six months in prison on charges of disobeying an order by a public servant and insulting the modesty of a woman. The action was taken through a mobile court, which is empowered to try offenses instantly.

Mohammad Ali Arafat, state minister for information and broadcasting, stated that the country’s information commission would investigate the incident and told CPJ that he would receive a copy of the commission’s investigative report on Monday, March 18.

Arafat did not immediately respond to CPJ’s subsequent requests for comment on the report’s findings. Mamun told CPJ that as of Wednesday, he had not received a copy of the report.

Separately, at around 12 p.m. on March 14, employees at an assistant land commissioner’s office in Lalmonirhat held Mahfuz Sazu, a correspondent for the broadcaster mytv and the newspaper The Daily Observer, after the journalist filmed a land dispute hearing allegedly conducted by an unauthorized official, according to news reports, Bangladeshi Journalists in International Media, and the journalist, who spoke to CPJ.

Twenty minutes later, four members of the Lalmonirhat Press Club arrived to help Sazu and were also confined within the premises. After a district revenue commissioner arrived at the scene, the five journalists were released around 12:50 p.m.

“CPJ welcomes a government investigation into the retaliatory jailing of Bangladeshi journalist Md Shofiuzzaman Rana. Journalists should not face reprisal merely for seeking information,,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “Authorities should launch a transparent probe into the confinement of five correspondents in a  government office in Lalmonirhat and ensure that journalists are not harassed with impunity.”

Rana’s arrest unfolded after an office assistant refused to provide the journalist with a receipt for his RTI application. Rana then called the Sherpur deputy commissioner, or district magistrate, to resolve the issue, Mamun told CPJ, citing Rana. The chief of the local government office arrived at the scene and shouted at Rana, saying, “You are a broker journalist” (an insult used to refer to a media member who makes money through one-sided stories).

Police then arrived at the scene, arrested the journalist, and seized his two mobile phones. Rana was held for one week in Sherpur District Jail and released on bail on March 12. A local magistrate court is scheduled to hear Rana’s appeal against the verdict on April 16.

Separately, Sazu told CPJ that after filming the land dispute hearing, he interviewed three people connected to the case in the corridor of the assistant land commissioner’s office when an official unsuccessfully attempted to confiscate his phone.

The official then called the assistant land commissioner. At the same time, the office staff escorted the three people he interviewed out of the building and locked the entrance, leaving the journalist confined within the premises, Sazu said.

Sazu told CPJ that the journalist’s four colleagues later entered the building with the assistance of a local ward councilor but were also locked inside the premises. The journalists were:

• Mazharul Islam Bipu, a correspondent for the broadcaster Independent Television
• SK Sahed, a correspondent for the newspaper Daily Kalbela
• Neon Dulal, a correspondent for the broadcaster Asian TV
• Liakat Ali, a correspondent for the newspaper Daily Nabochatona

The assistant land commissioner then arrived at the scene and shouted at the journalists, calling them “brokers” and threatening to send them to jail via a mobile court, Sazu said, adding that the journalists also heard him telling an unidentified individual on the phone that he would file legal cases against them.

Later that day, the divisional commissioner of Rangpur, which encompasses Lalmonirhat, issued an order transferring the assistant land commissioner to another locality. As of Wednesday, the order had not been executed, and no further legal or administrative action had been taken, Sazu told CPJ.

Arafat did not immediately respond to CPJ’s request for comment on the incident in Lalmonirhat.

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

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Shawn Musgrave.

In an unprecedented legal development, senior Australian politicians, including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, have been referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for investigation into whether they have aided or supported Israel’s actions in Gaza.

The referral, made by the Sydney law firm Birchgrove Legal on behalf of their clients, is the first time any serving Australian political leaders have been formally referred to the ICC for investigation.

The referral asserts that Albanese, Foreign Minister Penny Wong, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and other members of the government have violated the Rome Statute, the 1998 treaty that established the ICC to investigate and prosecute allegations of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.

• READ MORE: There has been much talk of war crimes in the Israel-Gaza conflict. But will anyone actually be prosecuted?
• Why is accountability for alleged war crimes so hard to achieve in the Israel-Palestinian conflict?

Specifically, the law firm references:

• Australia’s freezing of aid to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), the aid agency that operates in Gaza
• the provision of military aid to Israel that could have been used in the alleged commission of genocide and crimes against humanity
• permitting Australians to travel to Israel to take part in attacks in Gaza
• providing “unequivocal political support” for Israel’s actions in Gaza.

A key aspect of the referral is the assertion, under Article 25 of the Rome Statute, that Albanese and the others bear individual criminal responsibility for aiding, abetting or otherwise assisting in the commission (or attempted commission) of alleged crimes by Israel in Gaza.

At a news conference today, Albanese said the letter had “no credibility” and was an example of “misinformation”. He said:

Australia joined a majority in the UN to call for an immediate ceasefire and to advocate for the release of hostages, the delivery of humanitarian assistance, the upholding of international law and the protection of civilians.

How the referral process works
There are a couple of key questions here: can anyone be referred to the ICC, and how often do these referrals lead to an investigation?

Referrals to the ICC prosecutor are most commonly made by individual countries — as has occurred following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — or by the UN Security Council. However, it is also possible for referrals to be made by “intergovernmental or non-governmental organisations, or other reliable sources”, according to Article 15 of the Rome Statute.

The ICC prosecutor’s office has received 12,000 such referrals to date. These must go through a preliminary examination before the office decides whether there are “reasonable grounds” to start an investigation.

The court has issued arrest warrants for numerous leaders over the past two decades, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and his commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova; former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir; and now-deceased Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

ABC interview with barrister Sheryn Omeri KC on the referral of Australian political leaders to the International Criminal Court.

Acting for over 100 Australian lawyers, Omeri, through the law firm Birchgrove Legal, has referred Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese & key… pic.twitter.com/aHAdVct6eV

— Peter Cronau (@PeterCronau) March 5, 2024

Why this referral is unlikely to go anywhere
Putting aside the merit of the allegations themselves, it is unlikely the Australian referrals will go any further for legal and practical reasons.

First, the ICC was established as an international court of last resort. This means it would only be used to prosecute international crimes when courts at a national level are unwilling or unable to do so.

As such, the threat of possible ICC prosecution was intended to act as a deterrent for those considering committing international crimes, as well as an incentive for national authorities and courts to prosecute them.

Australia has such a process in place to investigate potential war crimes and other international crimes through the Office of the Special Investigator (OSI).

The OSI was created in the wake of the 2020 Brereton Report into allegations of Australian war crimes in Afghanistan. In March 2023, the office announced its first prosecution.

Because Australia has this legal framework in place, the ICC prosecutor would likely deem it unnecessary to refer Australian politicians to the ICC for prosecution, unless Australia was unwilling to start such a prosecution itself. At present, there is no evidence that is the case.

Another reason this referral is likely to go nowhere: the ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, is currently focusing on a range of investigations related to alleged war crimes committed by Russia, Hamas and Israel, in addition to other historical investigations.

Given the significance of these investigations – and the political pressure the ICC faces to act with speed – it is unlikely the court would divert limited resources to investigate Australian politicians.

Increasing prominence of international courts
This referral to the ICC, however, needs to be seen in a wider context. The Israel-Hamas conflict has resulted in an unprecedented flurry of legal proceedings before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the UN’s top court.

Unlike the ICC, the ICJ does not deal with individual criminal responsibility. The ICJ does, however, have jurisdiction over whether countries violate international law, such as the Genocide Convention.

This was the basis for South Africa to launch its case against Israel in the ICJ, claiming its actions against the Palestinian people amounted to genocide. The ICJ issued a provisional ruling against Israel in January which said it’s “plausible” Israel had committed genocide in Gaza and ordered Israel to take immediate steps to prevent acts of genocide.

In addition, earlier this week, a new case was launched in the ICJ by Nicaragua, alleging Germany has supported acts of genocide by providing military support for Israel and freezing aid for UNRWA.

PRESS RELEASE: #Nicaragua institutes proceedings against #Germany and asks the #ICJ to indicate provisional measures https://t.co/RtdImbNben pic.twitter.com/UdsKZmDdxS

— CIJ_ICJ (@CIJ_ICJ) March 1, 2024

All of these developments in recent months amount to what experts call “lawfare”. This refers to the use of international or domestic courts to seek accountability for alleged state-sanctioned acts of genocide and support or complicity in such acts. Some of these cases have merit, others are very weak.

As one international law expert described the purpose:

It’s […] a way of raising awareness, getting media attention and showing your own political base you’re doing something.

These cases do succeed in increasing public awareness of these conflicts. And they make clear the desire of many around the world to hold to account those seen as being responsible for gross violations of international law.

Dr Donald Rothwell, professor of international law, Australian National University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

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

In his first four weeks in office, Louisiana Republican Governor Jeff Landry has filled the ranks of state environmental posts with fossil fuel executives. 

Landry has taken aim at the state’s climate task force for possible elimination as part of a sweeping reorganization of Louisiana’s environmental bureaucracy. The goal, according to Landry’s executive order, is to “create a better prospective business climate.” 

And in his first month, Landry changed the name of the Department of Natural Resources, the state agency with oversight of the fossil fuel industry, by adding the word “energy” to its title.

While the United States and other countries have vowed to move away from fossil fuels, Landry is running in the opposite direction.

Landry, who has labeled climate change “a hoax,” wants to grow the oil and gas industry that supports hundreds of thousands of jobs in Louisiana. Environmentalists blame the industry for the pollution that has harmed vulnerable communities in the state and for the climate change tied to increased flooding, land loss, drought, and heat waves in the Gulf Coast state.

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Naveena Sadasivam, Zoya Teirstein, & Jake Bittle

A key indicator of where Landry is headed is the choice of Tyler Gray to lead the state’s Department of Energy and Natural Resources. Gray enters the new administration after spending the past two years working for Placid Refining Company as the oil company’s corporate secretary and lobbyist. 

Before that, Gray spent seven years with the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, or LMOGA, his final two years serving as the lobbying group’s president. During his tenure with LMOGA, Gray helped draft the controversial 2018 law that criminalized protesting near the oil and gas pipelines and construction sites. 

At the time, Gray said the law was needed as protection from individuals who attempt to unlawfully interrupt the construction of pipeline projects or damage existing facilities. Greenpeace USA found such laws — enacted in 18 states — were directly tied to lobbying by the fossil fuel industry and resulted in insulating more than 60 percent of the U.S. gas and oil industry facilities from protest. 

Anne Rolfes with the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, a grassroots nonprofit focused on accountability in the petrochemical industry, has a grim outlook on Gray’s tenure. Her organization has been involved with many of the protests in question.

“His willingness to suppress people’s rights in favor of that industry is alarming,” Rolfes said.

“He’s been writing laws that favor the oil industry over the rights of people throughout his career,” she added. “But the state has never stood up to the oil industry. Under every administration there is this myopic idea of destroying our state via the oil and gas industry is somehow economic development.”

Neither Landry nor Gray’s office responded to multiple requests for comments.

Landry picks have oil, gas, and coal ties

Gray is one of several former fossil fuel executives Landry has selected to lead Louisiana’s environmental efforts.

Tony Alford, the former co-owner and president of a Houma-based oil-field service company that was accused of spilling toxic waste in a Montana lawsuit, is now the chairman of the Governor’s Advisory Commission on Coastal Protection. And Benjamin Bienvenu, an oil industry executive and petroleum engineer, is serving as the commissioner of conservation within the Department of Energy and Natural Resources. 

Landry also tapped Aurelia Giacometto to lead the state’s Department of Environmental Quality. It was reported that Giacometto, the first Black woman to serve in the position, had ties with skeptics of climate science when she served under then-President Donald Trump as head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She currently sits on the board of a coal manufacturing company. 

Read Next

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Katie Myers

And Landry’s pick for the state’s new leader for the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, Madison Sheahan, doesn’t have a background in wildlife — or fisheries. She enters the job after serving as the executive director of the South Dakota Republican Party and managing Trump’s re-election campaign in that state. The agency led by Sheahan is one of the state entities responsible for investigating oil spills.

At a recent press conference, Landry said he seeks to expand oil and gas refining in Louisiana, seeing it as the only way to increase job opportunities for the middle class. 

For environmentalists, these are worrying signs for a state that is the site of a boom in proposed liquified natural gas facilities and carbon capture projects that they say threaten to increase Louisiana’s already high contribution of climate-changing greenhouse gases.

In late January, President Joe Biden announced his administration was halting approvals of new liquified natural gas export facilities to examine the need for the additional capacity and the environmental impact of such projects. The temporary delay reportedly affects five projects in Louisiana and one in Texas. 

Louisiana’s ‘sacrifice zone’

Landry’s moves weren’t unexpected, advocates say, given his past actions as state attorney general and his combative stance toward environmental justice issues. 

Gray’s appointment is “disappointing but not surprising,” said Jackson Voss, climate policy coordinator for the Alliance for Affordable Energy.

“Unfortunately, from our perspective, the history of the [Louisiana] Department of Natural Resources has always been very deeply connected with the oil and gas industry,” Voss said. “In some ways it helps us, because there’s not going to be very many surprises about where Secretary Gray will align on certain issues.” 

Read Next

The big question behind Biden’s liquefied natural gas pause

Jake Bittle

In its latest report, Human Rights Watch highlighted the environmental harms and health-related issues the oil and gas industry is accused of inflicting on predominantly Black communities in the southeast Louisiana corridor known as Cancer Alley. The group is asking state leaders to phase out fossil fuel production and to halt any new developments or expansions to existing fossil fuel and petrochemical facilities. 

Author Antonia Juhasz interviewed dozens of residents living in Cancer Alley who talked about miscarriages, high-risk pregnancies, infertility, respiratory issues and a multitude of other health impacts in their communities. They attribute the maladies to years of pollution and dangerous emissions from the high concentration of polluting industries, especially in southern Louisiana.  

“The fossil fuel and petrochemical industry has created a ‘sacrifice zone’ in Louisiana,” Juhasz, senior researcher on fossil fuels at Human Rights Watch, said in a prepared statement. “The failure of state and federal authorities to properly regulate the industry has dire consequences for residents of Cancer Alley.”

Landry takes aim at oil and gas limits

As the state’s attorney general, Landry pushed lawsuits against restrictions the Biden administration tried to implement on offshore oil lease sales and the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline. 

He also sued over the Environmental Protection Agency’s push to better regulate emissions from oil and gas facilities in Cancer Alley.

A Trump-appointed federal district court judge in western Louisiana recently sided with Landry on that lawsuit. U.S. District Judge James Cain said in his opinion that the federal agency’s enhanced oversight of proposed projects in Cancer Alley communities overstepped its powers and that it was “imposing an improper financial burden on the state.” 

Read Next

Human Rights Watch blames Louisiana regulators for low birth weights in Cancer Alley

Lylla Younes

As attorney general, Landry also sued to obtain correspondence between EPA, environmentalists and certain journalists. 

As governor, Landry has opposed Biden’s climate initiatives, including the push to increase manufacturing of electric vehicles. And Landry has claimed that boosting renewable energy in Louisiana, including solar and wind, would force the state into “energy poverty.” 

Oil and Gas Association applauds appointment

Landry’s pick of Gray was lauded by the president of the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association. In a prepared statement, Mike Moncla praised Gray for knowing their industry “backwards and forwards.” 

“This appointment marks the state of a new era for our state’s oil and gas industry,” Moncla wrote. “We know that he will be an incredible asset for our industry.” 

At LMOGA, Gray also pushed back at any efforts to limit offshore drilling and domestic energy production to reduce planet-warming emissions. Gray said the country needed “sound, science-based policies” and solutions to address climate change that also promote “domestic energy development” while not stifling the state’s economy and job market. 

Read Next

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Lylla Younes

LMOGA is a staunch supporter of carbon capture and sequestration. The agency Gray now leads recently received primary regulatory oversight from the federal government for the wells used to pump carbon dioxide underground for permanent storage. 

The technology is being touted as the solution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but debates are ongoing over its safety and effectiveness. 

Environmental advocates argue that carbon capture and storage is just a ploy to prolong the life of the fossil fuel industry instead of transitioning to cleaner energy sources like wind and solar. They lack confidence in the state’s ability to properly permit carbon capture projects with Gray at the helm. 

“With Gray’s appointment and then an already heavily underfunded and understaffed agency, it very much feels like they’ll be sending those permits through instead of truly evaluating them one by one,” said Angelle Bradford, a spokesperson with the Delta chapter of the Sierra Club. “It’s once again the usual good-old-boy mentality where we’re putting people in positions who not only won’t follow the rules but create rules that make it harder for the other side, which is us.”

She added, “Louisiana is not taking the climate crisis seriously.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline When a climate denier becomes Louisiana’s governor: Jeff Landry’s first month in office on Feb 15, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Terry L. Jones, Floodlight.

Former Fiji prime minister Voreqe Bainimarama and former Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum are due to appear in court today on a charge related to abuse of office, as is a former health minister Dr Neil Prakash Sharma.

Fiji state broadcaster FBC reported the trio were interviewed by CID officers yesterday for allegedly failing to comply with statutory requirements for tenders.

All three were kept in custody at the Totogo Police Station overnight.

• READ MORE: Fiji police charge Bainimarama, Sayed-Khaiyum and former health minister

Bainimarama and Sayed-Khaiyum are each accused of recklessly abusing their position by granting a waiver of tender process without lawful justification.

Sayed-Khaiyum is also charged with obstructing the course of justice.

Sharma faces four counts of abuse of office.

The new charge against Bainimarama comes less than four months after he was found not guilty of perverting the course of justice.

In October, according to local media reports, Magistrate Seini Puamau said the state had failed to establish a compelling case.

“According to their charge sheet, it was alleged that Bainimarama sometime in July 2020 as the Prime Minister directed the Police Commissioner to stop the investigation into a police complaint, in the abuse of the authority of his office, which was an arbitrary act prejudicial to the rights of the University of the South Pacific which is the complainant,” fijivillage.com reported last year.

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.

Yandex, once dubbed Russia’s Google for becoming the country’s dominant online search engine, will exit Russia entirely, selling its assets there in a deeply discounted $5.2 billion deal that marks the end of an era.

Under the agreement announced on February 5 by Yandex’s Netherlands-based corporate parent, a “purchaser consortium” that includes the company’s management, an investment fund linked to Russian oil giant LUKoil, and three other businessmen will take over Yandex’s operations inside Russia.

The Russian entity, meanwhile, takes over the vast bulk of the company’s revenue-generating businesses, including the country’s dominant search engine, and also major operations in things like online shopping, advertising, food delivery, taxis, maps, and other things.

The Dutch parent is expected to retain control of several non-Russian businesses, including operations in cloud computing, self-driving cars, and a number of patents and other intellectual property licenses.

The price takes into account a 50 percent discount mandated by law on the sale of assets of companies from "unfriendly countries" when they exit the local market.

“Since February 2022, the Yandex group and our team have faced exceptional challenges. We believe that we have found the best possible solution for our shareholders, our teams, and our users in these extraordinary circumstances,” Yandex’s board Chairman John Boynton said in a statement.

February 2022 is when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which sparked the exit of dozens of international companies from their Russian operations.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov welcomed news of the sale.

“Yandex is one of the economy’s national champions in high tech and one of the largest companies,” he told reporters. “It’s important for us that the company continues to work in the country.”

Yandex was a long-admired company, in and out of Russia, not only for its search-engine dominance but its innovations and fast-moving efforts to move into lucrative online businesses such as ride hailing and food delivery. Its shares, which traded on the U.S. Nasdaq exchange, were held by major Western institutional investors.

The announcement caps a tumultuous 18-month period since the Kremlin’s decision to launch its large-scale invasion of Ukraine. In the wake of the invasion, Russian lawmakers passed measures that amount to censorship of news and independent information about the war, which the Kremlin euphemistically calls a “special military operation.”

In the weeks that followed, Yandex, whose search engine and news portals were a major source of information for Russians, came under pressure to skew search results, and direct readers to only specified news outlets.

Two board members resigned; several top executives departed, along with thousands of employees; and the company’s American Depositary Receipts, traded on the U.S. Nasdaq exchange, were frozen. The company decided to sell its news and entertainment channels.

Months later, Yandex announced a plan for a wholesale reorganization, with a possible exit from Russia. Aleksei Kudrin, a former finance minister and longtime Kremlin confidant viewed as a “liberal” policymaker, was brought on to help negotiate the restructuring.

But the talks faltered as reports emerged that powerful Kremlin-linked oligarchs were in the running to take it over, and Yandex’s board feared Western sanctions imposed after the Russian invasion might pose legal problems. Kudrin himself ended up being sanctioned by the United States, while the company’s co-founder, Arkady Volozh, who resigned months after the invasion, was hit with European Union sanctions.

The negotiations were complicated further last August when Volozh publicly criticized the Ukraine war, calling it “barbaric.”

Aside from LUKoil and the stake to be held by management, the other three Russian members of the “purchaser consortium” are relatively unknown. One previously was an executive at Gazprom, the state-controlled natural gas giant.

None of the buyers are “a target of, or owned or controlled by a target of, sanctions in the U.S., EU, U.K., or Switzerland,” the company said.

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

Cook islands Deputy Prime Minister Robert Tapaitau, former National Environment Service (NES) director Nga Puna, and his wife and former Secretary of Infrastructure Cook Islands (ICI), Diane Charlie-Puna, have been found guilty of “all or most offences” following a judgment given by Chief Justice Patrick Keane.

In his ruling Chief Justice Keane said: “In my decision, issued [Wednesday, Cook Islands time], which this minute accompanies, I have found each defendant guilty of all or most of the offences with which they are charged, and have convicted them of those offences.”

The trio were accused of taking public funds amounting to CI$70,000 between April 2019 and March 2021.

• READ MORE: Other Cook Islands news reports

Prime Minister Mark Brown’s office confirmed he had been briefed on the matter [on Wednesday] afternoon, shortly before the 100-page judgment was obtained by Cook Islands News.

In a written statement, Brown’s office said the Prime Minister had been briefed “a short time ago” by the Solicitor-General on the decision released by Chief Justice Keane on Wednesday, relating to the trio.

“The government acknowledges the court’s decision and will take time to study the 100-page plus document, before commenting further.”

Tapaitau faced three charges of using a document to obtain pecuniary advantage and one charge of conspiracy to defraud.

‘Guilty of all offences’
Chief Justice Keane ruled: “Mr Tapaitau is guilty of all offences with which he is charged; and I convict him accordingly.”

Charlie-Puna faced seven charges of using a document to obtain pecuniary advantage and a charge of conspiracy to defraud to which she entered a guilty plea on 1 June 2023.

In his ruling, Chief Justice Keane said: “Mrs Puna is guilty of all offences with which she is charged, including those to which she has pleaded guilty, except those on which she has been discharged and charges 5,13; and I convict her accordingly.”

Charlie-Puna entered guilty pleas to conspiracy and theft charges in June 2023.

Nga Puna faced 22 charges of using a document to obtain pecuniary advantage, one of conspiracy to defraud, one of uttering a forged document and five charges of forgery.

Chief Justice Keane ruled: “Mr Puna is guilty of all offences with which he is charged, except charges 14, 25; and I convict him accordingly.”

They are due to be sentenced in March.

Pre-sentence report
“Each defendant is now to be sentenced on the basis of a pre-sentence report; and I direct accordingly. I should appreciate those reports being given high priority,” CJ Keane said.

“To ensure, if feasible, that sentences are imposed within the March session, which I will be conducting, on 21 March perhaps, I direct primary submissions be filed and served without reference to the pre-sentence reports.”

The Crown was given until February 21 to file and serve submissions while the defence had until seven days before the sentence date allocated.

In his judgement statement, Chief Justice Keane said that in the Cook Islands, government departments, and state agencies, entrusted with public money, money appropriated by Parliament and project aid money, were subject to clear statutory principles, standards and controls.

“Public money is the property of the Crown; and heads of government departments, and state agencies, are charged by statute with ensuring that those public entities have sound financial management systems and internal controls.”

The Public Expenditure Review Committee and the Audit Office were charged by statute with safeguarding public money, and the integrity of all public accounts, including those of government departments and state agencies.

“Within each government department, and state agency, accounts and records must be faithfully and properly kept, revenue must be properly assessed and collected, expenditure must be valid and correctly authorised, revenue, expenses, assets and liabilities must be properly recorded and accounted for, and financial and operating information must be reliable.”

Gave evidence, denial
All three defendants elected to give evidence and denied any offence.

Each said, with one exception, that any benefit they received in the ways charged lay within their entitlement; or that, if it did not, they had acted honestly in that belief and without any intent to defraud.

The primary issue on each of the charges, therefore, was not principally the documentary context, which was largely uncontested, Chief Justice Keane said in his judgement.

“The issue is whether the Crown, on the evidence called, is able to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the defendants did act dishonestly and with intent to defraud.”

In discharging charges five and 13 against Diane Puna, charge five alleged she fraudulently used, or procured the use of, an Infrastructure Cook Islands cheque to pay for a week’s Auckland accommodation for her family and herself, during her father’s funeral.

“There is, and can be, no issue that this ICI cheque was capable of, and did, confer on Mrs Puna a pecuniary advantage. It met the cost of her first seven days accommodation in Auckland, independently of her father’s house, while she was attending his funeral.”

Charge 13 alleged that fraudulently using, or procuring the use of, a cheque on 7 April 2020, $400 cash, to pay for a lunch for workers at her Rarotonga home address.

In the case against Nga Puna, he was not convicted on charges 14 and 25.

Two NES cheques
Charge 14 alleged Puna fraudulently used, or procured the use of, two NES cheques to benefit himself, together with a related deposit to his account on 29 August 2019.

There was a lack of evidence underpinning the inference that Puna did fraudulently misuse for his own benefit the cash proceeds of the two NES cheques, issued for a retreat, and thus the cheques themselves.

On charge 25, the Punas were jointly charged with fraudulently using, or procuring the use of, a cheque on 7 April 2020, $400 cash, to pay for a lunch for workers at their Rarotonga home address.

“This payment by cheque may well, I accept, have been a misuse of public money. But the house belonged to the government, and the work needed to be done. The payment was a gesture, after the event, to NES and ICI staff during the lockdown,” CJ Keane said.

The final submissions were heard in the high-profile corruption case late last year with CJ Keane indicating at the time that he would make a decision in the new year.

The guilty verdicts come more than two years after the trio were charged with various dishonesty offences.

In November 2023, CJ Keane released a ruling through the High Court of the Cook Islands, making an order that all theft charges be substituted with fraudulent document dealing charges.

Pleas remained the same
While the original charges were vacated, the pleas from the three defendants remained the same to the new charges.

Tapaitau was reinstated as Deputy Prime Minister for the second time early in November 2023 month after suspension amid the charges.

Tapaitau was the minister responsible for Infrastructure Cook Islands and National Environment Service when the offences took place. He was not responsible for those two ministries due to conflicts with the pending court decisions. The Penrhyn MP resumed his duties as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister responsible for Transport, Marine Resources, Energy and Outer Island Projects.

The trio faced a four-week Judge alone trial in July before it was confirmed final submissions in the trial had been pushed back, after CJ Keane sought clarification on legal issues, specifically whether the offending the Crown alleged, ought to be charged as theft, or as fraudulent use of a document.

This report was first published by Cook Islands News and is republished with permission.

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

When I became a journalist over 15 years ago, I did so to highlight the voices of activists—not top city officials. But things took an unexpected turn in 2014, as the Washington Post sought to end DC Mayor Vincent Gray’s career.

As his reelection bid neared, Gray comfortably led all polls—much to the chagrin of the Post, which hadn’t forgiven him for winning office four years earlier.

In that prior 2010 contest, Gray, riding a wave of Black support, upended the incumbent DC mayor, Adrian Fenty. It was an act for which the Post never forgave Gray, as Fenty was the paper’s dream come true.

Fenty had run as a progressive in 2006, and won in a landslide. But upon taking office, Fenty flipped and adopted the Post’s anti-labor, pro-gentrification agenda as his own. The shocking about-face earned Fenty the Post’s ever-lasting love, but cost him Black voters—and his reelection.

While Fenty conceded to Gray in 2010, the Post had a harder time moving on. And the paper would spend the next four years attacking Gray, particularly on the eve of the 2014 election.

Dog-whistling

As the 2014 election neared, anti-Gray editorials, already commonplace, started running multiple times a week, and then nearly daily. In the nine days leading up to the start of early voting, the Post (3/9–17/14) ran an incredible seven editorials targeting Gray.

And it wasn’t just the editorial page that was busy electioneering.

To the Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank (3/19/14), DC Mayor Vincent Gray “made a lamentable decision to stoke the city’s racial politics” by endorsing the statement that “Washington has become a city of the haves and have-nots.”

Two days into early voting, Gray received the endorsement of Marion Barry, the former four-term DC mayor. In his column on the endorsement, the Post’s Dana Milbank (3/19/14) dismissed Barry, who came out of the civil rights movement, as an “old race warrior” who “has inflamed racial tensions for decades.”

Milbank opened by taking advantage of the slurred speech of the ailing Barry (who’d live just eight more months):

Embattled Washington Mayor Vincent Gray called in a notorious predecessor, Marion Barry, to prop up his reelection campaign Wednesday afternoon. Gray got exactly what he deserved.

“Vince Gray,” Barry told a modest crowd in a church basement in Southeast Washington, “is a leader with a solid crack record.”

The self-proclaimed mayor for life caught this Freudian slip. “Track record,” he corrected.

Barry, now a 78-year-old City Council member in failing health, is, famously, the one with the crack record.

As an example of Gray’s potential “subtle but divisive appeals to African American voters,” the Post‘s Mike DeBonis (3/13/14) offered, “To some in our city, I’m just another corrupt politician from the other side of town.”

Milbank’s racialized attacks were not a one-off. A week earlier, Post columnist Mike DeBonis (3/13/14) gratuitously dropped Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan’s name into the mix, in an attempt to tie him to Gray:

If Gray is engaging in tribal politics, he’s certainly doing it more subtly than the master of the trade, Marion Barry…[who] after his 1990 drug arrest…was not shy about sending signals to his African-American base—embracing the support of Louis Farrakhan and other controversial activists.

Not only does Gray lack ties to Farrakhan—notorious for his history of antisemitism—but as a student at George Washington University, Gray joined a Jewish fraternity, where he was one of three Black students to integrate the school’s all-white fraternity system.

DeBonis was too busy dog-whistling to white voters to mention this in his column, ironically headlined “Is Vincent Gray Dog-Whistling to Black Voters?”

The day before DeBonis’ piece, Jonetta Rose Barras’ Post column (3/12/14) associated Gray with “some Third World dictatorship” and “snake-oil sellers.”

‘Growing ex-prisoner vote’

“Any taboo that previously muted politicking with prisoners, some of whom once preyed on city residents, has fallen away,” the Post‘s Aaron Davis (3/22/14) reported, and “no one is doing more to capture this vote than Gray.”

Meanwhile, with early-voting underway, here’s how Post reporter Aaron Davis opened his story, “In DC Mayor’s Race, Embattled Gray May Have a Secret Weapon in Growing Ex-Prisoner Vote” (3/22/14):

Above an official portrait of Mayor Vincent C. Gray, crisp silver lettering spells out a welcome to one of the shiniest new places in DC government—the Office on Returning Citizen Affairs.

And on a flier lying nearby: “YOU CAN LEGALLY VOTE!”

The bustling facility is designed solely for convicted criminals…a slice of the population growing by thousands each year. Ex-offenders account for at least one in 10 DC residents and perhaps many more…. Any taboo that previously muted politicking with prisoners, some of whom once preyed on city residents, has fallen away in favor of winning a few thousand votes that could tip the balance in a close race….

[And] no one is doing more to capture this vote than Gray, the embattled mayor seeking a second term.

In case the dog-whistling wasn’t loud enough, Davis all but accused Gray of buying the votes of ex-offenders, who in DC are disproportionately Black. He wrote that under Gray, DC

has hired 534 former inmates—most for positions with benefits, including hundreds into jobs that were once off-limits because of their proximity to children, such as school bus attendants, drivers and camp directors.

Despite the Post’s racialized attacks, the paper’s editorial board (3/12/14)—in a textbook example of projection—accused Gray of “injecting race” into the election.

‘Charges should be brought now’

“A lot of seamy stuff might come to light,” Post columnist Robert McCartney (5/23/12) speculated. As it turned out, it didn’t.

The Post’s dog-whistles to white voters could get the paper only so far—because DC is nearly half Black, and Black DC voters have a history of stubbornly defying the Post at the ballot box.

Knowing this, the Post sought to preempt DC voters by getting rid of Gray before he stood for reelection—via an indictment over his campaign four years earlier.

Gray’s 2010 campaign was aided by $650,000 in undisclosed funds. While Gray maintained he didn’t know about the funds (and he may not have), the Post had what it needed to get him indicted—at least if the US attorney was willing to play ball.

Flattering portrayals of Gray’s would-be-prosecutor, US Attorney Ron Machen, were commonplace in the Post; he was even hailed as “DC’s person of the year” and “St. Ron” in the lead up to the election.

In addition to glowing compliments, the Post also gave Machen his marching orders.

“He already has enough evidence to indict the mayor,” insisted Post columnist Robert McCartney (3/12/14), who previously called Gray “a liar” (5/23/12) who’d “have to resign in disgrace” or go “possibly to prison” (7/14/12). Fellow Post columnist Colbert King’s instructions (3/7/14) to Machen were no less clear: “Charges should be brought now—before DC voters head to the polls. Just get on with it.”

‘Vincent Gray Knew’

Less than a week before the start of voting in the mayoral primary, the Post‘s front page (3/11/14) all but announced an indictment of Gray that never came.

While Machen was able to secure seven guilty pleas among Gray’s aides over their roles in the 2010 campaign, he didn’t have the evidence to charge Gray. So he got creative. Just as voters were set to go to the polls, Machen stood before a bank of TV cameras, with FBI and IRS agents as his backdrop, and all but promised to indict the mayor.

The Post took it from there. Blazed atop the next day’s paper—”in type large enough for declarations of war,” noted the late housing organizer Jim McGrath—was Gray’s guilt. “Prosecutors: Vincent Gray Knew,” read the five-column headline (3/11/14).

Only Gray was never convicted of a crime. In fact, he would never even be charged with one. But with the Post and Machen all but promising an imminent indictment, Black turnout was depressed—”suppressed” might be the more apt word.

This is how Gray’s rock-solid lead vanished and he lost to the Post-endorsed Muriel Bowser—who remains mayor to this day, much to the paper’s delight.

Do the right thing

Once Gray was out of office, a new US attorney quietly brought Machen’s five-year investigation to a close.

Gray, now 81 and facing health struggles, recently announced (Washington Post, 12/20/23) that he won’t seek re-election as Ward 7 councilmember, the position he’s held since 2017.

With 2024 marking Gray’s last year in office, the Post should finally do right by him—and apologize.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com.

Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.

FEATURED IMAGE: Photo of Vincent Gray at Obama’s second inauguration (CC photo: Adam Fagen).

The post WaPo Owes an Apology to the DC Mayor It Drove From Office appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Pete Tucker.

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

Insurrection means an act or instance of revolting against a civil authority.

On January 20, 2017, Donald John Trump took the oath of office as President of the United States (POTUS), having been duly elected to that office in November 2016. Trump held that office until noon on January 20, 2021, when his four-year tenure as POTUS expired. As POTUS, Trump was Chief Executive of the United States (pursuant to Article II, Section 1[1]) and Commander in Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces (pursuant to Article II, Section 2[1]) of the Constitution of the United States.

Before entering that office, Trump took the following Oath of Affirmation prescribed in Article II, Section 1[8] of the Constitution of the United States: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

On January 6, 2021, Trump knowingly, purposely, and publicly directed, exhorted and commended his political supporters to march to the United States Capitol and prevent the House and Senate from certifying the Electoral College vote as prescribed by Article II, Section 1[3] of the Constitution of the United States, by which Joseph R. Biden and Kamala Harris were elected President and Vice President of the United States, respectively. That was an insurrection.

Hundreds of Trump’s supporters marched to the Capitol. They broke through physical barricades and attacked and overwhelmed members of the Capitol police force. They broke windows and unlawfully entered the Capitol. Trump’s supporters vocally called for the deaths of Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, the presiding officers of the U.S. Senate (Pence) and House of Representatives (Pelosi).

Their actions resulted in the death of one law enforcement officer (Capitol Police Officer Brian Sisnick), the death of one insurrectionist (Amy Babbitt), physical and emotional injuries to numerous other law enforcement personnel, damage to Capitol offices and theft of their contents.

That conduct by Trump’s followers was insurrection.

As POTUS, Trump invited his supporters to Washington, D.C. to attend a  “Stop the Steal” political rally in the weeks before January 6, 2021, knowing that Congress would certify the results of the 2020 general election for President on that date as required by Art—II, Section 1[3] of the Constitution of the United States.

As POTUS, Trump made a speech to thousands of his supporters on January 6 at the “Stop the Steal” political rally. During that speech, he admonished his supporters to “fight like hell” to prevent what he termed “the steal,” meaning certification of the tally showing Biden’s election and his defeat.

That was an insurrection.

As POTUS, Trump directed a Secret Service detail to drive him to the U.S. Capitol following his January 6 speech and attempted to force his driver to do so. But he was physically restrained by the Secret Service.

As POTUS, Trump refused to direct civilian or military assets to protect and defend the U.S. Capitol from encroachment by his supporters and refused to call on his supporters to refrain from engaging in insurrection or rebellion against the United States.

As POTUS, Trump cheered from the White House as his supporters attacked Capitol police after they unlawfully and violently entered the U.S. Capitol and after they forced the House and Senate to suspend official proceedings related to certification of the 2020 election result.

That well-known conduct by Trump, while holding the office of President of the United States and Commander in Chief of U.S. Armed Forces, constituted insurrection against the United States.

Moreover, Trump encouraged and cheered armed militants who engaged in insurrection against the United States. According to Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, Trump’s conduct makes him constitutionally unqualified from holding “any office, civil or military, under the United States.”

Trump is not qualified to hold the highest elected office in the U.S. government for the same reason that a 34-year-old person is unqualified. He is not qualified to hold the office of President of the United States for the same reason that a naturalized citizen is unqualified. He is not qualified to hold the office of the President of the United States for the same reason that a person who has not been a resident of the United States for fourteen years is unqualified.

If you don’t believe me, read Article II, Section 1[5] of the Constitution of the United States.

Trump’s disqualification under Section 3 of Amendment XIV to the U.S. Constitution is not based on partisanship. It is based on his disloyalty to the Constitution he swore an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend.” Trump’s disloyalty renders him constitutionally unfit to hold any public office, let alone the highest public office in the nation.

Trump’s constitutional disability could be legislatively removed by the vote of two-thirds of the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate. That legislation has not been introduced in either body, let alone enacted.

Some believe that election officials and court judges should not ban Trump from being elected based on Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. That group includes Trump supporters, Trump detractors and others who argue that barring Trump from holding office is “undemocratic” because he is the likely nominee of the Republican Party in 2024.

However popular a presidential candidate might be, the Constitution does not allow that person to hold the office of President of the United States if he or she is less than 35 years old, not a natural-born citizen of the United States, and has not been a resident within the United States for fourteen years.

And the Constitution does not allow that popular person to hold the office of President if he or she has engaged in insurrection against the United States.

The issue is not whether the Constitution declares Trump unfit to hold that office. Rather, the question is whether people are faithful, loyal and brave enough to say so and to act accordingly.

That is important not only for local and state election officials but also for state and federal judges. It is important for every citizen of the United States, no matter who we might favor in the 2024 presidential election contest.

This is not a political question. It is a matter of our fidelity to Article VI, Section 2 of the Constitution, which reads:

“This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof,…shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”

Donald Trump attempted an insurrection against the United States on January 6, 2021. Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution prohibits him from holding any political office, including the office of President of the United States.

The Constitution is the supreme Law of the Land, not Trump’s popularity. It is that simple.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Wendell Griffen.

About 15 people, several of whom were wearing pro-NPP T-shirts, confronted and assaulted Kobbena while he was covering an event at the party’s offices on January 4, 2024, in the central Cape Coast region, according to news reports and Kobbena, who spoke to CPJ by phone.

Kobbena told CPJ that he reported the incident to police that same day and provided officers with pictures of three suspects involved in the attack but had not received any updates as of January 26.

“The attack on David Kobbena is a worrying sign for the safety of journalists covering politics in Ghana as the country prepares for its December 2024 general elections,” said CPJ Africa Program Coordinator Angela Quintal, from New York. “Authorities should credibly investigate Kobbena’s assault and end the disturbing trend of impunity for attacks on the press in Ghana. The New Patriotic Party should also take appropriate disciplinary action if any of its members were involved in the attack and guarantee that journalists can cover its events safely.”

Kobbena said that he was confronted by two women dressed in T-shirts branded with a picture of NPP parliamentarian Mavis Hawa Komsoon shortly after he arrived at the party’s offices to cover the vetting of candidates to run for parliament in this year’s elections. The women mistook Kobbena for another journalist and accused him of insulting Komsoon during a program on the privately owned broadcaster UTV, according to Kobbena and Sorkpor Kafui Kofi Justice, a regional correspondent with the privately owned broadcaster Adom TV, who witnessed the incident and spoke with CPJ.

Kobbena protested that he did not work for UTV, had not appeared on the program, and showed the women a press card showing that he worked for Cape FM. Although the women walked away, a man approached Kobbena with the same accusation, and the journalist said a crowd of NPP supporters quickly gathered around him and started assaulting him.

They slapped and punched him in the face and all over his body, according to the two journalists. Kobbena, who said some of the attackers were also wearing Komsoon-branded T-shirts, was rescued by other journalists who pulled him away from the assailants. Kobbena said he suffered cuts on his lips, pain in his back and ribs, as well as a headache, adding that he was treated for his injuries and takes pain medication. 

Justice said he reported the incident to the NPP central regional organizer, Anthony Kwesi Sackey. Contacted by CPJ, Sackey accused Kobbena of lying, saying that the journalist had earlier reported to Sackey that he had been attacked by two people and not 15. Sackey said that he gave Kobbena money for treatment and said that the NPP condemns attacks on the press.

Kobbena confirmed that Sackey gave him 1,400 cedis (US$115.73) for his treatment but said that the money was insufficient to cover the cost. 

In a January 25 statement, the Ghana Journalists Association said that no investigations had been carried out into Kobbena’s assault and called for a news blackout on Komsoon, who also serves as Ghana’s Minister for Fisheries and Aquaculture Development. 

CPJ’s calls and text messages to Samson Baaba, the police officer in charge of the investigation, Ghana’s National Police Spokesperson Grace Ansah-Akrofi, and Koomson went unanswered.

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

The post The British Post Office Scandal and the Future of Democracy appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Eamonn Fingleton.

Established in 2013, the office serves as a control tower to oversee the national security affairs of South Korea and frequently holds emergency meetings when North Korea shows hostile or provocative movements towards the South. Its director often serves as the counterpart of the National Security Advisor of the United States.

South Korea’s President Yook Suk Yeol convened a cabinet meeting Tuesday and passed a bill to revise the organizational structure of the nation’s security office, according to a statement released by the Presidential Office. 

The restructuring includes the addition of a third deputy role in the office, dedicated solely to what Yoon referred to as “economic security” – terminology that the Yoon administration often uses in recognition of current international economic dynamics being an integral part of national security.

The new deputy will oversee the “emerging security areas,” including economic security, science and technology, the statement added, noting that the role will further expand the office’s responsibility encompassing issues related to Seoul’s supply chain management, export controls, and technology cooperation. 

The new position is expected to be responsible for establishing new supply chain initiatives among democratic nations while also solidifying Seoul’s technological security, a South Korean senior government official, requesting anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter, told Radio Free Asia.

The administration acknowledged that the boundary between economy and security has increasingly blurred in current international politics, the official added, noting that it has long been contemplating how to effectively address the evolving dynamics of such political developments.

South Korea has recently been actively involved in talks with other democratic nations including the U.S., United Kingdom, Netherlands, Indonesia, India and Japan, a move designed to diversify key resource supply chains to reduce dependence on specific countries. 

In fact, there has been growing fear in Seoul over the possibility of China using its dominant control of essential resources, such as rare earth materials, as a means of strategic influence in international politics. This concern is particularly relevant given the potential impact on crucial South Korean industries like semiconductors and electric vehicles, which could lead to significant economic disruption. 

Such concerns are not unfounded, as South Korea faced indirect economic repercussions from Beijing in 2017, following its decision to deploy the U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, system on its soil. Beijing said the deployment of the system was a direct threat to its national security, claiming its radar could monitor Chinese military activities on the mainland. 

As a result, China implemented informal retaliatory measures, including a de facto ban on Chinese tourists visiting South Korea and informal sanctions targeting South Korean businesses, particularly in the entertainment and retail sectors.

This has increased South Korea’s resolve to participate actively in U.S. President Joe Biden’s initiative to establish an alternative supply chain that requires less of China.

Recently, Seoul has become more outspoken on issues sensitive to China, including those concerning the South China Sea and Taiwan, ahead of the self-ruled island’s presidential election on Saturday.

For instance, South Korea – along with the U.S. and Japan – convened its first trilateral Indo-Pacific dialogue in Washington last week, and released a joint statement defending freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific. The three also “opposed any unilateral attempts to change the status quo by force or coercion anywhere in the waters of the Indo-Pacific,” the statement said.  

In addition, the statement underscored the trilateral alignment on the Taiwan issue, saying that the three “reaffirmed the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait as indispensable to security and prosperity in the international community.”

On Monday, China’s foreign ministry criticized the joint statement, labeling it interference in Beijing’s internal affairs.

Yoon in April also made comments about Taiwan in an interview with Reuters, saying that the situation in the Taiwan Strait was a “global issue.”

Edited by Taejun Kang and Mike Firn.

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

Photo by Sean Ferigan

In 2024, former President Donald Trump will face some of his greatest challenges: criminal court cases, primary opponents and constitutional challenges to his eligibility to hold the office of president again. The Colorado Supreme Court has pushed that latter piece to the forefront, ruling on Dec. 19, 2023, that Trump cannot appear on Colorado’s 2024 presidential ballot because of his involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

The reason is the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1868, three years after the Civil War ended. Section 3 of that amendment wrote into the Constitution the principle President Abraham Lincoln set out just three months after the first shots were fired in the Civil War. On July 4, 1861, he spoke to Congress, declaring that “when ballots have fairly, and constitutionally, decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets.”

The text of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment states, in full:

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

To me as a scholar of constitutional law, each sentence and sentence fragment captures the commitment made by the nation in the wake of the Civil War to govern by constitutional politics. People seeking political and constitutional changes must play by the rules set out in the Constitution. In a democracy, people cannot substitute force, violence or intimidation for persuasion, coalition building and voting.

The power of the ballot

The first words of Section 3 describe various offices that people can only hold if they satisfy the constitutional rules for election or appointment. The Republicans who wrote the amendment repeatedly declared that Section 3 covered all offices established by the Constitution. That included the presidency, a point many participants in framing, ratifying and implementation debates over constitutional disqualification made explicitly, as documented in the records of debate in the 39th Congress, which wrote and passed the amendment.

Senators, representatives and presidential electors are spelled out because some doubt existed when the amendment was debated in 1866 as to whether they were officers of the United States, although they were frequently referred to as such in the course of congressional debates.

No one can hold any of the offices enumerated in Section 3 without the power of the ballot. They can only hold office if they are voted into it – or nominated and confirmed by people who have been voted into office. No office mentioned in the first clause of Section 3 may be achieved by force, violence or intimidation.

A required oath

The next words in Section 3 describe the oath “to support [the] Constitution” that Article 6 of the Constitution requires all office holders in the United States to take.

The people who wrote Section 3 insisted during congressional debates that anyone who took an oath of office, including the president, were subject to Section 3’s rules. The presidential oath’s wording is slightly different from that of other federal officers, but everyone in the federal government swears to uphold the Constitution before being allowed to take office.

These oaths bind officeholders to follow all the rules in the Constitution. The only legitimate government officers are those who hold their offices under the constitutional rules. Lawmakers must follow the Constitution’s rules for making laws. Officeholders can only recognize laws that were made by following the rules – and they must recognize all such laws as legitimate.

This provision of the amendment ensures that their oaths of office obligate officials to govern by voting rather than violence.

Defining disqualification

Section 3 then says people can be disqualified from holding office if they “engaged in insurrection or rebellion.” Legal authorities from the American Revolution to the post-Civil War Reconstruction understood an insurrection to have occurred when two or more people resisted a federal law by force or violence for a public, or civic, purpose.

Shay’s Rebellion, the Whiskey Insurrection, Burr’s Rebellion, John Brown’s Raid and other events were insurrections, even when the goal was not overturning the government.

What these events had in common was that people were trying to prevent the enforcement of laws that were consequences of persuasion, coalition building and voting. Or they were trying to create new laws by force, violence and intimidation.

These words in the amendment declare that those who turn to bullets when ballots fail to provide their desired result cannot be trusted as democratic officials. When applied specifically to the events on Jan. 6, 2021, the amendment declares that those who turn to violence when voting goes against them cannot hold office in a democratic nation.

A chance at clemency

The last sentence of Section 3 announces that forgiveness is possible. It says “Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability” – the ineligibility of individuals or categories of people to hold office because of having participated in an insurrection or rebellion.

For instance, Congress might remove the restriction on office-holding based on evidence that the insurrectionist was genuinely contrite. It did so for repentant former Confederate General James Longstreet .

Or Congress might conclude in retrospect that violence was appropriate, such as against particularly unjust laws. Given their powerful anti-slavery commitments and abolitionist roots, I believe that Republicans in the House and Senate in the late 1850s would almost certainly have allowed people who violently resisted the fugitive slave laws to hold office again. This provision of the amendment says that bullets may substitute for ballots and violence for voting only in very unusual circumstances.

A clear conclusion

Taken as a whole, the structure of Section 3 leads to the conclusion that Donald Trump is one of those past or present government officials who by violating his oath of allegiance to the constitutional rules has forfeited his right to present and future office.

Trump’s supporters say the president is neither an “officer under the United States” nor an “officer of the United States” as specified in Section 3. Therefore, they say, he is exempt from its provisions.

But in fact, both common sense and history demonstrate that Trump was an officer, an officer of the United States and an officer under the United States for constitutional purposes. Most people, even lawyers and constitutional scholars like me, do not distinguish between those specific phrases in ordinary discourse. The people who framed and ratified Section 3 saw no distinction. Exhaustive research by Trump supporters has yet to produce a single assertion to the contrary that was made in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Yet scholars John Vlahoplus and Gerard Magliocca are daily producing newspaper and other reports asserting that presidents are covered by Section 3.

Significant numbers of Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate agreed that Donald Trump violated his oath of office immediately before, during and immediately after the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Most Republican senators who voted against his conviction did so on the grounds that they did not have the power to convict a president who was no longer in office. Most of them did not dispute that Trump participated in an insurrection. A judge in Colorado also found that Trump “engaged in insurrection,” which was the basis for the state’s Supreme Court ruling barring him from the ballot.

Constitutional democracy is rule by law. Those who have demonstrated their rejection of rule by law may not apply, no matter their popularity. Jefferson Davis participated in an insurrection against the United States in 1861. He was not eligible to become president of the U.S. four years later, or to hold any other state or federal office ever again. If Davis was barred from office, then the conclusion must be that Trump is too – as a man who participated in an insurrection against the United States in 2021.

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

The post Why 14th Amendment Bars Trump From Office: a Constitutional Law Scholar Explains Principle Behind Colorado Supreme Court Ruling appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Mark A. Graber.

Photograph Source: Gage Skidmore – CC BY-SA 2.0

On February 19, 1942, two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. It initiated a Department of Defense program that resulted in the rounding up and incarceration of about 122,000 individuals of Japanese descent. They were to be placed in federal “relocation centers” that would popularly become known as “internment camps.” As it happened, they were neither. They were prisons set up to house and so violate the civil and human rights of a despised and racially different group defined as “the enemy.”

Although that executive order did not, in fact, mention a specific ethnic or racial group, it was clearly understood that the prisons were not being established for citizens or residents of German or Italian descent, the other two nations then at war with the United States. While not a single person of Japanese ancestry was found to have spied on this country or to have committed acts of sabotage against it, pro-Mussolini and pro-Hitler demonstrations, rallies, and propaganda had been commonplace. Before the war, fascist groups had been allowed to organize and spread propaganda from coast to coast. Some even had influence over and alliances with members of Congress, mainstream journalists, and well-known scholars.

Such a travesty of justice was not just being pushed by Roosevelt, one of the most liberal presidents in American history, but by notables like California judge Earl Warren (later to become a liberal Supreme Court justice) and renowned journalist Edward R. Murrow.

Although lawsuits challenging the prison camps were filed, the Supreme Court allowed them to continue to operate. More than half of those incarcerated were U.S. citizens. None had been charged with any crimes. Often under the banner (made popular again in our time) of “America First,” far-right, racist policies had been put in place and millions suffered from them.

The openly discussed basis for unity in those years was, at least in part, opposition to non-Aryans and non-Protestants, whether they were Japanese, Jewish, or African American.

In 1981, 36 years after World War II ended with the atomic bombing of two Japanese cities, a Presidential Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians issued a report making clear that the imprisonment of Americans of Japanese descent in such striking numbers “was not justified by military necessity, and the decisions which followed from it… were not driven by analysis of military conditions. The broad historical causes which shaped these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”

 Trump Threatens

It’s important to keep this history in mind since Donald Trump and his MAGA associates are planning to emulate it on a grand scale in a second (and what they hope will be a never-ending) administration. Promises of new “camps,” should The Donald be elected a second time in 2024, are already pouring out of Trumpworld. These would be “huge camps” for migrants near the border with Mexico, as the New York Timesreported recently, “to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights.” To ensure that Congress has no direct role in funding them, they will be built and operated with money taken directly from the military budget.

Just to be clear, Trump isn’t against all immigrants. Anything but. After all, he married two, one from the Czech Republic and the other from Slovenia, countries that most Americans would have to google to find on a map of Europe. Instead, the targets of the pending Trumpian anti-immigrant tsunami will, of course, be individuals and families from the global South. The racism embedded in such a future effort isn’t beside the point, it is the point.

Trump’s former adviser and fellow xenophobe, Stephen Miller, stated that such a new administration would build “camps” — think: prisons — that could house up to a million undocumented immigrants while preparing them for mass deportations. As he told the New York Times, “Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown. The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”

And rest assured about one thing: the next Trump administration won’t just go after undocumented immigrants trying to enter the country. It will build an unprecedented gulag system to round up and deport millions of people of color, one that would be unimaginable if those undocumented immigrants came from Canada or Denmark. The Trump gang has stated that they will end TPS (temporary protected status), reinstate the former president’s Muslim ban, reimpose and expand health restrictions on asylum seekers, revoke visas for foreign students who participated in protests against recent Israeli actions, shut down the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and deport immigrants who had been allowed into the United States for humanitarian reasons.

Mind you, Trump proposed or tried to institute much of this while still in office, only to be thwarted by his administration’s ineptitude, Democratic resistance, grassroots organizing, and the courts. If, in the wake of the 2024 election, the GOP were to gain control over both chambers of Congress as well as the White House — a formula that would ensure the appointment of ever more Trump-friendly federal judges — success (as he defines it) will be a given for many of these efforts.

When Trump tells his followers that “Our cruel and vindictive political class is not just coming after me — they are coming after YOU,” he means that he hates the very same people they do and will provide the retribution for all the harm supposedly done to them by immigrants (of color), Muslims, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Native peoples, feminists, and other enemies.

The Fascist Aims of America First

While Trump is the likely GOP nominee in 2024, the election is still a year away and any number of unforeseen developments could lead to someone else being nominated. At this moment, the other potential Republican candidates are Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, business executive Vivek Ramaswamy, and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Christie excepted, there isn’t a sliver of policy difference between any of them and Trump. And notably, Christie supported Trump for nearly all of his administration. In addition, each of them would need the former president’s far-right MAGA base to win the nomination.

Trump’s people have cloaked themselves in an “America First” aura without in any way owning that as a meme. In fact, it harks back both to the second rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and the American fascist movement of the 1930s. By the mid-1920s, the KKK had ballooned to between three and eight million members and, as scholar Sarah Churchwell notes in her remarkable book Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream, it had already adopted “America First” as a motto.

While both Democratic President Woodrow Wilson and Republican Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge had used the term earlier to promote American isolationism, nativism, and “exceptionalism,” it was the KKK that truly embraced its white supremacist core ethos. As one example, 1,400 Klansmen chanted “America First” as they marched in a Memorial Day parade in Queens, New York, in 1927. And consider it more than ironic that, as Churchwell documents, their presence evolved into a riot that led to the arrests of five Klansmen, one bystander (by mistake), and under circumstances that remain less than clear, Fred Trump, the father of the future 45th president of the United States.

In 1940, the America First Committee (AFC) was founded. At its height, it would have more than 800,000 members. Initially, it was seen as isolationist — that is, against American entry into the war already being waged in Europe — and even anti-imperialist. As a result, its ranks initially included liberals, progressives, and socialists, as well as conservatives, libertarians, and avowed fascists. The latter, however, would eventually come to dominate, especially after the nation’s leading anti-Semite and pro-Hitler celebrity, pilot Charles Lindbergh, became its most popular spokesperson. The fascist-loving AFC then joined other U.S.-based far-right groups in celebrating German nazism and Italian fascism, while making America First their rallying cry.

Of course, the historically challenged Donald Trump undoubtedly doesn’t know much, if anything, about this history. But give him full credit. From the beginning, with the instincts of both a fascist and a white nationalist, he intuitively grasped the mobilizing value of seemingly patriotic but xenophobic slogans. Count on one thing, though: some of his allies know all about the noxious roots of “America First” and still embrace it. Such jingoistic patriotism has, in fact, become a thinly veiled cover for a revised and expansive contemporary version of white nationalism.

The proliferation of America First groups run by former Trump staffers and supporters is daunting. The dizzying array of them includes America First Legal, America First Action, America First Policies, America First Policy Institute, America First P.A.C.T. (Protecting America’s Constitution and Traditions), America First Foundation/America First Political Action Conference, and America First 2.0, the latter a contribution from Republican presidential aspirant Vivek Ramaswamy.

America First Legal is run by Stephen Miller and promotes itself as an alternative to the American Civil Liberties Union, but its deepest focus is on defending whiteness and amplifying Miller’s white nationalist proclivities. During the 2022 midterm election cycle, it typically produced radio and television ads like this fact-free one:

“When did racism against white people become OK? Joe Biden put white people last in line for Covid relief funds. Kamala Harris said disaster aid should go to non-white citizens first. Liberal politicians block access to medicine based on skin color. Progressive corporations, airlines, universities all openly discriminate against white Americans. Racism is always wrong. The left’s anti-white bigotry must stop. We are all entitled to equal treatment under the law.”

Decrying (fake) racism against whites fits well with Trump’s hysterical, desperate accusations that Georgia’s Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg are all “racists” out to prosecute him because he’s white, not because he broke the law in their jurisdictions. (So far, none of Trump’s Black supporters have echoed that call — perhaps a bridge too far even for them — but Miller and others on the far right certainly have.)

Linda McMahon, former head of the Small Business Administration under Trump, is now the president of the America First Policy Institute, which claims that its guiding principles are “liberty, free enterprise, national greatness, American military superiority, foreign-policy engagement in the American interest, and the primacy of American workers, families, and communities in all we do.” That well-funded group takes on policy and culture war issues. You undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that it recently held a gala at — yes! — Mar-a-Lago.

The America First P.A.C.T., led by former Arizona Republican Party chair Kelli Ward, focuses on running state candidates on a far-right MAGA agenda and prioritizes raising funds for GOP candidates. Blasted across its website is the phrase “A weak republican is more dangerous than a democrat.” Ward is under investigationin Arizona for her alleged involvement in a 2022 fake-elector plot there.

Perhaps this country’s best-known white nationalist (and former Trump dinner guest) Nick Fuentes is the founder and president of the America First Foundation. It sponsors the annual America First Political Action Conference, an unabashed gathering of white supremacists and other far-right and extremist elements. Fuentes founded AFPAC because he thought the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was too moderate. However, the political distance between the more traditional CPAC and AFPAC has narrowed. Noted Islamophobe Michelle Malkin, for example, spoke at both in 2019, as did conservative journalist Jon Miller in 2020. Neither Malkin, who is Asian, nor Miller, who is African American, called out Fuentes and other bigots at the conferences on their racism.

The 2022 AFPAC conference featured a who’s who of contemporary American extremists, including disgraced former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, defeated Arizona election-denier Kari Lake, longtime founder and publisher of the white supremacist American Renaissance Jared Taylor, Florida-based Islamophobe and anti-immigrant warrior Laura Loomer, extremist activist Milo Yiannopoulos, and former too-toxic-for-even-the-House-Republicans Representative Steve King. Current Republican congress members who have spoken at AFPAC include (you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn) Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar.

Violence as Politics

Like fascists and racists of old, Donald Trump and the America First crowd are demonizing and dehumanizing their opponents. In October 1923, Klan leader and Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans gave a fiery anti-immigrant speech in Texas railing against the “polluting streams of pollution from abroad” that immigrants were bringing to the United States. This October, exactly 100 years later, Trump gave an interview to the far-right National Pulse in which he declared that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

In his 2024 campaign, he’s not only planning to go after immigrants, but a broader group of liberal and progressive citizens and even Republicans who stand in the way of his fevered lust for heading a genuinely authoritarian government. If he returns to the Oval Office, he’s already declared that he’ll “root out” what he’s called “communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

“Vermin” (a classic Hitlerian word choice) and those who would “poison” the nation must be wiped out, annihilated. Responding to criticism of such language, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung called the very notion “ridiculous,” even as he reinforced the point by insisting that the former president’s critics suffered from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and “their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”

None of what Trump and his allies plan to do is likely to be passively accepted. In fact, they’re already anticipating a massive popular revolt and preparing for it. As the Wall Street Journal noted, in 2020 Trump first contemplated invoking the Insurrection Act, which allows a president to employ the military to enforce federal laws under special circumstances, to break up protests related to the murder of George Floyd and other African Americans by the police and racists. He was talked down. Its use was then suggested by Trump ally Roger Stone and evidently considered by the president as a way to “put down” any “leftwing protests” related to the 2020 election. Again, the idea went nowhere.

The third time, however, could be the deadly charm. The Washington Post has reported that Trump is now considering invoking the Insurrection Act on his first day back in office. One thing is certain: should he somehow, despite four criminal indictments and multiple trials, return to the White House on January 20, 2025, we can’t say we weren’t warned.

This column is distributed by TomDispatch.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Clarence Lusane.

The Sabail District Court in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, on Tuesday ordered that Orujov be held in pre-trial detention for three months after police arrested the journalist on Monday and searched his home, office, and vehicle, according to news reports and Orujov’s lawyer, Bahruz Bayramov, who spoke to CPJ.

If found guilty, he faces up to three years in prison under Article 288.2 of Azerbaijan’s criminal code.

Bayramov told CPJ that Orujov had been building a home for himself on a plot of land that he had purchased. While the land was not officially registered to Orujov, Bayramov said that this was also the case for thousands of other homes in Baku, and that he was not aware of anyone else being arrested for the offense. Instead, the charges were in retaliation for Orujov’s journalism, according to the lawyer.

The independent online broadcaster Kanal 13, which has more than 2 million subscribers on its YouTube channels, regularly covers sensitive topics such as demonstrations and human rights violations and gives space to opposition views, Alasgar Mammadli, founder of Media Rights Group, which advocates for press freedom in Azerbaijan, told CPJ.

“Hot on the heels of last week’s arrest of three journalists and media workers at the anti-corruption outlet Abzas Media, Azerbaijani authorities appear to be targeting yet another critical online news platform with the arrest of Aziz Orujov,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Azerbaijani authorities should release Orujov, drop the charges against him, and end their crackdown on the independent press.”

Orujov’s wife, Lamiya Orujova, told CPJ that her husband was arrested “like a terrorist,” by eight police officers, seven of whom were wearing masks. Police confiscated documents and USB sticks from Kanal 13’s office, and also took two laptops, a cell phone, documents, and bank cards from their home, she said.

Bayramov told CPJ that there was no legal basis under the illegal construction charges for conducting the searches and ordering Orujov’s pretrial detention.

Mammadli told regional outlet Caucasian Knot that there were around 500,000 illegally built homes in and around Baku, and that authorities’ decision to target the head of a popular and critical media platform on these grounds heralded “a new wave in the witch hunt against journalists” in Azerbaijan.

On November 21, a court detained Abzas Media’s director Ulvi Hasanli and chief editor Sevinj Vagifgizi for four months on charges of conspiring to bring money into the country unlawfully. Mahammad Kekalov, an assistant to Hasanli, was later ordered detained for the same period. On Tuesday, Azerbaijani authorities summoned the U.S., German, and French envoys and accused their embassies and organizations registered in those countries of unlawfully funding Abzas Media.

It is not the first time that Orujov has been jailed. In 2017, authorities sentenced him to six years in prison on charges of illegal entrepreneurship and abuse of power, which was widely viewed as retaliation for his journalism, and later released him on probation in 2018.

CPJ emailed the Baku Police Department and the Ministry of Internal Affairs for comment but did not immediately receive any replies.

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

The group was joined by Green Party Presidential Candidate Dr. Cornel West in the Senate lobby for a prayer vigil before the sit-in. The prayer vigil and sit-in were part of a week of action that included an antiwar rally on Tuesday night featuring Dr. West, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary; Claudia de la Cruz, Co-Executive Director of The People’s Forum; Lee Camp, American comedian, writer, podcaster, news journalist; Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK and Global Exchange; and Eugene Puryear, American journalist, activist, and host on Breakthrough News.

“We need Bernie to provide leadership to put a stop to the US funding of the Ukraine war now. Use the money for healthcare, not warfare,” said Burlington resident James Marc Leas.

Crystal Zevon, an artist and CODEPINK peace activist from Barnet, VT, expressed her disappointment in Senator Sanders, who has voted for more weapons to Ukraine and even criticized Democrats who called for peace talks. “Yes, Bernie should condemn the Russian invasion, but he should also be calling for a negotiated end to this brutal war,” said Zevon.

The group carried signs in support of peace talks and negotiations, including one quote from the Senator himself in which he previously called for a diplomatic solution.

Jodie Evans, Co-Founder of CODEPINK, reminded Senator Sanders of his antiwar roots, “We are showing up to remind Bernie of the values he espoused that made his name what it is. And call on him to stand for peace, to call for diplomacy and to again lead for peace,” said Evans.

Medea Benjamin, Co-Founder of CODEPINK and author of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, expressed her disappointment in the lack of Democrats calling for peace talks. “I am appalled that NO Democrats are saying what the majority of American people are saying: We need peace talks, not more war. This is NOT a MAGA issue or a Republican issue but an issue of human survival to stop WWIII and possibly a nuclear war. We need Bernie to be with us on the side of peace,” said Benjamin.

The activists are urging Senator Sanders to call for the flow of weapons to stop and the leadership of Ukraine, Russia, and the US to sit at the negotiating table and end the horrific war.

Click here to see all the photos and video clips from all the actions.

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

Hoekstra, a former employee of oil and gas giant Shell and fossil fuel-linked consultant group McKinsey, has garnered extensive criticism from the left-wing group and from dozens of civil society organizations due to his employment history.

"We believe that we have to change the system, not the climate," said Left MEP Silvia Modig of Finland. "Wopke Hoekstra's track record represents the system. We stand alongside civil society. Without a sense of urgency, we will continue on the same path we have for fifty years. Emissions will continue to grow, temperatures will continue to rise, and catastrophic climate events will persist."

"To entrust the helm of our climate policy to a former Shell employee, whose career trajectory clearly prioritizes profit over the planet, must serve as a wake-up call."

The full parliament is expected to hold a final vote on the commissioner-designates on Thursday, and with the Dutch Labour Party also indicating it would also vote against Hoekstra, Euronewsreported that "a political veto on either candidate is still possible."

The ENVI committee approved the two candidates two days after they were questioned extensively about their climate records and commitments.

Hoekstra and Šefčovič failed to garner the support of two-thirds of the committee members on Tuesday, as many lawmakers still had concerns about their commitments to carbon emissions reduction targets and other issues.

Hoekstra, who resigned as the minister of foreign affairs of the Netherlands last month, worked at Shell from 2002-04 and at McKinsey for a decade before entering government.

He claimed in his remarks to the committee this week that he now believes "fossil fuels must become history, the sooner the better," and that oil companies that have known about their activities' link to the climate crisis and have "sought to ignore the evidence" are "unethical."

He also promised to phase out fossil fuel subsidies and said he supports a target of slashing emissions by at least 90% by 2040—the lower end of a recommendation made earlier this year by the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change, which said the bloc must cut greenhouse gas emissions by 90-95% by 2040 in order to limit planetary heating to 1.5°C this century.

Despite some of Hoekstra's climate pledges to the committee, said the Left, he "represents the fossil fuel lobby and does not convincingly demonstrate competence as a climate protector."

Hoekstra's bid to lead the E.U.'s climate agenda, said the Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), represents the government's dismissal of 100,000 Europeans who have signed a petition opposing his candidacy and "is a symptom of a broader systemic issue: fossil fuel influence on our decision-making."

"To entrust the helm of our climate policy to a former Shell employee, whose career trajectory clearly prioritizes profit over the planet, must serve as a wake-up call," said the co-presidents of the Left, MEPs Manon Aubry of France and Martin Schirdewan of Germany. "It extends beyond the immediate concern of Hoekstra potentially reversing climate action; it symbolizes a broader issue of intertwining politics with fossil fuel interests. It's a call to fortify our political landscape, creating a firewall that safeguards decision-making for the greater good and minimizes undue influence of private interests."

The Left's concerns were bolstered last week by a letter to the ENVI committee signed by 50 groups including CEO, Global Witness, and Friends of the Earth International.

The groups warned that as minister of finance in the Netherlands, Hoekstra "pleaded against rapidly ending gas exploitation... despite the massive negative impacts gas drilling had on hundreds of thousands of citizens" and "personally blocked government plans for reducing nitrogen emissions that were aiming to bring Dutch policy measures in line with E.U. legislation on nature protection."

"If we want to prevent and mitigate climate disasters in the future, it is crucial that governments free themselves from the influence of the fossil fuel industry by introducing and implementing a conflict-of-interest framework," said the organizations. "Making a person with strong and long-time links with oil and gas interests responsible for E.U. climate policies is the wrong step."

Šefčovič's answers to the committee's questions this week also left progressive lawmakers dismayed, as he refused to commit to a timeline for toxic chemical regulations and and food sustainability rules.

"The Left does not consider that the commissioner has shown an awareness of the need to accelerate on the European Green Deal by failing to commit to deliver on critical promised legislative proposals in this mandate," said the group of Šefčovič, who currently serves at executive vice president of the European Green Deal, overseeing interinstitutional relations and foresight.

CEO noted that campaigners' objections to the two candidates pushed the ENVI committee to delay its approval this week and to demand transparency from Hoekstra about the clients he worked with at McKinsey.

"Bittersweet win for transparency. Conflict of interests firmly on the agenda," said CEO. "We will be watching."

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

“The arrest of NewsClick editor Prabir Purkayastha and the raids on NewsClick and the homes of at least 12 of its former and current journalists are an act of sheer harassment and intimidation,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator, in Frankfurt, Germany. “This is the latest attack on press freedom in India. We urge the Indian government to immediately cease these actions as journalists must be allowed to work without fear of intimidation or reprisal.”

On Tuesday, Delhi police arrested Purkayastha and NewsClick’s head of human resources, Amit Chakravarty, as part of an investigation into suspected foreign funding of the media outlet, a charge that NewsClick denies.

Earlier in the day, police searched the office of NewsClick and the homes of several of its staff and contributing journalists and seized several electronic devices, including laptops and phones.

The homes of the following journalists were searched; the six names marked with an asterisk were also questioned by the Delhi Police Special Cell, a unit of Delhi Police that investigates cases of terrorism and organized crime:

• Purkayastha*
• Subodh Varma, an editor
• Satyam Tiwari*, a reporter
• Paranjoy Guha Thakurta*, a contributor  
• Abhisar Sharma*, a contributor  
• Urmilesh*, a contributor  
• Aunindyo Chakraborty*, a contributor
• Bhasha Singh, a contributor
• Anuradha Raman, a contributor
• Aditi Nigam, an editor
• Sumedha Pal, a contributor
• Irfan K., a cartoonist