A West Papua independence leader says escalating violence is forcing indigenous Papuans to flee their ancestral lands.

It comes as the Indonesian military claims 18 members of the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB) were killed in an hour-long operation in Intan Jaya on May 14.

In a statement, reported by Kompas, Indonesia’s military claimed its presence was “not to intimidate the people” but to protect them from violence.

• READ MORE: Fiji rights coalition slams ‘betrayal’ of West Papua for Indonesian benefits
• Other West Papua reports

“We will not allow the people of Papua to live in fear in their own land,” it said.

Indonesia’s military said it seized firearms, ammunition, bows and arrows. They also took Morning Star flags — used as a symbol for West Papuan independence — and communication equipment.

The United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) interim president Benny Wenda, who lives in exile in the United Kingdom, told RNZ Pacific that seven villages in Ilaga, Puncak Regency in Central Papua were now being attacked.

“The current military escalation in West Papua has now been building for months. Initially targeting Intan Jaya, the Indonesian military have since broadened their attacks into other highlands regencies, including Puncak,” he said.

Women, children forced to leave
Wenda said women and children were being forced to leave their villages because of escalating conflict, often from drone attacks or airstrikes.

Earlier this month, ULMWP claimed one civilian and another was seriously injured after being shot at from a helicopter.

Last week, ULMWP shared a video of a group of indigenous Papuans walking through mountains holding an Indonesian flag, which Wenda said was a symbol of surrender.

“They look at us as primitive and they look at us as subhuman,” Wenda said.

He said the increased military presence was driven by resources.

President Prabowo Subianto’s administration has a goal to be able to feed Indonesia’s population without imports as early as 2028.

Video rejects Indnesian plan
A video statement from tribes in Mappi regency in South Papua from about a month ago, translated to English, said they rejected Indonesia’s food project and asked companies to leave.

In the video, about a dozen Papuans stood while one said the clans in the region had existed on customary land for generations and that companies had surveyed land without consent.

“We firmly ask the local government, the regent, Mappi Regency to immediately review the permits and revoke the company’s permits,” the speaker said.

Wenda said the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB) had also grown.

But he said many of the TPNPB were using bow and arrows against modern weapons.

“I call them home guard because there’s nowhere to go.”

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 U.S. government this week released thousands more records on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, long a source of fascination and intrigue. This is the final batch of JFK files after the federal government began declassifying documents in the early 1990s. While these latest files contain no major revelations about the assassination, they do include many previously redacted details about “the CIA global effort to influence elections, sabotage economies, overthrow governments,” says Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst with the National Security Archive, a government transparency organization and research institution. “Now at least we know what was being done in our name but without our knowledge.”

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

Australia is caught in a jam, between an assertive American ally and a bold Chinese trading partner. America is accelerating its pivot to the Indo-Pacific, building up its fighting forces and expanding its military bases.

As Australia tries to navigate a pathway between America’s and Australia’s national interests, sometimes Australia’s national interest seems to submerge out of view.

Admiral David Johnston, the Chief of the Australia’s Defence Force, is steering this ship as China flexes its muscle sending a small warship flotilla south to circumnavigate the continent.

• READ MORE: Other Declassified Australia investigative reports
• Other AUKUS reports

He has admitted that the first the Defence Force heard of a live-fire exercise by the three Chinese Navy ships sailing in the South Pacific east of Australia on February 21, was a phone call from the civilian Airservices Australia.

“The absence of any advance notice to Australian authorities was a concern, notably, that the limited notice provided by the PLA could have unnecessarily increased the risk to aircraft and vessels in the area,” Johnston told Senate Estimates .

Johnston was pressed to clarify how Defence first came to know of the live-fire drill: “Is it the case that Defence was only notified, via Virgin and Airservices Australia, 28 minutes [sic] after the firing window commenced?”

To this, Admiral Johnston replied: “Yes.”

If it happened as stated by the Admiral — that a live-fire exercise by the Chinese ships was undertaken and a warning notice was transmitted from the Chinese ships, all without being detected by Australian defence and surveillance assets — this is a defence failure of considerable significance.

Sources with knowledge of Defence spoken to by Declassified Australia say that this is either a failure of surveillance, or a failure of communication, or even more far-reaching, a failure of US alliance cooperation.

And from the very start the official facts became slippery.

Our latest investigation –

AUSTRALIA’S DEFENCE: NAVIGATING US-CHINA TENSIONS

We investigate a significant intelligence failure to detect live-firing by Chinese warships near Australia, has exposed Defence weaknesses, and the fact that when it counts, we are all alone.

… pic.twitter.com/GxbSxrtXyc

— Declassified Australia (@DeclassifiedAus) March 7, 2025

What did they know and when did they know it
The first information passed on to Defence by Airservices Australia came from the pilot of a Virgin passenger jet passing overhead the flotilla in the Tasman Sea that had picked up the Chinese Navy VHF radio notification of an impending live-fire exercise.

The radio transmission had advised the window for the live-fire drill commenced at 9.30am and would conclude at 3pm.

We know this from testimony given to Senate Estimates by the head of Airservices Australia. He said Airservices was notified at 9.58am by an aviation control tower informed by the Virgin pilot. Two minutes later Airservices issued a “hazard alert” to commercial airlines in the area.

The Headquarters of the Defence Force’s Joint Operations Command (HJOC), at Bungendore 30km east of Canberra, was then notified about the drill by Airservices at 10.08am, 38 minutes after the drill window had commenced.

When questioned a few days later, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese appeared to try to cover for Defence’s apparent failure to detect the live-fire drill or the advisory transmission.

“At around the same time, there were two areas of notification. One was from the New Zealand vessels that were tailing . ..  the [Chinese] vessels in the area by both sea and air,” Albanese stated. “So that occurred and at the same time through the channels that occur when something like this is occurring, Airservices got notified as well.”

But the New Zealand Defence Force had not notified Defence “at the same time”. In fact it was not until 11.01am that an alert was received by Defence from the New Zealand Defence Force — 53 minutes after Defence HQ was told by Airservices and an hour and a half after the drill window had begun.

Defence Minister Richard Marles later in a round-about way admitted on ABC Radio that it wasn’t the New Zealanders who informed Australia first: “Well, to be clear, we weren’t notified by China. I mean, we became aware of this during the course of the day.

“What China did was put out a notification that it was intending to engage in live firing. By that I mean a broadcast that was picked up by airlines or literally planes that were commercial planes that were flying across the Tasman.”

Later the Chinese Ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian, told ABC that two live-fire training drills were carried out at sea on February 21 and 22, in accordance with international law and “after repeatedly issuing safety notices in advance”.

Eyes and ears on ‘every move’
It was expected the Chinese-navy flotilla would end its three week voyage around Australia on March 7, after a circumnavigation of the continent. That is not before finally passing at some distance the newly acquired US-UK nuclear submarine base at HMAS Stirling near Perth and the powerful US communications and surveillance base at North West Cape.

Just as Australia spies on China to develop intelligence and targeting for a potential US war, China responds in kind, collecting data on US military and intelligence bases and facilities in Australia, as future targets should hostilities commence.

The presence of the Chinese Navy ships that headed into the northern and eastern seas around Australia attracted the attention of the Defence Department ever since they first set off south through the Mindoro Strait in the Philippines and through the Indonesian archipelago from the South China Sea on February 3.

“We are keeping a close watch on them and we will be making sure that we watch every move,” Marles stated in the week before the live-fire incident.

“Just as they have a right to be in international waters . . .  we have a right to be prudent and to make sure that we are surveilling them, which is what we are doing.”

Around 3500 km to the north, a week into the Chinese ships’ voyage, a spy flight by an RAAF P-8A Poseidon surveillance plane on February 11, in a disputed area of the South China Sea south of China’s Hainan Island, was warned off by a Chinese J-16 fighter jet.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry responded to Australian protests claiming the Australian aircraft “deliberately intruded” into China’s claimed territorial airspace around the Paracel Islands without China’s permission, thereby “infringing on China’s sovereignty and endangering China’s national security”.

Australia criticised the Chinese manoeuvre, defending the Australian flight saying it was “exercising the right to freedom of navigation and overflight in international waters and airspace”.

Two days after the incident, the three Chinese ships on their way to Australian waters were taking different routes in beginning their own “right to freedom of navigation” in international waters off the Australian coast. The three ships formed up their mini flotilla in the Coral Sea as they turned south paralleling the Australian eastern coastline outside of territorial waters, and sometimes within Australia’s 200-nautical-mile (370 km) Exclusive Economic Zone.

“Defence always monitors foreign military activity in proximity to Australia. This includes the Peoples Liberation Army-Navy (PLA-N) Task Group.” Admiral Johnston told Senate Estimates.

“We have been monitoring the movement of the Task Group through its transit through Southeast Asia and we have observed the Task Group as it has come south through that region.”

The Task Group was made up of a modern stealth guided missile destroyer Zunyi, the frigate Hengyang, and the Weishanhu, a 20,500 tonne supply ship carrying fuel, fresh water, cargo and ammunition. The Hengyang moved eastwards through the Torres Strait, while the Zunyi and Weishanhu passed south near Bougainville and Solomon Islands, meeting in the Coral Sea.

As the Chinese ships moved near northern Australia and through the Coral Sea heading further south, the Defence Department deployed Navy and Air Force assets to watch over the ships. These included various RAN warships including the frigate HMAS Arunta and a RAAF P-8A Poseidon intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance plane.

With unconfirmed reports a Chinese nuclear submarine may also be accompanying the surface ships, the monitoring may have also included one of the RAN’s Collins-class submarines, with their active range of sonar, radar and radio monitoring – however it is uncertain whether one was able to be made available from the fleet.

“From the point of time the first of the vessels entered into our more immediate region, we have been conducting active surveillance of their activities,” the Defence chief confirmed.

As the Chinese ships moved into the southern Tasman Sea, New Zealand navy ships joined in the monitoring alongside Australia’s Navy and Air Force.

The range of signals intelligence (SIGINT) that theoretically can be intercepted emanating from a naval ship at sea includes encrypted data and voice satellite communications, ship-to-ship communications, aerial drone data and communications, as well as data of radar, gunnery, and weapon launches.

There are a number of surveillance facilities in Australia that would have been able to be directed at the Chinese ships.

Australian Signals Directorate’s (ASD) Shoal Bay Receiving Station outside of Darwin, picks up transmissions and data emanating from radio signals and satellite communications from Australia’s near north region. ASD’s Cocos Islands receiving station in the mid-Indian ocean would have been available too.

The Jindalee Operational Radar Network (JORN) over-the-horizon radar network, spread across northern Australia, is an early warning system that monitors aircraft and ship movements across Australia’s north-western, northern, and north-eastern ocean areas — but its range off the eastern coast is not thought to presently reach further south than the sea off Mackay on the Queensland coast.

Of land-based surveillance facilities, it is the American Pine Gap base that is believed to have the best capability of intercepting the ship’s radio communications in the Tasman Sea.

Enter, Pine Gap and the Americans
The US satellite surveillance base at Pine Gap in Central Australia is a US and Australian jointly-run satellite ground station. It is regarded as the most important such American satellite base outside of the USA.

The role of ASD in supporting the extensive US surveillance mission against China is increasingly valued by Australia’s large Five Eyes alliance partner.

A Top Secret ‘Information Paper’, titled “NSA Intelligence Relationship with Australia”, leaked from the National Security Agency (NSA) by Edward Snowden and published by ABC’s Background Briefing, spells out the “close collaboration” between the NSA and ASD, in particular on China:

“Increased emphasis on China will not only help ensure the security of Australia, but also synergize with the U.S. in its renewed emphasis on Asia and the Pacific . . .   Australia’s overall intelligence effort on China, as a target, is already significant and will increase.”

The Pine Gap base, as further revealed in 2023 by Declassified Australia, is being used to collect signals intelligence and other data from the Israeli battlefield of Gaza, and also Ukraine and other global hotspots within view of the US spy satellites.

It’s recently had a significant expansion (reported by this author in The Saturday Paper) which has seen its total of satellite dishes and radomes rapidly increase in just a few years from 35 to 45 to accommodate new heightened-capability surveillance satellites.

Pine Gap base collects an enormous range and quantity of intelligence and data from thermal imaging satellites, photographic reconnaissance satellites, and signals intelligence (SIGINT) satellites, as expert researchers Des Ball, Bill Robinson and Richard Tanter of the Nautilus Institute have detailed.

These SIGINT satellites intercept electronic communications and signals from ground-based sources, such as radio communications, telemetry, radar signals, satellite communications, microwave emissions, mobile phone signals, and geolocation data.

Alliance priorities
The US’s SIGINT satellites have a capability to detect and receive signals from VHF radio transmissions on or near the earth’s surface, but they need to be tasked to do so and appropriately targeted on the source of the transmission.

For the Pine Gap base to intercept VHF radio signals from the Chinese Navy ships, the base would have needed to specifically realign one of those SIGINT satellites to provide coverage of the VHF signals in the Tasman Sea at the time of the Chinese ships’ passage. It is not known publicly if they did this, but they certainly have that capability.

However, it is not only the VHF radio transmission that would have carried information about the live-firing exercise.

Pine Gap would be able to monitor a range of other SIGINT transmissions from the Chinese ships. Details of the planning and preparations for the live-firing exercise would almost certainly have been transmitted over data and voice satellite communications, ship-to-ship communications, and even in the data of radar and gunnery operations.

But it is here that there is another possibility for the failure.

The Pine Gap base was built and exists to serve the national interests of the United States. The tasking of the surveillance satellites in range of Pine Gap base is generally not set by Australia, but is directed by United States’ agencies, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) together with the US Defense Department, the National Security Agency (NSA), and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Australia has learnt over time that US priorities may not be the same as Australia’s.

Australian defence and intelligence services can request surveillance tasks to be added to the schedule, and would have been expected to have done so in order to target the southern leg of the Chinese Navy ships’ voyage, when the ships were out of the range of the JORN network.

The military demands for satellite time can be excessive in times of heightened global conflict, as is the case now.

Whether the Pine Gap base was devoting sufficient surveillance resources to monitoring the Chinese Navy ships, due to United States’ priorities in Europe, Russia, the Middle East, Africa, North Korea, and to our north in the South China Sea, is a relevant question.

It can only be answered now by a formal government inquiry into what went on — preferably held in public by a parliamentary committee or separately commissioned inquiry. The sovereign defence of Australia failed in this incident and lessons need to be learned.

Who knew and when did they know
If the Pine Gap base had been monitoring the VHF radio band and heard the Chinese Navy live-fire alert, or had been monitoring other SIGINT transmissions to discover the live-fire drill, the normal procedure would be for the active surveillance team to inform a number of levels of senior officers, a former Defence official familiar with the process told Declassified Australia.

Expected to be included in the information chain are the Australian Deputy-Chief of Facility at the US base, NSA liaison staff at the base, the Australian Signals Directorate head office at the Defence complex at Russell Hill in Canberra, the Defence Force’s Headquarters Joint Operations Command, in Bungendore, and the Chief of the Defence Force. From there the Defence Minister’s office would need to have been informed.

As has been reported in media interviews and in testimony to the Senate Estimates hearings, it has been stated that Defence was not informed of the Chinese ships’ live-firing alert until a full 38 minutes after the drill window had commenced.

The former Defence official told Declassified Australia it is vital the reason for the failure to detect the live-firing in a timely fashion is ascertained.

Either the Australian Defence Force and US Pine Gap base were not effectively actively monitoring the Chinese flotilla at this time — and the reasons for that need to be examined — or they were, but the information gathered was somewhere stalled and not passed on to correct channels.

If the evidence so far tendered by the Defence chief and the Minister is true, and it was not informed of the drill by any of its intelligence or surveillance assets before that phone call from Airservices Australia, the implications need to be seriously addressed.

A final word
In just a couple of weeks the whole Defence environment for Australia has changed, for the worse.

The US military announces a drawdown in Europe and a new pivot to the Indo-Pacific. China shows Australia it can do tit-for-tat “navigational freedom” voyages close to the Australian coast. US intelligence support is withdrawn from Ukraine during the war. Australia discovers the AUKUS submarines’ arrival looks even more remote. The prime minister confuses the limited cover provided by the ANZUS treaty.

Meanwhile, the US militarisation of Australia’s north continues at pace. At the same time a senior Pentagon official pressures Australia to massively increase defence spending. And now, the country’s defence intelligence system has experienced an unexplained major failure.

Australia, it seems, is adrift in a sea of unpredictable global events and changing alliance priorities.

Peter Cronau is an award-winning, investigative journalist, writer, and film-maker. His documentary, The Base: Pine Gap’s Role in US Warfighting, was broadcast on Australian ABC Radio National and featured on ABC News. He produced and directed the documentary film Drawing the Line, revealing details of Australian spying in East Timor, on ABC TV’s premier investigative programme Four Corners. He won the Gold Walkley Award in 2007 for a report he produced on an outbreak of political violence in East Timor. This article was first published by Declassified Australia and is republished here with the author’s permission.

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

An executive order issued by U.S. President Donald Trump late Friday calls for the reduction of non-statutory components of the United States Agency for Global Media, or USAGM, the federal agency that funds RFA and several other independent global news organizations.

The U.S. Congress appropriates funds to USAGM, which disburses the monies to the grantee news outlets.

The brief order calls for the elimination “to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law” of USAGM and six other unrelated government entities that work on museums, homelessness, minority business development and more. While the order addresses “non-statutory components” of USAGM, RFA is statutorily established, meaning it was congressionally established by a statute in the International Broadcasting Act .

But a letter sent to the president of RFA Saturday and signed by USAGM special adviser Kari Lake, whose title is listed as “Senior Advisor to the Acting CEO with Authorities Delegated by Acting CEO,” notes that the agency’s federal grant has been terminated and that RFA is obliged to “promptly refund any unobligated funds.” It says that an appeal can be made within 30 days.

It was not immediately clear how and when operations would cease, but RFA is solely funded through federal grants.

In a statement issued Saturday, RFA President Bay Fang said the outlet planned to challenge the order.

“The termination of RFA’s grant is a reward to dictators and despots, including the Chinese Communist Party, who would like nothing better than to have their influence go unchecked in the information space,” the statement says. “Today’s notice not only disenfranchises the nearly 60 million people who turn to RFA’s reporting on a weekly basis to learn the truth, but it also benefits America’s adversaries at our own expense.”

An editorially independent news outlet funded through an act of Congress, RFA began its first Mandarin language broadcasts in 1996, expanding in subsequent years to a total of nine language services: Cantonese, Uyghur, Tibetan, Korean, Khmer, Vietnamese, Burmese and Lao.

RFA news programming is disseminated through radio, television, social media and the web in countries that have little to no free press, often providing the only source of uncensored, non-propaganda news. Because RFA covers closed-off countries and regions like North Korea, Tibet and Xinjiang, its English-language translations remain the primary source of information from many of these areas.

Its parent agency, USAGM, oversees broadcasters that work in more than 60 languages and reach an audience of hundreds of millions. These include Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which reported Saturday that its grants had also been terminated. Voice of America and the Office for Cuba Broadcasting, which are directly run by USAGM, put all staff on paid administrative leave Saturday.

In a post on Facebook, VOA Director Michael Abramowitz wrote: “I learned this morning that virtually the entire staff of Voice of America—more than 1300 journalists, producers and support staff—has been placed on administrative leave today. So have I.”

Committee to Protect Journalists Program Director Carlos Martinez de la Serna urged Congress to restore funding to USAGM, “which provides uncensored news in countries where the press is restricted.”

“It is outrageous that the White House is seeking to gut the Congress-funded agency supporting independent journalism that challenges narratives of authoritarian regimes around the world,” he said in a statement.

China watchers cautioned that cuts to RFA in particular could impact Washington’s ability to counter Beijing.

“Radio Free Asia plays a vital role in countering China’s influence by providing accurate and uncensored news to audiences facing relentless propaganda from the People’s Republic of China,” Rep. Ami Bera, a California Democrat, wrote in a post on X. “RFA helps advance American values amidst our ongoing Great Power Competition with China and exposes egregious human rights abuses like the Uyghur genocide and Beijing’s covert activities abroad.”

Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul called the dismantling of RFA and its sister publications “giant gifts to China,” while Human Rights Watch’s Maya Wang posted that in places like Xinjiang and Tibet: “Radio Free Asia has been one of the few which can get info out. Its demise would mean that these places will become info black holes, just as the CCP wants them.”

In a statement issued by USAGM Saturday evening and posted to X by Lake, the agency deemed itself “not salvageable” due to a range of alleged findings of security violations and self-dealing, though few details were provided.

“From top-to-bottom this agency is a giant rot and burden to the American taxpayer — a national security risk for this nation — and irretrievably broken. While there are bright spots within the agency with personnel who are talented and dedicated public servants, this is the exception rather than the rule,” the statement read.

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

COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

The country’s leading daily newspaper, The New Zealand Herald, screamed out this online headline by a columnist on February 10: “Should New Zealand invade the Cook Islands?”

The New Zealand government and the mainstream media have gone ballistic (thankfully not literally just yet) over the move by the small Pacific nation to sign a strategic partnership with China in Beijing this week.

It is the latest in a string of island nations that have signalled a closer relationship with China, something that rattles nerves and sabres in Wellington and Canberra.

• READ MORE: Should New Zealand invade the Cook Islands?
• Cook Islands opposition files no-confidence motion against PM
• China: Cook Islands’ relationship with Beijing ‘should not be restrained’
• Cook Islands crisis: Haka with the taniwha or dance with the dragon?
• Explainer: The diplomatic row between New Zealand and the Cook Islands
• Cook Islands’ diplomatic snub to NZ will be noticed – commentator
• Mark Brown on China deal: ‘No need for NZ to sit in the room with us’
• No debt in China deal – Mark Brown
• Mediawatch: NZ media in the middle of Asia-Pacific diplomatic drama
• Other China in Pacific reports

The Chinese have politely told the Kiwis to back off.  Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun told reporters that China and the Cook Islands have had diplomatic relations since 1997 which “should not be disrupted or restrained by any third party”.

“New Zealand is rightly furious about it,” a TVNZ Pacific affairs writer editorialised to the nation. The deal and the lack of prior consultation was described by various journalists as “damaging”, “of significant concern”, “trouble in paradise”, an act by a “renegade government”.

Foreign Minister Winston Peters, not without cause, railed at what he saw as the Cook Islands government going against long-standing agreements to consult over defence and security issues.

‘Clearly about secession’
Matthew Hooton, who penned the article in The Herald, is a major commentator on various platforms.

“Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown’s dealings with China are clearly about secession from the realm of New Zealand,” Hooton said without substantiation but with considerable colonial hauteur.

“His illegal moves cannot stand. It would be a relatively straightforward military operation for our SAS to secure all key government buildings in the Cook Islands’ capital, Avarua.”

This could be written off as the hyperventilating screeching of someone trying to drum up readers but he was given a major platform to do so and New Zealanders live in an oxygen-starved media environment where alternative analysis is hard to find.

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

“Governments resort to censoring news outlets when they have something to hide,” said CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg. “The Palestinian Authority should reverse its decision to suspend Al Jazeera’s operations and allow journalists to report freely without fear of reprisal.”

Palestinian official news agency WAFA reported on Wednesday that the Palestinian Authority suspended Al Jazeera on grounds of “inciting material.” The ban comes after the Authority criticized Al Jazeera’s last week coverage of a standoff between Palestinian security forces and militant fighters in Jenin camp, located in the West Bank, according to reports.

Israel raided Al Jazeera’s Ramallah offices in September and ordered its closure for 45 days, accusing the broadcaster’s West Bank operations of “incitement to and support of terrorism.” 

Israel banned Al Jazeera’s Israel operations in May, citing national security concerns.

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

Vanuatu is now in a state of emergency with at least 14 confirmed deaths following a 7.3 magnitude earthquake that struck the capital Port Vila yesterday, followed by
a 6.1 quake and other after shocks today.

According to the National Disaster Management Office (NDMO) in Vanuatu, more than 200 people were injured, with the numbers expected to rise.

The NDMO also reported that 10 buildings were damaged, included a building that housed the embassies of the United States and the United Kingdom, and the New Zealand High Commission.

• READ MORE: Vanuatu quake: Death toll rises – 14 dead, hundreds hurt in 7.3 disaster
• Buildings ‘pancaked’ in Vanuatu as 7.3 magnitude quake strikes off capital Port Vila
• Powerful 7.3 magnitude quake strikes Vanuatu – serious damage in Vila
• Violent’ earthquake strikes Vanuatu — at least one reported dead
• RNZ live news: Vanuatu earthquake updates
• ABC: Why earthquakes are more common in places such as Vanuatu

The Joint Police Operation Centre is assisting with search and rescue operations, including the planned deployment of medical teams equipped with heavy machinery. Efforts to restore power and water supplies are also ongoing, the NDMO added.

Meanwhile, Fiji’s Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka said in a statement that his country stood ready to help in any way it could.

“I extend my sincere condolences to the families who have lost their loved ones, and I wish those injured a quick recovery,” said Rabuka.

Although Port Vila airport remained closed to commercial flights, aerial assessments were underway.

The Head of Delegation for the International Federation of Red Cross (IFRC) Pacific, Katie Greenwood, shared in a post on X that their Emergency Operations Centre was now active, with staff and volunteers working tirelessly to assist those affected by the earthquake.

The University of the South Pacific (USP) has also expressed its sympathies to Vanuatu.

In an advisory, USP stated that its Emalus Campus would remain closed, following advice from the Campus DISMAC Committee. The closure would enable essential teams to assess and repair damage while national authorities address public infrastructure concerns.

Rescue operation continue in Port Vila, Vanuatu (it is 3:45am)
3 people have been pulled out of rubble alive, with one of them in serious condition.
All the staff from American Embassy is safe. #earthquake #sismo #Vanuatu #terremoto pic.twitter.com/oDVUjvJYci

— Disasters Daily (@DisastersAndI) December 17, 2024

Personnel from the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Pacific are on the ground in Vanuatu and are collaborating with the government, civil society organisations, and development partners to support immediate response efforts.

UNICEF, in a social media update, said it has already dispatched first aid kits and Interagency Emergency Health Kits (IEHK) to health facilities. It added that prepositioned supplies, including WASH, child protection, health, ECD, nutrition, and education kits, along with tents and first aid kits, are ready for distribution to reach at least 3000 people.

The UNICEF Vanuatu field office, comprising 19 staff and consultants, was working with local authorities and partners to assess the extent of the damage and determine response needs.

Published in partnership with the University of the South Pacific Journalism Programme’s Wansolwara News.

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

The post Foreign Spending to Influence US Elections Goes Well Beyond Russian Covert Operations appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

Israel is increasing the already strict restrictions on what is allowed into and across Gaza, including medical supplies and other essential items. Forced relocation orders have pushed both civilians and humanitarian workers into an area that is now approximately 15 square miles. This alleged “humanitarian zone” is still subjected to air strikes, making it extremely challenging for Palestinian civilians to receive aid assistance.

“Due to Israeli forced displacement orders, our staff in Gaza had to stop operations many times. The latest order impacted AFSC’s water distribution to four camps where we had been providing water to thousands of people,” said Hanady Muhiar, Palestine/Israel Country Representative for the American Friends Service Committee. “Palestinians in Gaza are under constant bombardment from Israeli air strikes and lack of access to food, water, and lifesaving medical supplies. We are calling on the international community to take all possible action to bring about a permanent ceasefire and guarantee humanitarian access. We must bring an end to these atrocities and allow all Palestinians who have been displaced to return to what remains of their homes and reunite with their families.”

The new restrictions come at a time when the humanitarian response is already critically impeded, with July marking the lowest amount of aid entering Gaza since the start of Israel’s military offensive more than 10 months ago.

The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and other leading humanitarian agencies call on the government of Israel to “immediately halt the forced displacement of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, which is causing unnecessary suffering, trauma, and severely disrupting access to essential aid. The Government of Israel must guarantee and facilitate safe, unhindered access for all humanitarian assistance, including vaccines, fuel, associated equipment (including cold chain storage), and specialist staff, through all crossing points into and within Gaza, as well as safe unfettered access for children and families to health points across the Strip.”

They also demand that Israel comply with its obligations under International Law and cease all military operations, withdraw fully from the entirety of the Gaza Strip, and open the crossings for unhindered provision at scale of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance. This is consistent with the provisional measures ordered by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in January, March and May and reaffirmed in a separate ICJ determination in July.

“The UN Security Council must take concrete action to ensure an immediate and permanent ceasefire is achieved. Only then will we see unimpeded humanitarian access that ensures vital aid can reach those in need,” said Mike Merryman-Lotze, Just Peace Global Policy Director for AFSC. “Members of the international community must halt the transfer of weapons, parts, and ammunition to all parties to the conflict, as these are being used to commit grave violations of International Humanitarian Law. All states should impose an arms embargo on Israel to avoid further escalation and create the possibility for peace and justice in the region.”

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

“This is one of the most perilous moments in the [Middle East] region in years,” says Ali Vaez, director of the International Crisis Group Iran Project, after Israel’s assassination of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh on Wednesday in Tehran. Iranian retaliation against Israel appears imminent. “All bets are off,” warns Vaez, adding that Israel’s latest maneuver will put Americans “in harm’s way,” as Iran will no longer hold back fellow Axis of Resistance members, especially Islamic militias in Iraq and Syria, from launching attacks on U.S. military bases in the region. “It is disastrous for a superpower who cannot control, basically, a client state that is destabilizing the region,” Vaez explains. We also hear from Palestinian human rights attorney Diana Buttu, who responds to Israel’s announcement that its July strike on al-Mawasi, an alleged safe zone in Gaza, killed Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif along with nearly a hundred civilians. Buttu argues it is Israel’s international impunity over the course of its campaign against Palestine that has led to this dangerous moment of escalation. “This is a monster that’s been unleashed,” she says. “This is going to spread, and this is exactly what Netanyahu wants.”

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

The online casinos, known as POGOs in the Philippines, proliferated during the administration of former President Rodrigo Duterte, whose term ended in 2022. They attracted customers from mainland China, where gambling is illegal, and other foreigners and were frequently embroiled in controversy.

“We now hear the loud shouts of the people to ban POGOs,” Marcos said during his third state of the nation speech. “Disguising as legitimate entities, their operations have ventured into illicit areas, furthest from gaming,” he told  a joint session of Congress.

“Effective today, all POGOs are banned,” Marcos said. The Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation has been instructed to wind down and cease operations of the online casinos by the end of the year, he said.

The gaming industry regulator has said more than 250 POGOs were suspected of operating without a license. 

Marcos’ announcement came amid a Senate probe involving a suspended mayor who had alleged links to illegal gaming operators.

In February and March, authorities raided two POGOs operating in a property allegedly owned by a company of Alice Guo, mayor of a town in Bamban, Tarlac province.

Documents that senators presented during their investigation alleged that Guo is a Chinese national named Guo Huaping, who reportedly faked her identity as a Filipino.

Guo’s case has surfaced against the backdrop of heightened tensions between Manila and Beijing in their maritime dispute in the South China Sea. 

The Philippines and China are locked in a years-long dispute over the resource-rich waterway. Other countries including Vietnam, Brunei, and Malaysia have overlapping claims to the waters. Taiwan is also a claimant.

Various Philippine security officials had raised concerns that Beijing could be using illegal gaming operations to stir up trouble in the Southeast Asian country.

Marcos has blamed the pro-China stance of the Duterte administration for emboldening Beijing to be more assertive in the South China Sea.

Last month, the Chinese Embassy in the Philippines urged Manila to ban the online casino operators. It said Beijing “prohibits all forms of gambling.”

“POGO is detrimental to both Philippine and Chinese interests and images as well as China-Philippines relations,” the embassy said in a statement. 

On July 1, officials from Manila and Beijing agreed to boost joint effort against transnational crimes, including illegal activities involving POGOs.

Manila’s fight in the South China Sea 

In his speech, Marcos also said that Manila would not back down in a territorial dispute with Beijing, shortly after both sides issued conflicting statements over resupply missions to disputed outposts in the South China Sea. 

“The Philippines cannot yield,” he said. Manila will continue to assert its rights through a “fair and pacific way.”

The president said the country continues to strengthen its “defensive posture, both through developing self-reliance and through partnerships with like-minded states.”  

Early this month, the Philippines and Japan signed a historic Reciprocal Access Agreement, which allows the deployment of troops on each other’s soil.

Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. said on Monday that the Philippines is eyeing similar defense pacts with France, Canada, and New Zealand. They will allow greater interoperability among Manila’s partners, he said.

“The West Philippine Sea is not just a figment of our imagination. This is ours,” Marcos said in his speech. “And this will remain ours until the flames of our beloved country, the Philippines, continue to burn brightly.”

Manila refers to territories in the South China Sea within its exclusive economic zone as the West Philippine Sea.

On Monday, a diplomatic tit-for-tat between Manila and Beijing erupted hours before Marcos’ speech in Congress. 

On Sunday, Manila’s Department of Foreign Affairs announced that the two countries reached a “provisional agreement” on the Philippines’ resupply missions to a military outpost in the Second Thomas (Ayungin) Shoal. 

It did not provide any further details.

But on Monday, China’s foreign ministry imposed restrictions and demanded that the Philippines remove BRP Sierra Madre, a World War II-era ship deliberately grounded in the shoal in 1999 in response to China’s earlier occupation of nearby Mischief Reef.

“China is willing to allow it in a humanitarian spirit if the Philippines informs China in advance and after on-site verification is conducted. China will monitor the entire resupply process,” a ministry spokesperson said on Monday.

Shortly after, DFA spokesperson Teresita Daza denied such conditions in the deal. 

Jojo Riñoza and Gerard Carreon contributed to this report from Manila.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Camille Elemia for BenarNews.

Because southern Laos doesn’t have a processing plant, the government must allow investors to ship their raw minerals through two overland border crossings with Vietnam, the official who works in Sekong province said.

“All of these minerals have to be exported to other countries,” she said.

The minerals are then sent from Vung Ang seaport in Vietnam’s Ha Tinh province to China’s Qingdao seaport – one of the busiest ports in the world. 

Australia’s ambassador to Vietnam, Andrew Goledzinowski, tweeted about the truck shipments during a visit to Ha Tinh last week. He noted in a follow-up tweet that a railway between Laos and the Vung Ang port is under consideration.

Until recently, most raw materials from Laos’ numerous Chinese-funded mining projects have been carried overland to China. Laotians have spoken frequently about seeing large, mineral-loaded trucks heading north on dirt roads and paved highways toward the Boten border checkpoint with China’s Yunnan province.

The mining projects have also prompted complaints that they don’t employ enough Lao workers and that nearby residents are often left without farmland or drinkable water.

Shipments in the north

Last year, National Assembly lawmaker Hongkham Xayakhom urged the government to reconsider its policy of allowing so much mining.

“The economic and financial conditions of our country have not improved,” she said at an Assembly meeting. “Most people are still struggling and our debt is still high.”

In March, Prime Minister Sonexay Siphandone directed the Ministry of Energy and Mines to require mining companies to process raw minerals in Laos before export.

A ministry official told RFA at the time that companies should comply with the requirement “as soon as possible.” 

Meanwhile, some shipments of raw minerals from Laos’ northern provinces are being sent to China through the Laos-China railway, an Attapeu province official told RFA. The railway opened in December 2021.

The shipment of raw minerals from Laos to China has the full support of the Lao government, according to the Attapeu official, who like other sources in this report requested anonymity to speak freely about government decision-making.

There are government committees appointed to inspect and weigh every truck loaded with raw minerals, he said. Officials must confirm that the mining companies are exporting the proper amount granted to them under the concession quotas, he said.

Minister of Energy and Mines Phoxay Xayasone told lawmakers last month that mining excavation generated US$2.4 billion for investors in 2023, which brought in US$322 million in tax revenue for the Lao government.

Translated by Phouvong. Edited by Matt Reed.

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

Orientation

Power struggles between the two sides of the brain

In Part I of this article, I compared the left to the right side of the brain across many categories. One of the most interesting prospects in Iain McGilchrist’s great book The Master and His Emissary, is that the two sides of the brain functions do not work in a harmonious manner all the time. There is a power struggle between them. Just as we have accepted Freud’s depiction of the psyche as composed of a struggle between the id and the superego and just as many of us have accepted that working class people are conflicted between a class-in-itself and a class-for-itself identity, so might the two sides of the brain be involved in working at cross-purposes. John Milton’s Paradise Lost seems to be a precisely profound exploration of the divided human brain.

Rise of the left side of brain in Western history

Over the course of Western history, the left side of the brain has gotten more powerful. But at least initially, as Karl Jaspers demonstrated in his book The Axial Age, the shift to the left-side of the brain has happened not just in the West, in Palestine and Greece, but also in the East in China and India. As we shall see, this power struggle is further externalized in the material world in Western history when we examine the differences between the Renaissance and the Reformation, between the Enlightenment and Romanticism and between capitalism and socialism. They will also show themselves in the commonalities between the Reformation, the scientific revolution of the 17th century, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.

The Ancient Worlds of the Greeks Lack of faces in Egypt and Mesopotamia

The right hemisphere is crucial in interpreting faces and evaluating facial reactions. The right hemisphere was also important for aesthetic judgments in art. In his book Faces: the Changing Look of Mankind, Milton Brener points out that there are no individual facial portraits in prehistoric art. The earliest drawings, especially in the Neolithic Age, lack of spatial orientation or a clear relationship between the parts and the whole. The faces in Bronze Age Egypt and Mesopotamia are inexpressive gazes. Artistic  subjects are mainly animals. If humans appear at all, it is only the parts of the body, the pelvis or buttocks, that are shown most frequently. Human figures are headless. When faces do appear as with aristocrats or kings, they are expressionless, and non-individualized. Lack of faces shows the lack of right brain involvement. 

Right brain presence in ancient Greece

In Archaic Greece at the time of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the right brain was clearly operating in the sustained, unified theme that  produced a single coherent narrative over a long stretch of time. The degree of empathy and insight into characters show the mark of the right hemisphere. A change to portraits came about in the 6th century BCE. Brener says the Greek subjects in this period are more individualized, varied, emotionally expressive and empathic. Emotions include pride, hate, bodily gesture, envy, anger, pity and love.  There is yet to be a separation between the body and the mind, matter and the soul. He posits it is the right hemisphere that creates and understands expressive poetry and uses metaphors in oral discourse and in writing.

Left brain in Greece and the commercial spirit (600-400 BCE)

Prometheus is the god of technical skill where the left side shows prominence over the right. The god Prometheus is said to bring numeracy and literacy to the Greeks while inventing weights and measures.

The invention of money is an indicator of the same neuropsychological development. As Marx pointed out, historically the use of money went from a means for exchanging commodities to developing an independent existence.

In his book Money and the Early Greek Mind, Richard Seaford points out that monetary currency is the prime mover of a new, more abstract kind of philosophy. Before the development of currency (whether barter or gift) there is an emphasis on reciprocity in exchange.  With currency, reciprocals relationships become static, based on equivalence with and the emphasis placed on utility and profit sustaining the community. Money is homogenous. It flattens its objects, eroding their uniqueness. Money is impersonal and weakens the need for bonds. Just as money freezes reciprocity between humans and objects, so too the mind becomes abstracted from its relationship with the body. The disembodied mind – noos – emerges, a mind separate from the body in about the 4th century. Bruno Snell discusses a fascinating history of this in his book Discovery of the Mind.

Legal constitutions, bodies of laws, formalized geography and study of maps

By the time of Socrates, the respect for the testimony of the senses had been slipping and the importance of metaphor was forgotten. For Plato, poets are to be banished from The Republic. In art again we return to the depiction of parts of the body: heads sprung without necks; arms wandered without their shoulders. The left hemisphere seems to be in control again, but then this changed back. The 4th to the 2nd century was a high point of expressiveness of portraits in painting and sculpture with the most extraordinary attention given to individual expression. The left and right together produced the development of a legal constitution and a body of laws, studies  of history, formalization of geography and the study of maps.

The Romans

As for the Roman world, McGilchrist tells us most of the great legacy of Rome’s literature belongs to the first century BCE with Virgil, Horace and Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  All three suggest an alliance between the right and left hemisphere. Until the end of the 3rd century, portraiture had sought to convey a lifelike individuality.

However, a fundamental change took place after the third century in the depiction of the face. Portraits of stone began to show a particularly abstract, distant gaze no longer concerned  with the real world. McGilchrist points out that the features suddenly stiffen in an expressive Medusa-like mask. There is a movement away from life-like nature to an abstract type; from plastic articulation to conceptual generalization; from the corporeal to the symbolic. Natural objects lose their liveliness and idiosyncrasy. In art an abrupt marionette-like movement predominates. A mechanical order is imposed on the objects from above and pressed into horizontal lines that are symmetrical, just like soldier to his rank-and file. With Roman military and administrative success, a bureaucracy grows and the left hemisphere begins to duplicate itself without regulation in the material world. In drama McGilchrist says there also is a possible parallel to the left hemisphere being out of control with the influence of Theophrastus character types.

Middle Ages

From this point through the Middle Ages the face and body are symbolic only. Individualized portraits of the emperor disappear and they become alike in the same way as the saints are depicted. Myth and metaphor are no longer semi-transparent but opaque. At best myth and metaphor or superficial ornaments – at worst lies and superstitions.

The Renaissance

Intensity in the rise of self-consciousness and individualism

The Renaissance was the next great flowering of the right-left hemispheres at their best. In this period, human dignity lay in our unique capacity to choose our own destiny, not simply be the plaything of fate as it was with the Greeks. This resulted in the importance attributed to the recording of individual lives in the rise of biography and autobiography. There seems to be this standing back, an even more self-conscious reflection than the Greeks in the 6th century. There is also a demand for abstraction and generalization, favoring the left hemisphere in the same time period.

The plays of Shakespeare

McGilchrist says drama has come to the fore at those points in history when we have achieved necessary distance but not yet so detached that we are inappropriately objective or alienated from one another. The plays of Shakespeare constitute one of the most striking testimonies to the rise of the right hemisphere during this period. There is a complete disregard for theory and categorization which might come about with the predominance of the left hemisphere. Everywhere, Shakespeare reveled in opposites, seeing life as a mix of good and bad. He did this instead of standing outside or above his creation and telling us how to judge his character. In music, there was the amazing efflorescence of polyphony and complex harmony throughout the Renaissance.

The Reformation

Attacks on image and metaphor

The Reformation is a great example of a religious movement driven by the left side of the brain gone haywire. The Reformation is the first great expression of the search for certainty in modern times. It attacks the visual image, the vehicle par excellence of the right hemisphere. McGilchrist points out that the decapitation of statues by the Reformers took place because both lay and clergy could not handle the confrontation between the animate form with an inanimate image. They could make sense of them together if the image could be understood as a metaphor for the real object. For the Protestants, either the statue is a god or an idolatrous thing, with nothing in between. During the Reformation there was a decline in metaphoric understanding of ceremony and ritual. Instead, they understood the repetition of empty procedures. In Protestant circles, words acquired the status of things. The word freezes into a kind of idol itself. The Reformation replaces the immediate presentation of an unmediated mystical experience in the Renaissance with a representation through the Bible. The way to get the meaning across for the Protestants was to repeat words endlessly, drumming and drilling it into the mind. This is something the left hemisphere would attempt. In the Reformation the sacred space centerpiece is no longer on the image on the altar, but on the pulpit.

Mechanization of sacred space

McGilchrist points out that the Catholic Church encouraged and incorporated movement, walking and processions into its ceremonies.  Not the Protestants. Koerner, in his book The Reformation of the Image draws attention to the bureaucratic categorization that springs up from the Lutheran church. People are neatly placed in symmetrical ranks on the floor of the Church which are laid out like graph paper in a typical left hemisphere materialization. The congregation is seated neatly in rows of obedient, mechanical subjects.

The Seventeenth Century

Philosopher of science Stephen Toulmin says 17th century science was a secular version of what the Protestants had done religiously. It was the reversal in Renaissance values. This can be seen in literature to philosophy in the movement:

• From Pantagruel to that of Pilgrim’s Progress
• From Shakespeare to Racine
• From Montaigne to Descartes
• From the reciprocal oral mode to fixed and unidirectional written mode
• From Eliot’s unified sensibility to dissociation

 Descartes and Madness

Descartes is one of the first and greatest exemplars of the left hemisphere philosophy in the 17th century. He has problems with the very idea of temporal continuity. Descartes thought that reliance on the body, the senses and the imagination would lead not only to error, but to madness. Yet as we have seen in Part I of this article, it is an excess of rationality that can lead to schizophrenia. In fact, Descartes had many of the same characteristics as schizophrenics: excessively detached, hyper-rational, an intense self-awareness, a disembodied and alienated condition. McGilchrist tells us Descartes describes looking out of his window seeing what he knows to be people passing by as seeming to him like machines. Descartes was not even sure he had a body at all. This is the rationality to which he was committed. This devitalization results in a need for certainty. The analytical geometry which he founded is a disciplined application of left-brain thinking.

The Enlightenment

Symmetry and balance

McGilchrist says the true relationship between the left and right side of the brain is that reason is the constitutive foundation of functioning and rationality plays a regulatory role. The relationship between reason and rationality is developed in some detail in Part I of my article. However, Kant reversed the relationship between reason and rationality. He imprisoned reason within the closed system of rationality, including his space, time and causality categories. Reason in the Enlightenment was static, not dynamic. Reason means holding tensions that are incompatible in a balanced symmetry meaning equal measure. Beauty in the Enlightenment is holding tensions symmetrically. Symmetry was also the ultimate guiding aesthetic principle of the Enlightenment typified in music by Hayden.

In any scientific procedure on a natural object, if the scientist leaves it unchanged s/he is admired. The butterfly is skewered and unmoving, a specimen in the collector’s cabinet. This is what McGilchrist says captures the Enlightenment’s sense of nature.  The changing, evolving nature of individual things or beings had to wait until the 18th century revolution in biology. Unlike the Reformation, the Enlightenment did not attack metaphor and imagination frontally. However, they trivialized it as nothing more than a playful ornament, an extra, not something that helps us to understand reality.

The all-seeing eye

There were serious political consequences to the discovery of optics. As Foucault has pointed out, the all-powerful, all-surveying and all-capturing eye achieved its ultimate form in Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a prison in which the authorities can see every prisoner while the authorities are invisible to the prisoners and the prisoners cannot see each other. This monstrous imaginary prison could only be hatched by the left brain. McGilchrist argues that Bentham has many of the features that would suggest a mild degree of autism and defects in right hemisphere functioning. Bentham was socially awkward, and probably never talked to a woman at all except to his cook and housemaid. He had a contempt for the British common law tradition which was much more right-brain law tradition.

The problem with sight, as Herder points out, is its tendency to meet the depth, breadth and volume of the world with the cool rebuff of a planar surface, a representation. In the romantic period, Herder and Winckelmann both praised sculpture for its depth, volume, fullness and complex curvature, transcending the rectilinear flatness of a single plane of vision which would be consistent with the left side of the brain. Wordsworth spoke of what he called the tyranny of the eye.

The uncanny

The uncanny is a psychological state which results from a loss of the distinction between the living and the purely mechanical. Koerner makes the point that iconoclasm of the Reformation granted so much uncanny powers to images that it came close to idolatry. McGilchrist criticizes the violence of the French Revolution by pointing out it was not saints made of wood images that were attacked by the revolutionaries but kings and dukes themselves that were decapitated. In the book The Female Thermometer: 18th Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny Terry Castle explores the elements of phantasmagoria, the grotesque, carnivalesque travesty, hallucination reveries, paranoia and nightmarish fantasy doubles, dancing dolls automata, waxwork figures, mirror selves and spectral emanations.

These are all related to schizophrenia as we saw in Part I. Living things are experienced as mechanisms. The living body becomes an assemblage of independently moving fragments. Interest in the uncanny resulted in the book Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Here in the person of the mad Dr. Frankenstein, the left hemisphere of Dr. Frankenstein assembles the dead body parts and breathes life into it through lightning. However, the result is not a human whole which is more than its parts, but a monster that is no more than the sum of the enlivened body parts, a monster. Remember, for the Enlightenment after all, nature is a whole equal to the sum of the parts. Later on, the Romantic William Blake contrasted the single-minded, limiting, measuring mechanical, the god of Newton, to the many-minded liberating power of the creative imagination the God of Milton.

Romanticism and the Right Side of the Brain

Depth and mystery

In the first wave of Romanticism in the early 19th century, we find a return to cultural expressions of the right brain. McGilchrist points to the work of Claude Lorain. He has been said to be the greatest landscape painter ever. His paintings have depth, both spatial and temporal, and a deep perspective with steeply angled buildings. Light and color suggest not just distance as such, but a succession, a progression of distances.

For the Romantics, half-light and transitional states have a multitude of affinities with complexity. The romantics are attracted to fog, haze, moonlights and mist. They love unfinished sketches, the half-light of dawn, music heard far off, and mountains where the top is obscured by mist. The right hemisphere is at home with blurry, fleeting, half-lite form. The romantics were convinced that one might learn more from half-light than full light. As many of you know, Hegel imaginatively said that the owl of Minerva, goddess of wisdom, only flew at dusk. For the Romantics there was a longing for the innocent unselfconscious both in a historical and personal past. It is with the right hemisphere that we recall our childhood memories. Distance in time and place expands the soul. Fusion with nature included fusion with the body. The fusion of body, soul and spirit were never more keenly aspired to than with romantic pantheism.

The Industrial Revolution: Making the World in the Likeness of the Left Brain

Who but a political economist and a class of people with the left side of the brain in overdrive could imagine that through the selfishness of individuals a harmonious social whole could result? Without care or compassion a whole is supposed to spontaneously emerge. “Liberty” for the left side of the brain is the laisse faire of Adam Smith’s version of capitalism.

The mechanization of work spaces, commodities, and workers under capitalism

In the next century, McGilchrist says the most daring assault of the left hemisphere on the world was the industrial revolution. It was creating a world in the left hemisphere’s own likeness. Whether it is the mechanics of the production of the factory, production of commodities or the production and reproduction of workers, they are broadly similar.

In the early days of the factory, skilled workers still controlled the pace of production and took breaks as they needed them. In the second half of the 19th century family capitalists joined in larger corporate entities and the organization of the factory changed. Now rectilinear grids of machines make identical surfaces and shapes. In the machine of factories, capitalists want to know three things;

• how much it could do?;
• how quickly can it do it?; and,
• with what degree of precision?

In the case of commodities, they were mass produced cheaply for a national market. Quantity replaces quality. Gone are the handicrafts, each of which is different and bears the creativity of the artisan who made them. Workers are the makers of commodities but due to alienation from their work they no longer understand that  commodities are a means to an end. Rather commodities become ends in themselves. As Marx says, things are in the saddle. People become enslaved to the things that they make.

Whether it is on the assembly line itself, the production of commodities or the life of the worker in the factory, the parts of the machine were just, equally interchangeable units of their categories. It is here that the inner structure of the human organism, the left side of the brain, externalizes and multiplies in ever increasing measure into the material world, transforming it along the way. The innate structure of the left hemisphere through capitalist technology is being incarnated in the world it has now come to dominate.

Socialism as a return of the right brain to the industrialization process

One the other hand it was through Marx and the socialist movement that the attempt was made to change these conditions. Socialists want to redesign factories so that artificial intelligence serves to relieve workers of rote movement and allow them to work less. Socialists want to produce commodities for use-value, not exchange value and restore the production of pre-capitalist production modes. They want to appreciate commodities as a means to an end, not an end in itself. But socialists seek to achieve this on a higher level. Lastly, socialists strive to overcome alienation of workers on the job and the specialization of labor where a worker does one activity over and over again. Instead, as Marx wrote, in a communist society people will fish in the morning, raise cattle in the afternoon and criticize society in the evening. The entire socialist program can be understood as a collective movement to reinstate the projects that are expressions of the right side of the brain.

 Modernity From 1880 to Mid 20th Century

Time and space contraction

In Anthony Giddens’ book, Modernity and Self-Identity he described the characteristic disruption of space and time that is required by globalization as a necessary context of industrial capitalism. This means the intrusion of distant events into everyday consciousness.

The features of modernity include:

• mobility which insures a permanent population with no attachment to place;
• a high pace of change in the physical environment; and,
• the need for convenience in physical transport.

These disruptions in time undermine traditions which are either discarded, marginalized or reinvented (Eric Hobsbawm’s Invention of Tradition). Attachments to others are weakened radically.

In the 20th century the Vienna Circle of logical empiricism involved another philosophical-scientific attempt by the left brain movement in its grasping for certainty, which was even more formal, and exact than the one of Descartes. But this had psychological implications. Louis Sass calls the result hyper-consciousness where everything gets dragged into the full glare of consciousness. This is typified in Robert Musil’s novel Man Without Qualities.

On the other hand, in the United States the pragmatic movement of William James, John Dewey and Charles Sanders Pierce were right-brain attempts to make philosophy practical and down to earth. Also, the emergence of Process philosophy in the work  of Whitehead and Samuel Alexander is an attempt to link a dynamic science of complexity to a dynamic philosophy.

Conclusion: What the Left Hemisphere Becoming Dominant Would Look Like:

• increased specialization;
• it would substitute information for knowledge;
• keep refining experiments in detail;
• increase in both abstraction and reification;
• expansion of bureaucracy;
• morality based on utility, calculation and enlightened self-interest;
• paranoia;
• panoptical control;
• individuals as interchangeable parts of mechanical system;
• altruism is seen as suspicious;
• lack of common sense;
• anger and aggression would be more common;
• loss of insight;
• pathos becomes shameful;
• boredom drives towards sensationalism and novelty;
• conceptual art lacks depth and distorted and bizarre perspectives;
• dance is solipsistic rather than communal; and,
• despoilation of the natural world.

 Psychological surveys show increased unhappiness in the Anglo-American Empire. Iain McGilchrist fears we are at risk of being trapped by the I-it world. On the other hand, the factor that explains the most in happiness in humanity is the breadth and depth of our social connections. McGilchrist writes that the fallout into this left brain world is the story of Adam and Eve being turned out of Paradise. McGilchrist tells us that the quest for certainty is the greatest of all illusions. It is what the ancients meant by hubris and this is what the Western world is currently trapped in.

Left Brain-Right Brain in Human History

• First published in Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

•• Read Part 1 here

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

With RIMPAC now underway, the lands and waters surrounding the Hawaiian Islands are being intensively bombed and shelled as participating forces practice amphibious landings and urban combat training, and the Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) find their sovereignty once again violated after more than 130 years of colonization by the US.

RIMPAC aims to fortify the colonization and militarization of the Pacific, ensuring the security of the West’s imperialist agenda against the rise of China and other threats to the US-led capitalist system.

In the interest of advancing a political education around the history and purpose of INDOPACOM as part of U.S. militarism, the Solidarity Network for the Black Alliance for Peace has published this comprehensive Fact Sheet on INDOPACOM.

WHAT IS INDOPACOM?

U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, or INDOPACOM, is one of the U.S. Department of Defense’s eleven unified combatant commands that together span the globe. INDOPACOM’s area of responsibility (AOR) covers half of the earth’s surface, stretching from California to India’s western border, and from Antarctica to the North Pole. INDOPACOM claims 38 nations within its AOR, which together comprise over half of the world’s population. Its AOR includes the two most populous countries in the world, China and India, while also encompassing small island nations, such as Diego Garcia, Guam, Palau, and Samoa, all of which are under some form of U.S. colonial occupation. INDOPACOM comprises multiple components and sub-unified commands. They include U.S. Forces Korea, U.S. Forces Japan, U.S. Special Operations Command Pacific, U.S. Pacific Fleet, U.S. Marine Forces Pacific, U.S. Pacific Air Forces, and U.S. Army Pacific.

According to INDOPACOM, this large and diverse area is optimal terrain to implement its “combat credible deterrence strategy.” This includes an estimated 366 bases and installations across 16 nations–more than any other command structure due to large concentrations in Guam, Hawai’i, Japan, Korea, and Okinawa. Many of the military installations strategically surround China and major trade routes.

Headquartered at Camp H.M. Smith of occupied Honolulu, Hawai’i, INDOPACOM claims to enhance stability and ensure “a free and open Indo-Pacific” through military and economic partnerships with countries in the region. Nonetheless, it also claims to advance “U.S. national security objectives while protecting national interests.” INDOPACOM states its mission is to build a combat-ready force “capable of denying its adversaries sustained air and sea dominance.”

THE HISTORY OF INDOPACOM

INDOPACOM is the U.S. military’s oldest and largest combatant command. It is the result of a merger between three commands–Far East Command, Pacific Command and Alaskan Command–which were established after World War II in 1947. The first commander of the Far East Command, General Douglas MacArthur, was tasked with “carrying out occupation duties of Korea, Japan, the Ryukyu Islands, the Bonin Islands, the Philippines and the Mariana Islands.” From the end of WWII to 1958, the U.S. military conducted 67 nuclear tests throughout the Marshall Islands under “Operation Crossroads.” It conducted another 36 nuclear detonations at Christmas Island and Johnston Atoll in 1962 under “Operation Dominic,” which permanently destroyed the natural biomes.

Against the backdrop of the Korean War, the key predecessor to INDOPACOM, Pacific Command, was primarily oriented toward combat operations in Korea and later, the Philippines. The ongoing Korean War has resulted in millions of casualties as well as the demarcation of North and South Korea since 1953. By 1957, Pacific Command saw a major expansion and strategic reorientation of its AOR, absorbing the Far East Command and most of the Alaskan Command. Camp H.M. Smith of occupied Honolulu, Hawai’i was selected as the new headquarters because the U.S. Fleet Marine Force, Pacific, the largest maritime invasion force in the world, was already located there.

Throughout the U.S. war on Vietnam, Pacific Command controlled all U.S. military forces, including South Vietnamese assets, and operations within the country. Leading both the U.S. Pacific Air Forces and Pacific Fleet, Pacific Command’s brutal campaigns resulted in some of the most egregious atrocities, such as the My Lai massacre in 1968. Pacific Command’s operations also included some of the heaviest aerial bombardments, like “Operation Rolling Thunder.” In its numerous campaigns, which also included “Operation Bolo,” “Linebacker I and II”, “Ranch Hand,” and “Arc Lightdropping,” Pacific Command dropped over 5 million tons of bombs and at least 11 million gallons of the highly corrosive herbicide known as “Agent Orange” on Southeast Asia. Pacific Command was also responsible for covert bombing operations targeting Cambodia and Laos during the war, dropping over 2.5 million tons of bombs through “Operation Menu.”

Pacific Command saw subsequent alterations to its AOR after U.S. forces fled Vietnam in 1973. Responsibility for Afghanistan and Pakistan was delegated to US Central Command after its inauguration in 1983, while Pacific Command assumed new responsibility for China and North Korea that same year. U.S. Secretaries of Defense Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfield respectively oversaw territorial expansions to Pacific Command’s AOR in 1989 and 2002, into INDOPACOM’s current formation.

INDOPACOM NOW

The United States continues to view the Asia-Pacific region as pivotal to the pursuit of its material interests, emphasizing that the region is home to some of the largest and fastest-growing economies and militaries. The Obama administration’s 2011 “Pivot to Asia” marked a stronger push by Pacific Command for confrontation not only with China but any nation or movement that poses a threat to U.S. hegemony in the region.

In 2018, Pacific Command was rebranded to Indo-Pacific Command, or INDOPACOM, as it is known today. This move was meant to recognize the strategic importance of India, following heightened aggression toward China during the Obama and Trump presidencies. INDOPACOM regularly conducts joint naval training exercises in the South China Sea with countries like Japan and Australia in clear violation of international law and even secretly stationed U.S. special-operations and support forces in Taiwan since 2021.

Massive military exercises like the largest international maritime warfare training, the “Rim of the Pacific Exercise (RIMPAC),” and others like “Cape North” and Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center trainings occur frequently in occupied Hawai’i and Guam, without the consent of the Indigenous populations. In 2023, INDOPACOM carried out new iterations of its“Talisman Sabre” exercise in Australia and its “Super Garuda Shield” exercise in Indonesia. These exercises involved tens of thousands of military personnel from 13 and 19 nations, respectively, including the Pacific island nations of Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and Tonga for the first time.

INDOPACOM’s major military partners in the Asia-Pacific region include Japan and South Korea. The U.S. military holds significant leverage over each nation’s armed forces via agreements undergirding the U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) and U.S. Forces Japan (USFJ), essentially commanding additional joint military structures with their own distinct mission, vision, and objectives in support of INDOPACOM. USFK continues to prevent reunification in Korea as part of its mission to “defend the Republic of Korea,” while USFJ remains committed to the colonial occupation of Okinawa as part of its mission of “provid[ing] a ready and lethal capability…in support of the U.S.-Japan Alliance.”

BAP AGAINST INDOPACOM

INDOPACOM works to extend U.S. military influence throughout the Asia-Pacific region and to promote the militarism and violence required to fulfill the material interests of the U.S. ruling class. By portraying China as a global bogeyman, INDOPACOM serves to obfuscate the indigeneity and legitimacy of liberation movements like those occurring on the occupied islands of Guam, Hawai’i, Okinawa, and Samoa, as well as nearly every other nation across the region from Indonesia and Malaysia to the Philippines. INDOPACOM’s aggressive role in the region serves to create the very instability it uses to justify its own existence and mask the responsibility of U.S. officials provoking new wars.

The Black Alliance for Peace stands against the influence and power of INDOPACOM, and the ever-increasing militarization of the region. Informed by the Black Radical Peace Tradition, we understand that peace is not the absence of conflict, but the achievement, by popular struggle and self-defense, of a world liberated from nuclear armament and proliferation, unjust war, and global white supremacy. As referenced in our Principles of Unity, BAP takes a resolute anti-colonial, anti-imperialist position that links the international role of the U.S. empire–one based on war, aggression and exploitation–to the domestic war against poor and working-class African/Black people in the United States.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Black Alliance for Peace.

 Orientation

Left and right brain divisions and dependencies

Why is the brain so clearly and deeply divided? Why are the two cerebral hemispheres asymmetrical? Is the division of labor in the brain complete or do the sides overlap in functions? A lot of what we once thought went on in one hemisphere alone is now known to go on in both. For instance, both sides of the brain can handle words and images, both are involved in thinking and both can process language. Further, there is duplication across both spheres. While the hemispheres need to cooperate, believe it or not, Iain McGilchrist claims there is a power struggle between them, analogous to differences between Freud’s id and superego or Marx’s divided worker possessing both  class-in-itself and class-for-itself identities. It is only at the level of the interpretation of specific events that competition between hemispheres occurs. The left hemisphere is ultimately dependent on the right, though it seems to have no awareness of this fact. As we will find in Part II, the brain does not merely mediate our experience of the world but shapes it as well.

Where we are going?

This article is divided into two parts. In Part I, we will contrast the differences between the left and the right side of the brain. Secondly, we will discuss how the left brain at its worst leads to schizoid or schizophrenic behavior. Lastly, in Part I we will explore the commonalities between schizophrenia and modern art, including painting, music and writing literature. Without arguing that modern art causes schizophrenia there is no question that cases of schizophrenia have multiplied during the industrialization process of the 19th and the first third of thc 20th century.

In Part II of this article, the author of the book The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist ambitiously claims that the difference between the hemispheres is not just inside the brains of individuals. They are expressed in the history of the West of the brain’s response to changes in the movements of thinking from ancient Greeks through the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the scientific revolution, capitalism, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.

Differences Between Hemispheres

Faust is seen by many as the best representative of modern self-consciousness who declared there were two souls in his breast. The right side of the brain deals with the big picture and emerges first in human development. Its attention is diffused and it searches for unique patterns in the real world. Whatever information it finds, it places it in a context. For the brain’s right side, wholes are more than the sum of their parts. Once the new information is in, its function is to stabilize the system (negative feedback). The right hemisphere watches out not only for itself but for the left side as well. It multitasks. In the brain, the right-side does parallel processing of systems at the same time. It generates alternatives to problems.

The left hemisphere is its junior partner and is more unpredictable. The left hemisphere is more specialized, focused and sees the parts very well in isolation. The left hemisphere does not seek out new information but focuses on bringing order and logic within the system. It does not seek out the new but organizes information within into types and classifies it. If the right hemisphere, processing wholistically, misses the trees for the forest, the left hemisphere is preoccupied with the trees, missing the forest. At its worst, the right side of the brain has attention deficient disorder. A corresponding downside of the left side of the brain would be obsessive compulsive disorder.

While the focus of the right hemisphere is to bring information from the real world into the system, the left hemisphere abstracts from what the right hemisphere brings in and then generalizes from it. The left hemisphere prefers to do one thing at a time, serially. It prefers linear processes with a beginning, middle and end. The right side of the brain understands that processes recur, they are cyclic, reciprocal and sometimes turn into spirals. The left side likes to break things into parts, analyzing them while the right side likes to pull processes together synthetizing them. The left side takes what the right brain pulls together and gives fixity to what was once an ambiguous process. It seizes one alternative and turns it every which way. Believe it or not, a great deal of psychological research shows that most of the normal psychological processes go on in our unconscious; namely, the automatic systems and sympathetic parts of our systems such as heart rate and blood pressure in reaction to emotions. This is part of the right side of the brain. The conscious part of our system. Where we solve problems is the domain of the left side of the brain.

The left side breaks processes into bits. The right side of the brain does not see bits, but rather networks. In the evolution of the triune brain stem, the right side of the brain is more directly connected to the limbic and mammalian system. The left side of the brain is connected to the late developing neocortex. The right brain is most interested in the dynamics of the world, where things are leading. The left side hungers to turn these events into a history, what has become of events. It follows the left brain and tries to capture the events of the world and freeze them into a static system. The right side is more at home with how things change over time. To use a metaphor the left side is like the noun side of language; the right side in interested in motion. Lastly the right side imagines that all of nature is alive and all relationships are “I-thou” to use Buber’s terminology. The left side prefers to make things out of nature, acting as in “I-it” relationships.

The left side of the brain is most at home with either/or answers, while the right side can tolerate ambiguity. The left side likes single meaning while the right side can handle meanings which only partly overlap. The left side of the brain is more likely to be dogmatic and the right side more open-minded. The left side prefers the denotation of language with precision of reference and meaning. The right side is more sensitive to the connotation, emotional side of language.

Rationality vs reason

A number of years ago two rhetoricians, Stephen Toulmin and Chaim Perelman made a very important distinction between two words we tend to use interchangeably: reason and rationality. These distinctions arose in order to address the question of the difference between formal logic and informal logic. We use our reason when we try to make probabilistic guesses about what is likely to be true when no one knows for sure (informal logic). Formal logic, what they call rationality, occurs in situations which are closed systems where one sure answer is possible. An example of a closed system problem is a word puzzle. You don’t search for information outside the problem to solve it. All the information you need is within the problem. The left side of the brain follows rules and manipulates symbols. The right side of the brain is more creative and finds new rules and new symbol systems. The right side of the brain is reasonable, the left side is rational. Rationality is about the relation of means to ends. The right side sees further into the distance by looking at ends in themselves. In terms of processing events, the right side is at its best starting things up and closing things out. The left side at its best is processing things in the middle, once they are under control. This has many other ramifications.

Reason understands the world more broadly. It appreciates poetry and metaphor. Rationality takes things literally and prosaically. Reason also has a sense of humor, including irony and sarcasm. The rationality side is dead serious, it doesn’t get jokes and as you might imagine, is socially awkward. A rational person acts something like a nerd. It focuses focus on digital communication while reason is sensitive to body language, vocal tone, gestures and postures (analogical messages). The rational brain likes the virtual world; the right side prefers the real world.

What Can Go Wrong With the Left Side of the Brain?

McGilchrist does not have much to say about what can go wrong with the right side of the brain, but he has plenty to say about what can go wrong with the left side. Remember that we said the one psychological fruit of the left-side of the brain that can be out of control is in obsessive-compulsive behavior. While repetition brings comfort, past a certain point it can result in mindless pounding or the mechanical and repetitive assembling and disassembling of machines. The left side prefers the codes for non-living things like tools or machines. On one hand it can lead to the perfecting of inventions. Yet this can lead to unrealistic perfectionism. Without the right side of the brain’s input, the left side of the brain can create non-realistic, distorted fantastic images which can result in the world being seen as uncanny as we shall see.

The left sphere has a precarious relationship with emotional life. It is capable of superficial social emotions but not good at imaging in depth the emotions of others.

The left side is good at making judgments when all the information is in but not when judgment is required in situations that are ill-defined. Because it prefers the world of the inanimate things, it often, as in the case of Descartes, treats its body as a thing among other objects. At worst it might not recognize its own body parts as in asomatognosia – a feeling that parts of a person’s body is “missing” or have disappeared from corporeal awareness.

In any dynamic system, there is positive feedback which amplifies the system to help it deal with environmental stress. On the other hand, negative feedback cools the system out to regulate the system over time. When the left side of the brain goes haywire the amplification process takes on a life of its own and shows itself in doing and undoing rituals or in pathological gambling.

The left side of the brain is individualistic and has to be coaxed into understanding other people. It takes a gods-eye-view of things, a view from nowhere so that it barely takes into account people other than its own self-interest, let alone anyone else’s. Table A at the end of Part I is a summary of the differences between the hemispheres.

Weaknesses in Left Hemisphere

To recap, in cases where the right hemisphere is damaged, we will find similar problems that we might identify in schizophrenia. These include:

• Subjects don’t understand context;
• Subjects don’t understand elements of discourse like subjects, predicates and objects;
• Subjects have difficulty interpreting emotions;
• Subjects have difficulty separating wholes (Gestalt perceptions) from parts;
• There is a decrease in the functioning of the limbic systems;
• There is difficulty interpreting tone;
• There is difficulty with interpreting facial expressions;
• There is trouble understanding underlying points of view; and,
• A lack of common sense.

 The Left Hemisphere Schizoid and Schizophrenia States and Behavior

The old ideas of schizophrenia include:

• They are a regression from a more mature state;
• The relationships between thoughts and reality or between thoughts and thoughts is irrational;
• In schizophrenia there is less sense of self-awareness than there is in non-schizophrenic people; and,
• That schizophrenia is a retreat to primitive emotions and infantile body states.

John Cutting in his book The Right Cerebral Hemisphere and Psychiatric Disorders has found that schizophrenia is a state in which the sufferer relies excessively on the left hemisphere. This explains the divorce from the body; detachment from human feeling; the separation of thought from action; excessive concern with clarity and fixity; and the triumph of representation over what is present. This is also the conclusion that Louis A. Sass comes to in his mammoth book Madness and Modernism.

Rather than a regression to an earlier developmental state, schizophrenia can happen to a mature adult. Secondly, schizophrenia is far from being irrational. In fact, it is hyper-rational. It is a product of the left side of the brain gone haywire! Instead of lacking in self-awareness the schizophrenic is hyper-reflective and cannot get out of their head back into the world. Rather than being lost in their emotional life, the schizophrenic is disengaged from their emotions and the emotions of others. This results in depersonalization, in which the person loses a sense of their identity in the world. They see themselves as an automaton. Schizophrenics routinely see themselves as machines, robots, computers or cameras. At the other end, they see the world in a derealized way which is when the real world loses its aliveness and becomes a thing, an object unconnected to the rest of the world.

Modernism and schizophrenia: the core phenomenology

In Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber and the Schizophrenic Mind Louis Sass explores the idea that madness is the end point of a trajectory that consciousness follows when it separates from the body and the passions from the social and practical world and turns upon itself. Chris Frith’s identification of the core abnormality of schizophrenia is an awareness of automatic processes. There is a veering between two apparently opposite positions that are really aspects of the same positions. They are omnipotence and impotence. Either there is no self or an all-observing eye that swallows the whole world into the self.

Schizophrenia and Schizoid  Disorders are Connected to Industrialization

Anthropological psychiatrists claim that schizophrenia goes all the way back to hunting and gathering societies. Yet McGilchrist points out that schizophrenia has grown with industrialization. He claims that in England it was rare if it existed at all before the 18th century. The same was true in Ireland, Yankeedom or Italy. Schizophrenia steeply increased in the first half of the 20th century. Mental health is generally better in rural populations. The risk of developing schizophrenia is doubled in urban environments. Multiple personality disorders are also modern. On the positive side people with schizoid or schizotypal traits will be attracted to and deemed suitable for employment in science, technology and administration, all of which have been influential in shaping our world during the last 100 years.

Dissociation is Connected to Both the Left Hemisphere and Schizophrenia

This includes:

• Inability to tell what another is thinking;
• Lack of judgment of non-verbal cues in communication;
• Lack of judgement of tone, humor, irony;
• Inability to detect deceit;
• Attraction to the mechanical;
• Treatment of other people and body parts as inanimate objects;
• Obsession with detail;
• Amnesia about autobiographical information;
• Identity disturbances such as depersonalization;
• Derealization – a lack of a sense of reality of the phenomenal world; and,
• Loss of feeling of belonging to the world (feeling we are spectators rather than participants).

The Relationship Between Schizophrenia and Modern Art

Self-referentiality, depersonalization and realization and representation

McGilchrist says in both schizophrenia and in the modern artist the interpreter begins to interpret himself. Each’s focus on paranoia do not allow for accidents or unintended actions. Depersonalization and derealization in each leads to devitalization. Devitalization leads to boredom, and boredom to sensationalism. Emptiness and restlessness lead to gross stimulation. Speech becomes either gross or hyperbolic.  Music appears loud and nervous .The left hemisphere with its orientation towards what is lifeless and mechanical appears desperate to shock us back to life. There is concern with materiality and simultaneous impulse in both modern art and schizophrenia. Representation is when real objects are replaced by concepts and concepts turn into things. Objects become more abstract and more thing-like. There is also a preference for inanimate things. In his book The Philosopher’s Gaze: Modernity in the Shadows of the Enlightenment, DM Levin writes that representation, rather than the presence of the real world, the left hemisphere’s role is the characteristic state of modernity.

The heart of the modern art is a dogmatic trampling of all taboos. The artist makes a fetish, a fascination with the amoral restlessness of modern urban life. Shock and novelty become defenses against the boredom and seeming inauthenticity of modern life. There is a fear that without novelty there is only banality. Objects are juxtaposed without being brought into relation. Increasingly, perspective is deliberately disrupted as with the Cubists. Modernism does not build on the past while taking it in a new direction, but it wants to sweep away the past altogether and start from scratch.

The left hemisphere prefers cylinders, cubes or spheres. McGilchrist points out that Modernist art appears to mimic the world as it would appear to someone whose right brain was inactivated. He writes:

The demonization of the body reaches its most disturbing apotheosis in the bizarrely distorted and dismembered marionettes of Hans Bellmer. Pointillism reduces Gestalt figures to a mass of discrete points. Collage represents the concept of a whole as composed of independent pieces. Futurism declares the left hemisphere’s preference for the future over the past. What the artist has written about his work is as important as the thing itself as if the artwork could not stand for itself. Similarly, some painters have made the eye more intellectual and have gone far beyond what was previously called a joy in form or color. More and more the symbolic replaces that which exists in reality. (415-416)

 Modern artists

In fact, a remarkable number of the leading figures of modernism displayed schizoid or schizotypal features: These included Nietzsche, Jarry, Strindberg, Dali, Wittgenstein, Kafka, and Stravinsky. Antonin Artaud had schizophrenia. He told Anais Nin that he wanted a theatre that would be like a shock treatment to galvanize people into feeling. In modern art attention is focused on the medium, not on the world beyond that medium. The content is denied. The self-reflective statements of modern literature and criticism concentrate attention on language and either deny or minimize the world beyond language. Tristen Tzara, one of the founders of Dada, summed up modernism early when he proclaimed that art is a private affair. The artist produces it for himself and any judgment about it had become completely subjective on the part of the critic. No critic has any objective powers.

 Modern music

Since the 20th century, music has aspired to and attained a high level of abstraction. As Schoenberg put it, how the music sounds is not the point. Gilchrist claims the melodic line has been largely abandoned and its harmonic structures are hard to appreciate intuitively even if they might be appreciated conceptually. Nietzsche writes that our ears have become more intellectual. The meaning in music is confusing because of the way it sounds. McGilchrist writes that the idea is to disturb the listener’s feeling of gravitational attraction by combining so many different forms of attraction that this sense of location cannot adjust fast enough. The lack of tonal centers destroys the listeners anchor point. He says we do not have sufficient short-term memory to cope with the degrees of apparent formlessness. On the other hand, harmony in music is an analogues to perspective in painting. Both harmony and perspective is right hemisphere dependent.

Coming Attractions

The differences between the left and the right side of the brain are not simply bio- psychological phenomenon taking place inside the bodies and minds of individuals, schizophrenics, or modern artists.  They are also manifested physically, materially in the world through the social institutions and movements in the West from the ancient world of the Greeks and the Romans through the Middle Ages and on to Modern life, beginning in the 14th century. The Renaissance is often contrasted to the Reformation, the Enlightenment to Romantism and Capitalism to Socialism. Can the differences in these European movements be expressions of the left and right brains? Can the common social problems which arose  between the Reformation, the Enlightenment and capitalism be attributed to the left brain which has gotten out of control? Through McGilchrist, I will examine this in Part II. 

Table A Contrasting the Left to the Right Side of the Brain

• First published in Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

All of Newshub operations — part of New Zealand’s second largest television news network channel Three — are to be shut down and 250 people will lose their jobs. The shutdown includes the company’s website, Warner Bros Discovery announced today.

The last 6pm news bulletin will air on July 5.

Warner Bros Discovery said talks were ongoing with third parties to provide a pared-back news service — such as a 6pm bulletin for the Three channel. However, no deals have been reached yet.

• READ MORE: TVNZ to cut Fair Go, midday and late night news bulletins
• TVNZ job cuts: Public asked to join ‘save our stories’ protest campaign
• RNZ News live blog on the cutbacks
• Other NZ news cutbacks reports

Head of networks Glen Kyne said Warner Bros Discovery had been clear it would listen to all feedback both internal and external over the five-week consultation period.

“Our door has been open and some conversations have taken place. They’re continuing to take place in confidence but there is no deal,” he said.

He promised to let staff know immediately if any new deals could be finalised.

He thanked staff for their feedback.

Definite shutdown
The announcement of the definite shutdown came at an all-staff meeting at a hall close to Newshub’s office in Auckland’s Eden Terrace this morning.

Newshub staff were told by Warner Bros Discovery managers in February it planned to axe the entire news operation.

The newsroom was losing too much money, staff were told.

Here is all the full information – devastated for my pals, colleagues and everyone who gives 110% there, NZ is a worse off place today with this news. https://t.co/q8HurxwV5g

— Darren Bevan (@geekboy73) April 9, 2024

Since then, it is understood there have been talks between Warner Bros Discovery and a number of media firms, including Stuff, about ways that part of the business could be preserved. It has been suggested that could include the production of a “slimmed-down” news bulletin by a third party.

Meanwhile, TVNZ staff will today hear the fate of its Sunday current affairs show, after the company confirmed on Tuesday it was axing the on-air version of Fair Go, and the Midday and Tonight news programmes.

Independent Spinoff founder Duncan Greive said the changes would be irreversible, and a “tragic” outcome for those affected.

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

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

The zone, which sits along the Mekong River in northwestern Bokeo province, is a gambling and tourism hub catering to Chinese tourists and has been described as a de-facto Chinese colony. 

It has become a haven for cyber scams, prostitution, money laundering, drug trafficking, and human and wildlife trafficking by organized criminal networks.

The Indians had been told by recruiters in Mumbai that they would get jobs related to cryptocurrency in Thailand’s Chiang Rai province, said the official, who like others in this report, did not want to be identified so he could speak freely. 

But when they arrived, the Chinese bosses loaded them on a boat that crossed the Mekong River to Bokeo province, where the Indians said they were forced to work as online scammers or fake call center workers in the zone.

Their plight came to light after one of the Indians managed to escape and return to India, where he filed a complaint with Mumbai police on March 24, The Laotian Times reported.

One Lao official said that they had received a tip-off email from someone who knew about their predicament, and “took action right away to help these youngsters.”

Hurt and abused

An official involved in anti-human trafficking efforts said the Chinese running the operations physically abused some of the Indians, denied them food, and locked them up if they didn’t generate revenue. 

“The Chinese bosses physically hurt the Indian nationals with hammers and sticks,” he told RFA. “They simply had to work for free or without getting paid.”

Anti-human trafficking agents in India arrested two people believed to be in charge of agents who recruited up to 40 young Indian nationals so they could be sent to Laos to work as online scammers, said the official.

Other Indians in the zone who find themselves in the same predicament contact Lao government officers daily for help, said a second official involved in anti-human trafficking activities.

Since the beginning of the year, about 30 Indians have contacted a Lao anti-human trafficking office, which can help them find a safe temporary place to stay and send them home once authorities receive a tip about them, he said.

Some information comes from India's Ministry of External Affairs asking for help to get Indian nationals out of the zone, the second official said.

It is unknown how many Indians are still working in the zone, he added.

South Korean and Malaysian nationals have also fallen victim to traffickers who hand them over to Chinese in the zone to engage in cyber fraud, said the official with knowledge of the situation.

The Embassy of India in Vientiane issued a recent notice on its website that it was aware that Indian nations were being lured for employment in Thailand or Laos as “digital sales and marketing executives” and “customer support services” by dubious companies involved in call-center scams and cryptocurrency fraud in the Golden Triangle SEZ.

Translated by Phouvong for RFA Lao. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcom Foster.

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

Prime Minister James Marape has announced comprehensive relief operations in Papua New Guinea’s devastating weather that has killed at least 21 people and impacted on 16 provinces.

The 21 who died were buried under tonnes of mud in three separate mudslides in Chimbu province.

Sixteen provinces in three regions were being monitored by the PNG National Weather Service for flooding following erratic changes in weather patterns, reports Claudia Tally.

• READ MORE: Heavy rain damages roads, bridges across PNG

From king tides, solar flares and rising temperatures since December 2023, the weather in the country has taken a swift turn to heavy downpours and reported flash flooding in Central, Northern, Western Highlands, Eastern Highlands, Madang and Morobe provinces over the last seven days.

The changes in the weather pattern, especially the flooding, has left many provincial highways eroded, bridges broken and people stranded.

The government’s relief operations, spearheaded by the Department of Works and Highways, National Disaster Office, and the PNG Defence Force, aims to mitigate the challenges faced by communities across the nation.

“King tides, landslips, and other unfortunate natural incidents as a result of the continuous rain and wet weather conditions around the country at present and in recent weeks is of concern to government,” Marape said.

Works directives
“We have already taken steps to provide relief and address the specific situations through the responsible government agencies.”

He said directives had been issued to the Works and Highways Department, National Disaster Office, and Defence Force to dispatch specialist teams.

“These teams are tasked with assessing and addressing road slippages and blockages, ensuring expedient restoration of access and support to the affected locales,” he said.

“Certain places around the country like Gumine in Chimbu Province have been cut off and require urgent attention to restore and relieve.

“Other places in low-lying areas of the country like Gulf Province are also being affected by the continuous rain.

“We’ve mobilised the necessary government resources to clear and relieve those areas affected by the heavy rains over the past month or more.”

He lauded the Department of Works and Highways for their prompt action in Porgera, Enga Province, following a landslip that severed connections to surrounding areas.

“The department’s efforts have successfully reopened the critical access road, demonstrating the government’s commitment to swift and effective crisis management,” he said.

Republished from the PNG Post-Courier with permission.

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

BISHKEK -- A day after searching the offices of the news website 24.kg, law enforcement officers in the Kyrgyz capital detained for questioning eight current and former members of the Temirov Live investigative group and the Ait Ait Dese project, as the government continues to pressure independent media.

Temirov Live's founder, prominent investigative journalist Bolot Temirov, said the journalists who were detained for questioning after their homes and offices were searched on January 16 included his wife and the director of the Temirov Live group, Makhabat Tajybek-kyzy.

Temirov said on X, formerly Twitter, that the searches and detentions may be connected to two recent investigative reports by Temirov Live -- one about a private New Year's Eve flight by President Sadyr Japarov to Milan, Italy, on a government plane, the second about corruption among top officials of the Interior Ministry, including minister Ulan Niyazbekov.

The Interior Ministry issued a statement, saying that the searches and detentions for questioning were linked to a probe launched into unspecified Temirov Live publications that "carried elements of calls for mass unrest."

Temirov said that Temirov Live reporters Sapar Akunbekov, Azamat Ishenbekov, and Aike Beishekeeva, as well as former journalists of the group Aktilek Kaparov, Tynystan Asypbek, Saipidin Sultanaliev, and Joodar Buzumov, also had their homes searched.

Temirov, who was deported to Moscow in November 2022 after a court ruled that he illegally obtained Kyrgyz citizenship, which he denies, added that two other employees of the Temirov Live group, whom he identified as Maksat and Jumabek, were detained.

Kyrgyzstan's civil society and independent media have traditionally been the most vibrant in Central Asia, but that has changed amid a deepening government crackdown.

Just a day earlier, officers of the State Committee for National Security (UKMK) detained for questioning the director-general of the 24.kg news website, Asel Otorbaeva, and two editors, Makhinur Niyazova and Anton Lymar, in a case of "propagating war" in an unspecified report about Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The three were later released but ordered not to reveal details of the case.

Lawmaker Janar Akaev called the moves against the journalists "an attack on freedom of speech."

"Such types of situations lead to self-censorship, and obstruct investigative reports on political and corruption issues," Akaev said, adding that the latest developments around independent journalists will be raised at parliament's next session.

Another lawmaker, Nurjigit Kadyrbekov, told RFE/RL that the ongoing pressure on independent journalists "could damage the president's image."

UN Human Rights Office spokeswoman Liz Throssell expressed concern over the developments around Kyrgyz journalists in the past two days.

"These latest actions by the authorities appear to be part of a larger pattern of pressure against civil society activists, journalists and other critics of the authorities," Throssel said in a statement on January 16, adding, "It is all the more concerning that the Kyrgyz Parliament is considering a draft law on mass media which would restrict the right to freedom of expression which includes media freedom."

"We call on the authorities to protect freedom of expression and ensure that media legislation in the country is in line with international human rights standards," Throssel said.

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

Radio Free Asia compiled the data from statements made by ethnic Wa and Kokang authorities in northern Shan state, the ruling military junta and China’s Ministry of Public Security.

Shan state, known as a hub for crystal methamphetamine trafficking, is rife with other illegal activities in enclaves along the Chinese border, as criminals take advantage of ongoing civil unrest and armed conflict under the junta which seized power in a 2021 coup. Falling within neighboring China’s orbit, northern Shan state has become a focal point for Chinese scammers who target their own citizens.

From Oct. 31 to Dec. 15, nearly 12,050 Chinese citizens linked to online scam groups in the region were arrested and deported, according to a mid-December announcement by the State Administration Council, the formal name of the military junta governing Myanmar. 

Most of the Chinese nationals sent back were operating in the Kokang region, whose mostly ethnic Chinese population has backed resistance to the junta. 

Arrests of other Chinese nationals involved in the criminal activity have occurred in territory controlled by the United Wa State Army, or USWA, said to be the largest ethnic armed organization in Myanmar. USWA soldiers arrested more than 1,000 Chinese nationals involved in the gangs on Sept. 6-7 and immediately transferred them across the border to Chinese police.

China’s Ministry of Public Security announced on Nov. 21 that it had apprehended more than 31,000 Chinese nationals linked to online fraud gangs in northern Myanmar. Those arrested included ringleaders, recruiters and over 1,500 Chinese fugitives. 

Altogether, the figures add up to over 40,000 Chinese nationals arrested and deported in connection with online scam operaions from early September to mid-December. 

'Self-serving local authorities'

Than Soe Naing, a political observer who lived on the China-Myanmar border, said the tens of thousands of Chinese nationals were able to commit crimes in Myanmar because of the involvement of local authorities.

“It is quite obvious that the self-serving local authorities at various levels of the junta are involved in this business,” he told RFA. “That’s why it [online scamming] has greatly expanded. It has become uncontrollable.”

Aung Myo, another political observer and former military officer, told RFA that Burmese officials in the border region have chosen not to crack down on the crime.

“It is especially related to the socioeconomic [situation] of the countries,” he said. “Because of this, the governments will not eradicate it. It’s natural that such business will develop, but it will diminish only when [the governments] crush it.”

The junta maintains several army battalions in northern Shan states as well as administrative and immigration offices. 

RFA could not reach Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun, the junta’s spokesman, for comment on why so many Chinese nationals have been able to enter the Kokang area and operate online scams given the heavy presence of military battalions.

But on Dec. 5, Zaw Min Tun said via state-controlled media that the junta did not accept acts that harm the interests and security of neighboring countries by using Myanmar territory, and that China and Myanmar were working closely together to ensure stability and the rule of law along the border.

RFA’s calls to Kokang regional officials for comment went unanswered.

'Everyone is responsible'

Both China and Myanmar are responsible for allowing Chinese nationals to illegally enter Myanmar and quickly forming online scam rings, said Hla Kyaw Zaw, a China-based political observer.

“Everyone is responsible,” she said. “It is likely that China and its policies are unable to control its borders very well. There are illegal crossings in some points.”

“There’s no need to say anything about Myanmar [because] there is no rule of law,” she added. “If you have money, [you’re allowed to do anything]. That’s why [Chinese are] entering.”

The Chinese Embassy in Yangon did not respond to an email request for comment.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said at the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Forum on Dec. 8 that China would collaborate with Mekong River countries to crack down on online scams since Myanmar’s instability affected areas across its borders.

Despite the ongoing arrests of online scammers in northern Shan state, residents have often informed RFA that online scam operations led by Chinese nationals are still growing uncontrollably in Shwe Kokko, a town in southeastern Myanmar's Kayin state that is controlled by an ethnic armed group, and in Shan state’s Tachileik on the Thailand-Myanmar border. 

Translated by Htin Aung Kyaw for RFA Burmese. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Matt Reed.

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

• U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration says Israel will allow a four-hour humanitarian pause each day in its combat operations in northern Gaza to allow civilians to flee to the south.
• Global day of action held calling for ceasefire in Gaza, with protests in New York, San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, and more.
• Democratic Representative Cori Bush of Missouri joined a group of veterans in front of the nation’s capital today, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
• Former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein announces her entry into the 2024 presidential race.
• Democratic senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has announced that he won’t seek reelection.
• Climate activists from the Bay Climate Action coalition gathered at Yerba Buena Gardens to hold a rally outside of Indo-Pacific Economic Framework negotiations ahead of next week’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.
• California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond held a Homeless Education Summit with lawmakers and educators to discuss the educational impacts caused by student homelessness amid the ongoing housing crisis in the state.

A man sits on the rubble as others wander among debris of buildings that were targeted by Israeli airstrikes in Jabaliya refugee camp, northern Gaza Strip, Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2023. A new U.N. report paints a stark picture of the devastating collapsing Palestinian economy after a month of war and Israel’s near total siege of Gaza. (AP Photo/Abed Khaled, File)

The post U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration says Israel will allow a four-hour humanitarian pause each day in its combat operations in northern Gaza to allow civilians to flee to the south – Thursday, November 9, 2023 appeared first on KPFA.

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

“We have been told for months this is impossible,” Fain said during the October 6 livestream. “We have been told the EV future must be a race to the bottom. We called their bluff.”

If Fain has made anything clear, it is that he, and the 383,000 people he leads, are not bluffing. In the two weeks since GM’s concession, the union has redoubled its efforts to win similar agreements from Ford and Stellantis. Last week, every one of the 8,700 workers at Ford’s massive Kentucky Truck Plant in Louisville joined the picket line, halting production of the company’s line of Super Duty pickup trucks. 

GM’s promise to unionize its EV and battery operations comes after automakers sold 300,000 EVs in the previous quarter, and everyone involved in the labor dispute feels the electric transition is all but inevitable. The strike has increased pressure on the Big Three to include their electrification ventures in the master contracts they hold with United Auto Workers, or UAW. It also could press other automakers to increase pay or agree to unionize if they hope to compete for workers.

Fain has made negotiating stronger contracts, including cost-of-living adjustments and four-day workweeks, a priority since his election in March. He also has castigated the Big Three’s battery factories for their low wages. When contract negotiations stalled, UAW members went on strike on September 14. There are now 34,000 autoworkers on strike nationwide, a number that is likely to grow as negotiations drag on.

Dianne Feeley is a retired autoworker who, like other UAW retirees, remains an active and voting union member. She says the rank and file spent 40 years working toward this moment, a fight that started as years of stagnation and corruption kept the UAW from moving forward. That led to a band of members launching United All Workers for Democracy, which expanded members’ rights to participate in bargaining and helped propel Fain to into leadership. It’s also helped conversations about the EV transition and its impact on workers come to the fore.

“This [UAW] administration has said, ‘Yes, let’s do electric vehicles, but there has to be a just transition.’ Whereas the old leadership, they didn’t even want to hear about electric vehicles,” Feeley said.  

Beyond ensuring that the workers assembling electric vehicles are paid the same as those assembling conventional cars, the risks inherent in battery production are a major concern to union members. Safety issues at GM’s Ultium Cells battery plant in Lordstown, Ohio, led to the factory’s unionization earlier this year. An explosion and fire there in March prompted an investigation by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Its inquiry, released last week, found 17 violations, including inadequate respiratory protection equipment, emergency showers, and eye-washing stations. OSHA could levy $270,000 in fines. 

“We’ve been sounding the alarm for months about Ultium and these high-risk, high-skill EV battery operations,” Fain said in a statement to Grist. “This is dangerous work that deserves to be compensated well.” 

Pay at Ultium has risen by $3 to $4 an hour since the union vote in December, even though workers do not yet have a formal contract. The master agreements the UAW holds with General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis await ratification, so none of the union’s recent victories are certain.

“It’s a little too soon to pop the bubbly and have champagne and celebrate, but it’s all good news,” said Arthur Wheaton, director of the Labor Studies department at Cornell University.

The fact GM is ahead of its domestic competitors when it comes to EV battery production played a role in its recent concession, Wheaton said. GM had already planned to phase out gas-powered vehicles by 2035. The UAW’s success at the Ultium plant, and more broadly within GM, could have an impact even beyond union shops, given the ongoing labor shortage and a need to stay competitive when attracting workers, especially when there is some evidence that EV plants will not, as some believe, require fewer workers. Auto industry analysts say any wage increases resulting from the strike will likely pressure large, stridently anti-union manufacturers like Tesla, which pays significantly less than the Detroit automakers, to raise wages in the hope that it forestalls the risk of unionizing. 

“If you get a big pay raise for GM and Ford, then many — not all — of the automakers will raise their wages to make sure they don’t get unionized,” Wheaton said.  “And you’ll see that in the battery sector as well.”

GM’s concession was far from assured. The Big Three co-own their battery plants with foreign companies, like Ultium, which GM co-owns with the Korean company LG Energy Solutions. These joint-venture plants are not automatically covered by existing UAW labor agreements, because they are what’s called a “permissive” part of those contracts that do not require either side to negotiate the terms of their operation. 

Beyond that, EVs have not had the same focus as other parts of the contract negotiations, despite the central role the cars, and the batteries powering them, will play in the future of both automakers and the men and women they employ. GM, Stellantis, and Ford had consistently claimed that conceding to UAW’s demands would make them less competitive against foreign automakers in the burgeoning EV market.

“That’s why [UAW was] happy to get GM, because they use what they call ‘pattern bargaining,’” Wheaton said, referring to a labor strategy, pioneered in part by autoworkers, that uses prior organizing wins to pressure other employers into take-it-or-leave-it offers. It may also bring the union fight back to an old battleground as EV battery plants open in an expanding “Battery Belt” spanning the right-to-work South, where several foreign automakers, including Nissan, Toyota, and Volkswagen, operate factories.

The UAW has struggled to organize Southern factories like the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which builds the electric ID.4. In a staggering loss considered a massive failure for the union’s organization efforts in the South, Volkswagen workers rejected union membership in 2019. Fain told Grist that the union has since the beginning of the strike been fielding calls from non-union autoworkers, “from the West to the Midwest and especially in the South,” indicating organizing priorities beyond the current contract fight.  

“We’re looking at organizing half a dozen auto companies in the coming years,” he said. “Pretty soon we won’t just be talking about the Big Three — more like Big Five, Big Seven, Big Ten unionized automakers.”

It’s an opportune time for UAW, since Inflation Reduction Act funds are only just now flowing to EV manufacturing. The money comes with stipulations that have been favorable to the union’s cause, in particular incentives for manufacturing everything from solar panels to EV batteries domestically with union labor. Because the allocations are just beginning to flow, many factories aren’t yet online, so hiring won’t start for a while. That gives unions like the UAW time to organize, with help from environmental groups. The Blue-Green Alliance, for example, has worked to bring labor and climate interests together.

“The Big Three have argued that there has to be a choice between paying autoworkers at family-sustaining union wages and benefits, and making the shift to EV production at a pace and scale that will meet both consumer demand and the climate crisis,” said Jason Walsh, the organization’s executive director. “We think that that’s a false choice. They can do both. And the agreement with GM suggests that they now recognize they have to do both.”

Feeley had similar thoughts when she decided to support the strike. She believes the EV transition must be equitable and just — not just now, but decades from now, because “one generation comes to the plant after another.” When autoworkers demand fair treatment and better pay, they do so not just for themselves, but for the children and grandchildren who will build the cars of the future.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline GM agreed to unionize its EV operations. Will others do the same? on Oct 20, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Katie Myers.

The V-22 platform was the first tiltrotor deployed by the military, a strange creature combining the characteristics of fixed-wing planes, helicopters and vertical take-off and landing craft. It was originally inspired by a Pentagon request to Bell and Boeing after the failure of the hostage rescue effort dubbed Operation Eagle Claw.  The April 1980 attempt by the Carter administration, intended to rescue US citizens being held by Iranian authorities, resulted in the deaths of five air force personnel and three marines.

The platform is slated for flying till 2055 yet sports a very blood-spattered resume.  Prior to 2007, it had had four crashes, resulting in 30 deaths.  Two of the first five prototypes suffered a number of fatal crashes in the early 1990s resulting in 30 deaths, though it formally came into the service of the Marines in 2007.  After 2007, a further 24 deaths were caused in a further 10 crashes.

The Marine Corps has persisted indulging its use, seeing it as central in fighting the new lighter version of conflict the US imperium envisages, one characterised by manoeuvrability and speed as marked out by the “Force Design 2030” strategy.  “Proponents of Force Design 2030 argue,” writes ground forces specialist Andrew Feickert, “that current Marine Corps design is outdated and that new forces and operational concepts are required to prevail against China.”

One such appealing operational concept is EABO, otherwise known as Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations.  It is a concept that has been embraced by the de-facto colonial Marine force located at the top end in Australia, cutely called by publicists worried about that fact the Marine Rotational Force – Darwin.  Occupying forces, the belief goes, do not rotate.  The unit, comprising 2,500 soldiers, has been based in the Northern Territory from April to October every year since 2012.

On the morning of August 27, a V-22B Osprey with 23 US marines crashed on Melville Island just north of Darwin.  Three marines were killed.  Several others were left injured with varying degrees of severity.  The episode brought back memories of another Osprey crash on Australian soil, which saw a failed effort on the part of the Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 265 to land on the flight deck of USS Green Bay on August 5, 2017.  On that occasion, there were also three fatalities, along with 23 injuries.

Those with claimed military or aviation expertise flock to the defence of this beast of moron and myth, admiring its “revolutionary design”, “a kind of plane-helicopter hybrid,” writes Peter Layton, involving wings tilting upwards “for take-off and landing and back down again for level flight.”  It is appealing to its users, most notably the Marine Corps, for having greater range than helicopters, with higher speed and formidable carrying capacity.

Layton goes on to sing the praises of this lethal hybrid. “The Osprey is at the leading edge of aviation technology, with nothing else in operational service like it.”  There are marvellous, evident reasons for that, but he prefers to note its essential role in the US strategy of prosecuting EABO operations against China from Australian bases rather than its hazards.

The literature about the V-22 Osprey notes the thorny history of this supposed “dream machine” and the problems of the Major Defense Acquisition Program that brought it into existence.  To follow its development and deployment was an act akin to faith and its accompanying delusions.  Richard Whittle, writing on the problem-plagued machine, found that, no matter what he penned, he “could usually count on being chastised by someone, for the Osprey was as close as a defense issue gets to being a religious question.  There were believers and nonbelievers, and neither had much use for those who gave credence to the other side.”

Certainly, believers can come up with the sort of waffle asserting that each “Osprey flight is a learning event for the pilots, the maintenance personnel and the aircraft’s manufacturer.”  This begs the question as to whether such equipment should ever see the light of day, especially given how often it snuffs out the lives of its users.

Other reasons for such an unfathomably dangerous record are also offered to distract from this deeply flawed craft.  The National Commission on Military Aviation Safety, for instance, noted the baleful safety record of the US military in toto in a 2020 study conducted at the behest of Congress.  The audit found that between 2013 and 2018, US forces suffered a remarkable 6,000 aviation safety “mishaps” during training and routine operations, resulting in 198 deaths and 157 lost aircraft.  The bill for this dubious achievement had been $9.41 billion.  The Osprey, it would seem, found itself in good, perishable company.

As with other religious questions, usually touching on doctrine and belief in some invisible, all-powerful tormentor, those saddled with it have paid the highest price.  As US military policy continues its inexorable march to the next war, this time shamelessly using Australian strategic real estate for the purpose, it will also happily place its own personnel in machines as deadly to them as to any intended adversary.

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

The workers – most of them Filipinos, with many others from China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia and other countries – were found when police commandos, armed with warrants, simultaneously raided seven buildings in Las Piñas, Metro Manila, on Tuesday.

The targets of the raid, the owners of a gaming hub, were identified as Quiha Lu, Liangfei Chen, Jimmy Lin, and Abbey Ng. Police said these suspects – all believed to be Chinese – were found to have violated the country’s anti-trafficking in persons law.

Capt. Michelle Sabino, a spokeswoman for the Philippine National Police’s Anti-Cybercrime Group, said the workers were promised work at an online casino.

“The job posting lured them into this work. They’re the ones assisting in online gaming,” Sabino told reporters on Wednesday.

Of the workers rescued, 1,528 were Filipinos trafficked from other parts of the country; there were also 600 Chinese, 183 Vietnamese, 137 Indonesians, 134 Malaysians, 81 Thais, and 21 Taiwanese; the rest were from Nigeria, Singapore, Myanmar, Yemen, Pakistan, South Africa, India, Somalia, Sudan, Cameroon, and Iran, a police report said.

Col. Jean Fajardo, national police spokesperson, said that only two of the seven buildings they raided had the relevant license to operate as offshore gaming establishments.
“We received information on the presence of foreigners in one of the buildings,” Fajardo told reporters.

Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators, or POGOs as they are more popularly called, entered the country in 2016 at the start of the term of then-President Rodrigo Duterte’s administration and have flourished due to loose gaming laws here.

Such operations cater largely to customers in mainland China, where gambling for money is banned. At their peak, POGOs hired more than 300,000 Chinese workers and brought them to the Philippines.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Jeoffrey Maitem for BenarNews.

This week the Five Eyes alliance — an intelligence alliance between Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and the United States — announced its investigation into a China-backed threat targeting US infrastructure.

Using stealth techniques, the attacker — referred to as “Volt Typhoon” — exploited existing resources in compromised networks in a technique called “living off the land”.

Microsoft made a concurrent announcement, stating the attackers’ targeting of Guam was telling of China’s plans to potentially disrupt critical communications infrastructure between the US and Asia region in the future.

• READ MORE: Deterring China isn’t all about submarines. Australia’s ‘cyber offence’ might be its most potent weapon

This comes hot on the heels of news in April of a North Korean supply chain attack on Asia-Pacific telecommunications provider 3CX. In this case, hackers gained access to an employee’s computer using a compromised desktop app for Windows and a compromised signed software installation package.

The Volt Typhoon announcement has led to a rare admission by the US National Security Agency that Australia and other Five Eyes partners are engaged in a targeted search and detection scheme to uncover China’s clandestine cyber operations.

Such public admissions from the Five Eyes alliance are few and far between. Behind the curtain, however, this network is persistently engaged in trying to take down foreign adversaries. And it’s no easy feat.

Let’s take a look at the events leading up to Volt Typhoon — and more broadly at how this secretive transnational alliance operates.

Uncovering Volt Typhoon
Volt Typhoon is an “advanced persistent threat group” that has been active since at least mid-2021. It’s believed to be sponsored by the Chinese government and is targeting critical infrastructure organisations in the US.

The group has focused much of its efforts on Guam. Located in the Western Pacific, this US island territory is home to a significant and growing US military presence, including the air force, a contingent of the marines, and the US navy’s nuclear-capable submarines.

It’s likely the Volt Typhoon attackers intended to gain access to networks connected to US critical infrastructure to disrupt communications, command and control systems, and maintain a persistent presence on the networks.

Volt Typhoon is the name Microsoft and the Five Eyes intelligence agencies have given a Chinese state sponsored hacking group, which they say installed a mysterious code in Guam’s telecommunications systems. https://t.co/xEwith7ZmM

— RN Breakfast (@RNBreakfast) May 25, 2023

The latter tactic would allow China to influence operations during a potential conflict in the South China Sea.

Australia wasn’t directly impacted by Volt Typhoon, according to official statements. Nevertheless, it would be a primary target for similar operations in the event of conflict.

As for how Volt Typhoon was caught, this hasn’t been disclosed. But Microsoft documents highlight previous observations of the threat actor attempting to dump credentials and stolen data from the victim organisation. It’s likely this led to the discovery of compromised networks and devices.

Living-off-the-land
The hackers initially gained access to networks through internet-facing Fortinet FortiGuard devices, such as routers. Once inside, they employed a technique called “living-off-the-land”.

This is when attackers rely on using the resources already contained within the exploited system, rather than bringing in external tools. For example, they will typically use applications such as PowerShell (a Microsoft management programme) and Windows Management Instrumentation to access data and network functions.

By using internal resources, attackers can bypass safeguards that alert organisations to unauthorised access to their networks. Since no malicious software is used, they appear as a legitimate user.

As such, living-off-the-land allows for lateral movement within the network, and provides opportunity for a persistent, long-term attack.

The simultaneous announcements from the Five Eyes partners points to the seriousness of the Volt Typhoon compromise. It will likely serve as a warning to other nations in the Asia-Pacific region.

Who are the Five Eyes?
Formed in 1955, the Five Eyes alliance is an intelligence-sharing partnership comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US.

The alliance was formed after World War II to counter the potential influence of the Soviet Union. It has a specific focus on signals intelligence. This involves intercepting and analysing signals such as radio, satellite and internet communications.

The members share information and access to their respective signals intelligence agencies, and collaborate to collect and analyse vast amounts of global communications data. A Five Eyes operation might also include intelligence provided by non-member nations and the private sector.

Recently, the member countries expressed concern about China’s de facto military control over the South China Sea, its suppression of democracy in Hong Kong, and threatening moves towards Taiwan.

The latest public announcement of China’s cyber operations no doubt serves as a warning that Western nations are paying strict attention to their critical infrastructure — and can respond to China’s digital aggression.

In 2019, Australia was targeted by Chinese state-backed threat actors gaining unauthorised access to Parliament House’s computer network. Indeed, there is evidence that China is engaged in a concerted effort to target Australia’s public and private networks.

The Five Eyes alliance may well be one of the only deterrents we have against long-term, persistent attacks against our critical infrastructure.

Dennis B. Desmond is a lecturer, Cyberintelligence and Cybercrime Investigations, University of the Sunshine Coast. 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.

The sanctioned entities include the Pyongyang University of Automation, described as one of the North’s “premier cyber instruction institutions,” and the Technical Reconnaissance Bureau, which the Treasury Department says works closely with Lazarus Group, a team of hackers who last year stole US$620 million in cryptocurrency.

The 110th Research Center, a subsidiary of the Technical Reconnaissance Bureau that has created “outages” at South Korean media outlets and attacked financial and government institutions in Seoul, has also been added to the U.S. sanctions list.

All three entities are accused of “malicious cyber activities” to steal funds for use in Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program, with South Korea’s government also simultaneously issuing similar sanctions.

“Today’s action continues to highlight the DPRK’s extensive illicit cyber and IT worker operations, which finance the regime’s unlawful weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs,” Brian Nelson, under secretary of the treasury, said in a statement.

$300,000 annual salaries

The list of sanctions entities, though, also includes the Chinyong Information Technology Cooperation Company, which is accused of managing computer specialists who “fraudulently” work remotely at companies in developed countries and earn hefty salaries.

“In addition to theft resulting from cyber intrusions, the DPRK generates significant revenue through the deployment of IT workers who fraudulently obtain employment with companies around the world, including in the technology and virtual currency industries,” the Treasury statement said, using an acronym for the North Korean regime.

“The DPRK maintains a workforce of thousands of highly skilled IT workers around the world, primarily located in the People’s Republic of China and Russia, to generate revenue that contributes to its unlawful WMD and ballistic missile programs,” it continued. 

“In some cases, DPRK IT workers can each earn more than US$300,000 per year,” it said.

The workers “obfuscate their identities, locations, and nationalities, typically using fake personas, proxy accounts, stolen identities, and falsified or forged documentation” to apply for remote jobs at firms in wealthy countries, the statement said. 

They have developed apps across the categories of “business, health and fitness, social networking, sports, entertainment, and lifestyle,” it added.

The Treasury Statement also says one individual – Kim Sang Man – has been sanctioned for managing “the payment of salaries to family members of Chinyong’s overseas DPRK worker delegations.”

‘A sharp break’

Experts told Radio Free Asia that cutting off financing was a critical part of weakening the North’s nuclear weapons program.

The sanctions represent an “important step in degrading North Korea’s ability to engage in illicit cyber-attacks to generate revenue” and raise awareness of how crypto is being misused, said Troy Stangarone, a senior director at the Washington-based Korea Economic Institute.

“In addition to making it more difficult for North Korea to act, the new designation is a reminder to crypto businesses and tech companies that North Korea is working to exploit their systems for its own gains and the need to take additional precautions,” Stangarone said. 

Bruce Klinger, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, meanwhile, said the simultaneous sanctions issued by South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s government showed the year-old administration in Seoul was taking a less diplomatic route than its predecessor.

The cooperation marks “a sharp break from the Moon Jae-in administration which sought to reduce international sanctions and law enforcement measures against North Korea as well as downplaying Pyongyang's human rights violations,” Klinger said.

Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Alex Willemyns and RFA Korean.

The United States' counterterrorism efforts in Somalia, which were ramped up after the emergence of the armed group al-Shabab in 2006, are worsening the East African country's instability, according to a new analysis released Thursday as progressives in Congress voted for a withdrawal of all U.S. troops from the nation.

As the Costs of War project at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University said in the new report, the U.S. has spent at least $2.5 billion on counterterrorism operations in Somalia since 2007, including funding for the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) and the Somali National Army. This figure does not include the undisclosed amount of money the government has poured into intelligence and military operations there.

U.S. spending in Somalia, ostensibly to eliminate al-Shabab and a new armed group that emerged in 2016, amounts to more than the country's annual tax revenue, and according to the Costs of War report, has gone towards ineffective top-down conflict resolution tactics which only serve to perpetuate conflict.

As Oxford University lecturer Eniọlá Ànúolúwapọ́ Ṣóyẹmí explains:

The U.S. government’s top-down approach to counterterrorism has now come to be incorporated into the political motivations and objectives of high-level political operatives in Somalia, who have the greatest access both to the U.S.' financial resources and to control of U.S.-trained forces. The U.S. military's centralized approach reinforces the tendency among elites in the Somali federal government to, themselves, centralize power in opposition to more inclusive, bottom-up politics that aim genuinely to stabilize security in Somalia for the benefit of the wider population.

"Somali forces trained by the United States have been co-opted and misused by the Somali political elite for non-counterterrorism purposes like bodyguard duty, roadblock policing, or attacking political opponents," Ṣóyẹmí added. "These forces are also exacerbating conflict, leading many to fear the outbreak of full civil war."

The Pentagon recorded a 23% rise in violent activity involving al-Shabab between 2021 and 2022, and the group is "still on the rise," the report says, despite more than a decade of counterterrorism efforts by the United States.

There are currently about 500 U.S. troops in Somalia conducting counterterrorism operations, and the U.S. has completed more than 275 air strikes and raids in the country in the past 16 years.

The Biden administration, like its predecessors, has claimed U.S. military involvement in Somalia is permitted under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, but members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) including Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) joined 100 other House members in supporting a War Powers Resolution put forward by on Thursday calling for the withdrawal of U.S. troops.

"House progressives remain principled in their commitment to upholding the constitutional authority of Congress's sole powers over war and peace, a check designed by the framers to limit needless conflicts led by the executive," a representative for the CPC told The Intercept ahead of the vote.

In voting for the resolution, progressives sought to end U.S. policies which Ṣóyẹmí says are "ensuring that the conflict continues in perpetuity."

"What the United States government is doing in Somalia is not peacekeeping, but warfighting," said Ṣóyẹmí.

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

Amid climate experts' urgent warnings to keep planet-heating fossil fuels in the ground, two recently published studies show that methane emissions from U.S. oil and gas fields as well as megafires exacerbated by rising temperatures are even worse than scientists thought.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that has more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide during its first two decades in the atmosphere.

The study on focused on emissions from drilling sites, published Monday in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, notes that the United States is the world's largest emitter of methane from the oil and gas industry, and cutting those emissions is a key piece of the U.S. government's stated climate action plan.

Based on surface and satellite observations, the researchers estimate that methane pollution from the nation's oil and gas industry was 70% higher than reported by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from 2010-19.

"While emissions in Canada and Mexico decreased over the period, U.S. emissions increased from 2010 to 2014, decreased until 2017, and rose again afterward," the study states. "Increases were driven by the largest production regions (Permian, Anadarko, Marcellus), while emissions in the smaller production regions generally decreased."

Study co-author and Harvard University professor Daniel Jacob explained to CNN how the findings expose the inadequacy of the EPA and fossil fuel industry's current monitoring practices, which rely on engineering models and handheld devices. The agency requires companies to do quarterly searches for methane leaks using infrared cameras and sensors.

"This has been known for a while, at least in the atmospheric science community," he said of the flawed approach. "When we observe methane in the air, we find concentrations much higher than one would expect from the EPA inventories."

Jacob added that "a leak that goes on for some days and then gets fixed, or some operator venting gas at a particular time of day—if you're just cruising around and trying to observe hotspots, you might miss them."

As CNN reported:

Jacob and other atmospheric scientists say there should be more monitoring of methane from the air, which can catch a huge plume that has gone undetected for weeks or months. But that's not the silver bullet for the problem either, since monitoring from the air isn't precise and can't drill down to locate which specific faulty equipment or well is causing a leak.

This is leading to even further advancements in technology in which satellites can monitor leaks with more precision to figure out exactly where it is coming from.

The findings align with those of other recent studies, including an International Energy Agency (IEA) analysis from February that found global methane emissions from the energy sector are about 70% higher than what national governments officially report.

At the time, IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol described the "massive underreporting" as "alarming" and stressed the need to dramatically reduce methane pollution, pointing out that cutting such emissions from human activities 30% by the end of this decade "would have the same effect on global warming by 2050 as shifting the entire transport sector to net-zero CO2 emissions."

As methane, CO2, and other greenhouse gases from human activities like fossil fuel use continue to drive global heating, the world faces more extreme droughts, hurricanes, floods, and wildfires—and as a study published Friday in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics highlights, fires produce more emissions that further warm the planet.

"Wildfires have become deadlier, more destructive, and more frequent globally over the past few years," states the study. "Particularly, the 2020 wildfire season saw massive wildfires in the western USA, Australia, Brazil, and the Arctic. The California 2020 wildfire season was exacerbated by abnormally high temperatures and dry conditions and emitted 10 times more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than the 2000-19 annual average wildfire emissions."

The University of California, Riverside (UCR) research team—which used a new detection method, relying on a remote sensing technique rather than air samples collected via aircraft—also found that methane pollution from the state's top 20 wildfires in 2020 was over seven times the average from fires the previous 19 years.

"Fires are getting bigger and more intense, and correspondingly, more emissions are coming from them," study co-author and UCR professor Francesca Hopkins said Monday. "The fires in 2020 emitted what would have been 14% of the state's methane budget if it was being tracked."

While California currently does not measure methane from natural sources, the study aserts that given the importance of reducing methane emissions and the significant contribution from wildfires, the state should start monitoring how much comes from them.

"Typically, these sources have been hard to measure, and it's questionable whether they're under our control. But we have to try," said Hopkins. "They're offsetting what we're trying to reduce."

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

A report published Wednesday by the Environmental Working Group examines how the "mining" process behind popular cryptocurrencies including bitcoin, Dogecoin, and Monero creates a wide range of pollution that is harming communities and fueling the climate emergency.

The EWG report—entitled Proof of Problems: Bitcoin Mining's Pollution Toll on U.S. Communities—profiles six case studies of adverse effects of the cryptocurrency mining process known as "proof-of-work."

"This report vividly shows how proof-of-work crypto-mining operations are contributing to increased air, water, and noise pollution in many communities across the U.S.," EWG policy director and report co-author Jessica Hernandez said in a statement.

"It amplifies the voices of those who are fighting to save their homes and livelihoods from the bitcoin mines invading their communities," Hernandez added. "The industry cannot continue to turn a blind eye to the real-world harm it is causing or greenwash the problem away."

As an executive summary of the report details:

Not all bitcoin mines are alike. Some rely on the resurrection of dormant fossil fuel power plants, some find low-cost high-pollution fuel sources like burning coal waste in Pennsylvania, and others flare gas from oil wells to generate the necessary electricity, like the mines blighting Montana's scenery.

They all use the same technology, individual computer hardware no bigger than a shoe box or two, all competing to solve the same puzzle and earn a few bitcoin. But it takes thousands of these mining computers, called rigs, to become competitive in the mining industry. That's why some companies are placing multiple shipping crates full of bitcoin mining rigs in communities across the U.S...

What these mines have in common is their use of proof-of-work, which is wasteful by design. This system, a type of software to record and manage bitcoin transactions, has proven highly inefficient, requiring massive amounts of fossil fuel-generated electricity to operate. Proof-of-work is a source of constant noise, a blight in communities across the country, and a hotbed of fraud and corruption that bilks consumers and ratepayers out of billions of dollars.

"Despite staunch opposition nearly everywhere bitcoin is mined, Wall Street bankers and other large financial backers manage to continue this assault on climate and communities across the country," the report states. "Change is needed, and it's needed urgently."

One of the report's case studies shows how a Blockstream mining center in Adel, Georgia created so much noise that the residents of one nearby house spent thousands of dollars to install 11 layers of insulation as the constant din damaged their hearing and kept them captive in their own home.

"It sounds like 1,000 jet engines taking off at one time. You can hear it five miles away from here," said Annette Tiveron, who lives in the house. "It ripples our pond from the vibration with the machines. It's literally shaking your brain."

The EWG report renews the group's calls to "change the code, not the climate" and highlights alternatives to proof-of-work, such as "proof-of-stake," to which the cryptocurrency Ethereum switched last year.

"Speaking with people around the country has been eye-opening in revealing the extent of the problems that bitcoin mines are causing in communities," EWG editor in chief and report co-author Anthony Lacey said in a statement. "It's hard to learn of these stories and not ask why bitcoin miners can't change their code to be better neighbors."

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

On Monday, March 20, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir ordered Voice of Palestine, the official broadcaster of the Palestinian Authority government, to be barred from operating within Israel, according to multiple news reports. After the order was issued, Israeli police officers arrived at the company’s offices in East Jerusalem and informed the staff about the ban, those reports said.

Later Monday, Israeli police summoned five Palestinian journalists based in East Jerusalem for questioning, according to news reports and journalists who spoke to CPJ.

“Israeli authorities must reverse their order to close the Voice of Palestine’s operations in Israel, which was issued without citing any specific problems with its coverage,” said CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour. “Palestinian journalists should be able to do their jobs freely, without fear of being interrogated, harassed, or obstructed from doing their work.”

Ben-Gvir’s order bars Voice of Palestine from operating within Israel but does not stop the outlet from continuing its work in the West Bank or Gaza, according to those news reports. In his decree, Ben-Gvir did not specify any specific reason for blocking the station, but said “we will not allow incitement and support for terrorism and terrorists, neither by the Palestinian Authority nor by any other body.”

Later on Monday, Israeli police in East Jerusalem summoned Palestinian reporters Layali Eid and Lana Kamela, photographers Yazan Haddad and Walid Kamar, and camera operator Firas Handawi, according to news reports, social media posts, and Kamar, who spoke with CPJ via messaging app.

Amir Abbas, director of the Marcel production company, which works with the Voice of Palestine’s parent company the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation among other outlets, told CPJ by phone that the five journalists had contributed to various local outlets including those operated by the PBC.

Kamar told CPJ that police interrogated him about his work with the PBC. He and Abbas said that police gave all five journalists a verbal warning to cease collaborating with the PBC from Jerusalem, and then released them without filing any formal charges. Abbas said authorities also summoned him, interrogated him for hours, and gave him a similar warning.

Israeli authorities closed the PBC’s Jerusalem office in 2018, according to news reports.

CPJ emailed the Israel Defense Forces for comment, and a representative referred CPJ to the National Security Ministry. CPJ emailed the ministry for comment but did not receive any reply.

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

On Wednesday, March 15, the outlet suspended its operations indefinitely, according to media reports and the outlet’s owner, David Boio, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app.

Boio told CPJ that the decision to shutter Camunda News, which covered current affairs on its website, Facebook page, and YouTube channel, came after months of government harassment.

“Angolan authorities must commit to the development of a free and independent media and refrain from harassing online outlets like Camunda News,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator. “Instead of censorship through intimidation and archaic licensing requirements, the government should encourage a plurality of media to fulfill the public’s right to access information.”

In October 2022, officials with the police National Criminal Investigation Service, the SIC, questioned Boio about Nelson Demba, an activist and co-host of the weekly current affairs show 360˚ aired on Camunda News’ YouTube and Facebook channels, Boio told CPJ.

Demba is facing charges including incitement to rebellion and outrage against the president, and is presently in hiding, according to reports, which said he believes the charges against him are retaliation for his political activity.

Boio told CPJ that SIC officers had also summoned Camunda News senior reporter llídio Manuel and two other staff members in October. He declined to name those staffers for fear of their safety.

Subsequently, in February 2023, SIC officers called Boio to summon him for questioning as a potential state witness in Demba’s case, according to Boio and those news reports. In that phone call, an investigator warned Boio that an arrest warrant would be issued if he failed to appear and instructed him to bring company documents related to Camunda News.

During three hours of questioning on March 7, Boio told CPJ that he was only asked one question about Demba and that most of the questions were related to Camunda News, its legal status and funding, and his personal life.

Shortly after that questioning, Boio suspended Camunda News’ current affairs video content. On Wednesday, he suspended the entire platform, he said.

“The harassment and intimidation are getting to a point where it could lead to more serious problems, and we know how the system in Angola can be complicated and make up serious accusations, so I need to consider my safety as well as that of all others working at Camunda,” Boio told CPJ.

Manuel, the senior reporter summoned in October, told CPJ that he was unable to hire a lawyer in time and did not attend the questioning, and had not received another summons. He said no details of the case had been disclosed to him.

Boio told CPJ that in May 2020 an SIC investigator had arrived at Camunda News’ offices and asked about its ownership, and the following day the broadcaster received a notification from the Ministry of Telecommunications Technologies and Media requesting the documentation to prove the outlet was operating legally.

“We wrote back to the Ministry explaining that we couldn’t find the legal framework for online content such as what we produced,” Boio told CPJ.

“If we had a license, we would probably be treated the same way the TV channels that got cancelled did, but because there is no legal framework they use SIC to intimidate us,” Boio said. Authorities suspended three TV broadcasters in 2021.

Benja Satula, a lawyer representing Camunda News, told CPJ via messaging app that there is no legal framework covering online content platforms, so there could be no illegal activity warranting a criminal investigation.

SIC spokesperson Manuel Alaiwa responded to CPJ’s requests for comment by phone and messaging app saying that he would call later. He had not responded by the time of publication.

When CPJ called Ministry of Telecommunications Technologies and Media spokesperson João Demba for comment, he said the ministry could not comment because it was awaiting information from the SIC.

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

When the New York Times (3/7/23) makes a claim based on anonymous US officials, other media take note—because everyone knows anonymous US officials wouldn’t lie to the New York Times.

The New York Times (3/7/23) on Tuesday ended its month-long boycott of veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh’s February 8 story claiming the US destroyed the Nord Stream gas pipeline.

The Times didn’t challenge Hersh’s story. It barely mentioned it. Instead, the Times reported “new intelligence” that “suggests” a pro-Ukrainian group was responsible.

No firm details are provided, simply speculation, and the only sources cited are anonymous US officials.

Hersh’s source also is unnamed, but is described as having “direct knowledge of the operational planning” of the operation. In contrast to the Times story’s lack of specifics, Hersh’s 5,000-word narrative provides extensive details of how US officials—at the direction of President Joe Biden—planned and executed the operation, using US Navy divers who used the cover of a NATO naval exercise in June to plant explosives, which were remotely detonated September 26.

Strikingly different treatment

The response of the nation’s major news organizations to the two stories also couldn’t have been more different.

While big news internationally, Hersh’s story was not reported by any of the major US corporate broadcast networks—NBC, ABC and CBS—or the public broadcasters, PBS and NPR. Nor did the nation’s major cable outlets, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, cover the story (FAIR.org, 3/3/23).

The Washington Post (3/7/23) proves that it too is able to find government officials willing to promote the official line with no accountability.

The Washington Post ignored Hersh’s story for two weeks, and then mentioned it (2/22/23) only after Russia cited Hersh’s story in calling for a UN investigation of the bombing. But the Post didn’t hesitate to follow the Times later Tuesday with its own story (3/7/23), headlined “Intelligence Officials Suspect Ukraine Partisans Behind Nord Stream Bombings, Rattling Kyiv’s Allies.” Like the Times, the Post relied solely on anonymous sources to attribute responsibility for the sabotage, who provided little in the way of details about how the bombing was accomplished.

In a striking example of how differently the large corporate news outlets treat Hersh, the Post credited its rival newspaper for breaking the story, but did not mention Hersh at all.

The Post story did add one significant development—that shortly after the Times story was published, German news media had reported that investigators in Europe “had identified a small team of saboteurs using a yacht rented from a company in Poland that was ‘apparently owned by two Ukrainians.’”

‘First significant lead’

Fox News (3/7/23) also jumped on the Times story later Tuesday, but added nothing new. Hersh’s story was mentioned in two sentences at the end of the story and described as a “blog post” that “the White House last month dismissed….”

CNN (3/8/23) also reported the Times story within 24 hours, but with a new element: “The German prosecutors’ office told CNN Wednesday they searched a boat in January that was suspected of carrying explosives.” The CNN story did not mention Hersh.

If the New York Times says so, it’s news (MSNBC, 3/8/23).

That same day, MSNBC ran a segment featuring NBC News reporter Molly Hunter (3/8/23), who repeated the Times’ claim that its story was “the first significant lead” in the investigation of the bombing. It also failed to mention Hersh.

A statement from German officials confirming that investigators in January had searched a vessel suspected of carrying explosives used in the bombing was reported by NBC News (3/8/23) and the Associated Press. The AP dispatch was picked up by ABC News (3/8/23) and PBS (3/8/23). All credited the Times story; none mentioned Hersh.

NPR did its own report Wednesday (3/8/23), which referenced a high Ukrainian government official “questioning recent reports that a pro-Ukraine group was behind the undersea bombings.” The official was quoted saying the reports by the Times and Germany’s Die Zeit newspaper (3/7/23), which first reported the suspected involvement of a yacht, “had ‘lots of assumptions and anonymous conjecture but not real facts.’”

While giving voice to skepticism about the Times story, NPR did not discuss Hersh’s alternative take.

Summarizing the scorecard, all three major cable news outlets—CNN, MSNBC and Fox News—publicized the Times story within a day of publication. Of the five major corporate and public broadcasters, NBC, ABC, PBS and NPR carried the story; only CBS remained silent.

As for Hersh, the blackout remains, with the sole exception of the two sentences totaling 49 words shirt-tailed to the Fox News report.

AP embarrasses itself

What’s not known about Nord Stream explosions (AP, 3/8/23): how to spell Seymour Hersch [sic].

After months of few developments in the probes, American investigative journalist Seymour Hersch, known for past exposes of US government malfeasance, self-published a lengthy report in February alleging that President Joe Biden had ordered the sabotage, which Hersch said was carried out by the CIA with Norwegian assistance.

That report, based on a single, unidentified source, has been flatly denied by the White House, the CIA and the State Department, and no other news organization has been able to corroborate it. Russia, followed by China, however, leaped on Hersch’s reporting, saying it was grounds for a new and impartial investigation conducted by the United Nations.

The misspelling was not corrected until the next day.

Zero times any number is zero

Snopes (2/10/23) has not yet run a piece criticizing the New York Times article (3/7/23) for relying on anonymous sourcing.

AP wasn’t alone in casting doubt about Hersh’s story by stressing it is “based on a single, unidentified source,” while failing to note the Times piece also rested entirely on anonymous “US officials.”

A Business Insider piece (2/9/23) published the day after Hersh posted his story, derided his account of the bombing as an “evidence-free theory,” noting his claims “appear to rely on a single unnamed source.”

Republished by Yahoo! (2/9/23) and MSN (2/9/23), the Business Insider article was the primary source of an article by the factchecking site Snopes (2/10/23), with the headline “Claim That US Blew up Nord Stream Pipelines Relies on Anonymous Source.”

It can be argued that the New York Times was exempted from such criticism because it didn’t rely on just one source; the plural “US officials” appears 16 times in the story.

But if Hersh’s unnamed source has zero credibility, then so does each source included under the umbrella of “US officials” at the Times. The laws of mathematics should apply: Zero times any number is still zero.

The post Anonymous Sources Are Newsworthy—When They Talk to NYT, Not Seymour Hersh appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by David Knox.

Scores of hits from publications across the globe pop up from an internet search for veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh’s claim that the US destroyed Russia’s Nord Stream gas pipeline.

The British news agency Reuters (2/9/23) ran at least ten stories on Seymour Hersh’s Nord Stream report; the US AP didn’t run one.

But what is most striking about the page after page of results from Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo in the weeks following the February 8 posting of Hersh’s story isn’t what is there, but what is not to be found:

•  The Times of London (2/8/23) reported Hersh’s story hours after he posted it on his Substack account, but nothing in the New York Times.
• Britain’s Reuters News Agency moved at least ten stories (2/8/23, 2/9/23, 2/12/2, 2/15/23, among others), the Associated Press not one.
• Not a word broadcast by the major US broadcast networks—NBC, ABC, CBS—or the publicly funded broadcasters PBS and NPR.
• No news stories on the nation’s major cable outlets, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News.

Is there justification for such self-censorship? True, Hersh’s story is based on a single anonymous source. But anonymous sources are a staple of mainstream reporting on the US government, used by all major outlets. Further, countless stories of lesser national and international import have been published with the caveat that the facts reported have not been independently verified.

Doubts about Hersh’s story aside, by every journalistic standard, the extensive international coverage given the story, as well as the adamant White House and Pentagon denials, should have made it big news in the United States.

More important, if Hersh got it wrong, his story needs to be knocked down. Silence is not acceptable journalism.

News blackout

The online magazine Newsweek (2/8/23) was one of the few notable US outlets to cover Hersh’s report as a news story.

What’s not in doubt is the remarkable breadth of the news blackout surrounding Hersh’s story. The only major US newspaper to cover it as breaking news was the New York Post (2/8/23).

It did appear on the opinion pages—but not the news columns—of two major dailies. The Los Angeles Times (2/11/23) mentioned Hersh’s story in the 11th paragraph of a weekly round-up by the letters editor. On the New York Times  opinion page (2/15/23), Ross Douthat included Hersh in a column headlined “UFOs and Other Unsolved Mysteries of Our Time.”

Fox News firebrands Tucker Carlson (2/8/23) and Laura Ingraham (2/14/23) collectively gave Hersh’s story a few minutes on their cable TV shows, but their network didn’t post a news story. On Fox News Sunday (2/19/23), National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby was asked about Hersh’s claims. But, again, Fox News didn’t do a separate news report.

Newsweek (2/8/23) has covered the story , but focusing mainly on White House denials and Russia’s reaction. Bloomberg News (2/9/23) ran a four-paragraph follow-up that also stressed the Russian response, but provided no details of Hersh’s account of the bombing.

The Washington Post’s first mention of the story (2/22/23) came two weeks after it was posted. Again, Russian reaction was the hook, as seen in the headline: “Russia, Blaming US Sabotage, Calls for UN Probe of Nord Stream.”

‘Discredited journalist’

Focusing on a story’s acceptance by an official enemy (Business Insider, 2/9/23) is a good tactic for promoting unquestioning rejection of information that challenges official narratives.

Arguably the most influential coverage of Hersh’s story came from Business Insider (2/9/23), which posted what can justly be called a hit piece, given its blatantly loaded headline: “The Claim by a Discredited Journalist That the US Secretly Blew Up the Nord Stream Pipeline Is Proving a Gift to Putin.”

The Business Insider article was picked up by Yahoo! (2/9/23) and MSN (2/9/23). It also was the primary source of an article in Snopes (2/10/23), the only major factchecking site to weigh in on Hersh’s claims. But Snopes, which bills itself as “the definitive Internet reference source for researching urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors and misinformation,” didn’t check any disputed facts. Instead, it starts with an ad hominem attack, asking “Who is Seymour Hersh?”

Snopes answers that rhetorical question by summarizing his body of work—uncovering the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize in 1970, revealing the secret bombing in Cambodia and the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq—but emphasizing that “his later work, however, has been controversial and widely panned by journalists for promoting conspiratorial claims that hinge on dubious anonymous sources or speculation.”

Snopes’ presentation is hardly even-handed. No defenders of Hersh are cited in the four-paragraph overview of his work, which includes seven hyperlinks to sources. That looks impressive. But clicking on the links reveals four are to the same source: the Business Insider hit piece.

Snopes’ failure to acknowledge multiple links to the same source isn’t just sloppy, it’s misleading, because most readers don’t check to see if the same source is cited repeatedly.

It’s likely Snopes used the Business Insider piece a fifth time—the last without attribution. The Snopes article’s final sentence states: “Hersch [sic] was asked by the Russian news agency TASS about the identity of his source. He told them that, ‘It’s a person, who, it seems, knows a lot about what’s going on.’ ”

The Business Insider piece ends with a paragraph with the same misspelling of Hersh’s name, the same TASS link and identical—word for word — translation of his response. (It doesn’t help Snopes’ credibility as a factchecker that Hersh’s name was originally misspelled two other times in the article.)

Much of the remainder of Snopes’ article consists of quotes from Hersh’s story, followed by commentary disparaging Hersh’s reliance on a single, unnamed source. Since that’s something Hersh readily acknowledges, it’s hard to see the informational value of the Snopes article.

Competition, not just critics

While several bloggers have challenged details in Hersh’s account, no news outlet has answered the only question that matters: Who blew up the pipeline?

Waiting for official explanations appears to be a dead end. Sweden, Denmark and Germany have launched investigations, but have not indicated when—or if—results would be released.

The giants of US journalism—the New York Times, Washington Post and the major broadcast networks—have the resources to try and solve the mystery. And it’s certainly possible that one or more of them are working to do just that. But the pipelines were destroyed five months ago. Since then, Seymour Hersh is the only journalist to offer an explanation of who was responsible.

There should be others. Hersh needs competition, not just critics.

The post Major US Outlets Found Hersh’s Nord Strom Scoop Too Hot to Handle appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by David Knox.

On Tuesday, February 21, Taliban officials, in a meeting with journalists in the southern province of Helmand, announced a ban on all media outlets—including Taliban-run Radio Television of Helmand and Bakhtar News Agency —preparing and distributing photos and videos, according to the media watchdog Nai and a journalist inside Afghanistan, who spoke to CPJ by messaging app on the condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal. Taliban authorities have not clarified whether text-based media activities are still allowed; however, Bakhtar News Agency has stopped operations in Helmand, because the ban on recording video and taking pictures has prevented them from producing any content.

Separately, on Monday, February 20, Taliban officials in northern Parwan province ordered the media to change their coverage to fall in line with what is reported by the Taliban-run Bakhtar News Agency, stifling all independent reporting, according to a local news report and another journalist inside Afghanistan, who spoke to CPJ by messaging app on the condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal.

“The Taliban’s severe restrictions imposed on the media in Helmand and Parwan provinces reflect an alarming escalation of local information control,” said Carlos Martinez de la Serna, CPJ’s program director, in New York. “The Taliban must immediately reverse these devastating orders and allow journalists to report without fear of retaliation. Access to information inside Afghanistan depends on it.”

Abdul Ahad Talib, the Taliban governor of Helmand, said during the February 21 meeting that recording videos and taking photos are forbidden in Islam, which is why the ban includes Taliban-run outlets, the journalist told CPJ. Taliban officials also warned the journalists attending the meeting not to discuss the order publicly.

CPJ contacted Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid for comment via messaging app but received no response. CPJ was unable to locate contact information for the Taliban governor of Helmand.

In August 2022, CPJ published a special report about the media crisis in Afghanistan, showing a rapid deterioration in press freedom since the Taliban retook control of the country one year earlier, marked by censorship, arrests, assaults, and restrictions on women journalists.

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

Janine Jackson interviewed Friends of the Congo’s Maurice Carney about the assassination of Patrice Lumumba for the January 20, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Patrice Lumumba

Janine Jackson:  CounterSpin listeners will have heard a number of tributes to Martin Luther King Jr. this past week—a few searching, many shallow. Importantly, the King holiday usually includes attention to his assassination, as well as to his life and work, though even the best reports, if we’re talking about corporate media, fail to draw the straightest lines between the two.

This week also marks the anniversary of another assassination, that of Patrice Lumumba, the first elected prime minister of the post-independence Democratic Republic of the Congo. Elite media appear to find that 1961 murder harder to pave over, and easier to just ignore.

But thinking about it, learning about it, involves the same sort of challenges to the US role in the world, and how racism shapes that role—lessons that we very obviously still need to learn.

We’re joined now by Maurice Carney, co-founder and executive director of the group Friends of the Congo. He joins us by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Maurice Carney.

Maurice Carney: Thank you. Thank you, Janine. It’s my pleasure to be back with you.

JJ: I will ask you to begin where we have in the past, with a reminder to listeners about January, 1961, and the circumstances of Patrice Lumumba’s assassination. How was the US involved, but also why was the US involved?

(PublicAffairs, 2008)

MC: Yes, the United States was directly involved. In fact, Janine, the United States State Department released declassified documents a number of years ago, in the last seven years or so, and those declassified documents revealed that the operation in the Congo on the part of the United States and its Central Intelligence Agency, the covert operation, was the largest in the world at that time, in terms of financing.

And the chief of station, Larry Devlin, chief of station of the CIA in the Congo, he wrote a book entitled Chief of Station, Congo, and he laid out why that the United States felt that Congo was important, and that it remained in the sphere of influence of the United States.

Larry Devlin said, in essence, that if we did not overthrow Lumumba, not only would we have lost the Congo, we would’ve lost all of Africa.

So Devlin centered the Congo as a part of US overall foreign policy, strategic policy for the African continent. So the overthrow of Lumumba was vital to the United States.

And we say “overthrow” because, in Devlin’s book, it’s really a playbook that he lays out for how the United States moves against democratically elected leaders who are not necessarily inclined to toe Washington’s line.

And that was the problem that the United States had with Lumumba, that he was an African nationalist and a pan-Africanist, one who loved his people, loved the continent, and, as Malcolm X stated, he was the greatest African leader to ever walk the African continent.

And the reason why Malcolm X said that is because he saw that the US couldn’t reach Lumumba, in the sense that they couldn’t corrupt him, they couldn’t entice him to sell out his people for trinkets, just like some of the other Congolese leaders had done.

So the Congo was key, and it’s key for a whole host of reasons that we can share a little later.

JJ: And the idea that the CIA chief of station, Larry Devlin, would use the pronoun “we”—”we” might lose Africa. This is so deeply meaningful in terms of policy narrative, and here’s where media come in to play their role of serving this narrative.

And I know that you’ve spoken in the past about the role that US news media played in working with the CIA and Larry Devlin and other US foreign policymakers to destabilize Congo and Lumumba. Media storytelling carried a lot of weight here.

A painting of Patrice Lumumba by Bernard Safran, commissioned by Time magazine but not published.

MC: Absolutely, absolutely. The narrative is critical. It was a number of years ago we talked about, Time magazine at the time was portraying Lumumba as a monster, basically laying the groundwork to justify his liquidation and removal from power.

We paint this picture of a monster to the global media when covert action is actually implemented by the Central Intelligence Agency, the US government, then folks are going to say, well, oh, he was a monster anyway. So it doesn’t matter if he was democratically elected. Doesn’t matter if he was a legitimate prime minister. He was a bad guy.

And the United States and its media and its people see themselves as the good guy. So if the good guys move in and get rid of the bad guys, then it’s fine.

And this is really an important point, too, Janine, because that narrative, these people who were involved at the time, some of them are really still alive today. They write books and they make films to paint themselves in a positive light, because of their concern of the repercussion of history, when the truth actually comes out, in terms of the dastardly role that they played, in not only removing a democratically elected leader who was subsequently assassinated, but also imposing a dictatorship over the Congolese people, in essence destroying any prospect of a peaceful, democratic, prosperous country in the heart of the richest continent on the planet.

So recounting the story and correcting the history and continuing to tell the story, especially during the commemoration of Lumumba’s assassination, is so vital. It’s so critical, and it’s not something that is stuck in the past, but it’s very, very much relevant for today, because the same forces that were at play in the ’60s to remove Lumumba are at play today in terms of keeping the Congolese from advancing and fully benefiting from the enormous wealth that’s in their country, which is what Lumumba stood for.

He made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that he was going to serve the interest of the Congolese people. He was going to leverage the wealth of the Congo, not only for the benefit of the Congo, but for Africa as a whole.

This basically scared the Western powers, because they thought they were going to lose access to the resources that we’ve learned, over the decades, are vital to a whole range of industries—not only in the West, but global industries.

NPR (12/20/22)

JJ: This is absolutely a story about this very day today, and it’s so important to not think of this as a historical commemoration. But when I looked for coverage, I found pretty much nothing in terms of US media coverage.

But I did find, for example, when I was just looking for references to Lumumba, one of the things I found was the Dutch prime minister’s official apology for that country’s role in slavery and in the trading of enslaved people.

And I wanted to ask the role of these official statements, about apologies, which is not the same thing as a truth and reconciliation conversation, but these official apologies in the context of a general informational void about the specific actions and attitudes that created the phenomenon that now official people are sad about.

And with context to Congo, I just wonder: This is the coverage, this is what media covers, is when a powerful person says I’m officially sorry, and that’s not the kind of coverage we need.

MC: Right. And that’s in line with narratives over the past few years, right? Because, see, even the summer of 2022, you have the Belgian king, who had gone back to Congo. He didn’t apologize for the role that Belgium played in basically plundering and destroying the Congo. But he said he regretted it.

And this apology, regret, it’s really important, because remember, one of the events that shot Lumumba into world attention was his June 30, 1960, inauguration speech, where he laid out in excoriating detail the nature and the scope of the brutality of King Leopold II in the Congo and Belgian colonialism.

CNN (9/10/22)

So we are talking about some 60 years later, where you have the Dutch or the Belgians issuing apologies or regrets, it really doesn’t carry weight for the masses of Africans. And I say that because, if you recall the passing of the queen of England, and if you look at the coverage, you saw that Africans writ large were basically celebrating, and recounting in detail the atrocities that the British colonial power carried out, not only in Africa, but certainly in India and in Asia.

So this apology narrative, Janine, it’s really an elite affair. And the broadcasting of it is sharing the crocodile tears of elites. But if you consult the masses, if you look at the oppressed masses, the working class, you’ll find the type of response that they have, not only to colonialism, but also to neo-colonialism and contemporary capitalists and imperialist exploitation of their lands.

And you’ll find outrage, you’ll find anger, and you’ll find people teeming to demand change of the power relations that exist currently in the world today.

JJ: I know that Friends of the Congo works year round, but that you also use every January 17 to uplift the life and the murder and the legacy of Patrice Lumumba, as well as that of Joseph Okito and Maurice Mpolo, who also died on that day.

And I would like you to talk a little bit about the goals of the action that you do every year, because it’s not just lamentation; it’s about more.

Maurice Carney: “The same forces that were at play in the ’60s to remove Lumumba are at play today in terms of keeping the Congolese from advancing.”

MC: Exactly. Exactly. We commemorate Lumumba to remind the world, not only of the imbalance in the power dynamics between the Western world and the global South, but also to remind people of the principles and ideas that Lumumba lived for and ultimately died: Self-sufficiency, self-determination, pan-Africanism, internationalism, and those principles obtain to this day, and they’ve been embraced by young Congolese in particular, young Africans in general, who are carrying out, building on the legacy of Lumumba.

So the cry is “Lumumba lives,” that is to say, his ideas, his principles. And I was in an exchange with one young Congolese before our commemoration yesterday, and he was sharing that there are a thousand Lumumbas in the Congo today.

So what we try to highlight is the extent to which the current generation has taken up the mantle, and is continuing that pursuit for a self-determined, independent Congo that is inextricably linked to the self-determination and independence of the African continent as a whole.

So that’s why we declare January 17 of each year Lumumba Day, and people go to LumumbaDay.org and they sign up to take action, either get a resolution passed commemorating the day; they can sign up to support the youth who are carrying on the tradition of Lumumba; they can be a part of the current movement in the Congo that is very much as critical today as it was during the time of Lumumba.

So it’s very current, very contemporary, and speaks to the tremendous importance that Congo carries, not only for Africa, but for the world as a whole, being part of the second-largest rainforest in the world, and is vital in the fight against the climate crisis.

And at the same time, Janine, being the storehouse of strategic minerals such as cobalt, which are vital in the pursuit of a renewable energy revolution.

So it’s at the nexus of critical resources that are vital to the future of the welfare of the planet as a whole.

JJ: I just wanted to ask you, if you have another minute in you, about precisely that, that Congo is not a story of the past. Congo is very much a story of the present. And I wonder, if journalists listening to this are looking to connect the history, and the ongoing history of exploitation, to the current exploitation, and are looking for stories as inroads to that, are there particular issues or stories that you would direct an enterprising US reporter who’s looking to get into this; what should they start at?

MC: Oh my goodness. There are so many. And if you’re talking about questions of peace and security, we see the instability unfolding in the Congo as a result of, in large part, US foreign policy and financing and backing proxy leaders in neighboring countries. So peace and security questions.

Congo has suffered the deadliest conflict in the world since World War II. It’d be interesting to see a comparison between the response that we have in Ukraine in the media and what we see in the Congo, wherein as many as 6 million people have lost their lives. But yet the coverage seems to lack in comparison to how Ukraine is covered.

Africa Report (5/17/21)

But if we’re talking about the Green New Deal and climate crisis and renewable energy revolution, you have to talk about Congo. There’s so many stories that you can address in that kind of pursuit: the minerals, cobalt, critical to renewable energy sector; the Congo Basin, which is the second-largest rainforest in the world, and yet it sequesters more carbon than the Amazon itself.

It is the largest repository of peatlands and tropical peatlands in the world, and stores enough carbon that it can address the carbon emissions of the United States for 20 years. So just a tremendous number of stories that can be addressed.

And then you have a situation where you have the Congolese, 70 million of them, living on less than $2 a day, while one billionaire, by the name of Dan Gertler, he makes $200,000 a day from royalties from Congo’s minerals. So the question of poverty, exploitation, plunder, that can be explored by journalists as well.

So there’s just a tremendous amount of stories that can be written around the Congo, because its significance, as I stated earlier, is not just for Africa alone, but for the world, and therefore, it demands the world’s attention, and it demands in-depth, nuanced treatment, not only of Congo itself, but of the Congolese people, and the enormous courage and dignity that they stand on in confronting the challenges that they face.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Maurice Carney of Friends of the Congo; find their work online at FriendsOfTheCongo.org. Maurice Carney, thank you so much for joining us this week on CountersSpin.

MC: Thank you. Thank you, Janine. It’s my pleasure.

The post ‘The Cry Is “Lumumba Lives”—His Ideas, His Principles’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Development officials at London's Tower Hamlets borough council voted unanimously on Dec. 1 to reject an application for planning permission for the new Chinese embassy on the former Royal Mint site, citing security fears, as well as the potential impact on tourism, policing and heritage.

The Strategic Development Committee said the plan, which included dormitories accommodating hundreds of employees and a landmark "cultural exchange" building, had attracted dozens of objections from residents of the surrounding area, which is home to a large Muslim community.

The plan was also opposed to by groups representing Hong Kongers in the U.K., who have been attacked both by pro-China thugs and by consular officials on British soils, and Uyghurs, who face security risks from Beijing's overseas policing and infiltration, which include unofficial renditions of government critics, often by using loved ones back home as leverage. 

The decision came as Canada became the latest country to investigate unofficial Chinese police "service stations" on its soil.

Senior Canadian foreign ministry official Weldon Epp told a parliamentary committee last week that Global Affairs had summoned the Chinese ambassador "multiple times" over the service centers, which have been reported by the Spanish-based rights group Safeguard Defenders in dozens of countries.

British Uyghur rights activist Rahima Mahmut, who heads the group Stop Uyghur Genocide, said Muslims in Tower Hamlets were angry at the plan to relocate the Chinese embassy to their backyard, while other residents were fearful of the impact of frequent demonstrations against China's rights abuses.

"Just because you have a lot of money, doesn't mean you can do anything," Mahmut told RFA. "Particularly in the U.K., which is a country where human rights are respected, and where the voice of the people, their wishes and requirements are taken extremely seriously."

The decision came after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said in his first foreign policy speech that the "golden age" of U.K.-China relations was now over, and as Chinese Ambassador Zheng Zeguang was summoned following the detention and beating of a BBC journalist who was covering recent anti-lockdown protests in Shanghai.

China's Consul General in the northern British city of Manchester admitted in October to assaulting a Hong Kong pro-democracy protester inside the grounds of the diplomatic mission following a peaceful protest on the street outside. 

Zheng Xiyuan told Sky News that he was the grey-haired man in a hat seen on social media footage pulling the hair of protester Bob Chan, adding: "I think it's my duty."

The British government is also planning a slew of measures aimed at curbing infiltration and influence operations by foreign governments, including probing the attacks at the Chinese consulate in Manchester and the possible closure of the Beijing-funded Confucius Institutes in universities. 

'Elaborate plan to dominate and monitor'

Hongkongers in Britain founder Simon Cheng, who has himself been the target of doxxing threats by pro-China agitators online for highlighting the risks of pro-China violence targeting Hong Kongers in the U.K., said the Tower Hamlets decision was a victory for freedom and for security.

He said the move would likely prevent another incident like the Manchester attack.

"This planning application gave rise to serious security concerns," Cheng told RFA. "It [would have] intruded into the daily lives of residents around the Royal Mint building, and also affected anyone passing by this super-embassy."

"The plan to move the Chinese embassy to the Royal Mint was part of an elaborate plan to dominate and monitor Hong Kongers, Uyghurs, Tibetans and Chinese nationals in the British capital, and was a danger to British sovereignty," said Cheng, who was detained and tortured by China’s state security police while working for the British consulate in Hong Kong during the 2019 protest movement.

Chinese buyers acquired the 200-year-old Royal Mint site in 2018. The planning application involved some restoration and some demolition of Grade II listed buildings, and an investment of £200,000 (U.S. $245,000) in site-wide surveillance systems.

The super-embassy would have been 10 times the size of the current site in Portland Place, making it China's biggest diplomatic facility anywhere, and the largest embassy in the U.K.

Former Hong Kong lawmaker Nathan Law welcomed the decision via his Twitter account.

"No new mega embassy for [China] in the UK. Great work fellows," he wrote, retweeting a Royal Mint residents' association campaign announcing the decision.

The English-language Global Times, a nationalistic tabloid with ties to Communist Party mouthpiece the People's Daily, said the U.K.'s tougher line on China was a mistake.

"Sunak's remarks are not that surprising since the China discourse in Britain, and more broadly the West, has been poisoned," the paper said in a commentary published on Dec. 2. "Politicians are competing to be the toughest, rather than the wisest, on China."

"Overstretching the concept of national security and using interdependence as an excuse to target China would be unwise," it warned.

In a separate article in Chinese, the paper said the Western media was using the embassy plans to "hype" China as a security threat, adding that residents' concerns were "unnecessary."

"The current Chinese embassy in the UK is located at 49 Portland Street, London, with a history of 145 years," the paper said. "However, multiple offices including visa, education, technology, etc. are located in other places in London, which is often inconvenient for their operations."

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Amelia Loi and Liu Fei for RFA Mandarin and Cantonese.

Our session was in a vast almost empty ballroom with maybe 20 people in attendance, which struck me as a sort of perfect representation of America’s interest in forgetting this latest failed American military campaign. My colleagues discussed a range of topics. Diane Tober provided a larger context for the session and the protests in Iran, Nasim Fekrat provided details on the current persecutions and massacres of Shi’a Hazara in Afghanistan, Emily Channell-Justice described developments in the war in Ukraine, Nazif Shahrani presented a devastating critique of anthropology’s failure to adequately study contemporary wars and Ghani’s disastrous rule in Afghanistan, noting that anthropology has only ever produced two heads of state, Jomo Kenyata who challenged colonialist forces, and Ashraf Ghani who embraced neocolonialism. Because my colleagues had such greater firsthand knowledge about Afghanistan, I focused my remarks primarily on anthropology’s institutional engagement with this war, occupation, and what lessons might be learned from military desires to use anthropology to control such an uncontrollable situation.

Obviously, many anthropologists spoke out in the post-9/11 world, warning that US military plans in Afghanistan could not work as promised, and rather than spending my 15-minutes just chanting “we told you so” it’s worth considering a few ways that military and intelligence agencies tried to harness anthropology for these campaigns, and why this didn’t work. Because US politicians, the public, and perhaps to a lesser extent the military, have not publicly taken stock in what went so wrong with this war, it is worth considering how false promises that counterinsurgency (COIN in military-speak) would bring American victories added to this mess.

One thing the war in Afghanistan did was force the American Anthropological Association to once again confront the dangers of our disciplinary knowledge being weaponized by military and intelligence agencies. There is a long history of these bodies seeking to leverage anthropology for war. And as with past military campaigns, the Pentagon and intelligence agencies hoped “culture” could solve military problems. Once again, people made ridiculous claims about the power of culturally attuned counterinsurgency operations. Many claims were obviously nonsense, but because they told civilian and military leaders what they wanted to hear, these claims flowed freely; often with substantial rewards for those telling these tales. Just as advertisers know labeling junky products as “tactical” (flashlights, knives, underwear, whatever…) increases consumer confidence, TRADOC (US Army Training and Doctrine Command) started pitching everything as counterinsurgency—my favorite ballyhoo combined both these hooks as “tactical counterinsurgency,” and their audience’s enthusiasm grew.

After two years in Afghanistan, we all increasingly heard claims that counterinsurgency (COIN) could deliver military victory and political stability. A swarm of counterinsurgency experts emerged, confidently claiming that knowledge of culture, and local customs could easily be weaponized to America’s advantage and Afghanistan’s future could be engineered. Soon US claims of “smart war” replaced old claims of “smart bombs.” And of course, neither were smart and didn’t work as claimed; and most anthropologists recognized this as nonsense, but it played well to a public wanting assurances that this would not be a two-decade long quagmire.

General Petraeus championed a new Counterinsurgency Manual embodying these smart means of conquest. The military ran a media blitz and with help from the University of Chicago Press, pitched this new Manual to the American public—this wasn’t just an effort to win the hearts and minds of people in Afghanistan and Iraq, the American public (who didn’t understand the war) was targeted in a homefront counterinsurgency campaign to convince them this could be a winnable war with these smart counterinsurgency tactics. This domestic propaganda campaign included PR stunts, like John Nagl chumming around with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show claiming American victory would come if we followed the wisdom of this new Counterinsurgency Manual whose message he claimed could be summarized as: “be polite, be professional, be prepared to kill”—an aphorism suggesting we anthropologists were needed to teach culturally appropriate forms of “politeness” to those preparing to kill.

But there were gaps between public claims and private actions. This new Manual drew heavily on unattributed anthropological writings, while leaked internal documents revealed the military viewed anthropology’s cultural understanding as a tool to be used in what the military privately called the “kill chain.” Claims of intellectually-fortified counterinsurgency were window dressing, diverting attention from the inevitable fiasco, and military concepts of culture proved to be more smurfisticated than sophisticated. This was the great COIN con, pressing the Big Lie that armed culturally-impregnated counterinsurgency operations would somehow engineer military victories and build local governments that would align with US interests. As if the trimmings of nuanced cultural acuity could camouflage a violent invasion and occupation. There is a great paper by Rochelle Davis and colleagues critiquing the idea that not showing people the bottom or your feet could make them forget you’re invading their country.

Australian counterinsurgency wonk David Kilcullen became a key US COIN “theorist.” Kilcullen had his own version of “conflict ethnography,” but unlike most others, he admitted that for counterinsurgency to work Americans would need to stick with his program for a long time—twenty years or more of intense counterinsurgency. Such plans obviously failed even after two decades. Dr. Kilcullen later insisted that he never really got the chance to implement his full plan, claiming the COIN Team fell from grace before he could run out the clock. But such complaints ignore the obvious reality that: Americans don’t have the patience for 20-year counterinsurgency operations; suggesting otherwise is like arguing that since it might be technically possible to grow potatoes on the moon, lunar plantations could alleviate world hunger. Notions that the US was ever going to do this for decades because it was theoretically possible appeared obviously absurd at the time.

The most infamous of these counterinsurgency pitches was of course, Human Terrain Systems. The Pentagon wasted almost three-quarter-of-a-billion dollars on Human Terrain, which would make it, hands down, the best funded “anthropological” project in history—except for one thing: it really wasn’t an anthropological project at all. It is difficult to not see HTS as a sort of self-deluding con, following the well-known pattern where too-good-to-be-true promises of conquest and peaceful occupation were sold to willing civilian and military marks.

I don’t know where the three-quarters of a billion dollars went, but it would be a worthwhile book project for someone to trace this. As an avid researcher of public records familiar with private contractors’ reporting obligations, I note that this would be a do-able research project. A 2010 Army investigation concluded Human Terrain was “fraught with waste, fraud and abuse” while in 2015 USA Today found it plagued with ethical concerns including “charges of time-sheet padding and sexual Harassment” with employees earning $280,000 a year “for work that investigators doubt was done.” And where are those who made bold claims for HTS? Steve Fondacro is a county administrator in San Jose, Montgomery McFate a Naval War College professor, while other Human Terrain employees have scrubbed any mention of this employment from their CVs, trying to bury the past as if it never happened. But of course, it did happen. I assume something like it will eventually happen again as a rebranded attractive nuisance, with a new name and more impossible promises, maybe with new AI technologies promising to easily crack the hard nut of culture for some military mission of empire as yet realized. It’s not like America learned from its COIN failures in Vietnam. And it is this seeming inevitability of recurrence that elevates the importance of learning from this painful disaster.

Don’t get me wrong: some counterinsurgency operations (like providing local health services, supplying medical or education materials, etc.) can do things like increase alliances, reduce tensions or delay or maybe prevent uprisings. But counterinsurgency simply cannot achieve the sort of military victories claimed possible by Kilcullen, Petraeus and others who added to this disaster. All foreign counterinsurgency operations face serious legitimacy issues that domestic counterinsurgency operations don’t face, because those enacting domestic operations have legitimacy with some of the populous. This is why HTS tried and use local actors to bolster legitimacy, but such tactics don’t work for long. By the time a military finds itself relying on counterinsurgency for military success in a foreign conflict, it has already lost.

Military victories relying heavily on counterinsurgency are rare in history. Some counterinsurgency historians argue that the only real 20^th century example of a this occurred in British Malaya, which required three decades of intensive work and spending by the British. A decade ago, a French commander explaining why the French no longer believe in counterinsurgency, said, “if you find yourself needing to use counterinsurgency, it means the entire population has become the subject of the war, and you either will have stay there forever or you have lost.”

A lot of what might be “lessons learned” about this debacle were obvious at the time: it was obvious that scared people don’t generally make smart choices, and when leaders are fear mongers in an already hypermilitarized state looking for any excuse to increase already obscene military budgets, there were few contingencies that were going to reward anyone trying to talk sense to these people, especially as those in charge were kept in place by feeding on the fear they were spreading. But in considering lessons learned from the tangled mess of American counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan, I find good news and bad news.

First the Good News. The good news is that the AAA, as an organization, took a stand resisting a lot of this. This didn’t stop it from happening, but it helped anthropology from getting sucked into all this. This did not happen in a vacuum, efforts by Association activists helped push the organization to strengthen its ethics code, condemn programs like Human Terrain, condemn anthropologist’s participation in interrogation sessions, and left space for those of us pledging to not support counterinsurgency. In part, the good news is that once again: activism, and speaking up matters.

The AAA didn’t get everything right, but to get some idea of how wrong we didn’t get it, consider what went down with our cousins in the American Psychological Association (APA), as their professional association enabled torture in shocking ways. If you haven’t done so, read the 2014 independent Hoffman Report detailing what happened within the APA. It is a painstaking roadmap of institutional corruption that shows how easily smart people sat aside fundamental ethics when their government told them to not worry–it’s like they never heard of Stanley Milgram. These psychologists believed their presence during harsh interrogations could prevent horrible things from happening, which was of course nonsense. This participation made them part of the torture process.

When the CIA and Pentagon approached the AAA in the aftermath of 9/11, seeking to place recruitment advertisements in our publications, our Association while avoiding the fundamental political issues of such work (a dimension important to many of us), established a commission to consider the ethical issues embedded in such questions; and then followed these recommendations, which provided some guidelines helping us to not sink in the quicksand that enveloped the psychologists.

That’s the good news, now the bad news. The bad news is I doubt America learned anything valuable (that it will remember) from the Afghanistan war. There was no national reckoning of what happened, and I don’t expect there will be one. Two decades ago, the outcome seemed obvious to many of us, and no one in power wanted to hear this then and they won’t want to hear it whenever the next Raytheon, Xe (formerly known as Blackwater), Haliburton et al-enriching campaign arrives. And we’ll likely have to roll that damn rock up the hill again—and even though this sucks, cursing the fates and rolling that rock back up matters because history is full of change, and we don’t know when the system will finally breakdown and people will listen. But someday it will break, so we have to keep trying, because nothing lasts forever.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David Price.

Miriam Zarriga, one of Papua New Guinea’s top experienced journalists, has been appointed as the PNG Post-Courier’s new chief-of-staff.

With more than 10 years working with the Post-Courier, Zarriga has extensive experience in political, security and general news reporting.

She replaces Lawrence Fong, a fellow stalwart of the Post-Courier who has held the position of chief-of-staff for the last three years.

• READ MORE: Stories by Miriam Zarriga on Asia Pacific Report

Fong welcomed Zarriga’s appointment and issued his unwavering support on behalf of the newsroom as she moves into her new role. He now shifts to become online content editor of the masthead.

Prior to her appointment, Zarriga played a key role in Post-Courier’s 2022 National General Election coverage alongside senior political journalist Gorethy Kenneth.

Her involvement provided extensive election coverage on election-related violence around the country, and in some cases facing the brunt of tribal warfare in daring situations.

‘No walk in the park’
Post-Courier’s editor Matthew Vari congratulated Zarriga on her appointment, saying the role embodied the challenges of running a modern newsroom.

“The chief-of-staff position is no walk in the park,” Vari said. “But I have every confidence in Ms Zarriga’s capabilities in ensuring we produce the best content for our readers.

“Her experience over the many years on the frontline of mainstream media provides Ms Zarriga with a wealth of understanding of what’s needed to be produced for our readers.”

The chief-of-staff role handles the content of the newspaper, and the day-to-day operations of the newsroom and its reporters.

Republished with permission.

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

Multiple explosions last week off the coast of Poland damaged both the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines, shutting down one and preventing the other from going online. The pipelines, intended to carry natural gas from Russia to Germany, are critical infrastructure for Europe’s energy markets.

The explosions triggered a lopsided “whodunnit” in US media, with commentators almost universally fingering Russia as the culprit, despite the lack of a plausible motive. Official US opposition to the pipeline has been well-established over the years, giving Washington ample motive to destroy the pipelines, but most newsrooms uniformly suppressed this history, and attacked those who raised it.

“Only Russia had the motivation,” the Washington Post (9/27/22) claimed—even as it reported that the pipelines “deepened Europe’s dependence on Russian natural gas,” which “many [presumably Western] officials now say was a grave strategic mistake.”

After the explosions, much of the press dutifully parroted the Western official line. The Washington Post (9/27/22) quickly produced an account: “European Leaders Blame Russian ‘Sabotage’ After Nord Stream Explosions,” citing nothing but EU officials who claimed that while they had no evidence of Russian involvement, “only Russia had the motivation, the submersible equipment and the capability.”

Much of the media cast their suspicions towards Russia, including Bloomberg (9/27/22), Vox (9/29/22), Associated Press (9/30/22) and much of cable news. With few exceptions, speculation on US involvement has seemingly been deemed an intellectual no-fly-zone.

The idea that only Russia had the means and motivation is clearly false on both counts. Washington has made it clear for years that it doesn’t want the pipeline, and has taken active measures to stop it from coming online. As for the means, it’s patently absurd to suggest that the US doesn’t have the capability to lay explosives in 200 feet of water.

Even Max Boot, who agreed in his Washington Post column (9/29/22) that only Russia had the means and motive, contradictorily acknowledged that “the means are easy.”

A long history of opposition

Any serious coverage of the Nord Stream attack should acknowledge that opposition to the pipeline has been a centerpiece of the US grand strategy in Europe. The long-term goal has been to keep Russia isolated and disjointed from Europe, and to keep the countries of Europe tied to US markets. Ever since German and Russian energy companies signed a deal to begin development on Nord Stream 2, the entire machinery of Washington has been working overtime to scuttle it.

The RAND report (2019) that recommended “Reduc[ing] [Russian] Natural Gas Exports and Hinder[ing] Pipeline Expansions” now comes with a warning saying it’s been “mischaracterized” by “Russian entities and individuals sympathetic to Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine.”

A 2019 Pentagon-funded study from the RAND Corporation on how best to exploit “Russia’s economic, political and military vulnerabilities and anxieties” included a recommendation to “Reduce [Russian] Natural Gas Exports and Hinder Pipeline Expansions.” The study noted that a “first step would involve stopping Nord Stream 2,” and that natural gas “from the United States and Australia could provide a substitute.”

This RAND study also prophetically recommended “providing more US military equipment and advice” to Ukraine in order to “lead Russia to increase its direct involvement in the conflict and the price it pays for it,” even though it acknowledged that “Russia might respond by mounting a new offensive and seizing more Ukrainian territory.”

The Obama administration opposed the pipeline. As part of the major sanctions package against Russia in 2017, the Trump administration began sanctioning any company doing work on the pipeline. The move generated outrage in Germany, where many saw it as an attempt to meddle with European markets. In 2019, the US implemented more sanctions on the project.

Upon coming into office, President Joe Biden made opposition to the pipeline one of his administration’s top priorities. During his confirmation hearings in 2021, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken told Congress he was “determined to do whatever I can to prevent” Nord Stream 2 from being completed. Months later, the State Department reiterated that “any entity involved in the Nord Stream 2 pipeline risks US sanctions and should immediately abandon work on the pipeline.”

In July 2021, the sanctions were relaxed only after contentious negotiations with the German government. The New York Times (7/21/21) reported that the administration and Germany still had “profound disagreements” about the project.

As Russia was gathering troops at Ukraine’s border at the beginning of this year, US administration officials issued threats against the pipeline’s operation in the event of a Russian invasion. In January, Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland — one of the main players during the 2014 Maidan Coup in Ukraine and wife of Robert Kagan, the founder of the neoconservative Project for a New American Century — issued a stern warning against the pipeline. “If Russia invades, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 Will. Not. Move. Forward.”

In February, Joe Biden himself told reporters, “If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” After a reporter asked how the US planned to end a project that was under German control, Biden responded, “I promise you, we will be able to do that.”

On February 22, after Russian troops were given orders to enter the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, Germany suspended the pipeline, in a move that was called “remarkable” at the time (New York Times, 2/22/22).

In sharp contrast to the US’s antagonism, Russia has taken the opposite approach to the pipeline it spent billions of dollars to complete. As recently as three weeks ago, Putin expressed willingness to supply more gas if the EU would lift the sanctions against the newer pipeline. He said: “If things are so bad, just go ahead and lift sanctions against Nord Stream 2, with its 55 billion cubic meters per year — all they have to do is press the button and they will get going.” Diplomatic sources told the Cradle (9/29/22) that Russia and Germany were in talks about both NS1 and NS2 on the day of the explosion.

The day after the attack, German government sources leaked to the German daily Der Spiegel (9/28/22) that weeks earlier, the CIA warned Germany of a potential attack on the pipeline. However, sources told CNN (9/29/22) that the warnings were “vague” and that “it was not clear from the warnings who might be responsible for any attacks on the pipelines, or when they might occur.” A high-level source in German intelligence told the Cradle (9/29/22) that they were “furious” because “they were not in the loop.”

After the attack, Blinken called the bombing a “tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy,” and said that this “offers tremendous strategic opportunity for years to come.” On the other hand, Russia has already announced plans to begin repairing the pipeline.

So contrary to what nearly the US entire media establishment has presented, the US has had ample motive to destroy the pipeline, and is actively celebrating its demise.

‘Thank you, USA’

One event that fueled speculation of US involvement was a tweet from a Polish member of the European Parliament, Radek Sikorski—a one-time Polish Defense minister as well as a former American Enterprise Institute fellow, who was named one of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers” in 2012 by Foreign Policy (11/26/12).

The Washington Post (9/28/22) suggested that by thanking the United States over a picture of the pipeline explosion, Radek Sikorksi may have been “crediting the United States with rendering the pipelines moot by pressuring Europe not to take Russian natural gas.”

Sikorski tweeted out a picture of the methane leak in the ocean, along with the caption, “As we say in Polish, a small thing, but so much joy.” He later tweeted, “Thank you, USA,” with the same picture.

He later tweeted against the pipeline, noting that “Nord Stream’s only logic was for Putin to be able to blackmail or wage war on Eastern Europe with impunity.” An hour later he elaborated:

Now $20 billion of scrap metal lies at the bottom of the sea, another cost to Russia of its criminal decision to invade Ukraine. Someone…did a special maintenance operation.

The last line was a joke about how Russia classifies its invasion of Ukraine as a “special military operation.”

After these tweets received attention from those who suspected US responsibility, Sikorski deleted them. Business Insider (9/30/22) dishonestly wrote that these latter tweets were actually an “attempt to clarify that the original tweet was a criticism of US support for the pipeline being built in the first place.” Any honest reading of the tweets demonstrates that the opposite is true; presumably this is why Insider didn’t link to any specific text.

The Washington Post (9/28/22) also offered a twisted interpretation of Sikorski’s tweets:

His meaning wasn’t entirely clear; it seems possible he was crediting the United States with rendering the pipelines moot by pressuring Europe not to take Russian natural gas. In later tweets, he seemed actually to point to Russian sabotage.

For the latter claim, the Post cited Sikorski’s joke about the “special maintenance operation,” but the full tweet shows that this is a preposterous interpretation.

While certainly not a smoking gun, such a high-profile accusation (or expression of gratitude, such as it was) raises eyebrows, especially given Poland’s strenuous opposition to the pipeline, and the recent completion of a Norway/Poland pipeline designed to “cut dependency on Russia.” The circumstances are even more suspicious, given that Sikorski is the husband of the fervently anti-Russian staff writer at The Atlantic Anne Applebaum, who has been a key media figure advancing the pro-NATO narrative in the West.

Applebaum even sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (a position she once shared with Victoria Nuland before Nuland moved into the Biden administration), a government-funded conduit for US regime change and destabilization projects that was an important driving force behind the 2014 coup that replaced Ukraine’s pro-Russian government with a Pro-Western one. Since then, the NED has funded English-language Ukrainian media like the Kyiv Independent, which, along with commentators like Applebaum herself, are now shaping coverage of the current war for Western audiences.

The fact that someone as connected as Sikorski would find it appropriate to publicly thank the US for the attack certainly deserves scrutiny. Some US media brought up the tweet, but dismissed it as unimportant (The Hill, 9/30/22).

‘A reminder from Moscow’

Business Insider (10/4/22): If Putin is willing to blow up his own pipelines, just think what he might do to yours!

US media have all but ignored the critical context above. If a case like that existed for the Russia-did-it theory, you can be sure that it would have been spelled out in detail by everyone. But instead, US media direct attention away from the obvious and are left to grasp at straws to find a potential Russian motive. In fact, many outlets readily acknowledged that there was no obvious motive for Russia to bomb its own pipeline. For example, the New York Times (9/28/22) wrote:

It is unclear why Moscow would seek to damage installations that cost Gazprom billions of dollars to build and maintain. The leaks are expected to delay any possibility of receiving revenue from fuel going through the pipes.

Vox (9/28/22) reported that “experts emphasized…it may be hard to fully know Moscow’s motivation.” NPR (9/28/22) also couldn’t readily answer “the question as to why Russia would attack its own pipelines.”

Having admitted that Russia has no readily apparent motive, establishment media are left to stretch. They presented a couple of theories for Putin’s potential motivation, but neither holds up to scrutiny. One, per the Times (9/28/22), is that the leaks “may help Russia by pushing energy prices higher,” since “the natural gas market is spooked.” But this logic makes little sense, as Russia has been pushing for Europe to open the Nord Stream 2 pipeline since it was completed. Higher natural gas prices do Russia little good if it’s unable to deliver its gas to market.

The Times (9/28/22) put forth another theory: that Putin is just teaching the West some kind of lesson:

The ruptures could also be a reminder from Moscow that if European countries keep up their support for Ukraine, they risk sabotage to vital energy infrastructure.

The Washington Post (9/27/22), speaking to “security officials,” cited similar theories:

One official said it might have been a message to NATO: “We are close.” Another said that it could be a threat to other, non-Russian energy infrastructure.

Business Insider (10/4/22) published a piece hysterically titled: “The Sabotage of Gas Pipelines Were a ‘Warning Shot’ From Putin to the West, and Should Brace for More Subterfuge, Russia Experts Warn.”

CNN (9/29/22) also found a US official to tell them that “Moscow would likely view [attacking the pipeline] as worth the price if it helped raise the costs of supporting Ukraine for Europe,” and that “sabotaging the pipelines could ‘show what Russia is capable of.’” Vox (9/28/22) found some “experts” to tell them the same story.

But the reality is that Russia has done its utmost to discourage NATO from further involvement in the war. A Russian attack on the pipeline would all but guarantee greater NATO involvement in Ukraine. Antagonizing Germany to teach the rest of Europe a lesson—which would only work if Russia was understood to be behind the sabotage—would be the opposite of Russia’s interests. This argument amounts to little more than “Putin is evil and hates Europe.”

As FAIR (3/30/22) has previously written, this cartoon narrative of Putin as Hitler allows for all logic and reasoning to fall by the wayside. The US behavior with regards to the pipeline is objectively more compelling than the case against Russia, yet the media have dismissed it out of hand.

A crack in the facade

One of the cracks in the uniform coverage was a segment on Bloomberg TV (10/3/22). Host Tom Keene brought on Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, who was recently the head of the Lancet’s investigation (9/14/22) into the origin of Covid-19. During the interview, Sachs stated that he “would bet [the attack] was a US action, perhaps US and Poland.”

Bloomberg TV host Tom Keene (10/3/22) takes Jeffrey Sachs to task for questioning the official Nord Stream narrative.

Keene immediately stopped him and demanded that he lay out evidence for the claim. Sachs cited radar evidence that US helicopters, normally based in Gdansk, had been hovering within the area of the explosion shortly before the attack. This is certainly not a smoking gun, given Western intelligence claims that Russian ships were observed in the area during this same timeframe, though it does add to the case for US responsibility. He also cited the threatening statements from Biden and Blinken as reasons for his suspicion.

Sachs acknowledged the propaganda system in which he was operating:

I know it runs counter to our narrative, you‘re not allowed to say these things in the West, but the fact of the matter is, all over the world when I talk to people, they think the US did it…. Even reporters on our papers that are involved tell me, “Of course [the US is responsible],” but it doesn’t show up in our media.

This was the only time FAIR saw an anchor push back and ask for evidence for guests’ speculation of responsibility—speculation that was usually pointed toward Russia.

The broken clock

As illustration of the weirdness that is the US elite’s opportunistic relationship with Russia, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson (9/27/22), the white nationalist who hosts the most popular evening talk show in America, was one of the only media figures to go against the dominant narrative. Carlson certainly overstated the case for US involvement in the pipeline attack, but he asked questions no one else in corporate media would touch.

The Washington Post (9/29/22) printed Tucker Carlson’s name in Cyrillic—implying that only a Russian agent would express doubts about the US’s innocence.

But rather than dissect Carlson’s case factually, most other media relied purely on redbaiting. The Washington Post (9/29/22) wrote Carlson’s name in Cyrillic —”Russian TV Is Very Excited About Такер Карлсон’s Nord Stream Theory”—to play into the McCarthyite fearmongering of the New Cold War.

The Post brought up the threatening statements from Nuland and Biden, and even the tweet from Sikorski, but only to dismiss them, because they weren’t a “smoking gun.” Of course, the Post refused to acknowledge that the quotes from administration officials demonstrated a clear opposition to the pipeline, and thus an obvious motive for the attack.

Despite the fact that Carlson repeatedly claimed that “we don’t know what happened,” the Post declared that “he delivered his speculation as if it were fact and invited his viewers to do the same.” While this is a fair assessment of the tone if not the text of the segment, the Post had nothing to say about the certainty with which others in the media accused Russia.

The Post’s reporting was picked up by MSNBC Katie Phang (10/1/22), who, also eschewing actual investigation, asked her guest, “How dangerous is it for an American media personality with the kind of reach that Tucker Calrson has to be out there spouting a talking point that ends up on Russian state TV?”

‘Baseless conspiracy theory’

AP (via ABC, 9/30/22) accused “Kremlin and Russian state media” of “aggressively pushing a baseless conspiracy theory” in “another effort to split the U.S. and its European allies.”

The Associated Press (9/30/22) wrote a widely republished story, headlined “Russians Push Baseless Theory Blaming US for Burst Pipeline,” that called the idea the US was responsible for the attacks a “baseless conspiracy theory.”

Like the other coverage, the AP didn’t evaluate any of the evidence, but called the theory “disinformation” designed to “undermine Ukraine’s allies” and, importantly, painted such speculation as beyond legitimate discussion:

The suggestion that the US caused the damage was circulating on online forums popular with American conservatives and followers of QAnon, a conspiracy theory movement which asserts that Trump is fighting a battle against a Satanic child-trafficking sect that controls world events.

Bloomberg (reprinted in the Washington Post, 9/27/22) acknowledged Biden’s threats against the pipeline, but writer Javier Blas dismissed them without actually explaining why:

Conspiracy theorists always see the hand of the CIA in everything. But that’s nonsense. The clear beneficiary of shutting down the Nord Stream pipelines for good is Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Yes, the “clear beneficiary” of the destruction of the main method Russia could sell billions of dollars worth of natural gas to Europe was…the Russian president. It doesn’t make more sense if you read the whole article.

The US press produced an overwhelming chorus of articles (e.g., Business Insider, 9/30/22; Vox, 2/28/22; Newsweek, 10/3/22) that deployed the term “conspiracy theory” to discredit the idea of US culpability. Not one of these pieces adequately explored the credible reasons for the suspicion, simply ignoring the body of evidence presented above.

The Brookings Institution (where Robert Kagan works) published a long article (10/3/22), complete with graphs and charts, that warned of the dangers of podcasters spreading the idea that the US was culpable in the attacks. It dismissed this possibility on the strength of a link to the New York Times (9/28/22), used to substantiate a claim that “experts broadly agree that Russia is the key suspect.” It did not do any investigation of its own.

When is a theory a ‘conspiracy theory’?

Caitlin Johnstone (10/4/22): “If you think the United States could have any responsibility for this attack at all, you’re a crazy conspiracy theorist and no different from QAnoners who think pedophile Satan worshipers rule the world.”

This use of the term “conspiracy theory” or “conspiracy theorist,” along with the mention of QAnon, has the effect of associating speculation of US involvement in the attack with a class of people that have largely been discredited (with good reason) in the public mind. Once this link has been made, evaluating the evidence is no longer required. It’s a lazy rhetorical trick to marginalize dissent.

In his book Conspiracy Theory in America, scholar Lance Dehaven Smith examined the way the term is deployed in establishment media:

What they actually have in mind are suspicions that simply deviate from conventional opinion about the norms and integrity of US officials. In practice, it is not the form or the object of conspiracy theories, or even the absence of official confirmation, that differentiates them from other (acceptable) beliefs; it is their nonconformity with prevailing opinion.

Writer Caitlin Johnstone (10/4/22) put it succinctly in a piece on the hysteria surrounding the pipeline attacks: “It’s Only a ‘Conspiracy Theory’ When It Accuses the US Government.” She wrote:

Over and over again we see the pejorative “conspiracy theory” applied to accusations against one nation but not the other, despite the fact that it’s the exact same accusation. They are both conspiracy theories per definition: They’re theories about an alleged conspiracy to sabotage Russian pipelines. But the Western political/media class consistently applies that label to one and never the other.

At a meeting of the UN Security Council—hastily called by Russia in the wake of the attacks—US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield called the Russian accusations “conspiracy theories,” then went on to accuse Russia of attacking its own pipeline. Reporting on the Security Council meeting, CNN (11/29/22) showed its own conspiratorial thinking, citing US officials who called the meeting itself “suspicious,” because “typically, the official said, Russia isn’t organized enough to move so quickly, suggesting that the maneuver was pre-planned.”

Of course there are irresponsible, popular conspiracy theories that fail to hold up to scrutiny, and are in fact quite dangerous. The QAnon theory that the world’s elite are harvesting a substance called adrenochrome from trafficked children to gain special abilities and extend their life is absurd. The 2020 election spawned many disproven theories about a stolen Trump victory that ended up leading to the deadly riot at the Capitol on January 6. But just as the existence of websites that fabricate pseudo-news reports for profit gave Donald Trump a label to dismiss any journalism he didn’t like as “fake news,” so to are such fanciful theories based on leaps of logic used to disparage well-documented efforts to peer behind the scenes of US official policy.

To be sure, we still don’t know for certain who was behind the pipeline bombing, but there is a solid prima facie case for US culpability. The explosion is a watershed moment in the escalation toward a direct confrontation between nuclear powers. Media malfeasance on this topic doesn’t just threaten the credibility of the press, but literally imperils the whole of human civilization.

The post US Media’s Intellectual No-Fly-Zone on US Culpability in Nord Stream Attack appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Bryce Greene.

Chinese police are currently running at least 54 "overseas police service centers" in foreign countries, some of which work with law enforcement back home to run operations on foreign soil, the Sept. 13 report from Safeguard Defenders said.

Initially started as a pilot scheme by police in Qingtian county, Zhejiang province in 2019, the overseas stations were ostensibly set up to help Chinese nationals overseas with administrative tasks, the report said.

"But they also serve a far more sinister and wholly illegal purpose," the report said. "Some official anecdotes of official operations explicitly cite the active involvement of Hometown Associations on the ground in tracking and pursuing targets indicated by [police or public prosecutors in China]."

Hometown associations are community based groups of people from the same town in China, and are connected to the hierarchy of the CCP's United Front Work Department, which runs outreach and influence operations both in China and overseas.

One of the key operations the service centers are involved in is the "persuasion to return" process, in which pressure is brought to bear on activists overseas using threats and retaliation against their loved ones back in China.

"In the mere fifteen months between April 2021 and July 2022 alone ... a staggering number of 230,000 Chinese nationals were returned to face potential criminal charges in China through these methods, which often include threats and harassment to family members back home or directly to the target abroad either through online or physical means," Safeguard Defenders said.

The "persuasion to return" campaign was rolled out as a pilot project across 10 provinces in 2018, and official guidelines include denying targets' children the right to an education in China, or targeting their family members for harassment.

"The combination of an absolute absence of minimal judicial safeguards for the target and the association by guilt methods employed on their families, as well as the illegal methods adopted to circumvent official international cooperation mechanisms and the use of United Front Work-related organizations abroad to aid in such efforts, pose a most grave risk to the international rule of law and territorial sovereignty," the report found.

Nine 'forbidden' countries

People living in any of the nine "forbidden" countries for Chinese nationals, which include Cambodia, the United Arab Emirates, the Philippines, Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Malaysia, Turkey and Indonesia.

"People who have no urgent need to travel to or stay in those countries are required to return to China as soon as possible," the report said.

While there is no official breakdown of where the 230,000 individuals were returned from, the majority appear to hail from the banned countries, with some 54,000 people "persuaded" to return from Myanmar between January and September 2021 alone.

It is likely that the pilot scheme will now be rolled out globally, Safeguard Defenders said, adding that Chinese state media have already reported that overseas police service stations actively assisted Chinese police in “persuasion to return” activities in Spain and Serbia.

The report found 54 physical overseas service stations in 30 countries across five continents set up by Fuzhou and Qingtian counties, although other police departments may also be operating more stations not found by the investigation.

Safeguard Defenders researcher Chen Yanting told RFA that the "persuasion to return" process basically uses family members as hostages, making it hard for them to find jobs or for their children to attend school.

"This is like a presumption of guilt ... [and] with private coercion used on anyone who doesn't want to return," Chen said.

Chen cited the case of a Chinese national who ran a burger restaurant in Cambodia.

"[He] was inexplicably asked by the police in his hometown to return to China, but he refused. So the police went to the outside of his mother's house to spray it with the label 'house of a fraud suspect' and even cut off the water and electricity," Chen said.

"These measures are being carried out in a number of coastal provinces."

An employee who answered the phone at one of the overseas service centers set up by the Fuzhou police said they accept tip-offs from members of the public.

"We carry out online intelligence gathering [and] we take police reports ... from overseas Chinese," the employee said.

"We have definitely detained some people, although I can't guarantee that we always manage to catch them."

Shih Yi-hsiang, head of the Taiwan Association for Human Rights, said the report should act as an urgent warning to governments around the world that the Chinese state is carrying out operations overseas.

"[We want to know] if it's possible for them to use those powers to target overseas dissidents or anyone wanted by the Chinese government," Shih said.

"Is there a risk that Taiwanese and Hong Kongers in the nine [banned] countries could be affected?"

Hong Kong has seen a mass wave of migration following a citywide crackdown on dissent in the wake of the 2019 protest movement, while Taiwan is a democratic country that has never been ruled by the CCP, nor formed part of the People's Republic of China, which nonetheless claims its territory and nationals as its own.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Hsia Hsiao-hua for RFA Mandarin.

The post Colombian Intelligence Operations, with US Backing, Are Bad for Peace appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by W. T. Whitney.

The headline of this editorial, we believe, expresses what every eligible voter, business house and candidate in the nation’s capital feels towards the Electoral Commission of PNG.

To make a decision like this, the deferral of polling, at the very last minute on the day when this important event is to take place is absurd. it’s costly and creates an impression that our electoral process is dysfunctional in the eyes our citizens and the international community.

The explanation by the Election Manager for NCD (National Capital District), Kila Ralai, citing interference from candidates and their scrutineers on the deferral is very weak and doesn’t hold water.

• READ MORE: PNG’s capital residents shocked with second deferral of polling day
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He was quoted as saying: “Unfortunately in that process there was interference, by the candidates and the scrutineers who came to over-rule the administration of the electoral process, that has prolonged the election operations.”

However, he goes on further and says: “We need to maintain our integrity, we need to maintain that integrity and the efficient process of the elections, so that we can deliver the elections to our voters.

“It is not good that we will push when the systems are not in place when the process is not prepared, we need to have all these before we conduct elections for NCD.”

Our question is: So what systems are not in place and whose job is it to prepare so that the integrity of the election is maintained?

The excuse made for the initial deferral from July 4-6 and now from 6th to maybe 8th of July is completely unacceptable.

And we endorse the sentiments of NCD Governor Powes Parkop and many other candidates who said: “Securing counting venues and preparing polling officials, ballot boxes and ballot papers are basic outcomes that the Chief Electoral Commissioner and his staff should have sorted out well before the 4th or 6th of July.

“These are basic issues they ought to have templates and be experts in these areas by now.

This basic failure shows the highest level of incompetency and someone should be brought to account for this level of incompetency which is bordering on stupidity.”

This basic failure shows poor level of leadership, poor planning and total incompetency on the part of Chief Electoral Commissioner and his officers.

They ought to hang their heads in shame!

For our capital city to be continuously subjected to such basic problems is totally unacceptable! It reflects badly on the Electoral Commission, our capital city and our country.

The Electoral Commission had four years and then a number of weeks due to deferral of the Issue of Writs and then two more days and they are still unprepared.

PNG Post-Courier. Republished with permission.

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

Changing attitudes after Ukraine

Beijing-based political commentator Wu Qiang said Zelenskyy appears to be aligning himself with U.S. policy goals in the Asia-Pacific.

"All countries are making these comparisons, but Zelenskyy is making a point of making them," Wu said. "I believe he is reciprocating [in return for U.S. support]; he is supporting the strategic goals of the United States in the Indo-Pacific region."

"During the past few months, U.S. President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have continued to emphasize that the long-term competitor of the U.S. in future will be China," he said.

He said Zelenskyy's comments are also representative of a change of attitude in Eastern Europe and the EU to Taiwan, in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

"It's more appropriate for him to represent this change in the EU's position," Wu said of Zelenskyy.

Chen Chi-chieh, associate professor of political science at Taiwan's National Sun Yat-Sen University, said Zelenskyy has been fairly careful to avoid provoking Beijing, however.

"He is smart enough not to want to provoke China, so he can't speak out very clearly on the Taiwan question, so he had to answer it in a subtle way," Chen told RFA.

He said there are many areas in which Ukraine relies on Chinese assistance, and will likely rely on it for post-war reconstruction.

"Ukraine's relationship with Taiwan isn't that close, so he doesn't need to sacrifice the relationship between Ukraine and China to support Taiwan, at least not very clearly," Chen said.

Austin also made it clear that the United States is still committed to maintaining the status quo across the Taiwan Strait, as well as its commitment under the Taiwan Relations Act, which requires Washington to help Taiwan to defend itself.

The war in Ukraine  featured prominently during sessions at the Shangri-La Dialogue.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told participants that the invasion of Ukraine "indefensible," and "a preview of a possible world of chaos and turmoil."

China’s Defense Minister Wei Fenghe delivered scathing remarks about the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy in a speech in Singapore on Sunday, calling it an attempt to form a clique to contain China.

In his speech on "China’s vision for regional order" at the Shangri-La Dialogue security forum he hit back at Austin’s remarks a day earlier, saying China firmly rejects America’s accusations and threats.

Wei said the Indo-Pacific strategy was "an attempt to build an exclusive small group to hijack countries in our region” to target one specific country – China.

“It is a strategy to create conflict and confrontation to contain and encircle others,” said the minister, who is also a general in China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

Chen said Wei is trying to prevent the U.S. from being too good an ally to Taiwan.

"[Beijing] wants to deter Taiwan from getting too close to the United States, and also hopes that the United States will stop selling arms to Taiwan, especially advanced weaponry," Chen said.

"That's why they are using such harsh words."

But Wu said Wei doesn't hold a very powerful position in the Chinese military establishment.

"Wei Fenghe is not even a member of the CCP's Politburo, but plays quite a secondary role," Wu said, adding that bilateral dialogue between Wei and Austin at the Shangri-La Dialogue could yield little of substance because it wasn't a meeting of equals or counterparts.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

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

A long-time Shell consultant based in the United Kingdom quit with a bang on Monday, condemning the fossil fuel giant for its dangerous efforts to expand oil and gas production despite numerous scientific warnings about the need for swift decarbonization to avert climate disaster.

"Shell's stated safety ambition is to 'do no harm,'" Caroline Dennett, who worked with the company for 11 years as a senior safety consultant, said in a video shared on LinkedIn, which echoed points made in a resignation letter she emailed to CEO Ben Van Beurden and 1,400 employees.

This so-called "Goal Zero" pledge "sounds honorable," said Dennett. "But they are completely failing on it. They know that continued oil and gas extraction causes extreme harms to our climate, to our environment, and to people."

"Shell is operating beyond the design limits of our planetary systems," Dennett wrote in an email obtained by Politico. "Shell is not implementing steps to mitigate the known risks. Shell is not putting environmental safety before production."

Dennett cited the findings of the International Energy Agency (IEA), which made clear last year that achieving a net-zero energy system by 2050—thus giving the world an even chance of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels by 2100, beyond which impacts grow increasingly catastrophic—requires halting new dirty energy projects and accelerating the shift to clean power.

Although the IEA stated unequivocally in May 2021 that "investment in new fossil fuel supply" and "new oil and natural gas fields" are incompatible with its net-zero pathway, Shell acknowledged around the same time—in a document purportedly outlining its own net-zero strategy—that it plans to explore new extraction projects until 2025.

Moreover, in an attempt to capitalize on Russia's war on Ukraine, which has thrown Europe's energy market into disarray, Shell has been lobbying the U.K. government to let it drill a new offshore gas field in the North Sea.

"I can no longer work for a company that ignores all the alarms and dismisses the risks of climate change and ecological collapse," wrote Dennett.

On LinkedIn, Dennett encouraged Shell's leadership "to look in the mirror and ask themselves if they really believe their vision for more oil and gas extraction secures a safe future for humanity. "

"We must end all new extraction projects immediately and rapidly transition away from fossil fuels, and toward clean renewable energy sources," she added. "Shell should be using all its capital, technical, and human power to lead this transition, but they have no plan to do this."

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

Threats, intimidation and misogyny have long been a reality for women in public life around the world, and the pandemic appears to have amplified this toxic reality.

Aotearoa New Zealand is led by one of the world’s best-known female prime ministers, Jacinda Ardern, and was the first country in the world to grant all women the right to vote.

Yet even here today, attempts to silence, diminish and demean the prime minister, female MPs and other prominent women have plumbed new depths, leading to calls for more robust policing of violent online and offline behaviour.

• READ MORE: There are differences between free speech, hate speech and academic freedom — and they matter
• Academic freedom can’t be separated from responsibility
• From ‘pretty communist’ to ‘Jabcinda’ – what’s behind the vitriol directed at Jacinda Ardern?

Unfortunately, the phenomenon extends well beyond elected representatives and public health professionals into most workplaces, including academia.

Women working in universities, including those in positions of academic leadership, are also routinely subjected to online vitriol intended to shut them down — and thus to prevent them exercising their academic freedom to probe, question and test orthodox ways of making sense of the world.

One of the commonest defences of abusive or threatening language (online or not) is an appeal to everyone’s right to free speech.

And this has echoes within universities, too, when academic freedom becomes a testing ground of what is acceptable and what isn’t.

A duty to call it out
The international evidence indicates that almost all of this behaviour comes from men, some of them colleagues or students of the women concerned.

The abuse comes in various forms (such as trolling and rape or death threats) and takes place in a variety of settings, including conferences. It is enabled by, among other things, the hierarchical nature of universities, in which power is stratified and unequally distributed, including on the basis of gender.

Threatened scholars warn that online harassment risks academic freedom. Rebekah Tromble and Patricia Rossini feared for their safety when the conservative online world turned against them last summerhttps://t.co/FZYo1e8Qzf pic.twitter.com/WLPGRRzIe0

— Times Higher Education (@timeshighered) February 15, 2019

As male academics we have an obligation not just to call out these sorts of behaviour but also to identify some of the corrosive consequences of the misogyny directed against women academics, wherever they may work.

We need to use our own academic freedom to assess what can happen to that of academic women when digital misogyny passes unchecked.

Whose freedom to speak?
Misogyny in university settings takes place in a particular context: universities have a statutory obligation to serve as producers and repositories of knowledge and expertise, and to act as society’s “conscience and critic”.

Academic freedom is what enables staff and students to carry out the work through which these obligations are met. This specific type of freedom is a means to various ends, including testing and contesting perceived truths, advancing the boundaries of knowledge and talking truth to power.

It is intended to serve the public good, and must be exercised in the context of the “highest ethical standards” and be open to public scrutiny.

A great deal has been written about threats to academic freedom: intrusive or risk averse university managers, the pressures to commercialise universities’ operations, and governments bent on surveilling and stifling internal dissent are the usual suspects.

But when women academics are subjected to online misogyny, which is a common response when they exercise academic freedom, we are talking about a different kind of threat.

Opinion: Misgendering students is not “academic freedom.” It’s an abuse of power. https://t.co/AatNwzrnB1

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) April 1, 2021

Betrayal of academic freedom
The misogynists seek to silence, shut down, diminish and demean; to ridicule on the basis of gender, and to deride scholarship that doesn’t align with their own preconceptions of gender and body type.

Their behaviour is neither casual nor accidental. As journalist Michelle Duff put it, it is intended to intimidate “as part of a concentrated effort to suppress women’s participation in public and political life”.

Its aim is to achieve the obverse of the purpose of academic freedom: to maintain an unequal status quo rather than change it.

It is to the credit of women academics that the misogynists frequently fail. But sometimes the hostility does have a chilling effect. For a woman to exercise her academic freedom when she is the target of online threats to rape or kill requires considerable bravery.

Women who continue to test perceived truths, advance the boundaries of knowledge and speak truth to power under such conditions are academic exemplars. They are contributing to the public good at considerable personal cost.

‘Whaddarya?’
The online misogyny directed at women academics is taking place in a broader context in which violent language targeting individuals and minority groups is becoming increasingly graphic, normalised and visible.

We do not believe the misogynistic “righteous outrage” directed at academic women is justified under the statutory underpinnings of freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech — within or beyond a university — is not absolute, and to the extent that it is invoked to cloak violent rhetoric against women, existing constraints on that freedom (which are better thought of as protections for the targets of misogyny) need strengthening.

Men who engage in online misogyny almost always speak from an (unacknowledged) position of privilege. Moreover, by hiding their sense of entitlement behind core democratic notions, their self-indulgence does all of us a disfavour.

With academic freedom comes the moral responsibility to challenge misogyny and not stay silent. What so many women across New Zealand’s tertiary sector are subject to poses a challenge to men everywhere.

The kind of conduct our women colleagues are routinely subjected to is the sort of behaviour at the heart of Greg McGee’s seminal critique of masculinity and masculine insecurity in New Zealand, the play Foreskin’s Lament. In the final scene of the play, the main character stares out at the audience and asks: “Whaddarya, whaddarya, whaddarya?”

He might have been asking the question of every man, including those of us who work in universities.

Dr Richard Shaw is professor of politics, Massey University; Dr Andrew Dickson is senior lecturer, Massey University; Dr Bevan Erueti, senior lecturer — Health Promotion/Associate Dean — Māori, Massey University; Dr Glenn Banks is professor of geography and head of school, School of People, Environment and Planning, Massey University; Dr John O’Neill, head of the Institute of Education te Kura o Te Mātauranga, Massey University, and Dr Roger McEwan is senior lecturer, Massey 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.