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

When an AI script written by a Department of Government Efficiency employee came across a contract for internet service, it flagged it as cancelable. Not because it was waste, fraud or abuse — the Department of Veterans Affairs needs internet connectivity after all — but because the model was given unclear and conflicting instructions.

Sahil Lavingia, who wrote the code, told it to cancel, or in his words “munch,” anything that wasn’t “directly supporting patient care.” Unfortunately, neither Lavingia nor the model had the knowledge required to make such determinations.

“I think that mistakes were made,” said Lavingia, who worked at DOGE for nearly two months, in an interview with ProPublica. “I’m sure mistakes were made. Mistakes are always made.”

It turns out, a lot of mistakes were made as DOGE and the VA rushed to implement President Donald Trump’s February executive order mandating all of the VA’s contracts be reviewed within 30 days.

ProPublica obtained the code and prompts — the instructions given to the AI model — used to review the contracts and interviewed Lavingia and experts in both AI and government procurement. We are publishing an analysis of those prompts to help the public understand how this technology is being deployed in the federal government.

The experts found numerous and troubling flaws: the code relied on older, general-purpose models not suited for the task; the model hallucinated contract amounts, deciding around 1,100 of the agreements were each worth $34 million when they were sometimes worth thousands; and the AI did not analyze the entire text of contracts. Most experts said that, in addition to the technical issues, using off-the-shelf AI models for the task — with little context on how the VA works — should have been a nonstarter.

Lavingia, a software engineer enlisted by DOGE, acknowledged there were flaws in what he created and blamed, in part, a lack of time and proper tools. He also stressed that he knew his list of what he called “MUNCHABLE” contracts would be vetted by others before a final decision was made.

Portions of the prompt are pasted below along with commentary from experts we interviewed. Lavingia published a complete version of it on his personal GitHub account.

Problems with how the model was constructed can be detected from the very opening lines of code, where the DOGE employee instructs the model how to behave:

You are an AI assistant that analyzes government contracts. Always provide comprehensive few-sentence descriptions that explain WHO the contract is with, WHAT specific services/products are provided, and WHO benefits from these services. Remember that contracts for EMR systems and healthcare IT infrastructure directly supporting patient care should be classified as NOT munchable. Contracts related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives or services that could be easily handled by in-house W2 employees should be classified as MUNCHABLE. Consider 'soft services' like healthcare technology management, data management, administrative consulting, portfolio management, case management, and product catalog management as MUNCHABLE. For contract modifications, mark the munchable status as 'N/A'. For IDIQ contracts, be more aggressive about termination unless they are for core medical services or benefits processing.

This part of the prompt, known as a system prompt, is intended to shape the overall behavior of the large language model, or LLM, the technology behind AI bots like ChatGPT. In this case, it was used before both steps of the process: first, before Lavingia used it to obtain information like contract amounts; then, before determining if a contract should be canceled.

Including information not related to the task at hand can confuse AI. At this point, it’s only being asked to gather information from the text of the contract. Everything related to “munchable status,” “soft-services” or “DEI” is irrelevant. Experts told ProPublica that trying to fix issues by adding more instructions can actually have the opposite effect — especially if they’re irrelevant.

Analyze the following contract text and extract the basic information below. If you can't find specific information, write "Not found".

CONTRACT TEXT: {text[:10000]} # Using first 10000 chars to stay within token limits

The models were only shown the first 10,000 characters from each document, or approximately 2,500 words. Experts were confused by this, noting that OpenAI models support inputs over 50 times that size. Lavingia said that he had to use an older AI model that the VA had already signed a contract for.

Please extract the following information: 1. Contract Number/PIID 2. Parent Contract Number (if this is a child contract) 3. Contract Description - IMPORTANT: Provide a DETAILED 1-2 sentence description that clearly explains what the contract is for. Include WHO the vendor is, WHAT specific products or services they provide, and WHO the end recipients or beneficiaries are. For example, instead of "Custom powered wheelchair", write "Contract with XYZ Medical Equipment Provider to supply custom-powered wheelchairs and related maintenance services to veteran patients at VA medical centers." 4. Vendor Name 5. Total Contract Value (in USD) 6. FY 25 Value (in USD) 7. Remaining Obligations (in USD) 8. Contracting Officer Name 9. Is this an IDIQ contract? (true/false) 10. Is this a modification? (true/false)

This portion of the prompt instructs the AI to extract the contract number and other key details of a contract, such as the “total contract value.”

This was error-prone and not necessary, as accurate contract information can already be found in publicly available databases like USASpending. In some cases, this led to the AI system being given an outdated version of a contract, which led to it reporting a misleadingly large contract amount. In other cases, the model mistakenly pulled an irrelevant number from the page instead of the contract value.

“They are looking for information where it’s easy to get, rather than where it’s correct,” said Waldo Jaquith, a former Obama appointee who oversaw IT contracting at the Treasury Department. “This is the lazy approach to gathering the information that they want. It’s faster, but it’s less accurate.”

Lavingia acknowledged that this approach led to errors but said that those errors were later corrected by VA staff.

Once the program extracted this information, it ran a second pass to determine if the contract was “munchable.”

Based on the following contract information, determine if this contract is "munchable" based on these criteria:

CONTRACT INFORMATION: {text[:10000]} # Using first 10000 chars to stay within token limits

Again, only the first 10,000 characters were shown to the model. As a result, the munchable determination was based purely on the first few pages of the contract document.

Then, evaluate if this contract is "munchable" based on these criteria: - If this is a contract modification, mark it as "N/A" for munchable status - If this is an IDIQ contract:   * For medical devices/equipment: NOT MUNCHABLE   * For recruiting/staffing: MUNCHABLE   * For other services: Consider termination if not core medical/benefits - Level 0: Direct patient care (e.g., bedside nurse) - NOT MUNCHABLE - Level 1: Necessary consultants that can't be insourced - NOT MUNCHABLE

The above prompt section is the first set of instructions telling the AI how to flag contracts. The prompt provides little explanation of what it’s looking for, failing to define what qualifies as “core medical/benefits” and lacking information about what a “necessary consultant” is.

For the types of models the DOGE analysis used, including all the necessary information to make an accurate determination is critical.

Cary Coglianese, a University of Pennsylvania professor who studies the governmental use of artificial intelligence, said that knowing which jobs could be done in-house “calls for a very sophisticated understanding of medical care, of institutional management, of availability of human resources” that the model does not have.

- Contracts related to "diversity, equity, and inclusion" (DEI) initiatives - MUNCHABLE

The prompt above tries to implement a fundamental policy of the Trump administration: killing all DEI programs. But the prompt fails to include a definition of what DEI is, leaving the model to decide.

Despite the instruction to cancel DEI-related contracts, very few were flagged for this reason. Procurement experts noted that it’s very unlikely for information like this to be found in the first few pages of a contract.

- Level 2+: Multiple layers removed from veterans care - MUNCHABLE - Services that could easily be replaced by in-house W2 employees - MUNCHABLE

These two lines — which experts say were poorly defined — carried the most weight in the DOGE analysis. The response from the AI frequently cited these reasons as the justification for munchability. Nearly every justification included a form of the phrase “direct patient care,” and in a third of cases the model flagged contracts because it stated the services could be handled in-house.

The poorly defined requirements led to several contracts for VA office internet services being flagged for cancellation. In one justification, the model had this to say:

The contract provides data services for internet connectivity, which is an IT infrastructure service that is multiple layers removed from direct clinical patient care and could likely be performed in-house, making it classified as munchable.

IMPORTANT EXCEPTIONS - These are NOT MUNCHABLE: - Third-party financial audits and compliance reviews - Medical equipment audits and certifications (e.g., MRI, CT scan, nuclear medicine equipment) - Nuclear physics and radiation safety audits for medical equipment - Medical device safety and compliance audits - Healthcare facility accreditation reviews - Clinical trial audits and monitoring - Medical billing and coding compliance audits - Healthcare fraud and abuse investigations - Medical records privacy and security audits - Healthcare quality assurance reviews - Community Living Center (CLC) surveys and inspections - State Veterans Home surveys and inspections - Long-term care facility quality surveys - Nursing home resident safety and care quality reviews - Assisted living facility compliance surveys - Veteran housing quality and safety inspections - Residential care facility accreditation reviews

Despite these instructions, AI flagged many audit- and compliance-related contracts as “munchable,” labeling them as “soft services.”

In one case, the model even acknowledged the importance of compliance while flagging a contract for cancellation, stating: “Although essential to ensuring accurate medical records and billing, these services are an administrative support function (a ‘soft service’) rather than direct patient care.”

Key considerations: - Direct patient care involves: physical examinations, medical procedures, medication administration - Distinguish between medical/clinical and psychosocial support

Shobita Parthasarathy, professor of public policy and director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at University of Michigan, told ProPublica that this piece of the prompt was notable in that it instructs the model to “distinguish” between the two types of services without instructing the model what to save and what to kill.

The emphasis on “direct patient care” is reflected in how often the AI cited it in its recommendations, even when the model did not have any information about a contract. In one instance where it labeled every field “not found,” it still decided the contract was munchable. It gave this reason:

Without evidence that it involves essential medical procedures or direct clinical support, and assuming the contract is for administrative or related support services, it meets the criteria for being classified as munchable.

In reality, this contract was for the preventative maintenance of important safety devices known as ceiling lifts at VA medical centers, including three sites in Maryland. The contract itself stated:

Ceiling Lifts are used by employees to reposition patients during their care. They are critical safety devices for employees and patients, and must be maintained and inspected appropriately.

Specific services that should be classified as MUNCHABLE (these are "soft services" or consulting-type services): - Healthcare technology management (HTM) services - Data Commons Software as a Service (SaaS) - Administrative management and consulting services - Data management and analytics services - Product catalog or listing management - Planning and transition support services - Portfolio management services - Operational management review - Technology guides and alerts services - Case management administrative services - Case abstracts, casefinding, follow-up services - Enterprise-level portfolio management - Support for specific initiatives (like PACT Act) - Administrative updates to product information - Research data management platforms or repositories - Drug/pharmaceutical lifecycle management and pricing analysis - Backup Contracting Officer's Representatives (CORs) or administrative oversight roles - Modernization and renovation extensions not directly tied to patient care - DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) initiatives - Climate & Sustainability programs - Consulting & Research Services - Non-Performing/Non-Essential Contracts - Recruitment Services

This portion of the prompt attempts to define “soft services.” It uses many highly specific examples but also throws in vague categories without definitions like “non-performing/non-essential contracts.”

Experts said that in order for a model to properly determine this, it would need to be given information about the essential activities and what’s required to support them.

Important clarifications based on past analysis errors: 2. Lifecycle management of drugs/pharmaceuticals IS MUNCHABLE (different from direct supply) 3. Backup administrative roles (like alternate CORs) ARE MUNCHABLE as they create duplicative work 4. Contract extensions for renovations/modernization ARE MUNCHABLE unless directly tied to patient care

This section of the prompt was the result of analysis by Lavingia and other DOGE staff, Lavingia explained. “This is probably from a session where I ran a prior version of the script that most likely a DOGE person was like, ‘It’s not being aggressive enough.’ I don’t know why it starts with a 2. I guess I disagreed with one of them, and so we only put 2, 3 and 4 here.”

Notably, our review found that the only clarifications related to past errors were related to scenarios where the model wasn’t flagging enough contracts for cancellation.

Direct patient care that is NOT MUNCHABLE includes: - Conducting physical examinations - Administering medications and treatments - Performing medical procedures and interventions - Monitoring and assessing patient responses - Supply of actual medical products (pharmaceuticals, medical equipment) - Maintenance of critical medical equipment - Custom medical devices (wheelchairs, prosthetics) - Essential therapeutic services with proven efficacy

For maintenance contracts, consider whether pricing appears reasonable. If maintenance costs seem excessive, flag them as potentially over-priced despite being necessary.

This section of the prompt provides the most detail about what constitutes “direct patient care.” While it does cover many aspects of care, it still leaves a lot of ambiguity and forces the model to make its own judgements about what constitutes “proven efficacy” and “critical” medical equipment.

In addition to the limited information given on what constitutes direct patient care, there is no information about how to determine if a price is “reasonable,” especially since the LLM only sees the first few pages of the document. The models lack knowledge about what’s normal for government contracts.

“I just do not understand how it would be possible. This is hard for a human to figure out,” Jaquith said about whether AI could accurately determine if a contract was reasonably priced. “I don’t see any way that an LLM could know this without a lot of really specialized training.”

Services that can be easily insourced (MUNCHABLE): - Video production and multimedia services - Customer support/call centers - PowerPoint/presentation creation - Recruiting and outreach services - Public affairs and communications - Administrative support - Basic IT support (non-specialized) - Content creation and writing - Training services (non-specialized) - Event planning and coordination

This section explicitly lists which tasks could be “easily insourced” by VA staff, and more than 500 different contracts were flagged as “munchable” for this reason.

“A larger issue with all of this is there seems to be an assumption here that contracts are almost inherently wasteful,” Coglianese said when shown this section of the prompt. “Other services, like the kinds that are here, are cheaper to contract for. In fact, these are exactly the sorts of things that we would not want to treat as ‘munchable.’” He went on to explain that insourcing some of these tasks could also “siphon human sources away from direct primary patient care.”

In an interview, Lavingia acknowledged some of these jobs might be better handled externally. “We don’t want to cut the ones that would make the VA less efficient or cause us to hire a bunch of people in-house,” Lavingia explained. “Which currently they can’t do because there’s a hiring freeze.”

The VA is standing behind its use of AI to examine contracts, calling it “a commonsense precedent.” And documents obtained by ProPublica suggest the VA is looking at additional ways AI can be deployed. A March email from a top VA official to DOGE stated:

Today, VA receives over 2 million disability claims per year, and the average time for a decision is 130 days. We believe that key technical improvements (including AI and other automation), combined with Veteran-first process/culture changes pushed from our Secretary’s office could dramatically improve this. A small existing pilot in this space has resulted in 3% of recent claims being processed in less than 30 days. Our mission is to figure out how to grow from 3% to 30% and then upwards such that only the most complex claims take more than a few days.

If you have any information about the misuse or abuse of AI within government agencies, reach out to us via our Signal or SecureDrop channels.

If you’d like to talk to someone specific, Brandon Roberts is an investigative journalist on the news applications team and has a wealth of experience using and dissecting artificial intelligence. He can be reached on Signal @brandonrobertz.01 or by email brandon.roberts@propublica.org.

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

Video posted on social media showed hundreds of parents outside the Nangong municipal government building in Hebei province on Sunday, demanding Fengyi Elementary School stay open after learning it was set to close its doors.

The planned closure appeared to be part of a broader government effort that began several years ago to scale back private education and boost state-run schools.

In the video, posted on X by Yesterday, a project that documents mass protests in China, the demonstrators could be heard shouting “Disagree!” and “Leaders come out!”

Witnesses told RFA that the protest continued into the night, and police were dispatched to maintain order.

A parent who did not want to be named for safety reasons told Radio Free Asia on Thursday that the school was well-regarded and parents would compete for placements for their children through a public lottery.

With the school’s closure, children were going to be sent instead to public schools with a reputation for chaotic management and high turnover of teachers, he said.

“They (the government) saw that the school had high educational quality and that parents with financial means sent their children to Fengyi Elementary School, so they wanted to close it down,” the parent said.

As well as being told the school would close, parents were told to choose a public school for their children. The video posted on X showed a form for them to fill out to list the priority of their school choices.

But following the protest, authorities reversed course.

An official from the Nangong City government office confirmed a “protest by thousands of parents a few days ago,” but said that “the problem has been resolved” and that “Fengyi Elementary School will not be closed.” The official said he wasn’t able to provide further details and the matter was being addressed by the Education Bureau.

In recent years, the Chinese Communist Party has sought to scale back private education and bring private schools under state control with the justification that it would promote fairness in education and reduce costs for parents. However, it has more recently eased restrictions on private tutoring.

According to statistics released by the Ministry of Education last October, the total number of private schools in the country has decreased by more than 20,000 in the past four years, and by more than 11,000 in 2023 alone. The data also showed that the current number of students enrolled in private schools stood at less than 50 million, down more than 3 million from 2023. In total, that represents nearly 17% of the total student population nationwide.

But private schools remain a first choice for many parents in China even as local governments have implemented policies to restrict the private education and narrow the gap in the quality with education offered in the public sector.

Jia Lingmin, a retired teacher from Zhengzhou, Henan, told RFA that as birth rates in China continue to decline, the number of children entering school is also decreasing year by year, and many public schools are facing the problem of insufficient enrollment and closure.

“Private schools have high education quality and a good teaching environment, and many parents are willing to send their children to private schools,” she said.

Yao Li, a parent in Handan, Hebei, said that although public schools offer free tuition for ages at which education is compulsory – from age 6 to 15 - parents still generally prefer private schools in terms of education, teacher quality and management methods.

The Nangong City Education Bureau Office did not respond to RFA’s call seeking comment.

Edited by Mat Pennington.

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

A strike by Southern California healthcare workers at Kaiser organized under the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) has now carried on for 20 weeks, prompting the intervention of California Governor Gavin Newsom. After months of deadlock, Kaiser refused to yield to workers’ demands for pensions and adequate time to attend to patient care duties. Over a month after Newsom’s office offered to bring both sides into mediation, Kaiser finally agreed to sit down with the Governor’s mediators, with sessions beginning on March 10. Mental health patients in particular have been left in the lurch by Kaiser’s intransigence, and the crisis is only worsening as the aftermath of the recent Los Angeles wildfires takes its toll on the area’s residents. Working People co-host Mel Buer investigates the ongoing strike in this interview with Kaiser workers Jessica Rentz and Adriana Webb.

Editor’s note: this episode was recorded on February 25, 2025, before Kaiser agreed to mediation on March 3, 2025.

Additional links/info: 

• Previous coverage of the strike from The Real News:
  • ‘What they’re offering is stabilization, not care’: Kaiser Strands Patients in Limbo as Strike Approaches Fourth Month
  • Kaiser workers’ strike enters second week in Southern California
• ABC7, February 7: “Kaiser Permanente mental health workers strike can end with help of a mediator, Gov. Newsom suggests”

Links to support the strike:

• Mutual Aid: “Adopt a Striking Worker”
• Strike GoFundMe 
• Picket Line Locations 
• NUHW Strike Page 

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production:
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Mel Buer.

The Center for Biological Diversity filed the challenge on February 19 in the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals under the Clean Air Act. The advocacy group says the federal agency has prohibited the use of phosphogypsum, a radioactive, carcinogenic, and toxic waste generated by the fertilizer industry, in road construction since 1992, citing an “unacceptable level of risk to public health.”

The legal challenge is centered on a road project proposed at the New Wales facility of Mosaic Fertilizer, a subsidiary of The Mosaic Company, some 40 miles east of Tampa. The EPA approved the project in December 2024, noting the authorization applied only to the single project and included conditions meant to ensure the project would remain within the scope of the application. But Ragan Whitlock, Florida staff attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, feared the project could lead to more roadways built with the toxic waste.

“Part of what makes this process so alarming, it’s not just a one-off science experiment,” he said. “It’s being billed as the intermediate step between laboratory testing and full-scale implementation of the idea. So our concern is that whatever methodology is used for this project will be used for national approval down the road.”

Read Next

‘Roadspreading’ returns: How Pennsylvania’s oil industry quietly dumped waste across the state

Jake Bolster

Phosphogypsum contains radium, which as it decays forms radon gas. Both radium and radon are radioactive and can cause cancer. Normally, phosphogypsum is disposed of in engineered piles called stacks to limit public exposure to emissions of radon. The stacks can be expanded as they reach capacity or closed, which involves draining and capping. More than 1 billion tons of the waste is stored in stacks in Florida, with the fertilizer industry adding some 40 million tons every year, according to the Center for Biological Diversity.

Mosaic aims to construct a test road near its Florida stack with four sections, each made with varying mixtures of phosphogypsum. The waste would be used in the road base, which would be paved over with asphalt. University of Florida researchers would be involved in the study.

Most of the comments the EPA received in response to the proposal opposed the use of phosphogypsum in road construction in general and criticized the current methods for managing the waste, but the federal agency said these comments were outside the scope of its review. The agency declined to comment on pending litigation.

“The review found that Mosaic’s risk assessment is technically acceptable, and that the potential radiological risks from the proposed project meet the regulatory requirements,” the EPA stated in the Federal Register dated December 23, 2024. “The project is at least as protective of public health as maintaining the phosphogypsum in a stack.”

Mosaic has faced scrutiny in the past after a pond at its Piney Point site leaked and threatened to collapse in 2021, forcing the release of 215 million gallons of contaminated water into Tampa Bay. Mosaic did not respond to a request for comment on the new litigation.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Plan to build a road with radioactive waste in Florida prompts legal challenge against the EPA on Mar 1, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Amy Green, Inside Climate News.

Exiled former pro-democracy lawmaker Ted Hui, who like Lam is a member of the Democratic Party, accusing authorities of “rewriting history.”

“It’s a false accusation and part of a totally fabricated version of history that Hong Kong people don’t recognize,” Hui told RFA Cantonese after the verdict was announced on Dec. 12.

“How does the court see the people of Hong Kong?” he asked. “How can they act like they live in two separate worlds?”

The District Court found Lam and six others guilty of “taking part in a riot” by as dozens of thugs in white T-shirts rained blows down on the heads of unarmed passengers -- including their own -- using rattan canes and wooden poles at Yuen Long station on July 21, 2019.

Lam, one of the defendants in the subversion trial of 47 activists for holding a democratic primary, is also currently serving a 6-years-and-9-month prison sentence for “conspiracy to subvert state power.”

While the defense argued that the men were defending themselves against the thugs, the prosecution said they had “provoked” the attacks and used social media to incite people to turn up and defend against the men.

Letters of thanks

The verdict came despite Lam and former District Councilor Sin Cheuk-lam having received letters from the Hong Kong Police thanking them for their role in the incident.

Sentencing in the trial, which began in October 2023, is expected on Feb. 27, with mitigation hearings set for Jan. 22.

A conviction for rioting carries a maximum sentence of 10 years' imprisonment, although the District Court is limited to handing out sentences of no more than seven years.

Issuing his verdict on Dec. 12, Judge Stanley Chan said he didn’t believe that Lam had using his standing as a Legislative Councilor to mediate the conflict or monitor the police response, and accused him of trying to take advantage of the situation for his own political benefit.

Felt numb

A victim of the attacks who is now overseas and gave only the pseudonym Galileo for fear of reprisals said he felt numb when he heard Thursday’s verdict, as he had felt the result to be inevitable amid an ongoing crackdown on public dissent in Hong Kong.

“I used a fire extinguisher and sprayed water [during the attacks],” Galileo said, adding that he and journalist Gwyneth Ho were “beaten several times.”

“I was panicky and scared, and my instinct was to protect myself and others,” he said.

According to Galileo, Lam’s actions likely protected others from also being attacked.

“I felt that his presence made everyone feel calmer, because he was a member of the Legislative Council at the time,” he said of Lam’s role in the incident. “He kept saying the police were coming, and everyone believed him, so they waited, but the police never came.”

Police were inundated with emergency calls from the start of the attacks, according to multiple contemporary reports, but didn’t move in until 39 minutes after the attacks began.

In a recent book about the protests, former Washington Post Hong Kong correspondent Shibani Mahtani and The Atlantic writer Timothy McLaughlin wrote that the Hong Kong authorities knew about the attacks in advance.

Members of Hong Kong’s criminal underworld “triad” organizations had been discussing the planned attack for days on a WhatsApp group that was being monitored by a detective sergeant from the Organized Crime and Triad Bureau, the book said.

Chased and beaten

According to multiple accounts from the time, Lam first went to Mei Foo MTR station to warn people not to travel north to Yuen Long, after dozens of white-clad thugs were spotted assembling at a nearby chicken market.

When live footage of beatings started to emerge, Lam called the local community police sergeant and asked him to dispatch officers to the scene as soon as possible, before setting off himself for Yuen Long to monitor the situation in person.

On arrival, he warned some of the attackers not to “do anything,” and told people he had called the police. Eventually, the attackers charged, and Lam and others were chased and beaten all the way onto a train.

One of the people shown in that early social media footage was chef Calvin So, who displayed red welts across his back following beatings by the white-clad attackers.

So told RFA Cantonese on Friday: “The guys in white were really beating people, and injured some people ... I don’t understand because Lam Cheuk-ting’s side were spraying water at them and telling people to leave.”

He described the verdict as “ridiculous,” adding: “But ridiculous things happen every day in Hong Kong nowadays.”

Erosion of judicial independence

In a recent report on the erosion of Hong Kong judicial independence amid an ongoing crackdown on dissent that followed the 2019 protests, law experts at Georgetown University said the city’s courts now have to “tread carefully” now that the ruling Chinese Communist Party has explicitly rejected the liberal values the legal system was built on.

RELATED STORIES

EXPLAINED: What is the Article 23 security law in Hong Kong?

Hong Kong police ‘knew about’ Yuen Long mob attacks beforehand

EXPLAINED: Who are the Hong Kong 47?

Nowadays, Hong Kong’s once-independent courts tend to find along pro-Beijing lines, particularly in politically sensitive cases, according to the December 2024 report, which focused on the impact of a High Court injunction against the banned protest anthem “Glory to Hong Kong.”

“In our view, at least some judges are issuing pro-regime verdicts in order to advance their careers,” said the report, authored by Eric Lai, Lokman Tsui and Thomas Kellogg.

“The government’s aggressive implementation of the National Security Law has sent a clear signal to individual judges that their professional advancement depends on toeing the government’s ideological line, and delivering a steady stream of guilty verdicts.”

Translated with additional reporting by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Luk Nam Choi and Edward Li for RFA Cantonese.

In their renewed push, junta forces are increasingly using Chinese-made surveillance and combat drones, rebels say, several of which have fallen into the hands of guerrilla groups.

The renewed fighting in the central Mandalay region comes almost a year after the Three Brotherhood Alliance of ethnic armies launched their Operation 1027 offensive -- named for its Oct. 27, 2023, start date -- which pushed back the military from territory in northern Shan state and other regions following its 2021 coup d’etat.

Pro-democracy militias, known as People’s Defense Forces, or PDFs -- formed by civilians after the coup to fight the military -- also launched offensives, capturing central areas, including around Myanmar’s second-biggest city of Mandalay.

For months, it seemed like the military was pushed back on its heels.

But two of the three “Brotherhood” armies -- the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, or MNDAA, and the Ta’ang National Liberation Army, or TNLA -- recently agreed to ceasefires after pressure from neighboring China for them to talk peace.

That may have given junta forces renewed impetus to re-take territory it lost over the past year.

Over the past month, junta troops have attacked the towns of Po Wa, Sine Kone and surrounding villages “multiple times,” said a resident of Madaya, 48 kilometers (30 miles) north of Mandalay.

In recent days, junta troops have attacked several towns and villages in Mandalay region, sending residents fleeing, they told RFA Burmese.

On Sunday, junta troops set fire to houses in Po Wa (North) and Sin Kone villages, in western Madaya township, destroying about 300 homes.

“Nearly the entire western region has been destroyed in the military raids,” said a Madaya resident who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on condition of anonymity due to security concerns. “There are no residents left in the western part of Madaya -- everyone has fled.”

According to the resident “around 10,000 residents from five villages” have been displaced due to the military’s advance.

Retaking villages

Meanwhile, on Dec. 4, junta forces regained control of Twin Nge village, with more than 1,000 houses and 4,000 residents, in Thabeikkyin district, bordering Madaya, residents said. The village is on a road connection from Thabeikkyin to the townships of Shwegu and Bhamo in Kachin state, as well as Mongmit in northern Shan state.

Maung Maung Swe, the deputy secretary of the Ministry of Defense for Myanmar’s shadow National Unity Government, or NUG, told RFA that the military’s deployment of large forces in concentrated offensives had forced the PDF to cede certain areas.

“[The military] deployed additional troops by air and launched offensives with air support,” he said. “As a result, we had to withdraw from some of the camps we had been holding due to the size of their advancing forces.”

In Myingyan district, areas abandoned by the military have been taken over by the pro-junta Pyu Saw Htee militia, which has launched its own campaign of arson and attacks, according to residents and the PDF.

An official from the Myingyan PDF told RFA that the junta’s offensive in areas it previously abandoned is aimed at regaining control and facilitating the holding of elections there.

The junta chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, has vowed to complete a census by the end of the year and then hold “free and fair elections,” but opponents and rebel leaders have dismissed the ballot as a sham, and a way for the military to legitimize its grip on power.

The census, aimed at tallying voters ahead of the 2025 elections, has met strong opposition from ethnic minority insurgent groups who say preparations for a nationwide vote are impossible while they battle a regime that continues to arrest and kill its critics.

Attempts by RFA to reach the junta’s spokesperson for the Mandalay region for comment on the situation went unanswered on Monday.

Chinese drones

In the first year or two of the conflict, rebel groups used drones as a low-cost method to level the playing field against the better-equipped military.

But at the end of 2023, the junta began buying Chinese drones and conducting training for its troops, according to former military officials.

Now, the military is using Chinese drones to fight its enemies across the country, said an anti-junta fighter who asked to be identified as Nyein, who runs the Cloud Wings drone unit based in Kayin state.

“The military junta has extensively used drones in almost all their battles,” he said. “They widely use Chinese drones, along with Chinese technology and hardware.”

Reports of widespread use of Chinese drones by the military follow a Sept. 26 announcement by the junta’s deputy minister for home affairs, Lt. Gen. Ni Lin Aung, that the regime had sought China’s assistance to “curb the flow of unmanned aerial vehicles” to the armed opposition.

RELATED STORIES

Kachin, Shan residents face hardships as China and Myanmar block trade

What happens when China puts boots on the ground in Myanmar?

Myanmar’s Kachin insurgents take control of their border with China

Htoo Khant Zaw, a press officer for the People’s Defense Comrade, which monitors airstrikes, told RFA that the junta has been using Chinese-made attack drones more frequently in townships in central Myanmar’s Sagaing region.

Other PDF officials told RFA that junta forces have been deploying Chinese drones “day and night” in Magway region to drop bombs and surveil rebel fighters.

RFA received no response from China’s embassy to inquiries regarding the junta’s use of Chinese drones. Attempts to reach junta spokesperson Major General Zaw Min Tun for a response to reports of civilian casualties caused by Chinese drones also went unanswered.

According to figures compiled by RFA, military drone attacks in October and November killed 13 civilians, including women and children, and injured 43.

Kachin rebels in talks with China

Meanwhile, battlefield successes by rebel groups have alarmed China, which has extensive economic interests in its neighbor to the south, including energy pipelines running up from the Indian Ocean and mining projects.

China has thrown its support behind the junta and its plans for an election next year, putting pressure on insurgent groups to respond positively to recent junta offers of talks.

General N’Ban La, the leader of one of the groups -- the Kachin Independence Organization, or KIO, in Kachin state -- has been holding talks with Chinese officials in China since Sunday, according to KIO spokesperson Major General Naw Bu, amid heavy fighting between Kachin rebels and the junta in Bamaw and Mansi townships.

“China and the KIO usually meet once a month or once every couple of months,” he said. “We were not made aware of the topic of discussion.”

Naw Bu said that the names of those in attendance from the China side and the venue for the talks had not been made public.

After the KIO’s armed wing, the Kachin Independence Army, or KIA, attacked and captured all border posts along Kachin state’s border with China in November, Beijing responded by closing its border gates, halting all trade.

Kachin political commentator Sha Bat said the meeting could be aimed at stabilizing the border region, reopening gates to trade, and preempting closer ties between rebels and Western governments.

Despite Chinese pressure since early October, the KIA has been attacking Bamaw township after seizing the rare earth mining towns of Chipwi and Sawt Lau, as well as the border towns of Panwa and Kan Paik Ti.

The KIA controls 13 towns in Kachin state and neighboring northern Shan state.

Translated by Aung Naing for RFA Burmese. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

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

Inspectors from China’s State Council have been touring the country in recent weeks in a bid to bring the nation’s lagging fire and workplace safety standards up to scratch, carrying spot checks and under-cover investigations that could land business owners with a big fine.

But store owners and food stall-holders are fighting back by shutting up shop, in an apparent bid to evade an inspection that could wind up costing them dearly in fines.

Photos of shuttered stores in two cities in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong were circulating on social media over the weekend.

Some showed humorous notices that read: “Off today due to fear of ghosts.”

“The boss is in a bad mood,” read another, while one notice suggested life was getting too tough for business owners: “The fish are drowning in water.”

Business owners also took to social media to explain the closures.

“These closures have been forced on us; they’re not voluntary,” one business owner commented. “Nobody wants to take the risk of running afoul of the inspection team.”

Reports emerged from Guangdong’s Chaozhou and Shantou cities that night markets, barbecue stalls and street hawkers were shutting up shop ahead of the inspections, for fear of getting hit with a hefty fine.

The “New Hunan” news service reported that stalls that cook on an open flame had been ordered to shut down from Nov. 22-28 by authorities at Shantou’s Longyan South nightmarket.

Social media users from Chaozhou commented: “Never seen so many stores closed,” drawing parallels with the three years of lockdowns under the zero-COVID policy, which ended in December 2022 following nationwide protests.

A social media user from the area city described it as “a ghost town that is especially eerie at night.”

Another comment said the closures were understandable.

“If you close, you only lose a few hundred yuan, whereas you could lose tens of thousands if you open,” read one comment. “If you close, your turnover will be zero, but if you open, it could be negative.”

Official denials

Chaozhao officials responded to the online speculation, which saw the topic trending on Weibo on Saturday, by denying claims that the businesses were closing to avoid inspection, and saying that it was business as usual in the city, local media reported.

But local residents ridiculed the response.

“I would have believed this if I didn’t live locally,” commented one, while another added: “The whole street was shut down.”

Local authorities later issued warnings to businesses that closing down could result in their being targeted for more stringent inspections in future, according to a copy of an official notice sent to the X citizen media account “Mr Li is not your teacher.”

RELATED STORIES

Worker Safety Concerns Linger 20 Years After Shenzhen Factory Fire

Named and shamed for ‘lying flat’

Chinese local governments struggle to pay civil servants' wages

A business owner from Guangdong who gave only the surname Liu for fear of reprisals said it was rare to see widespread store closures.

“It’s rare in our area to see such large-scale store closures,” he said. “It’s not a good idea to make it so that people are afraid to open for business.”

He said it was the sudden and nationwide nature of the inspections that had made many business owners particularly wary.

The Chaozhou government later issued a notice calling on businesses not to “intentionally close their doors to inspections without justifiable reason.”

A legal professional from Guangdong who gave only the surname Chen for fear of reprisal said many see safety inspections as the government trying to boost revenues when local coffers are empty.

“It’s another way for them to raise money,” Chen said. “Yes, they want to eliminate safety hazards and maintain stability, but they also want to help local governments raise revenues.”

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Qian Lang for RFA Mandarin.

The prison’s deputy director and spokesman, Nuth Savana, will continue in those roles while adding the director title, Minister of Interior Sar Sokha said in a statement on Wednesday.

No reason was given for the appointment, but it comes just days after Prime Minister Hun Manet ordered a probe into the video, which began circulating on Facebook and other social media accounts last week. 

It shows one young man – clad in just his underwear and a pair of sunglasses – dancing next to two prisoners who hug each other as they sway to an electronic beat. In the foreground, another prisoner chops up a white powder as others bop around amid flashing lights.

Nuth Savana told Radio Free Asia on Thursday that an investigation he led this week found that the video footage was taken in January 2023 during the Chinese New Year holiday and was shot inside Prey Sar.

“I am working on the case step by step,” he said. “The minister of interior ordered strict measures against those who were involved. He ordered inspectors to go there in addition to my team.”

On Tuesday, Hun Manet said at a public appearance in Kandal province that he had asked Sar Sokha to investigate why inmates were allowed to have a party in what looks to be a prison’s common area.

“We don’t know for sure what is happening on the Facebook video,” the prime minister said, according to a video of his speech that was posted to Facebook. “Maybe the [video] was 10 years old but we need to investigate, and we especially need to reform and strengthen the prisons across the country.”

He suggested that management of Prey Sar could be strengthened “by shuffling its leadership.”

‘Strict measures’ ordered

In June, prison officials in northern Stung Treng province were accused of taking bribes and then releasing eight Chinese prisoners who authorities said had illegally crossed into Cambodia.

The prisoners had told police that they had been smuggled across the border and planned to travel to Phnom Penh and Sihanoukville, a seaside resort that has become a hotbed of criminal activity over the last decade. 

Prey Sar, located on the outskirts of the capital, is Cambodia’s largest prison with about 8,000 inmates. 

The prison’s male facility, known as Correctional Center 1, has been criticized for poor conditions and overcrowding. 

Prey Sar’s previous director, Yin Kun, retired on Sept. 9. The acting director who was named to the role last month was sidelined by Nuth Savana’s appointment this week.

As the new director, Nuth Savana said he wanted to reform the prison so that human rights are fully respected and the well-being of prison guards and prisoners is ensured.

Translated by Yun Samean. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

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

Historian and journalist Betsy Phillips discusses her new book, Dynamite Nashville: Unmasking the FBI, the KKK, and the Bombers Beyond Their Control, which chronicles three bombings in 1957, 1958 and 1960 aimed at supporters of the civil rights movement in Nashville. The book has sparked a reopening of the formerly cold cases, the likely perpetrators of which Phillips names in her book. Phillips details what she uncovered through her research about the connections between the white supremacist terror campaign of the previous century and ongoing neo-Nazi activity in Nashville and the U.S. today.

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

Myanmar’s economy has been in freefall since the Feb. 1, 2021, coup, contracting by nearly 20%, according to the World Bank. Its 2024 gross domestic product growth estimates have been halved to 1%, in large part due to widespread conflict and junta mismanagement.

Investors have fled, citing political instability, rising inflation, difficulties with bank transactions, challenges in obtaining raw materials, and insufficient manpower as reasons for scaling back their presence or leaving Myanmar altogether.

According to official statements from Myanmar’s Directorate of Investments and Company Administration, foreign investment reached a mere US$150 million in the first seven months of 2024. Comparatively, some US$2.9 billion in investment flowed into Myanmar during the three years between 2021 and 2024.

These numbers represent a drop in the bucket when measured against US$3.8 billion in foreign investment in 2020 alone, when the country was governed by former State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi’s civilian National League for Democracy party.

Singapore’s Sembcorp became one of the latest firms to reduce its footprint in Myanmar on Aug. 12, when it announced the temporary closure of its gas-fired power plant in the Mandalay region city of Myingyan, citing safety concerns.

Similarly, on May 28, South Korea’s CJ Feed Myanmar announced the suspension of its production and sales of animal feed at its plant in the largest city Yangon due to the economic crisis.

Dueling exchange rates

One Myanmar businessman told RFA Burmese that the junta’s control of the exchange rate for the kyat has made it difficult for foreign companies to operate.

"The exchange rate of the dollar is unstable due to inflation,” said the businessman who, like others interviewed for this report, requested anonymity for security reasons. “The Central Bank’s control of the dollar, with a fixed rate of 2,100 kyats, poses significant challenges for foreign companies."

RELATED STORIES

Myanmar rebels claim capture of town on road to China

Resistance forces take control of two Chinese-backed joint ventures in Myanmar

Border conflicts cause shortages, high prices for Myanmar traders: report

The junta is increasingly cracking down on black market money changers as they keep desperately needed foreign exchange out of the formal banking system, where people and companies are forced to convert it to kyats at artificially low exchange rates.

In Myanmar’s informal banking sector, known as hundi, one U.S. dollar is worth more than 6,000 kyats.

Worsening conflict

However, the main obstacle to foreign investment is the worsening conflict, according to Aung Thu Nyein, a member of the Institute for Strategy and Policy – Myanmar think tank.

"The current environment in Myanmar is not conducive to smooth business operations,” he said. “The primary concern is that investing in Myanmar under the present circumstances entails significant political risk.”

Meanwhile, the junta’s investment policies are unclear, “making it uncertain with whom one should engage."

Just last month, Thailand-based newspaper The Thaiger reported that Thai companies with investments worth US$7 billion had withdrawn from Myanmar due to the persistent tensions between the junta and the armed opposition.

And Japan’s Nikkei Asia reported last week that numerous businesses in Myanmar have relocated to Thailand due to the conflict.

Junta lacks ‘business mindset’

A senior official from the junta’s Ministry of Investment and Foreign Economic Relations, who also declined to be identified, told RFA that “new investment is unlikely.”

“Foreign investment is almost non-existent under the present circumstances,” he said. “Existing businesses may be transferred, with the likelihood of such transfers depending on the evolving situation.”

The official noted that it was increasingly difficult for companies to justify investing in Myanmar when they could do so elsewhere in the region, where the political situation was more stable.

An economic analyst told RFA that the junta lacks a “business-oriented mindset.”

"If the economy were managed by a government with a strong understanding of business practices, the country’s economic situation would likely improve,” he said.

Following the coup in 2021, a majority of Western companies withdrew from Myanmar.

According to a report released by ISP-Myanmar at the end of 2022, out of 52 countries with companies that had regularly done business in Myanmar, 39 had ceased their investments.

The primary foreign investors in Myanmar now are companies based in Singapore, China, and Thailand. Among the 12 foreign investment sectors, energy, natural gas, and oil manufacturing attract the most investment.

Translated by Kalyar Lwin. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

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

The brain corals, with their geometric design of grooves, are among more than 500 coral specimens arranged within rows of tanks inside the Florida Coral Rescue Center, a facility staffed by SeaWorld and funded by Disney, the Fish and Wildlife Foundation of Florida, and the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. The nondescript facility is situated a few miles from the theme parks, off a congested highway.

The half-dozen conservationists gathered here on a recent evening had invested a year’s worth of work in the event. They calibrated the lighting to emulate the days, nights, and seasons of the Florida Keys, from where many of the corals were rescued. And they maintained the water inside the tanks to ensure the chemistry and temperature were precise, to recreate conditions that would signal to the corals it was time to spawn.

The conservationists succeeded. Slowly the egg bundles, each no larger than a pea and filled with 10 to 15 eggs, rose to the surface, where they were collected with nets. In time the eggs would be fertilized and baby corals raised in hopes of eventually applying them to the reefs.

“You don’t get a second chance. You have one chance a year to hit your mark,” said Justin Zimmerman, aquarium supervisor at the Florida Coral Rescue Center and SeaWorld Rescue Center, a separate facility. “There is some stress knowing that your entire year’s work depends on collecting these eggs one night or two nights of the year.”

An unprecedented marine heat wave last summer that ravaged Florida’s fragile reefs has upended restoration efforts across the state, prompting conservationists to preserve and propagate more of the sensitive corals on land, away from the waters that rapidly are becoming uninhabitable for them.

“The way that we’ve done it in the past does not appear that it’s going to be helpful into the future,” said Margaret Miller, research director at SECORE International, a conservation nonprofit. “The environment is revealing itself to be not viable for many species.”

The heat wave stunned conservationists not only for its intensity but duration. It was the longest marine heat wave documented in three decades, characterized by the hottest ocean temperatures ever recorded in Florida, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA.

In the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, less than 22 percent of the staghorn corals raised in offshore nurseries for the purpose of restoring the ailing reefs remained alive after the heat had passed, and only at the two northernmost reefs: Carysfort Reef and Horseshoe Reef. Elkhorn corals similarly raised in offshore nurseries and applied to the reefs also were devastated, surviving only at three of five: Carysfort Reef, Sombrero Reef, and Eastern Dry Rocks.

Both species, with branches that appear to reach up and out like the fingers of an open hand, are designated as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. The losses have been heart-rending for Maurizio Martinelli, coordinator of Florida’s Coral Reef Resilience Program for Florida Sea Grant, a research organization of the University of Florida.

“These are animals or ecosystems that we either study or have devoted careers to conserving because we love them,” he said. “Seeing those animals and this ecosystem go through these really intense events, go through these really drastic changes, seeing the kind of mortality that we see, it is hard. You finish your day of work sometimes and stare blankly at the wall because you need a moment to just process everything that’s going on.”

Heat affects corals by breaking down their relationship with the microscopic algae living inside them. The algae provide the corals both their vibrant hues and food, but when waters are too warm the corals expel the algae and turn white, a process called bleaching.

Corals can survive bleaching if water temperatures normalize quickly enough, although the process can leave them weakened, a problem poised to worsen as the global climate warms. Last summer’s widespread bleaching in Florida was part of a global bleaching event,the second in 10 years—involving every major ocean basin on Earth, according to NOAA.

“Most of the climate models and the ocean models said we weren’t going to face this situation until 2035, until 2050,” Miller said. “I really think we’re at this stage [where] parking the corals on land is really the best option that we have until we get the environment, until we get the ocean, back to a situation where it can support corals.”

Conservationists had feared even worse heat this summer, as the year began with water temperatures that continued to set records. By June, temperatures within the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary had exceeded the threshold where bleaching can occur, although heavy rains cooled the waters. With recent temperatures creeping back beyond the bleaching threshold, some corals are paling, a precursor to bleaching.

“Things are in better shape at this time compared to this time last year,” said Katey Lesneski, research and monitoring coordinator for Mission: Iconic Reefs, a NOAA program.

Florida’s Coral Reef is the third-largest barrier reef in the world, stretching some 360 miles from Dry Tortugas National Park north past West Palm Beach. A portion of the reef lies within the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, which spans more than 3,800 square miles and encircles the string of islands that constitute the Florida Keys. 

“There’s something about coral reefs that are incredible,” Martinelli said. “It is these underwater cities of beautiful bright corals that are teeming with life. There is energy. There is sound. It’s such a special, amazing, beautiful natural wonder that we have.”

The reef teems with lobsters, sea turtles, and fish, although the coral cover has declined by more than 90 percent over the last 40 years. Hurricanes have ripped through the corals, and boat groundings have crushed them. Pollution, disease, and heat have further stressed the corals.

For more than a decade, restoration efforts centered in large part around staghorn and elkhorn corals because of their characteristic branches, which can be broken off and grown separately into new corals, a process that constitutes cloning. Often the limbs were taken to offshore nurseries where they were suspended from ropes and cultivated to a point where they were returned to the reefs. The process was pioneered in Florida by Ken Nedimyer, technical director at Reef Renewal USA, a restoration group, and now is practiced throughout the world.

“They’re easy, like growing weeds,” he said. “Anybody can do it.”

These efforts began to evolve in response to a series of smaller bleaching events and the spread of the highly lethal stony coral tissue loss disease, which was first reported in 2014 in Florida and now is found throughout the Caribbean. Some 2,000 corals that were spared of the disease and bleaching were removed from the reefs and taken to 19 zoos and aquariums from Florida to California, where they could be propagated and their genetic diversity preserved.

In 2019, NOAA launched Mission: Iconic Reefs, a $100 million program billed as one of the largest investments in reef restoration in the world. The project aimed at rescuing seven iconic reefs in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary: Carysfort Reef, Horseshoe Reef, Cheeca Rocks, Sombrero Reef, Newfound Harbor, Looe Key Reef, and Eastern Dry Rocks.

Under the program, nearly half a million hand-reared corals would be affixed to the sanctuary’s reefs over the next two decades, beginning with elkhorn corals, which grow relatively quickly and are not susceptible to stony coral tissue loss disease. Slower-growing corals such as star, brain, pillar, and staghorn corals would be added later. Volunteer divers would help manage marine debris and nuisance species and also help reattach damaged or broken corals.

Read Next

Have the world’s coral reefs already crossed a tipping point?

Kate Yoder

Last summer’s blast of heat decimated the corals conservationists had staked their restoration work on. Because many of the corals had been cloned, they lacked the genetic diversity that might have bestowed on them some resilience to withstand the heat.

Conservationists rushed to save the offshore nurseries. Some were moved to cooler depths, while others were evacuated to land-based facilities. Artificial shades were used to shelter the delicate corals from the sun’s sharp glare. Without these interventions, the last wild elkhorn and staghorn corals left in the Florida Keys might have been lost, NOAA said.

“We were just taken by surprise last year,” Miller said, noting that water temperatures typically peak in August and September. “We had never seen corals bleaching in July before.”

Coral reefs are crucial to marine biodiversity and serve as important buffers that protect the shorelines from the violence of storms. In the Florida Keys more than one of every two jobs are connected with the marine ecosystem, according to NOAA.

Amid the rubble of last summer’s disaster, conservationists have found hope in the corals that survived, namely massive, brain, and boulder corals. Conservationists now are focused on understanding why these species fared better and how their reproduction can be fostered through the natural process of spawning rather than cloning, to improve their genetic diversity.

Read Next

‘Reef stars’ restored Indonesia’s blast-damaged corals in just 4 years

Syris Valentine

“This process of adapting to a 2-degree warmer temperature would normally take hundreds and hundreds of years,” Nedimyer said of the corals. “We need to make it happen in 10.”

At a Florida Aquarium facility outside Tampa, conservationists are concentrating on spawning and studying the traits of the offspring to identify those with the most resilience against heat and disease. Since last summer, fewer of the hand-reared corals have been transferred to the reefs, but some have made the journey because conservationists want to see how they will do, said Keri O’Neil, director and senior scientist of the Coral Conservation Program at the Florida Aquarium.

“We want the ocean to tell us what corals can live through this,” she said. “There really is no better laboratory than the ocean.”

Nonetheless, some see the work as futile as long as the oceans continue to warm.

“It’s buying time to solve the real problem, which is keeping our oceans or getting our oceans back to a state where they are viable for coral reef communities,” Miller said. “The solution is we have to fix climate change and maintain the water quality of our oceans.”

The Florida Coral Rescue Center in Orlando houses the largest number of corals rescued from Florida waters. The 2,000-square-foot facility contains some 20 species, and each specimen is labeled with the precise spot it came from. Fish such as blue tang, blue and black with a streak of yellow across the tail, help conservationists maintain the tanks by eating harmful algae.

“This is a true ecosystem,” said Zimmerman, the aquarium supervisor. 

The facility is a veritable Noah’s Ark of Florida’s coral reefs, anonymously assembled off a bustling central Florida highway. Conservationists hope it will preserve genetic diversity so they can restart certain populations, should it come to that.  

Zimmerman said the conservationists have only just gotten started, but already the corals appear to be spawning better every year. Other species will spawn in August and September.

“We can’t give up,” he said. “Their demise is happening so rapidly.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline For Florida corals, unprecedented marine heat prompts new restoration strategy — on shore on Aug 17, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Amy Green, Inside Climate News.

The soldier was traveling for work, delivering secret documents from one part of the country to another. When he arrived in Hamju county in the eastern province of South Hamgyong, he was not able to afford a room, so he stayed out in the open air and froze to death, a resident of the northern province of Ryanggang told RFA Korean on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

“Currently, there is one military inn in each province, but it is not available to regular soldiers,” the resident said. “Only high-ranking commanders or the regiment commander and above can use it. Soldiers on remote missions have to spend their own money to secure lodging and meals, so those without money have no choice but to survive by stealing or robbing.”

The incident is reminiscent of one in 2016, when four soldiers got lost during winter training and froze to death, even though there were residents nearby that could have helped them. The soldier who died in November was in a populated town.

Though in South Korea one can travel across the country in a matter of hours via high-speed rail, in the North, travel to rural parts of the country can take days due to aging technology and infrastructure and restrictions on movements of people. Some stations only see one train every few days.  

A traveler making a transfer to a different line might need to wait a few days for the train to come, so finding food and lodging is important. 

Soldiers who have to pay their own way often cannot afford either, and must endure without until they arrive at their destination.

Before and after

Things were different before the “Arduous March,” what North Koreans call the 1994-1998 famine and economic collapse that resulted after aid from the Soviet Union stopped.

“Before the Arduous March, there were separate travel certificates and meal tickets for soldiers, so soldiers could show these at inns or restaurants,” he said. “However, after the Arduous March, these travel certificates and meal tickets for soldiers have become useless,” he said.

The reason the certificates are not honored is because businesses stopped being held aloft by the government as they were before the economic collapse, he said. Now they had to be in business for themselves, and that meant charging prices far higher than the prices the government set. 

The resident said that in some towns, people with extra rooms in their homes might rent them out to travelers, but at a steep 10,000 won (US$1) per day, soldiers cannot afford this.

Though there is clearly a need for places for soldiers on remote missions to sleep, the order to create more military inns and restaurants may have other reasons, he said.

“The intention is to fundamentally block contact between residents and soldiers,” said the resident. “The goal is to prevent the leak of military secrets by blocking contact between citizens and soldiers and also to prevent crimes such as theft of military supplies.” 

He explained that North Korean marketplaces routinely sell supplies of food, clothing, gasoline, electrical appliances and auto parts that came from the military.

“More than half of the goods sold at the market, including food, clothing, gasoline and diesel oil, electrical appliances, and automobile parts, are military supplies stolen by soldiers,” he said.

Order from the top

Another Ryanggang resident explained that the orders to build military inns came from Kim Jong Un himself, and that every city and county across the country should have at least one. The goal would be to construct a military inn in about 200 cities and counties throughout North Korea, he said.

Members of the military are to serve as construction workers and the work is to be directed by the city and county party committees.

“The Central Military Commission of the Central Committee instructed the construction of military restaurants and inns to be completed within this year,” he said.

He said this would be difficult because it would require coordination between “front-line” and “rear” troops, who operate in different areas. The former are more in number, but concentrated in smaller areas, whereas the rear troops are fewer in number but spread out more.

“The frontline corps, which is responsible for attacking in case of emergency, has more than 100,000 active-duty military soldiers,” he said. “But the rear corps, which is organized around civilian forces, has less than 20,000 active-duty military soldiers.”

Translated by Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

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

The soldier was traveling for work, delivering secret documents from one part of the country to another. When he arrived in Hamju county in the eastern province of South Hamgyong, he was not able to afford a room, so he stayed out in the open air and froze to death, a resident of the northern province of Ryanggang told RFA Korean on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

“Currently, there is one military inn in each province, but it is not available to regular soldiers,” the resident said. “Only high-ranking commanders or the regiment commander and above can use it. Soldiers on remote missions have to spend their own money to secure lodging and meals, so those without money have no choice but to survive by stealing or robbing.”

The incident is reminiscent of one in 2016, when four soldiers got lost during winter training and froze to death, even though there were residents nearby that could have helped them. The soldier who died in November was in a populated town.

Though in South Korea one can travel across the country in a matter of hours via high-speed rail, in the North, travel to rural parts of the country can take days due to aging technology and infrastructure and restrictions on movements of people. Some stations only see one train every few days.  

A traveler making a transfer to a different line might need to wait a few days for the train to come, so finding food and lodging is important. 

Soldiers who have to pay their own way often cannot afford either, and must endure without until they arrive at their destination.

Before and after

Things were different before the “Arduous March,” what North Koreans call the 1994-1998 famine and economic collapse that resulted after aid from the Soviet Union stopped.

“Before the Arduous March, there were separate travel certificates and meal tickets for soldiers, so soldiers could show these at inns or restaurants,” he said. “However, after the Arduous March, these travel certificates and meal tickets for soldiers have become useless,” he said.

The reason the certificates are not honored is because businesses stopped being held aloft by the government as they were before the economic collapse, he said. Now they had to be in business for themselves, and that meant charging prices far higher than the prices the government set. 

The resident said that in some towns, people with extra rooms in their homes might rent them out to travelers, but at a steep 10,000 won (US$1) per day, soldiers cannot afford this.

Though there is clearly a need for places for soldiers on remote missions to sleep, the order to create more military inns and restaurants may have other reasons, he said.

“The intention is to fundamentally block contact between residents and soldiers,” said the resident. “The goal is to prevent the leak of military secrets by blocking contact between citizens and soldiers and also to prevent crimes such as theft of military supplies.” 

He explained that North Korean marketplaces routinely sell supplies of food, clothing, gasoline, electrical appliances and auto parts that came from the military.

“More than half of the goods sold at the market, including food, clothing, gasoline and diesel oil, electrical appliances, and automobile parts, are military supplies stolen by soldiers,” he said.

Order from the top

Another Ryanggang resident explained that the orders to build military inns came from Kim Jong Un himself, and that every city and county across the country should have at least one. The goal would be to construct a military inn in about 200 cities and counties throughout North Korea, he said.

Members of the military are to serve as construction workers and the work is to be directed by the city and county party committees.

“The Central Military Commission of the Central Committee instructed the construction of military restaurants and inns to be completed within this year,” he said.

He said this would be difficult because it would require coordination between “front-line” and “rear” troops, who operate in different areas. The former are more in number, but concentrated in smaller areas, whereas the rear troops are fewer in number but spread out more.

“The frontline corps, which is responsible for attacking in case of emergency, has more than 100,000 active-duty military soldiers,” he said. “But the rear corps, which is organized around civilian forces, has less than 20,000 active-duty military soldiers.”

Translated by Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

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

Clashes between junta troops and the Shan State Progressive Party/Shan State Army, or SSPP/SSA, in southern Shan’s Laihka township, and the Ta’ang National Liberation Army, or TNLA, in northern Shan’s Muse, Lashio and Kutkai townships since late last month are the military’s first orchestrated attacks against the groups since its 2021 coup d’etat.

Analysts said the offensives suggest the junta is trying to cut off the flow of weapons from the two groups to the armed resistance in lower Sagaing and Magway regions.

Following pressure from the junta on SSPP/SSA troops to withdraw from Laihka, fierce fighting broke out between the two sides on Aug. 6, prompting around 1,000 ethnic Ta’ang and Shan people to flee area villages, according to SSPP/SSA spokesman Major Sai Phone Han.

“There has been news that all anti-junta forces will be driven out from the Laihka area,” he told RFA Burmese, noting that the military had called in reinforcements of about 1,000 more soldiers, including members of the pro-junta Pyi Thu Sit militia. “[Anti-junta armed groups] in the south have tried to convince us to come to them, but we intend to stay here [to ensure the security of the area].”

In the meantime, residents of Laihka said they are frightened because of increased junta troop activity in the township.

“One side of the fighting has reinforced and the other side is trying to block them – it’s worrying indeed, as the tension between them is high,” said one resident, who declined to be named citing security concerns. “We saw two military junta helicopters hovering over our town today.”

The resident said that the local community is worried that the fighting will reach the seat of Laihka township, noting that those displaced by earlier clashes have yet to return home.

In Muse, Lashio and Kutkai townships, junta troops and TNLA forces fought “nearly everyday” from July 23 to Aug. 12, with the military deploying attack helicopters in Lashio during the last two days, TNLA spokesman Lieutenant Col. My Aik Kyaw told RFA.

“We don’t know what they aim to achieve in their offensives,” he said, adding that at least a dozen battles took place over the period.

RFA attempts to reach junta Shan state spokesman and economic minister Khun Thein Maung regarding the situation in the region went unanswered Thursday. 

RFA contacted junta Shan State Security and Border Affairs Minister Colonel Sein Win by telephone, but he declined to comment, saying he was in a meeting.

Targeting flow of weapons

Than Soe Naing, a researcher of Myanmar affairs, told RFA he believes the junta is putting pressure on ethnic armies in Shan state to stop the flow of weapons to the armed resistance in other parts of the country.

"[The military] assumes that the weapons flowing into Sagaing and Magway are coming from the Ta’ang region, so blocking the Ta’ang region is an important task for them,” he said. “No matter how many political discussions they hold with the … armed groups [in Shan], including the Ta’ang, they cannot help but interfere militarily. That’s why they will continue to fight.”

He said that the junta wants to remove the SSPP/SSA from Laihka and replace it with a rival group, the Restoration Council of Shan State/Shan State Army, or RCSS/SSA, with whom it has a good relationship, and is willing to fight a protracted war to do so.

While the SSPP/SSA is not a signatory to the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement, signed in 2015 and aimed at ending the country’s long-running armed conflicts, it is among the groups that meet frequently in the capital Naypyidaw with the junta’s Peace Delegation.

Two other rebel groups signed the agreement in 2018, bringing the number to 10. The signatories want a national military that cannot participate in politics and the formation of a federal democratic union in Myanmar.

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

TNLA leaders said that the situation in Shan state “depends on the military,” and that fighting is likely to continue as the junta’s offensive intensifies.

Translated by Myo Min Aung. Edited by Joshua Lipes.

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

“At first I thought I’d been hit by a log until I touched it and realized that it was a crocodile,” said the 20-year-old from Myanmar’s Ayeyarwaddy region. “It dragged me deep into the water and rolled me over and over, before smashing me against the riverbed.”

Recounting the attack of just over a year ago, Ko Min said that while he could barely swim because he was wearing boots and clothing, he managed to fight off the crocodile and escape.

“I was able to hit it with the crab hammer I had in my hands and run away up onto the shore,” he said.

Ko Min was taken by fellow residents of Bogale township’s Baw Ga Wa Di village to nearby Ka Don Ka Ni Village District Hospital, where he was treated for severe wounds to his thigh and pelvis. Doctors told the young man he was lucky to survive.

The incident highlights the dangers associated with settlement expansion in southwestern Myanmar, where people and wild animals are coming into increasing contact with one another in their search for food.

Others have been less fortunate in attacks that residents of Bogale township say are increasingly common as endangered fresh and saltwater crocodiles of up to 5.5 meters (18 feet) in length spread out from their habitat in the Mein Ma Hla Kyun Wildlife Sanctuary some 30 kilometers (18 miles) downstream and villagers expand their farmland.

The 500-square-kilometer (190-square-mile) protected area is an mangrove-covered island that is home to diverse wildlife situated in the Ayeyarwaddy Delta, where the Bogale River empties out into the Andaman Sea.

At least two people from Baw Ga Wa Di village have died in crocodile attacks in the last year alone, while others say they have had to fight for their lives to escape the encounters.

Call for authorities to act

Khin Pa Pa Hlaing said her husband, Ye Naung Tun, was killed by a large crocodile while removing a fishing net from the water near their village on July 27.

The 29-year-old has a four-year-old daughter and became a father for a second time, just a month ago.

Khin Pa Pa Hlaing told RFA that local officials have done nothing to help her family since Ye Naung Tun died, but she said she isn’t interested in financial assistance.

“What I want is for them to catch and kill the crocodile that killed my husband – that will satisfy me,” she said.

“I don't want these crocodiles swimming free. I don't want to hear of other people who met the same fate as my family, nor do I want to experience it again … I don’t want anybody to suffer like me.”

A 13-year-old girl from Baw Ga Wa Di named Sapal Aye was also killed in a crocodile attack in the past year.

U Myint, a member of Sapal Aye’s family, told RFA the young girl was a “good student” who was attacked while “fetching water from the river to wash her clothes and to cook.”

Authorities provided Sapal Aye’s family 300,000 kyats (US$142) in compensation for her death.

In the coastal villages of Bogale township, people are killed every year in crocodile attacks.

In addition to the two Baw Ga Wa Di villagers in the past year, a child from the village was killed by a crocodile four years ago, prompting authorities to put up signs warning residents not to enter the water.

Nonetheless, a man from Baw Ga Wa Di named Thant Zaw Oo was attacked by a crocodile in the past year, while residents of nearby Hlay Lone Kwe village have had to be hospitalized recently due to crocodile attacks.

Fresh and saltwater crocodiles are protected by Myanmar’s Forestry Department, and killing them is prohibited.

Out of respect for the ban, Baw Ga Wa Di Village Chief Soe Khaing has called on officials to act. He said that while he informed local police about Ye Naung Tun’s death, they did not inform the Forestry Department about the incident.

“The people are afraid that they will have to go to jail if they [take action to] defend themselves against the crocodiles,” he said.

“Even though [authorities] have put up a sign warning villagers not to go into the water, the people will starve if they don’t. We use the water to earn a living. What we want is for the authorities to drive the crocodiles away.”

Attempts by RFA to contact Ayeyarwady Region Social Affairs Minister Maung Maung Than for this report regarding the conservation of crocodiles in Bogale township went unanswered.

Need for buffer zones, awareness

A high-ranking official with the Environmental Conservation Department told RFA that incidents involving crocodiles and humans in Bogale township are on the rise because village populations are growing and inhabitants are clearing the mangrove forests and swamp land to farm.

“As a consequence, crocodiles have fewer places to live and their need for food has grown as well,” said the official, who spoke to RFA on condition of anonymity, citing security concerns. “An undeveloped country like Myanmar cannot sufficiently create space for animals to safely coexist with people, as in developed countries, so incidents like these continue to occur.” 

The official said that while the crocodiles involved in attacks were likely looking for food, “they don’t intend to eat people.”

He called for an expansion of conservation areas for the crocodiles, as well as “buffer zones” that people cannot enter and an increase in awareness efforts.

An expert working on wildlife conservation in Myanmar noted that because crocodiles are protected, their number will only increase, creating a need for blocking off areas from human access beyond the Mein Ma Hla Kyun Wildlife Sanctuary.

“Everyone knows that Mein Ma Hla Island is a crocodile area, but we can’t refer to that alone as the crocodile area,” said the expert, who also declined to be named. “We need to include a wider scope of land to account for all possible encounters.”

In the meantime, Ye Naung Tun’s wife, Khin Pa Pa Hlaing, said that villagers will still need to go into the water to fish, despite the danger of crocodiles.

“We have to go into the water to earn a living – there is no other way. How else can we survive?” she said. “My husband even lost his life to provide for me.”

Translated by Myo Min Aung. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Matthew Reed.

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

Heat waves can delay fights and melt airplane tarmac, but Amazon won’t let them hinder Prime deliveries. Extreme heat and unsafe working conditions under the merchant giant have now spurred drivers to unionize. In Southern California, 84 delivery drivers joined the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and negotiated the first union contract among any Amazon workers in the country. And since June 25, these workers have been on an indefinite strike.

Amazon’s requirement of drivers to make up to 400 stops per day, even when temperatures exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit, can make operating one of those ubiquitous gray and blue vans a particularly hazardous occupation. Raj Singh, a driver, knows that only too well.

“Sometimes it reaches 135 degrees in the rear of the truck and there’s no cooling system,” said Singh, who has worked the job for two and half years and through the height of the pandemic. “It feels like an oven when you step back there. You instantly start feeling woozy and it’s gotten to the point where I’ve actually seen stars.”

Even on scorching days, said Singh, “Amazon sets these ridiculous paces. Some people even have to miss their guaranteed 15 minute breaks, because if we break the pace, they contact us to try and find out why we’re behind.”

“On the days that you work, it’s basically mandatory overtime,” he added. “You don’t stop until you’re done or you get reprimanded.”

Last August, after the drivers prepared a list of demands around pay, safety, and extreme temperatures, Amazon responded by offering workers two 16-ounce bottles of water a day. 

Heat exposure affects delivery drivers across companies. UPS has reported at least 143 heat related injuries on the job in recent years, and a United States Postal Service driver recently died of heat exposure. UPS, whose iconic brown-uniformed drivers are directly employed by the company, recently agreed to install air conditioners in their trucks after drivers across the country picketed work sites and threatened to strike. But Amazon’s 275,000 drivers are hired through 3,000 third-party subcontractors, with whom Amazon can cancel contracts with little explanation or warning, making it particularly difficult for workers to unionize or fight to improve conditions. 

Despite the fact that workers who deliver Amazon packages sport branded vests, shirts, and pants; drive Amazon branded trucks; have schedules and wage floors set by Amazon; receive routes from an Amazon app; and can be disciplined and fired by Amazon, the company claims they aren’t technically employees. On paper, the drivers are employed by a network of small businesses that each rents 20–40 vans and employs up to 100 people. The 84 drivers in Palmdale work for Battle Tested Strategies, one of these businesses, which operates out of an Amazon warehouse.

On April 24, the drivers announced that they had formed a union and had bargained a contract with Battle Tested Strategies to address fair pay and worker safety in the heat. They asked that Amazon respect the terms of the new contract, which guarantees $30 hourly wages, health and vehicle safety standards, and the right to refuse unsafe deliveries.

Instead, the company immediately announced that the subcontractor “had a track record of failing to perform and had been notified of its termination for poor performance well before today’s announcement.” It also said their contract would expire on June 24.On June 25, the 84 drivers awoke to no assigned routes from Amazon or Battle Tested Strategies. They are currently on an indefinite strike (in their view, from their Amazon jobs) and hope to convince the trillion-dollar company to recognize the union, respect the contract, and end what they view as retaliation against workers. Teamsters across the country are now picketing warehouses in solidarity.

The Teamsters union, which represents the 84 drivers, has argued that Amazon exerts nearly total control over these workers. In their estimate, the company must recognize these drivers as employees and bargain with them directly in order to keep them safe in the heat. 

“Fulfilling the promise of the contract will require fundamentally changing Amazon’s exploitative business model,” said Randy Korgan, head of the Teamsters’ Amazon division. “And we will keep fighting until that happens.”

Amazon maintains that the drivers don’t actually work for the company. Spokesperson Eileen Hards called the Teamsters “intentionally misleading,” adding that the strike “does not include Amazon employees and is mostly attended by outside activists.” She reiterated that Amazon had terminated its contract with Battle Tested Strategies.

But according to Daniel Ocampo, a legal fellow at the National Employment Law Project, the National Labor Relations Act defines employment status by whether companies control conditions like pay, safety, and day-to-day work. “All of those are controlled at least jointly by Amazon,” he said. “For the drivers to meaningfully bargain over their conditions of work, they need to have Amazon at the table.”

“We’re here so we can have fair pay and safe jobs,” added Singh. “And we’re trying to get this done, not just for us but for every delivery driver that works for Amazon.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Extreme heat prompts first-ever Amazon delivery driver strike on Jul 11, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Tushar Khurana.

The provincial government said Saturday it has put together a taskforce to probe the grisly find by a student at the Jiangxi Industry Polytechnic College in the provincial capital, including education officials, market supervisors and police, state media reported.

The move comes after local market supervision officials announced that the sodden lump – which appears in the video to have eyes and rodent-like teeth – was in fact part of a "duck's neck" – a common ingredient in soups. 

Food quality has long been a bone of contention for students at Chinese vocational colleges, with campus protests breaking out in the southwestern province of Sichuan in 2019 over an incident of mass food poisoning.

Nanchang market supervision bureau official Jiang Xiexue told state-run Jiangxi Radio and TV that "local law enforcement officials had arrived at the scene and confirmed the strange item as a duck neck after repeated comparison," the Global Times reported.

But public suspicions weren't so easily allayed.

"Many netizens insisted on their speculation that it was a mouse head rather than a duck neck with some questioning that how come the duck neck has teeth and what the long 'hairs' were," it said, adding that Global Times commentator Hu Xijin had called for "more convincing evidence" to prove the lump came from a duck.

‘Duckrat’ memes

Jiang's claim was backed up by a written statement from the student who posted the viral video, which has spawned a number of "duckrat" memes, in which the head of a rat is edited onto a photo of a duck and spoof videos based on the phrase "calling a rat a duck."

"Hi everyone – in today's show we're going to learn how to write the phrase 'call a rat a duck,'" says one video, in the style of a calligraphy lesson or writing tutorial, as a hand inscribes the phrase onto a dirty car door.

"Finally, the truth emerged – turns out it came from a creature engineered by researchers at the Jiangxi Industrial Polytechnic College, known as a duckrat," says a mock documentary on the topic posted to the video-sharing site Bilibili and shared on Weibo.

Later reports also emerged that a student had found a green caterpillar in their food at the same canteen, the China Daily reported on June 12.

"Although the canteen continued to operate normally after the incident, fewer people are using it," the paper reported, citing the Henan-based Top News service. "Instead, many students have been seen receiving takeout deliveries at the entrance of their dormitories."

Seeking scapegoats

Beijing-based current affairs commentator Ji Feng said he wasn't optimistic that the upscaled investigation would improve matters.

"The point of the investigation ... will be to find scapegoats ... among the management or in the contractors operating the canteen," Ji said, adding that the university canteen business is highly lucrative for contractors.

Former Jiangxi high school teacher Sun Yanru agreed, saying that the inquiry will likely seek to take the heat off local officials.

"Firstly, this investigation won't yield any substantive results, although naturally they may come up with a few scapegoats to try to calm down [public outrage]," Sun said.

"That's what they did with the woman found chained up in Xuzhou, Jiangsu,” Sun said. "This kind of investigation task force lost any credibility with the general public a long time ago."

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gu Ting for RFA Mandarin.

Though RFA was not able to confirm North Korea’s tally, the South Korean National Intelligence Service reported at the end of May that suicides were up about 40% compared to last year.

“There are a lot of internal unrest factors in North Korea due to the hardships of people,” the spy agency said, adding that violent crimes are also on the rise as people struggle to make ends meet.

Kim officially defined suicide as an “act of treason against socialism,” and ordered local governments to take preventative measures.

The confidential suicide prevention order was delivered in emergency meetings in each province of the party committee leaders at the provincial, city and county levels, an official from the northeastern province of North Hamgyong told RFA’s Korean Service on condition of anonymity for security reasons. 

“Our meeting was held at the provincial party committee’s building located in Pohang district, in the city of Chongjin,” he said. “The large number of suicide cases in the province was revealed and some officials … could not hide their anxious expressions.”

Criticism of social system

Statistics delivered at the North Hamgyong meeting showed that there were 35 suicide cases this year in Chongjin and nearby Kyongsong county alone, the official said, adding that most of the cases involved whole families ending their lives together.

“[The attendees] were shocked by the disclosure of suicide notes that criticized the country and the social system,” he said.  

At the meeting in Ryanggang province, the attendees were told that suicide has had a greater social impact than starvation, an official there told RFA on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.

“Despite the suicide prevention policy ratified by the General Secretary, the officials were not able to come up with an appropriate solution,” he said. “Most of the suicides were caused by severe poverty and starvation, so no one can come up with a countermeasure right now.”

The meeting described several shocking cases in detail, according to the official.

“In the city of Hyesan, a 10-year-old boy was living with his grandmother after his parents died of starvation, but they took their own lives by eating rat poison,” he said. “It brought great sadness to all who saw it.”

The official described other shocking cases revealed at the meeting, including a couple in their 60s who hung themselves from a tree in the mountains, and a family of four who, after eating their final family meal together, ingested potassium cyanide, a highly toxic chemical often used in gold mining.

“Family suicide is a final act of defiance against a hopeless system,” he said.

Kim Jong Un’s order emphasized that the local government officials must take responsibility for prefenting suicides in their jurisdictions.

“It was emphasized that the responsible officials will be held jointly accountable, because ‘suicide is a clear social challenge and treason against the country.”

Translated by Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Kim Jieun for RFA Korean.

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

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

Voters in West Texas have decisively rejected three conservative Christian candidates who campaigned on infusing religious values into local decision making. But the support the candidates received from local churches during the race has prompted calls for state and federal investigations and triggered a local political reckoning.

“I think there should definitely be some penalties,” said Weldon Hurt, a two-term Abilene City Council member who won his race for mayor against one of the candidates. “I don’t know how severe it should be, but I think there has to be a way to curtail this from happening again,” he added. “I think there should be some discipline to these churches.”

ProPublica and The Texas Tribune reported a day before the May 6 election that three churches had donated a total of $800 to the campaign of Scott Beard, a pastor who was running for City Council. That was a clear violation of the Johnson Amendment, a law passed in 1954 by Congress prohibiting nonprofits from intervening in political campaigns. The IRS can revoke the tax exemption of violators, but there’s only one publicly known example of it doing so, nearly 30 years ago.

Beard, a senior pastor at Fountaingate Fellowship, said the donations were a mistake and that he would be returning the money. But within days after Beard’s defeat to retired Air Force Col. Brian Yates, a national group that espouses the separation of church and state demanded that the IRS revoke the churches’ tax exemptions.

“Beard is insisting that he has returned the donation checks, but his belated attempt at contrition doesn’t mitigate the initial transgressions” of the churches making the donations, the Freedom from Religion Foundation wrote in a news release. The group has sued the IRS in the past “to force it to take steps to enforce the law against tax-exempt entities from engaging in partisan politicking, and is prepared to sue again if necessary.”

Beard said via text message after the election that the money paid by the churches was intended to cover the cost of meals at one of his fundraisers. He said he returned the money and is in the process of amending his campaign finance reports.

Dewey Hall, the pastor of Fountaingate Merkel Church, which is nearly 18 miles west of Abilene and not affiliated with Beard’s church, told ProPublica and the Tribune before the election that Beard had told him that his church couldn’t give Beard’s campaign a $200 donation. Hall said he thought Beard would “be a good councilman, and we need to have Christians in politics nowadays.”

A representative of Remnant Church, which Beard reported gave him $400, responded to a question via Facebook Messenger to say that its donation was intended for Fountaingate Fellowship Church, not Beard’s campaign.

“They must have a mistake,” wrote the representative, who did not identify themselves when asked. “We will look into it.”

Neither Hall nor Remnant Church responded to additional questions after the election.

Bruce Tentzer, pastor of Hope Chapel Foursquare Church, also known as Hope 4 Life Church, said the $200 Beard’s campaign filing listed as having come from Tentzer’s church was an appreciation gift for Tentzer that he then used to pay for meals at Beard’s fundraiser for himself, another pastor and their wives.

“Obviously had I known that it would be considered a campaign contribution I would have not paid with the check. This is not some dark conspiracy,” Tentzer wrote via email. “I pray Mayor elect Weldon all the best as well as the newly elected council.”

The church donations may also violate Texas election law, which prohibits both nonprofit and for-profit corporations from making political contributions to candidates or political committees.

The Texas Ethics Commission is charged with investigating such violations and can assess a civil penalty of up to $5,000 or triple the amount at issue, whichever is greater, said J.R. Johnson, the commission’s executive director. Agency commissioners also have the authority to refer violations to local district attorneys for criminal prosecution, he said. Violations are considered third-degree felonies.

Beard has had at least two pending state ethics complaints filed against his campaign.

One comes from former Dyess Air Force Base Cmdr. Michael Bob Starr. His April 17 complaint alleges that Beard left in-kind donations from his own church, a nonprofit corporation, off his campaign finance report. Separately, on April 25, Abilene attorney Kristin Postell alleged that Beard’s campaign finance reports were incomplete, were incorrect and showed that he had accepted an anonymous donation.

“It just really bothered me that he was presenting himself as this upstanding citizen that’s going to be the moral voice of the city and has worked so hard to pass new city ordinances, yet can’t follow the rules as they exist and is lying about it,” Postell said.

Both Starr and Postell submitted their complaints to the state prior to the submission of Beard’s April 28 campaign finance report, which showed the donations by the three churches. In an interview before the election, Beard acknowledged the existence of the complaints and said “we made some errors in our reporting.”

“We’re amending those, and we’re going to resubmit them, and then we’ll just have to deal with whatever, if there’s financial penalties or whatever, we’ll just have to pay them and learn a lesson from it,” he said.

The ethics commission has not publicly announced on its website whether a violation occurred, nor has it assessed a civil penalty or made a referral to local DAs for criminal prosecution.

Both Starr and Postell said they plan to file additional state ethics complaints against Beard’s campaign for accepting donations from the churches, which are all nonprofit corporations in Texas.

Neither the IRS nor the commission would confirm or comment on any complaints.

Besides the monetary donations, at least five churches displayed campaign signs for Beard and two other Abilene candidates: Ryan Goodwin, who unsuccessfully ran for mayor against Hurt, and James Sargent, an unsuccessful City Council candidate.

The three candidates touted their involvement in an effort to get abortion outlawed in Abilene. They worked with Texas Right to Life, an anti-abortion group, and collected thousands of signatures to bring the ordinance to a vote before the council in April 2022. The council sent the matter to voters, who approved it in November 2022. Texas already prohibits most abortions, but Abilene’s ordinance goes further than state law. The ordinance, which has not been tested in court, purports to make it a crime to assist a city resident in getting an abortion, even outside of Texas, and expands who can potentially face lawsuits related to aiding or abetting a prohibited abortion.

More recently, Goodwin, an associate pastor at Mosaic Church, a small church on the outskirts of Abilene, and Sargent, a Mosaic Church member, pushed to remove books from Abilene’s public libraries that they said were obscene and harmful to children.

And all three candidates spoke about the need to prohibit family-friendly drag shows within the city limits and establish community standards as part of an effort they said would protect children. Beard said in interviews that those standards should be based on “Judeo-Christian principles” that he believes serve as the nation’s foundation.

Technically, local races are nonpartisan, but locally these were seen as a battle between social conservatives and conservatives more friendly to the business establishment.

Yates, Beard’s opponent, said it was overly simplistic to cast the election as a fight between religious conservatives and fiscal ones. He said he too is a Christian who opposes abortion. A key difference, he said, was that he and his allies don’t believe that establishing community standards is the role of government.

Hurt said he was disappointed that the local Republican Party endorsed Goodwin before the candidates got a chance to debate. At the debate, he said, he was asked what church he attended and how involved he was in it.

“Being a Christian, does that make you a better politician?” he asked in an interview. “I never used that avenue to promote myself politically. I think the time I’ve already served on council shows I’m devoted.”

The forum was meant to educate voters, said Chris Carnohan, chair of the Taylor County Republican Party, adding that churches had been “too silent and too much on the sidelines for too long” and that it was a misconception that they shouldn’t be involved in politics.

“I don’t know where that idea could ever get a foothold,” he said in an interview before the election. “They open every session of Congress in the U.S. Capitol every day with a prayer from the congressional chaplain. They do the same thing in Austin. I think they open our City Council meetings with a prayer, so what kind of crazy idea is this? You’re going to have to tear down a lot of America to get rid of the Judeo-Christian principles we were founded on.”

The local Republican Party endorsed Beard and Sargent as well. In the end, the three candidates each lost by at least 29 percentage points, according to unofficial final results.

Goodwin did not return a call seeking comment after the election, and Sargent declined a phone interview. In a text message, Sargent wrote that he disagreed with experts who have told the news organizations that churches are not legally allowed to put up political candidates’ campaign signs.

“I understand some individuals would prefer the ‘church’/church people to remain silent,” Sargent wrote. “Just because we are religious; or more specifically; Christians; it does not mean we lose our 1st Amendment rights. Pastors can and (I believe) should speak about social/political issues to inform their congregations.”

Jennifer Bell, a precinct chair for the local Republican Party, didn’t vote for the trio, because she said they were unwilling to lift the local abortion ban in cases of lethal fetal abnormalities, something doctors said her fetus had when she was pregnant in 2010.

Then, doctors gave her two options: continue to carry the fetus, which was unlikely to make it to full term, and go through a traumatic birth; or induce at 20 weeks, which would be legally considered an abortion, with medicine that could ease both her and the fetus’ suffering, she said. After praying with her husband, they made the difficult decision to do the latter.

“I think one of the most important things for a lawmaker to have is humility. I thought they would hear my story and have the humility to say, ‘Wow, we know her and she’s a good person. Maybe we should make allowances for this type of situation.’ But honestly, all I got was ‘I’m saving babies. I’m saving babies,’ and that’s honorable, but my baby couldn’t be saved,” Bell said. “I’m hoping to see the ordinance change, and I know the more of them that get into office, the less the chance of that.”

The candidates and the churches’ support of them have pushed away some like Denise Jones, who backed Yates and is leaving a church her family has attended for years because she disagreed with its pastor’s decision to give the trio of candidates the opportunity to deliver a Sunday sermon.

But others, like Diana Hartmann, a longtime Abilene resident who is active in the Republican Party, saw no problem with churches posting their campaign signs or with Beard, Goodwin and Sargent wanting to address social issues in addition to paving streets and providing water.

“I do think they have a role to play in this,” she said, referring to the City Council. “As far as I’m concerned, we have enough porno on TV and enough of that in our society today that maybe we should be making better choices that way.”

After the election, Beard returned to his pulpit and told his congregation he’d continue to look for ways to influence the city outside the four walls of his church and they should, too.

“In a world that’s grown kind of increasingly more hostile toward the church, I’m all the more motivated and really challenged to continue building here at Fountaingate a healthy and dynamic local church that not only impacts its community, but impacts its state, its nation and the nations” of the world, he said.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Jessica Priest.

Two of the hottest new artificial intelligence programs for people who aren’t tech savvy, DALL-E 2 and Midjourney, create stunning visual images using only written prompts. Everything, that is, that avoids certain language in the prompts — including words associated with women’s bodies, women’s health care, women’s rights, and abortion.

I discovered this recently when I prompted the platforms for “pills used in medication abortion.” I’d added the instruction “in the style of Matisse.” I expected to get colorful visuals to supplement my thinking and writing about right-wing efforts to outlaw the pills.

Neither site produced the images. Instead, DALL-E 2 returned the phrase, “It looks like this request may not follow our content policy.” Midjourney’s message said, “The word ‘abortion’ is banned. Circumventing this filter to violate our rules may result in your access being revoked.”

DALL-E blocks the AI image generator prompt of “abortion pills.”

Photo: DALL-E

During a time when women’s right to sexual equality and freedom is under increasing assault by the right, the AI bans could be making things worse.

Midjourney explains that “abortion” is banned as a prompt for the AI image generator.

Photo: Debbie Nathan

Related

▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​

A search on Midjourney for “gynaecological exam” provided four AI generated images.

Photo: Debbie Nathan; Midjourney

Midjourney AI’s return images for the prompt “pregnancy termination in 16-year-old girl. Realistic.”

Photo: Debbie Nathan; Midjourney

“Why are they censoring something that is clearly under attack?”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Debbie Nathan.

Unprecedented levels of disinformation will only get worse this election in Aotearoa New Zealand, but systems set up to deal with it during the pandemic have all been shut down, Disinformation Project researcher Dr Sanjana Hattotuwa has warned.

He says the levels of vitriol and conspiratorial discourse this past week or two are worse than anything he has seen during the past two years of the pandemic — including during the Parliament protest — but he is not aware of any public work to counteract it.

“There is no policy, there’s no framework, there’s no real regulatory mechanism, there’s no best practice, and there’s no legal oversight,” Dr Hattotuwa told RNZ News.

• READ MORE: Other reports on disinformation

He says urgent action should be taken, and could include legislation, community-based initiatives, or a stronger focus on the recommendations of the 15 March 2019 mosque attacks inquiry.

Highest levels of disinformation, conspiratorialism seen yet
Dr Hattotuwa said details of the project’s analysis of violence and content from the past week — centred on the visit by British activist Posie Parker — were so confronting he could not share it.

“I don’t want to alarm listeners, but I think that the Disinformation Project — with evidence and in a sober reflection and analysis of what we are looking at — the honest assessment is not something that I can quite share, because the BSA (Broadcasting Standards Authority) guidelines won’t allow it.

“The fear is very much … particularly speaking as a Sri Lankan who has come from and studied for doctoral research offline consequences of online harm, that I’m seeing now in Aotearoa New Zealand what I studied and I thought I had left behind back in Sri Lanka.”

The new levels of vitriol were unlike anything seen since the project’s daily study began in 2021, and included a rise in targeting of politicians specifically by far-right and neo-Nazi groups, he said.

But — as the SIS noted in its latest report this week — the lines were becoming increasingly blurred between those more ideologically motivated groups, and the newer ones using disinformation and targeting authorities and government.

“You know, distinction without a difference,” he said. “The Disinformation Project is not in the business of looking at the far right and neo-Nazis — that’s a specialised domain that we don’t consider ourselves to be experts in — what we do is to look at disinformation.

“Now to find that you have neo-Nazis, the far-right, anti-semitic signatures — content, presentations and engagement — that colours that discourse is profoundly worrying because you would want to have a really clear distinction.

No Telegram ‘guardrail’
“There is no guardrail on Telegram against any of this, it’s one click away. And so there’s a whole range of worries and concerns we have … because we can’t easily delineate anymore between what would have earlier been very easy categorisation.”

Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson said she had been subjected to increasing levels of abuse in recent weeks with a particular far-right flavour.

“The online stuff is particularly worrying but no matter who it’s directed towards we’ve got to remember that can also branch out into actual violence if we don’t keep a handle on it,” she said.

“Strong community connection in real life is what holds off the far-right extremism that we’ve seen around the world … we also want the election to be run where every politician takes responsibility for a humane election dialogue that focuses on the issues, that doesn’t drum up extra hate towards any other politician or any other candidate.”

Limited protection as election nears
Dr Hattotuwa said it was particularly worrying considering the lack of tools in New Zealand to deal with disinformation and conspiratorialism.

“Every institutional mechanism and framework that was established during the pandemic to deal with disinformation has now been dissolved. There is nothing that I know in the public domain of what the government is doing with regards to disinformation,” Dr Hattotuwa said.

“The government is on the backfoot in an election year — I can understand in terms of realpolitik, but there is no investment.”

He believed the problem would only get worse as the election neared.

“The anger, the antagonism is driven by a distrust in government that is going to be instrumentalised to ever greater degrees in the future, around public consultative processing, referenda and electoral moments.

“The worry and the fear is, as has been noted by the Green Party, that the election campaigning is not going to be like anything that the country has ever experienced … that there will be offline consequences because of the online instigation and incitement.

“It’s really going to give pause to, I hope, the way that parties consider their campaign. Because the worry is — in a high trust society in New Zealand — you kind of have the expectation that you can go out and meet the constituency … I know that many others are thinking that this is now not something that you can take for granted.”

Possible countermeasures
Dr Hattotuwa said countermeasures could include legislation, security-sector reform, community-based action, or a stronger focus on implementing the recommendations of the Royal Commission of Inquiry (RCOI) into the terrorist attack on Christchurch mosques.

“There are a lot of recommendations in the RCOI that, you know, are being just cosmetically dealt with. And there are a lot of things that are not even on the government’s radar. So there’s a whole spectrum of issues there that I think really call for meaningful conversations and investment where it’s needed.”

National’s campaign chair Chris Bishop said the party did not have any specific campaign preparations under way in relation to disinformation, but would be willing to work with the government on measures to counteract it.

“If the goverment thinks we should be taking them then we’d be happy to sit down and have a conversation about it,” he said.

“Obviously we condemn violent rhetoric and very sadly MPs and candidates in the past few years have been subject to more of that including threats made to their physical wellbeing and we condemn that and we want to try to avoid that as much as possible.”

Labour’s campaign chair Megan Woods did not respond to requests for comment.

Ardern’s rhetoric not translating to policy
Former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern spoke during her valedictory farewell speech in Parliament on Wednesday about the loss of the ability to “engage in good robust debates and land on our respective positions relatively respectfully”.

“While there were a myriad of reasons, one was because so much of the information swirling around was false. I could physically see how entrenched it was for some people.”

Ardern is set to take up an unpaid role at the Christchurch Call, which was set up after the terror attacks and has a focus on targeting online proliferation of dis- and mis-information and the spread of hateful rhetoric.

Dr Hattotuwa said Ardern had led the world in her own rhetoric around the problem, but real action now needed to be taken.

“Let me be very clear, PM Ardern was a global leader in articulating the harm that disinformation has on democracy — at NATO, at Harvard, and then at the UN last year. There has been no translation into policy around that which she articulated publicly, so I think that needs to occur.

“I mean, when people say that they’re going to go and vent their frustration it might mean with a placard, it might mean with a gun.”

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

Unprecedented levels of disinformation will only get worse this election, but systems set up to deal with it during the pandemic have all been shut down, Disinformation Project researcher Sanjana Hattotuwa has warned.https://t.co/LUVAbALjGD

— RNZ (@radionz) April 8, 2023

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

In a display described by some as a "red loyalty dance" in honor of the opening of the National People's Congress' in Beijing, hundreds of students dressed in full military uniform, bearing placards of calligraphy and wearing red armbands, marched through the streets of Shangrao on Sunday, singing songs of praise for Lei Feng. They were escorted by rows of uniformed police, a video clip provided to RFA showed.

Local media reports said officials in the town had agreed to let the display go ahead because March 5 marked both the opening of China's rubber-stamp parliament, the National People's Congress, in Beijing, as well as being National Lei Feng Day.

Radio Free Asia was unable to reach any of the students or staff who took part in the heavily choreographed parade, and several schools in the city denied having taken part when approached about the event.

Shangrao officials also seemed keen to distance themselves from the "loyalty dance."

An official who answered the phone at the municipal bureau of education on Monday said the event had nothing to do with them, and was organized by the Xinzhou district education and sports bureau.

An official who answered the phone at the Xinzhou district education and sports bureau said they didn't know which schools had taken part in the event, adding that some of the schools in the district are administered by the city education bureau.

"This wasn't organized by us ... there are district-run schools and city-run schools, and I don't know which schools you are referring to," the official said.

"Learning from Lei Feng is normal ... it's quite normal for schools to organize activities that promote it," the official said. "Maybe copying the clothes worn by Lei Feng is part of red education, but it's not formalistic."

Calls to the Xinzhou district government and Shangrao city government hadn't responded to requests for comment by the time of publication.

No nostalgia

A Shangrao resident who gave only his surname Xu, for fear of reprisals, said the parade was held on Dongmen Road, that has the reputation for being "retro," but that local people hadn't welcomed the display of nostalgia for the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, a decade of factional street fighting and political turmoil that saw teachers and doctors locked up in cowpens and their places taken -- sometimes to disastrous effect -- by revolutionary youths.

"March 5 was 'Everyone Learn from Lei Feng Day'," so they were trying to create some momentum for that," Xu said. "They set up Dongmen Road to look as if it was back in the 1980s."

"But this Red Guard craze will blow over," he predicted. "It can't become a trend in the absence of orders from people at the highest level."

A Guangdong-based lawyer who requested anonymity said the display had aroused feelings of disgust on social media, with many worrying that China will accelerate its move towards leftist ideology and wind up back in a situation similar to the Cultural Revolution, a concern that was also reflected in slogans hung from a Beijing traffic flyover ahead of the 20th party congress on Oct. 13.

"It's unclear whether this was spontaneous, or whether it was Xi Jinping's intention [for it to happen]," the lawyer said. "I really don't think it can develop into the red fever that we saw under [now jailed former municipal party secretary] Bo Xilai in Chongqing."

"But things have changed a lot in the past 10 years ... and [Xi] certainly seems to hope that everyone can be brainwashed into loyalty dances and singing red songs," he said. "But it'll probably be hard for him to achieve that in a short time frame after 40 years of market economics."

Red songs were temporarily banned in Chongqing and Beijing after Bo Xilai’s fall from power, amid unconfirmed rumors that he and his political allies had been planning a coup in Beijing.

A Shanghai-based entrepreneur warned however that a society that hasn't fully reflected on the tragedy of Maoist politics will inevitably wind up repeating it.

"Back in the days of economic development, everyone could make some money, but those days are gone forever," the entrepreneur warned. "If there is no money to hand out, then there is going to be a serious problem, like in North Korea -- it's inevitable."

"Things are getting worse -- if there are no monuments to the Cultural Revolution or to the Great Famine, then they will both happen again," they warned.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Xiaoshan Huang and Chingman for RFA Cantonese.

Republicans and right-wing commentators suddenly want to save the whales—and much of the news media is buying it.

As a humpback whale was found on the shore at Brigantine, New Jersey on January 12—the seventh dead whale to wash up on a New York or New Jersey beach since December 5—local Republicans rushed to blame it on offshore wind development projects.

“Not even the whales can survive [New Jersey Gov.] Murphy’s Energy Master Plan,” lamented the Jersey GOP on Twitter (1/18/23). The partisan account linked to a story in the New Jersey Monitor (1/17/23) with the alarming headline “Debate Grows Over Offshore Wind, as Whale Deaths Mount.” The article began by laying out that debate—”environmentalists put out dueling calls to continue or curtail offshore wind work”—before including an important clarification about wind farm construction and the whale deaths: “no evidence shows it caused the casualties.”

The project in question is the recently approved 1,100 megawatt wind project that Danish company Ørsted is expected to build off the New Jersey coast this year. It is projected to power more than half a million homes by 2025. Pre-construction activities, including probing the seabed with a metal rod to test the nature of the soil, have begun.

According to federal National Marine Fisheries Service reports (2/22/18, 4/4/18, 5/4/18) this method of surveying, known as cone penetration testing or CPT, had little noise impact and has not been found to injure marine mammals. A representative from Ørsted told FAIR that the company is not currently using acoustic tests such as sonar in these surveys off the East Coast, and wasn’t in December, either. Ørsted did use acoustic surveys in the early stages of its project, which ended in September 2022.

‘Whales paying the price’

That didn’t stop Fox News’ Jesse Watters (1/11/23) from professing outrage. “Something unusual is happening to these whales,” he said:

Maybe this has something to do with it: New Jersey is actively preparing to build massive wind farms right off the coast. And the whales are paying the price, probably. These experts are saying these projects are killing these whales.

In case you missed the point, the report was accompanied by all-caps chyrons with messages like “WIND SURVEYING IS KILLING OUR WHALES,” “OCEAN WINDMILLS ARE THE PROBLEM” and “WINDFARMS ARE UGLY AND THEY KILL WHALES.”

This is from the same Jesse Watters who just two months ago (11/29/22) brought a lobsterman on to condemn Whole Foods for pulling lobsters from its stores due to the risk lobster fishing gear poses to whales. He has also spent much of his career working to discredit the climate movement and dismiss activists as hysterical (Mediaite, 8/5/19; Jesse Watters Primetime, 7/7/22, 9/7/22; Media Matters, 7/21/21, 2/2/22, 10/18/22). But now, suddenly, Watters is a whale conservationist.

The “expert” Watters brought onto his January 11 show was Mike Dean (mistakenly identified as Mike Davis), affiliated with Protect Our Coast NJ, a right-wing nonprofit that has accepted fossil fuel money, disguised as a pro-ocean environmental group (Intercept, 12/8/21). On his Twitter feed, Dean expresses opposition to climate science, and regularly retweeting climate denial posts (Media Matters, 1/12/23).

“The industrial wind companies are out there pounding the seabed with sonar,” Dean incorrectly claimed. “Common sense would tell you that’s what killed these whales. That’s the only new thing going on out there right now.”

Unusual mortality events

Your “common sense” should take a few other facts into account. First, whale deaths on the Jersey coast have not been isolated to this past December and January. A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration spokesperson said they’re part of a larger spate of “unusual mortality events” the agency has been documenting since 2016, predating these recent wind farm projects (AP, 1/9/23). NOAA Fisheries recorded 17 unusual mortality events of endangered right whales on the East Coast in 2017, and 10 in 2019. It counted no dead right whales in 2022, and one so far in 2023. Humpback whale “unusual mortality events” on the East Coast ranged from 34 in 2017 to 10 in 2021.

Meanwhile, some factors unrelated to wind farms are new: The Port of New York and New Jersey has been the nation’s busiest in recent months, as labor disputes and congestion routed many ships from the West Coast (Post & Courier, 1/13/23).

Also new: The Marine Mammal Stranding Center and NOAA noted that there currently are a high number of large whales in the Mid-Atlantic, due to high numbers of fish they eat remaining in the waters. A 2018 Rutgers study found that warming oceans may be sending crustaceans and numerous fish species further north during the winters. Increasing populations of menhaden—small fish that whales feed on—have also been documented off the mid-Atlantic coast (CNN, 1/20/23).

Sonar, which uses low-frequency noise to detect objects, can potentially interfere with whale navigation (Science.org, 3/21/22). But it’s hardly new. It’s long been in use on the ocean floor by the US military, which often uses it in training missions. Sonar and seismic testing are also used to find oil and gas deposits under the sea bed. Sonar used for wind energy construction surveying is expected to have a much lower sonic impact than the seismic air guns used in fossil fuel exploration (CNN, 1/20/23).

Causes of whale deaths

Leading causes of deaths for whales include ship strikes and entanglement in commercial fishing gear. In fact, the Marine Mammal Stranding Center, along with scientists from the Atlantic Marine Conservation Society, Mystic Aquarium and Marine Education Research and Rehabilitation Institute, performed a necropsy on the whale found in Brigantine, and determined that a ship strike most likely caused its death, though the investigation is not complete.

According to NOAA, which recently published an FAQ (1/20/23) about its ongoing research on “interactions between offshore wind energy projects and whales on the East Coast,” thus far no whale deaths have been linked to offshore wind development.

Skepticism over the ethics, business practices and environmental impacts of a large international company like Ørsted is healthy. But so is listening to scientists. Erin Meyer-Gutbrod, an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina’s School of the Earth, Ocean & Environment, told the Post & Courier (1/13/23) that so far, scientists don’t know much about how offshore wind farm construction will affect right whales, but that her main concern is ship traffic during construction—not sonar before it.

“Meyer-Gutbrod worries that exaggerated claims about wind energy may distract from implementing evidence-based policies that can be a life raft for the species,” the article said.

The distraction is exactly the point for fossil fuel shills and their Fox cheerleaders. Fox’s Tucker Carlson (1/13/23) lamented that, instead of blaming offshore windmills for whale deaths, “the federal government is harassing the people who need the least harassment: commercial fishermen and lobstermen on the East Coast.” In reality, as of 2020, entanglements with commercial fishing gear, along with ship strikes, had “killed or seriously injured at least 31 right whales…since 2017 alone,” according to the National Marine Fisheries Service.

‘Stop offshore wind’

But rather than correcting misinformation, local and national papers often amplified false and misleading claims from Fox, Republican politicians and pseudo-environmental fossil fuel–backed groups.

“Murphy & Wind Companies Ignore US Navy Report; Sonar Can Kill Whales” shouted a headline at the Downbeach Buzz local news site (1/17/23).

“Six Dead Whales Wash Up in a Month. Stop Offshore Wind for Investigation, NJ Groups Say,” was a headline at Advance Publications‘ NJ.com (1/9/23). The piece opened with the drama of a dead whale:

Tire tracks in the sand marked the burial ground of a massive humpback whale Monday. The dead 30-foot female whale washed up ashore Saturday and two days later lay buried underneath, leaving behind a decaying rotten smell.

It followed this up with quotes from Clean Ocean Action, a conservationist group opposed to this wind project, offering a clear suggestion of where readers’ sympathies ought to lie.

The story did go on to debunk as false or unsubstantiated the groups’ major claims: that the whale deaths were “unprecedented,” that offshore wind were authorized to “hurt or kill more than 157,328 marine mammals.” But that wasn’t enough to shift the piece’s anti–wind power framing.

Other groups cited included right-wing and fossil fuel-friendly Protect Our Coasts NJ (whose politics the site did not identify), the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association and Defend Brigantine Beach—a Facebook group with some members sharing the aforementioned Watters and Carlson segments.

A few days later, the online paper (NJ.com, 1/13/23) was back with “Seventh Dead Whale Washes Up at Jersey Shore. Calls to Stop Offshore Wind Work Grow.” The article “balanced” statements from the Marine Mammal Stranding Center and NOAA against statements from two Republican politicians and Clean Ocean Action.

NY1 and NBC4 New York both published an AP piece (1/9/23) that led with accusations and claims made by the groups critical of the wind farm, waiting until the seventh paragraph to begin to reveal that each claim was unsubstantiated or debunked by the piece’s expert sources.

Consequences of CO₂

This coverage, seemingly more interested in elevating conflict than clarity, misses why wind and other renewable energies are needed in the first place: our world’s unsustainable addiction to fossil fuels—the largest contributor of greenhouse gas emissions leading to climate change (IPCC, 2018). Never mind that we may run out of them by the end of the century.

At least a quarter of CO₂ released by the burning of fossil fuels is absorbed by the ocean, acidifying the water and threatening sea life. CO₂ in the air causes algal blooms that lower oxygen levels in the water. Wastewater from fracking often contains substances like arsenic, lead, chlorine and mercury that can contaminate ground and drinking water.

And this is if all goes as planned. The Center for Biological Diversity estimates that the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill harmed or killed nearly 26,000 marine mammals, along with 82,000 birds of 102 species, about 6,000 sea turtles and “a vast (but unknown) number of fish… oysters, crabs, corals and other creatures.”

Humans aren’t exempt from the damage either, of course. A 2021 Harvard study (2/9/21) found that “more than 8 million people died in 2018 from fossil fuel pollution.”

And the fossil fuel industry is smart. Exxon knew about climate change and its own role in it since 1977, and subsequently spent millions on misinformation campaigns (Scientific American, 10/26/15). It used pseudo-science to cast doubt on the climate change science it knew to be true (NPR, 10/27/21), and to undermine the feasibility, efficiency and profitability of renewable energy (ASAP Science, 9/9/20).

We can’t blame individuals for being confused by clandestine fossil fuel industry lies—they’re designed to be confusing!

Before the sudden concern for whales, opposition to wind farms off the coast of the Jersey Shore was based on a not-in-my-backyard attitude from residents who didn’t want their ocean views altered, and who were concerned about the subsequent effect on tourism (Philadelphia Inquirer, 2/15/21).

“They will not be able to look out on the horizon and dream,” one woman was quoted.

“Enjoy the View While It Lasts,” declared an NBC 10 Philadelphia headline (6/17/22) last summer. Note that the wind farm in question will be approximately 15 miles out to sea.

‘Non-scientific’ and ‘dangerous’

At a January 17 news conference covered by NJ.com (1/17/23), climate activists said blaming these whale deaths on offshore wind energy was “baseless,” “non-scientific” and “dangerous.” The outlet quoted Jennifer Coffey, executive director of non-profit Association of New Jersey Environmental Commissions:

I think anytime anyone uses the guise of science without actually looking at the data to further their own agenda is dangerous, and when we’re talking about combating climate change the stakes could not be higher.

If local Republicans want to voice their dissatisfaction with Governor Murphy, they’re entitled to do that. But news media’s complicity in using feigned concern for dead whales to shield residents’ fiscal conservatism and fossil fuel interests undermines genuine environmental activism and ignores our planet’s desperate need for clean energy.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Olivia Riggio.

Republicans and right-wing commentators suddenly want to save the whales—and much of the news media is buying it.

As a humpback whale was found on the shore at Brigantine, New Jersey on January 12—the seventh dead whale to wash up on a New York or New Jersey beach since December 5—local Republicans rushed to blame it on offshore wind development projects.

The New Jersey Monitor headline (1/17/23) leaves out crucial information that’s in the lead: “no evidence shows [wind farm construction] caused the [whale] casualties.”

“Not even the whales can survive [New Jersey Gov.] Murphy’s Energy Master Plan,” lamented the Jersey GOP on Twitter (1/18/23). The partisan account linked to a story in the New Jersey Monitor (1/17/23) with the alarming headline “Debate Grows Over Offshore Wind, as Whale Deaths Mount.” The article began by laying out that debate—”environmentalists put out dueling calls to continue or curtail offshore wind work”—before including an important clarification about wind farm construction and the whale deaths: “no evidence shows it caused the casualties.”

The project in question is the recently approved 1,100 megawatt wind project that Danish company Ørsted is expected to build off the New Jersey coast this year. It is projected to power more than half a million homes by 2025. Pre-construction activities, including probing the seabed with a metal rod to test the nature of the soil, have begun.

According to federal National Marine Fisheries Service reports (2/22/18, 4/4/18, 5/4/18) this method of surveying, known as cone penetration testing or CPT, had little noise impact and has not been found to injure marine mammals. A representative from Ørsted told FAIR that the company is not currently using acoustic tests such as sonar in these surveys off the East Coast, and wasn’t in December, either. Ørsted did use acoustic surveys in the early stages of its project, which ended in September 2022.

‘Whales paying the price’

Suddenly Fox News‘ Jesse Watters (1/11/23) cares about whales—when they can be used to make a case against wind power.

That didn’t stop Fox News’ Jesse Watters (1/11/23) from professing outrage. “Something unusual is happening to these whales,” he said:

Maybe this has something to do with it: New Jersey is actively preparing to build massive wind farms right off the coast. And the whales are paying the price, probably. These experts are saying these projects are killing these whales.

In case you missed the point, the report was accompanied by all-caps chyrons with messages like “WIND SURVEYING IS KILLING OUR WHALES,” “OCEAN WINDMILLS ARE THE PROBLEM” and “WINDFARMS ARE UGLY AND THEY KILL WHALES.”

This is from the same Jesse Watters who just two months ago (11/29/22) brought a lobsterman on to condemn Whole Foods for pulling lobsters from its stores due to the risk lobster fishing gear poses to whales. He has also spent much of his career working to discredit the climate movement and dismiss activists as hysterical (Mediaite, 8/5/19; Jesse Watters Primetime,  7/7/22, 9/7/22; Media Matters, 7/21/21, 2/2/22, 10/18/22). But now, suddenly, Watters is a whale conservationist.

The “expert” Watters brought onto his January 11 show was Mike Dean (mistakenly identified as Mike Davis), affiliated with Protect Our Coast NJ, a right-wing nonprofit that has accepted fossil fuel money, disguised as a pro-ocean environmental group (Intercept, 12/8/21). On his Twitter feed, Dean expresses opposition to climate science, and regularly retweeting climate denial posts (Media Matters, 1/12/23).

“The industrial wind companies are out there pounding the seabed with sonar,” Dean incorrectly claimed. “Common sense would tell you that’s what killed these whales. That’s the only new thing going on out there right now.”

Unusual mortality events

CNN (1/20/23) quoted a NOAA official: ““There are no known connections between any of these offshore wind activities and any whale strandings, regardless of species.”

Your “common sense” should take a few other facts into account. First, whale deaths on the Jersey coast have not been isolated to this past December and January. A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration spokesperson said they’re part of a larger spate of “unusual mortality events” the agency has been documenting since 2016, predating these recent wind farm projects (AP, 1/9/23). NOAA Fisheries recorded 17 unusual mortality events of endangered right whales on the East Coast in 2017, and 10 in 2019. It counted no dead right whales in 2022, and one so far in 2023. Humpback whale “unusual mortality events” on the East Coast ranged from 34 in 2017 to 10 in 2021.

Meanwhile, some factors unrelated to wind farms are new: The Port of New York and New Jersey has been the nation’s busiest in recent months, as labor disputes and congestion routed many ships from the West Coast (Post & Courier, 1/13/23).

Also new: The Marine Mammal Stranding Center and NOAA noted that there currently are a high number of large whales in the Mid-Atlantic, due to high numbers of fish they eat remaining in the waters. A 2018 Rutgers study found that warming oceans may be sending crustaceans and numerous fish species further north during the winters. Increasing populations of menhaden—small fish that whales feed on—have also been documented off the mid-Atlantic coast (CNN, 1/20/23).

Sonar, which uses low-frequency noise to detect objects, can potentially interfere with whale navigation (Science.org, 3/21/22). But it’s hardly new. It’s long been in use on the ocean floor by the US military, which often uses it in training missions. Sonar and seismic testing are also used to find oil and gas deposits under the sea bed. Sonar used for wind energy construction surveying is expected to have a much lower sonic impact than the seismic air guns used in fossil fuel exploration (CNN, 1/20/23).

Causes of whale deaths

Contrary to Fox News‘ Tucker Carlson (1/13/23), experts say the leading cause of whale deaths is not Joe Biden.

Leading causes of deaths for whales include ship strikes and entanglement in commercial fishing gear. In fact, the Marine Mammal Stranding Center, along with scientists from the Atlantic Marine Conservation Society, Mystic Aquarium and Marine Education Research and Rehabilitation Institute, performed a necropsy on the whale found in Brigantine, and determined that a ship strike most likely caused its death, though the investigation is not complete.

According to NOAA, which recently published an FAQ (1/20/23) about its ongoing research on “interactions between offshore wind energy projects and whales on the East Coast,” thus far no whale deaths have been linked to offshore wind development.

Skepticism over the ethics, business practices and environmental impacts of a large international company like Ørsted is healthy. But so is listening to scientists. Erin Meyer-Gutbrod, an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina’s School of the Earth, Ocean & Environment, told the Post & Courier (1/13/23) that so far, scientists don’t know much about how offshore wind farm construction will affect right whales, but that her main concern is ship traffic during construction—not sonar before it.

“Meyer-Gutbrod worries that exaggerated claims about wind energy may distract from implementing evidence-based policies that can be a life raft for the species,” the article said.

The distraction is exactly the point for fossil fuel shills and their Fox cheerleaders. Fox’s Tucker Carlson (1/13/23) lamented that, instead of blaming offshore windmills for whale deaths, “the federal government is harassing the people who need the least harassment: commercial fishermen and lobstermen on the East Coast.” In reality, as of 2020, entanglements with commercial fishing gear, along with ship strikes, had “killed or seriously injured at least 31 right whales…since 2017 alone,” according to the National Marine Fisheries Service.

‘Stop offshore wind’

NJ.com (1/13/23) says these “calls to stop offshore wind work” come from “climate groups, like Save LBI and the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association.” Save Long Beach Island gets legal support from a right-wing fossil fuel–backed think tank (Distilled, 1/5/23); the LICFA is, of course, not a climate group but a commercial fishing association.

But rather than correcting misinformation, local and national papers often amplified false and misleading claims from Fox, Republican politicians and pseudo-environmental fossil fuel–backed groups.

“Murphy & Wind Companies Ignore US Navy Report; Sonar Can Kill Whales” shouted a headline at the Downbeach Buzz local news site (1/17/23).

“Six Dead Whales Wash Up in a Month. Stop Offshore Wind for Investigation, NJ Groups Say,” was a headline at Advance Publications‘ NJ.com (1/9/23). The piece opened with the drama of a dead whale:

Tire tracks in the sand marked the burial ground of a massive humpback whale Monday. The dead 30-foot female whale washed up ashore Saturday and two days later lay buried underneath, leaving behind a decaying rotten smell.

It followed this up with quotes from Clean Ocean Action, a conservationist group opposed to this wind project, offering a clear suggestion of where readers’ sympathies ought to lie.

The story did go on to debunk as false or unsubstantiated the groups’ major claims: that the whale deaths were “unprecedented,” that offshore wind were authorized to “hurt or kill more than 157,328 marine mammals.” But that wasn’t enough to shift the piece’s anti–wind power framing.

Other groups cited included right-wing and fossil fuel-friendly Protect Our Coasts NJ (whose politics the site did not identify), the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association and Defend Brigantine Beach—a Facebook group with some members sharing the aforementioned Watters and Carlson segments.

A few days later, the online paper (NJ.com, 1/13/23) was back with “Seventh Dead Whale Washes Up at Jersey Shore. Calls to Stop Offshore Wind Work Grow.” The article “balanced” statements from the Marine Mammal Stranding Center and NOAA against statements from two Republican politicians and Clean Ocean Action.

NY1 and NBC4 New York both published an AP piece (1/9/23) that led with accusations and claims made by the groups critical of the wind farm, waiting until the seventh paragraph to begin to reveal that each claim was unsubstantiated or debunked by the piece’s expert sources.

Consequences of CO₂

This coverage, seemingly more interested in elevating conflict than clarity, misses why wind and other renewable energies are needed in the first place: our world’s unsustainable addiction to fossil fuels—the largest contributor of greenhouse gas emissions leading to climate change (IPCC, 2018). Never mind that we may run out of them by the end of the century.

At least a quarter of CO₂ released by the burning of fossil fuels is absorbed by the ocean, acidifying the water and threatening sea life. CO₂ in the air causes algal blooms that lower oxygen levels in the water. Wastewater from fracking often contains substances like arsenic, lead, chlorine and mercury that can contaminate ground and drinking water.

And this is if all goes as planned. The Center for Biological Diversity estimates that the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill harmed or killed nearly 26,000 marine mammals, along with 82,000 birds of 102 species, about 6,000 sea turtles and “a vast (but unknown) number of fish… oysters, crabs, corals and other creatures.”

Humans aren’t exempt from the damage either, of course. A 2021 Harvard study (2/9/21) found that “more than 8 million people died in 2018 from fossil fuel pollution.”

“Enjoy the View While It Lasts” was NBC10‘s headline (6/17/22) over a story that admits that wind turbines would appear “about an eighth of an inch in size” from the perspective of viewers on the beach.

And the fossil fuel industry is smart. Exxon knew about climate change and its own role in it since 1977, and subsequently spent millions on misinformation campaigns (Scientific American, 10/26/15). It used pseudo-science to cast doubt on the climate change science it knew to be true (NPR, 10/27/21), and to undermine the feasibility, efficiency and profitability of renewable energy (ASAP Science, 9/9/20).

We can’t blame individuals for being confused by clandestine fossil fuel industry lies—they’re designed to be confusing!

Before the sudden concern for whales, opposition to wind farms off the coast of the Jersey Shore was based on a not-in-my-backyard attitude from residents who didn’t want their ocean views altered, and who were concerned about the subsequent effect on tourism (Philadelphia Inquirer, 2/15/21).

“They will not be able to look out on the horizon and dream,” one woman was quoted.

“Enjoy the View While It Lasts,” declared an NBC 10 Philadelphia headline (6/17/22) last summer. Note that the wind farm in question will be approximately 15 miles out to sea.

‘Non-scientific’ and ‘dangerous’

At a January 17 news conference covered by NJ.com (1/17/23), climate activists said blaming these whale deaths on offshore wind energy was “baseless,” “non-scientific” and “dangerous.” The outlet quoted Jennifer Coffey, executive director of non-profit Association of New Jersey Environmental Commissions:

I think anytime anyone uses the guise of science without actually looking at the data to further their own agenda is dangerous, and when we’re talking about combating climate change the stakes could not be higher.

If local Republicans want to voice their dissatisfaction with Governor Murphy, they’re entitled to do that. But news media’s complicity in using feigned concern for dead whales to shield residents’ fiscal conservatism and fossil fuel interests undermines genuine environmental activism and ignores our planet’s desperate need for clean energy.

The post Oil Lobby Prompts Right-Wing Media to Save Whales—From Wind Power appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Olivia Riggio.

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

• Five fired Memphis police officers charged with second degree murder in death of Black motorist Tyre Nichols
• Escalation between Gaza and Israel after a deadly Israeli raid in the occupied West Bank town of Jenin
• Democrats urge President Biden to reject Trump-era immigration policies like Title 42
• Asian American groups meet with San Francisco mayor following deadly violence in Half Moon Bay and Monterey Park
• President Biden warns of extreme Republican proposals on taxes, Social Security and Medicare

The post Second degree murder charges for the five police officers who beat Tyre Nichols “like a piñata”; Deadly Israeli raid in Jenin prompts Gaza-Israel clash; Democrats press President Biden on immigration: The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – January 26, 2023 appeared first on KPFA.

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

The Sunday afternoon raid by a joint force of gendarmes and police on a rented warehouse yielded 34 large containers of the powerful anesthetic known recreationally as “Special K,” National Authority for Combating Drugs Secretary General Meas Vyrith told RFA Khmer.

The seized ketamine, which can put users into a mildly hallucinatory state, is currently being held in a secure location in Sihanoukville, he said, adding that authorities believe it had been illegally smuggled into Cambodia for sale.

“Efforts are underway to locate those who are responsible for the drugs,” he said. “The criminals took advantage of a loophole when the relevant authorities took shifts in carrying out their duties and also employed different tactics to carry out their illegal activities.”

The bust follows several other large seizures this year in Cambodia, which is becoming a transit and production point for illicit drugs in the region.

Authorities shut down a processing site and seized 40.5 kilograms (89 pounds) of ketamine in May, and in July, they seized 1.8 tons of ketamine and nearly 300 tons of chemicals after raiding a processing site and six storage facilities. In August, authorities seized an additional 871 kilograms of ketamine throughout the country.

According to the NACD, authorities in Cambodia arrested more than 30,000 suspects in 10,461 drug-related cases in 2020 and 6,308 cases in 2021.

Meas Vyrith told RFA that the amount of drugs seized by authorities in Cambodia so far in 2022 had increased by more than half of the total seized in all of 2021.

The latest bust also follows an announcement by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in August which said that ketamine seizures had increased sharply in Cambodia from 112.5 kilograms in 2020 to 2.8 tons in 2021 – accounting for more than 50% of all ketamine seized in Southeast Asia (5.4 tons) that year. 

UNODC said that the increase was associated with growing evidence of illicit manufacture of the drug in Cambodia, based on the detection of several clandestine ketamine laboratories in the country.

Speaking to RFA on Monday, civil society groups urged the government to take stronger action against traffickers of ketamine and other illicit drugs to prevent Cambodia from becoming a haven for the drug trade in Southeast Asia.

Cheap Sotheary, the coordinator for human rights group ADHOC in Sihanouk province, said that the authorities need to be more transparent and forthcoming about information related to drug seizures. She said that drug trafficking remains a problem in Cambodia due to corruption.

“We are requesting that the information and photos of criminals be made public because we worry that local authorities may be complicit and allow them to get away,” she said.

“We also have no information about the places where [authorities] keep the seized illicit drugs. We’re talking about hundreds of tons of these drugs. What would happen if the people who look after the confiscated drugs steal them and sell them themselves? It’s very dangerous without proper oversight.”

Other groups have said that the rise of drug trafficking in Cambodia shows that criminals are not afraid to set up manufacturing operations in the country.

Ketamine is widely used in human and veterinary medicine and, while the drug is not under international control, its non-medical use has been related to a number of severe adverse health effects.

According to UNODC, high doses of ketamine used recreationally can cause cardiovascular and respiratory toxicity effects, as well as other adverse effects like bladder problems, anxiety, panic attacks, palpitations, tachycardia, chest pains, depression, aggravated symptoms of existing mental health issues, slurred speech and inability to speak.

Translated by Sok Ry Sum.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Angry protests raged overnight in the capital of China’s western Xinjiang region, as residents blamed tight COVID-19 lockdown measures for delaying a response to a deadly apartment fire, prompting the government to promise to ease the restrictions gradually, according to local sources and media reports.

The protests in Urumqi–which also erupted in Beijing, Shanghai and other cities–were triggered by a fire Thursday night in a residential building in Urumqi’s Jixiangyuan district that killed at least 10 people.

Citizen videos that circulated on the Internet showed screaming residents demanding authorities open exits they said were closed under strict COVID-19 restrictions that have been in place for more than 100 days.

Reuters news agency reported that videos verified as taken in Urumqi showed fist-pumping crowds chanting, “End the lockdown!” while others were singing China’s national anthem with its lyric, “Rise up, those who refuse to be slaves!”

AFP said it had verified videos showing hundreds of people gathered outside the Urumqi city government offices during the night, chanting: “Lift lockdowns!” while others marched chanted east of the city and berated authorities wearing white protective suits.

According to the residents, fire trucks that rushed to the scene were prevented from reaching the fire by parked cars and metal fences preventing people from coming out of their buildings and neighborhoods as part of the COVID-19 blockade, allowing the fire to burn for nearly three hours before it was extinguished.

Firemen didn’t clear the obstructions and tried to spray water on the building from a distance, but the hoses could not reach floors 14-19 of the 21 story building, where the fire was burning, sources told RFA Uyghur.

In response to the Friday night protests, the Urumqi city government held a news conference early Saturday and announced a three-stage easing of the lockdown in the city, home to 4.7 million people and subject to the longest and harshest lockdowns, imposed under the Chinese Communist Party’s unpopular zero-COVID policy.

Sui Rong, Urumqi’s Minister of Propaganda, said easing would begin in low-risk areas to allow residents to leave their apartments and go downstairs. But residents would still be required to show proof of their reason to leave their buildings and have to maintain social distance, wear masks and avoid gathering in groups, local media quoted Sui as saying.

China’s state broadcaster CCTV said the fire was caused by a board of electric sockets in the bedroom of one of the apartments.

CCTV said Urumqi Mayor Maimaitiming Kade had issued a rare formal apology for the blaze at Saturday’s briefing.

But Kade rejected assertions by residents and commenters on social media that COVID-19 strictures had contributed to the tragedy, saying the doors of the burning building were not locked.

Urumqi fire chief Li Wensheng blamed haphazard parking by private cars for impeding firetruck’s access to the blaze, CCTV reported.

Far away from Xinjiang in the eastern city of Nanjing, citizen videos seen by RFA Mandarin showed students gathering at the Nanjing Institute of Communication to mourn and call attention to victims of the fire and bereaved families.

Another video shows a man who appeared to be a school official holding a loudspeaker and telling the students, "You will pay for everything you have done today.”

The threat angered the students, who shouted back: "You have to pay the price too," and "This country is paying the price.”

RFA was unable to verify the videos immediately, but similar clips were shared showing similar gatherings in Shanghai and in western Sichuan province.

‘Total disregard for Ughurs' suffering’

The 12 million Uyghurs have been subject to harsh government campaigns, including a mass incarceration program that affected as many as 1.8 million people, that China says are necessary to fight extremism and terrorism.

The United States and the parliaments of some Western countries declared China’s repression of the Uyghurs, including arbitrary detainment and forced labor, amounted to genocide and crimes against humanity. In late August, the United Nations human rights chief issued a report on conditions in Xinjiang and concluded that the repression “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.”

 The World Uyghur Congress, an advocacy group based in Germany, condemned the authorities’ response in a statement that also provided details of Thursday’s deadly fire and casualties.

“Since August, Uyghurs in East Turkistan have endured these lockdowns without access to food or medical care. Social media accounts have been flooded with videos of people dying due to complete neglect from the authorities, and total disregard for Uyghur’s suffering,” it said, using the Uyghurs preferred name for Xinjiang.

Among those who died were a family of three: the mother, Qemernisahan Abdurahman, and her children, Nehdiye and Imran. The father, Eli Memetniyaz, and their older son, Eliyas Eli, are both serving 12 and 10 years prison sentences, respectively, the statement said.

“The Uyghur community is extremely distressed after hearing the horrific news of numerous families losing their lives in the fire,” said Dolkun Isa, president of the World Uyghur Congress. 

“The fact is that the Chinese government has absolutely no mercy and the local authorities are completely ignoring the needs and demands of the Uyghur people, therefore they have not promptly acted to extinguish the blaze,” he said.

Written by Paul Eckert.

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

"The Organized Crime and Triad Bureau is dealing with the case," the government said in a statement on Tuesday. "Police will take follow-up actions seriously in accordance with the law on whether the incident has breached the National Anthem Ordinance or any other legislation of Hong Kong, including the Hong Kong National Security Law."

The national security law, which heralded a citywide crackdown on dissent and mass exodus of people in the wake of the 2019 protests, bans public speech or actions deemed likely to "incite hatred" of the government, while the national anthem law bans any speech or actions deemed to be disrespectful to the Chinese national anthem. 

In a scene that went viral on social media in Hong Kong, "Glory to Hong Kong" blared out over the sound system before a rugby match between Hong Kong and South Korea played just outside of Seoul on Sunday. International sporting protocol would require China’s communist national anthem, the March of the Volunteers, to be played instead.

The Hong Kong government said the song is "closely associated with violent protests and the [Hong Kong] 'independence' movement," although the song calls for freedom and democracy rather than independence. 

In September, a 43-year-old man was arrested for "sedition" after playing Glory to Hong Kong on the harmonica at Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral vigil in Hong Kong.

The police announcement came as match organizers Asian Rugby blamed the anthem gaffe on "an innocent mistake" by an intern, government broadcaster Radio Television Hong Kong reported on Tuesday.

"But questions remain about why the song, associated with violent protests in Hong Kong in 2019, ended up in a folder where all national anthems were stored," the station's report said.

Asia Rugby’s interim CEO, Benjamin van Rooyen, told reporters that the Hong Kong Rugby Union had provided the correct audio file to Asia Rugby when the Hong Kong rugby team played in Bangkok last month, and that the Korea Rugby Union should have had the correct anthem on file after Hong Kong played a match in the country in July.

"This was somebody who was provided with a song ... and somebody pressed play. That person has no understanding of the politics of the world," van Rooyen told an online news conference in comments quoted by Radio Television Hong Kong. "I don’t think there were any ulterior motives in any of this. This was a simple human error."

The Hong Kong Rugby Union said future errors of this type would mean the Hong Kong team's "immediate withdrawal from competition."

'Chilling effect'

Last week, Hong Kong citizen journalist Paula Leung was jailed for three months after she pleaded guilty to "insulting the national anthem" by waving a colonial-era Hong Kong flag at a shopping mall that was screening a medal ceremony for Hong Kong fencer Edgar Cheung on July 26, 2021.

Australian lawyer and rights activist Kevin Yam said Hong Kong courts are imposing increasingly harsh sentences on cases involving China's national symbols.

"There were a few cases more than 10 years ago now involving the national flag law, but they only wound up with fines of around 1,000 or a few hundred Hong Kong dollars," Yam told RFA. "Nowadays, you can go to jail for booing the national anthem."

"This is a terrible thing, and it will have a chilling effect, and shows how Hong Kong is moving backwards, and not with the times," he said. "Things are different under the national security law, and freedom and human rights have all gone into reverse."

Sociologist Chung Kim-wah said such measures can only ban public expressions of anti-government feeling, not the feelings themselves.

"They are now using various laws to impose the heaviest possible sentences, so that nobody will dare to resist or spread discontent with the regime," Chung told RFA. "Beijing ... wants Hong Kong people to refrain from expressing themselves so that they eventually get used to it, and can only obey [the authorities]."

"But stopping them expressing themselves won't mean they accept all of this; it will just fuel greater discontent in more people."

In 2019, when protesters began defending peaceful demonstrators against riot police firing tear gas, non-lethal bullets and occasionally live ammunition with Molotov cocktails, bricks and other makeshift weapons, Hong Kong fans chanted "Freedom for Hong Kong" and booed the Chinese national anthem at a soccer match in South Korea.

They waved banners that read "Liberate Hong Kong, revolution in our time!" a popular protest slogan that was banned under the national security law, and sang "Glory to Hong Kong." 

Hong Kong passed a national anthem law in June 2020 banning 'insults' to the Chinese national anthem after Hong Kong soccer fans repeatedly booed, yelled Cantonese obscenities or turned their backs when it was played at matches. 

Hong Kong second-in-command Chan Kwok-ki met with the South Korean Consul General on Monday to protest against Sunday's incident.

"The [Hong Kong government] raises strong objections to [Asian Rugby] for its inability ... to prevent the incident from happening," Chan was quoted as saying in a government statement. He said the Hong Kong Rugby Union would launch its own investigation to study ways to ensure the incident is never repeated.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chen Zifei for RFA Cantonese.

More than a year after it froze $7 billion of Afghanistan’s central bank reserves in the wake of the Taliban’s military victory, the US has announced it will use half the money to establish a fund at a Swiss bank to help stabilize the cratering Afghan economy.

The New York Times (9/14/22) wrote that the US “explored trying to directly recapitalize the Afghan central bank”—in other words, considered giving some of Afghanistan’s money back to Afghanistan.

President Joe Biden’s refusal over the past year to allow the Afghan central bank access to its own reserves has caused an economic crisis that has pushed most of the population into extreme poverty and malnutrition. Moreover, in February, Biden announced that he was reserving half of Afghanistan’s money for families of 9/11 victims, sparking international outrage—and yawns from TV news outlets (FAIR.org, 2/15/22).

The establishment of the “Afghan Fund” is a half measure that, while almost certain to provide some much needed relief, continues both the unjust theft of half the funds and the hobbling of the country’s recovery by undermining the central bank. (Economist Andrés Arauz describes Biden’s plan as “starting a parallel private foundation ‘central bank’ from scratch,” and argues that it’s a “terrible idea”—CEPR, 9/15/22.)

When a government invades a country, occupies it for 20 years, and then sends it into a humanitarian crisis by appropriating most of its money, you’d expect good journalists from that country to follow the story closely and vigorously hold their government to account. In the US, instead, you get largely shrugs and government talking points.

Obscuring US responsibility

The story of Biden’s reallocation of Afghanistan’s reserves wasn’t mentioned by a single TV news outlet, according to a search of the Nexis news database. That failure is sadly unsurprising, given their overwhelming lack of interest in the Afghan people once the US military withdrawal was complete—after incessant wailing about the fate of those people during the withdrawal itself (FAIR.org, 12/21/21).

The AP story the LA Times (9/15/22) ran on the Biden administration’s reallocation of Afghanistan’s banking reserves didn’t quote any Afghans.

The Los Angeles Times (9/15/22) ran an AP report on the funds on its front page. That report—which also ran in major papers like the Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun—obscured the US responsibility for the situation, using passive language to explain that “international funding to Afghanistan was suspended” and “billions of dollars of the county’s assets abroad, mostly in the United States, were frozen” after the US withdrawal.

That Biden had unilaterally announced that half the money would be effectively stolen from the Afghan people, who had nothing to do with 9/11, and reserved for families of 9/11 victims, was likewise reported with passive language and no hint of controversy: “The other $3.5 billion will stay in the US to finance payments from lawsuits by US victims of terrorism.”

The only quotes the AP offered were from US officials and the Swiss bank.

CNN.com (9/14/22) also quoted only US officials, and offered the rather credulous assessment: “By setting up this mechanism, the US is making it clear that they intend to get the frozen funds to the Afghan people”—which is hard to square with the earmarking of fully half the funds for US citizens, not the Afghan people.

‘Unusual dilemma’

The Washington Post headline (9/14/22) reflects the framing that Afghanistan is to blame for the theft of its reserves: “US officials say the Taliban has refused to do what is necessary for the funds to be returned.”

The New York Times and Washington Post at least included a human rights critic each, but still included language downplaying US culpability. At the Times (9/14/22), reporter Charlie Savage told readers the crisis is “a highly unusual dilemma”:

Afghanistan’s economy went into a free fall when its government collapsed amid the Taliban’s takeover in August 2021. Financial aid and international spending dried up, in part because the Taliban are a designated terrorist group subject to US and international sanctions that make it a crime to transfer money that could reach them.

In this framing, it’s not US sanctions that are to blame, but rather the fact that the “Taliban are a designated terrorist group” and thus subject to sanctions. Designated by whom? By not answering this question, the Times deflects attention from US decision-making and its catastrophic impact on the Afghan people.

The only unalloyed criticism appearing in any US news outlet we could find came from Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, who told the Washington Post (9/14/22), “This move can’t possibly compensate for the harm to the Afghan economy and millions of people who are starving, in large part because of the US confiscation of Afghanistan’s central bank reserves.”

The Post‘s Jeff Stein also was nearly alone in including criticism from a spokesperson for the Afghan central bank. (The only other major US news outlet we found that included a quote from a Taliban spokesperson was the Wall Street Journal—9/14/22).

Even so, the Post couldn’t help tucking an old-fashioned both-sidesing into the story:

Economists say the freezing of these funds has fueled the collapse of Afghanistan’s economy and its hunger crisis, but the Biden administration and other analysts have said the Taliban cannot be trusted to administer such substantial amounts of money.

Urging release of funds

The Intercept report (6/6/22) frankly refers to “the humanitarian disaster triggered by the Biden administration’s decision to seize Afghanistan’s $7 billion in banking reserves.”

The US isn’t alone in its concerns about the Taliban, but Washington’s argument is disingenuous. Central bank funds are not the property of the country’s government, and that government cannot simply withdraw them for its own purposes; the vast majority—some 90%—of the bank’s holdings in fact belong to Afghan citizens and businesses (CEPR.net, 9/15/22).

That’s why a wide range of individuals and groups around the world, including human rights groups, economists and the UN secretary general, have urged the release of the entirety of the funds to the central bank.

The earmarking of half the funds for 9/11 families—which a group of economists including Joseph Stiglitz called “arbitrary and unjustified”—is particularly galling. Kelly Campbell, co-founder of 9/11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, told the Intercept (6/6/22):

The fact of the matter is that these reserves are the Afghan people’s money. The idea that they are on the brink of famine and that we would be holding on to their money for any purpose is just wrong. The Afghan people are not responsible for 9/11, they’re victims of 9/11 the same way our families are. To take their money and watch them literally starve—I can’t think of anything more sad.

Missing: women’s voices

Al Jazeera (12/4/21): “The Afghan people should not be denied vital healthcare and be abandoned without food because the international community sees economic starvation as the only available tool to influence the Taliban regime. “

Even those the West most professes concern for, Afghan women, have deeply criticized Biden’s handling of the funds. In March, the US canceled talks in Doha with the Taliban about the funds, ostensibly because the Taliban reversed its decision to allow girls to attend high school (Reuters, 3/27/22). But as Jamila Afghani, founder and president of the Afghan chapter of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, pointedly argued (Al Jazeera, 12/4/21): “We are not supporting Afghan women by starving them.”

In an op-ed for Foreign Policy (1/31/22) several months into the freeze, Jamila Afghani and Yifat Susskind of the global women’s human rights group MADRE argued that US policymakers’ framing of the situation offers a false choice between economic relief and women’s rights—which, they point out, is “grounded in historical hypocrisy,” as the US used women’s rights to justify their war, despite spending nearly 1,000 times more on military operations than promoting women’s rights. (See FAIR.org, 8/23/21.)

“In reality,” Afghani and Susskind wrote, “the best way for policymakers to ensure their actions promote an effective economic recovery is to center the voices of Afghan women leaders and heed their recommendations.”

US journalists’ over-reliance on official sources means that the false choice between economic relief and women’s rights is not just the dominant policymaker narrative, but the dominant media narrative as well. In not a single story in the latest round of coverage was an Afghan woman’s voice heard—let alone centered. Nor were any civilian male voices heard, for that matter. In a story fundamentally about the fate of the Afghan people, to US journalists, those people are little more than silent pawns.

The post Biden’s Afghan Shell Game Prompts Media Shrugs and Stenography appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julie Hollar.

The death of Queen Elizabeth II has focused global attention on the British royal family and renewed criticism of the monarchy both inside the U.K. and abroad, especially among peoples colonized by Britain. “There’s a degree of psychosis that you can go to another people’s land, colonize them, and then expect them to honor you at the same time,” says Kenyan American author Mukoma Wa Ngugi, who teaches literature at Cornell University and whose own family was deeply impacted by the bloody British suppression of the Mau Mau revolution. He says that with Queen Elizabeth’s death, there needs to be a “dismantling” of the Commonwealth and a real reckoning with colonial abuses. We also speak with Harvard historian Caroline Elkins, a leading scholar of British colonialism, who says that while it’s unclear how much Queen Elizabeth personally knew about concentration camps, torture and other abuses in Kenya during her early reign, the monarchy must reckon with that legacy. “Serious crimes happened on the queen’s imperial watch. In fact, her picture hung in every detention camp in Kenya as detainees were beaten in order to exact their loyalty to the British crown,” says Elkins.

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

Two New Zealand government agencies have revealed mounting concern about the intensity and the impact of online misinformation — and prompted loud calls for government action.

But behind the scenes, the government’s already reviewing how to regulate media content to protect us from “harm” — and the digital platforms are already heading in new directions.

“There is no minister or government agency specifically tasked with monitoring and dealing with the increasing threat posed by disinformation and misinformation. That should change,” Tova O’Brien told her Today FM listeners last week.

• LISTEN TO THE FULL RNZ MEDIAWATCH REPORT: Mounting fake news
• Frontline reports on disinformation — Pacific Journalism Review

For her, the tipping point was friends and peers recycling false rumours about the Prime Minister and her partner that have been circulating for at least five years.

The Tova show made fun of those rumours — and the paranoid people spreading them — in a comedy song when it launched back in March. Co-host Mark Dye asked the PM about one of them — the claim O’Brien and Ardern were once flatmates.

The PM laughed it off on the air back then, but last week O’Brien told her listeners the worst rumors had now spread so widely there’s nothing funny about them anymore.

“Thanks to social media . . . they’ve been picked up by all of us,” she said.

‘Sad and scary’
“It’s sad and it’s scary and . . . powerful propagandists are taking advantage of them.

“It is time now for a government ‘misinformation minister’,” she said — acknowledging the job title could be misconstrued.

But last Monday, one minister said he was on the case.

“Who is the minister in charge of social media? Is that you?” Duncan Greive asked the Broadcasting and Media Minister on Spinoff podcast The Fold.

“I suppose so  . . . and we’re trying,” said Willie Jackson, who also said he had heard misinformation from people he knows, including relatives.

“There’s a lot of things out of control, but I’m trying to bring some balance to it,” he said.

“We’re going through a whole content regulation review right now. I’m waiting on some of the results.”

That review, overseen by Internal Affairs Minister Jan Tinetti, began in May 2021 — and it’s complicated.

Role of the regulators
It is reconsidering the role of the regulators and complaints bodies which uphold standards for mainstream media today — the Broadcasting Standards Authority, the Advertising Standards Authority, the Media Council and the Classification Office.

And for the first time, online outlets including social media could also be classed as “media service providers” obliged to abide by agreed standards too.

Just last week the BSA released fresh research showing New Zealanders were worried about digital social media platforms’ misinformation “making it harder to identify the truth.”

But while people can complain to the Broadcasting Standards Authority about the accuracy of what they see or hear on the air, it is all but impossible to successfully challenge fake news online.

“We need to bring a set of rules to the table. We have to at the same time balance those rules with freedom of expression,” Willie Jackson told The Fold.

Jackson also said he would soon be meeting Google and Meta (parent company of Facebook) executives to discuss all of that and more.

They already know there’s a problem.

Living by the Code — or ticking boxes?
Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and Tik Tok all signed up last week to the new Aotearoa New Zealand Code of Practice for Online Safety and Harms overseen by Netsafe.

It was hailed as “a world first” in several media reports, but also condemned by some critics as a possible box-ticking exercise — that only requires the powerful platforms to tick easy boxes.

The Code creates an oversight committee to consider public objections — and that will be yet another self-regulatory body that people can complain to.

“It sounds like the worst sanction is that they’d be asked to leave the agreement, which isn’t really a sanction at all. It’s understandable that there are some people saying some concrete legislation that would have proper penalties in place would be better,” former newspaper editor Andrew Holden told RNZ this week.

“The signatories can pick and choose which measures they agree to implement, and which ones they don’t think are appropriate to them, and they can ignore,” Stuff’s technology writer Tom Pullar-Strecker noted.

Net users’ group Tohatoha called it ”an industry-led model that avoids the real change and real accountability needed to protect communities, individuals and the health of our democracy.”

“I think that this is an attempt to preempt that regulatory framework that’s coming down the pipeline,” Tohatoha chief executive Mandy Henk told Newstalk ZB last week.

She was referring to that Review of Media Content Regulation going on slowly behind the scenes and out of the headlines. One round of consultation with news media has been completed on the basic principles — and another one has begun on some of the details and the framework.

One-stop digital-age shop
The review says content can cause harm to individuals, communities and society.

A one-stop digital-age shop to regulate and set standards for all media could oblige offshore tech companies to curb misinformation on their platforms — or be penalised.

Online outlets including social media could be classed as “media service providers” with minimum standards to uphold, just like the established news media and broadcasters.

RNZ MediaWatch understands Cabinet will soon consider a proposed new regulatory framework, and details are due to be published next month for public input and discussion.

The stated goal of the review is also “to mitigate the harmful effects of content, irrespective of the way the content is delivered”.

One of the possibilities is the development of “harm minimisation codes”, with legislation setting out minimum standards for harm prevention and moderation. This could even mean the creation of new criminal offenses and penalties for non compliance.

Can this be done without compromising freedom of speech in general — and specific fundamental press freedoms as well?

Good reporting that is clearly in the public interest routinely causes some distress — or even “harm” — to certain people or groups. (Investigative reporting on Gloriavale over the past 30 years, for example).

Online giants ahead of the game

But while the government and the media industry ponder all this, the social media platforms continue to evolve in unforeseen ways.

Within the last fortnight users of Facebook and its sister platform Instagram have found their feeds featuring far more stuff from influencers, celebrities and even strangers — and less stuff from their friends, family or favoured sources of news.

The reason is Facebook fighting off Tik Tok, the Chinese made video-sharing app that now has more than a billion users around the world — including plenty here in New Zealand.

AI-driven algorithms are shaping much more of what social media users will see from now on. What this means for the spread of misinformation here in New Zealand is not yet clear.

Two days after the new social media code of practice was unveiled, Meta’s vice-president of public policy in Asia and Pacific was in Auckland talking about “the regulatory models that can drive greater transparency and accountability of digital platforms and the work being done to promote greater safety across the Meta Family of Apps.”

“We’re already creating and developing guardrails to address safety, privacy, and well-being in the metaverse,” Simon Milner said, though misinformation on Facebook or Instagram today was not mentioned.

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.

On Tuesday, Reuters reported from Geneva that a letter authored by China expressing “grave concern” about the Xinjiang report was circulated among diplomatic missions. The note asked countries to sign it to show their support for China’s goal of convincing High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet to halt its release, the news agency said.

“Despite frequent assurances by the Office of the High Commissioner that the report would be released in short order, it remains unavailable,” said a U.S. State Department in Washington.

“We call on the High Commissioner to release the report without delay. And we are highly concerned about any effort by Beijing to suppress the report’s release,” the spokesperson said in an e-mailed statement.

Bachelet, who visited Xinjiang in May, informed the Human Rights Council in September 2021 that her office was finalizing its assessment of information on allegations of rights violations. Three months later, a spokesperson said the report would be issued in a matter of weeks, but it was not released.

On Wednesday, a spokesperson for UN Human Rights Office said it was still being finalized and that Bachelet had said it would be released before she leaves office ends in August or September.

“The report is being finalized and final steps are being undertaken prior to public release,” the spokesperson wrote in a statement to RFA Uyghur.

The final steps include “sharing with the concerned Member State for its comments before publishing as per standard practice,” the spokesperson said.

“Reports are shared for comments with the concerned Member State. The Office will reflect comments of a factual nature in the final version,” said the statement.

The spokesman had no comment on the letter cited in the Reuters report.

The letter and any related Chinese pressure campaign at the UN was unsurprising because Beijing is “hypersensitive to criticism,” said Sophie Richardson, China director of New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW).

“The Chinese government regularly tries to undermine or preempt or reject any criticism,” she told RFA.

The letter emerged a month after nearly 50 United Nations member states on Wednesday issued a joint statement criticizing China’s atrocities against Uyghurs and calling on Bachelet to release the Xinjiang report.

The UN report would cover a period in which Chinese authorities detained up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in internment camps since 2017, according to numerous investigative reports by researchers and think tanks.

Xinjiang’s Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other minorities have reportedly been subjected to severe human rights abuses, torture and forced labor, as well as the eradication of their linguistic, cultural and religious traditions in what the United States and several Western parliaments have called genocide and crimes against humanity.

The Campaign for Uyghurs, part of a coalition of 230 organizations who have demanded that Bachelet resign from her post, urged the UN to resist Chinese pressure.

“It is not the first time China is trying to drum up support for its genocide, nor will it be the last,” said CFU Executive Director Rushan Abbas.

“The question is whether countries will succumb to China’s whims because of economic ties, and if Michelle Bachelet will once again be coaxed into listening to China’s demands,” she added.

Bachelet’s China tightly orchestrated Xinjiang visit, about which she has disclosed little, has been criticized as a staged, Potemkin-style tour.

In Beijing Wednesday, however, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said the 70-year-old former Chilean president “experienced in person what a real Xinjiang is like: a region that enjoys security and stability and sustained robust development, and its people live a happy and fulfilling life.”

He told a news conference that China’s stance enjoyed the support of developing countries.

“The calculations of a small number of countries to use Xinjiang to engage in political manipulation, tarnish China’s reputation and contain and suppress China will not succeed,” Wang said.

HRW’s Richardson said Bachelet was caught between demands from Uyghurs, rights groups and Western governments for accountability and a disclosure of facts in Xinjiang and Beijing’s pressure to silence its critics.

“Whether she goes ahead and how accurate it is will tell us a lot about how seriously she takes her mandate and how willing she is to challenge some of the most powerful members of the U.N. system,” she told RFA.

 Written by Paul Eckert.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Jilil Kashgary and Alim Seytoff for RFA Uyghur.

The U.S. National Archives on Tuesday asked the Secret Service to investigate the "potential unauthorized deletion" of agents' text messages sent the day of and before the January 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump.

"It is especially distressing to see such behavior from a federal agency that had such critical duties during the attack on the Capitol."

"If it is determined that any text messages have been improperly deleted... then the Secret Service must send NARA a report within 30 calendar days of the date of this letter with a report documenting the deletion," U.S. Chief Records Officer Laurence Brewer informed the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) records officer, referring to the National Archives and Records Administration.

"This report must include a complete description of the records affected, a statement of the exact circumstances surrounding the deletion of messages, a statement of the safeguards established to prevent further loss of documentation, and details of all agency actions taken to salvage, retrieve, or reconstruct the records," he added.

Brewer's request followed news that the Secret Service will inform the congressional committee investigating the Capitol attack that it has found no new text messages related to the deadly insurrection. The House committee subpoenaed the Secret Service on Friday as part of the bipartisan panel's effort to recover text messages that were deleted shortly after oversight officials requested them.

The National Archives request also comes after the DHS Office of Inspector General (OIG)—which sought records related to the events of January 6—determined that the Secret Service "erased text messages as part of a device replacement program."

According to The Washington Post:

The Secret Service's text messages have become a new focal point of Congress' investigation of January 6, as they could provide insight into the agency's actions on the day of the insurrection and possibly those of Trump. A former White House aide last month told the House select committee investigating the assault on the Capitol that Trump was alerted by the Secret Service on the morning of January 6 that his supporters were armed but insisted they be allowed to enter his rally on the Ellipse with their weapons.

Trump told multiple White House aides that he wanted to lead the crowd to the Capitol and indicated his supporters were right to chant about hanging Vice President Mike Pence, all pieces of evidence that help describe his state of mind and what he wanted to happen at the Capitol that day.

Alleging that the Secret Service "appears to have violated federal criminal law by destroying text messages" around the time of the Capitol attack, the advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) on Monday filed a complaint asking the U.S. Justice Department to launch "an immediate and full investigation into whether Secret Service employees willfully destroyed federal records."

"It is extremely troubling to think that the Secret Service would destroy key evidence in any investigation, let alone one that is central to getting answers and accountability for the unprecedented attack on our democracy that occurred on January 6, 2021," CREW chief counsel Donald Sherman said in a statement.

"The Federal Records Act requires that agencies like the Secret Service preserve records so that there is a complete and accurate history of the government's actions and decisions," he continued. "It is especially distressing to see such behavior from a federal agency that had such critical duties during the attack on the Capitol and had a front row seat to former President Trump's behavior that day."

"The Justice Department must take this apparent violation of federal law seriously," Sherman added.

Secret Service Chief of Communications Anthony Guglielmi—whose controversial career includes stints as spokesperson for police departments in Baltimore and Chicago, where he is accused of helping cover up the officer murder of Black teenager Laquan McDonald—insisted in a statement last week that the deletion of the texts was not malicious, and that "none of the texts" sought by the OIG were erased.

Appearing on ABC's "This Week" Sunday, January 6 committee member Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) said that "we need all of the texts from the fifth and sixth of January."

"I was shocked to hear that they didn't back up their data before they reset their iPhones. That's crazy, and I don't know why that would be," she added. "But we need to get this information to get the full picture."

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

The release of the first images from NASA’s new flagship James Webb Space Telescope brought renewed attention to the controversy over naming the telescope after James Webb, who led NASA ahead of the Apollo moon landings in the 1960s. He also played a key role in purging LGBTQ+ people from NASA in what was known as the “lavender scare,” and before that at the State Department under President Truman. We speak with Lucianne Walkowicz, one of four astronomers who led a petition to rename the telescope. Although the petitioners value the insights the telescope contributes, “the way that NASA has dug in its heels about naming the telescope after James Webb has really cast a pall over that,” says Walkowicz. They are also the co-founder of the JustSpace Alliance, which made a new documentary about the push to rename the telescope. We feature an extended excerpt from “Behind the Name: James Webb Space Telescope,” which also examines the push to name the telescope after Harriet Tubman, who “observed the night sky and used the stars for celestial navigation in the service of … people’s freedom.”

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

Former prime minister and New Ireland Governor Sir Julius Chan is defending his seat one last time in Papua New Guinea’s 2022 general elections next month because he believes the system of government has failed the country.

Had the system not “failed miserably”, the iconic New Irelander said he could have called time “a long time ago” — but a lot of things, systems, mechanisms and people had misfired and failed along the way, prompting his last shot at a last term.

At 83, Sir Julius said this would be the last roll of the dice in his long and illustrious political career in which he was twice prime minister of PNG.

• READ MORE: Other reports on the PNG elections

Showing no signs of fragilities, he was opening a new LLG office in the gold-rich Lihir Islands and campaigning on his resource policy in the neighbouring Anir (Feni) Islands, south of Lihir last week.

An advocate of power sharing, Sir Julius wants to see New Ireland emerge as an autonomous province of PNG before he retires.

Autonomy is the rallying call for his reluctance to step down. He reckons mainland PNG will remain immune to autonomous political squabbling but in the islands, it will be as easy as “cutting the rope and floating away”.

It is the Sunday after the PNG Kumuls’ epic rugby league Test win over Fiji.

Humorous insight
We are sitting in the antiquated living room of Sir Julius’ Port Moresby apartment.

He is a little wry, perhaps taxed by the boat travels in his sparsely isolated home islands, from the past week.

Not one to shy away from life’s challenges, he even offers a humorous insight into what his political adversaries have dished out in the last couple of months.

“You know, my opponents have declared me dead four times on Facebook, and every time, I’ve risen from the dead,” he chuckles.

In a one-on-one exclusive, the knight spoke his mind: “I am not coming back just to play the game, nogat, I am here to score more, otherwise I am just wasting my time. If I don’t get anywhere, I make up my decision in between.”

Sir Julius said the people must have greater power sharing nationally, on a provincial and local level.

“Sadly yes, the system of government has failed the people, we must have greater sharing of power, national, provincial and local, greater sharing if not practically practised I think this country will disintegrate,” he said.

‘It happened in Russia’
“I mean we got enough to look at some of the more advanced countries in the world, how it got disintegrated. It happened in Russia, it used to be a big, big, big country, they are now fighting one another.

“Because of the regional population I think if we don’t change the system and give the other areas of PNG a chance to lead, that too will cause friction as it is at the moment. You increase the electorate… every time you increase one electorate in the New Guinea Islands region.

“I think you have to increase 10 in other parts of the country so hap blo mi yia, forever and ever. It will go smaller in percentage terms and being human that doesn’t go down too well; everybody wants to participate therefore we have to come up with a system somewhat to adapt [to] that.

“And when people have that power, they make decisions and when something goes wrong, they cannot throw blame at the government.

“As it is at the moment, every good is enjoyed at the local government but everything bad is the cause of the national government. And if you allow that to go on for a few years, it will deteriorate this country completely.

“I [have] got to share this with everybody — the mainland will never break, it’s not easy and it’s just like Israel and all the other countries that [are] next to it. The other countries, you know whenever there is a land problem, they will forever for thousands of years from the days, they will never be able to solve the disputes of the land border.

“But in the islands, you just cut the rope and we float — we are different. So there it is, that’s my summary and I am not coming back just to play the game, nogat, I am here to score more, otherwise I am just wasting my time. If I don’t get anywhere, I make up my decision in between.”

Gorethy Kenneth is a senior PNG Post-Courier journalist. Republished with permission.

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

"These very same leaders in Beijing are using the free and open media that we ensure that are protected in democratic systems to spread propaganda to spread disinformation."

Tesla needs Beijing's goodwill

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