reveals – Radio Free

Trump’s top Gaza negotiator reveals Israel bias

The Grayzone — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 15:51:03 +0000

This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.

New Caledonia’s population drops to below 265,000, census reveals

APR editor — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 01:10:03 +0000

By Patrick Decloitre, RNZ Pacific correspondent French Pacific desk

New Caledonia’s population has shrunk to 264,596 over the past six years, the latest census, conducted in April and May 2025, has revealed.

This compares to the previous census, conducted in 2019, which recorded a population of 271,400 in the French Pacific territory.

To explain the population drop of almost seven thousand (6811), Jean Philippe Grouthier, Census Chef de Mission at the French national statistical institute INSEE, said that even though the population natural balance (the difference between births and deaths during the period) was more than 11,000, the net migration balance showed a deficit of 18,000.

In terms of permanent departures and arrivals, earlier informal studies (based on the international Nouméa-La Tontouta airport traffic figures) already hinted at a sharp increase in residents leaving New Caledonia for good, after the destructive and deadly riots that erupted in May 2014, causing 14 dead and over 2 billion euros (NZ$3.8 billion) in damages.

The census was originally scheduled to take place in 2024, but had to be postponed due to the civil unrest.

“New Caledonia is probably less attractive than it could have been in the 2000s and 2010s years,” Grouthier told local media yesterday.

However, he stressed that the downward trend was already there at the previous 2019 census.

‘Not entirely due to riots’
During the 2014-2019 period, a net balance of around then 1000 residents had already left New Caledonia.

“It’s not as if it was something that would be entirely due to the May 2024 riots,” he said.

At the provincial level, New Caledonia’s most populated region (194,978), the Southern Province, which makes up three quarters of the population, has registered the sharpest drop (about four percent).

Meanwhile, the other two provinces (North, Loyalty Islands) have slightly gained in population over the same period, respectively +2.1 (50,947) and +1.7 percent (18,671).

The preliminary figures released yesterday are now to be processed and analysed in detail, before public release, ISEE said.

The latest population statistics are regarded as essential in order to serve as the basis for further calculation for the three provinces’ share in public aid as well as planning for upgrades or building of public infrastructure.

The latest count will also be used to organise upcoming elections, starting with municipal elections (March 2026) and provincial elections later that year.

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

Fmr. Green Beret Who Worked at Gaza Food Sites Reveals Rampant War Crimes

Democracy Now! — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 14:10:13 +0000

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

“Designed as Death Traps”: Fmr. Green Beret Who Worked at Gaza Food Sites Reveals Rampant War Crimes

Democracy Now! — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 12:14:11 +0000

As more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed seeking aid at militarized aid distribution sites run by the U.S.- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a former GHF security contractor tells Democracy Now! he saw U.S. mercenaries and Israeli forces commit war crimes by indiscriminately shooting at starving Palestinians waiting for aid. “What I witnessed in Gaza, I can only describe as a dystopian, post-apocalyptic wasteland,” says Anthony Aguilar, a retired U.S. soldier who worked as a subcontractor with UG Solutions in the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid delivery operation. “We, the United States, are complicit. We are involved, hand in hand, in the atrocities and the genocide that is currently undergoing in Gaza.”

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

Leaked document reveals proposed law revisions in NZ, as Western defence of Zionist genocide threatens Pacific

Pacific Media Watch — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 05:41:20 +0000

SPECIAL REPORT: By Mick Hall

A leaked document has revealed secretive plans to revise terror laws in New Zealand so that people can be charged over statements deemed to constitute material support for a proscribed organisation.

It shows the government also wants to widen the criteria for proscribing organisations to include groups that are judged to “facilitate” or “promote and encourage” terrorist acts.

The changes would see the South Pacific nation falling in line with increasingly repressive Western countries like the UK, where scores of independent journalists and anti-genocide protesters have been arrested and charged under terrorism laws in recent months.

The consultation document, handed over to the New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties (NZCCL), reveals the government has been in contact with a small number of unnamed groups this year over plans to legally redefine what material support involves, so that public statements or gestures involving insignia like flags can lead to charges if construed as support for proscribed groups.

As part of a proposal to revise the Terrorism Suppression Act, the document suggests the process for designating organisations as terror groups should be changed by “expanding the threshold to enable more modern types of entities to be designated, such as those that ‘facilitate’ or ‘promote and encourage’ terrorist acts”.

The Ministry of Justice has been contacted in an attempt to ascertain which groups it has been consulting with and why it believed the changes were necessary.

NZCCL chairman Thomas Beagle told Mick Hall In Context his group was concerned the proposed changes were a further attempt to limit the rights of New Zealanders to engage in political protest.

‘What’s going on?’
“When you look at the proposal to expand the Terrorism Suppression Act, alongside the Police and IPCA conspiring to propose a law change to ban political protest without government permission, you really have to wonder what’s going on,” he said.

A report by the Independent Police Conduct Authority (IPCA) in February proposed to give police the right to ban protests if they believed there was a high chance of public disorder and threats to public safety.

That would potentially mean bans on Palestinian solidarity protests if far right counter protestErs posed a threat of violent confrontation.

The stand-alone legislation would put New Zealand in line with other Five Eyes and NATO-aligned security jurisdictions such as Australia, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

Beagle points out proposed changes to terror laws would suppress freedom of speech and further undermine freedom of assembly and the right to protest.

“We’ve seen what’s happening with the state’s abuse of terrorism suppression laws in the UK and are horrified that they have sunk so far and so quickly,” he said.

More than 100 people were arrested across the UK on suspicion of supporting Palestine Action, a non-violent protest group proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the British government earlier this month.

Arrests in social media clips
Social media clips showed pensioners aggressively arrested while attending rallies in Liverpool, London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Bristol and Truro over the weekend.

Independent journalists and academics have also faced state repression under the UK’s Terrorism Act.

Among those targeted was Electronic Intifada journalist Asa Winstanley, who had his home raided and devices seized in October last year as part of the opaque counter-terror drive “Operation Incessantness”.

Independent journalist Asa Winstanley . . . his home was raided and devices seized in October last year as part of “Operation Incessantness”. Image: R Witts Photography/mickhall.substack.com

In May, the country’s Central Criminal Court ruled the raid was unlawful.

Journalist Richard Medhurst has had a terror investigation hanging over his head since being detained at Heathrow Airport in August last year and charged under section 8 of the Terrorism Act. Activist and independent journalist Sarah Wilkinson had her house raided in the same month.

Others have faced similar intimidation and threats of jail. In November 2024, Jewish academic Haim Bresheeth was charged after police alleged he had expressed support for a “proscribed organisation” during a speech outside the London residence of the Israeli ambassador to the UK.

Meanwhile, dozens of members of Palestine Action are in jail facing terror charges. The vast majority are being held on remand where they may wait two years before going to trial — a common state tactic to take activists off the street and incarcerate them, knowing the chances of conviction are slim when they eventually go to court.

‘Targeted amendments’
The document says the New Zealand government wants to progress “targeted amendments” to the Act, creating or amending offences “to capture contemporary behaviours and activities of concern” like “public expressions of support for a terrorist act or designated entities, for example by showing insignia or distributing propaganda or instructional material.”

Protesters highlight the proscription of Palestine Action outside the British Embassy at The Hague on July 20. No arrests were made following 80 arrests by Dutch police the week before. Image: Defend Our Juries/mickhall.substack.com

It suggests that the existing process for proscribing an organisation is slow and cumbersome, noting that: “Specific provisions need to be followed to designate entities not on a UN list, but the decision-making process is lengthy and the designation period is short. This impacts timely decision-making and the usefulness of designation as a tool to prevent terrorism.”

It proposes to improve “the timeliness of the process, by considering changes to who the decision-maker is” and extending the renewal period from three to five years.

The document suggests consulting the Attorney-General over designation-related decisions to ensure legal requirements are met may not be required and questions whether the designation process requiring the Prime Minister to review decisions twice is necessary. It asks whether others, like the Foreign Minister, should be involved in the decision-making process.

Beagle believes the secretive proposals pose a threat to New Zealand’s liberal democracy.

“Political protest is an important part of New Zealand’s history,” he said.

“Whether it’s the environment, worker’s rights, feminism, Māori issues, homosexual law reform or any number of other issues, political protest has had a big part in forming what Aotearoa New Zealand is today.

Protected under Bill of Rights
“It’s a right protected by New Zealand’s Bill of Rights and is a critical part of being a functioning democracy.”

The terror laws revision forms part of a wider trend of legislating to close down dissent over New Zealand’s foreign policy, now closely aligned with NATO and US interests.

The government is also widening the definition of foreign interference in a way that could see people who “should have known” that they were being used by a foreign state to undermine New Zealand’s interests prosecuted.

The Crimes (Countering Foreign Interference) Amendment Bill, which passed its first reading in Parliament on November 19, would criminalise the act of foreign interference, while also increasing powers of unwarranted searches by authorities.

The Bill is effectively a reintroduction of the country’s old colonial sedition laws inherited from Britain, the broadness of the law having allowed it to be used against communists, trade unionists and indigenous rights activists.

Republished from Mick Hall in Context on Substack with permisson.

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

Greenpeace Calls for Drastic Cut in Plastic Production as New Report Reveals Millions at Risk of Toxic Air Pollution Exposure

Newswire Editor — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 20:06:53 +0000

A new Greenpeace International report released today reveals that over 50 million people in 11 countries [1] are at risk of exposure to hazardous air pollution from plastic linked petrochemical production. The findings intensify pressure on negotiators at the Global Plastics Treaty talks in Geneva to secure a treaty that tackles the problem at its source: plastic production.

Graham Forbes, Global Plastics Campaign Lead for Greenpeace USA and Greenpeace Head of Delegation for the Global Plastics Treaty negotiation said: “What this report shows is that the plastics crisis is a public health emergency. The Global Plastics Treaty must deliver a 75% cut in plastic production by 2040 to reduce escalating threats to human and planetary health. People are being poisoned so fossil fuel and petrochemical companies can churn out more unnecessary plastic. Without a treaty that cuts production, the plastic crisis will only grow worse.”

The report, Every breath you take: air pollution risks from petrochemicals production for the plastics supply chain, shifts the lens to midstream level plastic production—to the petrochemical plants that produce precursors to plastic and expose frontline communities living near to these facilities who are potentially facing exposure to dangerous air pollutants.

During the production of feedstock, petrochemical facilities emit a suite of harmful airborne substances typically including Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), nitrogen oxides (NOₓ), and sulfur oxides (SOₓ) and particulate matter (PM). Studies report higher concentrations of these pollutants near petrochemical facilities, with proximity linked to increased illness—raising a serious cause for concern.

Key findings from the report include:

Over 51 million people in the 11 countries studied live within 10 km of plastics-linked petrochemical facilities; 16 million live within 5 km. In every country studied, residential areas lie within 10 km of plastic-linked petrochemical plants.
The United States has the highest number of people living at a distance that is linked to elevated risk—13 million, especially in Texas and Louisiana.
One in four people in the Netherlands live at a distance that is linked to elevated risk of exposure to air pollution emissions, including toxic emissions, from petrochemical plants. It has the highest proportion of its population at risk with 4.5 million people or 25.6% of the entire population within the exposure zones assessed in the analysis. The country with the second highest proportion is Switzerland at 10.9% of the population.
The pollution created by some petrochemical plants in the regions reviewed for the report is transboundary. Several plants are located in border zones, affecting communities in Austria, Poland, Singapore, Belgium, France and Germany.[2]
In documented case studies, communities near petrochemical facilities suffer disproportionately from cancer, respiratory disease, and premature death. The UN has labeled some of these areas "sacrifice zones."

The report also warns of industry plans to expand global plastic production through 2050, which would create more sacrifice zones, more waste exported to low-income countries, and more short-lived products driving the climate, health and waste crisis.

The global Greenpeace network is demanding that the Global Plastics Treaty must reduce plastic production by at least 75% by 2040 to protect people’s health, the climate and the environment. The next round of negotiations will happen on August 5 to 14, 2025 in Geneva, Switzerland.

Full report can be found here.

Photos and videos can be accessed in the Greenpeace Media Library.

Interactive maps of petrochemical production zones can be found here.

Notes:

[1] The report, Every breath you take: air pollution risks from petrochemicals production for the plastics supply chain, identified the locations of petrochemical facilities linked to plastics in 11 countries: Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, South Korea, Canada, USA, Germany, United Kingdom, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. The countries were selected because of their significant petrochemical presence or association with major plastic-related concerns.

[2] The transboundary zones include populations in Austria and Poland (from German facilities), Singapore (from Malaysian facilities) Belgium and Germany (from Dutch facilities) France and Germany (from Swiss facilities).

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

‘Call Amy!’: Lawyer for Mahmoud Khalil reveals how he won his freedom

Maximillian Alvarez — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 17:51:45 +0000

After being abducted from his New York apartment building by plainclothes agents and locked away in an ICE jail in Louisiana for over 100 days, Mahmoud Khalil has been freed and reunited with his family. A federal judge ruled that Khalil’s detention was unconstitutional and that he was neither a flight risk nor a threat to the public, and the Syrian-born Palestinian activist, husband, father, and former Columbia University graduate student was finally released on June 20, 2025. But the fight for Khalil’s freedom is not over, and we have by no means seen the last of the Trump administration’s authoritarian attacks on immigrants, universities, and the movement to stop Israel’s US-backed genocide of Palestinians. In this exclusive interview, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Amy Greer, an associate attorney at Dratel & Lewis and a member of Mahmoud Khalil’s legal team, about the epic legal battle to free Khalil.

Guest:

Amy Greer is an associate attorney at Dratel & Lewis, and a member of Mahmoud Khalil’s legal team. Greer is a lawyer and archivist by training, and an advocate and storyteller by nature. As an attorney at Dratel & Lewis, she works on a variety of cases, including international extradition, RICO, terrorism, and drug trafficking. She previously served as an assistant public defender on a remote island in Alaska, defending people charged with misdemeanors, and as a research and writing attorney on capital habeas cases with clients who have been sentenced to death.

Additional resources:

Mahmoud Khalil arrest video
ACLU Press Release (June 20, 2025): Mahmoud Khalil to be freed from detention, reunite with wife and son as case proceeds
Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “‘A tremendous chilling effect’: Columbia students describe dystopian reality on campus amid Trump attacks”

Credits:

Studio Production / Post-Production: David Hebden

Transcript

EXCLUSIVE: Lawyer for Mahmoud Khalil reveals how he won his freedom

The Real News Network — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 17:50:08 +0000

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

Professor Reveals the Truth behind South China Sea Conflict

Rise of Asia — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 15:00:45 +0000

Why is the South China Sea such a flashpoint between China, the U.S., and Southeast Asia? In this eye-opening video, Professor Kishore Mahbubani breaks down the deeper truth behind the conflict that mainstream media often overlooks. With decades of diplomatic experience and sharp geopolitical insight, he explains what’s really at stake—and why the West’s narrative may not tell the full story. Watch till the end to understand the hidden forces shaping this critical region.

The post Professor Reveals the Truth behind South China Sea Conflict first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Rise of Asia.

New Footage Of Bucha Massacre Reveals How Russia Targeted Civilians On Yablunska Street

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 09:50:25 +0000

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

New report reveals OpenAI’s impact on the environment

Democracy Now! — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 22:00:12 +0000

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

Investigation Reveals "Systematic" Destruction in Gaza

Democracy Now! — Tue, 20 May 2025 21:00:43 +0000

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

New Report Reveals No-Till’s Massive Pesticide Problem

Newswire Editor — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 17:42:03 +0000

A new report from Friends of the Earth refutes the widely-held assumption that conventional no-till agriculture is “regenerative.” Based on a first-of-its-kind analysis of U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) data, the report finds that most no-till systems are so heavily dependent on toxic herbicides to manage weeds that a staggering one-third of the U.S.’s total annual pesticide use (a term that includes herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides) can be attributed to no- and minimum-till corn and soy production alone.

Chemical-intensive agriculture predominates in the U.S. not through the fault of farmers, but because that is what public policies and markets support. Farmers have widely adopted no-till to minimize soil erosion and now must be supported to reduce agrochemical inputs.

The report finds that the vast majority (93%) of acreage of the top two no- and minimum-till crops, corn and soy, use toxic herbicides that have devastating consequences for soil life and human health. These chemicals, being broadcast across nearly 100 million acres nationwide, predominantly in the Heartland and Great Plains, have been linked to cancer, birth defects, infertility, neurotoxicity, disruption of the gut microbiome, endocrine disruption, and more. The majority (61%) of use is chemicals that are classified as highly hazardous. Glyphosate, the cancer-linked main ingredient in the widely criticized weedkiller Roundup, is the most widely used herbicide in no-till corn and soy.

The cost of chemical-intensive no-till goes beyond impacts on our health: It is also destroying the soil that grows our food. The pesticides widely used in conventional no-till devastate soil health, harming the soil microbiome and invertebrates like worms and beetles, as well as essential pollinators and other wildlife. Healthy, living soil improves farmers’ resilience to droughts and floods, conserves water, and draws more carbon down from the atmosphere. Soil ravaged by toxic pesticides, on the other hand, threatens resources needed for a healthy food system.

The report debunks the faulty assumption that conventional no-till is a climate solution, summarizing extensive scientific research showing there is no clear relationship between no-till and soil carbon sequestration. And the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the fossil-fuel-based synthetic pesticides and fertilizers used in no- and minimum-till corn and soy are equivalent to that of 11.4 million cars on the road over an entire year — about the number of cars in the top 9 no-till states combined.

“As regenerative agriculture takes center stage in national conversations about how to make America healthy, it’s crucial that we advance truly regenerative agriculture,” said Dr. Kendra Klein, Deputy Director of Science at Friends of the Earth. “Conventional no-till, soaked in toxic pesticides that threaten our children’s health, ravage soil, and exacerbate climate change, is taking us in the wrong direction.”

The ascendance of no-till is linked to the chemical industry’s attempt to deepen farmers’ dependence on their toxic products. Chemical companies such as Imperial Chemical Industries and Chevron conducted no-till experiments and helped spread the concept of industrial no-till in the 1970s, recognizing it as an opportunity to increase the market for their herbicides. Currently, pesticide giant Bayer is offering to pay farmers to practice no-till as part of their “regenerative agriculture” program.

“Major food companies investing in regenerative agriculture need to avoid greenwashed conventional no-till and instead support the transition to legitimately regenerative agriculture that will protect soil health, human health — and their future bottom line,” said Sarah Starman, Senior Campaigner of Food & Agriculture with Friends of the Earth.

Truly regenerative agriculture cannot be boiled down to single practices, it works with the farming system as a whole. Research shows that careful tillage in holistic farming systems can achieve better soil outcomes than chemical-intensive no-till agriculture.

A central tenet of truly regenerative agriculture is dramatic reduction of harmful agrochemicals. Research shows that reducing use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers in conventional agriculture is not only possible, it can increase yields by fostering beneficial insects and healthy soil and can increase profitability by reducing farmers’ input costs.

A leading form of truly regenerative agriculture is organic farming. And unlike the term ‘regenerative,’ the USDA organic seal is enforced through a rigorous legal standard. Decades of research shows that organic farms, on average, improve soil health, climate resilience, and soil carbon sequestration; reduce emissions; and protect biodiversity, human health, and community wellbeing.

Key findings

At least 93% of no-till and minimum-till corn and soy acreage in the U.S. uses synthetic herbicides, representing an area the size of California (99.5 million acres).
Herbicide use in no-till corn and soy can be associated with 33% of total annual pesticide use in the U.S. — 285 million out of 851 million pounds of pesticides.
The majority of use (61%) is herbicides classified as highly hazardous to human health and/or the environment — 173 million pounds.
Glyphosate accounts for an estimated 40% of the total use of herbicides in no-till corn and soy.
At least 26 million pounds of additional herbicides are used annually due to conventional no- and minimum-till management in corn and soy.
At least 89% of conventional no- and minimum-till corn and soy acres rely on seeds genetically engineered to be herbicide tolerant.
Neonicotinoid seed coatings are used on up to 100% of conventional no-till corn acreage.
Fossil-fuel-based inputs to no- and minimum-till corn and soy in the form of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers can be associated with ~49.3 million metric tons of CO2-equivalent emissions.
Conventional no-till production does not increase soil carbon and in some cases has been found to reduce it.
Tillage is not universally detrimental to soil health and can be incorporated into regenerative farming systems.

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

New modelling reveals full impact of Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs – with US hit hardest

APR editor — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 09:49:06 +0000

ANALYSIS: By Niven Winchester, Auckland University of Technology

We now have a clearer picture of Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs and how they will affect other trading nations, including the United States itself.

The US administration claims these tariffs on imports will reduce the US trade deficit and address what it views as unfair and non-reciprocal trade practices. Trump said this would

forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn, the day America’s destiny was reclaimed.

The “reciprocal” tariffs are designed to impose charges on other countries equivalent to half the costs they supposedly inflict on US exporters through tariffs, currency manipulation and non-tariff barriers levied on US goods.

Each nation received a tariff number that will apply to most goods. Notable sectors exempt include steel, aluminium and motor vehicles, which are already subject to new tariffs.

The minimum baseline tariff for each country is 10 percent. But many countries received higher numbers, including Vietnam (46 percent), Thailand (36 percent), China (34 percent), Indonesia (32 percent), Taiwan (32 percent) and Switzerland (31 percent).

The tariff number for China is in addition to an existing 20 percent tariff, so the total tariff applied to Chinese imports is 54 percent. Countries assigned 10 percent tariffs include Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

Canada and Mexico are exempt from the reciprocal tariffs, for now, but goods from those nations are subject to a 25 percent tariff under a separate executive order.

Although some countries do charge higher tariffs on US goods than the US imposes on their exports, and the “Liberation Day” tariffs are allegedly only half the full reciprocal rate, the calculations behind them are open to challenge.

For example, non-tariff measures are notoriously difficult to estimate and “subject to much uncertainty”, according to one recent study.

LIBERATION DAY RECIPROCAL TARIFFS pic.twitter.com/ODckbUWKvO

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) April 2, 2025

GDP impacts with retaliation
Other countries are now likely to respond with retaliatory tariffs on US imports. Canada (the largest destination for US exports), the EU and China have all said they will respond in kind.

To estimate the impacts of this tit-for-tat trade standoff, I use a global model of the production, trade and consumption of goods and services. Similar simulation tools — known as “computable general equilibrium models” — are widely used by governments, academics and consultancies to evaluate policy changes.

The first model simulates a scenario in which the US imposes reciprocal and other new tariffs, and other countries respond with equivalent tariffs on US goods. Estimated changes in GDP due to US reciprocal tariffs and retaliatory tariffs by other nations are shown in the table below.

The tariffs decrease US GDP by US$438.4 billion (1.45 percent). Divided among the nation’s 126 million households, GDP per household decreases by $3,487 per year. That is larger than the corresponding decreases in any other country. (All figures are in US dollars.)

Proportional GDP decreases are largest in Mexico (2.24 percent) and Canada (1.65 percent) as these nations ship more than 75 percent of their exports to the US. Mexican households are worse off by $1,192 per year and Canadian households by $2,467.

Other nations that experience relatively large decreases in GDP include Vietnam (0.99 percent) and Switzerland (0.32 percent).

Some nations gain from the trade war. Typically, these face relatively low US tariffs (and consequently also impose relatively low tariffs on US goods). New Zealand (0.29 percent) and Brazil (0.28 percent) experience the largest increases in GDP. New Zealand households are better off by $397 per year.

Aggregate GDP for the rest of the world (all nations except the US) decreases by $62 billion.

At the global level, GDP decreases by $500 billion (0.43 percent). This result confirms the well-known rule that trade wars shrink the global economy.

GDP impacts without retaliation
In the second scenario, the modelling depicts what happens if other nations do not react to the US tariffs. The changes in the GDP of selected countries are presented in the table below.

Countries that face relatively high US tariffs and ship a large proportion of their exports to the US experience the largest proportional decreases in GDP. These include Canada, Mexico, Vietnam, Thailand, Taiwan, Switzerland, South Korea and China.

Countries that face relatively low new tariffs gain, with the UK experiencing the largest GDP increase.

The tariffs decrease US GDP by $149 billion (0.49 percent) because the tariffs increase production costs and consumer prices in the US.

Aggregate GDP for the rest of the world decreases by $155 billion, more than twice the corresponding decrease when there was retaliation. This indicates that the rest of the world can reduce losses by retaliating. At the same time, retaliation leads to a worse outcome for the US.

Previous tariff announcements by the Trump administration dropped sand into the cogs of international trade. The reciprocal tariffs throw a spanner into the works. Ultimately, the US may face the largest damages.

Dr Niven Winchester is professor of economics, Auckland University of Technology. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

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

Unseen Footage Reveals New Evidence of Bucha Mass Executions | RFE/RL Exclusive

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 07:00:27 +0000

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

Elon Musk’s family history reveals ties to neo-Nazi movements

Democracy Now! — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 22:00:23 +0000

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

Elon Musk’s Family History in South Africa Reveals Ties to Apartheid & Neo-Nazi Movements

Democracy Now! — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 14:58:35 +0000

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

Elon Musk’s Family History in South Africa Reveals Ties to Apartheid & Neo-Nazi Movements

Democracy Now! — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 12:34:14 +0000

Elon Musk was born in 1971 in Johannesburg, South Africa, and raised in a wealthy family under the country’s racist apartheid laws. Musk’s family history reveals ties to apartheid and neo-Nazi politics. We speak with Chris McGreal, reporter for The Guardian, to understand how Musk’s upbringing shaped his worldview, as well as that of his South African-raised colleague Peter Thiel, a right-wing billionaire who co-founded PayPal alongside Musk. “Musk lived what can only be described as a neocolonial life,” said McGreal. “If you were a white South African in that period and you had any money at all, you lived with servants at your beck and call.”

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

“The President Wanted It and I Did It”: Recording Reveals Head of Social Security’s Thoughts on DOGE and Trump

by Eli Hager — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 14:25:00 +0000

by Eli Hager

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

Since the arrival of a team from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, Social Security is in a far more precarious place than has been widely understood, according to Leland Dudek, the acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration. “I don’t want the system to collapse,” Dudek said in a closed-door meeting last week, according to a recording obtained by ProPublica. He also said that it “would be catastrophic for the people in our country” if DOGE were to make changes at his agency that were as sweeping as those at USAID, the Treasury Department and elsewhere.

Dudek’s comments, delivered to a group of senior staff and Social Security advocates attending both in person and virtually, offer an extraordinary window into the thinking of a top agency official in the volatile early days of the second Trump administration. The Washington Post first reported Dudek’s acknowledgement that DOGE is calling the shots at Social Security and quoted several of his statements. But the full recording reveals that he went much further, citing not only the actions being taken at the agency by the people he repeatedly called “the DOGE kids,” but also extensive input he has received from the White House itself. When a participant in the meeting asked him why he wouldn’t more forcefully call out President Donald Trump’s continued false claims about widespread Social Security fraud as “BS,” Dudek answered, “So we published, for the record, what was actually the numbers there on our website. This is dealing with — have you ever worked with someone who’s manic-depressive?”

Throughout the meeting, Dudek made alarming statements about the perils facing the Social Security system, but he did so in an oddly informal, discursive manner. It left several participants baffled as to the ultimate fate of the nation’s largest and most popular social program, one that serves 73 million Americans. “Are we going to break something?” Dudek asked at one point, referring to what DOGE has been doing with Social Security data. “I don’t know.”

But then he said, in a more reassuring tone: “They’re learning. Let people learn. They’re going to make mistakes.”

Leland Dudek (via Social Security Administration)

Dudek embodies the dramatic whipsawing of life as a public servant under DOGE. For 25 years, he was the ultimate faceless bureaucrat: a midlevel analyst who had bounced between federal agencies, ultimately landing at the Social Security Administration and focusing on information technology, cybersecurity and fraud prevention. He was largely unknown even within the agency. But in February, he suddenly vaulted into the public eye when he was put on leave for surreptitiously sharing information with DOGE. It appeared that he might lose his job, but then he was unexpectedly promoted by the Trump administration to the position of acting commissioner. At the time, he seemed unreservedly committed to the DOGE agenda, writing — then deleting — a bellicose LinkedIn post in which he expressed pride in having “bullied agency executives, shared executive contact information, and circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done.”

Now, only weeks into his tenure, he was taking a far more ambivalent posture toward not just DOGE but Trump. On multiple occasions during last week’s meeting, according to the recording, Dudek framed the choices that he has been making in recent weeks as “the president’s” agenda. These choices have included planned cuts of at least 7,000 Social Security employees; buyouts and early retirement offered to the entire staff of 57,000, including those who work in field offices and teleservice centers helping elderly and disabled people navigate the program; cuts to disability determination services; the dissolution of a team that had been working to improve the user experience of the ssa.gov website and application process; a reduction of the agency’s footprint across the country from 10 regional offices to four; the terminations of 64 leases, including those for some field office and hearing office space; proposals to outsource Social Security customer service; and more.

“I work for the president. I need to do what the president tells me to do,” Dudek said, according to the recording. “I’ve had to make some tough choices, choices I didn’t agree with, but the president wanted it and I did it,” he added later. (He didn’t name specific actions that Trump did or did not direct.)

At still another point, Dudek said that “I don’t want to fire anyone” but that “a lot of the structural changes that you’ve seen me make at headquarters, I’ve had long conversations with the White House about, and the DOGE team. … And that’s not to say I don’t have some more hard choices to come. The president has an agenda. I’m a political appointee. I need to follow that agenda.”

Dudek also more than once dismissed Trump’s claims about Social Security fraud, which the president amplified just hours after Dudek’s meeting in a speech to Congress in which he implied that millions of probably-dead people over the age of 100 are receiving Social Security benefits. There are indeed 110-year-old and older people in one of the Social Security databases that the DOGE team has been looking at, Dudek said, but those people are “not in pay status” — they’re not actually being paid benefits. “These are records we never bothered with,” he explained.

Still, Dudek and two of his deputies, who also spoke intermittently at the meeting, seemed hesitant to more publicly resist Trump’s misstatements. A spokesperson chimed in to say that they were proud of a recent press release in which, in mild language, they’d obliquely contradicted some of the false claims. The other official said that DOGE’s narrative about dead people receiving benefits “got in front of us” but that “it’s a victory that you’re not seeing more [misinformation], because they are being educated.”

Spokespersons for Dudek and the Social Security Administration, the White House and Elon Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

Dudek’s remarks come at a time when many Social Security employees are feeling confused about Dudek, his role versus DOGE’s and what it all means for the future of the Social Security Administration, according to ProPublica’s conversations with more than two dozen agency staffers. Many said that because the recent cuts at the agency have been carried out in a piecemeal fashion, the public doesn’t seem to be grasping the totality of what is happening to the program, which is having its 90th anniversary this year.

The layoffs — and the looming specter of potentially thousands more employees taking a buyout by a Friday deadline — have meant even less attention to the complicated casework of low-income elderly people and people with physical and intellectual disabilities, as ProPublica has reported.

Meanwhile, DOGE, which Musk has portrayed as a squad of techno-efficiency geniuses, has actually undermined the efficiency of Social Security’s delivery of services in multiple ways, many employees said. Under DOGE, several Social Security IT contracts have been canceled or scaled back. Now, five employees told ProPublica, their tech systems seem to be crashing nearly every day, leading to more delays in serving beneficiaries. This was already a problem, they said, but it has gotten “much worse” and is “not the norm,” two employees said.

And under a policy that DOGE has applied at many agencies, front-line Social Security staff have been restricted from using their government purchase cards for any sum above $1. This has become a significant problem at some field offices, especially when workers need to obtain or make copies of vital records or original documents — birth certificates and the like — that are needed to process some Social Security claims, one management-level employee said.

“Elections have consequences,” Dudek wrote in a March 1 email to the agency’s staff.

In the meeting last week, Dudek was asked about many of these organizational changes, according to the recording. Regarding the closure and consolidation of regional offices as well as the cuts to the part of the agency that helps evaluate disability claims, which is already severely backlogged, he said: “It certainly was done at the administration level. That would have not been my first preference. I think we need to see what’s going to happen in terms of fallout.”

“Again,” he said, “I work for the president. DOGE is part of that.”

Dudek, who had been scheduled to speak for only 15 minutes, according to a copy of the agenda, instead spoke for around an hour, talking about everything from his upbringing by a disabled mother who’d depended on Social Security, to a 1989 book titled “Bureaucracy” that mentions Trump. He continued to vacillate between sharing advocates’ concerns for vulnerable Social Security recipients and sticking up for some of what DOGE has been trying to do at his agency.

“I actually like having the kids around,” he said, adding that although they were unfamiliar with the “nuances” of Social Security, he was trying to get them to be more thoughtful. “They’re thinking about work differently.”

He confirmed that the DOGE team members had broad access to Americans’ Social Security numbers and other personal data, but he claimed that if they were to do anything illegal with that information, he’d have them investigated and potentially prosecuted. He said he wanted to bulk up resources for field offices and customer service, even as front-line workers received buyout offers just like other staffers.

Throughout, Dudek emphasized that he wanted constructive feedback and open conversation, because he cares deeply about the Social Security Administration and the people it serves. He was honest about his shortcomings: “I’m in a role that I did not expect to be in,” he said. “I am an IT guy and a fraud guy.”

Dudek will eventually be replaced by Frank Bisignano, Trump’s long-term pick to run the Social Security Administration. At times, Dudek sounded fatalistic.

“I’m the villain,” he said in the recording. “I’m not going to have a job after this. I get it.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Eli Hager.

Drone Footage Reveals The Scale Of Ukraine’s Death Toll

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 10:03:43 +0000

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

What a Wrongful Death Lawsuit Reveals About America’s Largest Oxygen Provider

by Peter Elkind — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 10:00:00 +0000

by Peter Elkind

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

Lincare, a giant respiratory-device supplier with a long history of fraud settlements and complaints about dismal service, is facing its latest legal challenge: a lawsuit that claims its failures caused the death of a 27-year-old man with Down syndrome.

The case, set to go to trial in state court in St. Louis on March 17, centers on the 2020 death of LeQuon Marquis Vernor, who suffered from severe obstructive sleep apnea and relied on a Lincare-supplied BiPAP machine to help him breathe while sleeping. The lawsuit, filed by his mother, accuses Lincare of negligence after the company took seven days to respond to her report that the device had stopped working.

Lincare, the largest oxygen-device supplier in the U.S., with $2.4 billion in annual revenue, has long faced an array of legal issues, but it’s rare for a claim of wrongful death linked to its service and equipment to go to trial. The litigation over what happened to Vernor offers an unusual window into the company’s interaction with a vulnerable patient. This account is based on extensive court filings, including medical records, deposition excerpts and Lincare’s internal “customer account notes.”

Vernor lived with his mother, who was 64 and on disability, in a tidy public housing apartment complex in Madison, Illinois, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. He suffered from obstructive sleep apnea, a common problem among adults with Down syndrome that is often exacerbated by obesity. Just under 5 feet tall, Vernor weighed 280 pounds.

Since 2015, Vernor had relied on a BiPAP (or bilevel positive airway pressure) machine, which delivers pressurized air through a mask. The device was prescribed after the Sleep Medicine Center at Washington University in St. Louis found that he repeatedly stopped breathing while he slept. “His airway is extremely crowded,” his doctor wrote in his medical notes at the time. Vernor, who was on Medicare, regularly used the device for 10 to 12 hours while he slept, according to his mother.

He spent his days at New Opportunities, a local nonprofit that provides educational opportunities for people with developmental disabilities. “He was a happy young man,” said Kim Fears, executive director of the program.

On Sept. 11, 2020, Vernor’s BiPAP suddenly started making “a loud buzzing or humming sound,” according to his mother, Sharon Vernor. She called the local Lincare office to report the problem, telling the customer service representative that the breathing machine wasn’t working and that it was “something that he needed” and “could not go without.”

The Lincare representative told her that, because his machine was more than 5 years old, under Medicare rules her son was eligible for a replacement BiPAP but that Lincare would first need to obtain a new order from his doctor. This was required for Lincare to collect rental payments for the new device. The representative later recounted making a call that day to the doctor’s office that went unanswered, then faxing the office a request. (Lincare said it was unable to find a copy of the fax among its voluminous records related to LeQuon Vernor.)

In the meantime, the representative suggested unplugging the malfunctioning BiPAP for 30 minutes. That didn’t fix the problem. The representative then promised, according to the account notes, to have a company respiratory therapist contact Sharon Vernor about the problem “until we get him a new machine.”

But that never happened. No one from Lincare, which had an office about 20 minutes away, came out to fix the broken machine or assess LeQuon Vernor’s condition, according to testimony in the case. (Lincare hadn’t performed any home visits or maintenance on the BiPAP since 2015.) As the company acknowledges, Lincare also never offered to provide Vernor with a “loaner” BiPAP to use while waiting for a new device to arrive. Industry veterans say other companies commonly provide temporary replacements while a patient with a malfunctioning device waits for a repair or a new, permanent one to arrive.

Without his BiPAP, Vernor struggled to sleep (and breathe), snoring loudly throughout the night. The Vernors got no further word from the company until seven days later, on Friday, Sept. 18.

Late that morning, Lincare nurse Ann Marie Eberle called Vernor’s mother, explaining that she would be arriving later that day with his new BiPAP. The doctor’s order had finally arrived. Sharon Vernor prepared a breakfast of sausage and biscuits for her son, who hadn’t yet gotten up. She was surprised when he still didn’t appear; the smell of food usually roused him. About 2 p.m., she went upstairs to wake him up.

She opened the door to find her son motionless in bed, with bloody fluid and foam coming out of his mouth and nose. His body was cold. The broken BiPAP sat on the dresser nearby. Frantic, she called 911. “I think my son’s dead! Oh Lord, please God, NO!” she screamed. “Please hurry!”

An ambulance and police cars were still parked in front of the Vernors’ apartment when Lincare’s Eberle pulled up to deliver the new BiPAP machine. “It just gave you a sunken feeling when you saw that,” Eberle later testified. Sharon Vernor met her at the door in tears. Eberle’s notes state that she “SAT WITH MOTHER UNTIL FAMILY MEMBER ARRIVED. POLICE STILL PRESENT UNTIL CORONER ARRIVED WHEN I LEFT.”

An autopsy completed two days later for the Madison County coroner found LeQuon Vernor’s lungs were a “maroon” color, heavily “congested and edematous” — filled with fluid that made it difficult to breathe. The report attributed Vernor’s death to “complications of obstructive sleep apnea.”

In 2022, Sharon Vernor brought a wrongful death suit against Lincare and Washington University, now set for trial next week. Her case accuses Lincare of putting profits ahead of patient care by failing to make sure that her son got a replacement BiPAP quickly and refusing to provide “loaner equipment” in the meantime, because the company didn’t believe it could bill for it.

“In short, when faced with information that LeQuon’s bipap was not working properly, Lincare did nothing,” a December 2024 filing alleged. The company took no action for a week, even though “Lincare knew this was a life-or-death situation for their customer LeQuon.” Johnny Simon, the Vernors’ St. Louis lawyer, said that “this was an avoidable, horrific tragedy.” (Sharon Vernor declined an interview request.)

The suit also accuses the Washington University medical program of failing to respond “in a timely manner” to requests for a new BiPAP order. The clinic’s prescription for LeQuon Vernor’s new BiPAP was signed on Sept. 15 but not sent back to Lincare for two more days. The Washington University medical school declined comment through a spokesperson, citing the litigation. In a legal filing, the university denied the allegations in the suit.

ProPublica has reported extensively on Lincare, which has a decadeslong history of Medicare-related misconduct, including multiple settlements regarding claims of billing fraud. And that misconduct continued even while the company was under government “probationary” agreements requiring it to provide enhanced compliance oversight. On the Better Business Bureau’s website, 939 customer reviews give the company an average 1.28 rating out of 5, offering lacerating complaints about dirty and broken equipment, delivery delays, nightmarish customer service, improper billings, and harassing sales and collection calls.

In emailed responses to questions from ProPublica, Lincare offered its “sympathies” to the Vernor family but asserted that “the allegations against Lincare are false.” The company said that it is legally barred from providing even a loaner BiPAP until it receives a new prescription and suggested that it had no reason to believe LeQuon Vernor faced a life-threatening situation, because “a BiPAP is not a life-sustaining device.” The company added: “Lincare delivers a high level of care to millions of patients in a heavily regulated field. Our response to this case was consistent with legal requirements and our policies.”

Lincare’s lawyers went a step further in a February court filing, blaming what happened on an alleged failure by Vernor’s doctors to provide the new order promptly. “Lincare did its job,” the company argued. “The moment Lincare knew that Decedent needed a new machine, Lincare reached out to Decedent’s medical provider. However, Lincare did not receive an updated prescription until one week later.” The company, they added, was “at the mercy of Decedent’s medical provider to supply an updated prescription.”

Sharon Vernor’s lawyers dispute Lincare’s claim that it was barred from providing a loaner BiPAP without obtaining a new prescription. (A spokesperson for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services declined to address the issue, citing a “pause on mass communications and public appearances” imposed by the new Trump administration.) LeQuon Vernor’s 2015 prescription, filled by Lincare, also specified that he had a “lifetime” need for a BiPAP.

Two former Lincare managers told ProPublica that they were discouraged from dispatching temporary replacement equipment; at least one manager instructed staff to falsely tell customers “all our loaners are out.” One said that, acting on orders from her supervisor, she tossed CPAP and BiPAP devices marked by local offices as loaners into dumpsters. The respiratory companies they later worked for, both said, routinely provided loaner equipment to patients who relied on a breathing device while they awaited a repair or a doctor’s order required to replace it. As one of them put it, “We would make sure the patient is taken care of in that moment.” (“Lincare’s policy is to provide loaner equipment to its patients in accordance with our patient care standards and regulatory requirements,” the company responded.)

In a deposition, Dr. Gabriela de Bruin, a Washington University neurologist who assessed Vernor’s sleep study in 2015, said allowing him to go a week without a functioning BiPAP posed a serious health risk, given the severity of his disease. Noting that Vernor had “severe sleep apnea,” she said, “Anytime we prescribe treatment for obstructive sleep apnea, our recommendation is that patients should use it nightly and should avoid being without their device if they can.” Asked whether Lincare should have understood that Vernor’s apnea created a risk of death, she said, “It’s very difficult for me to say there was this much risk that he could have died.” She added, “But certainly, I would be very concerned.”

A judge in the case dealt Lincare a setback on March 5, ruling that the evidence presented by Sharon Vernor’s lawyers had met the state’s legal standard for seeking punitive damages. That, he wrote, would allow a “trier of fact” to reasonably conclude that “Lincare intentionally acted with a deliberate and flagrant disregard for the safety of others.”

During deposition questioning, Pamela Karban, the manager of the Lincare outlet that handled LeQuon Vernor’s equipment, testified that “we should have referred the mom, if it was that serious, to take him to the nearest emergency room.” Asked whether the company was negligent for not providing Vernor with loaner equipment, she replied: “Yes. We failed to provide that.” Lincare subsequently submitted an affidavit, signed by Karban, stating that she didn’t understand the legal meaning of the term “negligence.”

Doris Burke contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Peter Elkind.

Captured North Korean soldier reveals use of Russian drone-jamming gun

Taejun Kang for RFA — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 05:21:09 +0000

TAIPEI, Taiwan – A captured North Korean soldier told a South Korean lawmaker that he used a drone-jamming gun provided by the Russian military in fighting against Ukrainian forces.

It was the first confirmation of North Korean troops using such technology in Russia’s war against Ukraine and fuel concerns that they are gaining valuable knowledge of drone warfare that could be used in a conflict with South Korea.

The soldier, identified as Ri, was among an estimated 12,000 North Korean troops sent to Russia’s Kursk region to combat Ukrainian forces, who occupied parts of the area in August. Ri was captured in Kursk and is now being held in Ukraine.

Neither Russia nor North Korea has acknowledged the presence of the North Korean troops on the battlefield..

During an interview with the South Korean lawmaker, Yoo Yong-won, who recently visited Ukraine, Ri said his company had six drone jamming guns, but they were not that effective.

“At first, the drones fell easily, but it seems the Ukrainians changed the frequency. After that, it didn’t work as well,” Ri told Yoo, who revealed part of his interview to the Yonhap News Agency on Friday.

Yoo said the devices were provided by Russia, and this indicated that North Korean soldiers were learning more about drones and gaining knowledge that could become a “direct threat” to South Korea.

“North Korean troops are gaining real combat experience through their deployment, shedding blood, and suffering heavy losses. They are also accumulating knowledge about drone warfare through trial and error,” said Yoo.

“If a significant number of North Korean soldiers return home alive, they could pose a direct threat to us in a future conflict.”

Reports suggest North Korean troops in Kursk are suffering heavy casualties due to relentless Ukrainian drone strikes. Lacking effective countermeasures, they are struggling to defend their positions as drones target them with precision, worsening their battlefield losses.

Ri also told Yoo that there were seven Russian officials directly working with his company who served as a bridge between Russian authorities and the North Korean soldiers.

“They maintained communication with their authorities, coordinated artillery support when needed, guided us through unfamiliar terrain, and provided rear logistics support. They also conducted drone reconnaissance and shared the gathered intelligence with us,” said Ri.

Reports about Ri’s comments came a few days after South Korea’s main spy agency said it had intelligence indicating that North Korean troops dispatched to Russia were receiving drone training from Russian forces.

The South’s National Intelligence Service said on Wednesday that it was closely monitoring the “possibility” of North Korea-Russia cooperation in drone technology and production.

North Korea likely to produce drones with Russian support this year: report

High casualty rate could deplete North Korean troops in Kursk by mid-April: report

In February, Japan’s public broadcaster NHK reported that North Korea was set to produce multiple types of drones this year in collaboration with Russia. It said Moscow had agreed to provide technical support to Pyongyang in exchange for its military assistance in the fighting against Ukrainian forces.

The two countries have reached an agreement under which Russia will provide technical assistance to North Korea for the development and mass production of various types of drones, the broadcaster reported, citing multiple unidentified sources.

Ri’s testimony echoed what the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War think tank reported last month, that Russia may be providing drone and missile technology to North Korea in exchange for North Korean troops fighting in Kursk.

The think tank reported at that time that the North was using the war against Ukraine as a testing ground for its own military capabilities.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also warned in February that Russia was deliberately transferring “modern technology” to North Korea, including drone technology.

Edited by Mike Firn.

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

Advocates: NY Prison Guard Strike Reveals History of Repression & Violence Against Prison Activism

Democracy Now! — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 16:18:54 +0000

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

Zolgensma: What a $2 Million Per Dose Gene Therapy Reveals About Drug Pricing

ProPublica — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 22:19:23 +0000

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

What a $2 Million Per Dose Gene Therapy Reveals About Drug Pricing

by Robin Fields — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 13:00:00 +0000

by Robin Fields

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

Vincent Gaynor remembers, almost to the minute, when he realized his part in birthing the breakthrough gene therapy Zolgensma had ended and the forces that turned it into the world’s most expensive drug had taken over.

It was May 2014. He and his wife were sitting in the cafeteria at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

Elsewhere in the hospital, an infant — patient No. 1 in a landmark clinical trial — was receiving an IV infusion that, if it worked, would fix the genetic mutation that caused spinal muscular atrophy, a rare, incurable disease. At the time, children born with the most severe form of SMA swiftly lost their ability to move, to swallow, to breathe. Depending on the disease’s progression, most didn’t live to their second birthdays.

The Gaynors’ daughter Sophia had been diagnosed with SMA five years earlier. Since then, they’d raced to fund research to save her. Their charity, Sophia’s Cure, was covering a substantial portion of the costs of the trial.

They’d helped raise about $2 million for a program at Nationwide run by Brian Kaspar, a leading researcher. Gaynor, a New York City construction worker, had forged a tight bond with Kaspar, speaking frequently with him by phone, sometimes deep into the night.

But their relationship had started to fray when — with success in sight — Kaspar became part owner of AveXis, a biotech startup that had snapped up the rights to his SMA drug. Billions of dollars were at stake.

When Kaspar walked into the cafeteria that day, Gaynor said, the scientist didn’t acknowledge him or his wife before sitting down a short distance away. Neither did the man with him, the startup’s CEO.

“It was like they didn’t know us,” Gaynor recalled.

When Zolgensma hit the market five years later, it was hailed as a miracle drug. Some babies treated with it grew up able to run and play. It helped reduce U.S. death rates from SMA, long the leading genetic cause of infant mortality, by two-thirds.

That leap forward came at a sky-high price: more than $2 million per dose, making Zolgensma then the costliest one-time treatment ever.

How did a drug rooted, like many, in seed money from the U.S. government — that is, American taxpayers — and spurred by the grassroots fundraising of desperate parents, end up with such a price tag?

The story of Zolgensma lays bare a confounding reality about modern drug development, in which revolutionary new treatments are becoming available only to be priced out of reach for many. It’s a story that upends commonly held conceptions that high drug prices reflect huge industry investments in innovation. Most of all, it’s a story that prompts, again and again, an increasingly urgent question: Do medical advances really have to be this expensive?

ProPublica traced Zolgensma’s journey from lab to market, from the supporters there at the beginning to the hired guns brought in at the end to construct a rationale for its unprecedented price.

We found that taxpayers and private charities like Sophia’s Cure subsidized much of the science that yielded Zolgensma, providing research grants and opening the door to federal tax credits and other benefits that sped its path to approval.

Yet that support came with no conditions — financial or otherwise — for the for-profit companies that brought the drug over the finish line, particularly when it came to pricing.

Vincent Gaynor with his daughter Sophia (Photo courtesy of Vincent Gaynor)

Once Zolgensma’s potential was clear, early champions like the Gaynors were left behind as the private sector rushed in. AveXis’ top executives and venture-capital backers made tens or hundreds of millions of dollars apiece when the startup was swallowed by the pharmaceutical giant Novartis AG in 2018.

Wall Street analysts predicted Novartis’ new prize drug would be the first therapy to smash the million-dollar-a-dose mark. The Swiss colossus crafted a sophisticated campaign to justify more than double that amount, enlisting a team of respected academics, data-modelers and pricing strategists to help make its case.

“This was a case where the charities and the government did everything to get this thing commercialized, and then it just became an opportunity for a bunch of people to make transformative, generational wealth,” said James Love, director of the public advocacy group Knowledge Ecology International.

In a statement to ProPublica, Novartis said Zolgensma’s price reflects its benefits to children with SMA and to society more broadly.

“Zolgensma is consistently priced based on the value it provides to patients, caregivers and health systems,” the company said, adding that the drug may reduce the burden of SMA by replacing “repeat, lifelong therapies with a single treatment.”

Zolgensma’s price quickly became the standard for gene therapies. Nine of them cost more than $2 million. A tenth, approved in November, is predicted to run about $3.8 million, just shy of the most expensive, also approved last year, which costs $4.25 million a dose.

“Drug companies charge whatever they think they can get away with,” said David Mitchell, the founder of Patients For Affordable Drugs. “And every time the benchmark moves up, they think, ‘Well, we can get away with more.’”

Parents of children with SMA say their concerns about costs pale in comparison to the hope offered by such cutting-edge therapies. “I mean, it’s a child’s life,” said Hailey Weihs, who battled her health plan to get Zolgensma for her daughter. “Anybody would want that for their own child.”

The seven-figure costs of Zolgensma and other gene therapies add to the nation’s ballooning bill for prescription drugs, absorbed by all Americans in the form of rising insurance premiums and taxes for public programs like Medicaid.

Breakthroughs like Zolgensma are often framed as wins for all: Patients get life-saving new therapies. Drug companies and biotech investors make enough money to incentivize even more breakthroughs.

But not everyone’s a winner, Gaynor noted.

No one wanted Zolgensma to succeed more than he did, or understands better what it has meant for families like his. Yet his years behind the scenes of the drug’s development left him and his family disillusioned.

“I learned it’s all about money,” Gaynor said. “It’s not about saving people.”

When Vincent and Catherine Gaynor started their married life in 2006, they knew one thing for certain: They wanted children.

They learned well into Catherine’s 2008 pregnancy that they were both carriers for SMA, meaning there was a 25% chance their child would be born with the muscle-wasting disorder.

They were concerned but clung to the larger chance the baby would be born healthy.

When Sophia was born in late February 2009, at first they just marveled at her sweet disposition and bright, expressive eyes. How she loved being snuggled. How she sighed after she burped.

But it didn’t take long for Vincent, who’d grown up with younger siblings, to sense something was off. Sophia didn’t lift her legs. They flopped outward like a frog’s when he changed her diaper.

Their pediatrician assured them Sophia was fine. Then a different doctor suggested testing her for SMA. While they waited for the results, the family went to a nearby park, and Catherine pushed Sophia’s stroller around a pond. “I remember walking behind her with the video camera and knowing in my heart this was the last day we were all going to be happy,” Vincent recalled.

After Sophia’s diagnosis, Catherine quit her office job to care for the baby full time. Vincent started gulping down studies and going to conferences, desperate to find a way to save his daughter.

At the time, there were no treatments to slow or stop SMA. By the time Sophia was 4 months old, she needed a machine to help her breathe overnight. At 6 months, she could no longer take a bottle and needed a feeding tube. Each time she lost ground, their urgency to find a treatment grew.

The Gaynors didn’t have deep pockets or wealthy friends. He was a steamfitter with Local 638, from a family of steamfitters. They began raising small amounts of money by hosting golf tournaments and throwing Zumba parties. As the volume of donations grew, they founded Sophia’s Cure, emerging as serious players in the small world of SMA charities.

I learned it’s all about money. It’s not about saving people.

—Vincent Gaynor, who raised funds for medical research to help his daughter with spinal muscular atrophy

Vincent met Brian Kaspar at a cocktail hour for high-yield fundraisers. Kaspar was among the small group of top researchers working to find treatments for SMA, competing fiercely for recognition and funds. (Kaspar declined an interview request from ProPublica and didn’t respond to written questions.)

Because his drug was a gene therapy, public grant money and private philanthropy played an especially central role, with the National Institutes of Health alone putting over $450 million into science related to SMA. Drug companies at the time approached these treatments with more skepticism, waiting longer to invest and letting universities and academic hospitals do the heavy lifting, said Ameet Sarpatwari, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School who studies the pharmaceutical industry.

Drug companies sponsored only 40% of the U.S. gene therapy trials active in January 2019, according to a study Sarpatwari co-authored.

“The narrative of industry is, ‘We’re doing the hard, expensive part of drug development,’ and, at least for cell and gene therapies, the most risky part is actually being done by public or federally supported labs,” Sarpatwari said, calling Zolgensma a “poster child” for the study’s findings.

By the time of the cocktail party, Kaspar had turned early research into a promising drug therapy that he was beginning to test on animals — the precursor to a human trial. Gaynor remembered him as humble and almost classically nerdy, happy to spend hours on the phone explaining how motor neurons work.

More established SMA charities tended to hedge their bets, spreading money around to multiple programs. But Sophia was already around 18 months old, and Gaynor had no time for that. In September 2010, when Sophia’s Cure won a $250,000 grant from the Pepsi Refresh Project by amassing votes online, he steered the money to Kaspar’s program. The following June, the charity signed an agreement promising Kaspar up to $1 million more, for which it had launched a drive to recruit 200 people to raise $5,000 apiece.

As the money flowed in, Gaynor and Kaspar became close friends. The Gaynors stayed overnight at Kaspar’s house on their drive to an annual charity event. Kaspar did a Q&A for the Sophia’s Cure YouTube channel from the Gaynors’ dining room and proofread posts Vincent wrote for the charity’s website.

Gaynor said they often talked about how getting the drug through the development process would require way more money and muscle than the various SMA charities could muster. Kaspar shared his conversations with venture capital firms and even asked Gaynor to talk to a potential investor.

Yet Gaynor said he was blindsided when Kaspar told him he’d formed a relationship with a Dallas startup called BioLife Cell Bank that had been focused on stem cell research.

The CEO, John Carbona, then 54, had run medical device and equipment companies, but he had no background in drug development. In an interview, Carbona told ProPublica that he took the reins at BioLife in the aftermath of his mother’s death, determined to do something “significant” to fulfill her hopes for him. After an associate’s twins were born with SMA, he said he became convinced that Kaspar’s gene therapy was the answer.

Carbona remade BioLife into AveXis: Av for adeno-associated virus serotype 9, the engine of Kaspar’s drug; ve for vector; X for the DNA helix; and Is for Isis, the goddess of children, nature and magic.

Still, for much of the next year and a half, money from charities and more than $2.5 million from the National Institutes of Health remained Kaspar’s bread and butter. In late 2012, Sophia’s Cure agreed to provide another $550,000 for a Phase 1 clinical trial. The Nationwide Children’s Hospital Foundation, an affiliate of the hospital, agreed to match it.

Kaspar singled out Sophia’s Cure for the extent of its support in a Nationwide press release.

“Sophia’s Cure Foundation has been the lead funder of this program and their incredible investment in this lab has accelerated our program by many years,” he said.

The trial protocol called for Kaspar’s therapy to be tested on infants up to 9 months old. It was a pragmatic decision: The company had limited funds and capacity to produce the test doses, which would be smaller for children who weighed less. Plus, the youngest children were likely to show the most dramatic results since they’d be treated before SMA inflicted its worst damage.

That left out Sophia, as well as most of the kids whose parents made up Gaynor’s fundraising network.

Gaynor’s dream of saving his daughter had tapered into determination to stop the disease’s progression and preserve the strength she had left. Sophia could no longer move her whole hand, but she could still tap with her right pointer finger. She could use an eye-gaze computer to click open screens and attend school remotely. She could communicate a bit, blinking once for yes and twice for no.

Early on, Gaynor said, Kaspar had promised a trial for older kids. But Gaynor felt Kaspar’s commitment wavered as his ties to AveXis grew and his reliance on funding from Sophia’s Cure diminished.

Carbona struck a deal with Nationwide Children’s in late 2013, getting AveXis the exclusive right to develop an SMA treatment using the hospital’s inventions, including Kaspar’s, in exchange for stock. A few months later, Kaspar signed a contract that granted him an even larger stake in the company. The company also landed its first major investor, Paul Manning of PBM Capital.

Over this period, Gaynor said, the phone calls and updates from Kaspar slowed. The Gaynors were invited to Nationwide Children’s for the start of the clinical trial by the family of the child receiving the first dose.

After the initial awkwardness in the cafeteria, the Gaynors said, Kaspar and Carbona eventually came over and sat with them. Carbona remembers it differently, saying that he recalled seeing the Gaynors that day and the mood was friendly, even celebratory.

Tension surfaced two months later when they all converged in Lancaster, Wisconsin, for Avery’s Race, an annual SMA fundraiser benefiting Sophia’s Cure.

The event brought together dozens of families from across the country for an awareness walk, an auction and a rubber ducky race in a nearby creek. In the finale, parents posed questions to Kaspar, Gaynor and Carbona, almost all of them about the clinical trial.

In video footage captured by a documentary filmmaker, Catherine Gaynor asked bluntly whether testing the drug only on infants meant the FDA would approve the treatment only for the youngest patients while “everyone else is left hanging out to dry.”

Kaspar acknowledged this was possible. He described expanding the treatment to older children as “step two” but made clear that funds for testing would have to come from Sophia’s Cure.

That’s what the money raised at Avery’s Race would support, Vincent Gaynor said, adding pointedly that his nonprofit would focus on the work others would avoid “because it’s not going to push stock prices up.”

Neither Kaspar nor Carbona responded directly to the dig. Carbona, noting the company had other funding needs, said they would expand testing when they had proof the drug worked.

I mean, they all have their hearts in the right place, but they’re being run by people who are looking for a return on investment.

—John Carbona, former CEO of AveXis

By early 2015, AveXis had raised millions from deep-pocketed biotech investors, adding members of several venture-capital funds to its board. Their participation would be critical in bringing the drug to market, paying for licenses to patented technology needed to make and administer it, for example. It also meant that Zolgensma had to do more than save lives — its promise had to make AveXis’ investors a profit.

Almost immediately, Carbona said, the board pushed to take the company public.

“I mean, they all have their hearts in the right place, but they’re being run by people who are looking for a return on investment,” he said.

As AveXis moved toward an initial public offering, some on the board questioned whether Carbona should continue running it, he said. He’d been accused years earlier of fraud and breach of fiduciary duty by a former employer, who won a $2.2 million court judgment against him. Carbona had denied any wrongdoing and the judgment was reversed in part and reduced on appeal, but the case left lasting damage. “It hurt me immensely,” he said.

Later that year, the board replaced Carbona with a new chief executive, Sean P. Nolan, who had a decadeslong record at pharmaceutical and biotech companies.

In September, a company representative offered the Gaynors a meeting with Nolan, saying Kaspar had stressed how instrumental Sophia’s Cure had been to the work on the drug. The Gaynors traveled into Manhattan for the meeting at a hotel bar. They told Nolan about their concerns, including that older kids wouldn’t have access to Kaspar’s drug since it hadn’t been tested on them. They said Nolan was cordial but never followed up. (Nolan didn’t respond to emailed questions from ProPublica.)

Nasdaq posted a video to Facebook with the caption, “Getting ready to ring the #Nasdaq opening bell with AveXis, Inc!” (Excerpt from archived live video clip obtained from Nasdaq/Facebook)

Watch video ➜

Early the following year, AveXis went public. Nolan celebrated by ringing the NASDAQ opening bell as Kaspar, other company executives and members of the board whooped and clapped.

The IPO and subsequent stock sales raised hundreds of millions of dollars, but little of the money went toward additional trials on Zolgensma, an analysis by KEI, the public advocacy group, concluded.

The drug’s trials were small, often involving two dozen patients or fewer. AveXis, and later Novartis, spent less than $12 million up to the point of the drug’s approval — surprisingly little — to prove the therapy was safe and effective, the group estimated, based on information obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, from studies and in Securities and Exchange Commission filings. (Novartis did not respond to questions from ProPublica about trial costs.)

The companies spent more than 10 times that amount to license intellectual property from others, KEI found. It’s not the clinical trials, Love, the director, said, that “makes developing gene therapies more expensive than it has to be.”

By the time of AveXis’ IPO, the Gaynors had decided to wind down Sophia’s Cure and step back from the SMA community. In 2015, Sophia began having seizures that became more frequent over time. She was 6 years old and growing weaker. Her SMA had progressed too far for Kaspar’s drug to help her.

Vincent’s sense of failure was crushing. In September 2016, after years of pent-up anger, he took a last stab at getting Kaspar and AveXis to acknowledge that the charity and its donors had essentially been a partner in developing Zolgensma.

Sophia’s Cure sued Kaspar, Carbona, Nolan, AveXis, Nationwide Children’s Hospital and its affiliated research institute and foundation for breach of contract. They’d relied on the charity’s money to advance the treatment, the lawsuit alleged, then violated the terms of donation agreements by cutting it out of credit and ownership rights once the drug was headed for success. The suit sought damages of $500 million.

Many larger disease foundations have launched venture philanthropy programs that invest in biotech companies and projects, getting royalties and other financial considerations if their gifts help fund new treatments. In court filings, Nationwide Children’s called the notion that the tiny Sophia’s Cure had any right to the drug “simply not true, or even plausible,” and AveXis called it “wholly unsupported.”

Carbona said he was “disappointed and surprised” by the lawsuit. Nationwide didn’t respond to questions about the matter.

In November 2017, as the litigation went on, the results of the clinical trial that the charity helped fund were published.

They were remarkable. At 20 months, all 15 children who’d been treated remained alive, and none relied on a ventilator to breathe. Eleven of 12 infants who received a higher dose of the therapy were able to sit unassisted, speak and be fed orally. Two could walk on their own.

Based on preliminary trial data, the FDA had designated Zolgensma a breakthrough therapy, one of three special designations that helped it race from human trials to regulatory approval in five years. Once the full trial results came out, AveXis became a red-hot acquisition target.

In April 2018, Novartis beat out another bidder, agreeing to buy the company for $8.7 billion.

The sale delivered massive windfalls to those with the biggest stakes in AveXis.

Kaspar alone took in more than $400 million. He swapped his longtime family home in New Albany, Ohio, for a 9-acre estate in San Diego County, California, that had been listed for just over $8 million. It featured a dine-in stone wine cellar, a horse ring and stables.

Nolan, who’d led AveXis for less than three years, walked away with over $190 million; according to a financial filing, his payout included a golden parachute worth almost $65 million. Manning, the startup’s first big investor, made more than $315 million, multiplying his original investment by about 60. (Manning didn’t respond to calls or emailed questions from ProPublica.)

Carbona, too, made a bundle — he declined to say how much. Since he’d already left the company, his payout wasn’t disclosed in SEC filings. “It didn’t matter,” he said of the money. The 20-hour days he’d put into AveXis had helped advance a lifesaving drug. “This was a significant impact on humanity.”

After watching AveXis’ executives and investors cash in, the Gaynors were dealt another painful setback. In early 2019, a U.S. district court judge in Ohio dismissed Sophia’s Cure’s lawsuit against all parties, concluding there had been no breach of contract.

Their last hope for recognition of the charity’s role in bringing Zolgensma to the world was extinguished.

Once Novartis acquired AveXis, it turned to setting a price for its much-anticipated gene therapy.

Unlike other nations, the United States allows companies to charge whatever they want for new drugs. This often means Americans pay the world’s highest prices, particularly during the period when only the original manufacturer can market a drug. Research by PhRMA, the trade group for drug companies, suggests unfettered pricing buys Americans faster access, as long as insurers will pay: New medicines most often launch first in the U.S.

Novartis’ deliberations took place at the end of a decade in which launch prices of new drugs had risen exponentially, drawing ire from patient advocacy groups and Congress. The median annual launch price for a new drug jumped from about $2,000 in 2008 to about $180,000 in 2021, one study found.

In part, the increase reflected that a growing proportion of new drugs treated rare diseases. Drug companies have argued these therapies should cost more because their markets are smaller, making it harder to recoup expenses.

Cell and gene therapies also drove prices higher. The first three such treatments were approved in 2017, launching at prices of $370,000 or more. Luxturna, a gene therapy for a rare disorder that causes vision loss, costs $425,000 per eye.

Industry insiders assumed Zolgensma would cost more than Luxturna. But how much?

There was what I would call pressure from Wall Street. This was going to set a precedent. Investors wanted to see a high price here.

—Dr. Steven D. Pearson, founder of a nonprofit that assesses drug prices

How drug companies pick prices for their products is among their most closely held secrets.

Beyond its statement, Novartis didn’t respond to questions from ProPublica about how it set or justified Zolgensma’s price. We reached out to more than three dozen people who were at the company or consulted for it at the time; most didn’t respond or declined to comment. A couple said they were bound by nondisclosure agreements.

The most visible portion of Novartis’ work was an effort to put a dollar value on how much Zolgensma would extend and improve SMA patients’ lives and offset the costs of caring for them.

This approach, known as value-based pricing, was originally championed by insurers and consumer watchdogs hoping to rein in drug prices. Other nations use economic assessments to decide whether to cover drugs and at what price, often paying far less than the U.S. for the same treatments.

But pharmaceutical companies have learned to use these techniques to their advantage.

Novartis brought together experts from academia and top consulting firms to work with its internal health economics team to publish research framing Zolgensma as a good value even at a high price.

One of the academics was Daniel Malone, then a professor at the University of Arizona’s College of Pharmacy. The target audience was mainly insurers, he said in an interview.

“We’re trying to influence the thousands of pharmacy and therapeutics committees around the country that are going to be looking at this therapy and whether they are going to provide it,” he said.

At the company’s direction, Malone said, their model mainly compared Zolgensma to the only other SMA treatment then on the market, a chronic treatment called Spinraza. It, too, was pricey, costing $750,000 in the first year and $375,000 every year after; over a decade, the tally would come to more than $4 million. (This was hypothetical; the FDA had approved Spinraza in December 2016, so no one had ever taken it for that long.)

A paper Malone co-authored concluded that Zolgensma, at prices up to $5 million, was a better buy than its rival, delivering more therapeutic benefit at a similar cost.

Company executives publicly floated multimillion-dollar prices for Zolgensma using data points from Malone and others.

“Four million dollars is a significant amount of money,” Dave Lennon, then president of Novartis’ AveXis unit, told Wall Street analysts on a call in November 2018. But “we’ve shown through other studies that we are cost-effective in the range of $4 million to $5 million.”

Such talk normalized “prices that would’ve been inconceivable a generation ago,” said Peter Maybarduk, director of access to medicines at the nonprofit consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. “It has a desensitizing effect.”

Novartis’ team of experts also helped the company prepare for Zolgensma’s evaluation by the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, a nonprofit that assesses whether drugs are priced fairly.

Unlike agencies in Europe that do similar evaluations to set drug prices for national health systems, ICER’s recommendations aren’t binding, but they’ve become increasingly influential among public and private payers when it comes to coverage decisions.

Dr. Steven D. Pearson, the nonprofit’s founder, said that as ICER began its review, he was aware that investors were pushing for a big number.

“There was what I would call pressure from Wall Street,” he said. “This was going to set a precedent. Investors wanted to see a high price here.”

At first, it looked like ICER would resist. Its December 2018 draft report said Zolgensma would be overpriced at $2 million.

Novartis pushed back. Another consultant, University of Washington professor emeritus Louis Garrison, submitted public comments echoing a forthcoming AveXis-sponsored journal article he’d co-authored. It argued that drugs like Zolgensma, which treat rare, catastrophic conditions, deserved higher prices, in part to “incentivize appropriate risk taking and investments” by their developers.

Garrison said AveXis reviewed the article prior to publication, but he had the final say on its content. “I thought I could make a value-based argument that they would welcome and that I believe in,” he said. He said he was not directly involved in the company’s pricing decision.

Nonetheless, ICER’s final report in April 2019 concluded Zolgensma would need to be priced under $900,000 to be cost-effective, though it acknowledged the drug was still being tested on infants who hadn’t yet shown symptoms of SMA. If they also benefited, the report suggested the drug’s value might increase.

On May 24, the FDA approved Zolgensma to treat children under 2 with all forms of SMA.

Novartis finally revealed the treatment’s U.S. launch price, $2.125 million, framing this as a 50% discount on Spinraza and what the company’s research showed the gene therapy was worth.

It also pocketed yet another taxpayer-funded benefit: a voucher from the Food and Drug Administration redeemable for accelerated review of another drug. Such vouchers — designed to encourage companies to invest in pediatric rare-disease treatments — can be sold, typically bringing prices of around $100 million apiece.

That same day, ICER released an update. New data showing Zolgensma’s substantial benefits for presymptomatic children made the drug cost-effective at prices up to $1.9 million by one benchmark and up to $2.1 million by another, it said.

Pearson acknowledged the scale and timing of the switch were unusual, but said it was driven by the data, not outside pressure. “We weren’t trying to fit into somebody’s preexpectation of where the number would be, believe me,” he said.

He immediately caught flak from insurers.

“I got a lot of phone calls saying, ‘Why on earth did you say $2.1 million was a fair price? How could that possibly be the case? We’re going to get swamped with this,’” he recalled.

The Gaynors, linking to news coverage on Zolgensma’s launch, wrote on the Sophia’s Cure Facebook page that they were “ecstatic” for children newly born with SMA, but that helping create the world’s most expensive drug “is certainly not what we had in mind.”

Malone said he thought it was mostly the potential for blowback that had prevented Novartis from demanding even more for Zolgensma. He’d recommended charging the full $5 million.

“Obviously it didn’t stick,” he said. “They decided not to price the product there, I think, because of the political backlash they would’ve gotten being the first out of the gate at that price point.”

In the months after Zolgensma hit the market in the U.S., parents of children with SMA frequently ran into resistance from health insurers that refused to pay for it.

Between late 2019 and mid-2022, Chicago attorney Eamon Kelly represented at least seven parents battling health plans across the country, helping them appeal denied claims or representing them at state Medicaid hearings.

Hailey Weihs came to Kelly when her insurer, a Medicaid-managed care plan in Texas, wouldn’t pay for Zolgensma for her infant daughter Aniya. As the coverage dispute dragged on, Aniya developed tongue tremors and lost the ability to bear weight on her legs.

Kelly won the case, as he had all the others, but Aniya’s five-month wait to get the drug was terrifying. “Every day kids with this disease lose motor neurons,” Weihs said. “When you lose them, you cannot get them back.”

Now state Medicaid programs and most employer health plans cover Zolgensma, but they often limit which patients get access. Some require doctors to get approval in advance before providing the treatment or impose restrictions on who’s eligible that go beyond what’s on the drug’s label, such as requiring an SMA specialist to prescribe it.

Though fewer than 300 American children are born each year with SMA, treatments for the disease annually rank among the top 20 drug classes for Medicaid spending. From 2019 through 2022, Medicaid spent $309 million on 208 Zolgensma claims, an average of almost $1.5 million per claim. (Under federal law, Medicaid doesn’t pay list price for drugs, getting substantial rebates; other payers also negotiate discounts.)

Globally, more than 4,000 children have been treated with Zolgensma, Novartis said. The drug topped $1 billion in annual sales in its second full year on the market. Through 2024, the company had reported over $6.4 billion in revenue from Zolgensma sales.

Novartis is working to expand use of the drug in older children, in part by seeking approval for a second version of the drug, administered by spinal injection, for children with less severe SMA.

“We are unwavering in our commitment to the SMA community and will continue to advance efforts to ensure access to Zolgensma for SMA patients who may benefit from this transformative, one-time gene therapy,” the company said in its statement.

Still, more than five years after Zolgensma’s approval in the U.S., the drug remains out of reach for children in many low- and middle-income countries.

Love, KEI’s director, said he’s heard from families in countries like India and South Africa, where it’s a struggle to obtain not only Zolgensma, but also other SMA treatments available in the U.S.

“It’s maddening to me,” he said.

After setting aside their charity work, the Gaynors refocused their energy on Sophia and her two younger siblings, who don’t have SMA.

The Gaynor family (Photo courtesy Vincent Gaynor)

They’ve taken the clan to Disney World and to the Bahamas to swim with dolphins. Their youngest, who’s 8, lies beside Sophia on her bed and watches movies with her.

Now 15, Sophia had her longest-ever hospitalization in early 2024 when a virus caused her blood sugar to plummet and triggered frequent seizures. She didn’t wake up for two weeks. Since then, she’s been weaker, her affect flatter.

Her parents say they don’t think about the future. “Our focus is that she’s happy, that there’s love all around her,” Catherine said. “It’s just day to day.”

The Gaynors have taken solace in the idea that, through Sophia’s Cure, their daughter has made a difference for all the children with SMA who came after her. “That was kind of our consolation prize,” Catherine said.

One of those kids turned out to be her cousin, Vincent’s sister’s son, who was diagnosed with SMA in 2023 and then treated with Zolgensma. He walked at 10 months and now races around. “That helped me, in part, feel better about what we did,” Vincent said.

He still bristles at the drug’s price, which he blames on the payouts hauled in by those at AveXis and now Novartis.

“All those people, they all came in at the 12th hour once the trial was funded and you had the breakthrough,” he said. “Once it was taken from us, it was all about greed.”

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Kirsten Berg contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Robin Fields.

A third of the Arctic’s vast carbon sink now a source of emissions, study reveals

Patrick Greenfield, The Guardian — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 14:00:00 +0000

A third of the Arctic’s tundra, forests, and wetlands have become a source of carbon emissions, a new study has found, as global heating ends thousands of years of carbon storage in parts of the frozen north.

For millennia, Arctic land ecosystems have acted as a deep-freeze for the planet’s carbon, holding vast amounts of potential emissions in the permafrost. But ecosystems in the region are increasingly becoming a contributor to global heating as they release more CO₂ into the atmosphere with rising temperatures, a new study published in Nature Climate Change concluded.

More than 30 percent of the region was a net source of CO₂, according to the analysis, rising to 40 percent when emissions from wildfires were included. By using monitoring data from 200 study sites between 1990 and 2020, the research demonstrates how the Arctic’s boreal forests, wetlands, and tundra are being transformed by rapid warming.

“It is the first time that we’re seeing this shift at such a large scale, cumulatively across all of the tundra. That’s a pretty big deal,” said Sue Natali, a co-author and lead researcher on the study at the Woodwell Climate Research Center.

The shift is occurring despite the Arctic becoming greener. “One place where I work in interior Alaska, when the permafrost thaws, the plants grow more so you can sometimes can get an uptick in carbon storage,” Natali said. “But the permafrost continues to melt and the microbes take over. You have this really big pool of carbon in the ground and you see things like ground collapse. You can visually see the changes in the landscape,” she said.

Ukraine reveals handwritten letter of a fallen North Korean soldier in Kursk

Taejun Kang for RFA — Thu, 26 Dec 2024 03:11:17 +0000

TAIPEI, Taiwan – Ukraine revealed a handwritten note that is said was found on the body of a North Korean soldier killed in Russia’s Kursk region, as part of its latest evidence highlighting the increasing presence and casualties of North Korean troops in Russia.

American, South Korean and Ukrainian authorities have said there are up to 12,000 North Korean soldiers in Russia, deployed there primarily to help Russia push Ukrainian forces out of positions they captured in Kursk in August.

As of Monday, Ukraine reported that more than 3,000 North Korean soldiers had been killed or wounded in the Russian region, while South Korea estimated the number of casualties among North Korean troops is at least 1,100.

“Dear Song Ji-myong, my closest comrade in arms, celebrating his birthday here on Russian land, away from our beloved Choson and the embrace of his affectionate father and mother,” read the crumpled letter, written in black ballpoint pen. North Koreans refer to their country as Choson.

“I sincerely wish you good health and a happy birthday.”

According to the Ukrainian military, the name written on the soldier’s identification card was Jong Kyong-hong. It is believed that the letter was either not delivered or was a draft, as it was dated Dec. 9.

Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces released a photograph of the note, which was written in Korean, on Tuesday.

“These are some of the deciphered entries from seized notebooks … translations of other entries are in progress and more will be revealed,” said the Ukrainian military.

Radio Free Asia has not been able to independently verify the photo.

Separately, a Ukrainian military intelligence official said the presence of North Korean soldiers alongside Russian troops in Kursk had not yet had a major influence on the course of the battle.

“The involvement of the North Koreans in the fighting has not had a significant impact on the situation. It is not such a significant number of personnel,” Yevgen Yerin, spokesperson for the Ukrainian military intelligence service, told AFP.

“But they are also learning. And we cannot underestimate the enemy. And we can see that they are already taking some things into account in their activities,” he added.

Ukraine military drops leaflets urging North Korean troops to surrender

Russians see North Koreans as a ‘burden’ over ignorance of drones: South says

Yerin’s remarks came about a week after South Korea’s spy agency said that North Korean soldiers’ inexperience in modern warfare was leading to mass casualties.

“North Korean troops are being ‘consumed’ for front-line assaults in an unfamiliar battlefield environment of open fields, and they lack the ability to respond to drone attacks,” said the South’s National Intelligence Service.

Russian troops were complaining about the North Koreans’ ignorance of drones, calling them a “burden,” the agency added, without elaborating.

Neither President Vladimir Putin nor North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has confirmed the North’s troop deployment to Russia but reports indicate that ties between two countries are progressing swiftly.

The South’s spy agency said last week that North Korea’s military was likely preparing to deploy additional troops and military equipment to Russia, potentially including so-called suicide drones, in support of Moscow’s war against Ukraine.

On Monday, Kremlin foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov said that he thought it was likely North Korean troops would participate in Russia’s Red Square parade next year.

Edited by Mike Firn.

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

Rabuka reveals details of 1987 coup navy ‘secret weapons mission’

Pacific Media Watch — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 06:12:08 +0000

By Litia Cava, FBC News multimedia journalist

Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka has revealed how arms and ammunition used to conduct the 1987 military coup were secretly brought into Fiji on board a naval survey ship.

Speaking at the commissioning of a new research vessel for the Lands and Mineral Resources Ministry on Friday, Rabuka described the strategic measures taken to ensure the weapons reached Fiji undetected.

He recounted that during preparations for his coup against Dr Timoçi Bavadra’s Labour government of 1987, Fiji lacked sufficient arms and ammunition.

READ MORE: The media and the coup leader: Sitiveni Rabuka — Pacific Journalism Review
Other Fiji coup reports

“I realised that we didn’t have enough weapons and ammunition in Fiji to do what I wanted to do. So I sent a very quick message to the captain who was there to pick up the ship and surprised him by asking that, get that ship commissioned in Singapore before you sail back to Fiji.”

Rabuka explained the decision, saying the commissioning had allowed the ship to fly a naval flag, ensuring it would avoid inspection at international ports.

He said the ship’s captain was instructed to load arms and ammunition en route which were successfully brought back to Fiji.

The Prime Minister said the measures were necessary at the time to achieve what needed to be done.

Rare glimpse of tactics
His remarks offered a rare glimpse into the behind-the-scenes tactics of 1987, highlighting the extent of planning and resourcefulness involved.

Rabuka’s comments were made during the launch of a state-of-the-art research vessel which will serve as a floating laboratory for marine geological studies and coastal surveys.

The vessel is equipped with advanced tools to map the ocean floor, study tectonic activity and support communities affected by climate change.

The Prime Minister said the new vessel marked a significant step in understanding Fiji’s marine ecosystem.

He also spoke about the importance of integrating scientific research with traditional knowledge to address critical issues such as climate change and sustainable resource management.

The PM said there was a need for informed planning to prevent disasters, referencing the recent earthquake in Vanuatu.

Rabuka said early geological surveys could have guided city planners and engineers in designing structures that mitigate damage from such events.

The new vessel is expected to provide critical insights into the ocean’s mysteries while contributing to Fiji’s resilience against climate-related challenges.

Fiji’s President celebrates birthday with military
Meanwhile, earlier today members of the Republic of Fiji Military Forces (RFMF) gathered at State House to celebrate the 71st birthday of Fiji’s President and Commander-in-Chief, Ratu Naiqama Lalabalavu.

The celebration was led by the Commander of the Fiji Navy, Humphrey Tawake, with senior officers. It was marked by a march by officers and the RFMF band. adding a ceremonial and heartfelt touch to the happy occasion.

On behalf of the commander of the RFMF who is away on official leave, Commander Tawake extended birthday wishes to the Head of State.

President Lalabalavu praised the dedication of the RFMF in upholding law and order.

“The strength of our nation lies in our collective efforts, and since assuming office, I have witnessed the vital role you play in ensuring peace and stability,” he said.

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

Papua New Guinea reveals defense deal with US worth $864 million

Harry Pearl for BenarNews — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 17:41:09 +0000

Read this story on BenarNews

SYDNEY — The United States will spend more than $864 million on infrastructure and military training in Papua New Guinea over 10 years under a defense deal signed between the two nations in 2023, PNG’s foreign minister has said.

No figure putting a value on the agreement has previously been publicly released.

The size of the package reflects increasing U.S. security engagement with Pacific island nations as it seeks to counter China’s inroads in the vast ocean region.

The proposed investment is part of a defense cooperation agreement, signed in May 2023, that gives the U.S. military “unimpeded access” to develop and deploy forces from six ports and airports, including the Lombrum Naval Base.

Papua New Guinea's Foreign Minister Justin Tkatchenko, left, and China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Port Moresby, April 20, 2024.

“The agreement is over 3.5 billion [kina] in investment in infrastructure development, training, equipment for the benefit of security in our region,” PNG Foreign Minister Justin Tkatchenko said in a speech on Monday in the Australian city of Sydney.

“It shows you the commitment that the United States now has directly with PNG. Before they used to allow Australia, for example, to look after the region. Now, the United States has taken the lead itself to deal with our Pacific island countries.”

A spokesperson from the U.S. Embassy Port Moresby said the agreement “does not have a dollar amount associated with it,” but was aimed at addressing shared defense and security challenges.

In PNG’s 2025 national budget, released last month, 441.9 million kina (US$109.2 million) was set aside for defense spending, which is projected to fall to around 400 million kina in the coming years.

Australia has for decades been PNG’s leading security partner under a bilateral program that contributed US$31.8 million in 2022–23, according to the Australia Army Research Center.

The poor state of PNG defense forces has been a long-running concern for both the PNG and Australian governments.

Mihai Sora, director of the Pacific islands program at the Lowy Institute, said the amount suggested by Tkatchenko was substantial, and would be “commensurate with PNG’s scale as by far the largest Pacific country” and the high level of external support needed for security and law enforcement.

But he said it was important not to lose sight of the scope and scale of Australian assistance to PNG over the last few decades.

“The U.S.’s recent contributions, though laudable, don’t really compare,” he told BenarNews. “And there’s the question of how much of what the U.S. has announced will it be able to actually get through Congress and will we see on the ground in PNG or elsewhere in the Pacific.

“Given both Australia and the U.S. have security agreements with PNG, all three countries will be coordinating on national and regional security very closely into the future.”

Although Donald Trump’s election victory has prompted questions around the world about whether the U.S. will be a less reliable ally, Tkatchenko said he was confident the defense relationship would endure.

“We would like to ensure that the DCA continues because the work has already started,” he said. “Runways are being constructed, wharfs are being constructed. Fuel storage facilities are now being constructed as we speak, and many, many other programs.”

PNG, the most populous Pacific island country, is rich in natural resources and strategically located with “one foot in Southeast Asia and one foot in the Pacific,” Tkatchenko said.

Its proximity to Guam – the main U.S. military hub in the Western Pacific – and Australia also makes it a critical point from which American forces and material can be staged and deployed in the event of a regional conflict, including in East Asia.

The 15-year defense cooperation agreement allows for the transit, maintenance and refueling of U.S. aircraft and vessels, and prepositioning of personnel and disaster relief materials. Some facilities identified in the deal, or parts of them, can be used exclusively by U.S. forces, which have permission to refurbish them.

Papua New Guinea's Prime Minister James Marape shakes hands with US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in Port Moresby, July 27, 2023.

During a visit to Port Morseby last year, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Washington is not seeking a permanent military base in the country. But America’s security footprint is growing.

Ann Marie Yastishock, the U.S. ambassador to PNG, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, said defense exercises in the Pacific nation had increased by 25% between 2023-24, from four to five.

Visits by U.S. Navy and Coast Guard vessels to PNG’s waters had grown by 27% over the same period, from 11 to 14, she said at the same investment event in Sydney.

The U.S. military had also finished building a bunkhouse at Igam Barracks, near Lae, and would award three more small-scale infrastructure projects this year, with work to begin in 2025.

“We will continue to exercise with the Papua New Guinea Defense Force in bilateral and multilateral exercises,” she said. “We also have additional plans of small incremental increases in Department of Defense personnel in the country, as well as looking for additional training opportunities.”

Following decades of neglect, U.S. interest in the Pacific was galvanized in early 2022 after Beijing and the Solomon Islands signed a security pact. Washington and allies such as Canberra feared it could lead to a Chinese military presence in a region they consider crucial to their defense and security.

China has also emerged as a key development partner for many economically-lagging Pacific nations as it seeks to isolate Taiwan diplomatically and reshape global institutions in its favor.

Beijing was “a friend of PNG” and an important economic partner, Tkatchenko said, but “at the end of the day … we keep to our traditional security partners.”

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Harry Pearl for BenarNews.

Reaction to ICC Indictment Reveals Bipartisan Contempt for International Law

Stephen Zunes — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 16:40:48 +0000

The international community wants to hold Israeli leaders accountable for war crimes committed in Gaza. Why is the United States standing in the way?

This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Stephen Zunes.

Yulia Skripal Reveals the Biggest Secret of All at Novichok Show Trial

John Helmer — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 15:41:58 +0000

Yulia Skripal communicated from her bedside at Salisbury District Hospital on March 8, 2018, four days after she and her father Sergei Skripal collapsed from a poison attack, that the attacker used a spray; and that the attack took place when she and her father were eating at a restaurant just minutes before their collapse on a bench outside.

The implication of the Skripal evidence, revealed for the first time on Thursday, is that the attack on the Skripals was not perpetrated by Russian military agents who were photographed elsewhere in Salisbury town at the time; that the attacker or attackers were British agents; and that if their weapon was a nerve agent called Novichok, it came, not from Moscow, but from the UK Ministry of Defence chemical warfare laboratory at Porton Down.

Porton Down’s subsequent evidence of Novichok contamination in blood samples, clothing, car, and home of the Skripals may therefore be interpreted as British in source, not Russian.

This evidence was revealed by a police witness testifying at the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry in London on November 14. The police officer, retired Detective Inspector Keith Asman was in 2018, and he remains today the chief of forensics for the Counter Terrorism Policing (CTPSE) group which combines the Metropolitan and regional police forces with the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and the Security Service (MI5).

According to Asman’s new disclosure, Yulia Skripal had woken from a coma and confirmed to the doctor at her bedside that she remembered the circumstances of the attack on March 4. What she remembered, she signalled, was not (repeat not) the official British Government narrative that Russian agents had tried to kill them by poisoning the front door-handle of the family home.

The new evidence was immediately dismissed by the Sturgess Inquiry lawyer assisting Anthony Hughes (titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley), the judge directing the Inquiry. “We see there,” the lawyer put to Asman as a leading question, “the suggestion, which we now know not to be right, of course”. — page 72.

Hughes then interrupted to tell the witness to disregard what Skripal had communicated. “If the record that you were given there is right, someone suggested to her ‘Had you been sprayed’. She didn’t come up with it herself.” — page 73. Hughes continued to direct the forensics chief to disregard the hearsay of Skripal. “Anyway the suggestion that she had been sprayed in the restaurant didn’t fit with your investigations? A. [Asman] No, sir. LORD HUGHES: Thank you.”

So far in in the Inquiry which began public sessions on October 14, this is the first direct sign of suppression of evidence by Hughes.

Hearsay, he indicates, should be disregarded if it comes from the target of attack, Yulia Skripal. However, hearsay from British Government officials, policemen, and chemical warfare agents at Porton Down must be accepted instead. Hughes has also banned Yulia and Sergei Skripal from testifying at the Inquiry.

The lawyer appointed and paid by the Government to represent the Skripals in the inquiry hearings said nothing to acknowledge the new disclosure nor to challenge Hughes’s efforts to suppress it.

Asman described his career and credentials in his witness statement to the Inquiry, dated October 23, 2024. His rank when he retired from the regular police forces in 2009 was detective inspector. He was then promoted to higher ranking posts at the operations coordinating group known as Counter Terrorism Policing for the Southeast Region (CTPSE). By 2018 Asman says he was “head of the National Counter Terrorism Forensics Working Group since 2012, and was the UK Counter Terrorism Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) forensic lead.” In June 2015 Asman was awarded the Order of the British Empire (MBE) “for services to Policing.”

At page 19 of his recent witness statement, this is what Asman has recorded for the evening of March 8, 2018:

Source: Dawn Sturgess Inquiry — page 19.

Asman’s went on to claim in this statement: “At this point Yulia Skripal was described as being emotional and fell unconscious. I made notes of my conversation with DI [Detective Inspector] VN104 in one of my notebooks, and in addition this information was confirmed to me in writing the next morning. The information she provided about being sprayed at the restaurant [Zizzi] was seemingly inconsistent with the presence of novichok at the Mill public house and 47 Christie Miller Road. On hearing this, I personally wondered whether Yulia Skripal knew more about it than she had alluded to and therefore whilst being fully cognisant of the SIO’s [Senior Investigative Officer] hypothesis and the need to be open-minded continued to prioritise her property.”

The Scene of the Novichol Crime

Source: Dailymail.co.uk

The Evidence the Crime Was British

Left: Yulia Skripal in May 2018, the scar of forced intubation still visible; read more here. Centre; Dr Stephen Cockroft who recorded the exchange with Skripal at her bedside on March 8, 2018; that was followed, Cockroft has also testified, by forced sedation and tracheostomy – read more. Right: read the only book on the case evidence.

Open-minded was not what the judge and his lawyers wanted from Asman when he appeared in public for the first time on Thursday, November 14. Referring precisely to the excerpt of Skripal’s hospital evidence, Francesca Whitelaw KC for the Inquiry asked Asman: “We can take that [witness statement excerpt] down, but this information as well, was it consistent or inconsistent with what you had found out in terms of forensic about the presence of Novichok at The Mill and 47 Christie Miller Road? A. [Asman] It, I would say, was inconsistent on the basis that she said she was sprayed in the restaurant.” — page 73.

Asman was then asked by Whitelaw to comment on Yulia Skripal’s exchange with Cockroft. “My question for you is: how, if at all, this impacted on your investigations? A. It only very slightly impacted on it…It was information to have but not necessarily going to change my approach on anything.” — page 73.

In the Inquiry record of hearings and exhibits since the commencement of the open sessions on October 14, there have been eleven separate exhibits of documents purporting to record what Yulia and Sergei Skripal have said; they include interviews with police and witness statements for the Inquiry; they are dated from April 2018 through October 2024. Most of them have been heavily redacted. None of them is signed by either Skripal.

Neither Yulia nor Sergei Skripal has been asked by the police, by the Inquiry lawyers, or by Hughes to confirm or deny whether Yulia’s recollection of March 8, 2018, of the spray attack in Zizzi’s Restaurant is still their evidence of what happened to them.

The post Yulia Skripal Reveals the Biggest Secret of All at Novichok Show Trial first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John Helmer.

Hundreds of Israel lobbyists ‘writing America’s news’, reveals new probe

Pacific Media Watch — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 20:45:26 +0000

Pacific Media Watch

Hundreds of former employees of Israel lobbying groups such as AIPAC, StandWithUs and CAMERA are working in top newsrooms across the United States, writing and producing America’s news — including on Israel-Palestine, reports a new investigation.

These outlets include MSNBC, The New York Times, CNN and Fox News, says the MintPress News inquiry written by Alan MacLeod.

“Some of these former lobbyists are responsible for producing content on Israel and Palestine — a gigantic and undisclosed conflict of interest,” MacLeod writes.

“Many key US newsroom staff were also formerly Israeli spies or intelligence agents, standing in stark contrast to journalists with pro-Palestine sentiments, who have been purged en masse since October 7, 2023.”

This MintPress News investigation is part of a series detailing Israel’s influence on American media.

An earlier report exposed the former Israeli spies and military intelligence officials working in US newsrooms.

“The fight for control over the Israel-Palestine narrative has been as intense as the war on the ground itself,” writes MacLeod.

Criticised for ‘distinct bias’
“US media have been widely criticised for displaying a distinct bias towards the Israeli perspective.”

However, MacLeod said this new investigation had revealed “not only is the press skewed in favour of Israel, but it is also written and produced by Israeli lobbyists themselves”.

“This investigation unearths a network of hundreds of former members of the Israel lobby working at some of America’s most influential news organisations, helping to shape the public’s understanding of events in the Middle East.

“In the process, it helps whitewash Israeli crimes and manufacture consent for continued US participation in what a wide range of international organisations have described as a genocide.”

The report author, Alan MacLeod, is senior staff writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017, he published two books, Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent and writes for a range of publications.

Read the full report

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

Ukraine reveals ‘intercepted’ radio communications of North Korean soldiers in Russia

Taejun Kang for RFA — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 05:42:20 +0000

TAIPEI, Taiwan – Ukraine has released an audio clip of what it says are intercepted radio communications between North Korean soldiers in Russia, as media reported that Russia had gathered 50,000 soldiers in its Kursk region, including North Korean troops, to attack Ukrainian positions there.

In the audio, uploaded by the Defense Intelligence of Ukraine, or DIU, on YouTube on Sunday, soldiers can be heard exchanging coded terms in North Korean-accented Korean.

“Mulgae hana, Mulgae dul,” was one exchange, which translates as “Seal one, Seal two”.

In another recording, a soldier says, “wait,” apparently giving an instruction to a subordinate.

The DIU said it intercepted the radio communications on Saturday, adding that the signals were about “ordering them to return immediately.”

Ukraine and the United States estimate that North Korea has sent 11,000 troops to help Russia in its war against Ukraine, with these forces reportedly stationed in the Russian border region of Kursk, which Ukrainian forces aided in early August. Moscow has faced challenges in reclaiming territory from Ukrainian forces.

Ukrainian troops have held parts of Kursk since then and Russia has struggled to re-take them.

The Ukrainian military suggests that the North Koreans may engage in combat in the coming days. The Pentagon has also confirmed the presence of a “small number” of North Korean soldiers on the front lines, speculating they may be deployed in “some type of infantry role.”

The New York Times, citing U.S. and Ukrainian officials, reported on Sunday that the Russian military has assembled about 50,000 soldiers, including North Koreans, to launch an assault to reclaim territory in Kursk.

Similarly, CNN quoted an unidentified U.S. official as saying Russia has gathered a “large force of tens of thousands” of troops and North Korean soldiers to participate in an imminent assault.

Strategic partnership

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law to ratify a comprehensive strategic partnership treaty with North Korea, which includes a mutual defense clause in the event of “aggression” against either signatory, Russia’s state news agency TASS said on Saturday.

Russian President Vladimir Putin delivers a speech during a plenary session as part of the 21st annual meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club in Sochi, Krasnodar region, Russia, Nov. 7, 2024.

The treaty was signed in Pyongyang on June 19 as Putin was visiting North Korea. Commenting on the treaty, Putin said on Thursday that it did not contain anything new but the two countries had returned to a similar arrangement that they had during the Soviet era.

“The treaty we signed with North Korea was the one we’ve signed with other countries. It was with the Soviet Union, then of course it ceased to exist, and we actually returned to it. That’s all. There is nothing new there,” said Putin, as cited by TASS in a separate report.

Putin also mentioned the possibility of Russia and North Korea holding joint military exercises.

“Why not? We’ll see,” Putin was cited by TASS as saying, without commenting on reports about North Korean troops in Russia.

Possible Russian support

South Korea and its allies have speculated that North Korea could get Russian assistance with its nuclear and missile programs in exchange for its help for Russia to fight Ukraine, which has included large volumes of weapons including missiles and artillery shells.

The South Korean military said that an intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, that North Korea tested on Oct. 31, was launched without the test of a new engine, which could suggest Russian assistance.

North Korea test fired what it said was a Hwasong-19, a new model, not an improved version of an existing missile. It was launched without testing a new engine, said South Korean lawmaker Yoo Yong-won, who was briefed by the South’s Defense Intelligence Agency.

“Considering the increased length and diameter of the missile’s fuselage and the increased maximum altitude, we can say the Hwasong-19 is a new ICBM that is different from the Hwasong-18,” the agency said, cited by Yoo.

The agency said that the fact that North Korea developed and launched the new missile without having to test its engine lent weight to the possibility of Russian technical assistance. Media also reported the possibility that Russia had provided North Korea with the engine.

North Korea reported a ground-based engine test for a medium-range ballistic missile on Nov. 15 last year, and on March 20 this year disclosed a multi-stage engine ground-based test for a new medium- to long-range hypersonic missile.

The South Korean military said that North Korea had not been confirmed as conducting any additional solid-fuel engine tests since March.

“There is a possibility that the North is receiving technologies from Russia under the name of ‘cooperation in the field of space technology’ that could be used for ballistic missile development,” the agency said.

ICBM test ‘proves’ North Korea’s missile tech helped by Russia alliance, experts say

Days before US election, North Korea stages record long missile test

North Korea first tested an ICBM in July 2017. It tested two more that year, including one in November that traveled for 50 minutes and reached an altitude of 4,500 kilometers (2,800 miles).

Over the next five years, the North did not test any ICBMs, but in March 2022, it launched one that blew up shortly after takeoff.

North Korea tested four ICBMs in 2022 and 2023. The Oct. 31 test was the first this year.

Edited by Mike Firn.

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

Ex-DPRK Deputy Ambassador reveals why Pyongyang backs Russia in Ukraine | Radio Free Asia (RFA)

Radio Free Asia — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 14:20:45 +0000

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

Video reveals police punching, tasering deaf man with cerebral palsy-Phoenix police charge victim

The Real News Network — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 17:09:42 +0000

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

New Sentencing Project Report Reveals 4 Million Americans Denied Voting Rights Due to Felony Convictions

Newswire Editor — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 16:15:12 +0000

A new report from The Sentencing Project, “Locked Out 2024: Estimates of People Denied Voting Rights Due to a Felony Conviction” found that 4 million Americans will be unable to vote in the upcoming 2024 election due to felony disenfranchisement laws. Despite recent reforms in several states that have reduced disenfranchisement rates, the report underscores the continued exclusion of millions of Americans from the democratic process.

“Felony disenfranchisement remains a critical barrier to full civic participation, particularly for communities of color. Seventy percent of voting-age Americans who are banned from voting are currently living in their communities, without a voice in the policies and laws that shape their lives,” said Kara Gotsch, Executive Director of The Sentencing Project. “Despite progress in many states, felony disenfranchisement echoes policies of the past, like poll taxes and literacy tests. Felony voting bans keep communities that have been historically unheard and under-resourced from having equal representation in our democracy. It’s time to guarantee voting rights for all, including those with felony convictions, to create a truly inclusive democracy.”

The report also found that:

Since 2016, the number of disenfranchised people has declined by 31% as more states implement policies to restore voting rights, but significant barriers remain, particularly for individuals unable to pay court-ordered fines and fees.

One in 22 African Americans of voting age is disenfranchised, a rate more than three times that of non-African Americans. More than 10% of African American citizens are barred from voting in five states—Arizona, Florida, Kentucky, South Dakota and Tennessee.

Approximately 496,000 Latino Americans are disenfranchised, with over 5% of Latino voters in Arizona and Tennessee affected by felony voting bans. Latino voters are disenfranchised at higher rates than the general population in 28 states.

Approximately 764,000 women are barred from voting due to felony convictions, making up just under 20% of the disenfranchised population. 56% of women who are disenfranchised have completed their sentences.

Florida and Tennessee lead the nation in disenfranchisement rates, with more than 6% of their adult populations unable to vote, due to a felony conviction.

The report also revealed that while half of U.S. states have made strides in expanding voting rights for people with felony convictions, other states—particularly in the Southeast—have resisted such reforms. As a result, the number of disenfranchised voters in these states grew, even as the national figure decreased. This disparity underscores the urgent need for national solutions to address the persistent barriers to voting faced by justice-impacted communities.

“The Locked Out 2024 report underscores a harsh reality: our nation remains ensnared by the remnants of Jim Crow through the practice of felony disenfranchisement. Black and Brown communities bear the brunt of felony voting bans, further perpetuating the persistent racial inequities that plague our country,” said Nicole D. Porter, Senior Director of Advocacy at The Sentencing Project.

“As we approach another critical election, millions of citizens are still excluded from participating in the democratic process. If America truly wants to live up to its promise as the beacon on the hill of democracy, it’s time to ensure we’re living up to these ideals. Guaranteeing that every voting-age citizen has a voice in shaping our future is essential to building a more inclusive and equitable society.”

“The Locked Out 2024 report highlights the urgent need for reforms that go beyond piecemeal state-level changes,” said Christopher Uggen, co-author of the report. “Millions of Americans—disproportionately from marginalized communities—are barred from voting, representing a profound failure of our democratic system. If we are serious about creating a truly inclusive democracy, we need to make voting rights for people with felony convictions a national priority.”

The report "Locked Out 2024: Estimates of People Denied Voting Rights Due to a Felony Conviction" updates and expands on research The Sentencing Project has released on a biennial basis since 1998, analyzing the scope of felony disenfranchisement, as well as the state-level laws that ban people with previous felony convictions from voting.

The report is co-authored by Christopher Uggen (University of Minnesota), Ryan Larson (Hamline University), Sarah Shannon (University of Georgia), Robert Stewart (University of Maryland), and Molly Hauf (Hamline University).

The Sentencing Project will host a webinar offering a deeper analysis of the report on Wednesday, October 16 at 2:00 pm ET. Panelists include co-author of the report Christopher Uggen, and formerly incarcerated criminal legal reform and voting rights advocates Desmond Meade, Justin Allen, and Kemba Smith.

The full report is available here. Media interviews with The Sentencing Project are available upon request.

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

New Report Reveals Corporate Capture in NPR and Local Stations

matthew — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 14:09:19 +0000

NEWS RELEASE EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE THURSDAY, September 19, 2024, 11:00 AM PLEASE HONOR EMBARGO FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT: Michael Swerdlow or Ralph Nader, 202-387-8030 or info@csrl.org New Report Reveals Corporate Capture in NPR and Local Stations Report Calls for New Approach to Public Media to Ensure Stable Public Funding and Community Representation The Center for…

This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader and was authored by matthew.

"Dynamite Nashville" Book Reveals KKK Behind Unsolved Civil Rights-Era Attacks, Prompts New Probe

Democracy Now! — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 14:31:46 +0000

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

“Dynamite Nashville” Book Reveals KKK Behind Unsolved Civil Rights-Era Attacks, Prompts New Probe

Democracy Now! — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 12:39:40 +0000

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!.

Uruguay closes teen care home after openDemocracy reveals neglect

Angelina de los Santos — Fri, 16 Aug 2024 15:17:08 +0000

Uruguay’s child welfare agency cut ties with the centre after we exposed brutality, abuse and sexual exploitation

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Angelina de los Santos.

Netanyahu’s Speech Reveals the Demise of the Bipartisan Consensus on Israel

Newswire Editor — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 21:37:50 +0000

Stefanie Fox, Executive Director, Jewish Voice for Peace: “This will go down in history as a moment of shame for the American people: standing ovations for the genocidal lies of a fascist leader who is using US weapons to commit crimes against humanity against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza. Netanyahu’s speech was as racist as it was devoid of fact — filled with anti-Palestinian and islamophobic diatribes, the appalling use of Israeli captives as fodder for his own political survival, and the slander of anti-war Americans. The Prime Minister should be held accountable for war crimes, as should the U.S. government leaders who are paying and cheering for these historic atrocities.”

Beth Miller, Political Director, Jewish Voice for Peace: “Netanyahu’s speech was a nauseating display of genocidal racism and lies. But let’s be clear: today revealed the demise of the bipartisan consensus on Israel. Over 130 Democrats boycotted Netanyahu’s speech. In a desperate attempt to make this authoritarian leader appear popular, seats were filled with guests, rather than elected officials. The far-right agenda of groups like AIPAC that seek to back Israel’s crimes against humanity are growing more toxic by the day, and the will of American voters who want a human-rights centered foreign policy is breaking through.”

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

Leaked plan reveals bid to get Chinese officials to have more kids

By Chen Zifei for RFA Mandarin — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 18:02:00 +0000

A leaked internal draft document from the municipal health authority in the southeastern Chinese city of Quanzhou floating measures to encourage officials and government employees to have three children to boost flagging birth rates has sparked heated debate on social media.

The document, which circulated online in the form of a screenshot before being identified as a leaked draft by the Quanzhou Municipal Health Commission, lists a number of ways being considered by city officials to "organize and implement the three-child policy."

China scrapped its policy limiting most couples to just one child in 2015, following decades of human rights abuses, including forced late-term abortions and sterilizations, as well as widespread monitoring of women's fertility by officials.

Couples were then limited to two children, but by 2020, the fertility rate stood at around 1.3 children per woman in 2020, compared with the 2.1 children per woman needed for the population to replace itself, and the limit was raised to three in May 2021.

Yet the people who do most of the mental, physical and emotional work of child-bearing and childcare -- China's women -- have been reluctant to step up to solve the government's population problems despite claims from Communist Party leader Xi Jinping that they have an "irreplaceable" role to play in the "rejuvenation of the Chinese nation."

Principal Li Xiuling washes her hands in a wash room once used by children at a kindergarten-turned-elderly centre in Taiyuan, in China's northern Shanxi province, July 1, 2024. Senior citizens sway to old-time tunes in the classroom of a former kindergarten in northern China, as educators turn their sights away from children in the face of a rapidly aging population and a baby bust. (Adek Berry/AFP)

The leaked Quanzhou document, which was confirmed by health officials as a genuine leak by "negligent" staff in comments reported by Jiemian News, goes a little further than sloganeering, calling on officials lead by example and have more children themselves, while proposing an array of support services to help them.

"Party members and cadres at all levels and cadres of state-owned enterprises benefiting from [connections to government] business units should take the lead in implementing the three-child policy," the document says in a section titled "key tasks and measures."

That would include the families of officials and employees working throughout the municipal government and party committee system, as well as state-owned enterprises with connections to Quanzhou or the counties under its jurisdiction, according to a screenshot from the document circulating widely on social media this week.

It also calls for "eugenics" and post-natal care. While eugenics originated as a socialist, progressive movement, it has become closely linked in some countries to discrimination against minority groups, often based on ethnicity or disability, using "scientific" rationales, according to a 2020 article by Leo Lucassen in the International Review of Social History.

Heated online discussion

In Nazi Germany, women deemed "fit" to have children by the authorities were banned from having abortions, according to Lisa Pine's 1997 book Nazi Family Policy, 1933–1945.

While no overt plan to force people to have children has yet been tabled in China, the screenshot sparked heated online discussion, according to Jiemian News, because "some people feared it was a veiled reference to forcing people to have three children."

Blogger Tuzao Ershan commented that if the policy is implemented, officials who don't have three kids "can forget about getting promoted or getting rich," while blogger Xiao Lu Jie said there are two main ways for Chinese people to demonstrate their patriotism: spend money and have kids.

"Nothing wrong with party members and officials taking the lead by having kids, because it's an important way to demonstrate patriotism," the blogger wrote. "They should just set up a birth-promotion bureau."

Another blog post seen by RFA Mandarin said that the families of officials who responded to the call to have a second child in 2015 are already struggling.

"It reminds me of what happened to a lot of my classmates ... who are now couples with four elderly parents and two kids who have to make loan payments, raise their kids and also take care of medical treatment and health issues for their elders," blogger Chuanfu Buhuo wrote. "It really doesn't bear thinking about."

Xi Jinping told the All-China Women's Federation in 2023 that Chinese women should be mobilized "to contribute to China's modernization."

"The role of women in the ... great cause of national rejuvenation ... is irreplaceable," he said.

Children are seen inside a Xiaomi SU7 electric vehicle on display during the World Intelligence Expo in Tianjin, June 23, 2024. (Pedro Padro/AFP)

The pressure to boost births comes as young people in China are increasingly avoiding marriage, having children and buying a home amid a tanking economy and rampant youth unemployment.

The number of Chinese couples getting married for the first time tumbled 8.3% in the first quarter of 2024, while first marriages have plummeted by nearly 56% over the past nine years, according to the 2023 China Statistical Yearbook.

That’s contributing to a sharp decline in birthrates and a shrinking, aging population – a trend that the United Nations projects will lead China’s population to contract from 1.4 billion to 800 million by 2100.

Analysis: For women in Asia, motherhood is a complicated investment

Chinese women unimpressed by government's plan to make more babies

Wuhan sculpture spawns two more kids, sparking ridicule

China deletes leaked stats showing plunging birth rate for 2023

Passive resistance

Current affairs commentator Fang Yuan said the official pressure to have more children is part of the planned economy and social control system being implemented by Xi.

But he said it wouldn't bear fruit for at least another couple of decades.

"You need at least 20 years to raise a generation," Fang said. "Their expectation that the population structure will be optimized immediately, and that major long-term problems like low productivity and an aging population will be solved immediately ... is wishful thinking and unrealistic."

He said such a scheme is unlikely to succeed in the absence of huge subsidies from the government, because of the sheer cost of raising children in today's China.

Without substantial financial help, it'll be a case of passive resistance to top-down policy from further down the ranks, Fang said.

A woman shares ice-cream with a man as children play at a commercial complex in Beijing, July 15, 2024. (Ng Han Guan/AP)

Economist Si Ling said party members and government officials make up around 7% of China's population, which is likely not enough to solve China's population problem, even if all of them complied.

"Short of financial resources, the Chinese government has discovered that it still needs to rely on foreign investment to drive economic growth," Si said. "But it no longer has the ability to make concessions in terms of administrative fees and taxation rates."

He said that any attempt to put pressure on officials to have more children will fail if the cost of subsidizing those children isn't fully worked out in advance.

"All it can offer is cheap labor ... so the Chinese government needs people to have more children to attract foreign investment, but this is a false proposition, as it’s almost impossible to achieve in the short term," he said.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie.

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

Latest Puncak Jaya massacre reveals West Papua ‘is a time bomb’, claims Benny Wenda

APR editor — Sat, 20 Jul 2024 10:05:28 +0000

Asia Pacific Report

A brutal killing of three Papuan civilians in Puncak Jaya reveals that occupied West Papua is a ticking time bomb under Indonesian President-elect Prabowo Subianto, claims the leader of an advocacy group.

And United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) Benny Wenda says the Melanesian region risks becoming “another East Timor”.

The victims have been named as Tonda Wanimbo, 33; Dominus Enumbi, and Murib Government.

READ MORE: Shooting of human rights defender shows increasing threats in Papua

Their killings were followed by riots in Puncak Jaya as angry indigenous residents protested in front of the local police station and set fire to police cars, said Wenda in a statement.

“This incident is merely the most recent example of Indonesia’s military and business strategy in West Papua,” he said.

“Indonesia deliberately creates escalations to justify deploying more troops, particularly in mineral-rich areas, causing our people to scatter and allowing international corporations to exploit the empty land – starting the cycle of bloodshed all over again.”

According to the ULMWP, 4500 Indonesian troops have recently been deployed to Paniai, one of the centres of West Papuan resistance.

An estimated 100,000 West Papuans have been displaced since 2018, while recent figures show more than 76,000 Papuans remain internally displaced — “living as refugees in the bush”.

Indonesia ‘wants our land’
“Indonesia wants our land and our resources, not our people,” Wenda said.

The Indonesian military claimed that the three men were members of the resistance movement TPNPB (West Papua National Liberation Army), but this has been denied.

Military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Candra Kurniawan claimed one of the men had been sought by security forces for six years for alleged shootings of civilians and security personnel.

“This is the same lie they told about Enius Tabuni and the five Papuan teenagers murdered in Yahukimo in September 2023,” Wenda said.

“The military line was quickly refuted by a community leader in Puncak Jaya, who clarified that the three men were all civilians.”

Concern over Warinussy
Wenda said he was also “profoundly concerned” over the shooting of lawyer and human rights defender Christian Warinussy.

Warinussy has spent his career defending indigenous Papuans who have expelled from their ancestral land to make way for oil palm plantations and industrial mines.

“Although we don’t know who shot him, his shooting acts as a clear warning to any Papuans who stand up for their customary land rights or investigates Indonesia’s crimes,” Wenda said.

Indonesia’s latest violence is taking place “in the shadow of Prabowo Subianto”, who is due to take office as President on October 20.

Prabowo has been widely accused over human rights abuses during his period in Timor-Leste.

“Will he form militias to crush the West Papua liberation movement, as he previously did in East Timor?” asked Wenda.

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

Reuters Reveals Secret U.S. Government Anti-China Operation to Increase Covid-19 Deaths in East Asia and Pacific

Eric Zuesse — Sun, 16 Jun 2024 19:06:15 +0000

On June 14, Reuters headlined: “Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic: The U.S. military launched a clandestine program amid the COVID crisis to discredit China’s Sinovac inoculation – payback for Beijing’s efforts to blame Washington for the pandemic. One target: the Filipino public. Health experts say the gambit was indefensible and put innocent lives at risk.”

A June 15 Google-search of the headline “Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic” produced virtually no publication of that Reuters news-report anywhere within the U.S. empire — U.S., Canada, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Philippines, etc. The news-report was not published, for example, in the New York Times, Washington Post, London Times, Guardian, Telegraph, and Daily Mail, nor CNN, NBC, CBS, BBC, NPR, PBS, Deutsche Welle, etc. That headline did briefly run on the websites of USA Today and Fox News, but never the news-report itself on that given site, and the link to the story no longer works at either USA Today or Fox News. There had been a link to that headlined story, but that news-report had not been published on either site. The only mainstream site in the U.S. empire that posted not only the headline but that also at their site the actual news-report, was Australian Broadcasting Corporation, on June 15. A Google-search of that headline four hours later on June 15 showed no better results. So, this extraordinarily important news-report remains as being news even the day after Reuters had published it on their news-feed. Suppression of a major news-story from a U.S. empire news-agency such as Reuters is highly extraordinary.

That suppressed news-report — which should immediately have been splashed everywhere, because it was among the biggest news-stories anywhere on June 14 — opened:

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus.

The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.

Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that matched descriptions shared by former U.S. military officials familiar with the Philippines operation. Almost all were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan #Chinaangvirus – Tagalog for China is the virus.

This post, identified by Reuters, matched the messaging, timeframe and design of the U.S. military’s anti-vax propaganda campaign in the Philippines, former and current military officials say. Social media platform X also identified the account as fake and removed it.

TRANSLATION FROM TAGALOG

#ChinaIsTheVirus

Do you want that? COVID came from China and vaccines came from China

(Beneath the message is a picture of then-Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte saying: “China! Prioritize us first please. I’ll give you more islands, POGO and black sand.” POGO refers to Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators, online gambling companies that boomed during Duterte’s administration. Black sand refers to a type of mining.)

“COVID came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don’t trust China!” one typical tweet from July 2020 read in Tagalog. The words were next to a photo of a syringe beside a Chinese flag and a soaring chart of infections. Another post read: “From China – PPE, Face Mask, Vaccine: FAKE. But the Coronavirus is real.”

RELATED

Podcast: Pentagon’s anti-vax campaign

After Reuters asked X about the accounts, the social media company removed the profiles, determining they were part of a coordinated bot campaign based on activity patterns and internal data.

The U.S. military’s anti-vax effort began in the spring of 2020 and expanded beyond Southeast Asia before it was terminated in mid-2021, Reuters determined. Tailoring the propaganda campaign to local audiences across Central Asia and the Middle East, the Pentagon used a combination of fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to spread fear of China’s vaccines among Muslims at a time when the virus was killing tens of thousands of people each day. A key part of the strategy: amplify the disputed contention that, because vaccines sometimes contain pork gelatin, China’s shots could be considered forbidden under Islamic law.

The military program started under former President Donald Trump and continued months into Joe Biden’s presidency, Reuters found – even after alarmed social media executives warned the new administration that the Pentagon had been trafficking in COVID misinformation. The Biden White House issued an edict in spring 2021 banning the anti-vax effort, which also disparaged vaccines produced by other rivals, and the Pentagon initiated an internal review, Reuters found.

“I don’t think it’s defensible. I’m extremely dismayed, disappointed and disillusioned to hear that the U.S. government would do that.”

Daniel Lucey, infectious disease specialist at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine.

The news-report also said:

Then-Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte pleaded with citizens to get the COVID vaccine. “You choose, vaccine or I will have you jailed,” a masked Duterte said in this televised address in June 2021.

When he addressed the vaccination issue, the Philippines had among the worst inoculation rates in Southeast Asia. Only 2.1 million of its 114 million citizens were fully vaccinated – far short of the government’s target of 70 million. By the time Duterte spoke, COVID cases exceeded 1.3 million, and almost 24,000 Filipinos had died from the virus. The difficulty in vaccinating the population contributed to the worst death rate in the region.

COVID-19 deaths in the Philippines

The pandemic hit the Philippines especially hard, and by November 2021, COVID had claimed the lives of 48,361 people there. …

To implement the anti-vax campaign, the Defense Department overrode strong objections from top U.S. diplomats in Southeast Asia at the time, Reuters found. Sources involved in its planning and execution say the Pentagon, which ran the program through the military’s psychological operations center in Tampa, Florida, disregarded the collateral impact that such propaganda may have on innocent Filipinos.

“We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective,” said a senior military officer involved in the program. “We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.” …

In 2019, before COVID surfaced in full force, then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper signed a secret order that later paved the way for the launch of the U.S. military propaganda campaign. The order elevated the Pentagon’s competition with China and Russia to the priority of active combat, enabling commanders to sidestep the State Department when conducting psyops against those adversaries. The Pentagon spending bill passed by Congress that year also explicitly authorized the military to conduct clandestine influence operations against other countries, even “outside of areas of active hostilities.”

Esper, through a spokesperson, declined to comment. A State Department spokesperson referred questions to the Pentagon.

The statement — “We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective,” said a senior military officer involved in the program. “We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.” — means that the U.S. Government was placing a higher priority upon “dragging China through the mud” than on keeping covid-19 deaths down in the Assia-Pacific region. Especially in the Phillipines, which under Duarte’s Presidency was neutralist in the conflict between the U.S. Government and the Chinese Government, adding to the death-rate there was not a practical concern for the U.S. Government. In other words: the U.S. Government treats neutralist nations as-if they’re instead among its enemy-nations, to such an extent that even civilian deaths there that are caused by the U.S. Government, are of no practical (much less of ethical) concern. This operation by the U.S. Government was expected to increase deaths in that region (because the U.S. Government believed that vaccinations would reduce covid-19 deaths in its own and allied territories), but they were not concerned about that. They were interested only in “how we could drag China through the mud.” The possibily that deaths would increase deaths in and around Asia as a result of what they were doing, was of no concern to them. The extent to which the post-1945 U.S. Government is significantly different than was Hitler’s Government in Germany, is therefore an appropriate matter for public debate, though it’s not being debated anywhere in today’s U.S. empire. The major importance of this news-report from Reuters is that it importantly contributes to that debate; and, now, the further fact of its virtually complete black-out within the U.S. empire, displays the extent to which the U.S. empire will not tolerate the existence of any such public debate. Perhaps this fact is even more important than that extraordinary report from Reuters itself was.

A reasonable conclusion from all of this is that America’s Government treats neutral countries as-if they are enemy countries. An associated aspect of this fact is that starting on June 11th the U.S. Government increased its secondary sanctions against Russia — the sanctions against businesses that trade with Russia — so as to punish them for that and thereby to limit such firms’ choices as to which countries they will be allowed by the U.S. Government to have commerce with. Secondary sanctions present non-U.S. targets (neutral countries and firms) with a choice: do business with the United States or with the sanctioned target, but not both. This is erecting a new “iron curtain,” of a specifically economic type, between the American empire — “The West” — and “The East.”

The U.S. Government is, in effect, betting that to force neutrals to choose between “The West” and “the East,” “The West” will expand, instead of reduce, its empire. Whether, or the extent to which, the reverse might happen, was so much as even considered by “The West,” is not, as-of yet, publicly known.

However, specifically as regards what was the topic in that Reuters news-report: to be concerned not at all about how the death-rates in the east-Asian region would be affected, but ONLY about “how we could drag China through the mud,” was — given the fact that the U.S. Government thought that to increase the vaccination-rates in that region would reduce the death-rates there — for the U.S. Government to intend to increase covid-19 deaths in the East-Asia & Pacific region. It was their intent, regardless of whether, or the extent to which, it was the result of what the U.S. Government did there.

The post Reuters Reveals Secret U.S. Government Anti-China Operation to Increase Covid-19 Deaths in East Asia and Pacific first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

What Donald Trump’s Criminal Trial Reveals About a Potential Second Trump Administration

by Andrea Bernstein — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 10:00:00 +0000

by Andrea Bernstein

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

There’s a tape that both the defense and the prosecution played in summations in former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial. In it, you can hear the chaos of Trump’s office at Trump Tower in September of 2016: Trump seems to be having multiple conversations almost simultaneously. He talks to an unidentified person on the phone. He discusses polls with Michael Cohen, his executive vice-president at the time. Trump and Cohen talk about a diversity initiative and stopping the media from unsealing the records of Trump’s first divorce. His executive assistant pops in with word of a call from a developer. Trump calls for a Coke.

And then, very clearly, you can hear Cohen saying, “I need to open up a company for the transfer of all of that info regarding our friend, David, you know, so that — I’m going to do that right away. I’ve actually come up and I’ve spoken … I’ve spoken to Allen Weisselberg” — then the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer — “about how to set the whole thing up.”

Trump interrupts and says, “So, what do we got to pay for this, 150?” Then he says, “Cash?”

“No, no, no, no no,” Cohen says. “I got it.”

On the most literal level, the tape showed Trump discussing the logistics of paying off a woman who said she had an affair with him. This was key evidence for the jury’s ultimate finding that he had intended to alter the outcome of the 2016 election by making unlawful hush money payments.

When this tape was first made public, in 2018, it was hard to pin down exactly what it all meant. But as Trump’s seven-week trial proceeded, the broader meaning of the tape emerged in sharp relief: Everything is connected in Trump world, ethical borders are easily crossed and Trump is on top of every detail.

The verdict in the criminal trial provided answers to a narrow series of questions, not least of which was whether a presidential candidate had used illicit means to prevent voters from learning about a payoff to conceal a sexual encounter. (Trump has vowed to appeal.) But the trial also unveiled a broad array of evidence that went far beyond the charges. It revealed a lot about how Trump went about running his company and the presidency — and provided hints of how that might play out in a second Trump administration.

For most of Trump’s presidential term, I co-hosted the ProPublica/WNYC podcast “Trump, Inc.,” whose mission was to delve into the conflicts of interest between Trump’s business and his presidency. Because there was so much that journalists didn’t — and couldn’t — understand about a privately held company that clung tightly to its secrets, “Trump, Inc.” billed itself as “an open investigation.” We were candid about what we did and did not know because we lived in a world of doubt.

“Trump, Inc.” uncovered a lot, including unearthing Cohen’s dubious connections in 2018 and outlining how his role as Trump’s lawyer (then still intact) created a cloak of legal privilege that hid their interactions.

But we saw just tiny glimpses of the documents that have now been revealed in their entirety in the criminal trial; we had no access to the many Trump employees, current and former, who have now described, under oath, the inner workings of the Trump Organization.

That testimony confirmed what that tape seemed to show: that Trump pays close, close attention to all his business affairs, and always has. This, in turn, suggests that the mixing of Trump’s presidency and business that “Trump, Inc.” and others documented occurred under that same watchful eye. And if voters elect Trump a second time — this time knowing that he was convicted of a crime, one where key acts were committed in the Oval Office, on top of his two impeachments — Trump can conclude that America’s voters have blessed his way of doing business. There’s every reason to believe his conflicts of interest will only be more open and more unapologetic.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump employees testified to his intense level of control in three trials against Trump or his company over the past two years. These were among five trials since 2022, each of which I covered in person, including the criminal trial of his company for tax fraud, two defamation suits brought by the writer E. Jean Carroll and the New York attorney general’s civil fraud trial. Each trial ended badly for Trump or his company (and each is being appealed).

Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York offered one sharp revelation after the next. The disclosures came not just from the talked-about witnesses, such as former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, Stormy Daniels and Cohen himself, but also from Trump’s former comptroller, his executive assistant and the aide who sat closest to the Oval Office. Some of these individuals, including a junior bookkeeper for the Trump Organization and the head of the company’s accounts payable department, work in Trump Tower to this day.

The picture that emerges from their testimony is of a boss — “The Boss” is what they nearly uniformly call him — who manages the tiniest of details but leaves the faintest of traces of all that management. Up until the throes of the 2016 campaign, Trump had to approve every payment over $2,500, an extraordinarily tiny sum for a mogul with assets around the globe. (For the duration of the campaign, until he became president, that amount inched up, to $10,000.) Trump would reject checks he didn’t want to pay and send them back to his underlings, with the word “VOID” scrawled on them in Sharpie.

Trump watched every expense in this way, his comptroller Jeff McConney testified. Trump once told him, early in his time at the company, “You’re fired,” because McConney hadn’t made an effort to reduce Trump’s bills before presenting Trump with payment documents. “It was a teaching moment,” McConney said on the stand. This close attention and tight-fistedness extended company wide: When it came to Trump University, Cohen testified, it was part of his job to offer a vendor 20% of what they were owed, or to pay them nothing at all.

Trump brought this ethos to the White House, where, as his lawyers liked to point out, he was the “leader of the free world.” He took time to write “PAY” on a $6,974 invoice sent by Trump Organization executive assistant Rhona Graff for an annual membership and “food minimum” at the Winged Foot Golf Club in Mamaroneck, New York.

Trump, of course, handed over control of the Trump Organization, including the oversight of its payments, to his older sons and Weisselberg at the outset of his administration. But he never gave up ownership of his company. He always made money from it, and does to this day.

And Trump, while president, went to extraordinary lengths to keep control of his “personal” checking account. That account actually belonged to a Trump Organization business entity, which underscored the lack of separation between Trump and the company he had ostensibly separated himself from. Trump’s personal checks were approved by Weisselberg; generated by Deborah Tarasoff, the head of Trump’s accounts payable department; stapled to the approved invoice; and sent via FedEx by Trump’s junior bookkeeper, Rebecca Manochio, to the Washington home of Trump’s bodyguard-turned-White House aide, Keith Schiller, who would bring them over for Trump to sign. That’s how the checks that Trump signed to Cohen made their way to the Oval Office.

“Checks came in a FedEx envelope” that Schiller delivered, testified Madeleine Westerhout, Trump’s director of Oval Office operations. “I opened the envelope. And inside was a manila folder with a stack of checks. And I brought the manila folder in to the president for him to sign.”

Money wasn’t the only thing Trump paid close attention to. He wrote all of his social media posts, save for a few written by an aide, Dan Scavino. Sometimes, Trump would dictate tweets to Westerhout. She would type them up, print them out and show them to Trump so the president of the United States could take time to scrutinize, and adjust, the punctuation. “He liked to use the Oxford comma,” Westerhout testified.

Trump did not send emails or text messages. This aversion has long been known, but the trial testimony laid out a whole series of ways in which Trump communicated without leaving precise documentation.

He was on the phone beginning at 6 in the morning and “late into the night after I went to bed, so I always felt guilty about that,” Westerhout testified. He’d often use Schiller’s cellphone to make calls, and employees would use that number to reach Trump. There were no Trump memos, no notepads, no Post-it notes, just an occasional Sharpie scrawl. And largely, except for Cohen’s, no testimony that what these employees did, they did “at the direction of” and “for the benefit of” Donald Trump. (This was an essential part of the judge’s charge to the jury: that Trump “personally, or by acting in concert with another person or persons, made or caused a false entry in the business records of an enterprise.”)

This is the backdrop for the conflicts “Trump, Inc.” and other news media covered while Trump was president. To recap some of them (at a moment when polls show many Americans have forgotten much of what transpired during his administration): Trump’s hotel in Washington became a must stop-by for foreign officials, earning his company millions. He caused the U.S. Treasury to spend more than $1 million to house Secret Service agents in rooms with top-of-the-market rates at Mar-a-Lago and had the government pick up the tab for $1,005.60 in cocktails apparently enjoyed by administration officials and friends at his resort’s bar.

During Trump’s presidency, the response to questions about all this went something like this: As a global businessman, he or his allies would say, how could he possibly pay attention to whether the presidential seal was used on his golf courses? Or whether his son, Don Jr., was trading on the name “Donald Trump” to sell condos in India. Or whether businesspeople with foreign ties were trying to make a buck, or millions, from his presidency?

Indeed, this was part of Trump’s defense in the criminal trial, and in the civil fraud trial at which Trump was ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to New York state for what a judge found was a yearslong practice of lying about the value of his assets. When he testified at that civil trial, Trump distanced himself from the fraud: “All I did was authorize and tell people to give whatever is necessary for the accountants to do the statements,” he said. And the false statements of financial condition? “I would look at them, I would see them and maybe on some occasions, I would have some suggestions.”

As is his right, Trump chose not to testify at his criminal trial, but his lawyer Todd Blanche argued on his behalf that Trump “had nothing to do, had nothing to do with the invoice, with the check being generated, or with the entry on the ledger” and that he was so busy being president he maybe didn’t even look at the checks he signed. “Sometimes he would sign checks even when he was meeting with people, while he was on the phone, and even without reviewing them,” Blanche said during closing arguments.

The jury did not buy that defense.

Trump is currently leading in the polls. It’s entirely possible he will be elected president. Yet he’s continuing to aggressively pursue business deals in countries that will have a long list of issues on which they will be seeking U.S. support.

The Trump Organization entered a full-on partnership with LIV Golf, an entity majority-owned by the government of Saudi Arabia, for tournaments at his golf courses. And last year, a New York Times reporter and photographer visited what the reporter called a “multibillion-dollar project backed by Oman’s oil-rich government that has an unusual partner: former President Donald J. Trump.” The project was launched and is being built while Trump is the front-runner for a second presidency. But neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign tried to defend or separate the project from the candidate who, while not running the company, still makes money from it.

“It’s like the Hamptons of the Middle East,” Eric Trump, who now runs the Trump Organization, told the Times. The paper wrote: “Oman, in fact, is nothing like the Hamptons. It is a Muslim nation and absolute monarchy, ruled by a sultan, who plays a sensitive role in the Middle East: Oman maintains close ties with Saudi Arabia and its allies, but also with Iran, with which it has considerable trade.”

It isn’t just the foreign deals. In April, right around the time Trump was about to be criminally tried in New York, he offered oil executives gathered at Mar-a-Lago “a deal,” the Washington Post reported. The publication summarized his message as: “You all are wealthy enough that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House.” In exchange, the Post said, Trump promised to reverse President Joe Biden’s initiatives to slow climate change, vowing to roll back some of them “on Day 1.”

And, as has been widely reported, with Truth Social going public, Trump has set up what Vox called “a perfect avenue for potential corruption.” As Vox noted, it’s “a way for Trump’s supporters to personally offer him financial support at a time when he desperately needs it.” By propping up the share price of the stock of the cash-hemorrhaging social media company, shareholders have potentially put billions of dollars in Donald Trump’s pocket.

It’s clear that Trump plays favorites and rewards loyalty; nearly eight years after he was inaugurated in 2017, it’s hard to imagine that any savvy businessperson or foreign leader fails to recognize this.

Certainly, those who were once in Trump’s orbit, if only briefly, testified to the dark side of that equation. Both Cohen and Daniels described the torrent of retribution they’ve experienced. Trump is unapologetic about his quest for vengeance. As he put it in one social media post last summer, “IF YOU GO AFTER ME I’M COMING AFTER YOU.”

Merely having been once employed by Trump seems to have taken a toll, on even relatively minor figures. In the civil fraud trial, Trump’s former comptroller, McConney, started weeping when he was asked why he no longer worked at the Trump Organization. He said he could no longer “deal with” the legal scrutiny he’d suffered. In the criminal trial, both former communications director Hope Hicks and Westerhout burst into tears on the stand, reflecting on their work history with Trump. Both said they remained loyal, but both had been banished from Trump’s graces.

And as for Weisselberg, he was not called to testify in this trial. His previous testimony in the trial of Trump’s company resulted in felony convictions on 17 counts and a five-month jail sentence. He is now serving a second jail sentence, in Rikers Island, for committing perjury in Trump’s civil fraud trial.

In the courthouse, Trump spent long stretches of time in an uncomfortable room with the shades always drawn, the fluorescent lighting unforgiving. He was required to listen to weeks of unflattering testimony, including, several times, to his own voice on that tape Cohen made of him, utterly cognizant of the tawdry deal he was striking. Saying, “So, what do we got to pay for this, 150?” After all the testimony in his criminal trial, this no longer seems like a random moment. It sounds like who Trump is: his attention to detail, his willingness to subvert the rules, the way he wields money to enhance his power, and vice versa, and is utterly unashamed.

The public knows all this now. In a second Trump presidency, it’s exactly what we’d get. Except this time, it will be all out before us, not in a secretly recorded tape.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Andrea Bernstein.

The Arizona Trial that Reveals Our Border Dysfunction

Miriam Davidson — Thu, 23 May 2024 19:54:50 +0000

A man was likely murdered on a ranch; the question of who did it is as politically charged as the border itself.

This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Miriam Davidson.

Cruelty of Language: Leaked NY Times Memo Reveals Moral Depravity of US Media

Ramzy Baroud — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 05:58:12 +0000

Image by Jakayla Toney.

The New York Times coverage of the Israeli carnage in Gaza, like that of other mainstream US media, is a disgrace to journalism.

This assertion should not surprise anyone. US media is driven neither by facts nor morality, but by agendas, calculating and power-hungry. The humanity of 120 thousand dead and wounded Palestinians because of the Israeli genocide in Gaza is simply not part of that agenda.

In a report – based on a leaked memo from the New York Times – the Intercept found out that the so-called US newspaper of record has been feeding its journalists with frequently updated ‘guidelines’ on what words to use, or not use, when describing the horrific Israeli mass slaughter in the Gaza Strip, starting on October 7.

In fact, most of the words used in the paragraph above would not be fit to print in the NYT, according to its ‘guidelines’.

Shockingly, internationally recognized terms and phrases such as ‘genocide’, ‘occupied territory’, ‘ethnic cleansing’ and even ‘refugee camps’, were on the newspaper’s rejection list.

It gets even more cruel. “Words like ‘slaughter’, ‘massacre’ and ‘carnage’ often convey more emotion than information. Think hard before using them in our own voice,” according to the memo, leaked and verified by the Intercept and other independent media.

Though such language control is, according to the NYT, aimed at fairness for ‘all sides’, their application was almost entirely one-sided. For example, a previous Intercept report showed that the American newspaper had, between October 7 and November 14, mentioned the word ‘massacre’ 53 times when it referred to Israelis being killed by Palestinians and only once in reference to Palestinians being killed by Israel.

By that date, thousands of Palestinians had perished, the vast majority of whom were women and children, and most of them were killed inside their own homes, in hospitals, schools or United Nations shelters. Though the Palestinian death toll was often questioned by US government and media, it was later generally accepted as accurate, but with a caveat: attributing the source of the Palestinian number to the “Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza”. That phrasing is, of course, enough to undermine the accuracy of the statistics compiled by healthcare professionals, who had the misfortune of producing such tallies many times in the past.

The Israeli numbers were rarely questioned, if ever, although Israel’s own media later revealed that many Israelis who were supposedly killed by Hamas died in ‘friendly fire’, as in at the hands of the Israeli army.

And even though a large percentage of Israelis killed during the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation on October 7 were active, off-duty or military reserve, terms such as ‘massacre’ and ‘slaughter’ were still used in abundance. Little mention was made of the fact that those ‘slaughtered’ by Hamas were, in fact, directly involved in the Israeli siege and previous massacres in Gaza.

Speaking of ‘slaughter’, the term, according to the Intercept, was used to describe those allegedly killed by Palestinian fighters vs those killed by Israel at a ratio of 22 to 1.

I write ‘allegedly’, as the Israeli military and government, unlike the Palestinian Ministry of Health, are yet to allow for independent verification of the numbers they produced, altered and reproduced, once again.

The Palestinian figures are now accepted even by the US government. When asked, on February 29, about how many women and children had been killed in Gaza, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said: “It’s over 25,000”, going even beyond the number provided by the Palestinian Health Ministry at the time.

However, even if the Israeli numbers are to be examined and fully substantiated by truly independent sources, the coverage of the New York Times of the Gaza war continues to point to the non-existing credibility of mainstream American media, regardless of its agendas and ideologies. This generalization can be justified on the basis that NYT is, oddly enough, still relatively fairer than others.

According to this double standard, occupied, oppressed and routinely slaughtered Palestinians are depicted with the language fit for Israel; while a racist, apartheid and murderous entity like Israel is treated as a victim and, despite the Gaza genocide, is, somehow, still in a state of ‘self-defense’.

The New York Times shamelessly and constantly blows its own horn of being an oasis of credibility, balance, accuracy, objectivity and professionalism. Yet, for them, occupied Palestinians are still the villain: the party doing the vast majority of the slaughtering and the massacring.

The same slanted logic applies to the US government, whose daily political discourse on democracy, human rights, fairness and peace continues to intersect with its brazen support of the murder of Palestinians, through dumb bombs, bunker busters and billions of dollars’ worth of other weapons and munitions.

The Intercept reporting on this issue matters greatly. Aside from the leaked memos, the dishonesty of language used by the New York Times – compassionate towards Israel and indifferent to Palestinian suffering – leaves no doubts that the NYT, like other US mainstream media, continues to stand firmly on Tel Aviv’s side.

As Gaza continues to resist the injustice of the Israeli military occupation and war, the rest of us, concerned about truth, accuracy in reporting and justice for all, should also challenge this model of poor, biased journalism.

We do so when we create our own professional, alternative sources of information, where we use proper language, which expresses the painful reality in war-torn Gaza.

Indeed, what is taking place in Gaza is genocide, a horrific slaughter and daily massacres against innocent peoples, whose only crime is that they are resisting a violent military occupation and a vile apartheid regime.

And, if it happens that these indisputable facts generate an ’emotional’ response, then it is a good thing; maybe real action to end the Israeli carnage of Palestinians would follow. The question remains: why would the New York Times editors find this objectionable?

The post Cruelty of Language: Leaked NY Times Memo Reveals Moral Depravity of US Media appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ramzy Baroud.

What the eclipse reveals about the progress and shortfalls of U.S. energy

Sachi Kitajima Mulkey — Sat, 06 Apr 2024 08:30:00 +0000

On April 8, millions of glasses-clad onlookers will, for the second time in seven years, hold their breath. As the celestial odds align, the Earth and moon will be in the perfect position to blot out the sun across the U.S., along with the solar power that makes up an increasing share of our energy mix. With eclipses anticipated decades in advance, local utilities have had time to prepare for the big day. From little Vermont to hulking Texas, how the eclipse will impact the energy grid paints a picture of energy progress, but also how we still depend on fossil fuels to stay resilient.

During the last full solar eclipse in 2017, an estimated 10 million pounds of extra carbon emissions were released into the U.S. atmosphere as fossil fuel-based power stepped in to replace the loss in solar output, according to Vahe Peroomian, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Southern California. That’s the annual equivalent of 1,000 gasoline cars. Since then, “our reliance on solar power has increased by about a factor of three,” Peroomian said, meaning the amount of energy to make up for will be greater than any previous eclipse.

Each of the 15 states along the 115-mile path of totality, in which the sun will be completely eclipsed for a short period of time, have a different mix of power sources feeding their grid. From the moment the moon’s shadow begins to block the sun, until it relinquishes its grip, their systems will have to switch it up.

Even a small loss of sunlight directly translates to less energy. Batteries and other renewable energies, like wind, are expected to pick up some of the slack. However, even a leading clean-energy state like California, which will only experience a partial eclipse, may need to tap into its fossil fuel resources to keep up with demand, said Peroomian. “The impact is going to be nationwide.”

The eclipse is a challenge states can prepare for, highlighting how a renewables-dependent grid might deal with sudden weather changes, equipment failure, and other outage-causing events. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, or EIA, utilities are also anticipating increased demand from homes and businesses that rely on small-scale solar, which may instead need to draw power from the grid.

Texas is the largest state to experience totality and has a couple of unique factors making it the ultimate testing ground for solar reliance. While other states tap into a larger regional utility system, Texas is an energy island and its grid primarily uses energy produced in-state. It’s also recently become a nationwide leader in solar energy, with nearly a 3,700 percent increase in the last decade. In most of the state, the eclipse will momentarily blot out some ninety percent of that power.

“It is perfectly timed to have maximum impact,” said Joshua Rhodes, an energy researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, who says the eclipse will pass over the state at “solar noon”, the time when the sun is highest in the sky and produces the most energy. But having collaborated alongside the state’s utility provider, ERCOT, for 14 years, Rhodes is confident that the grid is ready for the event. “I mean really we do this every day,” he said. “A cloudy day could create the same kind of gap that we’re going to see on Monday.

Following a winter storm in 2021 that caused days of blackouts, Texas invested in grid resilience, emphasizing renewables and giant power-storing batteries, which can provide energy when sources go offline. But the state still relies on fossil fuels for roughly 60 percent of its energy. In 2023, when a partial solar eclipse passed over, the loss of energy caused the amount of natural gas used to almost double momentarily.

Still, while the eclipse offers a look at our continued reliance on fossil fuels to meet demand, the recent prevalence of energy storage indicates a shift towards cleaner resilience. Today, according to the EIA, the U.S. has 15.4 gigawatts of battery storage, capturing solar and wind energy to release when needed. During the 2017 eclipse, the U.S. had only 0.6 gigawatts of these reserves. Even with the lost sunlight, the agency said it expects solar to be the third-largest energy source in the U.S. on eclipse day.

Traffic backed up on Highway 25 in Wyoming as millions of people flocked to the 2017 eclipse. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

April 8 will also likely see increased emissions from another source: the crowds that will flood into cities along the path of totality, in numbers akin to 50 Superbowls, with most arriving in gas-guzzling planes and cars. In largely rural Vermont, some fear miles of stopped, idling traffic, overwhelming the state’s backroads and highways.

“Our biggest consideration is if someone has an outage or something, you know, how do we actually get to them?” said Andrea Cohen, manager of member relations at Vermont Electric Cooperative, which services 78 towns in the state’s north. But when it comes to sourcing energy, Cohen says the utility is “well prepared” for the eclipse, just as they would be on a bad-weather day.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What the eclipse reveals about the progress and shortfalls of U.S. energy on Apr 6, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Sachi Kitajima Mulkey.

Kia Ora Gaza reveals more on Freedom Flotilla plans to break Gaza siege

APR editor — Sun, 31 Mar 2024 10:55:45 +0000

Asia Pacific Report

A New Zealand charity providing humanitarian aid for Gaza today revealed more details of the international Freedom Flotilla’s bid to break the Israeli siege of the enclave as mass starvation looms closer.

Latest reports say 27 children have died from malnutrition so far and the death toll is expected to rise in the coming days from Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.

About 1000 protesters in an Auckland’s Aotea Square rally today waved empty dinner plates, some with messages such as “Gaza is being starved”, “Free Palestine” and “Starve Israeli weapons”.

They then marched in a silent vigil around central Auckland streets.

Among the speakers was Kia Ora Gaza coordinator Roger Fowler, who introduced one of the doctors that will be joining the charity’s medical team on the siege-breaking humanitarian voyage.

Twenty seven Gazan children die from malnutrition. Video: Al Jazeera

“We’ve got a fundraising campaign, obviously we’ll be sending a flotilla of ships to Gaza,” he said.

Fowler introduced Dr Adnan Ali, an Auckland GP and surgeon who is a member of Medics International.

“We hope another doctor we are talking with will be able to join him,” Fowler told Asia Pacific Report.

Kia Ora Gaza’s Roger Fowler at today’s Palestine rally. His wife Lyn Doherty is on the left. Image: David Robie/APR

Israel defies ceasefire order
Israel has defied a near unanimous UN Security Council — the US abstained — demand last week for an immediate Ramadan ceasefire with just 10 days left of the Muslim religious fasting period.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also so far ignored further orders from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) which is investigating Israel over South Africa’s allegations of genocide.

The court ruled on Thursday that “in view of the worsening conditions of life faced by Palestinians in Gaza, in particular the spread of famine and starvation”, Israel must take “all necessary and effective measures to ensure, without delay, in full cooperation with the United Nations, the unhindered provision at scale by all concerned of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to Palestinians throughout Gaza”.

The measures outlined includes food, water, electricity, fuel, shelter, clothing, hygiene and sanitation requirements, as well as medical supplies and medical care.

Israel was also ordered to open more of the seven land crossings into Gaza.

On Friday, Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories, told the UN Human Rights Council that Israel was committing acts of genocide in the Gaza Strip.

She said that countries should impose an arms embargo and sanctions on Israel.

Kia Ora Gaza’s Roger Fowler introduces Dr Adnan Ali (centre) of Medics International at today’s Palestine rally. Image: David Robie/APR

Luxon government condemned
Speakers at today’s Aotea Square rally — including Labour’s List MP Shanan Halbert and the Greens’ Ricardo Menéndez March — criticised Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and his coalition government for refusing to condemn Israel’s atrocities against and failing to make any “meaningful” humanitarian response to the war.

During his speech about Kia Ora Gaza and the Freedom Flotilla, Roger Fowler reminded the crowd about Israel’s brutal response to the 2010 flotilla.

The flotilla, led by the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara was intercepted by the Israeli navy, and commandos shot nine Turkish and one Turkish-American pro-Palestinian activists. A 10th who was in a coma died six years later.

This attack led to a diplomatic crisis between Turkey and Israel.

Israeli forces have destroyed the memorial memorial erected in Gaza to honour those killed during the current war.

“Gaza is being made to starve” . . . empty plates at the Palestinian rally in Aotea Square today. Image: David Robie/APR

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

Hong Kong reveals new security law with harsher penalties

By Lee Heung Yeung for RFA Cantonese — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 16:16:06 +0000

Hong Kong's government on Friday tabled a draft national security bill that proposes life sentences for anyone who "endangers national security," with sentences of up to 10 years' imprisonment for "illegally disclosing state secrets."

The Safeguarding National Security bill, which is highly likely to pass in the city's Legislative Council within a few weeks due to the lack of opposition lawmakers, comes amid an ongoing crackdown on dissent in the wake of the 2019 pro-democracy protests that has used both a 2020 National Security Law and colonial-era sedition laws to prosecute and jail people for protest and political opposition in unprecedented numbers.

The government says the legislation will plug "loopholes" left by the 2020 National Security Law and claims it is needed to deal with clandestine activity by "foreign forces" in the city, which the ruling Chinese Communist Party blames for the 2019 mass protest movement that was sparked by plans to allow extradition to mainland China.

The law proposes sentences of up to life imprisonment for "treason," "insurrection," "sabotage" and "mutiny," 20 years for espionage and 10 years for crimes linked to "state secrets" and "sedition."

It also allows the authorities to revoke the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region passports of anyone who flees overseas, and to target overseas activists with financial sanctions.

The concept of "collusion with foreign forces " runs throughout the draft bill, and sentences are harsher where "foreign forces" are deemed to be involved.

Hong Kong activist Alexandra Wong, also known as Grandma Wong, waves Britain's Union Jack as she protests the national security law in front of the Central Government Offices in Hong Kong on March 8, 2024. (Holmes Chan/AFP)

Currently, pro-democracy media mogul Jimmy Lai is on trial for a similar offense under the 2020 National Security Law -- the case against him relies heavily on opinion articles published in Lai's now-defunct Apple Daily newspaper.

The draft law allows police to extend the detention of arrested persons from 48 to 14 days in national security cases, and also creates a new offense: "unlawfully using a computer or electronic system to endanger national security," which is punishable by 20 years in prison.

Security chief Chris Tang said there was a "genuine and urgent need" for the new law, citing waves of mass popular resistance and campaigns for full democracy in recent years, and particularly the protests of 2019.

"Hong Kong has undergone serious threats to national security, especially the color revolution and black-clad violence in 2019, which was an unbearably painful experience," said Tang, who has previously warned that art "can be a pretext for subversion."

Elastic definition of 'national security'

Hong Kong officials and national security judges, who operate without a jury, have so far employed a highly elastic definition of what constitutes a threat to “national security.”

For example, dozens of former opposition politicians and activists are currently standing trial for “subversion” for organizing a democratic primary election.

But rights experts and activists including the U.N. Special Rapporteur for Rights Defenders have warned during the consultation process that the law will criminalize actions like peaceful protest or political opposition that should be protected under international law.

Some lawmakers expressed concerns on Thursday that the law could be used to curb public speech or the media.

Hong Kong security chief Chris Tang speaks during a Legislative Council meeting to scrutinize the bill on Article 23 legislation in Hong Kong on March 8, 2024. (Li Zhihua/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images)

Justice Secretary Paul Lam appeared to confirm that it could, saying that the law would be used to target those who "incite hatred," citing the example of "insulting words" used about visitors from mainland China in recent years.

Amnesty International in January described the Article 23 legislation as "a dangerous moment" for human rights in Hong Kong, warning that Hong Kong authorities would likely "push through" this legislation with minimal meaningful consultation, and without ensuring its compliance with international law.

“The government has made clear it intends to double down on repression of civic freedoms under Article 23 by introducing steeper penalties and expanding cases in which the legitimate exercise of rights would be criminalized in the name of national security," the group's China director Sarah Brooks said in a statement on Jan. 30.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Lee Heung Yeung for RFA Cantonese.

Unanimous? Supreme Court Ruling Leaving Trump on Ballot Reveals Split Among Justices

Democracy Now! — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 15:55:50 +0000

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

Unanimous? Supreme Court Ruling Leaving Trump on Ballot Reveals Split Among Justices

Democracy Now! — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 13:35:35 +0000

We look at Monday’s unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruling that states do not have the authority to remove Donald Trump from the ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment with Slate senior writer Mark Joseph Stern, who calls the decision a “disaster” that appears tailor-made to let Trump avoid accountability for the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. He says despite the superficial unanimity of the 9-0 ruling, it was closer to a 5-4 split, with the five conservative justices who wrote the majority opinion raising additional barriers to keeping insurrectionists from public office.

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

Video Reveals Deputy Mistakes Acorn for Gun Fire, Unloads Magazine at Handcuffed Man

The Real News Network — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 22:30:48 +0000

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

New Poll Reveals How Middle East Conflict Could Imperil Biden’s Reelection Bid

Newswire Editor — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 18:50:01 +0000

A new YouGov poll, commissioned by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), shows that a majority of Americans would hold President Biden responsible for a rise in gasoline prices, if the ongoing conflict in the Middle East were to widen further.

23 percent of respondents who voted for Biden in 2020 reported that they would hold the president responsible for an increase in gas prices due to a widening of the current conflict.

“This is a very large group of people who voted for Biden in 2020 and would hold him responsible for a rise in gasoline prices resulting from a widening Middle East war,” said Mark Weisbrot, economist and Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

“This could easily make the difference in a close election. If a small percentage — even about 1 in 20 — of this large group of voters were to stay home as a result of their dissatisfaction with the rise in gasoline prices, that could be enough to tip the election,” said Weisbrot. This calculation is based on the results of the 2020 election, where a defection of this very small number of Democratic voters would have changed the result, with Biden losing Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia, and therefore getting just 269 electoral votes — not enough to win the presidency.

Overall, 52 percent of respondents reported that they would hold President Biden responsible if the current war in the Middle East expands and gasoline prices rise to more than $5 a gallon; 34 percent reported that they would not; and 14 percent reported that they do not know.
71 percent of respondents reported that increased gas prices, owing to an expanded war, would affect the outcome of the US presidential election in November; 12 percent reported that they would not; 18 percent reported they don’t know.

“The 2024 election could very easily be tipped by just a very small fraction of Biden voters who become upset about high gasoline prices, blame the president, and choose not to come out and vote,” said Justin Talbot Zorn, a Senior Advisor at CEPR.

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

‘Dear media friends’ – China interferes in Honiara media over Taiwan, reveals In-depth Solomons

Pacific Media Watch — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 20:42:43 +0000

By Ronald Toito’ona and Charley Piringi in Honiara

China’s interference and moves to control the media in the Solomon Islands have been exposed in leaked emails In-depth Solomons has obtained.

On Monday last week [15 January 2024], Huangbi Lin, a diplomat working at the Chinese Embassy in Honiara, called the owner of Island Sun newspaper, Lloyd Loji, and expressed the embassy’s “concern” in a viewpoint article that the paper published on page 6 of the day’s issue.

The article, which appeared earlier in an ABC publication, was about Taiwan’s newly-elected president William Lai Ching-te, and what his victory means to China and the West.

Lin’s phone call and his embassy’s concern was revealed in an email Loji wrote to the editorial staff of Island Sun, which In-depth Solomons has cited. Loji wrote:

“I had received a call this morning from Lin (Chinese Embassy) raising their concern on the ABC publication on today’s issue, page 6.

“Yesterday, he had sent us a few articles regarding China’s stance on the elections taking place in Taiwan which he wanted us to publish.

“Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Solomon Islands) made a press release (as attached) reaffirming Solomon Island’s position with regards to the Taiwan elections (recognition of one China principle).

“Let us align ourselves according to the position in which our country stands.

“Be mindful of our publication since China is also a supporter of Island Sun.

“Please collaborate on this matter and (be) cautious of the news that we publish especially with regards to Taiwan’s election.”

Loji has not responded to questions In-depth Solomons sent to him for comments.

The day before on Sunday, Lin sent an email to owners and editors of Solomons Islands’ major news outlets, asking for their cooperation in their reporting of the Taiwanese election outcome. His email said:

“Dear media friends.

“As the result of the election in the Taiwan region of the People’s Republic of China being revealed, a few media reports are trying to cover it from incorrect perspectives.

“The Embassy of the People’s Republic of China would like to remind that both inappropriate titles on newly-elected Taiwan leaders and incorrect name on the Taiwan region are against the one-China policy and the spirit of UN resolution 2758.”

In the same email, he also sent two articles from the State Council Taiwan Affairs Office and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China on the results of the Taiwan elections.

He requested that the articles be published in the next day’s papers.

None of the two articles appeared in the Island Sun the next day, but the paper eventually published them on Tuesday.

The Solomon Star featured both articles, along with a government statement issued at the behest of the Chinese Embassy, on its front page.

Lin failed to respond to questions In-depth Solomons sent to him for comments.

Taiwan has been Solomons Islands’ diplomatic ally until 2019 when Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare ditched Taiwan for China.

In the last two years, China has provided both financial support and thousands of dollars’ worth of office and media equipment to the Island Sun and Solomon Star.

China’s reported manipulation of news outlets around the Pacific has been a topic of discussion in recent years. The communist nation is one of the worst countries in the world for media freedom. It ranks 177 on the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index.

Responding to the incident, the Media Association of Solomon Islands (MASI) has urged China to respect the independence of the media.

“This incident is regrettable,” MASI President Georgina Kekea told In-depth Solomons.

“Any attempts to control or manipulate the media compromise the public’s right to information,” Kekea added.

“Despite the one-China Policy, China must respect the rights of Solomon Islanders in their own country.

“The situation shows the big difference between the values of the Solomon Islands and China. Respect goes both ways.

“Chinese representatives working in Solomon Islands must remember that Solomon Islands is a democratic country with values different to that of their own country and no foreign policy should ever dictate what people can and cannot do in their own country.”

Kekea further added that it was disheartening to hear interference by diplomatic partners in the day-to-day operations of an independent newsroom.

She said in a democratic country like Solomon Islands, it was crucial that the autonomy of newsrooms remained intact, and free from any external government influence on editorial decisions.

Kekea also urged Solomon Islands newsroom leaders to be vigilant and not allow outsiders to dictate their news content.

“There are significant long-term consequences if we allow outsiders to dictate our decisions.

“Solomon Islands is a democratic country, with the media serving as the fourth pillar of democracy.

“It is crucial not to permit external influences in directing our course of action.”

Kekea also highlighted the financial struggles news organisations in Solomon Islands face and the financial assistance they’ve received from external donors.

She pointed out that this sort of challenge arose when news organisations lacked the financial capacity to look after themselves.

“The concern is not exclusive to China but extends to all external support.

“It is essential to acknowledge and appreciate the funding support received but there should be limits.

“We must enable the media to fulfil its role independently. Gratitude for funding support should not translate into allowing external entities to exploit us for their own agenda or geopolitical struggles.

“Media is susceptible to the influence of major powers. Thus, we must try as much as possible to not get ourselves into a position that we cannot get out of.

“It is important to keep our independence. We must try as much as possible to be self-reliant. To work hard and not rely solely on external partners for funding support.

“If we are not careful, we might lose our freedom.”

Republished by arrangement with In-Depth Solomons.

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

Greenpeace USA Urges Biden to Act as Study Reveals Alarming Human Impact on Oceans

Newswire Editor — Thu, 04 Jan 2024 21:44:36 +0000

"Generative AI has the potential to help those with fewer resources or experience quickly learn and develop new skills," he noted. "The real challenge, though, is how to center the dignity and economic security of working-class Americans during the changes to come. And unlike the Industrial Revolution, which spanned half a century at least, the AI revolution is unfolding at lightning speed."

"Our generational task is to ensure that AI is a tool for lessening the vast disparities of wealth and opportunity that plague us, not exacerbating them."

Khanna stressed that "today the Democratic Party is at a crossroads, as it was in the 1990s, when the dominant wing in the party argued for prioritizing private sector growth and letting the chips fall where they may," ignoring prescient criticism from former Democratic Sens. Paul Wellstone (Minn.) and Russ Feingold (Wis.), as well as Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), who then served in the House.

After failing to heed their warnings, he argued, "the Democratic Party cannot claim to be the party of the working class if we allow AI to erode the earnings and security of the working class. The party can be forgiven once for the mistake of abetting globalization to run amok, just not twice."

"Technologies—our technologies—are meant to complement and enhance human initiative, not subordinate or exploit it," he asserted. "We must push for workers to have a decision-making role in how and when to adopt technologies, and we must insist on workers' profiting from the implementation of these technologies. Our generational task is to ensure that AI is a tool for lessening the vast disparities of wealth and opportunity that plague us, not exacerbating them."

Underscoring the urgency of his message, Khanna pointed out that in September, "tech's biggest names trekked to Capitol Hill for a forum on artificial intelligence" that "was reminiscent of Davos conferences in the 1990s and early 2000s," and this year alone, tens of thousands of workers at hundreds of companies could be laid off and replaced with AI.

Already, AI is factoring into labor negotiations and legislative battles. After California legislators last year overwhelmingly approved Assembly Bill 316, which would have required a human driver on self-driving trucks weighing over 10,000 pounds that are transporting goods or passengers for at least five years, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed it.

"Tech companies argue that replacing human drivers with AI is feasible, will reduce labor costs, and will therefore make it cheaper to transport goods and services. They lobbied heavily against the bill," explained Khanna. "I supported A.B. 316 because drivers say it's currently an unnecessary risk to have large trucks on public roads without a human on board. This is especially true if there is extreme weather, hazardous conditions, or heavy cargo on board. No one understands the safety risks at play here better than the drivers themselves, and it's both foolish and insulting to suggest they would make up such concerns to keep jobs that do not add value."

"It's not just the AI concerns of truck drivers that are causing divides in the Democratic coalition," the congressman continued, highlighting that the monthslong strikes of unionized writers and actors in Hollywood last year ended with deals that include provisions about artificial intelligence.

The California Democrat—who joined striking writers on the picket line—wrote that "even though writers' jobs are very different from truck drivers' jobs, labor solidarity is one of the few countervailing forces that can blunt the dehumanization of work motivated by short-term profit maximization in a world where AI is capable of suddenly disrupting both blue- and white-collar work."

Khanna—author of the 2022 bookDignity in a Digital Age: Making Tech Work for All of Us—published the Times piece amid fears about how AI will impact everything from mass surveillance and misinformation to healthcare and war, not only in the United States but around the world.

His Thursday column won praise from progressives across the country. Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, head of the California Labor Federation, said that his piece is "truly a must-read for any policymaker" while Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation's editorial director and publisher, called it an "important read and issue for now and in '28."

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

NZ Labour Party leader Chris Hipkins reveals new shadow cabinet

APR editor — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 02:04:15 +0000

RNZ News

New Zealand’s opposition Labour Party has announced its shadow cabinet to face off against the conservative coalition government.

The party endorsed Chris Hipkins as leader and voted Carmel Sepuloni as deputy earlier this month. Sepuloni is also Pacific Peoples minister.

Many of the roles are a continuation of the portfolios MPs served while ministers in government, though some roles have had to be changed due to the departure of two senior figures.

READ MORE: Former broadcast minister defends NZ journalism fund, state-funded media independence

David Parker has picked up Foreign Affairs, after former minister Nanaia Mahuta was not returned to Parliament. His former environment role has gone to Rachel Brooking, who served as Associate Environment Minister for the final few months of the Labour government.

The departure of Andrew Little means Phil Twyford has been given the immigration portfolio, while Dr Ayesha Verrall will be the Public Service spokesperson.

Ginny Andersen will keep the police portfolio, but her justice role has been given to Duncan Webb.

“Duncan is forensic in the sort of work that he does, and I think that he’s just the right person to scrutinise the actions that David Seymour’s taking in that portfolio.”

Experience and energy
Leader Chris Hipkins said the line-up brought experience and energy to the job of opposition.

“The election didn’t go Labour’s way and we have work to do to make sure Kiwis know and feel that Labour backs them. I have absolute confidence our team will work with communities right across the country to build this support back,” he said.

“With the start this coalition has had, it’s clear New Zealanders will need an opposition that stands up for their values and what is right.”

Labour leader Hipkins reveals shadow cabinet Video: RNZ

Hipkins had already confirmed every MP, including the two newcomers Cushla Tangaere-Manuel and Reuben Davidson, would have a portfolio.

Tangaere-Manuel, the MP for cyclone-hit Ikaroa-Rāwhiti, picks up tourism and hospitality, forestry, and cyclone recovery.

Hipkins had already confirmed Grant Robertson would be finance spokesperson, while Dr Ayesha Verrall would remain in the health portfolio.

Robertson’s decision to run as a list-only candidate at the election had prompted speculation he would retire from Parliament if Labour lost the election, but on Wednesday, at a press conference accusing the government of a fiscal hole, he confirmed he would stick around.

“I’m here, and this first few days has indicated to me exactly why I’d like to be here,” he said.

‘Coalition of chaos’
Hipkins said the new Labour line-up was “going to hold the coalition of chaos to account over the next three years”.

“The front bench includes a mix of very experienced and newer former ministers, who are going to bring the skills and energy we need to those jobs and to their portfolios. We’ve got roughly three times more ministerial experience in our top 20 than National, NZ First and ACT combined.”

“There are six women and four men in our top 10 — it’s a diverse line-up.”

“What we’ve seen from the other side already is a lack of moral compass, a depressing laundry list that undoes progress and takes New Zealand and Kiwis backwards.

“This Labour team has the values, the energy and the experience to hold the other side to account . . . and that’s exactly what we’re going to be doing.

“We’re under no illusion though we’ve got a big job ahead to win back the support of our communities. But one thing is for absolute certain — when Christopher Luxon takes away the services people need and rely on, we will be there asking why.”

Hipkins said “every one of our 34 MPs has a contribution to make. I’ve been in opposition before . . . I’ve seen MPs from some of the lowest rankings make some of the biggest contribution to the opposition effort.”

Asked if any MPs planned on quitting, he said nobody had confirmed.

“Obviously in a period of time like this after an election loss, there will be people who will want to contemplate that, but nobody has given a firm timeline for making decisions on that.”

PM Luxon ‘has no control’
On Christopher Luxon’s handling of Winston Peters, Hipkins said Luxon had no control.

“Christopher Luxon set very high standards for ministers in the last government. He doesn’t seem to have anywhere near those standards for ministers in his own government.

“I think what really he announced yesterday was he has no control over Winston Peters because Winston Peters has no respect for him, and there’s nothing he can really do about Winston Peters’ behaviour. I don’t think that’s good enough from a prime minister.”

Hipkins calls Peters’ comments “very serious allegations” and “don’t comply with the requirements of a minister”.

“His implicit directions to TVNZ and RNZ . . . fall well foul of the requirements of a minister not to give directions to those organisations that are editorially independent, and Christopher Luxon has done nothing about it.”

The full line-up:

Chris Hipkins – Leader of the Opposition, Ministerial Services, National Security and Intelligence
Carmel Sepuloni – Deputy Leader of the Opposition, Social Development, Pacific Peoples, Auckland Issues, Child Poverty Reduction
Grant Robertson – Finance, Racing
Megan Woods – Climate Change, Energy, Resources, Associate Finance
Willie Jackson – Māori Development, Broadcasting and Media, Employment, Associate Housing, Associate Workplace Relations and Safety
Dr Ayesha Verrall – Health, Public Service, Wellington Issues
Kieran McAnulty – Shadow Leader of the House, Housing, Local Government, Regional Development
Willow-Jean Prime – Children, Youth, Associate Education (Māori)
Ginny Andersen – Police, Prevention of Family and Sexual Violence, Social Investment, Associate Social Development
Jan Tinetti – Education, Women
Barbara Edmonds – Economic Development, Infrastructure, Associate Finance
Peeni Henare – Defence, Sport and Recreation, Associate Health
Priyanca Radhakrishnan – Conservation, Disability Issues, NZSIS, GCSB
Jo Luxton – Agriculture, Biosecurity, Rural Communities
Duncan Webb – Deputy Shadow Leader of the House, Justice, Regulation, Earthquake Commission, Christchurch Issues
Deborah Russell – Revenue, Science, Innovation and Technology, Associate Education (Tertiary)
Rachel Brooking – Environment, Food Safety, Space
Damien O’Connor – Trade, Associate Foreign Affairs, Associate Transport
David Parker – Foreign Affairs, Shadow Attorney General, Electoral Reform
Kelvin Davis – Māori Crown Relations: Te Arawhiti, Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations
Tangi Utikere – Chief Whip, Transport, Oceans and Fisheries, Associate Education (Pacific)
Camilla Belich – Junior Whip, Workplace Relations and Safety, Emergency Management
Arena Williams – Assistant Whip, Commerce and Consumer Affairs, Building and Construction, State Owned Enterprises
Phil Twyford – Immigration, Disarmement and Arms Control, Associate Foreign Affairs
Greg O’Connor – Assistant Speaker, Courts, Veterans
Jenny Salesa – Ethnic Communities, Customs
Rachel Boyack – ACC, Arts, Culture and Heritage, Animal Welfare
Adrian Rurawhe – Whānau Ora, Associate Māori Development
Rino Tirikatene – Corrections, Land Information
Helen White – Community and Voluntary Sector, Small Business and Manufacturing, Associate Justice
Ingrid Leary – Seniors, Mental Health
Lemauga Lydia Sosene – Internal Affairs, Associate Pacific Peoples, Associate Social Development and Employment
Reuben Davidson – Statistics, Digital Economy and Communications, Associate Broadcasting and Media
Cushla Tangaere-Manuel – Tourism and Hospitality, Forestry, Cyclone Recovery

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

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

WIRED Analysis Reveals Disturbing Details of Government Surveillance Program, Highlights Urgent Need for Reform

Newswire Editor — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 21:19:29 +0000

Amnesty investigators visited the sites of the bombings, Saint Porphyrius Greek Orthodox Church in Gaza City and a home in al-Nuseirat refugee camp near Deir al-Balah, and interviewed 14 people, including nine survivors of the attacks and two other witnesses. The group's Crisis Evidence Lab also analayzed satellite imagery and and audiovisual material.

The two bombings, which killed a total of 46 civilians, including 20 children, "were indiscriminate attacks or direct attacks on civilians or civilian objects, which must be investigated as war crimes," said Amnesty.

"These deadly, unlawful attacks are part of a documented pattern of disregard for Palestinian civilians and demonstrate the devastating impact of the Israeli military's unprecedented onslaught has left nowhere safe in Gaza, regardless of where civilians live or seek shelter," said Erika Guevara Rosas, director of global research, advocacy, and policy for the U.K.-based group. "We urge the International Criminal Court's prosecutor to take immediate concrete action to expedite the investigation into war crimes and other crimes under international law opened in 2021."

The group noted that on October 19, when the historic church was struck, the Israeli government released a statement saying that "IDF fighter jets struck the command and control center belonging to a Hamas terrorist involved in the launching of rockets and mortars toward Israel."

But the IDF later deleted a video it had posted of the strike on Saint Porphyrius, and has provided no information to substantiate the claim that the church was a "command and control center."

Before the strike, in the first days of Israel's relentless bombardment of Gaza, church officials had publicly said hundreds of civilians were taking shelter at Saint Porphyrius.

"Their presence would therefore have been known to the Israeli military," said Amnesty. "The Israeli military's decision to go ahead with a strike on a known church compound and site for displaced civilians was reckless and therefore amounts to a war crime, even if there was a belief that there was a military objective nearby."

One of the families sheltering in the church was that of Ramez al-Sury, whose three children—aged 14, 12, and 11—were killed in the attack.

"We left our homes and came to stay at the church because we thought we would be protected here. We have nowhere else to go. The church was full of peaceful people, only peaceful people," al-Sury told Amnesty. "There is nowhere safe in Gaza during this war. Bombardments everywhere, day and night. Every day, more and more civilians are killed. We pray for peace, but our hearts are broken."

The day after al-Sury's children were killed, Hani al-Aydi was sitting at home with family members at al-Nuseirat refugee camp, which is within the area the Israeli military had ordered Palestinians to evacuate to from the north.

Despite telling people the area was safe, the IDF launched a strike that destroyed the al-Aydi family home, which the military had no reason to suspect was a Hamas target, according to Amnesty.

"All of those present in the al-Aydi house that was hit directly and in the two nearby homes were civilians," said Amnesty. "Two members of the al-Aydi family had permits to work in Israel, which requires rigorous security checks by Israeli authorities, for those obtaining the permit and their extended family.

Al-Aydi told the group that "everything collapsed on our head" suddenly when Israel bombed the house, killing 28 people including 12 children.

"All my brothers died, my nephews, my nieces," said al-Aydi. "My mother died, my sisters died, our home is gone… There is nothing here, and now we are left with nothing and are displaced. I don't know how much worse things will get. Could it get any worse?"

Amnesty noted that even if it had found in its investigation that there were plausible military targets in the vicinity of the two sites—which it did not—"these strikes failed to distinguish between military objectives and civilian objects. The evidence collected by Amnesty International also indicates that the Israeli military failed to take feasible precautions to minimize damage to civilians and civilian property, including by not providing any warning—at minimum to anyone living in the locations that were hit—before launching the attacks."

The Geneva Conventions require parties in a conflict to take measures to protect the lives of civilians and prohibit collective punishment of a population for acts committed by a particular group.

"The harrowing accounts from survivors and relatives of victims describing the devastating human toll of these bombardments offer a snapshot of the mass civilian suffering being inflicted daily across Gaza by the Israeli military's relentless attacks, underscoring the urgent need for an immediate cease-fire," said Guevara-Rosas.

Amnesty made the request of the ICC as the death toll in Gaza surpasses 13,300 people in just over six weeks. At least 5,500 children have been killed.

Al-Mezan, a Gaza-based human rights group, also addressed the ICC on Monday, calling on the body to issue warrants for Israeli officials responsible for crimes against Palestinian children.

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

New Report from the Institute for Policy Studies Reveals the True Cost of Billionaire Philanthropy

Newswire Editor — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 13:09:29 +0000

On November 15, the Institute for Policy Studies released a crucial new report revealing the true cost of billionaire philanthropy to taxpayers, the nonprofit sector, and our society.

The report comprehensively details how the ultra-wealthy use charitable giving to avoid taxes and exert influence, while ordinary taxpayers foot the bill.

As communities prepare to enter the season of giving and highlight charitable donations as a critical way to support communities’ urgent needs, this report reveals how the wealthiest donors in our society give differently than ordinary donors.

The ultra-wealthy claim the lion’s share of the hundreds of billions in annual tax subsidies to incentivize charitable giving.
Yet most donations by the ultra-wealthy flow to private foundations and donor-advised funds (DAFs), intermediaries controlled by these donors (As our report shows, 41 cents of every dollar of individual giving in 2022 went to one of these intermediaries). At best, this delays the flow of funds to working nonprofit charities on the ground. At worst, it leads to a warehousing of charitable funds. Private foundations are only required to payout 5 percent of assets annually to charities and donor-advised funds (DAFs) have no payout requirement. To make matters worse, some wealthy donors are playing shell-games to fulfill these minimal obligations.
The most charitably-orientated billionaires in the U.S., those who have signed the Giving Pledge to donate half their wealth during their lifetime, are not immune from these trends. At their current pace, most funds will end up in perpetual family foundations, not in the hands of active charities.

As wealth concentrates in fewer hands, the imbalance is having a corrosive impact on our nonprofit sector. U.S. nonprofit charities are currently experiencing a transition from broad-based support across a wide range of donors to an increasing reliance on a small number of ultra-wealthy people, a trend IPS has named “top-heavy philanthropy.”

The report sounds the alarm over the way that wealthy donors are using taxpayer-subsidized giving systems to create perpetual foundations that extend their private power and influence.

Key findings include:

WEALTHY DONORS RECEIVE THE BIGGEST TAX BREAKS.

Millions of U.S. donors give directly to local charities without any reduction in their taxes. Less than ten percent of households use the charitable deduction. Wealthy donors, in turn, receive most of the taxpayer subsidies for charitable giving. The taxpayer subsidy for charity is hundreds of billions of dollars –and the wealthier the donor, the greater the taxpayer subsidy.

The direct taxpayer subsidy for charitable giving was $73.24 billion in 2022 due to personal and corporate charitable deductions and is $111 billion including other known reductions in taxes. But the subsidy is several hundreds of billions a year if estate and capital gains tax reductions are included.
The wealthier the donor, the greater the taxpayer subsidy for their donation. For every dollar a billionaire donates to charity, taxpayers chip in 74 cents in lost revenue. This is because wealthy donors not only reduce their income tax obligations, but also capital gains, estate and gift taxes.

RISE OF DONOR-CONTROLLED INTERMEDIARIES.

Low and middle income givers are more likely to give directly to local nonprofit charities in their community including youth centers, food banks, and organizations addressing poverty, social needs, arts, and environmental issues.

In contrast, the report finds that wealthy donors are more likely to contribute to their own private foundations and donor-advised funds (DAF), intermediaries that they continue to control. These donors receive immediate tax reductions in the year of their donation, but as this report shows, the funds may take decades to reach working charities, if ever.

An estimated 41 cents of every 2022 individual donation going to charity went to either a private foundation or DAF, up from 37 percent in 2021. In 2022, 27 percent of individual donations went to DAFs, up from 22 percent in 2021. In 2022, 14 percent of individual donations went to private foundations.

“One of the main drivers of DAF growth is the financial industry’s aggressive marketing of DAFs for their considerable tax benefits, secrecy, and non-existent payout rate,” observed Chuck Collins, author of the report.

Over the past five years, the median payout rate for private foundations has hovered between 5.2 and 5.6 percent. And this payout includes compensation to trustees, overhead, and donations to donor-advised funds (DAFs) which have no payout.

Donations to DAFs are now more than a quarter of all U.S. individual charitable giving. The $85.5 billion donated to DAFs in 2022 made up a full 27 percent of the $319 billion in individual giving that year, up from $73.34 billion and 22 percent in 2021.

The largest DAF sponsors now take in more money each year than our largest public charities. By 2021, seven of the top ten recipients of charitable revenue in the country were DAF sponsors, including the four largest affiliated with Fidelity, Schwab, Vanguard and the National Philanthropic Trust.

A significant amount of DAF grants go to other DAFs. We found $2.5 billion in grants going from national donor-advised funds to other national donor-advised funds in 2021 alone.

GIVING PLEDGERS NEED TO PICK UP THE PACE.

The report analyzes the progress of the Giving Pledge, founded in 2010 by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, that has inspired over 220 billionaires to pledge to donate half of their wealth during their lifetime. The report found that while a handful of donors are moving funds in a timely manner, most have seen their wealth dramatically increase over the fourteen years since the start of the Giving Pledge and need to pick up the pace of giving.

The report suggests that most of these pledges will be fulfilled by donations to private family foundations and donor-advised funds, delaying the public benefit of the taxpayer subsidized donations. In the worst case, some Pledgers have used their philanthropy for self-serving purposes, such as taking out loans from their foundations or paying themselves hefty trustee salaries.

The 73 living U.S. Giving Pledgers who were billionaires in 2010 saw their wealth grow by 138 percent, or 224 percent when adjusted for inflation, through 2022. Their combined assets increased from $348 billion in 2010 to $828 billion over those twelve years.

Of these 73 people, 30 of them have seen their wealth increase more than 200 percent when adjusted for inflation. Those with the greatest growth include Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan (1,382 percent), Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna (1,166 percent), Elaine and Ken Langone (755 percent), Arthur M. Blank (739 percent), and Bernie and Billi Marcus (714 percent).

Of the $12 billion in identifiable gifts of over $1 million that the Giving Pledge signers donated to charity in 2022, 68 percent — more than $8 billion — went either to foundations or to DAFs.

The action of some billionaire donors raise concerns that what began as a civic-minded initiative to spur generosity is instead serving to concentrate private wealth and power at taxpayer expense.

“The missing voice in the philanthropy discussion is the U.S. taxpayer, who subsidizes the private giving of billionaires to the tune of several hundred billion a year,” explains Chuck Collins, co-author of the report and the director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies. “We should be alarmed at the ways billionaires use philanthropy as a taxpayer-subsidized extension of their private power and influence.”

“We need to update the laws governing philanthropy to keep the financial industry from capturing it and turning it into another tax dodge for the wealthiest people in our society,” Collins adds.

Key recommendations to reform charitable giving and ensure more money ends up in the hands of actual active charities, where it’s needed most:

Implement a payout requirement for donor-advised funds
Raise the minimum payout rate requirement for private foundations
Prevent grants to DAFs from counting towards foundation payout
Require sponsors to report on DAFs on an account-by-account basis
Implement a universal charitable tax credit for non-itemizers

“We have to make sure that the tax breaks we underwrite are actually funding charities actively working for the public good,” warns Helen Flannery, co-author of the report and a researcher at the Institute for Policy Studies who is an expert on philanthropy and charitable giving.

“We hope this report will encourage policymakers, the media, and the public to look at the charitable pronouncements of billionaires with more scrutiny,” she adds. “Sometimes their giving is a genuine attempt to give back, but other times it is more about enhancing their political voice, their reputation, or their wallet.”

Full report: https://ips-dc.org/report-true-cost-of-billionaire-philanthropy

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

Is TikTok Safe? Algorithm Investigation Reveals the Truth

Amnesty International — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 11:02:19 +0000

This content originally appeared on Amnesty International and was authored by Amnesty International.

Josh Paul Reveals The Truth Behind US Arms Supply to Israel

The Laura Flanders Show — Fri, 27 Oct 2023 22:53:04 +0000

This content originally appeared on The Laura Flanders Show and was authored by The Laura Flanders Show.

Clarence Thomas & the Koch Network: ProPublica Reveals SCOTUS Justice Attended Fundraising Events

Democracy Now! — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 12:20:56 +0000

A new damning investigation from ProPublica reveals Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas attended multiple fundraisers in connection with the billionaire Koch brothers, who have spent millions on conservative causes and funneled vast donations into Republican campaigns. “None of this was disclosed as it should have been on his annual financial disclosures,” says Justin Elliott, reporter for ProPublica covering Supreme Court corruption and ethics. “He’s spending time with people like the Kochs who have active interest and, in fact, cases at the Supreme Court.” This comes as a Supreme Court precedent known as Chevron is set to be revisited, with conservatives seeking to limit the power of federal agencies to issue regulations in areas ranging from the environment to labor rights to consumer protection. “If this Chevron doctrine is overturned by the Supreme Court, it’s going to make it much, much easier to challenge a regulation if you, as a company, don’t like it,” says Elliott.

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

Vanuatu asked for Indonesian aid funds, Jakarta’s envoy reveals

APR editor — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 03:15:28 +0000

By Doddy Morris in Port Vila

The controversial multimilion dollar funding that Indonesia is providing to Vanuatu comes in response to a request made by the Vanuatu government, says the Indonesian Ambassador of Indonesia to Vanuatu and Australia.

According to Ambassador Siswo Pramono, the Vanuatu government requested the Indonesian government to send humanitarian aid and renovate the VIP Lounge at Bauerfield Airport following the devastation caused by cyclones Judy and Kevin in March this year.

“This is why we offer help to Vanuatu, because of the letter the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Vanuatu sent to us,’’ he said.

Indonesian aid for Vanuatu . . . a controversial topic that was front page news in the Vanuatu Daily Post on Friday. Image: Joe Collins/AWPA

“We are not going to send aid if there is no letter of request.’’

Pramono was responding to questions from the media concerning Vanuatu civil society accusations that their country should not receive aid from Indonesia in the form of development and relief supplies.

These claims were made on social media platforms. There are public concerns from critics in Vanuatu that the people in West Papua are still suffering and it is “not acceptable” to accept funds from Indonesia.

Pramono said Indonesia was going to spend 110 million vatu (NZ$1.6 million) to repair the airport as requested by the Vanuatu government.

“It’s not natural, we are requested to do so,’’ he said.

‘Nothing to do with West Papua’
“[It has] nothing to do with the West Papua movement because we also give our aid to Africans and Europeans and many other developing countries. West Papua is a domestic issue in Indonesia, we are going to solve it at the national level.’’

He said that during the groundbreaking ceremony for the renovation of the VIP lounge, Foreign Affairs Minister Matai Seremiah also explained to the public that this symbolised friendship between Indonesia and Vanuatu.

The architecture and design of the airport would reflect both the Melanesian culture of Vanuatu and that of Indonesia.

“The design has been approved by the Vanuatu government so step by step the Indonesian government is working with the government of Vanuatu,” he said.

Abdul Kadir Jailani, Indonesia’s Director-General for Asia Pacific and African Affairs, also revealed that the priority of foreign policy of Indonesia was to elevate engagement with Pacific countries through cooperation with the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG).

He reaffirmed that as part of their commitment to supporting the MSG, they were going to identify certain initiatives that would be carried out bilaterally.

“Our relationship with the MSG and bilateralism go hand in hand; delivery is always made in a bilateral framework, and Indonesia also agrees to help MSG build its capacity by contributing annually and providing cars among other things,’’ he said.

Indonesia ‘a Melanesian country’
“Indonesia considers itself as a Melanesian country, we have 13 million Melanesians in Indonesia, the most populated country with Melanesian people,” he said.

“We continue in assisting Vanuatu because we think this is what we should do as Pacific neighbours and brothers, so this is the time for us to engage with them,” he said.

He said Indonesia valued the importance of having good relations with all Pacific countries.

“At the end of last year, we had a forum called it Indonesia Pacific Development Forum, and on the forum, we coordinated and consolidated international support for the Pacific,’’ he said.

“The main objective for having this forum is how to strengthen development cooperation with Pacific countries.

“The rationale is more about [that] we really want to have a high relationship between Indonesia and the Pacific as we want to grow together because we think that the future belongs to us,” Jailani said.

Doddy Morris is a Vanuatu Daily Post reporter. Republished with permission.

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

Should the U.S. Keep Funding War in Ukraine? Debate Reveals Deep Divisions Within Republican Party

Democracy Now! — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 12:52:51 +0000

The first Republican presidential primary debate highlighted “deep divisions within the Republican Party about foreign policy,” says The Nation's national affairs correspondent John Nichols. He says the nationalist “America First” ideology championed by former President Donald Trump is now being pushed even further by Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron DeSantis, who are critical of U.S. funding to Ukraine, while more establishment candidates like Nikki Haley insisted on continued support for the country's defense against Russia.

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

Massive deforestation in West Papua – Greenpeace reveals loss of 641,400 ha

APR editor — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 09:42:19 +0000

Jubi News

Greenpeace Indonesia’s forest campaigner Nico Wamafma says the West Papua region has lost 641,400 ha of its natural forests in the two decades between 2000-2020 in massive deforestation.

Greenpeace’s research shows this deforestation occurred mainly due to the increasingly widespread licensing of land-based extractive industries that damage the rights of indigenous peoples.

Wamafma said that the total forests loss consisted of 438,000 ha spread across Papua, Central Papua, Mountainous Papua and South Papua provinces.

READ MORE: Other West Papua deforestation reports

The remaining 203,000 ha were lost in West Papua and Southwest Papua provinces.

“In the last two decades, we lost a lot of forests in Merauke, Boven Digoel, Mimika, Mappi, Nabire, Fakfak, Teluk Bintuni, Manokwari, Sorong and Kaimana,” Wamafma told Jubi in a telephone interview

Papua is losing natural forests due to the licensing of land-based extractive industries, such as mining, Industrial Plantation Forest (HTI), Forest Concession Rights (HPH), and oil palm plantations.

Wamafma said the formation of four new provinces resulting from the division of Papua had also accelerated the rate of deforestation in Papua.

He said that if the government continued to take a development approach like the last 20 years that relied on investment, the potential for natural forest loss would be even greater in Papua.

Wamafma said there were now 34.4 million ha of natural forests in Papua.

Republished from Tabloid Jubi with permission.

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

NYT Reveals That a Tech Mogul Likes China—and That McCarthyism Is Alive and Well

Julie Hollar — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 18:41:57 +0000

“A Global Web of Chinese Propaganda Leads to a US Tech Mogul,” the New York Times (8/5/23) announced on its front page. “The Times unraveled a financial network that stretches from Chicago to Shanghai and uses American nonprofits to push Chinese talking points worldwide,” read the subhead.

This ostensibly major scoop ran more than 3,000 words and painted a picture of multimillionaire socialist Neville Roy Singham and the activist groups he funds as shady agents of Chinese propaganda. The piece even referenced the Foreign Agents Registration Act, noting that “none of Mr. Singham’s nonprofits have registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, as is required of groups that seek to influence public opinion on behalf of foreign powers.”

So it should come as no surprise that the piece has led to a call for a federal investigation into those Singham-funded nonprofits. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) sent a letter to the Justice Department citing the Times article and arguing that the groups, including the antiwar organization Code Pink and the socialist think tank Tricontinental, “have been receiving direction from the CCP [Communist Party of China].” Rubio concluded, “The CCP is our greatest adversary, and we cannot allow it to abuse our open system to promote its malign influence any longer.”

‘A socialist benefactor of far-left causes’

To illustrate its article, the Times published a picture of a Code Pink activist holding up a sign with the subversive message, “China is not our enemy.”

But what, exactly, did the Times dig up on Singham and his funded groups? Despite its length, the piece provides no evidence that either the philanthropist himself or the groups he funds are doing anything improper. Instead, the reams of evidence it offers seem to show only that Singham has a pro-China tilt and funds groups that do as well, while the paper repeatedly insinuates that Singham and his associates are secretly Chinese foot soldiers.

The article begins by describing a “street brawl” that “broke out among mostly ethnic Chinese demonstrators” in London in 2019. The Times says “witnesses” blame the incident on a group, No Cold War, that receives funding from Singham and allegedly “attacked activists supporting the democracy movement in Hong Kong.” FAIR could find no reporting substantiating this version of events, but, true or not, it serves to introduce Singham’s world as both anti-democratic and thuggish.

It quickly adds duplicitous and possibly treasonous to that picture. “On the surface,” the Times writes, No Cold War is a collective of American and British activists “who say the West’s rhetoric against China has distracted from issues like climate change and racial injustice.” But the Times is here to pull back the curtain:

In fact, a New York Times investigation found, it is part of a lavishly funded influence campaign that defends China and pushes its propaganda. At the center is a charismatic American millionaire, Neville Roy Singham, who is known as a socialist benefactor of far-left causes.

What is less known, and is hidden amid a tangle of nonprofit groups and shell companies, is that Mr. Singham works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide.

It all sounds quite illicit, with the lavish funding, the propaganda-pushing and the hiding amidst tangles of shell companies. (The Times uses the word “propaganda” 13 times in its piece, including in the headline.) And this sort of language, which insinuates but never demonstrates wrongdoing, permeates the length of the piece to such a degree that it’s hard to narrow down the examples. For instance, when it reports Singham’s categorical denial that he follows instructions from any foreign government or party, and acts only on his “long-held personal views,” the paper immediately retorts:

But the line between him and the propaganda apparatus is so blurry that he shares office space—and his groups share staff members—with a company whose goal is to educate foreigners about “the miracles that China has created on the world stage.”

The Times accuses Singham of funding news sites around the world that do things like intersperse “articles about land rights with praise for Xi Jinping” or sprinkle “its coverage with Chinese government talking points” or offer “soft coverage of China.” It accuses the groups Singham funds of “sharing one another’s content on social media hundreds of times,” and “interview[ing] one another’s representatives without disclosing their ties.”

A seditious notebook

The article concludes as it began, with a scene meant to cast Singham in a nefarious light:

Just last month, Mr. Singham attended a Chinese Communist Party propaganda forum. In a photo, taken during a breakout session on how to promote the party abroad, Mr. Singham is seen jotting in a notebook adorned with a red hammer and sickle.

In other words: Communist!

If you think China is evil and Communists are the devil—as you might, if you read US corporate news media (FAIR.org, 5/15/20, 4/8/21)—this sounds like important reporting on a dangerous man. The trouble is, there’s nothing illegal about any of this. All the Times succeeds in proving in this article is that Singham puts considerable money, amassed by selling a software company, toward causes that promote positive views of China and are critical of hawkish anti-China foreign policy, which is his right as an US citizen. If you were to replace “China” in this tale with “Ukraine,” it’s hard to imagine the Times assigning a single reporter to the story, let alone putting it on the front page.

But, as Singham is boosting a country vilified rather than lionized in US news media, the Times appears to be doing its best to convey the impression that there’s something deeply problematic about it all. Perhaps the clearest signal of the Times‘ underlying message comes at this moment in the article:

[Singham] and his allies are on the front line of what Communist Party officials call a “smokeless war.” Under the rule of Xi Jinping, China has expanded state media operations, teamed up with overseas outlets and cultivated foreign influencers. The goal is to disguise propaganda as independent content.

The article names many organizations and individuals as being associated in some way with Singham. It even names attendees at his wedding—described as being “also a working event”—including Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman, Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, and V, author of The Vagina Monologues. All of these “allies” are implicated by association as soldiers fighting China’s cold war against the US, “foreign influencers,” Trojan horses of Chinese propaganda—no evidence needed other than the company they keep.

It’s a picture, in short, of treason lurking among the “far left.”

‘Propaganda trick’

Indeed, many on the left, including those targ eted, have accused the Times of McCarthyism. It’s worth remembering the history of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Enacted in 1938 to address Nazi propaganda, it has in fact rarely been used—no doubt in part because it’s difficult to square with the constitutional right to petition the government and the right to free speech. But it was used in the McCarthy era, most famously to target W.E.B. Du Bois and his Peace Information Center.

Tricontinental, a think tank named in the Times piece, published an open letter (8/7/23) in response to the article, decrying “McCarthy-like attacks against individuals and organizations criticizing US foreign policy, labeling peace advocates as ‘Chinese or foreign agents.'”

The PIC, a US anti-nuclear group, was connected with international peace movements and published anti-nuclear and pacifist literature from around the world, including the international Stockholm anti-nuclear petition. The Justice Department deemed this a Communist threat to national security and a “propaganda trick,” and indicted Du Bois and four other PIC officers for failing to register as foreign agents. The charges were dismissed by a judge, but they caused the PIC to fold.

Du Bois later wrote (In Battle for Peace, 1952):

Although the charge was not treason, it was widely understood and said that the Peace Information Center had been discovered to be an agent of Russia…. We were not treated as innocent people whose guilt was to be inquired into, but distinctly as criminals whose innocence was to be proven, which was assumed to be doubtful.

This was abetted by credulous news media coverage at the time (Duke Law Journal, 2/20). The New York Herald Tribune (2/11/51) editorialized that the

Du Bois outfit was set up to promote a tricky appeal of Soviet origin, poisonous in its surface innocence, which made it appear that a signature against the use of atomic weapons would forthwith insure peace…in short, an attempt to disarm America and yet ignore every form of Communist aggression.

Government use of FARA ramped up again in the wake of accusations of Russian interference in the 2016 elections, but it has primarily been used to target antiwar and international solidarity groups—including the recent indictments of Black liberation activists (Nation, 4/25/23).

Regarding Singham and his “allies,” the Times reported that the FARA “usually applies to groups taking money or orders from foreign governments. Legal experts said Mr. Singham’s network was an unusual case.”

It is certainly unusual in the sense that it’s hard to construe it as a FARA case. It’s not unusual, unfortunately, in the sense that US news media are prone to engage in character assassination of those who sympathize with official enemies.

Research assistance: Brandon Warner

The post NYT Reveals That a Tech Mogul Likes China—and That McCarthyism Is Alive and Well appeared first on FAIR.

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

Congressional Investigation Reveals Top-Secret Evidence of Crashed “Alien” Spacecraft

William Manson — Sat, 29 Jul 2023 08:09:34 +0000

On July 26, 2023, as the House Subcommittee on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) continued its ongoing hearings, several witnesses with sound scientific and military background testified to the frequent sightings of strange flying objects that “defy the laws of physics as we know them.” One highly credible witness, not at liberty to disclose the full facts, nonetheless informed the Committee of the discovery of crash-sites in which “non-biologics”– evidently the remains of non-human occupants of these craft–had been identified:

Committee members were thunderstruck: had the combined armed forces and intelligence agencies hidden this astounding discovery from the American citizenry? And why? Clearly a widespread conspiracy, impervious to media investigation, had long been operative.

The U.S. House of Representatives, confronting their oversight responsibility in the event of sudden threats to national security, established this special Subcommittee precisely for this purpose. Many pilots, civilian and military, have in recent months been spotting unknown aerial objects with erratic flight “behavior.”

To my mind, this conspiracy may well have begun in the aftermath of the now-declassified file on the “Roswell incident.” It is self-evident that “alien” beings, commonly referred to as “extra-terrestrials,” must have arrived quite a long time ago to our unexceptional Solar system, one among thousands of such systems astronomically detectable just a few “light-years” away. Moreover, who can doubt that, given the extraordinary technological advances of Homo sapiens inhabiting what astronomer Carl Sagan called our “tiny blue dot” (that is, from the perspective of a NASA probe in our outer planets), that these highly intelligent beings wisely chose to investigate our possibly threatening activities.

And it is only logical that their crafts have an as yet unknown propulsive force, allowing them to travel at the optimal speed of 186,000 miles per second (yes, “the speed-of-light!”). Moreover, extrapolating further, one can justifiably conclude that such astounding spacecraft are most likely to have originated from a planet within the Star System closest to ours, Proxima Centauri. Therefore, these remarkable beings, having chosen our planet (out of countless thousands of others) as an urgent destination, were quite willing, given their incredible achievement of the maximal velocity possible in the universe, to devote some 3.2 earth-years of their time to arrive at our designated planet.

All I can say is: we must be mighty important in this infinite Universe of ours! The scientifically qualified experts who have patriotically testified to the Subcommittee this week are no doubt dedicated to resisting any threat, no matter how mysterious, to our national security. And they clearly are already hard at work, using our most advanced technological-analytical systems, to identify the exact nature–and intent–of these alien visitors. Our intelligence agencies, both military and CIA/NSA/DSA, are to be commended for their “top-secret” policy, thereby avoiding the massive panic of the entire citizenry that would naturally occur if the real facts finally were revealed.

The scientific teams, continuing to work in secrecy since as early as 1948, have still to solve certain unsettling puzzles (beyond merely the purpose of these “ETs”). Why, clearly exhibiting the fastest velocity and navigation scientifically possible in the universe (according to Einstein), do these incredible vehicles, once attaining the lower strata of our tiny’s planet atmosphere, commonly crash? Moreover, conducting their top-secret analyses of the perplexingly flimsy construction evident in the slipshod debris found at the crash-sites, NASA-affiliated scientists specializing in aerodynamics and spacecraft construction have, according to a “reliable source,” adhered to their original, 50-year old explanation: metal fatigue.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by William Manson.

The Intercept Reveals Border Patrol Is Caging Migrants Outdoors in Deadly Arizona Heat

Democracy Now! — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 14:09:55 +0000

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

The Intercept Reveals Border Patrol Is Caging Migrants Outdoors in Deadly Arizona Heat

Democracy Now! — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 12:19:31 +0000

As a record-breaking heat wave continues in Arizona, reporters with The Intercept say they have observed U.S. Border Patrol holding about 50 migrants inside a chain-link pen in the Sonoran Desert, at the Ajo Border Patrol Station. This comes as the group Humane Borders reports the bodies of at least 13 people were found over the past month in the Sonoran Desert where many migrants cross. “You really can’t overstate how deadly this ecosystem is,” says reporter Ryan Devereaux, who describes the well-funded border agencies’ lack of support for border crossers. Roland Gutierrez, Democratic state senator running against Ted Cruz for Senate, says, “We need to revamp the whole system.”

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

New FISA Court Opinion Reveals More of the Same: Systemic Misuse of FISA 702

Newswire Editor — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 21:55:20 +0000

Nebraska had a 20-week abortion ban in place in April 2022, when Burgess's stillbirth took place.

Prosecutors ultimately dropped the misdemeanor charges against Burgess in exchange for her plea of guilty to a felony charge of concealing or abandoning a dead body. On the Facebook messaging application, Burgess and her mother had discussed "burning the evidence" of the stillbirth and burying it, which they did with the help of a third person named Tanner Barnhill, who has been sentenced to probation.

According toJezebel, police received a tip about the disposal of the remains and obtained a warrant to view the mother and daughters' Facebook messages after Celeste Burgess mentioned the correspondence when she was being questioned by law enforcement.

Meta, the company that owns Facebook, complied with the warrant and released the messages, which were not subject to end-to-end encryption.

Digital rights groups have long called on Facebook and other online messaging platforms to make end-to-end encryption the default setting for users' conversations.

Burgess' case illustrates "the real, human cost of mass surveillance of everyone's private digital communications," said Meredith Whittaker, president of the encrypted messaging app Signal.

Emma Roth, a staff attorney at Pregnancy Justice, which advocates for people who face pregnancy-related criminal charges, toldJezebel that police and prosecutors in Nebraska charged Burgess out of desperation to "criminalize what they view as immoral behavior," in the absence of state laws against the 17-year-old's procurement of abortion pills.

"When [prosecutors] are faced with the limitations of state law and the fact that a self-managed abortion or a pregnancy loss is not illegal under state law, it's almost as if they start throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks," Roth said. "Prosecutors are much more likely to try to 'make an example' of someone who seeks an abortion later on in pregnancy because they deem that less morally acceptable, and they may seek charges in the hope that the public will find the facts of the case egregious and will welcome a prosecution."

"But the risk, of course, is that any type of precedent that a prosecutor sets when bringing a case against someone who sought a later abortion can be applied against somebody seeking an earlier abortion," she added.

In the case of Burgess, noted journalist Jessica Valenti, one detail that made it into numerous media reports was a claim that the 17-year-old said in her Facebook messages that she couldn't "wait to get the 'thing' out of her body."

In reality, Valenti wrote, "that sentence is nowhere in the Facebook messages; in fact, the language is actually a police officer's interpretation of the teenager's conversation."

Prosecutors in Madison County, Nebraska "tried to paint a portrait of this mother and daughter in a negative light and to deprive them of their humanity and to erase the fact that we're talking about a teenager who was not ready to have a child," Roth told Jezebel.

While prosecutors have long filed charges against people for pregnancy losses and self-managed abortions, saidJezebel reporter Susan Rikunas, "Celeste Burgess may be the first person charged and sentenced for crimes related to an abortion since the Supreme Court's Dobbs ruling."

Last year's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization reversed nearly a half-century of national abortion rights affirmed by Roe.

As progressive advocacy group Indivisible said, Burgess' jail sentence represents Republican lawmakers' "deranged vision for our country."