• Canadian PM Carney tells Trump Canada never for sale as leaders hold first meeting
• Israel plans to escalate in Gaza and take over aid distribution, as critics call it not in line with humanitarian principles
• Hamas says will no longer take part in ceasefire talks with Israel, citing “hunger and extermination war” in Gaza
• CSU students hold hunger strike calling for divestment from Israel
• Trump orders halt to US airstrikes on Yemen’s Houthis

The post Canadian PM Carney tells Trump Canada never for sale as leaders meet; Israel plans military escalation and takeover of aid distribution in Gaza – May 6, 2025 appeared first on KPFA.

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

Photograph Source: Ministerio Bienes Nacionales – CC BY 2.0

Some 40 people form a circle on the dusty, late-summer grass. Following days of uncertainty and fear, cut off from most forms of communication, families from Mapuche communities in Argentina’s Chubut province gather to talk about what happened to them on Feb. 11.

At 7 AM that Tuesday, hundreds of Argentina’s armed provincial and federal police forces raided their homes, smashing windows and destroying belongings. The special forces, wielding assault rifles, held men, women and children at gunpoint for more than ten hours.

During their day of terrorizing Mapuche families, police took cell phones and computers, leaving the communities—spread over miles at the eastern base of the Andes—cut off from each other. They confiscated books and farm tools, forced indigenous men, women and children to give DNA samples, semi-stripped young women and photographed tattoos and other body markings, manhandled elders, and separated young children from their parents while forcing toddlers to witness the violence against their mothers. In the twelve simultaneous strikes, police also broke into a Mapuche community radio in El Maiten, Radio Petu Mogelein, and destroyed vital communications equipment.

These communities, often just a handful of indigenous families that survived the bloody campaigns of genocide and displacement throughout Argentina’s colonial history, are the now the target of a new offensive under the “anarchocapitalist” policies of Javier Milei. The repression aims at stripping them of the little they have left of their ancestral territory and placing it in the hands of some of the world’s largest corporations and wealthiest billionaires.

Trawun, testimony

Outside one of the homes that was raided, Mapuche community members described the violence. A few international journalists and representatives of regional human rights organizations observed the trawun—a community gathering to share information, repair the community and plan strategy. We strained to hear the words of their testimonies as the wind whipped through a stand of poplar trees.

An 84-year-old elder pushed up his sleeve to show bruises from being thrown to the ground and cuffed by police. Young women described being forced to lie face down on the floor for hours and as police intimidated them with their guns. Children witnessed scenes of brutality that will mark them for life.

For hours the security forces refused to present a judicial order or inform indigenous families of the reason behind the violent invasion of their homes. Authorities finally presented a judicial order, signed by judge Jorge Criado, who was formally accused of racial discrimination against the Mapuche in a 2020 case, to investigate a vandalism attack Jan. 18 in Estancia Amancay 80 kilometers away.

Police arrested Victoria Núñez Fernández, a 37-year-old member of the Lof Pillan Mawiza who has lived with and worked with the Mapuche community for years. Witnesses and evidence from GPS records prove that Núñez Fernández was miles from the scene at the time the equipment was set on fire, but the judge ordered 60 days of house arrest as government authorities continue to declare her guilt.

Forest fires as a smokescreen

Since they began in December, Argentine government propaganda has blamed the Mapuches for forest fires that have burned more than 50,000 hectares of mostly national forest land in Patagonia. It’s a triple ploy– to distract from the role of climate change and government negligence in the fires, to divert attention from real estate interests waiting to take over land for megaprojects, and to criminalize the indigenous people who are the last the remaining bulwark against the mass exploitation and destruction of one of the world’s largest freshwater and forest reserves.

“It’s so outrageous that we should be blamed when actually the Mapuche community has always done everything to protect life here. We´re part of the territory that we defend, and we’re going to protect the life of the river, the life of the mountain, the life of the forest”, Evis Millán of the Lof (community) Pillan Mawiza told me in an interview at her ranch by the river.

“We would never set fire to it. This set-up that the government of Chubut is carrying out with the national government has a clear objective–to name an internal enemy to cover up the criminalization and eviction of the Mapuche communities.”

Without a trial or investigation, the day after the police operation, Governor Ignacio Torres of Chubut province presented a PowerPoint accusing the Mapuche of the fires and the vandalism. Flanked by hooded agents bearing machine guns in what was supposed to be a press conference, he projected the faces of four indigenous women, calling them “the persons responsible for the attack [on Amancay]” and swore “they will rot in jail”. Among them was Victoria Núñez Fernández, still in custody, and Moira Millán. Moira Millán is an internationally known indigenous land defender, novelist and women’s rights leader.

Torres’ performance followed a playbook handed down from the far-right government of Javier Milei and his Minister of National Security Patricia Bullrich. Bullrich, whose ministry is also responsible for preventing and controlling forest fires, has long promoted usurping land from indigenous peoples for sale on the international market. Following the raids, she released a video with images of the police raid on Millan’s home, stating, “These people will be declared under Article 41 TER-ROR-ISTS”.

Milei’s government established the legal framework for this extreme measure just days after the raids, when it listed  “RESISTENCIA ANCESTRAL MAPUCHE (RAM)” (Mapuche Ancestral resistance) as a terrorist organization in the Public Registry of Persons and Entities linked to Acts of Terrorism and its Financing. The RAM is an invention to smear the Mapuche people; the communities have stated repeatedly they have no knowledge of or contact with it. There’s only one person identified with the RAM, Facundo Jones Huala. Despite taking credit for the vandalism at Amancay, Jones Huala has not been arrested and makes no effort to hide from authorities. Meanwhile, the government continues hold Núñez Fernandez on trumped-up charges and to make the untenable claim that a handful of Mapuche women torched the forests they live in as an act of revenge for efforts to displace them.

Mapuches in Patagonia point to powerful economic interests with ties to Milei’s government as the real culprits behind the fires.

A fire sale of Patagonia

The forest fires that destroyed thousands of acres in the summer months are finally being quelled by autumn rains. Experts have warned that the high temperatures and low rainfall caused by climate change is behind rising fire destruction in the region. But local governments and the government of Javier Milei—a climate change denier—prefer to blame the Mapuche, while taking advantage of the destruction to privatize a land coveted for its minerals and pure water, and for its natural beauty and remoteness.

Milei began preparations to sell off Patagonia to foreigners as soon as he took office. Using presidential decrees, he repealed the law that limited foreign land ownership on Dec. 21 as part of a package of decreesto deregulate the economy and promote sale of resources to foreign investors.

In what seem to be moves to increase the vulnerability of protected natural reserves, he eliminated the Fund for the Protection of Forests and transferred responsibility to the security ministry, leaving a huge void in know-how, infrastructure and funding to confront forest fires, despite the fact that each year fire destroys more forest land. He also cut spending of the National Service for Fire Management by 81%.

Milei also announced the repeal of the law that bans the immediate sale of land affected by fire for agribusiness and real estate development. This kind of law exists in most countries as a necessary safeguard against business incentives to torch public lands. Although the repeal has not gone into effect yet, it recently passed committee in the Senate and continues to be a key element in the government’s plan for a massive fire sale of Patagonian lands.

Mining companies, real estate interests, hydroelectric plants and other megaproject developers have long waited to get their hands on more land in Argentina’s Patagonia. Milei is banking on the sell-off of indigenous territories and resources to help pay for the huge debt he hopes to receive in order to prop up the Argentina peso and avoid the total collapse that looms under his radical free-market policies.

Neocolonialism, rebooted

The Milei government has mapped the road forward for Patagonia, and it runs right over the bodies and the territories of the Mapuche people. To mask its own complicity with business interests hoping to move onto affected lands, the Milei government launched a media and legal strategy to deflect attention from the link between the fires and land-use changes that stand to benefit billionaire foreigners, and to neutralize the Mapuche-Tehuelche people who stand in their way through criminalization, eviction and extermination.

The formula is not new. Crusades against the Mapuche began with the conquest of their ancestral lands centuries ago and has not let up since then. The current crisis has the same colonial roots as previous genocidal campaigns: racism and the takeover of land and resources by force.

In January, Bullrich ordered the eviction of the Lof Pailako in the Los Alerces National Park. To avoid bloodshed, community members abandoned their homes hours before the arrival of police forces. Families were left homeless, animals without sustenance and children without access to housing, health or education. Bullrich stated triumphantly: “This is the first eviction of a series that will mark the end of a period in which a lack of respect for private property reigned in Argentina.”

The Minister of Security acts with the full backing of the federal and provincial governments. Milei, an admirer of Donald Trump and member of the international far right, launched the offensive against the Mapuche with his trademark free-market and white supremacist zealotry. While giving investors free rein, he ended indigenous land registry programs and rescinded Law 26.160, the Emergency Indigenous Territory Law of 2006 that at least nominally suspended evictions of indigenous communities in indigenous territory. Despite having signed on to international indigenous rights treaties, successive governments of both the right and the left failed to institutionalize recognition of land and rights, paving the way for Milei to revert gains and protections for the communities.

Human rights organizations have denounced the repeal of indigenous rights to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the Office of the Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

The billionaire bonanza

As the Mapuche are violently evicted from the few hectares of land they live on, international billionaires already own, often illegally, millions of hectares in the Argentine Patagonia and are looking to take over more. The ultra-rich set their sights on this land with its sweeping views of the Andes and miles of clear lakes and open woods decades ago. The region holds much of the earth’s remaining fresh water, clean air and pristine forests. Corporations have moved in to exploit natural resources, and individual billionaires see the region as their private playground and a refuge for when the rest of the planet becomes inhabitable.

A case point is Lago Escondido, property of the British multimillionaire Joe Lewis. Lewis owns 12-14 thousand hectares including the entire lake. Although he has entertained Argentine presidents and foreign dignitaries on his property, it’s sealed it off to public access by physical barriers and armed guards. Other foreign interests with extensive holdings in the Argentine Patagonia include the Israeli firm Mekorot, the Italian firm Benetton, the actor Sylvester Stallone, and investment companies from United Arab Emirates, among others.

Like Trump, Milei’s government of the rich and for the rich has acted fast to remove environmental and social restrictions. Milei instituted a new Incentive Regime for Large Investments (RIGI by its Spanish initials) last year that provides tax breaks, customs incentives and foreign exchange benefits for projects of more than 200 million dollars that are initiated within two years. The law will promote the kind of large-scale extractivist projects that citizen groups and Mapuche communities have opposed for uprooting communities and destroying the land.

An analysis of the likely impact of RIGI in Chubut finds that Patagonian province could see a rapid boom in mining and oil and gas exploitation. Chubut has a ban on open-pit mining–the result of grassroots organizing. Experts fear a legal challenge that could result in overturning the popular will expressed in the ban.

RIGI and the other programs to sell Patagonia to foreign investors set the scene for local conflicts over land and resource use. Billionaire land owners stand to profit enormously from Milei’s measures and already have drawn up plans to expand holdings and operations.

The attacks, expulsions and criminalization of the Mapuche communities can be seen as a preemptive measure to weaken forces that defend native lands and environmental protection.

Reinforcing the Police State

The federal government has prepared to put down resistance by legalizing violent repression of local and national opposition. On March 10, Congress passed the so-called  “Anti-Mafias Law” that mandates that all members of a group can be given the same sentence as a single member, a law the international associations of jurists and human rights organizations have called the “legalization of a virtual state of siege” especially designed to apply to those most hurt by Milei’s measure–the poor, political opposition, unionists and indigenous peoples.

Milei’s government also adopted an “anti-picket protocol” that criminalizes protest. These measures have led to more than a thousand protesters injured due to excessive use of force, according to a report by Amnesty International. Most recently, police fired a gas canister directly at a photographer during March 12 protests. The photographer Pablo Grillo, whose skull was broken, is still in intensive therapy.

The recreation of a brutal police state in Argentina conjures images of the military dictatorship, a period of state terrorism that lasted from 1976 to 1983. Millan warns that the Milei government is a dictatorship and that the country is seeing a return to the “state terrorism” that led to thousands of assassinations and disappearances during the military dictatorship.

When Caring for Land and Culture Means Risking your Life

It’s not surprising that the regime has made indigenous women the center of its defamation campaign. Women are the core of Mapuche defense of their territory and the protection of the land and life against extractivist projects and privatization. They’ve worked for decades to consolidate and reestablish communities in ancestral lands, teach new generations the Mapuche language and customs, and build peaceful resistance. The latest government-corporate offensive has put their lives and liberty at grave risk.

“This group in power—patriarchal, racist —feels threatened by the capacity and the defense of life that we women carry out,” Moira explained in a recent interview. “The State and the corporations know that women can build alliances among sectors to defend rights so they need to weaken this strong organizational process in this historic moment, including at the global level.” In this context she added, the openly misogynist attacks of the Milei government are strategic, they’re being incorporated into public policy, and they are a focus of repressive policies.

Despite all the forces against them, today’s Mapuche communities continue to live on and care for their land. They protect the rivers and lakes, and manage the forests to keep trees healthy, prevent fire damage and control invasive species. Some have lived on these lands continuously for generations, others have returned from forced migration to urban slums to rebuild their lives, their land and their identity.

Almost every day during the weeks of our visit, the women left the house early to hold traditional ceremonies. Language, spirituality, and ancestral knowledge and practices are nourished through daily life, family and community ties. Even after the genocidal campaigns and the speeches devoted to denying their existence (the government frequently speaks of “pseudo-Mapuches”) or spreading hate, these communities still survive and it’s because of them that the region still offers world-famous fresh water, abundant fish and unspoiled views.

The power of example can be more threatening to illegitimate power than might.

Two radically different views of the land and humans’ relationship to it are in play here. As plans advance to create an extractivist enclave out of nature’s masterpiece, Moira Millán summed it up: “We have firmly opposed extractivist large-scale mining, dams, hydroelectric projects that would murder the river to provide electricity to transnationals and lately the aqueduct that oil companies are pushing for. The Mapuche people recover land to reaffirm the commitment to life. For us, life is the most important. And not just human life, the life of everything in our surroundings.”

The post Milei’s Fire Sale of Patagonia and the Mapuche People’s Fight for Life appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Laura Carlsen.

Trump administration officials have been working on an agreement to sell the popular social media app, owned by China-based ByteDance, to an American buyer, as required by a bipartisan law enacted in 2024. But this also requires China’s approval.

“We had a deal pretty much for TikTok – not a deal but pretty close – and then China changed the deal because of tariffs,” Trump told reporters. “If I gave a little cut in tariffs they would have approved that deal in 15 minutes, which shows the power of tariffs.”

Trump on Wednesday signed a far-reaching “reciprocal tariff” policy at the White House, in which he imposed a 34% tariff rate on China. Coupled with the existing 20% tariffs on Chinese imports, the true tariff rate on China is now 54%.

China on Friday announced it was retaliating, with its own 34% tariff on all imports from the U.S. starting April 10. It also announced plans to restrict exports of some rare earth items.

Before Trump announced widespread tariffs, the TikTok deal was reportedly close, advanced by a consortium of U.S. investors, but Trump said China’s objections impeded the pact. The Washington Post reported earlier that Trump’s moves to heighten tariffs on China stalled the talks.

Trump previously said he may consider reducing China tariffs to help facilitate a TikTok deal.

The U.S. Congress had initially mandated that the short-video platform find a new, non-Chinese owner by Jan. 19 for national security reasons, with Trump later extending the deadline until April 5.

During his first term as president, Trump had tried to ban TikTok, but a U.S. federal judge ruled the president did not have the authority to ban the app. Following that judicial rebuke, Congress passed the bill calling for TikTok’s sale, which then-President Joe Biden signed.

Some lawmakers in the U.S. said that China could gain access to TikTok’s personal data for the purpose of influencing political opinion in the country, but the Chinese Foreign Ministry has said the country’s government has never asked companies to “collect or provide data, information or intelligence” held in foreign countries.

TikTok, which has offices in Singapore and Los Angeles, has said it prioritizes user safety.

(Mandel Ngan/AFP)

Trump said that he would maintain tariffs on foreign nations unless the trade deficits the U.S. faces with various countries, including China, were eliminated.

“Hundreds of billions of dollars a year we lose with China,” Trump told reporters on Sunday

“And unless we solve that problem, I’m not going to make a deal,” said Trump, adding that he was “willing to deal with China, but they have to solve their surplus.”

The 10% baseline tariff imposed by Trump on almost all trading partners became effective Saturday morning, with a second wave of tariffs set to take effect Wednesday morning. These new measures, combined with recently implemented tariffs on foreign metals, automobiles, and goods from Canada, Mexico, and China, have increased U.S. import tariffs by nearly ten times their previous levels.

Trump’s trade policies have sparked widespread opposition, drawing criticism even from U.S. allies.

China responded with a series of aggressive countermeasures, while other countries are attempting to negotiate reduced rates.

Vietnam, which faces one of the highest proposed tariff rates at 46%, for instance, is requesting a 45-day postponement and has offered to eliminate its own tariffs.

Taiwan’s president, Lai Ching-te, on Sunday offered zero tariffs as the basis for talks with the U.S., pledging to remove trade barriers and saying Taiwanese companies would increase their U.S. investments.

Asian markets plunged on Monday, with Japan’s benchmark Nikkei falling by more than 8% shortly after opening.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index dropped by 9% in early trade, with shares in Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Tencent falling more than 8%.

In South Korea, trading on the Kospi index was halted for five minutes at 9.12 a.m. as stocks plummeted.

Taiwan’s stock exchange fell almost 10% on the Monday open, the first day of trading since the tariffs were announced due to a two-day holiday last week. Falls were driven by the world’s largest chipmaker TSMC and the world’s largest contract manufacturer Foxconn, and marked the largest daily point and percentage loss on record, according to local media.

Trump said he had spoken to leaders from Europe and Asia over the weekend, who hope to convince him to lower tariffs that are as high as 50% and due to take effect this week.

“They are coming to the table. They want to talk but there’s no talk unless they pay us a lot of money on a yearly basis,” he said.

Separately, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said more than 50 nations had started negotiations with Washington since last Wednesday’s announcement.

“He’s created maximum leverage for himself,” Bessent said on NBC News’ Meet the Press, referring to Trump.

Bessent added there was “no reason” to anticipate a recession, citing stronger-than-anticipated U.S. jobs growth last month, before the tariffs were announced.

Neither Trump nor Bessent named the countries or offered details about the talks.

Edited by Mike Firn.

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

The United States has approved a multibillion-dollar deal to sell 20 fighter jets to the Philippines, officials announced just days after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made his first official visit to Manila.

The sale for the package of F-16s along with related equipment and parts is contingent on Manila formally accepting it through a letter, the U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DCSA) said in a statement Tuesday.

“The State Department has made a determination approving a possible Foreign Military Sale to the Government of the Philippines of F-16 Aircraft for an estimated cost of $5.58 billion,” the statement said, adding the DCSA had notified Congress about the possible sale.

The Philippines, one of America’s closest allies in Southeast Asia, for years has been looking to modernize and upgrade its military arsenal and air force fleet as it confronts territorial tensions with China in the South China Sea.

“This proposed sale will support the foreign policy and national security of the United States by helping to improve the security of a strategic partner that continues to be an important force for political stability, peace and economic progress in Southeast Asia,” the DCSA said.

If finalized, the sale “will enhance the Philippine Air Force’s ability to conduct maritime domain awareness and close air support missions and enhance its suppression of enemy air defenses,” the agency said. “This sale will also increase the ability of the Armed Forces of the Philippines to protect vital interests and territory, as well as expand interoperability with the U.S. forces.”

The sale, the agency also said, would “not alter the basic military balance in the region.”

The Philippine Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a BenarNews request for comment.

RELATED STORIES

US to send advanced military hardware to Philippines

Philippine envoy: Manila’s defense alliance with Washington ‘remains intact’

Philippines to get US $500M in defense infusion from Washington

Greg Poling, a maritime analyst from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said it was too soon to say if the deal would go through.

“State has approved it, but that doesn’t mean the Philippines will actually follow through with the purchase, or that the final number will really be 20 F-16s,” he told BenarNews.

“If this does happen, it certainly doesn’t change the balance of power, but it could give the Philippines a greater ability to defend its own aircraft over the South China Sea. Right now, the Philippines’ only capable combat aircraft are FA-50 trainer jets from South Korea.”

Defense secretary visit

The announcement followed Hegseth’s meetings with Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro Jr. on March 28 in Manila, where he assured the Filipinos that Washington’s defense commitment to its treaty ally would remain strong under the second administration of President Donald Trump.

“Deterrence is necessary around the world, but specifically in this region, in your country, considering the threats from the communist Chinese, and that friends need to stand shoulder-to-shoulder to deter conflict,” Hegseth told Marcos, according to a transcript of their meeting at Malacañang Palace.

(Basilio Sepe/Reuters)

Marcos said that Hegseth’s choosing Manila as the first stop on his first Asian trip as the Pentagon chief “sends a very strong message of the commitment of both our countries to continue to work together to maintain the peace in the Indo-Pacific region within the South China Sea.”

China: Who’s fueling the flames?

In Beijing on Wednesday, Foreign Ministry Spokesman Guo Jiakun questioned the proposed sale.

“We’ve made clear more than once our position on military and security cooperation between the Philippines and the U.S. Whatever defense or security cooperation between the Philippines and other countries should not target any third party or harm their interest, still less threaten regional peace and security or escalate tensions in the region,” he said in response to a question during the daily news conference.

“Who exactly is fueling the flames? Who exactly is instigating military confrontation? Who exactly is turning Asia into a ‘powder keg?’ Regional countries are not blind.” 

For months, Philippine officials had filed diplomatic complaints against their Chinese counterparts over incidents involving ships firing water cannons and jets flying too closely in disputed South China Sea waters.

In January, a Philippine Navy spokesman accused China of an “increase in aggression” by using a long-rang acoustic device that sailors said could damage hearing or cause severe discomfort by emitting piercing, high-decibel sounds.

‘Unprecedented’ funding

Under Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, the U.S. announced in July 2024 what it called an “unprecedented” infusion of $500 million to help the Philippines defend its shores against perceived threats from China.

Lloyd Austin and Antony Blinken, then the U.S. secretaries of defense and state, negotiated with their Filipino counterparts, Teodoro and Foreign Affairs Secretary Enrique Manalo at a “2+2” meeting in Manila.

“[W]e are taking bold steps to strengthen our alliance,” Austin told reporters following nearly four hours of closed-door talks.

“We are poised to deliver a once-in-a-generation investment to help modernize the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine Coast Guard. We are working with the U.S. congress to allocate $500 million in foreign military financing into the Philippines,” he said.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news service.

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

BlackRock and CK Hutchison, which is controlled by Hong Kong billionaire Lee Ka-shing, announced earlier this month that they had reached an agreement in principle for BlackRock to acquire CK Hutchison’s 90% interests in Panama Ports, which owns and operates the Panama terminals Balboa and Cristobal.

BlackRock will also buy CK Hutchison’s 80% controlling interest in a further 43 ports in 23 other countries, the companies said in a joint statement dated March 4.

(Bobby Yip/Reuters)

The sale came amid growing calls in Washington for action to loosen Beijing’s influence stemming from Chinese and Hong Kong companies' control over key infrastructure on the Panama Canal and other port facilities in the Western hemisphere.

On Feb. 3, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio threatened Panamanian leader José Raúl Mulino with potential American retaliation if his country didn’t immediately reduce Chinese influence over the canal.

Lee said concerns about the deal “deserve serious attention,” possibly hinting at some form of legal action.

“We oppose the abusive use of coercion or bullying tactics in international, economic and trade relations,” Lee told journalists in Hong Kong on Tuesday, adding that Hong Kong would handle any commercial transaction “according to the law.”

“The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government urges foreign governments to provide a fair and just environment for enterprises, including enterprises from Hong Kong,” he told journalists at a regular briefing on Tuesday.

(Tyrone Siu/Reuters)

The ruling Chinese Communist Party responded by sending a delegation to Panama led by Ma Hui, vice-minister of the Central Committee’s International Department, state news agency Xinhua reported.

“China is willing to strengthen exchanges with Panamanian political parties and think tanks, enhance mutual understanding and trust, and solidify public support for friendly relations between China and Panama,” it quoted Ma as saying on March 17.

The visit came as Communist Party-backed media criticized the CK Hutchison port sale, citing a “close personal relationship” between BlackRock and the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.

Hong Kong’s Ta Kung Pao newspaper said the Trump administration had “directly and blatantly intervened and manipulated the deal without scruple, using it as a way to promote their global hegemony.”

“Now that the Panama Canal has been Americanized and politicized, the United States will definitely be using it to promote its own political agenda,” the paper said, citing “huge risks” for Chinese companies' shipping costs and supply chains.

It said plans to charge Chinese ships bigger docking fees could affect China’s shipping industry, foreign trade and President Xi Jinping’s “Belt and Road” global supply chain, infrastructure and influence program.

(Enea Lebrun/Reuters)

“This is power politics packaged as commercial behavior,” the paper said in an editorial that was posted to the official website of Beijing’s Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office (in Chinese).

It said accusations on social media that CK Hutchison had engaged in “spineless grovelling and profit-seeking while disregard the national interest” were “completely understandable.”

“The company concerned should think twice ... and think carefully about what side it’s on,” the paper said.

Neither China’s State Administration for Market Regulation nor the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office of the State Council had responded to requests for comment by the time of publication.

Financial analyst Simon Lee said Lee Ka-shing was caught between a rock and a hard place.

“If he sells, he’s done for. If he doesn’t sell, he’s done for,” Lee said. “It seems that it’s no longer possible to be just a business, whether in China or the United States.”

“Now you have to pick a side -- you can’t just do business like you could before.”

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Dawn Yu for RFA Cantonese.

COMMENTARY: By Gideon Levy

And what if US President Donald Trump suggested setting up death camps for the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip? What would happen then?

Israel would respond exactly as it did to his transfer ideas, with ecstasy on the right and indifference in the centrist camp.

Opposition leader Yair Lapid would announce that he would go to Washington to present a “complementary plan”, like he offered to do with regard to the transfer plan.

• READ MORE: Hamas says 3 Gaza captives to be freed on Saturday as Israel warns of war
• New Zealand, one state for two nations — Gideon Levy via Pacific Media Centre
  
• On the skewed media coverage of Gaza

Benny Gantz would say that the plan shows “creative thinking, is original and interesting.” Bezalel Smotrich, with his messianic frame of mind, would say, “God has done wonders for us and we rejoice.” Benjamin Netanyahu would rise in public opinion polls.

The issue is no longer a hypothetical one. Trump will not explicitly suggest death camps, but he has already consented to Israel’s continuing a war that is not a war but rather a barbaric assault on a desolate stretch of land. From there, the road to annihilation is short, and Israel will not bat an eye. Trump approved it.

After all, no one In Israel rose up to tell the president of the United States “thank you for your ideas, but Israel will never support the expulsion of the Gaza Strip’s Palestinians.”

Hence, why be confident that if Trump suggested annihilating anyone refusing to evacuate Gaza, Israel would not cooperate with him? Just as Trump exposed the transfer sentiment beating in the heart of almost every Israeli, aimed at solving the problem “once and for all,” he may yet expose a darker element, the sentiment of “it’s us or them.”

A whitewasher of crimes
It’s no coincidence that a shady character like Trump has become a guide for Israel. He is exactly what we wanted and dreamed about: a whitewasher of crimes. He may well turn out to be the American president who caused the most damage ever inflicted on Israel.

There were presidents who were tight-fisted with aid, others who were sour on Israel, who even threatened it. There has never been a president who has set out to destroy the last vestiges of Israel’s morality.

From here on, anything Trump approves will become Israel’s gold standard.

Trump is now pushing Israel into resuming its attacks on the Gaza Strip, setting impossible terms for Hamas: All the hostages must be returned before Saturday noon, not a minute later, like the mafia does. And if only three hostages are returned, as was agreed upon? The gates of hell will open.

They won’t open only in Gaza, which has already been transformed into hell. They will open in Israel too. Israel will lose its last restraints. Trump gave his permission.

But Trump will be gone one day. He may lose interest before that, and Israel will be left with the damage he wrought, damage inflicted by a criminal, leper state.

No public diplomacy or friends will be able to save it if it follows the path of its new ethical oracle. No accusations of antisemitism will silence the world’s shock if Israel embarks on another round of combat in the enclave.

How would Israel respond if Trump called for death camps in Gaza? https://t.co/oYiMlp3PnE.

— Gideon Levy (@gideonle) February 13, 2025

A new campaign must begin
One cannot overstate the intensity of the damage. The renewal of attacks on Gaza, with the permission and under the authority of the American administration, must be blocked in Israel. Along with the desperate campaign for returning the hostages, a new campaign must begin, against Trump and his outlandish ideas.

However, not only is there no one who can lead such a campaign, there is also no one who could initiate it. The only battles being waged here now, for the hostages and for the removal of Netanyahu, are important, but they cannot remain the only ones.

The resumption of the “war” is the greatest disaster now facing us, heralding genocide, with no more argument about definitions.

After all, what would a “war” look like now, other than an assault on tens of thousands of refugees who have nothing left? What will the halting of humanitarian aid, fuel and medicine and water mean if not genocide?

We may discover that the first 16 months of the war were only a starter, the first 50,000 deaths only a prelude.

Ask almost any Israeli and he will say that Trump is a friend of Israel, but Trump is actually Israel’s most dangerous enemy now. Hamas and Hezbollah will never destroy it like he will.

Gideon Levy is a Ha’aretz columnist and a member of the newspaper’s editorial board. He joined Ha’aretz in 1982, and spent four years as the newspaper’s deputy editor. He is the author of the weekly Twilight Zone feature, which covers the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza over the last 25 years, as well as the writer of political editorials for the newspaper. Levy visited New Zealand in 2017.

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

We speak with a Greenlandic member of the Danish Parliament, Aaja Chemnitz, about incoming U.S. President Donald Trump’s plans to make America larger, in part by taking ownership of Greenland, which is controlled by Denmark. Greenland’s prime minister rejected the idea this week, saying, “We are not for sale and will never be for sale.” Trump’s statement on Greenland was made as he announced he was picking PayPal co-founder Ken Howery as his pick for United States ambassador to Denmark. “We’re open for business. We’re not for sale,” says Chemnitz. “The decision on what should happen with the future of Greenland is up to the Greenlandic people.”

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

Yi Shenghua, who until Wednesday morning local time was listed as a director of the Beijing Yongzhe Law Firm, sparked a social media storm after he revealed the grisly details of a body-snatching scheme in which dead bodies and body parts were sold off to biotech institutions to be harvested for dental bone grafts without relatives’ knowledge or consent.

Investigators from the Ministry of Public Security are investigating reports that Shanxi Aurui Biomaterials had been involved in trading thousands of dead bodies or body parts, on suspicion that the company engaged in “theft of, insult to, or intentional destruction of human remains,” according to multiple news reports that followed up on Yi’s posts.

Yi had alleged that bodies were being sent to the company from funeral homes across Shanxi, Sichuan and Guangxi provinces, with thousands of bodies in Sichuan alone, and more than 70 families seeking redress. 

Their bones were being used to create dental bone implants, and relatives couldn’t be sure the ashes they were receiving were indeed the complete remains of their loved ones, he wrote, quoting a fellow lawyer.

Later, after being warned off going public by officials from the Beijing Municipal Judicial Affairs, he posted: “I am willing to pay the price to expose this enraging truth.”

In an Aug. 13 official announcement, the Bureau said Yi would step down from his position as director of Beijing Yongzhe, which he founded. The firm didn’t immediately update its website, however, and Yi was still listed as a director on Wednesday morning.

An employee who answered the phone at Beijing Yongzhe on Wednesday appeared to confirm the move when contacted by RFA Mandarin.

“Li Yinghong is now the director recognized by the Judicial Affairs Bureau,” the employee said, before handing the phone to a colleague.

Asked why Yi’s name was still listed on the firm’s website, the second colleague said: “The Bureau of Judicial Affairs’ version will definitely be more accurate than ours.”

Soon afterward, Yi’s listing as director was removed from the firm’s website, and Li Yinghong’s name appeared in its place.

‘Anyone who dares to expose’

A Beijing-based lawyer who gave only the pseudonym Wang for fear of reprisals said Yi’s ouster was definitely linked to his whistle-blowing over the body-snatching case.

“The Beijing Municipal Judicial Affairs Bureau has a deputy director of the lawyers’ work guidance department called Zhu Yuzhu who has been behind the punishment of many lawyers and law firms in the past,” Wang said. “He was the architect of the July 9, 2015, political crackdown [on rights lawyers].”

“Now, it’s Yi Shenghua’s turn,” he said. “Yi’s exposure of the theft and sale of human bones was a meaningful act for society, but ... he is being punished by the Beijing Municipal Judicial Affairs Bureau.”

Another lawyer who gave only the pseudonym Tan for fear of reprisals said Yi’s sacking highlights how little freedom of speech there is in China.

“It’s not just Yi Shenghua; journalists who exposed the gutter oil scandal were also persecuted back then,” Tan said. “Anyone who dares to expose the dark side [of Chinese society] will be attacked and retaliated against.”

Chinese censors have moved in tandem with the sacking of Yi Shenghua to minimize public discussion of the scandal.

All of Yi’s Weibo posts about the body-snatching case have since been removed from the social media platform Weibo, along with much of the content and comment on the case.

According to an in-depth follow-up from official media outlet The Paper that has since been deleted, the Taiyuan Public Security Bureau in the northern province of Shanxi sent the results of an investigation into the illegal sale of corpses to the state prosecutor for review and prosecution in May.

Shanxi Aorui stands accused of “illegally purchasing human remains and body parts from Sichuan, Guangxi, Shandong and other places for processing into bone grafts worth 380 million yuan (US$53 million) between January 2015 and July 2023,” The Paper said.

It said police had seized “more than 18 tonnes of human bones” and more than 34,000 articles of finished product from the company, and that one suspect identified only by his surname Su had arranged for more than 4,000 human remains to be stolen from four funeral homes in Yunnan, Chongqing, Guizhou and Sichuan between 2017 and 2019.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie.

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

The chairman of Papua New Guinea’s national power provider has called for a faster U.S. and foreign donor roll-out of promised electricity infrastructure while saying there is absolutely no plan to sell critical grid assets to China. 

At APEC’s Port Moresby meeting in 2018, the U.S, Australia, New Zealand and Japan pledged to fund new electricity infrastructure in the Pacific country with the goal of connecting 70% of PNG’s population by 2030. 

The deal was announced against a backdrop of growing concern in Washington and Canberra about China’s inroads with Pacific island nations, especially as an economic partner.

But six years later, there is little to show in terms of electricity connectivity, according to analysts and industry insiders, with one donor admitting the “2030 target remains ambitious.”

“It could be faster, and there are a lot more discussions that need to be made between the parties,” Moses Maladina, the chairman of PNG Power, told RFA affiliate BenarNews on the sidelines of an investment conference in the Australian city of Brisbane.

“There is room for improvement. We just have to work closely and make sure we achieve the target.”

Maladina, who is also the chairman of Kumul Consolidated Holdings, the government’s investment arm in state-owned infrastructure, ports, logistics and financial services, batted away reports that the power grid was for sale. 

Australian broadcaster Channel 7 claimed last week that management from PNG Power had traveled to China seeking investment in its power grid, triggering a furious denial from Port Moresby which accused the station of inflaming geopolitical tensions.

Maladina said that legally and officially there had been no talks about any potential sale to Chinese investors. 

“From a shareholders point of view, there has been no discussion on it and absolutely no interest on our part to sell our transmission lines or our distribution lines in any way,” he said.

Papua New Guinea is the most populous Pacific island country with an estimated 11.7 million people, but its economy is small, underdeveloped and plagued by infrastructure problems.

Only about 13% of the population is estimated to have access to electricity, and even then it is unreliable and confined primarily in urban areas, according to the Asian Development Bank.

In 2018, the Trump White House touted the Papua New Guinea Electrification Partnership (PEP) as a “principles-based, sustainable infrastructure development that is transparent” – in an apparent rebuke of what it frequently said was China’s secrecy-shrouded development financing to poor nations.

Australia committed A$25 million in the first year of the multi-year PEP project. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade did not provide figures on overall investment by the time of publication. 

New Zealand has invested NZ$41 million (US$24.7 million) to date towards electrification in PNG under the partnership, including rural grid extension and renewable generation projects.

“The constraints to broad based grid connection in Papua New Guinea are significant, including geography, land ownership structures and the regulatory environment, so a 2030 target remains ambitious,” said a spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. 

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) launched a five-year US$57 million electrification program under the PEP in November 2020, but did not reply to a request for comment about its continued involvement.

Mihai Sora, director of the Pacific islands program at the Lowy Institute, said the partnership’s 2030 target was looking increasingly out of reach. 

“The PEP was designed as a multi-party flagship development initiative that was intended to present an alternative to the BRI for PNG,” he told BenarNews, using the acronym for China’s globe-spanning infrastructure program, the Belt and Road Initiative.

“But progress has been slow, complicated by the deep governance challenges in PNG’s domestic power sector, the rugged geography of PNG, the difficulty of coordinating so many separate partners, and low capacity among domestic stakeholders in PNG.”

Sora said the strategic context during which the deal was signed in 2018 has become more pronounced today, as China vies for influence in PNG with the U.S. and its allies. However, it would be difficult for PNG to “pivot to China for the same kind of support in the power sector, given the work that is already underway on this project.”

PNG’s Minister for State Enterprises William Duma demanded an apology from Channel 7 over its report, calling it “ridiculous.” But the broadcaster said it stood by the story. 

Duma’s demand was not the first time he has squared off with Australian media. He successfully sued the Australian Financial Review last year for defamation over claims that he acted corruptly in granting a petroleum license and won A$545,000 (US$340,000). 

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.

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

The Center for Biological Diversity and Natural Resources Defense Council filed the lawsuit together with Earthjustice, on behalf of Cook Inletkeeper, Kachemak Bay Conservation Society, and Alaska Community Action on Toxics.

Lease Sale 258, held by the Department of the Interior in December 2022, opened nearly a million acres of federal waters in Southcentral Alaska to the fossil fuel industry, potentially locking in decades of future oil and gas drilling.

The Interior Department originally canceled Lease Sale 258 in May 2022, but then announced it would move ahead in August after the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. Though that legislation spurred efforts to address climate change, it included a provision reviving the Cook Inlet lease sale (along with two others in the Gulf of Mexico: Lease Sales 259 and 261, which are being litigated).

While Lease Sale 258 only resulted in one bid for a relatively small tract, the areas auctioned off to bidder Hilcorp overlapped with critical habitat for federally endangered marine mammals. Cook Inlet is home to beluga whales and sea otters protected under the Endangered Species Act.

Tuesday’s ruling noted that, among other things, the Department of the Interior failed to fully consider the lease sale’s cumulative impacts on beluga whales, as well as the issue of blaring vessel noise. Belugas use sound to “see” in a process known as echolocation, which supports behaviors such as hunting, avoiding obstacles, and finding each other, so noise impacts can threaten whales’ survival.

Following the ruling, Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management must conduct a supplemental environmental review and determine based on this new review whether or not to add protections or redo the lease sale. The ruling also suspends Hilcorp’s lease while this process is underway. Since the start of 2024 alone, Hilcorp has been the subject of four different enforcement actions from the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.

In addition to endangered marine life, Cook Inlet also supports thriving subsistence, commercial and recreational fisheries and a multi-faceted tourist industry, fed by visitors from around the world drawn by the region’s unparalleled natural beauty. The Inlet is also essential for Alaska Native communities, who have stewarded these lands and waters for millennia.

Alaska is experiencing more extreme consequences of climate change than the continental United States. Coastal erosion, thawing permafrost, melting sea ice, and fishery collapse are all ramifications of the worsening global climate crisis, which will only intensify with new oil and gas drilling operations.

Partnering organizations released the following statements in response to this favorable decision:

“Today’s legal victory is a win for Alaska communities, threatened beluga whales, and future generations who will face a hotter planet,” said Earthjustice attorney Carole Holley. “We’re celebrating the fact that this destructive lease sale has been sent back to the drawing board, and we will continue to push for a transition away from fossil fuels and toward a brighter and healthier energy future.”

“This is a huge victory for Cook Inlet belugas. I hope this decision makes it clear to federal officials that they can’t keep ignoring the ways offshore drilling threatens these critically endangered whales,” said Kristen Monsell, oceans legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s reckless to keep destroying wildlife, ocean habitat and our climate for oil and gas drilling and it needs to stop. Interior must do its job and protect our country’s irreplaceable public lands, waters and wildlife from industrial havoc.”

“We are glad that the court recognizes the long-term harm that this lease sale would cause to our precious marine environment, belugas, and coastal communities,” said Pamela Miller, executive director of Alaska Community Action on Toxics. “This is the time for restoration and renewal, and for a swift transition to renewable energy, not more offshore oil and gas lease sales which will only perpetuate harm. Given the history of the oil corporations’ illegal dumping of toxic waste, spills, noise, and chronic damage, we must ensure that Interior fulfills its responsibility to protect our fisheries, wildlife, and health of our communities.”

“This ruling helps protect Cook Inlet’s vibrant ecosystem, which is home to endangered beluga whales, and supports productive fishing grounds and culturally important sites for Alaska Natives,” said Irene Gutierrez, senior attorney for NRDC. “The region should not be sacrificed to decades of oil drilling. Interior must fully consider the range of potential harms when it carries out the court’s ruling.”

“Today’s victory in Cook Inlet is a triumph of community resilience and environmental stewardship,” said Loren Barrett, co-executive director at Cook Inletkeeper. “Our coastal communities have long resisted oil and gas leasing, understanding the irreversible impacts of industrial disasters and the need to preserve Cook Inlet’s habitat, fisheries, and natural beauty. By overturning Lease Sale 258, the court has recognized the critical importance of safeguarding Cook Inlet's dynamic ecosystem, and an essential piece of habitat required to ensure the continued survival of the iconic Cook Inlet beluga whale.”

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

No religious services were scheduled at the time of the real estate sale and the counter-protest. Contrary to what the media is falsely reporting, the entrance was never blocked by anyone.

It is outrageous that President Biden and certain media outlets have misrepresented this protest as an anti-Semitic attack on worshippers. President Biden went as far as to say it was “un-American.” Is Biden saying that using a place of worship to sell “Anglo neighborhoods” on stolen land illegally is an American value?

This mischaracterization by President Biden is outrageous and has real consequences, as seen recently when two Palestinian-American children were nearly murdered in Texas, likely influenced by such inflammatory rhetoric. President Biden has not commented on this crime.

This rhetoric is reminiscent of the McCarthy-era smears used to discredit and, at times, deport activists for peace & civil rights. Not only is his narrative false but also dangerous—the protest aimed to address the unethical sale of Palestinian land, not to target any religious group.

During the protest, Zionists attacked peace activists and stole their phones, and the LAPD stood by, offering support to the aggressors. Organizers from CODEPINK Southeast LA explained how the police enabled and assisted zionist counter-protestors who attacked them:

“While our comrades were physically assaulted, pepper/bear sprayed, and attacked as they walked back to their cars, LAPD did nothing to keep us safe but rather pushed and used their combat toys to add to injury… shame on LA for allowing the hosting of these types of events that promote illegal sales of Palestinian territory and homes!”

The protest was solely focused on the illegal sale of Palestinian land. We respect religious practices and make sure our actions are directed toward real estate activities, not against worshippers. Those who claim to have journalism ethics must maintain the actual target of the protest: the illegal sale of Palestinian land is the issue, and it must be addressed without distortion.

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

Democratic Congressmember Delia Ramirez of Illinois says “big money in politics” is a threat to U.S. democracy, pointing to Jamaal Bowman’s primary race as an example of how deep-pocketed interest groups can impact election contests. Bowman is a progressive “Squad” member facing a tight nomination race in New York’s 16th Congressional District against his Democratic challenger George Latimer, who has the backing of groups affiliated with the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, which have pumped millions of dollars into the primary. Bowman was one of the first lawmakers to call for a Gaza ceasefire after October 7. “They are literally trying to purchase that election because he dared to stand for peace and justice,” says Ramirez.

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

Photograph Source: Voz de América – Public Domain

Teargas for mega-mines

Corporations and their government enablers prefer to keep the ecocidal and ethnocidal  reality of extractivism hidden, but activists in Ecuador are exposing the truth.

The Ecuadorian government, led by the administration of President Daniel Noboa, is forcefully and illegally pursuing mineral and fossil fuel extraction without democratic consent, tear-gassing peaceful protestors in full public view, and doing far worse to remote frontline communities. In the Andean Cotopaxi region, where Canadian firm Atico Mining plans to extract gold and copper at the expense of a key water source, repression has been intensifying.

Ecuadorian law requires mining corporations to consult with impacted communities before starting operations. But last month, when the Palo Quemado community in Cotopaxi attempted to exercise this right, police and the military responded like Atico Mining henchmen, attacking more than 100 people and labeling them terrorists. One person was hospitalized and remains in critical condition according to a spokesperson from Extinction Rebellion Ecuador.

Refusing to let this violence stand, activists with XR Ecuador and fellow members of an anti-mining coalition joined with indigenous groups for multiple solidarity actions in Quito in March, starting with a protest in front of the Canadian Embassy. Officials took note, as became apparent the next day.

Surrounded by press on a busy city street, police bombarded protesters and onlookers with teargas during a peaceful sit-in at the Ministry of the Environment. “Something like this, in front of the media and the public, hasn’t happened in a long time in the city,” said a member of Extinction Rebellion from Quito. Despite the police aggression, the protesters managed to stay calm, regrouped, and continued with their planned rally.

Stop the gaslighting

Illegal mining isn’t Ecuadorian activists’ only ongoing struggle against extractivism. In a historic referendum in 2023, Ecuadorian citizens voted massively in favor of keeping over 726 million barrels of oil in the ground under the Amazonian Yasuní National Park. Celebrated as a climate victory around the world, the reality on the ground is that the battle to preserve this precious region, the most biodiverse in the world and home to two of the world’s last Indigenous communities living in voluntary isolation, is far from over.

To fund a crackdown against gang violence, Ecuador’s recently elected president Daniel Noboa has suggested a moratorium on the referendum, even though he vowed to protect the Yasuní when he was a presidential candidate. In a January interview to a local media outlet, Noboa said that he believed a “moratorium [to the referendum result regarding oil exploitation in the Yasuní] is a viable path”.

Pedro Bermeo is a spokesperson for YASunidos, a coalition of indigenous NGOs from the Amazon that led the call for the referendum. He recently told Climate Home News that Noboa’s statement is “worrying, unwise, and undemocratic” as Noboa is saying he won’t abide by people’s votes.

As someone who voted in favor to keep Yasuní’s oil underground, Bermeo said that people like him feel their “hope is being taken away”. When the referendum took place, Ecuador was already facing extreme violence and poverty. But nevertheless, people voted to keep the oil in the ground. “There was a feeling of hope to protect life on the planet”, says the activist. Bermeo argues that voters feel defrauded and “have stopped believing in the State”.

Belén Páez, president of climate and indigenous rights NGO Fundación Pachamama, said Noboa’s statement “is very dangerous in several ways because it attempts against the citizens’ decision and puts democracy at risk”. Páez, who has worked to protect indigenous rights in Ecuador, added that Noboa’s remarks could result in a set back of other environmental policies.

On February 1, the indigenous Amazon Waorani Nationality declared themselves in a ‘territorial emergency’ and demanded that the government respect the referendum and announced that, if a moratorium is formally proposed, they will take legal action against the Ecuadorian State. Their decision to do so was supported by the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon. “We are not going to allow our rights to continue being violated,” said Waoranai Nationality president Juan Bay, “it is time for us to have social and environmental justice”.

Since his remarks in January, president Noboa hasn’t referred to the moratorium again. But government insiders say that it is still a possibility.

Petroecuador, the state oil company, has actually ramped up extraction since the referendum, reaching a new peak production in 2023 in an attempt to extract as much oil as possible before the referendum can be enforced. In Yasuní alone, Petroecuador operates more than 400 gas flares, many beside the houses of indigenous people. The flares cause cancer, decimate biodiversity, and emit more than 100 million tons of greenhouse gasses each year.

A successful lawsuit against the government to remove the flares was filed by Las Nueve Niñas, a group of young women from Yasuní. Yet three years later, the flares are still there, and the government is trying to wriggle free of the court’s order.

On March 12, UDAPT, an anti-extractivist NGO co-organized a march through Quito with XR Ecuador, joined by Las Nueve Niñas and 300 more activists, to demand compliance with the court. The coalition then followed up with a sit-in at the national court. More actions are planned for May and June to pressure the government to stay true to its word, follow its own laws, and accept that Ecuador is not for sale.

Leave it in the ground

The idea that Ecuador should forgo extracting some of its oil in exchange for international financial support from wealthy countries had been more than 17 years in the making – first raised in 2006 by the economist and incoming Minister of Energy and Mines, Alberto Acosta. The plan would also have kept an estimated 410 million tons of CO2 – the major greenhouse gas driving climate change – from reaching the atmosphere.

Acosta’s proposal was embraced by the newly elected president Rafael Correa. The following year, Correa announced at the United Nations that Ecuador was seeking to raise funding commensurate to half of the value of 846 million barrels of unexploited oil the Ishpingo, Tambococha and Tiputini (ITT) oil fields in Yasuní. The plan was scrapped six years later when less than 10 percent of the target figure was raised. In 2013, Correa declared that Ecuador would move forward with operations in the ITT oil fields, proclaiming that, “The world has failed us”.

The government folded under the immense pressure of development debt and the predatory global financial architecture upon which extractive capitalism vampirizes the global south. Correa was not wrong in his assessment that the world had failed Ecuador, and in fact it was poised to steamroll the people’s consensus to reject ecocide and ethnocide in exchange for lining a few pockets with petrodollars.

In the months that followed, the Correa administration advanced oil operations within the ITT via two separate legal manipulations. First, he asked the Ecuadorian congress to declare that these operations were in the “national interest”, a constitutional prerequisite for drilling inside a national park. Ecuador’s constitution also prohibits “all forms of extractive activities” on the territories of peoples living in voluntary isolation. In a bureaucratic maneuver to circumvent these protections for indigenous communities, his administration changed official maps that had shown the presence of isolated family groups living in and around the ITT oil fields.

Activists and affected communities, however, did not cave. In August 2013, YASunidos launched a campaign to gather enough signatures to force a nationwide referendum on the question of whether Ecuador should leave the oil under the ITT fields in the ground in perpetuity. By 2015, the activists amassed over 750,000 signatures, the majority of which were invalidated by the Correa administration. Nearly a decade and multiple legal battles later, Ecuador’s constitutional court ruled in 2023 that YASunidos had enough valid signatures to force the referendum. Sadly, during that long period of litigation, the government had forged ahead with operations inside the ITT fields, which began producing oil in 2016.

The people of Ecuador have repeatedly made themselves clear through resistance in the streets, in the courts, and by voting for life – both for the rights of nature and for the Indigenous people living in places like Yasuní and Cotopaxi. In 2008, Ecuador became the first country to recognize the rights of nature in its constitution, building to the outcome of the 2023 referendum as the nation’s affirmation of the recognition that nature and all its constituent parts have inherent rights to life and wellbeing. In this paradigm, humans are a part of nature.

Trickle-down tricks

Natalia Greene, a political scientist, founding member of YASunidos, and executive committee member of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature, rejects the implication made by Petroecuador and pro-oil groups that oil extraction is needed to alleviate poverty in Ecuador.

“We’ve had 50 years of oil exploitation and we’re still a very poor country,” she said. “Exploitation of nonrenewable resources has a structure where few people and foreign companies win a lot of money, a few people get poor-paying jobs and our resources are exported. The social and environmental costs are never taken into account.”

Activists are pointing out rising inequality as a result of neoliberalism and neocolonial economic relations and are promoting alternative solutions for ending both poverty and extractivism. According to YASunidos, the income of the 110 largest companies in Ecuador represent 62% of the entire GDP. However, year after year the percentage of income taxes they pay continues to decrease while their profits increase. This trend is further accentuated with the 20 largest companies.

Reversing the trend of reducing the tax burden for the ultra rich is one way that activists propose to finance improved social welfare while leaving fossil fuels and other resources in the ground – and the numbers are impressive. If the corporate tax rate was increased by just 1.5%, more money would be raised than by the planned exploitation of the Yasuní. That is, in 25 years, more than $20 billion would be generated, which would more than offset the $18 billion that could be extracted from the natural reserve. These numbers do not even account for the many economic assets of Yasuní beyond oil. Destroying this ecosystem and the communities who have made it their home for millennia is simply a bad investment.

Ecuadorians have learned from experience that the trickle-down economics promised by extractivist corporations and state enablers is a myth, yet the destruction it leaves behind is painfully real. Between 2007 and 2013, oil revenues of $51.5 billion were generated – much more than the $18 billion that could supposedly be obtained from the ITT fields of Yasuní. However, even with this influx of cash, Ecuador was not able to overcome poverty and debt.

It is empirically untrue when it is claimed that continued mass extraction will end Ecuador’s miseries, as is currently being argued by the Noboa administration as well as fossil fuel and mining corporations. Equivalent money can be generated by other means without ecocide and ethnocide, without violating the Rights of Nature (inclusive of humans) in Yasuní, Cotopaxi, and elsewhere.

All out for transformation

The Constitution of Ecuador, in its article 317, declares that the State “will prioritize intergenerational responsibility, the conservation of nature (…) and will minimize negative environmental, cultural, social and economic impacts.” While these are beautiful words, this is not something that can be achieved in a vacuum, let alone the hostile, predatory vacuum of neocolonial extractivism. The governments of the world have failed to provide an efficient, coherent and organized response to climate change, hence the climate and ecological emergency continues to worsen; a fact that will affect the younger generations even more.

In a statement given on the long standing and growing coalition of anti-extractivist organizations and communities, YASunidos explains:

“We are a diverse and inclusive group of groups, we are people organized in defense of life in all its manifestations and forms, we seek active participation in the decision-making of our country and the world to determine our daily life and our future.

“We start from a reality of environmental devastation and climate change, the product of an ideology that has put its efforts and expectations in the promises of a capitalist and anthropocentric society where life is nothing more than a commodity.

“We want to transform our relationships with nature and other animals, in order to stop the history of destruction and death.”

As they prepare for ongoing struggle and brace for increasing repression from the current “business friendly” Noboa administration, activists in Ecuador are an example to the world – a world which must finally stop failing them by joining in solidarity against extractivism and for just alternatives.

This fight is a long-distance race, another lesson from struggle in Ecuador, but that doesn’t mean there is time to waste. “Join the movement,” says YASunidos. “We need to inform ourselves. Discuss alternatives. Share them. Get organized. Join collective actions in your community.”

The post Ecuador is Not For Sale appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Alexandria Shaner.

The Iranian government "bears responsibility" for the physical violence that led to the death of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Iranian-Kurdish woman who died in police custody in 2022, and for the brutal crackdown on largely peaceful street protests that followed, a report by a United Nations fact-finding mission says.

The report, issued on March 8 by the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran, said the mission “has established the existence of evidence of trauma to Ms. Amini’s body, inflicted while in the custody of the morality police."

It said the mission found the "physical violence in custody led to Ms. Amini’s unlawful death.... On that basis, the state bears responsibility for her unlawful death.”

Amini was arrested in Tehran on September 13, 2022, while visiting the Iranian capital with her family. She was detained by Iran's so-called "morality police" for allegedly improperly wearing her hijab, or hair-covering head scarf. Within hours of her detention, she was hospitalized in a coma and died on September 16.

Her family has denied that Amini suffered from a preexisting health condition that may have contributed to her death, as claimed by the Iranian authorities, and her father has cited eyewitnesses as saying she was beaten while en route to a detention facility.

The fact-finding report said the action “emphasizes the arbitrary character of Ms. Amini’s arrest and detention, which were based on laws and policies governing the mandatory hijab, which fundamentally discriminate against women and girls and are not permissible under international human rights law."

"Those laws and policies violate the rights to freedom of expression, freedom of religion or belief, and the autonomy of women and girls. Ms. Amini’s arrest and detention, preceding her death in custody, constituted a violation of her right to liberty of person,” it said.

The New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran hailed the findings and said they represented clear signs of "crimes against humanity."

“The Islamic republic’s violent repression of peaceful dissent and severe discrimination against women and girls in Iran has been confirmed as constituting nothing short of crimes against humanity,” said Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the center.

“The government’s brutal crackdown on the Women, Life, Freedom protests has seen a litany of atrocities that include extrajudicial killings, torture, and rape. These violations disproportionately affect the most vulnerable in society, women, children, and minority groups,” he added.

The report also said the Iranian government failed to “comply with its duty” to investigate the woman’s death promptly.

“Most notably, judicial harassment and intimidation were aimed at her family in order to silence them and preempt them from seeking legal redress. Some family members faced arbitrary arrest, while the family’s lawyer, Saleh Nikbaht, and three journalists, Niloofar Hamedi, Elahe Mohammadi, and Nazila Maroufian, who reported on Ms. Amini’s death were arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced to imprisonment,” it added.

Amini's death sparked mass protests, beginning in her home town of Saghez, then spreading around the country, and ultimately posed one of the biggest threats to Iran's clerical establishment since the foundation of the Islamic republic in 1979. At least 500 people were reported killed in the government’s crackdown on demonstrators.

The UN report said "violations and crimes" under international law committed in the context of the Women, Life, Freedom protests include "extrajudicial and unlawful killings and murder, unnecessary and disproportionate use of force, arbitrary deprivation of liberty, torture, rape, enforced disappearances, and gender persecution.

“The violent repression of peaceful protests and pervasive institutional discrimination against women and girls has led to serious human rights violations by the government of Iran, many amounting to crimes against humanity," the report said.

The UN mission acknowledged that some state security forces were killed and injured during the demonstrations, but said it found that the majority of protests were peaceful.

The mission stems from the UN Human Rights Council's mandate to the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran on November 24, 2022, to investigate alleged human rights violations in Iran related to the protests that followed Amini's death.

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

"Let's be serious. NATO cannot be an a la carte military alliance, it cannot be a military alliance that works depending on the humor of the president of the U.S." day to day, Borrell said after Trump suggested that under his administration the United States might not defend NATO allies that failed to spend enough on defense.

Borrell added that he would not keep commenting on "any silly idea" emerging from the U.S. presidential election campaign.

Trump, the Republican front-runner in the 2024 race, sent a chill through European allies when he said at a campaign rally on February 10 he would "encourage" Russia to attack any NATO country that does not meet financial obligations.

U.S. President Joe Biden called Trump's comments "appalling and dangerous" in a statement on February 11, joining several European defense and foreign ministers responding over the weekend.

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine

RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia's full-scale invasion, Kyiv's counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

The reactions continued on February 12, with Dutch Defense Minister Kajsa Ollongren saying Trump's comment was "exactly what Putin loves to hear."

Ollongren called the comment "worrying" and said it was not the first time that Trump has made a comment along these lines.

While in office, Trump -- who was defeated by Biden in the 2020 election -- often expressed doubts about the need for NATO and repeatedly threatened to pull out of the alliance if members did not pay what he considered their fair share for their defense.

Ollongren rebuffed Trump, stressing that NATO's strength is in its unity.

"If we're not united, it makes us weaker. And we know that that is what Putin is looking for," he told Reuters on February 12.

The principle of collective defense -- the idea that an attack on one member is considered an attack on all and would trigger collective self-defense action -- is enshrined in Article 5 of NATO's founding treaty. It is considered the hallmark of the NATO alliance.

Ollongren also noted that most NATO allies were close to or had reached the target budget spending on defense of 2 percent of gross domestic product by 2024. NATO allies agreed to the goal in 2014.

German Finance Minister Christian Lindner also reacted to Trump’s comment. Speaking in London on February 12, Lindner said the transatlantic partnership will continue.

"Regardless of who is in the White House, we have an overriding interest in continuing to cooperate across the Atlantic, economically, politically, and also in matters of security," he said.

Lindner said Britain and Germany shared similar challenges when it came to strengthening free-trade capabilities.

The dialogue "is of particular importance" after Trump's statements, Lindner said before going into a meeting with British counterpart Jeremy Hunt.

"We are facing major challenges as European members of NATO," Lindner said, adding that Europe's peace and free-trade order had been put at risk by Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier echoed other EU leaders, saying the statements "are irresponsible and even play into Russia's hands."

Meanwhile, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk on February 12 discussed ramping up security cooperation in Europe with the leaders of Germany and France as fears grow that Trump's possible return to the White House might threaten Western solidarity against Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Tusk said the philosophy at the heart of relations between the European Union and NATO was based on "one for all, all for one."

Speaking in Paris, he said Poland was "ready to fight for this security." Later in Berlin, Tusk hailed a "clear declaration that we are ready to cooperate" on Europe's defense.

With reporting by Reuters, AP, and AFP

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

The court issued an order to allow junta officials to put the house up for auction on Mar. 20 for a reserve price of roughly US$90 million, the source said, asking to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

“The price that has been decided would be divided up after auctioning and selling,” he said.

“Now, the order has been implemented. It determined the reserve price of the auction and set the date of the auction and when the sale will be made.”

The source claimed the Kamayut District Court in Yangon region that issued Thursday’s order was junta-affiliated.

Ownership of the historic lakeside home and yard at 54, University Avenue in Yangon’s Bahan township has long been disputed by Aung San Suu Kyi and her brother Aung San Oo.

The house was awarded to Aung San Suu Kyi’s mother, Khin Kyi, after Gen. Aung San was assassinated in 1947. 

On Aug. 22, 2022, the junta-controlled Union Supreme Court declared the house would be auctioned under Aung San Oo’s appeal. 

Aung San Suu Kyi lived there for almost 15 years under house arrest during the military regime. The shadow National Unity Government has designated the house a national cultural heritage site and announced that legal action will be taken if the junta sells it.

Aung San Suu Kyi was arrested along with former President Win Myint and other leaders of the deposed National League for Democracy party shortly after the military seized power in a Feb. 2021 coup.

The junta sentenced the 78-year-old to 33 years in prison for 19 charges. Last August she was partially pardoned for five of them as part of a general amnesty, reducing her sentence to 27 years. 

The Nobel Peace Prize laureate was initially jailed in solitary confinement in Yangon’s Insein Prison. It's not clear where she is currently being held.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.

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

Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

On December 24, 2023, the Biden Administration announced a $582 million arms sale to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Three Congressional resolutions aim at blocking the sale.

S.Res. 109,[1] which Senator Christopher Murphy (D-CT) introduced on March 15, 2023, invokes a little-used section of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961.[2] Section 502B bars the US from providing “security assistance,” including arms sales, to any country with a “consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.”[3] The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia certainly fits that requirement.

502B allows Congress to request that the White House produce a report on a foreign government’s human rights record. A 502B report on Saudi Arabia[4] would focus on (1) Saudi Arabia’s human rights record; and (2) Saudi conduct with respect to Yemen, particularly the Kingdom’s disproportionate killing of civilians (which the US has aided).[5] If the Executive fails to produce the report within 30 days all security assistance to the country in question stops automatically.[6]

There are exceptions. Even if the Executive does not produce a report within 30 days security assistance can continue if the Secretary of State determines that “extraordinary circumstances” exist;[7] or, if in the Secretary’s opinion, continuing the assistance is in the US “national interest”;[8] or, the if president determines that there has been a significant improvement in the country’s human rights practices.[9] These exceptions are big enough to drive a truck through and could allow the president to evade enforcing the law. Whether Congress approves S.Res. 109 or not may not make a difference.

Biden Promises to End US Arms Sales to Saudi Arabia

Even before he was elected, Biden promised to reevaluate the US-Saudi relationship. This was in part a reaction to the assassination of dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who had been chopped up by a bone cutter at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018. Khashoggi’s murder was ordered by Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. During the November 20, 2019 Democratic presidential debate, Biden called Saudi Arabia an international “pariah” and vowed that the US would no longer sell weapons to the Saudis.

Biden condemned arms sales to Saudi Arabia in his first major foreign policy speech as president on February 4, 2021. Biden announced that he was “ending all support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales.” Pay close attention to that wording.

Biden’s Empty Promises

The Biden Administration has not treated Saudi Arabia as a “pariah.” Biden even visited the crown prince on July 15, 2022, in hopes of persuading Bin Salman to boost oil production.

And the weapons continued to flow. For the first six months of Biden’s presidency there were no US arms sales to Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates. In January 2021, the administration announced a temporary freeze on the Trump Administration’s pending weapons sales to Saudi Arabia. There was less to this move than met the eye. As the Wall Street Journal noted: “U.S. officials said it isn’t unusual for a new administration to review arms sales approved by a predecessor, and that despite the pause, many of the transactions are likely to ultimately go forward.”

Then on August 2, 2021 the Biden Administration announced $5 billion in arms contracts to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. This was followed by a $650 million arms sale to Saudi Arabia which was announced on November 21, 2021. On December 7, the US Senate voted 30-67 against a joint resolution (S.J. Res. 31) which would have blocked the sale.

Biden said during his February 4 speech that he was “ending all support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales.” The key word here is “offensive.” Which weapons are “offensive” and which “defensive”? The Biden Administration won’t say and has rebuffed Congressional attempts to find out. Many weapons can be used for either defense or offense. Whenever the Biden White House sells arms to Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates it simply asserts that they will be used for defense, such as defense against Iran or the Houthis.

This brings us to the $582 million sale announced by the Administration on December 24, 2023. S.Res. 109 would block this sale, along with all other arms sales and security assistance to Saudi Arabia. Two other resolutions target only the $582 million sale. The two resolutions are S.J. Res. 53 , introduced on Dec. 11, 2023 by Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) and H.J. Res. 106 , introduced on January 2, 2024 by Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN-5). Representative Omar has said: “It is simply unconscionable to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia while they continue to kill and torture dissidents and support modern-day slavery.” Omar has also excoriated Saudi Arabia’s “systematic murder, rape, and torture of [hundreds of Ethiopian refugees]” who were attempting to enter Saudi Arabia from Yemen.[10]

S.Res. 109 has been gathering dust since March 2023 without a vote. Let’s hope that these two new resolutions have more luck.

Notes.

[1]  Full title: “A Resolution requesting information on Saudi Arabia’s human rights practices pursuant to section 502B(c) of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961.”

[2]  According to the Center for Civilians in Conflict: “Congress has only used the process outlined in Section 502B once in nearly fifty years.” The process was used in 1976 to compel the Executive to issue a human rights report; it has never been used to block an arms sale.

[3]  Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 Section 502B(a)(2).

[4]  The U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Human Rights, Democracy, and Labor already issues annual reports on “internationally recognized human rights” in other countries. The “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices” were established in Section 502B(b). The latest report for 2022 includes a section on human rights in Saudi Arabia.

[5]  Saudi Arabia has been at war with Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels since 2015. There has been a truce between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis since April 2022.

The US has been complicit in the Saudi-UAE aggression since day one.   The US has provided the Saudi-led coalition with intelligence, targeting assistance, logistics, and (until November 2018) in-flight refueling of coalition warplanes.

The Houthis are currently in the news because of their attacks on Red Sea shipping. Since November 2023, the Houthis have been targeting Red Sea naval traffic connected to Israel, including US Navy vessels. The Houthis say the attacks are acts of solidarity with Gaza and will continue until Israel ends its killing in Gaza. The conflict in the Red Sea could escalate into a regional war, particularly following Iran’s dispatch of a warship to the Red Sea on January 1.

[6]  Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 Section 502B(c)(2)(B)(3).

[7]  Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 Section 502B(c)(1)(C)(i).

[8]  Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 Section 502B(c)(1)(C)(ii).

[9]  Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 Section 502B(a)(4)(C)(e).

[10]  See the August 21, 2023 report from Human Rights Watch: “’They Fired on Us Like Rain’: Saudi Arabian Mass Killings of Ethiopian Migrants Along the Yemen-Saudi Border.”

The post Biden’s $582 Million Arms Sale to Saudi Arabia. Can It Be Blocked? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Charles Pierson.

This year, there are at least 2,456 lobbyists at COP28, the U.N. climate summit in Dubai — nearly four times as many as last year — from companies like Shell, Total and ExxonMobil. The lobbyists outnumber the delegations of every country other than Brazil and the United Arab Emirates, which is hosting the summit, presided over by the CEO of the UAE’s national oil company, Sultan Al Jaber. “It’s definitely impossible to ignore how front and center the fossil fuel influence is at this particular COP,” says Rachel Rose Jackson, director of climate research and policy at Corporate Accountability, who says the climate summit must kick out big polluters and “reset the system so that it can finally end fossil fuels and advance real solutions and save millions of lives that don’t need to be lost.”

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

Lease Sale 261, which the Biden administration canceled in 2021, is the last of three offshore oil and gas lease sales mandated under the Inflation Reduction Act. Lease Sales 258 and 259, held in December 2022 and March 2023, were also revived by the IRA. Those lease sales were challenged in federal court for failing to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act.

Today’s lawsuit challenges the upcoming lease sale for violating NEPA because Interior did not consider the health threats to Gulf Coast communities living near oil refineries and other polluting drilling infrastructure. The department also failed to adequately consider the climate harm from this massive new source of fossil fuel production. The lease sale could result in the production of more than 1 billion barrels of oil and 4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas over the next 50 years, resulting in more than 370 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions.

The department agreed to limit the leasing area to reduce the risk of driving the endangered Rice’s whale to extinction. Scientists estimate there may be only 51 Rice’s whales left on Earth.

The lawsuit was filed in federal court in the District of Columbia on behalf of Healthy Gulf, Bayou City Waterkeeper, Friends of the Earth, Center for Biological Diversity, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Sierra Club.

In September, Interior is expected to release its final proposed five-year program for offshore oil and gas leasing. The plan, which lasts through 2028, could include as many as 11 new offshore lease sales. Holding 11 new fossil fuel auctions would sanction up to 70 years of additional fossil-fuel extraction with the potential to emit up to 3.5 billion tons of carbon pollution.

Statements from Earthjustice, its clients and partners:

“Once again, the Biden administration has fallen short of the federal law by neglecting to consider the impact of this massive oil sale on Gulf communities and the climate,” said Earthjustice attorney George Torgun. “We’re pleased that Interior excluded habitat for the nearly extinct Gulf of Mexico whale from this lease sale, but it’s equally critical that Interior builds on this step and protects climate and Gulf communities from the harms of leasing.”

“Unfortunately, given BOEM’s history of sacrificing the Gulf of Mexico to Big Oil, this lease sale decision comes as no surprise,” said Hallie Templeton, legal director of Friends of the Earth. “Our lawsuit should also come as no surprise, since BOEM continues to rely on the same outdated, broken environmental analysis. If we are going to make a dent in the climate crisis, business as usual must stop. We are going to keep fighting until the Gulf of Mexico is off the table for good.”

“As steward of the country’s public lands and waters, Interior has a duty to fully consider the harms offshore leasing can cause, from air pollution to oil spills, and beyond,” said Julia Forgie, attorney for NRDC (the Natural Resources Defense Council). “This vast lease sale — for millions of acres — poses threats to Gulf communities and endangered species while contributing to the climate crisis this region knows far too well. We are holding the agency to its obligation to carefully assess these risks and the climate fallout of this giveaway to Big Oil.”

“It’s mind-boggling that in this summer of deadly fossil fuel-driven record heat, fires and flooding the Biden administration couldn’t be bothered to look carefully at the damage this lease sale will cause to people, endangered wildlife and the climate,” said Kristen Monsell, oceans legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Across the country we’re seeing lethal wildfires, boiling ocean temperatures and mass coral die-offs, all caused or exacerbated by a climate unnaturally warmed by fossil fuel emissions. We’ve got to stop letting oil and gas companies make it worse by drilling in our oceans.”

“It is time to transition away from fossil fuels,” said Kristen Schlemmer, legal director and waterkeeper for Bayou City Waterkeeper. “Continued development in the Gulf of Mexico creates unfair burdens on communities in Houston and across the Gulf South. Moving forward with Lease Sale 261 means more drilling in the years to come. It means more facilities in our backyards. It means higher rates of cancer and heart and lung diseases, and it means more risks during major storms.”

“Selling public lands and waters to Big Polluters is incompatible with achieving the ambitious climate goals the Biden Administration itself has set,” said Devorah Ancel, Sierra Club Environmental Law Program senior attorney. “Fossil fuel extraction is destructive to communities, ecosystems, wildlife, and our climate. The devastating effects of climate change, from heat waves to storms, are particularly harmful to frontline communities, as this summer has shown. Moving forward with this lease sale locks us into extraction for decades to come, right as we should be transitioning to clean energy.”

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

The guidelines will now undergo a 60-day public comment period. As summarized by the FTC, the 13 proposed merger guidelines are:

1. Mergers should not significantly increase concentration in highly concentrated markets.
2. Mergers should not eliminate substantial competition between firms.
3. Mergers should not increase the risk of coordination.
4. Mergers should not eliminate a potential entrant in a concentrated market.
5. Mergers should not substantially lessen competition by creating a firm that controls products or services that its rivals may use to compete.
6. Vertical mergers should not create market structures that foreclose competition.
7. Mergers should not entrench or extend a dominant position.
8. Mergers should not further a trend toward concentration.
9. When a merger is part of a series of multiple acquisitions, the agencies may examine the whole series.
10. When a merger involves a multi-sided platform, the agencies examine competition between platforms, on a platform, or to displace a platform.
11. When a merger involves competing buyers, the agencies examine whether it may substantially lessen competition for workers or other sellers.
12. When an acquisition involves partial ownership or minority interests, the agencies examine its impact on competition.
13. Mergers should not otherwise substantially lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly.

"The new merger guidelines send a clear signal to corporate America: no more free passes on illegal mergers," said Lisa Gilbert, executive vice president of Public Citizen. "By releasing the new guidelines, the FTC and DOJ are working to ensure that they can access the tools, available under longstanding law, to push back on one of the main forces behind corporate concentration: mergers."

The draft guidelines come as the FTC, led by Lina Khan, is using its authority to challenge mergers across the U.S. economy, from pharmaceuticals to tech. Late last week, a federal court rejected the FTC's last-ditch attempt to stop Microsoft from buying the video game company Activision Blizzard, a roughly $70 billion deal that critics say would harm consumers and strengthen Microsoft's already dominant market position.

Barry Lynn, executive director of the Open Markets Insititute, welcomed the new merger guidelines on Wednesday as "the first effort by U.S. law enforcers to rethink and restate the basic purposes and rules of competition since Reagan."

"Written 40 years ago by President Ronald Reagan and followed by both Democratic and Republican administrations ever since, the U.S. government's 1982 'merger guidelines' fundamentally changed the American economy and society by making it far easier for private corporations to concentrate economic power and control," said Lynn. "The 'consumer welfare' philosophy embedded in these guidelines upset fundamental balances in politics and business in all corners of the nation. The result today directly threatens the freedom and well-being of every American."

"This draft heralds a long overdue end to the dangerous and destructive approach of the last four decades."

Since the 1980s, corporate profits have surged as consolidation has accelerated—with deleterious consequences for workers and consumers. One estimate suggests that corporate concentration costs the median U.S. household $5,000 per year by driving down wages.

Critics argue that U.S. antitrust policy—still under the shadow of the Reagan-era guidelines after more than 40 years—is ill-equipped to curb the harmful trend of corporate concentration, pointing specifically to the so-called "consumer welfare standard" that took hold in the 1980s.

Under that standard, as the American Economic Liberties Project explains, "antitrust cases hinge on consumer prices and so-called 'efficiency' within businesses, rather than antitrust law's traditional role of protecting workers and small businesses from abusive or anti-competitive tactics by powerful firms."

Matt Stoller, director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, applauded the FTC and Justice Department on Wednesday for issuing "an important update to merger enforcement to bring in all the new learning and evidence discovered by economists, business people, consumers, and scholars over the last fifteen years."

"Older models of economics and antitrust enforcement have not captured key merger harms and legal violations, failing to see problems with a host of mega-mergers like Google-DoubleClick, Live Nation-Ticketmaster, CVS-Caremark-Aetna, and American-U.S. Airways," said Stoller. "These mistakes have suppressed worker pay, embrittled our supply chains, and undermined industrial policy."

Stacy Mitchell, co-executive director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, welcomed the Biden administration's effort to unravel Reagan-era merger guidelines.

"The 1982 guidelines, which were embraced by subsequent Democratic and Republican administrations, ushered in waves of consolidation that have stripped Americans of their basic economic freedoms, left many industries brittle and weakened by a lack of competition, and imperiled our democracy by allowing a few corporations to assume an extraordinary degree of control over our lives and communities," said Mitchell.

"For these reasons, today's release of new draft guidelines by the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice is a moment to be welcomed by all Americans," Mitchell added. "This draft heralds a long overdue end to the dangerous and destructive approach of the last four decades."

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

The guidelines will now undergo a 60-day public comment period. As summarized by the FTC, the 13 proposed merger guidelines are:

1. Mergers should not significantly increase concentration in highly concentrated markets.
2. Mergers should not eliminate substantial competition between firms.
3. Mergers should not increase the risk of coordination.
4. Mergers should not eliminate a potential entrant in a concentrated market.
5. Mergers should not substantially lessen competition by creating a firm that controls products or services that its rivals may use to compete.
6. Vertical mergers should not create market structures that foreclose competition.
7. Mergers should not entrench or extend a dominant position.
8. Mergers should not further a trend toward concentration.
9. When a merger is part of a series of multiple acquisitions, the agencies may examine the whole series.
10. When a merger involves a multi-sided platform, the agencies examine competition between platforms, on a platform, or to displace a platform.
11. When a merger involves competing buyers, the agencies examine whether it may substantially lessen competition for workers or other sellers.
12. When an acquisition involves partial ownership or minority interests, the agencies examine its impact on competition.
13. Mergers should not otherwise substantially lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly.

"The new merger guidelines send a clear signal to corporate America: no more free passes on illegal mergers," said Lisa Gilbert, executive vice president of Public Citizen. "By releasing the new guidelines, the FTC and DOJ are working to ensure that they can access the tools, available under longstanding law, to push back on one of the main forces behind corporate concentration: mergers."

The draft guidelines come as the FTC, led by Lina Khan, is using its authority to challenge mergers across the U.S. economy, from pharmaceuticals to tech. Late last week, a federal court rejected the FTC's last-ditch attempt to stop Microsoft from buying the video game company Activision Blizzard, a roughly $70 billion deal that critics say would harm consumers and strengthen Microsoft's already dominant market position.

Barry Lynn, executive director of the Open Markets Insititute, welcomed the new merger guidelines on Wednesday as "the first effort by U.S. law enforcers to rethink and restate the basic purposes and rules of competition since Reagan."

"Written 40 years ago by President Ronald Reagan and followed by both Democratic and Republican administrations ever since, the U.S. government's 1982 'merger guidelines' fundamentally changed the American economy and society by making it far easier for private corporations to concentrate economic power and control," said Lynn. "The 'consumer welfare' philosophy embedded in these guidelines upset fundamental balances in politics and business in all corners of the nation. The result today directly threatens the freedom and well-being of every American."

"This draft heralds a long overdue end to the dangerous and destructive approach of the last four decades."

Since the 1980s, corporate profits have surged as consolidation has accelerated—with deleterious consequences for workers and consumers. One estimate suggests that corporate concentration costs the median U.S. household $5,000 per year by driving down wages.

Critics argue that U.S. antitrust policy—still under the shadow of the Reagan-era guidelines after more than 40 years—is ill-equipped to curb the harmful trend of corporate concentration, pointing specifically to the so-called "consumer welfare standard" that took hold in the 1980s.

Under that standard, as the American Economic Liberties Project explains, "antitrust cases hinge on consumer prices and so-called 'efficiency' within businesses, rather than antitrust law's traditional role of protecting workers and small businesses from abusive or anti-competitive tactics by powerful firms."

Matt Stoller, director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, applauded the FTC and Justice Department on Wednesday for issuing "an important update to merger enforcement to bring in all the new learning and evidence discovered by economists, business people, consumers, and scholars over the last fifteen years."

"Older models of economics and antitrust enforcement have not captured key merger harms and legal violations, failing to see problems with a host of mega-mergers like Google-DoubleClick, Live Nation-Ticketmaster, CVS-Caremark-Aetna, and American-U.S. Airways," said Stoller. "These mistakes have suppressed worker pay, embrittled our supply chains, and undermined industrial policy."

Stacy Mitchell, co-executive director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, welcomed the Biden administration's effort to unravel Reagan-era merger guidelines.

"The 1982 guidelines, which were embraced by subsequent Democratic and Republican administrations, ushered in waves of consolidation that have stripped Americans of their basic economic freedoms, left many industries brittle and weakened by a lack of competition, and imperiled our democracy by allowing a few corporations to assume an extraordinary degree of control over our lives and communities," said Mitchell.

"For these reasons, today's release of new draft guidelines by the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice is a moment to be welcomed by all Americans," Mitchell added. "This draft heralds a long overdue end to the dangerous and destructive approach of the last four decades."

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

The guidelines will now undergo a 60-day public comment period. As summarized by the FTC, the 13 proposed merger guidelines are:

1. Mergers should not significantly increase concentration in highly concentrated markets.
2. Mergers should not eliminate substantial competition between firms.
3. Mergers should not increase the risk of coordination.
4. Mergers should not eliminate a potential entrant in a concentrated market.
5. Mergers should not substantially lessen competition by creating a firm that controls products or services that its rivals may use to compete.
6. Vertical mergers should not create market structures that foreclose competition.
7. Mergers should not entrench or extend a dominant position.
8. Mergers should not further a trend toward concentration.
9. When a merger is part of a series of multiple acquisitions, the agencies may examine the whole series.
10. When a merger involves a multi-sided platform, the agencies examine competition between platforms, on a platform, or to displace a platform.
11. When a merger involves competing buyers, the agencies examine whether it may substantially lessen competition for workers or other sellers.
12. When an acquisition involves partial ownership or minority interests, the agencies examine its impact on competition.
13. Mergers should not otherwise substantially lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly.

"The new merger guidelines send a clear signal to corporate America: no more free passes on illegal mergers," said Lisa Gilbert, executive vice president of Public Citizen. "By releasing the new guidelines, the FTC and DOJ are working to ensure that they can access the tools, available under longstanding law, to push back on one of the main forces behind corporate concentration: mergers."

The draft guidelines come as the FTC, led by Lina Khan, is using its authority to challenge mergers across the U.S. economy, from pharmaceuticals to tech. Late last week, a federal court rejected the FTC's last-ditch attempt to stop Microsoft from buying the video game company Activision Blizzard, a roughly $70 billion deal that critics say would harm consumers and strengthen Microsoft's already dominant market position.

Barry Lynn, executive director of the Open Markets Insititute, welcomed the new merger guidelines on Wednesday as "the first effort by U.S. law enforcers to rethink and restate the basic purposes and rules of competition since Reagan."

"Written 40 years ago by President Ronald Reagan and followed by both Democratic and Republican administrations ever since, the U.S. government's 1982 'merger guidelines' fundamentally changed the American economy and society by making it far easier for private corporations to concentrate economic power and control," said Lynn. "The 'consumer welfare' philosophy embedded in these guidelines upset fundamental balances in politics and business in all corners of the nation. The result today directly threatens the freedom and well-being of every American."

"This draft heralds a long overdue end to the dangerous and destructive approach of the last four decades."

Since the 1980s, corporate profits have surged as consolidation has accelerated—with deleterious consequences for workers and consumers. One estimate suggests that corporate concentration costs the median U.S. household $5,000 per year by driving down wages.

Critics argue that U.S. antitrust policy—still under the shadow of the Reagan-era guidelines after more than 40 years—is ill-equipped to curb the harmful trend of corporate concentration, pointing specifically to the so-called "consumer welfare standard" that took hold in the 1980s.

Under that standard, as the American Economic Liberties Project explains, "antitrust cases hinge on consumer prices and so-called 'efficiency' within businesses, rather than antitrust law's traditional role of protecting workers and small businesses from abusive or anti-competitive tactics by powerful firms."

Matt Stoller, director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, applauded the FTC and Justice Department on Wednesday for issuing "an important update to merger enforcement to bring in all the new learning and evidence discovered by economists, business people, consumers, and scholars over the last fifteen years."

"Older models of economics and antitrust enforcement have not captured key merger harms and legal violations, failing to see problems with a host of mega-mergers like Google-DoubleClick, Live Nation-Ticketmaster, CVS-Caremark-Aetna, and American-U.S. Airways," said Stoller. "These mistakes have suppressed worker pay, embrittled our supply chains, and undermined industrial policy."

Stacy Mitchell, co-executive director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, welcomed the Biden administration's effort to unravel Reagan-era merger guidelines.

"The 1982 guidelines, which were embraced by subsequent Democratic and Republican administrations, ushered in waves of consolidation that have stripped Americans of their basic economic freedoms, left many industries brittle and weakened by a lack of competition, and imperiled our democracy by allowing a few corporations to assume an extraordinary degree of control over our lives and communities," said Mitchell.

"For these reasons, today's release of new draft guidelines by the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice is a moment to be welcomed by all Americans," Mitchell added. "This draft heralds a long overdue end to the dangerous and destructive approach of the last four decades."

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

The guidelines will now undergo a 60-day public comment period. As summarized by the FTC, the 13 proposed merger guidelines are:

1. Mergers should not significantly increase concentration in highly concentrated markets.
2. Mergers should not eliminate substantial competition between firms.
3. Mergers should not increase the risk of coordination.
4. Mergers should not eliminate a potential entrant in a concentrated market.
5. Mergers should not substantially lessen competition by creating a firm that controls products or services that its rivals may use to compete.
6. Vertical mergers should not create market structures that foreclose competition.
7. Mergers should not entrench or extend a dominant position.
8. Mergers should not further a trend toward concentration.
9. When a merger is part of a series of multiple acquisitions, the agencies may examine the whole series.
10. When a merger involves a multi-sided platform, the agencies examine competition between platforms, on a platform, or to displace a platform.
11. When a merger involves competing buyers, the agencies examine whether it may substantially lessen competition for workers or other sellers.
12. When an acquisition involves partial ownership or minority interests, the agencies examine its impact on competition.
13. Mergers should not otherwise substantially lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly.

"The new merger guidelines send a clear signal to corporate America: no more free passes on illegal mergers," said Lisa Gilbert, executive vice president of Public Citizen. "By releasing the new guidelines, the FTC and DOJ are working to ensure that they can access the tools, available under longstanding law, to push back on one of the main forces behind corporate concentration: mergers."

The draft guidelines come as the FTC, led by Lina Khan, is using its authority to challenge mergers across the U.S. economy, from pharmaceuticals to tech. Late last week, a federal court rejected the FTC's last-ditch attempt to stop Microsoft from buying the video game company Activision Blizzard, a roughly $70 billion deal that critics say would harm consumers and strengthen Microsoft's already dominant market position.

Barry Lynn, executive director of the Open Markets Insititute, welcomed the new merger guidelines on Wednesday as "the first effort by U.S. law enforcers to rethink and restate the basic purposes and rules of competition since Reagan."

"Written 40 years ago by President Ronald Reagan and followed by both Democratic and Republican administrations ever since, the U.S. government's 1982 'merger guidelines' fundamentally changed the American economy and society by making it far easier for private corporations to concentrate economic power and control," said Lynn. "The 'consumer welfare' philosophy embedded in these guidelines upset fundamental balances in politics and business in all corners of the nation. The result today directly threatens the freedom and well-being of every American."

"This draft heralds a long overdue end to the dangerous and destructive approach of the last four decades."

Since the 1980s, corporate profits have surged as consolidation has accelerated—with deleterious consequences for workers and consumers. One estimate suggests that corporate concentration costs the median U.S. household $5,000 per year by driving down wages.

Critics argue that U.S. antitrust policy—still under the shadow of the Reagan-era guidelines after more than 40 years—is ill-equipped to curb the harmful trend of corporate concentration, pointing specifically to the so-called "consumer welfare standard" that took hold in the 1980s.

Under that standard, as the American Economic Liberties Project explains, "antitrust cases hinge on consumer prices and so-called 'efficiency' within businesses, rather than antitrust law's traditional role of protecting workers and small businesses from abusive or anti-competitive tactics by powerful firms."

Matt Stoller, director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, applauded the FTC and Justice Department on Wednesday for issuing "an important update to merger enforcement to bring in all the new learning and evidence discovered by economists, business people, consumers, and scholars over the last fifteen years."

"Older models of economics and antitrust enforcement have not captured key merger harms and legal violations, failing to see problems with a host of mega-mergers like Google-DoubleClick, Live Nation-Ticketmaster, CVS-Caremark-Aetna, and American-U.S. Airways," said Stoller. "These mistakes have suppressed worker pay, embrittled our supply chains, and undermined industrial policy."

Stacy Mitchell, co-executive director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, welcomed the Biden administration's effort to unravel Reagan-era merger guidelines.

"The 1982 guidelines, which were embraced by subsequent Democratic and Republican administrations, ushered in waves of consolidation that have stripped Americans of their basic economic freedoms, left many industries brittle and weakened by a lack of competition, and imperiled our democracy by allowing a few corporations to assume an extraordinary degree of control over our lives and communities," said Mitchell.

"For these reasons, today's release of new draft guidelines by the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice is a moment to be welcomed by all Americans," Mitchell added. "This draft heralds a long overdue end to the dangerous and destructive approach of the last four decades."

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

The innovative meat, grown from cell cultures fed amino acids, sugars, salts, and vitamins, has generated intrigue among investors, animal rights advocates, and fancy-food connoisseurs. One of cultivated meat’s key selling points, beyond mere novelty, is that it could be a salve for global warming. Growing meat in a lab doesn’t involve livestock or land for grazing and cuts out the greenhouse gas emissions associated with raising cows, chickens, and pigs for food — 11 percent to 14.5 percent of global climate pollution. By some estimates, cultivated meat could reduce those emissions by 92 percent.

“The key thing here is that it’s all about efficiency,” said Elliot Swartz, a scientist at the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that promotes alternative proteins. Culturing cells in a lab is roughly three times more efficient at converting nutrients into meat than conventional chicken farming, Swartz said. “This efficiency means you need less crops to grow, which translates to less land.” That, in turn, means more land that could be used to store carbon through rewilding and habitat restoration, Swartz added. 

The story doesn’t end there. As with other emerging technologies, there’s uncertainty about the climate implications of cultivated meat. While feeding stem cells, muscle cells, or fat cells, doesn’t generate methane — the potent greenhouse gas belched by cows — a lot of energy goes into manufacturing the ingredients to feed those cells and maintaining the right conditions, like temperature, to nurture them. Some research suggests that replacing methane emissions from cattle with the carbon dioxide generated from meat cultivation could be worse for the planet in the long run. 

“For lab-grown meat, most of the emissions are associated with energy inputs,” said Marco Springmann, a senior researcher at the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute. Given how energy intensive the process is, Springmann expressed skepticism about the claims that cultivated meat is significantly better for the environment than the cuts you’d get today at the supermarket. A study by researchers at the University of California, Davis indicates that meat cultivation would have to become more energy efficient to compete with conventional meat from a climate standpoint. (Swartz said he sees potential issues with assumptions underlying that research, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, such as that cultivated meat producers have already adopted energy-saving practices not reflected in the study). 

One big advantage to cultivated meat, according to both Springmman and Swartz, is that it can be powered by renewables. Cows are always going to burp methane. But the carbon dioxide that comes from growing meat in a lab can be dialed back with wind or solar. “The manufacturer of cultivated meat has a lot of control over the carbon footprint,” Swartz said.

A host of questions remain about how manufacturers will scale up their products and what their emissions will look like. One thing that’s settled, according to Springmann, is that a better climate solution than growing meat in labs is eating less meat in favor of more vegetables. “It’s very unlikely you can design a product that can be more environmentally friendly than legumes.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Lab-grown meat is now approved for sale in the US. Will it help the climate? on Jun 26, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Max Graham.

In a society built on lies, the search for truth is a game.

Consider the debate surrounding alleged ‘threats’ to the BBC’s ‘independence’, even as the BBC itself reports of its outgoing chairman:

‘As for Mr Sharp’s departure, I understand conversations between the BBC and the government have been had in recent days. You’d expect that.

‘The BBC chairman is a political appointment.’

If that doesn’t justify Twitter labelling every BBC journalist ‘UK state-affiliated media’, we don’t know what does.

Or consider how, cap in hand, the Guardian now presents itself as a Media Lens-style operation, declaring at the end of its articles:

‘As a reader-funded news organisation, we rely on your generosity. Please give what you can, so millions can benefit from quality reporting on the events shaping our world.’

We wonder how many readers funding this heroic mission are aware that, last year, Guardian editor, Kath Viner, received a 42 per cent pay rise of £150,000, taking her salary to £509,850. Brazen claims that the Guardian is ‘free from commercial influence’ appear in the pages of a newspaper overflowing with corporate adverts on which it is deeply dependent. Last year, print and advertising generated revenues of £71.5m and £73.7m respectively. The Guardian is owned by the Scott Trust, which runs a £1.3bn investment fund.

Even if we try to imagine corporate journalists rising above this nonsense, it’s impossible to conceive of them examining deeper issues of media bias.

Recall the context in which news and commentary appear: the tsunami of 24/7 corporate advertising that is subject to no discussion whatever regarding its bias. Unless we accept that these adverts should be balanced by a counter-tsunami of anti-corporate advertising, there is no question of media impartiality for this reason alone.

But this is still just scratching the surface. In our corporate society, the greatest triumph of the corporate monoculture is not the filtered content of the daily newspaper or nightly newscast; it is us, our conception of who we are, of what it means to be human. We may mock the Sun and lament the Mail, but look in the mirror – we are the ultimate product of propaganda.

Erich Fromm wrote of man’s conception of him and herself in capitalist society:

‘His body, his mind and his soul are his capital, and his task in life is to invest it favourably to make a profit of himself.’ (Erich Fromm, The Sane Society, Routledge, 1991, p.138)

The significance cannot be overstated: if millions of corporate men and women fundamentally perceive themselves as products to be sold on the job market, the question of non-conformity, of challenging corporate society, does not even arise. The idea is not just irrelevant, it is a threat to conformity facilitating ‘success’. The result is deeply dehumanising:

‘The alienated personality who is for sale must lose a good deal of the sense of dignity which is so characteristic of man even in most primitive cultures. He must lose almost all sense of self, of himself as a unique and induplicable entity.’ (Fromm, p.138)

In this case, it is not that we are somewhat biased on some specific issue in the way of a newspaper report; the very idea that we should seek and act on truth, that we are moral agents, becomes ridiculous, laughable. And this, indeed, is the basic theme of much tabloid and other media ‘humour’ targeting left and green activists.

In a society of this kind, Fromm wrote, truth is not a concern:

‘All that matters is that nothing is too serious, that one exchanges views, and that one is ready to accept any opinion or conviction (if there is such a thing) as being as good as the other.’ (p.152)

When Fromm says ‘nothing is too serious’, he means that we are fundamentally indifferent.

Can we point to evidence? Last week, it was reported that the highest April temperature ever recorded in Spain – the kind of record that might, historically, have been broken by a fraction of a degree – had been blown away by a rise of 5C.

This latest sign of impending climate catastrophe was reported briefly and then forgotten. It received a tiny fraction of the merited attention and concern – not just from the press but also from the public. It was just one more example of how ‘modern man exhibits an amazing lack of realism for all that matters. For the meaning of life and death, for happiness and suffering, for feeling and serious thought’. (Fromm, p.166)

Needless to say, corporate journalism is the natural home of Corporate Man because its real task is to defend the status quo.

While working as the ostensibly leftist senior political editor at the New Statesman, Mehdi Hasan – who now presents the Mehdi Hasan Show on Peacock and MSNBC – wrote the following comments in a letter to Lord Dacre, the owner of the Daily Mail:

‘Although I am on the left of the political spectrum, and disagree with the Mail’s editorial line on a range of issues, I have always admired the paper’s passion, rigour, boldness and, of course, news values. I believe the Mail has a vitally important role to play in the national debate, and I admire your relentless focus on the need for integrity and morality in public life, and your outspoken defence of faith, and Christian culture, in the face of attacks from militant atheists and secularists. I also believe… that I could be a fresh and passionate, not to mention polemical and contrarian, voice on the comment and feature pages of your award-winning newspaper.’

Hasan added:

‘I could therefore write pieces for the Mail critical of Labour and the left, from “inside” Labour and the left (as the senior political editor at the New Statesman).’

One could hardly imagine a better example of Fromm’s ‘alienated personality who is for sale’ (p.138), with Hasan hawking the features, advantages and benefits of his insider left credentials for attacking the left.

Another prime example of this personality type treating truth as a game is senior Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland. Political analyst, Norman Finkelstein, whose mother survived the Warsaw Ghetto, the Majdanek concentration camp and two slave labour camps, and whose father was a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Auschwitz concentration camp, commented on Freedland:

‘… when my book, The Holocaust Industry, came out in 2000, Freedland wrote that I was “closer to the people who created the Holocaust than to those who suffered in it”. Although he appears to be, oh, so politically correct now, he didn’t find it inappropriate to suggest that I resembled the Nazis who gassed my family.’

Finkelstein made a key point:

‘We appeared on a television program together. Before the program, he approached me to shake my hand. When I refused, he reacted in stunned silence. Why wouldn’t I shake his hand? He couldn’t comprehend it. It tells you something about these dull-witted creeps. The smears, the slanders – for them, it’s all in a day’s work. Why should anyone get agitated? Later, on the program, it was pointed out that the Guardian, where he worked, had serialised The Holocaust Industry across two issues. He was asked by the presenter, if my book was the equivalent of Mein Kampf, would he resign from the paper? Of course not. Didn’t the presenter get that it’s all a game?’

It’s all a game to be played for profit – nothing is to be ‘taken too seriously’ by corporate humans who exhibit ‘an amazing lack of realism’ for everything that matters.

‘Plainly a War Crime’ – Chorley Interviews Chomsky

Matt Chorley, formerly of the Taunton Times, hosts a radio show on Rupert Murdoch’s Times Radio. On 26 April, Chorley tweeted a clip of his impersonation of ‘Zippy’, a puppet in the UK children’s programme, Rainbow, which ran for two decades from 1972-1992. The clip also featured Tim Shipman, the Sunday Times’ chief political commentator, responding with his own impersonation of ‘George’, a pink hippopotamus from the same show.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with having a bit of fun. But in his recent interview with Noam Chomsky, the level of Chorley’s journalism did not rise much higher. Like Hasan and Freedland, and most of corporate journalism, Chorley is an individual pursuing Fromm’s ‘marketing orientation’.

We learn a lot when the likes of Chorley encounter Chomsky and other dissidents whose souls are not for sale; not because the Chorleys have much to say, but because we are witness, not just to a clash of ideas and values, but of ways of being. It is a clash between sincerity and fakery, clarity and obfuscation, engagement and indifference, compassion and egotism.

Typically, these clashes involve a corporate interviewer who is focused, not on asking genuine questions, but on throwing traps in Chomsky’s path. The aim is not to find out what he thinks but to catch him out in some way, to demonstrate that he is deluded, or treasonous. Indeed, after the interview, Chorley described his purpose in talking to Chomsky: ‘See how the long-term Russia enthusiast explains Ukraine.’

This clarifies an otherwise mystifying comment by Chorley in the interview, suggesting that Chomsky’s ‘anti-West position’:

‘… led you to an alliance with Vladimir Putin, who was a new type of Russian leader. And it was all hunky-dory, up until the point he invades Ukraine, and now you’re essentially trying to justify it by the back door – he’s let you down, Vladimir Putin.’

Anyone who knows anything about Chomsky, knows that he has never been a ‘long-term enthusiast’ for Russian Bolshevism, Russian Communism, Stalinism, Soviet state tyranny in general, and certainly not for Putin. The problem, we would guess, is that Chorley doesn’t know what anarcho-syndicalism is, or what Chomsky means when he says he’s a ‘derivative fellow traveller’ of anarchism. And so, the whole interview was based on a bogus conception of Chomsky’s politics.

Chorley began amiably enough, asking harmless questions about Chomsky’s job role and his thoughts on the concept of a ‘public intellectual’; whether he placed himself in that category. Knowing exactly the type of person he was dealing with – Chorley works for Murdoch, after all – Chomsky immediately held up a mirror to Chorley’s worldview, noting that both he and Chorley were fortunate to be able to enter the public domain and have some small impact on public discourse. It is a privileged position that comes with real moral responsibility. This already highlighted the gulf separating Chomsky from the moral indifference of corporate journalism.

Chorley asked if Chomsky thought we are living in more ‘dangerous and disconcerting times’ than previous generations. Chomsky replied that our time is ‘far more dangerous’, citing how the famous Doomsday Clock is now measured, not in minutes to midnight, but in seconds to midnight (currently, 90 seconds). Escalating threats include the risk of nuclear war, but above all environmental catastrophe:

‘We’re racing towards a precipice of environmental destruction. We’ve got a couple of decades in which we could mitigate or control it, but we’re racing in the opposite direction – nothing could be more dangerous than that. That means reaching irreversible tipping points, at which stage, just steady decline to the destruction of human life on Earth. We’ve never faced that before. Actually, we’ve been facing it in a way since August 6^th, 1945, but never at this level of danger.’

Typically for this kind of disengaged journalism, Chorley responded to this awful assertion as if he hadn’t truly heard what had been said, responding: ‘It’s interesting that; I was going to ask you…’. ‘It’s interesting’ was not a serious response to the gravity of what Chomsky had said. Chorley blandly recognised that politicians didn’t seem very interested in responding to the climate crisis. As for the rest of us, he said, ‘we spend our time talking about trivial things’.

Suppose Chomsky had said a school was on fire and hundreds of children were being burned alive. How would we react to someone responding that the news was ‘interesting’, before noting that the authorities seemed uninterested in doing much about it, while the public seemed to be more concerned with trivia?

A past master, of course, at squeezing taboo thoughts through this kind of blather, Chomsky mentioned some non-trivial crises that are discussed: the Ukraine war, the Yemen war, ‘the total destruction of Iraq, going on still; these are all very serious issues’.

He noted, further, that, last year, fossil fuel production had increased – the US is expanding new oil fields, opening up federal lands for exploration and exploitation for decades ahead. With his usual dark humour, Chomsky added:

‘The fossil fuel companies are euphoric with the prospects for increased public support for their enterprise of destroying life on Earth. So, it doesn’t look good.’

Chorley then raised the issue of Ukraine:

‘Certainly, in the UK, the left – actually under people like Jeremy Corbyn – argued that it wasn’t Russia that was the enemy, it was the US that was destabilising the world. But then Russia invades a sovereign, democratic country right on its border, starting a conflict which has claimed tens of thousands of innocent lives. Does that not make clear who the real threat to the world is? It’s not the US, as the leftists have argued for a long time; it’s Vladimir Putin’s Russia.’

After Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and as many more examples as one might care to mention, these were childish comments. Chomsky responded:

‘Well, the invasion of Ukraine is plainly a war crime. You can’t put it in the same category as greater war crimes, but it’s a major one.’

Which crimes did Chomsky have in mind? He noted that the UN and Pentagon estimate that about 8,000 civilians have been killed in Ukraine:

‘That’s a lot of people, what the United States and Britain do overnight.’

Of course, the 8,000 figure is ‘presumably an underestimate’, Chomsky added, before offering a series of thought experiments:

‘Let’s say it’s twice as much – that would put it at the level of the [1982] US-backed, Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which killed about 20,000 people. Let’s say it’s off by a factor of ten… that would put it in the category of Reagan’s terrorist atrocities in El Salvador, roughly on the order of 80,000. Of course, Iraq is just another dimension.

‘So, it’s serious, a terrible crime. But you can understand why the Global South does not take very seriously the eloquent protestations of Western countries about this “unique episode in history”. They’ve been victims of far more. Maybe the Russians will go on to our level… Maybe they could even go to the point of commemorating their worst atrocities, like Mariupol.’

Chomsky commented that one of the worst US crimes in Iraq was the destruction of Iraq’s beautiful third city, Fallujah. He noted that the US Navy has recently named its latest warship, the USS Fallujah, ‘in honour of the Marine assault which carried out one of the worst atrocities in Iraq. Well, maybe the Russians will get to that point, too, someday.’

Chorley commented: ‘It’s interesting though, Noam Chomsky; we hear the same thing from the left here in the UK…’

Chomsky interrupted: ‘It’s nothing to do with the left…’

These, indeed, are simply facts – the approximate death tolls are well-known, highly credible. The killers are known. There is no ideological bias in these observations. There is ideological bias in the notion that these facts are somehow ‘leftist’.

Chorley went on:

‘This is trying to create equivalence, an anti-West position… You’ve literally just drawn equivalence with the number of deaths in various places… That doesn’t make what Vladimir Putin’s done alright, does it?’

Notice that, having heard Chomsky cite the far greater death tolls from Western crimes, Chorley was astonished that Chomsky might be suggesting the West was on a par with Putin. It was inconceivable to him that the West might be worse. Notice, also, that Chorley suggested Chomsky was using these comparisons to justify Russia’s invasion seconds after he had strongly condemned the invasion as ‘plainly a war crime’, ‘a terrible crime’.

Chomsky countered:

‘Of course not. I said it’s a major crime, but there’s no equivalence – that’s following the party line. I gave figures. No equivalence. Maybe the casualty toll is ten times as high as estimated. Well, that would make it like Reagan’s crimes in El Salvador. That’s not equivalent.’

This was followed by a telling silence from Chorley, who perhaps at last realised that Chomsky had been agreeing that it was wrong to talk of ‘equivalence’, but not for the reasons Chorley had in mind.

The ‘moral equivalence’ angle of attack – clearly intended to be the key focus of this interview – is a standard feature of corporate interviews with Chomsky and other dissidents. The intention is to present critics of Western policy as warped apologists for Western enemies. In a 2004 BBC interview, a clearly astonished Jeremy Paxman commented to Chomsky:

‘You seem to be suggesting, or implying – perhaps I’m being unfair to you – but you seem to be implying there is some equivalence between democratically elected heads of state like George Bush, or Prime Ministers like Tony Blair, and regimes in places like Iraq.’

Interviewing former UN Assistant-Secretary General, Denis Halliday, in a BBC radio interview in 2001, an exasperated Michael Buerk said:

‘You can’t… you can’t possibly draw a moral equivalence between Saddam Hussein and George Bush Senior, can you?’

Inevitably – again ignoring what Chomsky had repeatedly just said – Chorley moved on to the argument tirelessly advanced by the likes of the Guardian’s George Monbiot:

‘But… I suppose, some people listening to this will think you’re seeking to excuse what Vladimir Putin’s done.’

The argument makes sense – if a journalist cannot discuss ‘our’ crimes – cannot even conceive that ‘our’ crimes might be worse than ‘their’ crimes – but cannot refute the undeniable facts indicating that such is indeed the case, then a Get Out Of Jail Free card is to suggest that the person making these points is secretly on the side of The Bad Guys and therefore not to be taken seriously. Moving from facts to motives usefully directs public attention away from the facts. Chomsky responded:

‘No, that is a fabrication of the right wing; I am not seeking to excuse anything. I said it’s a terrible war crime; that’s not excusing anything. I’m talking about the extreme hypocrisy of claims about how this is the worst thing that ever happened, when it’s a fraction of what we do all the time. That’s why the Global South is watching with ridicule as pompous Western commentators try to lecture them: “Why don’t you join us in opposing this terrible crime?” … They laugh in ridicule: “That’s what you’ve been doing to us forever!”

But ‘why can’t Ukraine join Nato?’, asked Chorley. Chomsky replied:

‘What would happen if Mexico decided to join a Chinese-run international military alliance, sending heavy weapons to Mexico aimed at the United States?… What would happen to Mexico? It’d be blown away. You know that.’

Chorley again fell back on the ‘equivalence’ theme:

‘But you’re then drawing comparisons between Nato and China and Russia; you see an equivalence between…’

Again, Chomsky rejected the claim:

‘No, I don’t; Nato is a much more aggressive alliance. Nato has invaded Yugoslavia, invaded Libya, invaded Ukraine – backed up the invasion of Ukraine – backed up the invasion of Afghanistan. It’s an aggressive military alliance. Everybody outside the West can see it. In the West, we’re not allowed to think it because we’re deeply controlled by adherence to the party line. But everybody else can see it.’

Yet again, Chorley hammered the implied theme that Chomsky was some kind of camouflaged supporter of Putin:

‘It sounds to me like you are justifying the Russian invasion of Ukraine.’

Chorley then asked about Jeremy Corbyn. He later made much of this part of the interview on Twitter, disingenuously suggesting that the interviewee who ran rings around him on every issue was deluded enough to believe that Corbyn had won the 2017 general election.

In fact, when Chomsky said that Corbyn had ‘won a major victory’ in 2017, he meant in generating a massive ‘swing’ in Labour’s favour despite awesome internal and external Establishment pressures. In 2017, the Independent reported that Corbyn had ‘increased Labour’s share of the vote by more than any other of the party’s election leaders since 1945’ with ‘the biggest swing since… shortly after the Second World War’.

In a final, remarkable question indicating just how disengaged and indifferent he had been throughout the interview, Chorley asked:

‘Finally, then, let’s round this off; let’s try and be a bit more optimistic… Will the next century be better than the last?’

Again, it was as if Chorley hadn’t heard what Chomsky had said. Heroically, Chomsky retained his patience for a few seconds longer:

‘There won’t be organised human life a century from now, unless we reverse the course the leadership is now taking towards racing over the precipice on climate destruction.’

By way of a final little joke, Chomsky added: ‘You read the latest IPCC report, I’m sure.’

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Media Lens.

Survey data published Wednesday shows that the U.S. electorate's approval of President Joe Biden's handling of the climate crisis has declined since October.

Voters' approval fell even further after they were made aware of the incongruence between Biden's 2020 campaign trail vow to end oil and gas leasing on public lands and his administration's March 13 move to rubber-stamp ConocoPhillips' massive Willow drilling project on federally controlled territory in the Alaskan Arctic.

The decline in support has been most pronounced among Democrats, Independents, and voters under 50, according to polling conducted by Data for Progress and Fossil Free Media.

From October 21-25 and then again from March 17-21, researchers asked respondents if they approved or disapproved of how the Biden administration has addressed climate change and the environment before mentioning any specific policy or decision.

Five months ago, 82% of Democrats, 37% of Independents, and 10% of Republicans gave Biden a thumbs up on this issue. Just over a week ago, approval had decreased among Democrats and Independents, with 69% and 30% of such voters expressing support for the president's climate performance. Meanwhile, Republican support for Biden's environmental policies increased to 17% during this time period.

The drop in support was even steeper among younger voters. In October, 37% of voters 40-49, 51% of voters 30-39, and 48% of voters 18-29 said they approved of the Biden administration's handling of climate change and the environment. Those percentages have decreased across all three age groups, with just 35% of voters 40-49, 45% of voters 30-39, and 35% of voters 18-29 giving the president a passing grade on the issue earlier this month.

"If the move to approve Willow was intended to win the favor of Independents concerned about high energy prices, this research suggests it may not have landed as intended."

Notably, the aforementioned decline in support for Biden's climate performance since October among Democrats (13% drop), Independents (7% drop), and voters aged 18-29 (13% drop) doesn't take into account the president's Willow betrayal. Data for Progress and Fossil Free Media first tested for approval before introducing respondents to the president's campaign promises and news of his administration's decision to greenlight the largest oil drilling endeavor on public land in U.S. history.

Although awareness of the Willow project has increased since October when 71% of voters said they hadn't heard, seen, or read anything at all about the climate-wrecking venture, 52% of voters were still completely unaware of it when surveyed from March 17-21.

After measuring baseline support, pollsters reminded voters of Biden's campaign pledge to ban new fossil fuel leasing on public lands and informed them about his administration's recent approval of the Willow project, which seeks to extract more than 600 million barrels of crude from Alaska's North Slope over the next 30 years. Then, pollsters retested their original question.

Once this contrast was made explicit, public approval of Biden's climate performance plummeted. Net approval measured in March fell by 33 points among Democrats and 12 points among Independents. It's worth noting that in October, Biden enjoyed a net climate approval rating of 68 points among Democrats.

Young voters' disappointment was also palpable, with net approval measured in March falling by 1 point among voters 18-29, 16 points among voters 30-39, and 5 points among voters 40-49.

It's unclear why the Biden administration refused to use its authority to halt a fossil fuel project capable of spewing about 280 million metric tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere on the same day United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned that the planet is reaching a "point of no return." Environmental advocacy groups have responded with lawsuits.

Biden may be enjoying higher approval ratings on environmental issues if he had blocked Conoco's drilling proposal. According to Data for Progress and Fossil Free Media, voters remain supportive of the president's original campaign promises on climate.

Researchers also asked respondents whether the federal government should prioritize the production of renewable energy or fossil energy on public lands.

By a 21-point margin, voters said they want new energy developments on public lands to be green, such as wind and solar farms—not planet-heating oil and gas drilling sites.

"This research shows that voters strongly support transitioning to clean energy projects instead of building fossil fuel projects on public lands," wrote Anika Dandekar, a senior analyst at Data for Progress.

The recent approval of the Willow project "not only undermines Biden's campaign promise to transition to a fully clean power sector by no later than 2035, but also may explain why Democrats, Independents, and voters under 50 increasingly disapprove of the Biden administration's handling of climate change and the environment," she noted.

"Younger generations, most likely to be impacted by the further degradation of the environment, are paying attention," Dandekar continued. "Furthermore, if the move to approve Willow was intended to win the favor of Independents concerned about high energy prices, this research suggests it may not have landed as intended."

"If the Biden administration wants to maintain support from these important demographics," she added, "it will need to continue taking bold actions to curb emissions and keep its promises."

Notably, the White House is facing fresh criticism on Wednesday over its decision to plow ahead with Lease Sale 259, one of the largest offshore auctions in U.S. history. Earlier this month, several green groups filed a lawsuit to challenge the sale, which offered more than 73 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico to the highest-bidding oil and gas drillers.

"President Biden's decision to once again sacrifice an enormous portion of the Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas drilling is unconscionable," Nicole Ghio, senior fossil fuels program manager at Friends of the Earth, said in a statement. "Reviving lease sales and greenlighting massive fossil fuel projects demonstrates the administration cares more about Big Oil profits than frontline communities and endangered species."

"Reviving lease sales and greenlighting massive fossil fuel projects demonstrates the administration cares more about Big Oil profits than frontline communities and endangered species."

"We will continue pushing Biden to take his long-held climate promises seriously and stop locking us into decades of dirty energy," said Ghio.

A 2021 lawsuit filed by many of the same groups led a federal judge to vacate Lease Sale 257, the nation's largest-ever offshore auction wherein more than 80 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico were offered to the fossil fuel industry.

Despite Biden's campaign pledge to curtail new fossil fuel projects on public lands and waters, his administration has approved more permits for oil and gas drilling on public lands in its first two years than the Trump administration did in 2017 and 2018.

Two weeks ago, a trio of groups filed a 30-day notice of their intent to sue the Biden administration for refusing to respond to a petition to wind down fossil fuel extraction on public lands and waters.

Signed by a coalition of more than 360 progressive advocacy organizations, the January 2022 petition submitted to Biden and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland provides a blueprint to reduce federal oil and gas production by 98% by 2035 using long-dormant provisions of the Mineral Leasing Act, Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, and the National Emergencies Act.

Research published after the petition was filed shows that wealthy countries must end oil and gas production entirely by 2034 to give the world a 50% chance of limiting global warming to 1.5°C—beyond which the climate emergency's impacts will grow increasingly deadly, particularly for the world's poor who have done the least to cause the crisis.

After the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest assessment report last week, Guterres demanded "a quantum leap in climate action," including a prohibition on approving and financing new coal, oil, and gas projects as well as a phaseout of existing fossil fuel production.

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

"We, again, urge all states to adopt alternatives to immigration detention," said the U.N. human rights office.

The 68 men who were being held at the migration facility were mainly from Guatemala, Honduras, Venezuela, and El Salvador originally, and Reuters reported Wednesday that many migrants had been "rounded up off the streets of Ciudad Juarez on Monday" and taken to the center, which is run by Mexico's National Migration Institute (NMI).

A woman named Viangly Infante told the outlet that her husband was among those detained and that the couple had traveled from their home country of Venezuela last fall with their three children, crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in December into Eagle Pass, Texas.

They were then sent back to Mexico by U.S. immigration authorities and bused to Ciudad Juarez.

"We cannot ignore that many of these migrants continue to wait in border cities like Ciudad Juarez without documentation so they can enter the United States to seek protection—a situation created by successive U.S. administrations' undue restrictions on asylum access," said Rachel Schmidtke, senior advocate for Latin America at Refugees International. "The U.S. and Mexican governments must work together to ensure that migrants receive access to asylum and to fair and efficient processing at the border and are given humanitarian support when forced to wait in Mexico."

The U.N. Refugee Agency in January warned the Biden administration that its expansion of former President Donald Trump's Title 42 policy—under which the White House is expelling up to 30,000 migrants per month unless they arrive in the U.S. via a humanitarian parole program—is "not in line with refugee law standards" by which the U.S. is obligated to abide.

Like the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the NMI in Mexico has long been denounced by migrant rights advocates over its treatment of people in its detention facilities, including overcrowding and lack of medical care. Protests broke out last year in detention centers in Tijuana and the southern city of Tapachula, near the border of Guatemala.

The fire that broke out early Tuesday was reportedly started by migrants who were protesting their confinement in a cell intended for a maximum of 50 people in which 68 people were being detained, and the guards' refusal to provide them with drinking water.

Outrage over the fire, in which at least 29 people have been hospitalized in addition to those who were killed, was compounded Wednesday after newly released surveillance footage footage showed guards quickly walking away from the cell where the men were protesting, while smoke filled the room.

The men were trapped behind padlocked doors as they yelled for help, NBC News reported.

"How could they not get them out?" Katiuska Márquez, a Venezuelan woman who was looking for her half-brother, asked the Associated Press.

The deaths of more than three dozen people in the fire "lay bare a truly inhumane system of immigration enforcement," said Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas director at Amnesty International. "How is it possible that the Mexican authorities left human beings locked up with no way to escape the fire? These facilities are not 'shelters,' but detention centers, and people are not 'housed' there, but deprived of their freedom."

Amnesty called on Mexican officials to adhere to a recent ruling by the country's Supreme Court of Justice (SCJN), which said on March 15 that people should not be held in migrant detention facilities for more than 36 hours.

"Amnesty International urges the Mexican state to comply with the ruling of the SCJN and to establish protocols to act in fires, as well as evacuation routes in such situations," said the group. "It also calls on the state to investigate the human rights violations, especially the allegations that the migrants were left locked up while the fire occurred, as well as to recognize that the migrants were in its custody and, therefore, it was its obligation both to prevent the fire and to act diligently during the fire to avoid fatal consequences."

The court ruling made clear, said Edith Olivares Ferreto, executive director of Amnesty International Mexico, that the country must "put an end to the practices that have caused untold damage, including torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, to thousands of migrants who have passed through these centers."

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

WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 23: TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew prepares to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill on March 23, 2023 in Washington, DC. The hearing was a rare opportunity for lawmakers to question the leader of the short-form social media video app about the company’s relationship with its Chinese owner, ByteDance, and how they handle users’ sensitive personal data. Some local, state and federal government agencies have been banning use of TikTok by employees, citing concerns about national security (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

The US’ TikTok hearing is politically manipulated to cover its real purpose of robbing the profitable firm from China, which reflects the US’ mounting hegemony and bullying against firms with Chinese background, experts said on Friday, noting the US witch-hunting against TikTok portends US’ technological innovation is going downhill and the political farce against a tiny app has seriously shattered the US values of fair competition and its credibility.

The US House Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing on Thursday (US time) titled, “TikTok: How Congress can safeguard American data privacy and protect children from online harms.”

While US lawmakers acted like they are pursuing a solution on how to ensure data security, the hearing turned out to be a political show that was designed to smear an international firm that has Chinese background and cover up its real purpose of stealing the firm from its Chinese parent, experts said.

Whether it ends up “killing” TikTok or forcibly taking the child out of its parent ByteDance’s arms, it is one of the ugliest scenes of the 21st century in high-tech competition, they said. “Your platform should be banned,” House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers said as she started the hearing, claiming that the app has ties with Chinese government.

During the roughly five-hour  hearing, CEO Shou Zi Chew’s attempts to illustrate TikTok’s business operations were frequently interrupted. His requests to elaborate on concerns of members of US Congress were also blocked.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning denounced the US’ move on Friday, saying the US is adopting the presumption of guilt and engaging in an unreasonable crackdown against TikTok without any proof.

“We noted that some US lawmaker has said that to seek a TikTok ban is a ‘xenophobic witch hunt’,” she said, urging the US to respect the market economy and fair competition rules, stop the unreasonable crackdown on foreign firms and provide an open, fair and non-discriminatory environment for other countries’ firms in the US.

The Chinese government places high importance on protecting data privacy and security according to laws. China has never and will never ask firms or individuals to violate local laws to collect or provide data and information stored within other countries’ borders, Mao stressed.

The latest hearing followed reports that the Biden administration has threatened to ban TikTok if its China-based parent company ByteDance doesn’t divest its stakes in the popular video app.

It is another dark scene in Washington’s struggle for US supremacy, the US’ barbaric act only underscores that US values of fair competition, freedom of speech and inclusiveness are gradually disappearing and instead xenophobia is rising, experts said, noting that the US government lacks confidence in competing with China.

Even more ironic is that rather than finding a solution to problems brought about by the negative impact of US social problems on children such as suicide, self-harm and drug abuse, US lawmakers are instead faulting the company, Li Yong, deputy chairman of the Expert Committee of the China Association of International Trade, told the Global Times on Friday.

“The hearing was hegemonic and bullying against a private firm,” Li said, noting that it’s common for American politicians to put unwarranted labels on entities with Chinese background by fabricating excuses.

“While the US has always paraded itself as a rules-based market economy, they don’t really have any objective rules. All the rules are selected and serve American political elites’ interests and US hegemony,” Li said.

The US’ forced sale of TikTok is shameless robbery of a profitable firm from China, he said, noting that the US is increasingly politicizing an innovative app that has enriched the digital life of American people and benefited a lot of micro businesses in the US.

“TikTok itself is not available in the Chinese mainland, we’re headquartered in Los Angeles and Singapore, and we have 7,000 employees in the US today,” Chew said in his opening remarks.

Dismissing Chew’s testimony, US officials have stepped up their fight against TikTok. Speaking at a separate House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday TikTok should be “ended one way or another,” adding that he did not know if it would be sufficient for TikTok to be divested from its Chinese parent company, CNN reported.

The high-profile hearing also attracted wide attention from netizens who called US Congress members arrogant, ridiculous and ignorant.

“Not a single one of them has made an argument that makes a lick of sense,” an American net user posted on Twitter. “By his logic every other social media app should be banned,” posted another netizen.

The topic “TikTok CEO attending US hearing” became trending on China’s Twitter-like social media Sina Weibo, generating nearly 5 million views.

“I feel sorry for what Chew endured at the hearing. American politicians weren’t so arrogant and aggressive at Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook hearing. It seems all the lawmakers are bullying Chew,” a Chinese netizen posted on Sina Weibo.

While Chew was grilled in Washington, Apple CEO Tim Cook was met with cheers and applause at an Apple store in Beijing on Friday, prompting Chinese netizens to compare the “so-called free market” in the US and “real free market” in China.

The Biden administration’s so-called “national security” narrative has also caused widespread speculation among TikTok users, scholars and researchers.

A TikTok sale would be “completely irrelevant to any of the alleged ‘national security’ threats” and go against “every free market principle and norm” of the state department’s internet freedom principles, the Guardian reported, citing Karim Farhat, a researcher with the Internet Governance Project at Georgia Tech.

NBC News reported on Thursday that a 19-year-old Harvard freshman named Aidan Kohn-Murphy, who used TikTok to rally support for Biden in 2020, is now trying to use the app to stop Biden from killing the platform.

“If they went ahead with banning TikTok, it would feel like a slap in the face to a lot of young Americans,” he said. “Democrats don’t understand the political consequences this would have.”

Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

Sinister move doomed

By forcing the sale of TikTok, the Biden administration is aiming to repeat its takeover of French power company Alstom and its torment on Japanese chip firm Toshiba, but the US’ sinister move is doomed to meet challenges, given similar roadblocks faced by Trump three years ago, experts said.

“The Biden administration will find it hard to completely ban TikTok, as the app has a large user base of more than 150 million in the US,” Xiang Ligang, director-general of the Beijing-based Information Consumption Alliance, told the Global Times.

It’s an even more complicated issue for the US to take over TikTok, as a possible deal should also be in compliance with Chinese laws, he said. Experts said the Chinese government may step in to block the sale of TikTok.

“The Chinese side is firmly opposed to the forced sale or divestiture of TikTok,” Chinese Commerce Ministry spokesperson Shu Jueting said on Thursday.

Exports of Chinese technology must be subject to administrative licensing procedures in accordance with Chinese laws, and the Chinese government is legally bound to make a decision, she reiterated.

In August 2020, China’s Ministry of Commerce revised its restrictions on technology exports, including personalized content recommendations based on data analysis and a number of other technologies such as AI algorithms, which is widely considered as China’s countermeasures against US’ forced sale of TikTok then.

Back in 2020, then president Donald Trump and his administration sought to remove TikTok from app stores and force ByteDance to sell off its US assets. US courts blocked the order, concluding that banning the app would likely restrict the “personal communications” and sharing of “informational materials” by TikTok users.

In addition, the Washington Post reportedly worked with a privacy researcher to look under the hood at TikTok in 2020, concluding that the app does not appear to collect any more data than typical mainstream social network platforms in the US.

“From the US’ groundless crackdown on Huawei to targeting TikTok citing the so-called ‘national security,’ American politicians have not had a comprehensive ‘blueprint’ for their moves, it’s all politically motivated,” Xiang said, referring to reports saying Biden is seeking a second presidential term.

On Thursday, the US put an additional 14 Chinese companies to a red flag list, forcing US exporters to conduct greater due diligence before shipping goods to them, mainly technology and solar firms.

Xiang said the US’ unabated crackdowns on international firms including those from China violate international rules, disrupt global industrial and supply chains and harm both sides’ interests and the global economy as a whole.

Ghost of McCarthyism haunts TikTok Hearing. Cartoon: Carlos Latuff

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ma Jingjing.

WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 23: TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew prepares to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill on March 23, 2023 in Washington, DC. The hearing was a rare opportunity for lawmakers to question the leader of the short-form social media video app about the company’s relationship with its Chinese owner, ByteDance, and how they handle users’ sensitive personal data. Some local, state and federal government agencies have been banning use of TikTok by employees, citing concerns about national security (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

The US’ TikTok hearing is politically manipulated to cover its real purpose of robbing the profitable firm from China, which reflects the US’ mounting hegemony and bullying against firms with Chinese background, experts said on Friday, noting the US witch-hunting against TikTok portends US’ technological innovation is going downhill and the political farce against a tiny app has seriously shattered the US values of fair competition and its credibility.

The US House Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing on Thursday (US time) titled, “TikTok: How Congress can safeguard American data privacy and protect children from online harms.”

While US lawmakers acted like they are pursuing a solution on how to ensure data security, the hearing turned out to be a political show that was designed to smear an international firm that has Chinese background and cover up its real purpose of stealing the firm from its Chinese parent, experts said.

Whether it ends up “killing” TikTok or forcibly taking the child out of its parent ByteDance’s arms, it is one of the ugliest scenes of the 21st century in high-tech competition, they said. “Your platform should be banned,” House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers said as she started the hearing, claiming that the app has ties with Chinese government.

During the roughly five-hour  hearing, CEO Shou Zi Chew’s attempts to illustrate TikTok’s business operations were frequently interrupted. His requests to elaborate on concerns of members of US Congress were also blocked.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning denounced the US’ move on Friday, saying the US is adopting the presumption of guilt and engaging in an unreasonable crackdown against TikTok without any proof.

“We noted that some US lawmaker has said that to seek a TikTok ban is a ‘xenophobic witch hunt’,” she said, urging the US to respect the market economy and fair competition rules, stop the unreasonable crackdown on foreign firms and provide an open, fair and non-discriminatory environment for other countries’ firms in the US.

The Chinese government places high importance on protecting data privacy and security according to laws. China has never and will never ask firms or individuals to violate local laws to collect or provide data and information stored within other countries’ borders, Mao stressed.

The latest hearing followed reports that the Biden administration has threatened to ban TikTok if its China-based parent company ByteDance doesn’t divest its stakes in the popular video app.

It is another dark scene in Washington’s struggle for US supremacy, the US’ barbaric act only underscores that US values of fair competition, freedom of speech and inclusiveness are gradually disappearing and instead xenophobia is rising, experts said, noting that the US government lacks confidence in competing with China.

Even more ironic is that rather than finding a solution to problems brought about by the negative impact of US social problems on children such as suicide, self-harm and drug abuse, US lawmakers are instead faulting the company, Li Yong, deputy chairman of the Expert Committee of the China Association of International Trade, told the Global Times on Friday.

“The hearing was hegemonic and bullying against a private firm,” Li said, noting that it’s common for American politicians to put unwarranted labels on entities with Chinese background by fabricating excuses.

“While the US has always paraded itself as a rules-based market economy, they don’t really have any objective rules. All the rules are selected and serve American political elites’ interests and US hegemony,” Li said.

The US’ forced sale of TikTok is shameless robbery of a profitable firm from China, he said, noting that the US is increasingly politicizing an innovative app that has enriched the digital life of American people and benefited a lot of micro businesses in the US.

“TikTok itself is not available in the Chinese mainland, we’re headquartered in Los Angeles and Singapore, and we have 7,000 employees in the US today,” Chew said in his opening remarks.

Dismissing Chew’s testimony, US officials have stepped up their fight against TikTok. Speaking at a separate House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday TikTok should be “ended one way or another,” adding that he did not know if it would be sufficient for TikTok to be divested from its Chinese parent company, CNN reported.

The high-profile hearing also attracted wide attention from netizens who called US Congress members arrogant, ridiculous and ignorant.

“Not a single one of them has made an argument that makes a lick of sense,” an American net user posted on Twitter. “By his logic every other social media app should be banned,” posted another netizen.

The topic “TikTok CEO attending US hearing” became trending on China’s Twitter-like social media Sina Weibo, generating nearly 5 million views.

“I feel sorry for what Chew endured at the hearing. American politicians weren’t so arrogant and aggressive at Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook hearing. It seems all the lawmakers are bullying Chew,” a Chinese netizen posted on Sina Weibo.

While Chew was grilled in Washington, Apple CEO Tim Cook was met with cheers and applause at an Apple store in Beijing on Friday, prompting Chinese netizens to compare the “so-called free market” in the US and “real free market” in China.

The Biden administration’s so-called “national security” narrative has also caused widespread speculation among TikTok users, scholars and researchers.

A TikTok sale would be “completely irrelevant to any of the alleged ‘national security’ threats” and go against “every free market principle and norm” of the state department’s internet freedom principles, the Guardian reported, citing Karim Farhat, a researcher with the Internet Governance Project at Georgia Tech.

NBC News reported on Thursday that a 19-year-old Harvard freshman named Aidan Kohn-Murphy, who used TikTok to rally support for Biden in 2020, is now trying to use the app to stop Biden from killing the platform.

“If they went ahead with banning TikTok, it would feel like a slap in the face to a lot of young Americans,” he said. “Democrats don’t understand the political consequences this would have.”

Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

Sinister move doomed

By forcing the sale of TikTok, the Biden administration is aiming to repeat its takeover of French power company Alstom and its torment on Japanese chip firm Toshiba, but the US’ sinister move is doomed to meet challenges, given similar roadblocks faced by Trump three years ago, experts said.

“The Biden administration will find it hard to completely ban TikTok, as the app has a large user base of more than 150 million in the US,” Xiang Ligang, director-general of the Beijing-based Information Consumption Alliance, told the Global Times.

It’s an even more complicated issue for the US to take over TikTok, as a possible deal should also be in compliance with Chinese laws, he said. Experts said the Chinese government may step in to block the sale of TikTok.

“The Chinese side is firmly opposed to the forced sale or divestiture of TikTok,” Chinese Commerce Ministry spokesperson Shu Jueting said on Thursday.

Exports of Chinese technology must be subject to administrative licensing procedures in accordance with Chinese laws, and the Chinese government is legally bound to make a decision, she reiterated.

In August 2020, China’s Ministry of Commerce revised its restrictions on technology exports, including personalized content recommendations based on data analysis and a number of other technologies such as AI algorithms, which is widely considered as China’s countermeasures against US’ forced sale of TikTok then.

Back in 2020, then president Donald Trump and his administration sought to remove TikTok from app stores and force ByteDance to sell off its US assets. US courts blocked the order, concluding that banning the app would likely restrict the “personal communications” and sharing of “informational materials” by TikTok users.

In addition, the Washington Post reportedly worked with a privacy researcher to look under the hood at TikTok in 2020, concluding that the app does not appear to collect any more data than typical mainstream social network platforms in the US.

“From the US’ groundless crackdown on Huawei to targeting TikTok citing the so-called ‘national security,’ American politicians have not had a comprehensive ‘blueprint’ for their moves, it’s all politically motivated,” Xiang said, referring to reports saying Biden is seeking a second presidential term.

On Thursday, the US put an additional 14 Chinese companies to a red flag list, forcing US exporters to conduct greater due diligence before shipping goods to them, mainly technology and solar firms.

Xiang said the US’ unabated crackdowns on international firms including those from China violate international rules, disrupt global industrial and supply chains and harm both sides’ interests and the global economy as a whole.

Ghost of McCarthyism haunts TikTok Hearing. Cartoon: Carlos Latuff

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ma Jingjing.

Experts said Friday that Elon Musk's large sale of Tesla shares shortly before the company announced lower-than-expected vehicle deliveries should draw scrutiny from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, an agency that has previously investigated and charged the billionaire for fraud.

The Wall Street Journalreported Friday that earlier this month, "Tesla announced fourth-quarter vehicle deliveries that were significantly below the company’s most recent forecast to investors. The news sent Tesla's stock price plunging when markets opened the next day."

Just weeks before the company's announcement, Musk sold roughly $3.6 billion worth of Tesla stock, raising questions over whether the Tesla CEO unlawfully took advantage of material nonpublic information.

James Cox, a securities law professor at Duke University, told the Journal that Musk's stock sale "should be of great interest to the SEC."

"The issue here is, what did he know and what was the market anticipating when he sold? That's a critical moment," said Cox.

Musk has repeatedly clashed with the SEC in recent years, saying in 2018, "I do not respect them."

The comment came after the agency charged Musk with securities fraud over "a series of false and misleading tweets about a potential transaction to take Tesla private." Musk ended up paying a $20 million fine for the tweets, and he's currently facing a shareholder lawsuit over the debacle.

Musk has since purchased Twitter for $44 billion, a transaction that also drew the attention of federal authorities.

The SEC—now headed by Gary Gensler, a former Tesla shareholder—launched an investigation last year to examine whether Musk properly disclosed his purchase of Twitter shares prior to the takeover.

Musk could soon be facing additional heat from the SEC over his suspiciously well-timed stock sale. As the Journal reported Friday, the Tesla chief "sold nearly 22 million shares December 12-14 at an average price of about $163 a share, according to a regulatory filing."

"When the stock closed on January 3 at just over $108, the shares Mr. Musk sold the prior month had declined in value by $1.2 billion," the newspaper continued. "The stock has since rebounded to about $127."

In an interview with the Journal, Georgetown University securities law professor Donald Langevoort said of the sale, "Is it suspicious? Yes. Is it entirely possible there are other explanations? Of course."

"But that's what the enforcement process is all about," he added.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

"So much wrong here," Fight for the Future said Tuesday, sharing the story on Twitter. The group highlighted that many cops can use facial recognition systems without publicly disclosing it, and anyone's "life can be upended because of a machine's mistake."

Reid—a 28-year-old Black man misidentified as one of three people who allegedly stole over $10,000 in Chanel and Louis Vuitton purses from a pair of shops via bogus credit card purchases—was pulled over by local police in Georgia's Dekalb County on November 25, while he was driving on Interstate 20 to meet up with his mother, NOLA.com reported.

"They told me I had a warrant out of Jefferson Parish. I said, 'What is Jefferson Parish?,'" Reid recalled. "I have never been to Louisiana a day in my life. Then they told me it was for theft. So not only have I not been to Louisiana, I also don't steal."

Reid wasn't released from the Dekalb County jail until December 1. While behind bars, he worried about losing his job as a transportation analyst and being convicted of felonies that he did not commit.

"Not eating, not sleeping. I'm thinking about these charges. Not doing anything because I don't know what's really going on the whole time," he said. "They didn't even try to make the right ID."

Tommy Calogero, Reid's lawyer, told NOLA.com that Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office detectives "tacitly" admitted the misidentification and rescinded a July warrant. The news outlet noted that court records show a Baton Rouge Police Department detective "adopted JPSO's identification of Reid to secure an arrest warrant" for one of the thefts.

According to the report:

Sheriff Joe Lopinto's office did not respond to several requests for information on Reid's arrest and release, the agency's use of facial recognition, or any safeguards around it. That office also denied a formal request for the July 18 arrest warrant for Reid and copies of policies or purchases related to facial recognition, citing an ongoing investigation.

Baton Rouge police also did not respond to questions about its warrant for Reid's arrest. The warrant, signed by 19th Judicial District Judge Eboni Rose, does not say how Lopinto's office identified Reid.

As Fight for the Future summarized: "Police blindly trusted a facial recognition scan to arrest a man in Georgia. He was wrongly imprisoned for a WEEK. Now (surprise, surprise) the cops are stonewalling the press about their failure."

Experts from the ACLU of Louisana and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) shared concerns with NOLA.com about police use of the technology—which, as research has shown, more frequently misidentifies people of color.

In response to reporting on Reid's experience, the national ACLU on Tuesday stressed the flaws of facial recognition tools and asserted that "law enforcement must drop this dangerous technology—we shouldn't have to worry about being falsely arrested because an algorithm gets it wrong."

The national ACLU has previously called on policymakers to end law enforcement use of facial recognition technology across the United States—including after the January 2020 wrongful arrest of Robert Williams, a Black man in Michigan misidentified as a shoplifting suspect.

"My daughters can't unsee me being handcuffed and put into a police car. But they can see me use this experience to bring some good into the world," Williams wrote in a June 2020 opinion piece. "I keep thinking about how lucky I was to have spent only one night in jail—as traumatizing as it was. Many Black people won't be so lucky. My family and I don't want to live with that fear. I don't want anyone to live with that fear."

Even before Williams' arrest, Fight for the Future and partners groups launched a "Ban Facial Recognition" campaign, which has tracked restrictions and known uses of the technology as well as enabled constituents to pressure lawmakers to ban it. Despite some progress in restricting or banning law enforcement's use of such tools at the local and state levels, the United States still lacks federal law on the topic.

"Like nuclear or biological weapons, facial recognition poses a threat to human society and basic liberty that far outweighs any potential benefits," the campaign's website argues. "Silicon Valley lobbyists are disingenuously calling for light 'regulation' of facial recognition so they can continue to profit by rapidly spreading this surveillance dragnet. They're trying to avoid the real debate: whether technology this dangerous should even exist."

According to the campaign, "Industry-friendly and government-friendly oversight will not fix the dangers inherent in law enforcement's use of facial recognition: We need an all-out ban."

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

Environmentalists in Alaska and beyond pointed to the oil and gas industry's lack of interest in a Friday lease sale for nearly a million acres of seafloor as the latest evidence that the U.S. must move beyond fossil fuels and protect the Cook Inlet.

The U.S. Interior Department's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) announced that Hilcorp Alaska LLC submitted the sole bid, offering $63,983 for one of the 93 available blocks. That lease may be granted after a 90-day review process.

"The result should stiffen Interior's spine to stop leasing our public lands for fossil fuel and instead align their management with the urgent need to combat climate change."

The Interior Department had initially canceled the lease sale in May, citing lack of industry interest, but was ultimately required to hold it before the end of the year by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which President Joe Biden signed into law in August.

While the IRA included about $369 billion in "energy security and climate change" investments, campaigners had blasted concessions including the lease sale requirement, with Siqiniq Maupin, executive director of Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic, saying at the time: "This new bill is genocide, there is no other way to put it. This is a life-or-death situation and the longer we act as though the world isn't on fire around us, the worse our burns will be. Biden has the power to prevent this, to mitigate the damage."

Campaigners on Friday also took aim at the administration, while pledging to continue their fight to protect the region.

"This damaging sale never should have happened in the first place, and we'll continue challenging it in court and fighting to preserve beautiful Cook Inlet," said Kristen Monsell, oceans legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a statement. "We urge Biden not to issue any leases without meaningful consideration of drilling's threats to local communities and wildlife like the endangered Cook Inlet beluga whales, as he's required to do by federal law."

The center joined with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Earthjustice—which represents Cook Inletkeeper, Kachemak Bay Conservation Society, and Alaska Community Action on Toxics—in filing a lawsuit last week over what was then the planned lease sale.

"Lease sale 258 was a flop," Earthjustice attorney Erik Grafe said Friday. "The result should stiffen Interior's spine to stop leasing our public lands for fossil fuel and instead align their management with the urgent need to combat climate change."

"We urge Interior to start by exercising its discretion not to issue a lease to Hilcorp, the sole bidder on the lease," he added. "It is a troubled operator with a long history of violations, the lease on which it bid is in important habitat for endangered belugas, and there should be no more oil leasing in the Inlet for Hilcorp or any other company."

The NRDC's Julia Forgie also highlighted Hilcorp's "record of safety violations and spills," and argued that industry's "lackluster" response to the sale "made clear that there's no need to lease this vibrant ocean ecosystem for oil production."

As Reutersreported Friday:

The federal government has held several oil and gas lease sales in the Cook Inlet since the 1970s, but no production has occurred in federal waters there to date. There are 14 active federal leases in Cook Inlet, all of which were purchased by Houston-based Hilcorp at the last federal auction in the region in 2017.
Operating oil and gas platforms in the area are all in state waters, but oil production has declined substantially since peaking in the 1970s.

"The 1970s heyday of Cook Inlet oil and gas development is long behind us as illustrated, once again, with today's lackluster showing," declared Nicole Whittington-Evans, director of Defenders of Wildlife's Alaska Program. "Policy for Cook Inlet waters needs to keep pace with modern reality and focus on addressing the biodiversity and climate crises we face."

"The federal government must take aggressive measures to reduce disturbances and restore critically endangered Cook Inlet beluga whales, which have declined by 75%," Whittington-Evans asserted. "And it must pivot to clean energy technologies and stop trying to double down on fossil fuel projects that undermine our climate goals."

Other Alaskans similarly called for moving on from planet-heating extraction efforts in the region—echoing increasingly urgent warnings from scientists who say humanity must keep fossil fuels in the ground.

"Local opposition to Lease Sale 258 and new drilling activity remains strong," Sue Mauger of Cook Inletkeeper said Friday. "Today's outcome reinforces that fossil fuel development in Cook Inlet is no longer a sound investment. Alaskans know our climate crisis is no joke and are ready to move beyond the fossil fuel era and those who prioritize economic profits over livable communities. We won't give up trying to protect Cook Inlet from carbon pollution, oil spill risks, and shortsighted thinking."

Roberta Highland, president of the Kachemak Bay Conservation Society, stressed that "they call these offshore oil leases but, for us in Kachemak Bay, these waters are neither out of sight nor out of mind."

"New drilling in Lower Cook Inlet," she warned, "will dramatically change our lives, our local economy, and subsistence cultures."

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

More than 100,000 people as of Friday have signed an Amnesty International letter calling upon United Nations member states to "urgently address" government abuse of spyware by enacting a moratorium on its sale, transfer, and use.

"We are witnessing a global spyware crisis in which activists, journalists, and lawyers are targeted with invasive surveillance as a means to silence and intimidate them," Amnesty International secretary general Agnès Callamard said in a statement. "There is an urgent need for stronger human rights protections on the export of surveillance technology."

According to the letter:

Where surveillance is operated without adequate oversight, safeguards, and transparency, the harms of unlawful surveillance impact far beyond those who may have actually been targeted. In the face of opacity and inadequate safeguards, and especially in situations where surveillance is known or suspected to be carried out in unlawful ways, human rights defenders and civil society are forced to self-censor out of fear of being criminalized for their work, even where such surveillance may in fact not be taking place.

Numerous research reports by Amnesty International reveal how this chilling effect can have a serious and detrimental effect on global civil society, affecting not only the right to privacy but also those to free expression and association. Across the globe, human rights defenders have had to live in a constant state of fear, perpetually looking over their shoulders and feeling a sense of impending danger wherever they go as surveillance is often the prelude to other online and offline violence.

"Until a robust human rights regulatory framework is in place, a global moratorium on the sale, transfer, and use of targeted surveillance technology is necessary," Amnesty argues. "The unregulated and un-transparent sale and use of these products means that we may never know the full extent of similar abuses involving other actors. The world can no longer turn a blind eye to this enormous global threat to our rights."

Amnesty's letter comes amid ongoing revelations of individuals targeted with NSO's Pegasus spyware, as well as consumer-grade spyware scandals like TruthSpy, so-called stalkerware that has been planted in the electronic devices of hundreds of thousands of unwitting people. 

Amnesty says:

Companies continue to profit from the sale of spyware used for unlawful surveillance. Every month, new cases are confirmed of people being unlawfully targeted with spyware. The past year has seen cases in El Salvador, Greece, Spain, Egypt, Israel/Occupied Palestinian Territories, Morocco-Western Sahara, Poland, and Thailand. The unregulated and opaque nature of the spyware industry means that we may never know the full extent of similar abuses involving other actors.

"U.N. member states must stop using, and stop tolerating, spyware as a tool of repression," Callamard argued. "And until this happens, states must step up and support a global moratorium on the export of spyware."

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

W.E.B. DuBois: ‘To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.’

Patrick Duffy of ‘Dallas’ Fame Lists Oregon Ranch for $14 Million

Imagine a world where smart cohesive thinkers come together and work with these multimillionaires and get some break on the property and then get a community going there: people who want to learn how to farm-raise animals; how to preserve foods; how to construct tiny homes and microhomes; how to grow food; how to heal; and how to bring together so many types of people who want to heal trauma and get better. I am not just talking about those rough sleepers you might run into, AKA, homeless, many times men of all ages, opting to get off the bureaucratic grid (they too are humans and global citizens, lest we forget). Not just folks who are really down and out, or who just want to be left alone. Although many of those would fit well on a property like this — a river there, ponds, fields, trees, and central outbuildings.

I’ve written about this before — “All the World’s a Stage … Except in our Own Backyards! All it takes is a cool seven million smackeroos to build that field of dreams”

Here, the low down via the realtor —

• $6,945,000.
• 205 +/-  acres zoned AF-5
• Includes 49 Acre Campus with 6+ Buildings totaling approx. 130,000 SF:
  1. Expansion Hall- Administration Building with Auditorium, Classrooms and Offices
  2. Harmony Hall- Girl’s dorm with 67 rooms, 7 offices, lounge, chapel, commercial kitchen, dining room, bath suites, etc. and attached 3-bedroom Dean’s house
  3. Devotion Hall- Boy’s dorm with 49 rooms (19 rooms need sheetrock finished and painted), apartment with kitchen, bath suites, rec room, lounges, etc. and attached 5-bedroom Dean’s house
  4. Gymnasium/Music Building with Stage
  5. Science Classroom Building with Library
  6. Industrial Arts Building with Auto Shop, Wood Shop and Welding Shop
• Extensive Updates during current ownership include:
  1. Administration Building has newer metal roof, updated windows, new insulation, remodeled auditorium and meeting rooms, new HVAC, electrical service and lighting
  2. New windows, high efficiency hot water system, new HVAC, new kitchen appliances and walk-in refrigerator, insulation, paint, lighting and carpeting in Harmony Hall (Girl’s dorm)
  3. New windows, insulation in 49 rooms plus new sheetrock in 30 rooms of Devotion Hall (Boy’s dorm)
  4. New and repaired roofs and new electrical services
• Domestic water system and sewage system for campus
• Includes separate 4.69 acres (Tax Lot 1301) with Spring and water rights– domestic water source for campus
• Adjacent 151 +/- acres well suited for low density residential development with 30 LA water co-op certificates
• Vineyard soils & Beautiful Views
• South Fork Hill Creek flows through property
• Rural location approximately 14 miles south of Hillsboro near Gaston
• Washington County
• Tax Lots 2400 & 1532, Sec 5, Tax Lots 400, 2400 & 2500, Sec 5c and Tax Lot 1301, Sec 16, T2S, R3W, W.M.

That was August 2021. I have had many intersections with places like that, where there is raw land, established multiple room buildings, with commercial kitchens, and gardens, even equestrian building, rivers and springs, and alas, up for sale, and, in the scheme of capitalism and the end rot of nonprofit do-gooders and the inability to get things going that would actually help people, including adults and families who have faced housing challenges, and then also bringing together students, and retirees, and others to create a triple-healing community where people live, eat, think, create and recreate together, yes, IMPOSSIBLE in capitalism. In a wooded and riverside area, throughout the land, thousands of locales, ready for a new paradigm!

There are literally tens of thousands of opportunities like the one listed above, and also that 395-acre ranch Duffy has put on the market.

In capitalism, using county coding as a blunt anti-do hammer, in the scheme of things, getting anything this creative off the ground is almost impossible. You know, getting maybe art students and social worker majors, journalism majors, filmmakers, construction and engineering students, nursing students and others out there to do theses in situ with the very people and situations they may have studied.

Encampments, visiting elders programs, and permanent housing in the form of tiny homes, with tons of support, tons of community connectivity, and then, of course, mental and physical health practitioners, nurtritionists, farmers, and construction gurus on the spot assisting people to learn how to do for themselves.

The template is easy to produce, and that letter I wrote to Jeff Bezos’s ex, MacKenzie Scott Tuttle, in reference to another property for sale in Oregon, 200 acres, for $7 million. Now, just replace that location with this new location:

+–+

Dear MacKenzie Scott-Tuttle:

RE: Satellites of Tierra Firma – Some Look to Mars and the Moon, We Look to Soil Here

& Medicine Wheel of Healing, Growing, Learning, Living

People and land need healing which is all inclusive – holistic.

                 — Allan Savory

 Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

                — Nelson Mandela

Reverence is an emotion that we can nurture in our very young children, respect is an attitude that we instill in our children as they become school-agers, and responsibility is an act that we inspire in our children as they grow through the middle years and become adolescents.

                — Zoe Weil, p. 42, Above All Be Kind: Raising a Humane Child in Challenging Times

Oh, the naysayers tell me and my cohorts to not even try to break into the foundation you run, that this concept of having Mackenzie Scott Tuttle even interested in becoming a placeholder for an idea, and for this land that a group of visionaries see as an incubation collective space for dreams to become reality.

We place our hopes in your ability to read on and see the vision and plans driving this solicitation, this ask. And it is a big ask.

This is figuratively and literally putting the cart before the horse. Here we have 200 acres, and the vision is retrofitting this center that is already there, Ananda, into a truly holistic healing center, youth run, for a seven generations resiliency and look forward ethos of learning to steward the land, learning to grow the land, toward biodynamic farming, all mixed in with intergenerational wisdom growing.

We are seeing this, as stated above, as a medicine wheel. A circle of integrative thinking, education, experimentation and overlapping visions of bringing stakeholders from around the Pacific Northwest (and world) into this safe harbor. There are already facilities on this property as you can see from the real estate prospectus. There are 120 rooms in a great building. There are outbuildings, a gymnasium, barns, and spring water.

It is unfortunately up for sale, and the danger there is a developer with a keen eye to massive profits and turning a spiritual and secular place of great healing and medicine wheel potential into “dream homes” for the rich.

Good land turned into a gated community? We are asking your philanthropy to take a deep dive into helping put this property on hold from those nefarious intentions and allow our group to develop this circle of healing – education across disciplines, elder type academy mixed with youth directed programs; farming; food production; micro-home  building and construction facility; trauma informed healing.

Actually, more. Think of this as a community of communities.

Young People Need Hope, a Place (many places) and Leadership and Development

So many young people are done with Industrial and Techno Capitalism. They know deep down there is more to a scoop of soil than a billion bacteria, and they want to be part of healing communities.

We are proposing the Foundation you have set up invest in this property, as a placeholder for our development plan – actually it is an anti-developer plan. This property will be scarfed up for a steal by land and housing developers who want McMansions out here in this incredible eco-scape. Just what we do not need in the outlying areas of Portland.  Or in so many other locations across this country.

We are a small group ready to do what we can to get food growers and producers at the table to invest in intellectual and sweat and tears capital to make this 200 acres work as a living community of new farmers, people living and learning on the property, incubating ideas for, we hope, to include a micro-home building project, crops, vineyards, learning centers for farming and preserving, marketing and engaging in food healing.

We come at this with decades around food systems, learning from Via Campesina/o or Marion Nestle, Alice Waters, Winona LaDuke, Rachel Carson. We believe in biomimicry, that is, learning how nature settles scores, survives and thrives. We come at this as deeply concerned about ecological footprints, life cycle analyses, the disposable culture and the planned and marketed obsolescence.

We are also coming at this as educators – earth teachers, who know classrooms in prison like settings, with rows of desks, do not engender creative and solutionaries– young people ready to go into the world, even a small community, with engaged, creative and positive ways to deal with climate chaos and the impending shattering of safety nets, including biological and earth systems “nets” and “webs.”

This property is unique, as all of our earth is. This is firstly Kalapua land, first, and that is the Grande Ronde and Siletz, as well as the Atfalsti, too. We call it Gatson, near Hillsboro, Oregon, but the land is the essence of the spirit givers of this continent before “discovery.”

Rich, in the wine country of the new people to this region, this land is about applying our ethos and yours, Ms. Scott-Tuttle, toward a real healing, a real stewardship and real intergeneration ethos around carrying the wisdom of tribes and growers and educators to the youth. We believe women are at the center of many of the themes already listed – farming, educating, healing, human stewardship.

Think of this project as the cart before the horse because the old system, the horse, was always the money, the source of power, and with power comes strings attached. The people involved in this project are looking to have a multistoried community of farmers, learners, youth learning trades and people skills, as well as elders, both Native and new arrivals, to understand that a farm is more than that, as well as a vineyard is more than the sum of the grapes. It is about a reclaiming of the sacred – soil, air, photosynthesis in a truly sustainable fashion.

The only “green washing” we can imagine this project will carry forth is the washing of the greens, the other harvests, in tubs of clear spring water.

Some of us on this project have traveled to other parts of this continent, and spent time with coffee growers and understand that shade grown coffee and beyond fair trade are the only elements to a truly fair and equitable system. Train the people of the land, who are the true stewards, to not only grow, but to roast and market the bounty. Grow the community with water projects, irrigation, schools, and globalized sharing of people, visitors.

This project needs a placeholder, to keep the land out of the insane real estate market. We will do the rest, we solutionaries. There are so many growers and investment angels who want to be part of the Seventh Generation solution.

Clearly, the lessons for people to be in this 200 acre community, farm-soil-healing satellite, are lessons you, Ms. Scott-Tuttle, the fiction writer, know, which you capture deftly with Luther Albright. The world for young people in the Pacific Northwest is that crumbling home and crumbling dam of Albright. The healing we need is more than the structures and infrastructure. It is inside, at the heart of the soul of imagination. Some of us on this project are soliciting from your charity a placeholder purchase of the property are tied to the arts, believing STEAM is the only way forward, and that S.T.E.M. is lifeless and dangerous without the A – arts. We believe the true voice of people are those who believe in asking “what should we do” rather than what is currently on superchargers – “What Can We Do?”

We realize that for many young people, politics have failed them. Many youth I speak with and work with, believe this country is in the midst of an empire of chaos in steep decay. Alternatives to the decay is building communities that would fit the model here on 200 acres – agroecological farming; nutritional centered living; housing; long-term care assistance; youth directed entrepreneur projects; bringing in local and state businesses leaders to be part of a design from the grassroots up.

The catch for most of the youth we have engaged is —  to paraphrase and level  a composite point, “We are ruled by an elite class of individuals who are completely out of touch with the travails of the average American.” This simple statement is packed full of context and frightening reality for millions of students and adults who feel disconnected and neutered by both government agencies and corporate policies.

First, who wants to be “ruled” by anyone? That we have this class system of elite, middle managers, the elite’s high ranking servicers, and then, the rest of the citizens, the so-called 80 percent who have captured less than the overall 10 percent of “wealth” in this country. The very idea of an elite out of touch, or completely out of touch speaks to an ignorance that is dangerous to the world, to the 80 percent, and also speaks to a possible planned ignorance. That we have millions of amazing people, to include nonprofits, community-led organizations, educational institutions, journalists, and others, who can speak to what those “travails” are, and yet, the elites failing to grasp those challenges, or failing to even acknowledge them, this is what many believe is the decay of this society.

This may not sit well with you or your philanthropy, but we as a group have dozens of years experience working with K12, higher ed, farming groups, social services/mutual aid movements, and have systems thinking in our backgrounds, and we underscore youth and community-driven projects and designs. This medicine wheel/circle land trust we are asking you to consider with a follow up meeting, well, this is the only way to a model-driven set of safety nets to move into some challenging times for this Empire in a world that is no longer USA centric.

We are solutionaries, that is, we look for solutions by taking apart problems and then applying holism and deep experimentation in design, but using tried and proven systems that do work.

Healthy food, healthy relationships to culture, people, nature, healthy work, worthy work, with an eye always on the arts. Just as a farming and tiny home community, where biodynamic farming and food preserving and from nail to roof to complete tiny home design are part and parcel the key elements for this community to thrive under, well, there are no better classrooms and transferable skills.

Some of us have seen youth and adults learn the crafts needed to design, plan buildings, and market tiny homes that would be used to seed communities that are, again, centered around farming, centered around healing, centered around Native American healing, and local community values. A young woman who finishes the hands-on learning of building a tiny home – with windows, skylights, plumbing, furnishings, electricity ready, all of that which a home entails – is a remarkable, valuable person. All those skills, again, like a medicine wheel, teach deeper lessons, and transferable skills.

This is what this property would also “house.”

All Tied Together – School, Outdoors, People, Action, Solving Food Insecurity and Housing

The should is an educational-farming-entrepreneur-solutions incubator on these 200 acres. Proving that this could be one of a thousand across the land. There are literally thousands of similar properties around the US, within their own cultural-community-ecological-historical milieus, but again, this project is one that Luther Albright would have thrived inside as a “New Engineer for Growing Communities,” as opposed to river-killing dam builder.

Our earthquake is here now, with all measure of tremors and aftershocks —  that is the climate chaos, wildfires, food insecurity, and alas, the New/New Gilded age of deep inequities that are criminal, as you well know, Ms. Scott Tuttle.

Here, the cart (before the horse):  this amazing collective piece of land and buildings with a multiversity of spiritual under girders . The horses are ready, but they need the cart, the home, the fabric of incubation. Those stallions and mares are engaged, ready, who are willing to take a leap of faith here and risk being outside the common paradigm of predatory and consumer-driven capitalism that has put many millions in a highly precarious position.

It’s amazing, the current system of philanthropy which forces more and more people to beg for less and less diverse money for fewer and fewer truly innovative ideas. Funding a project like this is a legacy ad-venture, the exact formula we need (scaled up to a 1,000 different locales) to break the chains of Disaster and Predatory Capitalism. We need that “capital,” the cart, to help those stallions and mares to break for the field of ideas and fresh streams of praxis.

There are any number of ideas for sustainability communities. Co-ops, growers groups, or mixed communities for young and old to exchange knowledge, capacity, growth, sweat equity —  called intergenerational living. This is about a pretty inventive suite of concepts and practices:

• learning spaces, inside and outside
• buildings to develop micro home (unique, easily packaged and ready to put together) manufacturing and R & D
• food systems – farming of sustainable food, herbs and those vines
• husbandry
• learning food systems, from farm to plate
• ceramics, painting, music, dance, theater and writing center
• speakers’ bureau
• farmers,  restaurateurs and harvesters with a stake in the community
• healing center
• Youth directed outdoor education and experiences
• sustainability practicums for students
• low income micro home housing
• day care center, early learning center

How does this make any sense to a billionaire, who has devoted her life to “giving away” half of her wealth in her lifetime? Well, we see this project – this land-property – as a legacy for many of the avocations and interests (passions) you have articulated over the years. Your vision and commitment to education and women-centered projects are admirable. This is one of those projects.

There is that emotional and sappy Movie, Field of Dreams, and the statement – “if you build it, they will come.” We have found that over the years teaching in many places – Seattle, Spokane, Portland, El Paso, Auburn, Mexico – that young people and nontraditional students want mentoring, leadership and the tools to be mentors and leaders. They need the cart before the horse can herald in the new ideas, and the new way to a better future. If the classroom and master facilitator allows for open growth, unique student-led ideas and work, well, that person has BUILT the field of dreams from which to grow.

There are so many potentials with this project, and it starts with the land, holding it as a Scott-Tuttle placeholder. From an investment point of view, as long as you have people wrangling other people and professionals to get this satellite of sanity, the medicine wheel with many spokes radiating out and inward, the property increases in monetary value. Land is sacred, but just as sacred are the ideas and the potential that land might germinate and grow. It is the reality of our country – too few control too much. We see it in the infamous “Complex” – not just military, but, Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Media, Big Business, Big Education, Big Medicine, as well as private prisons, for profit social services, AI , and Big Tech, so called Surveillance Capitalism.  Who in the 80 percent has the funds to purchase a $7 million project?

Big ideas like this cooperative land medicine wheel (a first of many satellites) might be common, but the web of supportive and cohesive things tied to this property is unusual, to say the least. With the failing of small businesses throughout the area, with the food insecurity for women, children and families, with the housing insecurity, added to debt insecurity —  with all those insecurities young and old face, this project could be the light at the end of many tunnels.  We have connections to Oregon Tilth and Latinx Farmers, and large biodynamic vineyards. We have connections to women’s veteran groups, to aging in place experts. We have connections to trauma healers and growers and interested folk who know construction and design. Additionally, the Pacific Northwest, from Puget Sound to Gold Beach, OR, is full of innovators, and those include the dozens of colleges and universities just in these two states – Oregon and Washington. We intend to trawl for investors – farms, food purveyors, wineries, restaurants, schools and various college programmers – to put into this project. A soil plot to test perennial wheat, a al the Land Institute, to Amory Lovins, Novella Carpenter, and so many more, finding a place of integrated living, ag, permaculture and ever-evolving cultural understanding of the finite planet we are on.

We are hopeful, even under the current Sixth Extinction.

It is telling, this entomologist and educator’s perspective after three decades of teaching:

Diana Six, an entomologist for 30 years who teaches at the University of Montana, took her students to Glacier National Park on a field trip and reported the following:

Life doesn’t just deal with this. When I went up Glacier with my students a few weeks ago, the flowers were curling up. At some of the lower elevations, glacier lilies were shriveled, lupins didn’t even open. The flowers should extend for another three weeks and they’re already gone. Any insects or birds that depend upon them, like bees or hummingbirds, are in trouble, their food is gone. Bird populations have just baked… People seem to think of extinctions as some silent, painless statistic. It’s not. You look at birds that can no longer find fish because they’ve moved too far off shore. They’re emaciated; they’re starving to death. We are at the point that there’s nothing untouched.

How contradictory and illustrative that this student experience took place in a “protected national park.”

Referencing how climate change impacts life, Diana said:

Somewhere along the way, I had gone from being an ecologist to a coroner. I am no longer documenting life. I’m describing loss, decline, death.

We are hopeful that our youth can document life on this Medicine Wheel Land Satellite, and instead of  describing “loss, decline, death,”  this one satellite can help individuals to describe resurgence, restoration, holism, and growth. A model, like the one we propose, could be the incubator and inspiration for other similar projects throughout the land. So many empty buildings, so many abandoned farms, so much good land about to be grabbed up by McMansion developers, or those who have no vision toward a resilient and communitarian existence.

We are thinking of a medicine wheel since so many people can utilize the Farm, from horse therapists, to gardening as trauma healers; from alternative medicine experts, to restaurants with a connection to growers. This is Terra Firma Robusta, for sure, with so much potential to integrate a suite of smart, worldly, localized and educational programs, permanent, long-term, and short in duration.  This would be the linchpin of inspiration, an incubator for similar projects, and we’d make sure that the Philanthropy you head up would be in some form of limelight – imagine, a billionaire placing a property with a deep spiritual history into a land trust of perpetuity. I know another billionaire has purchased farmland and is now the largest farm land holder in the US, but this one here we propose would fit an entirely different model, having nothing to do with industrial farming, genetic engineering and monocultures. Like all good societies, the cornucopia of life and backgrounds and people and land is what makes them dynamic, healthy and resilient, as well as fair.

We propose a grand idea, but we need that field of dreams, that field, that farm, before we can engage a hundred people to be part of this medicine wheel of land healing and hope.

Please let our team discuss this further. Truly, we have both the passion and persistence to get this Medicine Wheel of Healing Farm Community to an unimaginably vibrant level. Will you be part of our field of dreams?

Sincerely,

Paul Haeder

+–+

Here it is, yet more second, third and fourth homesteads for the stars, up for sale!

A therapy pool and then a sweat lodge somewhere on the property? Think big, man.

Get garbage warriors out there, man:

Here’s the photo layout for this place:  on a website called, Mansion Global.

Imagine, the Rich and Famous, a site (there are hundreds) to sell mansions, castles, private jets, yachts, and more.

Getting access to MacKenzie or Duffy or any of these star chamber superstars is one issue, but then getting through the red tape, the endless litigation, all the NIMBY retrogrades complaining, and really, getting people to sign onto a community-centered project, one where a lot of sweat equity is expelled, it is so so tough in predatory, dog-eat-dog capitalism. Getting the project off the ground, and getting the resources to keep it sustainable, well, that is the $1 Billion Question.

We are scattered, atomized, factionalized, silo-centric, contrarian. Hyper competitive, dog-eat-dog, and letting the rich and the connected and the bureaucracies of bad government run things, most people have no center, no ability to move along great ideas and projects.

This is primo property for any multilayered approach to trauma healing, getting young and old to do something as in a going concern tied to making tiny home kits, growing organic food, etc.

As they purchased adjacent properties over the years, they acquired eight more houses and several pastures that are rented out to local ranchers. One of the homes was demolished, six are rented to tenants, and one is used as the ranch manager’s house, according to Mr. Duffy.

“We became a working ranch but not with our own animals,” he said. “It added the most beautiful, bucolic sense of the place.”

A homestead that dates back over 100 years still sits at the entrance to the property, he said. In it he found an old stove, which he restored and put in the main house. But the majority of the roughly 390 acres remains wilderness. The property now has approximately 2 miles of river frontage, according to Mr. DeVries.

These villages or centers are easy to build, in the ten or twenty houses clusters, or bigger. But imagine, on land, growing food, working in soil, campfires at night.

Again, not just chronically homeless, but people who are about to be homeless. Imagine an amazing community, a pop-up village, a sort of “charter town,” without the negative implications of “charter anything” involved. For every 100 households of renters in the United States that earn “extremely low income” (30 percent of the median or less), there are only 30 affordable apartments available, according to a 2013 report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition. It is getting worse, and people are burned out on capitalism. Easily designed, that mock up below. Imagine that as one of several nodes on the Duffy Property.

Efforts to break through the red tape and raise money to house the homeless almost always pay off for a community. Even the most expensive tiny-house projects—such as a new, ambitious $6-million campaign to build a 200-person tiny-house park this year in Austin, Texas—can’t rival the cost of homelessness to taxpayers, which was more than $10 million per year in Austin, for example, as YES! reported in December 2013.

“Chronically homeless people—people who have disabilities and are homeless for long periods of time—can be very expensive to systems of public care,” explains Roman. In 2007, the National Alliance to End Homelessness compiled three studies showing that it costs the same or less money to provide permanent housing as it does to allow people to remain homeless. In Denver, Colo., a housing program for the homeless reduced the costs of public services (including medical services, temporary shelter, and costs associated with arrests and incarceration) by an estimated $15,773 per person per year, saving taxpayers thousands of dollars.

Here, just one organization:

In a wooded area behind Ithaca’s commercial strip, there is a location known as “the jungle.” Here, individuals experiencing homelessness gather and make what home they can. Second Wind’s journey began when our founder, Carmen Guidi, started to build relationships with the residents, bringing pizza and listening to their stories. It was when one of his new friends, who had been asking for help, committed suicide that Carmen knew he needed to do more. Acting as an advocate, Carmen was able to find housing for all but nine men.

With his own money, Carmen purchased campers to provide shelter for the men who were still in The Jungle come winter. He placed these on his land and paid for the utilities, but it became clear that living in campers in the winter was still uncomfortable and very expensive. Through a process of collaboration, Second Wind evolved from campers to cottages and became an official 501(c)(3). Programs have expanded to include a house for women and a formalized Homeless Crisis Alleviation team. In 2020 the “cottages” was dropped from our DBA to better represent all that Second Wind does. Each of the projects we manage is further described on their own pages under the “About Us” tab.

​Second Wind’s vision is to house and walk with people towards restored lives. To this end, SW seeks to improve the relationships with self, family, and the larger community. Accomplished by our mission to

• ​Provide housing, support, and encouragement to homeless and at-risk people in our community.
• Mentor residents in life skills needed to reintegrate into society and, when possible, family life.
• Practice living as good neighbors by building relationships amongst residents and the surrounding community.
• Sustain relationships and support residents who have moved on from Second Wind.
• Future projects include an on-site community center, a multi-unit house for women, and a multi-bay work garage.

Here, a higher end way to age and die in place.

Even some churches are attempting to get into the act!

Churches across the US are building tiny houses on spare land to accommodate homeless people, The Associated Press reported.

A number of faith leaders are working with nonprofits and affordable housing organizations to create the micro homes. They typically have a single bedroom and a small kitchen area and are being built on vacant land belonging to churches.

Tiny homes are becoming an increasingly popular solution to help tackle the homelessness crisis. More than half a million people were homeless in the US in 2020, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness’ most recent report, and 70% of those were individuals. (source)

Of course, that was 2020, and now we see Europe in the sewer for what has been happening with the U$A dictating how EuroTrashLandia will slide into more and more recession, joblessness, and homelessness. Finland ends homelessness and provides shelter for all in need

Yes, adults, seniors, so to speak, are in very precarious positions:

Why Are Seniors Homeless in America? (source)

Over the years, the number of homeless seniors aged 65 years and older in the U.S. has been increasing. Homelessness among older people aged 50-60 years is also increasing. Not all seniors have enough income and money saved to pay for a safe and stable place to live and other necessities such as food, utilities, and medication.

Homeless elders can face many challenges—especially health issues. Many don’t have enough money or insurance coverage to go to the doctor and get treatment. Some don’t trust health care and social services providers. Accessing public assistance programs can also be daunting to homeless elders. Some get discouraged by application processes, have a hard time getting to places to receive care and services, and refuse help.

The key to stable housing for older people and seniors is preventing eviction. State and local departments of social services often help with housing emergencies for the elderly and by providing housing for low income seniors. In many communities, religious organizations help homeless senior citizens by providing emergency housing assistance, case management, and money management services to maintain housing and prevent homelessness.

And,

In May of 1990, the Citizens Committee for the Homeless, a Santa Cruz County nonprofit, began a new project by opening the gates of an organic garden on Pelton Avenue.

The Homeless Garden Project would provide job training and meaningful work in a therapeutic environment. The Homeless Garden Project began as a place to provide sanctuary, refuge, and meaningful work within the healing space of the organic farm. Blossoming over time and furthering the project’s benefits, the farm harvests have provided an opportunity to support our vision and community through our CSA program, farm stand, and crafts, which are sold at our local Santa Cruz stores and on-line.

We are genuinely humbled by the profound transformations our trainees make in our program, and the generous support provided by our community. Our purpose-driven nonprofit has proven to be a benefit to our neighbors in need, our community, and our environment. We couldn’t have done this without the continual generosity and support of our donors, volunteers, and CSA members. We are so grateful for each one of you.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

California on Thursday committed to prohibiting the sale of so-called "natural" gas heaters and furnaces by the end of the decade, a first-in-the-nation move climate campaigners and environmentalists hope will serve as an example other states will follow.

"We're really hopeful that this is the beginning of a domino effect and other states will follow California's lead."

The California Air Resources Board (CARB) unanimously approved a plan primarily aimed at attaining the federal health-based standard for ozone, which is usually experienced as smog.

CARB says its plan contains "an unprecedented variety of new measures to reduce emissions from sources under the state's authority," including zero- or reduced-emission trucks, trains, and space and water heaters.

"We need to take every action we can to deliver on our commitments to protect public health from the adverse impacts of air pollution, and this strategy identifies how we can do just that," CARB Chair Liane Randolph said in a statement. "While this strategy will clean the air for all Californians, it will also lead to reduced emissions in the many low-income and disadvantaged communities that experience greater levels of persistent air pollution."

"But to truly meet the ozone standard, California needs more federal action to clean up harmful diesel pollution from primarily federally controlled sources, from locomotives and ocean-going vessels to aircraft, which are all concentrated in communities that continue to bear the brunt of poor air quality," Randolph added. "We simply cannot provide clean air to Californians without the federal government doing its part."

Leah Louis Prescott, a senior associate at the clean energy nonprofit RMI, told Bloomberg that "we're really hopeful that this is the beginning of a domino effect and other states will follow California's lead."

"Together furnaces and water heaters typically that run on gas account for 90% of gas use in the average California household," Prescott said in a separate interview with KSWB. "So just eliminating these two sources of pollution is going to be a big win for our air quality and our health as well as for addressing climate change."

"I do think a lot more states are going to be following in California's footsteps and looking at this as an opportunity to reduce the pollution in our homes and businesses," she added.

While CARB's plan does not include gas stoves, dozens of California municipalities—including Los Angeles, San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley—have banned or limited their use in new residential buildings.

According to Canary Media:

Indoor fossil fuel use accounts for roughly 12% of total U.S. carbon emissions, making it an important target for efforts to combat climate change. But CARB's proposal, which is part of a much broader plan to move the state toward compliance with federal Clean Air Act standards, isn't primarily justified by the goal of reducing carbon emissions. Instead, it's intended to reduce the nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions that contribute to smog-forming and health-harming ozone and particulate air pollution.

A growing body of scientific evidence shows that emissions from burning gas to heat buildings, cook food, and dry clothes are a far more significant source of NOx emissions than previously realized. Beyond being a precursor to the formation of smog, NOx can be a significant cause and exacerbator of asthma, heart disease, and other health problems on its own.

California's move toward ending sales of gas heaters and furnaces will likely mean an increased reliance upon heat pump technology, which uses electricity to transfer heat from warm to cool places, and is already in widespread use in Europe.

Fossil fuel and utility lobbyists have successfully fought attempts to ban or limit the use of gas appliances. At least 20 Republican-controlled states have passed laws to outlaw such bans.

Thursday's CARB announcement came two months after California moved to outlaw the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035.

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

Advocates for public utilities are applauding this week following an announcement by the Board of Commissioners in Bucks County, Pennsylvania that officials opposed a plan to sell the county's sewer system to a private company.

"This was a backroom corporate deal from the start, and it only stopped because local residents started to ask questions, voice their concerns, and hold their elected county commissioners who have the power to change the BCWSA's charter accountable."

At $1.1 billion, the proposed sale of the Bucks County Water and Sewer Authority (BCWSA) to Aqua Pennsylvania would have been the largest privatization of a public wastewater system in U.S. history, and local residents had planned to rally against the proposal at Wednesday's Board of Commissioners meeting before all three commissioners on Tuesday urged the BCWSA to halt the sale.

"What we heard from the public was clear, nonpartisan, and near-universal: Do not sell off the publicly run BCWSA sewer system to a private entity," said Diane Ellis-Marseglia, vice chair of the board.

The chairman of the water and sewer authority confirmed Tuesday that the sale would not go through, saying in a statement, "We were never going to be in conflict with the commissioners' position."

The proposal garnered outcry when it was publicized in April, with local group Neighbors Opposing Privatization Efforts (NOPE) warning that handing over control of the public utility would lead to escalating sewer bills for residents and eliminate local control.

About 100,000 residents in 31 towns across Bucks, Montgomery, and Chester counties pay an average of $48 per month for water and sewer service, according toThe Philadelphia Inquirer. Aqua proposed freezing current rates for a year but then increasing them to match its monthly rate, which is currently $88.

Local anti-privatization campaigners applauded the decision by the commissioners, noting that the state must act to stop companies from taking control of public services, as has happened in a growing number of towns since new rules were passed in 2016 encouraging local officials to sell public utilities.

"We are thankful to the commissioners and to the Board of the Authority for coming to this decision," said David McMahon, co-founder of NOPE. "We are grateful to all the residents, township officials, [and] utility workers who devoted considerable time and effort in these past weeks to share the information, spread the word, and stand together in time to turn this sale back. It is important to recognize though, that our state legislators still have a role to play."

McMahon urged members of the Pennsylvania General Assembly to reject S.B. 597, which water rights campaigners say would saddle small municipal systems with "new, inappropriate requirements and oversight fees, which could force them to privatize."

"Our public utility acquisition laws are still broken and there are currently communities fighting these corporate takeovers of public property," said Kofi Osei, a community organizer with NOPE. "The way our utility code is written opens up the floodgates for potential corruption. We need to severely narrow the scope of when privatization is acceptable and give ratepayers a seat at the table with referendum."

Mary Grant, a right to water campaign director at Food and Water Watch (FWW), which also spoke out against the privatization scheme, called the local organizing effort against Aqua's plan a "rallying cry" against corporate takeovers, while the group's Eastern Pennsylvania organizer, Ginny Marcille-Kerslake, credited the residents with stopping the deal.

"This was a backroom corporate deal from the start, and it only stopped because local residents started to ask questions, voice their concerns, and hold their elected county commissioners who have the power to change the BCWSA's charter accountable," said Marcille-Kerslake. "Getting the board to see the light and slam the brakes on this terrible deal is a huge win for clean water, public input, and democracy itself."

The commissioners' announcement came a day after Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican, suggested that the solution to the state capital's water emergency was privatization. After decades of disinvestment in Jackson's water system and recent flooding, residents faced a major drop in water pressure and were left without safe drinking water.

"Corporate interests now seek to exploit the devastation in Black and brown communities like Baltimore and Jackson," Grant told The Guardian Thursday. "[But] privatization would exacerbate the harm by extracting resources and driving up water bills for communities already in an affordability crisis."

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

The Conflict group of islands in Papua New Guinea’s Milne Bay province cannot be sold to foreign interests, Parliament has been told.

Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Lands John Rosso said yesterday the privately-owned controversial islands would instead be turned into an environmental marine conservation area.

Irked by the potential sale of the islands for a substantial amount of money, Rosso has issued a ministerial directive for an immediate investigation into the acquisition of titles and the alleged sale.

• READ MORE: Other reports on PNG land sales

The 21 islands have been owned by retired Australian businessman Ian Gowrie-Smith who placed the atolls on the open market.

They include among the named islands Panasesa Island, Madiboiboi, Gabugabutau, Tubinagurm Island, Lutmatavi Island, Panaboal, Ginara Island, Panarakuum Island, Panarakiim Motina, Muniara Island, Auriria Island, Panamaiia, Parapaniian, Panaiiaii, Kisa, Itamarina and Ilai Islands.

The Conflict islands are in PNG which put them closer to the Australian mainland and the potential sale has raised alarm bells in that country, which has been wary of the controversial security pact between Solomon Islands and China — and also China’s rise in the Pacific.

In Parliament yesterday, Kiriwina-Goodenough MP Douglas Tomuriesa took Rosso to task, demanding action from the government to stop the sale of these atolls because of the cultural significance and traditional values they had on the local people.

Traditional hunting grounds
“This group of islands is the traditional hunting grounds for our people and our people cannot be allowed into these islands due to the owner being strict,” Tomuriesa said.

“These are traditionally resting and hunting grounds. Today, our people cannot do that.”

It is understood the islands were being sold for substantial amounts, a sale that has not only angered the locals but caused heartbeat to Australia as it poses a national and regional security risk to its sovereignty, given the Chinese conglomerates that have allegedly put up their hands to buy the islands.

Rosso told Parliament that these islands would never be sold under his watch and that the government would make sure they would be kept as conservative and protected areas.

He warned that the investigations could also lead to the revocation of the lease but was subject to the completion once initiated.

“The Conflict islands cannot be sold to non-citizens and that is my stand, and the PNG government stand, there will be an investigation to establish the status and the way the title was awarded in the first instance,” Rosso said.

“The islands will be declared as a conservative and protected area to be administered by special purpose vehicle to protect it for our children to benefit from in the future.

Status of titles probe
“I have already asked the Department of Lands to institute an investigation to establish the status of these titles which are freehold and ascertain the way these titles were created and granted to, we believe, a non-citizen.

“I would like to encourage the current titleholder to come forward voluntarily and discuss these issues with me.

“The position of the government of PNG through the Minister for Lands and Physical Planning is that these islands and the sea belong to the broader community because it is part of their marine and sea life to sustain the marine and pristine ecosystem.

“Therefore, PNG as a custodian of these parts of marine eco-system intends to declare the Conflict Islands as a conservation protected area to be administered by a special purpose vehicle that has the same status as Australia Great Barrier Reef, that is my view and I will be pursuing.

“I will be working closely with the Milne Bay provincial government to ensure that this is carried out.

“For the temporary timing, I will not allow the Conflict islands to be sold under my watch.

“I will be pursuing properly talks with the current owner to see a way forward for this but with a very firm view that we will not allow these islands to be sold, likewise other protected areas in PNG.

“The Conflict islands, the sales and transfer can be made only to a PNG citizen.

“How did the titleholder, believed to be [not] a PNG citizen come to own these freehold titles for 20 years.”

Gorethy Kenneth is a PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.

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

Chang said the data was linked to host oss-cn-shanghai-shga-d01-a.ops.ga.sh, which is a Shanghai police local area network (LAN) that is physically isolated from the internet, using private services from Alibaba Cloud.

The breach is likely the biggest to hit China since Communist Party (CCP) rule began in 1949.

"The data is linked to one billion people, with everything there," Chang said. "I saw on Twitter that some people have already started analyzing the population decline, telecom fraud or other research based on the data."

"A lot of people have downloaded some part of it."

The data dump reportedly includes ID card and phone numbers, payment records for online purchases including groceries, ticket sales and hotel bookings, as well as details of age and gender.

Current affairs commentator Li Ang said the data dump is highly sensitive, coming as it does ahead of the CCP's 20th National Congress later this year, at which CCP leader Xi Jinping is expected to seek an unprecedented third term in office.

"This isn't some regular hacker; they must have used very high-tech means to get this data, and to publish it," Li told RFA. "I don't think this is an accident."

"The person was already holding this data, and they have chosen this time to publish it," he said.

China has yet to comment on the estimated 24TB of data involved in the leak, and many online comments said the government was unlikely to respond, for fear of encouraging more people to try obtaining data.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

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

Chang said the data was linked to host oss-cn-shanghai-shga-d01-a.ops.ga.sh, which is a Shanghai police local area network (LAN) that is physically isolated from the internet, using private services from Alibaba Cloud.

The breach is likely the biggest to hit China since Communist Party (CCP) rule began in 1949.

"The data is linked to one billion people, with everything there," Chang said. "I saw on Twitter that some people have already started analyzing the population decline, telecom fraud or other research based on the data."

"A lot of people have downloaded some part of it."

The data dump reportedly includes ID card and phone numbers, payment records for online purchases including groceries, ticket sales and hotel bookings, as well as details of age and gender.

Current affairs commentator Li Ang said the data dump is highly sensitive, coming as it does ahead of the CCP's 20th National Congress later this year, at which CCP leader Xi Jinping is expected to seek an unprecedented third term in office.

"This isn't some regular hacker; they must have used very high-tech means to get this data, and to publish it," Li told RFA. "I don't think this is an accident."

"The person was already holding this data, and they have chosen this time to publish it," he said.

China has yet to comment on the estimated 24TB of data involved in the leak, and many online comments said the government was unlikely to respond, for fear of encouraging more people to try obtaining data.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

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

Today’s Matariki celebrations signal the maturing of Aotearoa New Zealand, says Māori leader Sir Pou Temara.

A ceremony attended by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and other dignitaries was held in Wellington to mark the first national public holiday in New Zealand for Matariki.

On a still Wellington morning at Te Papa, the hautapu ceremony was led by Sir Pou Temara and an array of tohunga.

• READ MORE: Matariki falls during a quiet retail season – but NZ businesses should be wary of cashing in
• Matariki: reintroducing the tradition of Māori New Year celebrations
• Other Matariki reports

“Today is a moment in time. This is a moment that future generations will look upon and say this is when we came of age,” Sir Pou said.

Matariki is the start of the Māori New Year Matariki – a time for celebration, remembrance, growth and renewal and events to acknowledge this have been organised across the country.

RNZ is marking Matariki with special programming throughout the day with highlights including a live broadcast of the celebrations from Te Papa hosted by Julian Wilcox and Māni Dunlop and an interview with renowned Māori astronomer Professor Rangi Mātāmua.

‘Unites us under the stars’
Prime Minister Ardern recalled announcing the holiday in Rotorua in September 2020 and the joy that greeted the news, especially among young people.

She said she had witnessed several special moments this week, as people prepared for Matariki, including during her visit yesterday to Wainouimata Intermediate School to watch tamariki stage a performance of the many stories of Matariki.

The prime minister said the public holiday should not divide us by Māori ancestry or other, rather “it unites us under the stars of Aotearoa”.

The thing I’ve liked about the Matariki stars, though I knew them for decades as the Pleiades, is their lovely shimmer, caused by a dust cloud passing between them and us. They can look so different to other constellations. No wonder people have stared at them for millennia. pic.twitter.com/TDvV69pTUE

— JeremyReesnz (@JeremyReesnz) June 23, 2022

“Matariki provides us with a chance to reflect; to think of those we have lost and to prepare and share a sense of hope and optimism for the future.

“I can’t think of a better moment in time for us to take up what Matariki has to offer us as individuals but also as a nation.”

Matariki offered “a space where there is room for us all,” she said.

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

Mānawatia a Matariki mai Heretaunga, ngā mihi o te tau hau e hoa mā pic.twitter.com/QRrbLJk8EY

— Olly McMillan (@oliverwaiapu) June 23, 2022

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

Aotearoa New Zealand will enjoy a new official public holiday on June 24, with the country marking Matariki — the start of the Māori New Year. But with it comes the temptation for businesses to use the day to drive sales.

Some Māori have already expressed concern that businesses were positioning themselves to market Matariki as a shopping event.

On the back of those concerns, Skye Kimura, chief executive of Māori cultural marketing and communications agency Tātou, launched a campaign called “Matariki is not for sale”.

• READ MORE: Australia Day, Invasion Day, Survival Day: a long history of celebration and contestation
• Matariki: reintroducing the tradition of Māori New Year celebrations
• Other Matariki reports

“No one wants to see a Matariki Big Mac,” she argued.

But those trying to defend Matariki from mass commercialisation could be fighting a difficult battle.

Few public holidays, either in New Zealand and elsewhere, have been immune to commercial interests. In the United States, for example, businesses are facing criticism for attempting to make money from Juneteenth, a holiday to celebrate the emancipation of slaves.

Human tendency to mark the change
One of the difficulties facing critics of the commercialisation of public holidays is that they may be fighting deep habits born out of capitalism and human nature.

A lot of our special occasions are structured around various parts of the year and changes in the pattern of life. The earliest pagan rituals were about the change in seasons and to mark what was different from one period of life to the next.

From a social and possibly evolutionary perspective, we are already primed to do something different from our day-to-day activities to mark the significant changes we see around us.

When we have these seasonal celebrations, it doesn’t take much of a nudge for retailers to say, hey, people are looking to mark the change and shopping is a really good way to enact that transition between two phases — an “out with old, in with the new” message.

Shopping to celebrate is what we do
Each year is already punctuated with several cultural celebrations that have, over time, become shopping events. The most classic example is the commercialisation of Christmas.

Even though there is the Christian tradition of the three wise men giving gifts at the birth of Christ, establishing the ritual of gift giving, the three months leading up to December 25 have become about sales and opportunities to spend.

Easter, Valentine’s Day, Queen’s Birthday weekend and even Labour Day have all become sales events for retailers.

Matariki also lands in a quiet time of the year for retail — right in the middle of winter and between the big shopping weekends of Queen’s Birthday and Labour Day.

Potential for blowback against retailers
But when businesses commercialise anything there is always the question of whether they have the legitimacy to do so, or whether they’re bastardising the event for commercial gain.

There is the potential for significant blowback for businesses looking to cash in on Matariki. And they only need to look at Anzac Day as an example of commemoration that remains off limits to blatant commercialisation.

Yes, it’s fine to sell poppies or to have a donation box at your point of sale. It’s even okay to advertise with a “thank you for your service” banner. But if a business tries obviously to make money on the back of Anzac Day, people start to get a little upset.

That doesn’t mean businesses don’t try to get around public sentiment. Every year there is an element of “Anzac washing”, where companies try to make it look like they’re supportive of veterans, even if they have otherwise done nothing to support former and current military personnel.

It is likely that how we handle Anzac Day will provide a baseline for critics assessing businesses that try to use Matariki as a way to drive sales.

Businesses could be judged by whether or not they have Matariki sales, or whether there is some sort of attempt to “Matariki-wash” their other commercial offerings.

Businesses should tread carefully
It is an area full of potential landmines, with little clear benefit at this stage.

Not only is there the commercialisation of a public holiday, which some people find annoying already, but there’s also the debate about cultural appropriation versus cultural appreciation.

Companies need to realise the potential for blowback and controversy is multiplied above other, more established public holidays. There are those who are annoyed about another public holiday adding labour costs for businesses. And there even are those objecting to the supposed “wokeness” of celebrating Matariki.

At a bare minimum, then, businesses determined to use Matariki as part of their sales pitch need to understand what the celebration is really about and its significance within the community.

It will be interesting to see if any are willing to risk the minefield for the sake of sales that come from an extra three-day weekend, or whether they’ll wait and see what happens to those who take the risk first.

Dr Mike Lee is associate professor of marketing, University of Auckland. 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.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday called on the U.S. Senate to protect Americans' "most private information" by banning data brokers from selling people's health and location data, which is constantly collected and stored by tech companies.

Introducing the Health and Location Data Protection Act as the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to soon overturn Roe v. Wade and take away the right to abortion care for millions of Americans, the Massachusetts Democrat said "it is more crucial than ever for Congress toprotect consumers' sensitive data."

"Data brokers profit from the location data of millions of people, posing serious risks to Americans everywhere," said Warren. "The Health and Location Data Protection Act will ban brokers from selling Americans' location and health data, rein in giant data brokers, and set some long overdue rules of the road forth is $200 billion industry."

The bill defines data brokers as any person or entity "that collects, buys, licenses, or infers data about individuals and then sells, licenses, or trades that data."

The bill—which is co-sponsored by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—was introduced several weeks after a data firm called SafeGraph announced under pressure that it would no longer sell information about cellphone users who visit abortion clinics.

"When abortion is illegal, researching reproductive healthcare online, updating a period-tracking app, or bringing a phone to the doctor’s office all could be used to track and prosecute women across the U.S."

The company had been obtaining users' location data through apps on their phones, with many people unaware that the apps were sending information about their whereabouts to a third party.

As Common Dreams reported, over a one-week period in April, just before a leaked draft opinion revealed that the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court had voted to overturn Roe, SafeGraph sold data showing more than 600 visits to Planned Parenthood clinics for $160 to Vice.

Rights advocates expressed relief when SafeGraph announced it would end such sales, but Frederike Kaltheuner, director for technology and human rights at Human Rights Watch, said the business's actions show "what lack of data regulation means in practice."

Under Warren's proposal, the FTC, state attorneys general, and people whose data has been sold would be empowered to sue to enforce the provisions of the law and Congress would provide $1 billion to the FTC over the next decade to ensure it can enforce the ban.

Wyden said passage of the ban is crucial as the nation awaits the Supreme Court's ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.

"When abortion is illegal, researching reproductive healthcare online, updating a period-tracking app, or bringing a phone to the doctor’s office all could be used to track and prosecute women across the U.S.," said Wyden. "It amounts to uterus surveillance. Congress must protect Americans' privacy from abuse by far-right politicians who want to control women's bodies."

As Common Dreams reported earlier this month, privacy advocates say the collection and storage of people's location data could make tech companies "complicit in the criminalization of people seeking abortions in a post-Roe world."

Warren noted that location data has already been used by federal agencies to circumvent the Fourth Amendment by purchasing private data instead of obtaining it via a subpoena or warrant and to out LGBTQ+ people.

“Health and location data are incredibly sensitive and can be used for a range of harms, from profiling and exploiting consumers to spying on citizens without warrants to carrying out stalking and violence," said Justin Sherman of Duke University's Data Brokerage Project, who endorsed the bill. "Companies should not be allowed to freely buy and sell Americans' health and location data, on the open market, with virtually no restrictions."

"Imposing strong legal and regulatory controls on this dangerous practice is vital to protecting the privacy of every American—particularly women, the LGBTQIA+ community, people of color, the poor, and other vulnerable communities," Sherman added.

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

Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday called on the U.S. Senate to protect Americans' "most private information" by banning data brokers from selling people's health and location data, which is constantly collected and stored by tech companies.

Introducing the Health and Location Data Protection Act as the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to soon overturn Roe v. Wade and take away the right to abortion care for millions of Americans, the Massachusetts Democrat said "it is more crucial than ever for Congress toprotect consumers' sensitive data."

"Data brokers profit from the location data of millions of people, posing serious risks to Americans everywhere," said Warren. "The Health and Location Data Protection Act will ban brokers from selling Americans' location and health data, rein in giant data brokers, and set some long overdue rules of the road forth is $200 billion industry."

The bill defines data brokers as any person or entity "that collects, buys, licenses, or infers data about individuals and then sells, licenses, or trades that data."

The bill—which is co-sponsored by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—was introduced several weeks after a data firm called SafeGraph announced under pressure that it would no longer sell information about cellphone users who visit abortion clinics.

"When abortion is illegal, researching reproductive healthcare online, updating a period-tracking app, or bringing a phone to the doctor’s office all could be used to track and prosecute women across the U.S."

The company had been obtaining users' location data through apps on their phones, with many people unaware that the apps were sending information about their whereabouts to a third party.

As Common Dreams reported, over a one-week period in April, just before a leaked draft opinion revealed that the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court had voted to overturn Roe, SafeGraph sold data showing more than 600 visits to Planned Parenthood clinics for $160 to Vice.

Rights advocates expressed relief when SafeGraph announced it would end such sales, but Frederike Kaltheuner, director for technology and human rights at Human Rights Watch, said the business's actions show "what lack of data regulation means in practice."

Under Warren's proposal, the FTC, state attorneys general, and people whose data has been sold would be empowered to sue to enforce the provisions of the law and Congress would provide $1 billion to the FTC over the next decade to ensure it can enforce the ban.

Wyden said passage of the ban is crucial as the nation awaits the Supreme Court's ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.

"When abortion is illegal, researching reproductive healthcare online, updating a period-tracking app, or bringing a phone to the doctor’s office all could be used to track and prosecute women across the U.S.," said Wyden. "It amounts to uterus surveillance. Congress must protect Americans' privacy from abuse by far-right politicians who want to control women's bodies."

As Common Dreams reported earlier this month, privacy advocates say the collection and storage of people's location data could make tech companies "complicit in the criminalization of people seeking abortions in a post-Roe world."

Warren noted that location data has already been used by federal agencies to circumvent the Fourth Amendment by purchasing private data instead of obtaining it via a subpoena or warrant and to out LGBTQ+ people.

“Health and location data are incredibly sensitive and can be used for a range of harms, from profiling and exploiting consumers to spying on citizens without warrants to carrying out stalking and violence," said Justin Sherman of Duke University's Data Brokerage Project, who endorsed the bill. "Companies should not be allowed to freely buy and sell Americans' health and location data, on the open market, with virtually no restrictions."

"Imposing strong legal and regulatory controls on this dangerous practice is vital to protecting the privacy of every American—particularly women, the LGBTQIA+ community, people of color, the poor, and other vulnerable communities," Sherman added.

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

Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday called on the U.S. Senate to protect Americans' "most private information" by banning data brokers from selling people's health and location data, which is constantly collected and stored by tech companies.

Introducing the Health and Location Data Protection Act as the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to soon overturn Roe v. Wade and take away the right to abortion care for millions of Americans, the Massachusetts Democrat said "it is more crucial than ever for Congress toprotect consumers' sensitive data."

"Data brokers profit from the location data of millions of people, posing serious risks to Americans everywhere," said Warren. "The Health and Location Data Protection Act will ban brokers from selling Americans' location and health data, rein in giant data brokers, and set some long overdue rules of the road forth is $200 billion industry."

The bill defines data brokers as any person or entity "that collects, buys, licenses, or infers data about individuals and then sells, licenses, or trades that data."

The bill—which is co-sponsored by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—was introduced several weeks after a data firm called SafeGraph announced under pressure that it would no longer sell information about cellphone users who visit abortion clinics.

"When abortion is illegal, researching reproductive healthcare online, updating a period-tracking app, or bringing a phone to the doctor’s office all could be used to track and prosecute women across the U.S."

The company had been obtaining users' location data through apps on their phones, with many people unaware that the apps were sending information about their whereabouts to a third party.

As Common Dreams reported, over a one-week period in April, just before a leaked draft opinion revealed that the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court had voted to overturn Roe, SafeGraph sold data showing more than 600 visits to Planned Parenthood clinics for $160 to Vice.

Rights advocates expressed relief when SafeGraph announced it would end such sales, but Frederike Kaltheuner, director for technology and human rights at Human Rights Watch, said the business's actions show "what lack of data regulation means in practice."

Under Warren's proposal, the FTC, state attorneys general, and people whose data has been sold would be empowered to sue to enforce the provisions of the law and Congress would provide $1 billion to the FTC over the next decade to ensure it can enforce the ban.

Wyden said passage of the ban is crucial as the nation awaits the Supreme Court's ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.

"When abortion is illegal, researching reproductive healthcare online, updating a period-tracking app, or bringing a phone to the doctor’s office all could be used to track and prosecute women across the U.S.," said Wyden. "It amounts to uterus surveillance. Congress must protect Americans' privacy from abuse by far-right politicians who want to control women's bodies."

As Common Dreams reported earlier this month, privacy advocates say the collection and storage of people's location data could make tech companies "complicit in the criminalization of people seeking abortions in a post-Roe world."

Warren noted that location data has already been used by federal agencies to circumvent the Fourth Amendment by purchasing private data instead of obtaining it via a subpoena or warrant and to out LGBTQ+ people.

“Health and location data are incredibly sensitive and can be used for a range of harms, from profiling and exploiting consumers to spying on citizens without warrants to carrying out stalking and violence," said Justin Sherman of Duke University's Data Brokerage Project, who endorsed the bill. "Companies should not be allowed to freely buy and sell Americans' health and location data, on the open market, with virtually no restrictions."

"Imposing strong legal and regulatory controls on this dangerous practice is vital to protecting the privacy of every American—particularly women, the LGBTQIA+ community, people of color, the poor, and other vulnerable communities," Sherman added.

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

Switzerland will not allow visa-free entry for Vanuatu citizens whose passports were issued on or after May 25, 2015.

The ban will stay in place until February 3, 2023.

This follows a decision in March by the European Union’s Council to partially call off the visa waiver agreement with Vanuatu.

• READ MORE: Other Vanuatu passport reports

The EU had concerns that Vanuatu’s investor citizenship programmes, known as “Golden passports”, is a threat to the EU countries.

Switzerland’s Federal Department of Justice and Police, which works alongside the Swiss State Secretariat for Migration, stated that those with passports issued before May 25, 2015, are not affected by the decision.

Both the EU and Swiss authorities said Vanuatu has been granting passports to foreigners without proper security clearance, and this may represent a risk to public order and internal security.

In March, when the EU Council published its decision to suspend the visa-free travel agreement with Vanuatu, it highlighted that in many cases, authorities in Vanuatu had granted citizenship to applicants who were listed in Interpol databases.

The council also claimed applications were quickly processed without security checks, and those who obtained Vanuatu golden passports were not obliged to be physically present in Vanuatu.

The EU has also urged its member states operating golden passports to stop the practice, calling the schemes “objectionable ethically, legally and economically”.

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

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

The post Massive Kootenai National Forest Timber Sale Challenged by Conservation Groups appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by CounterPunch News Service.

On April 27, junta deputy information minister, Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun, told reporters at a press conference in the capital Naypyidaw that the sealed-off homes of detained activists had been “presented to the court” and would be sold at auction sometime in the future.

When asked for clarification on Thursday, Zaw Min Tun told RFA’s Myanmar Service that the junta had obtained court permission to proceed with the sales.

“You must present evidence according to court procedure,” he said. “Once the court has ruled on the evidence, there are certain procedures to follow. Right now, we have presented the evidence as needed.”

The deputy minister provided no other details on the homes in question, including who they had belonged to or what the former owners are being charged with.

Last week’s announcement came six days after National Unity Government (NUG) Minister for Finance and Investment Tin Tun Naing told RFA of plans to sell a number of properties he said were identified by the shadow government as having been illegally occupied by senior junta officials when the military seized power in a Feb. 1, 2021, coup.

Among the properties is the former guesthouse of Myanmar’s military and accompanying two-acre plot of land at No. 14 Inya Road in Yangon, which now serves as Min Aung Hlaing’s home. Tin Tun Naing said the NUG plans to sell the estate for U.S. $10 million — about one-third of the property’s current value — in 100,000 shares of U.S. $100 each.

On Thursday, Tin Tun Naing provided additional details of the sale, which he said involves 100,000 shares of the estate priced at U.S. $100 apiece.

“Once we identified it as state property, we started to sell it to facilitate the end of the dictatorship and to raise funds needed for the success of the Spring Revolution, in the interest of the people,” Tin Tun Naing said.

“As soon as it was announced that it would go on sale, there were several purchases. One single person has already bought shares worth U.S. $100,000.”

The NUG’s Ministry of Finance and Investment said the sale will involve around 400 acres of land occupied by junta officials in Yangon, Mandalay, and Naypyidaw, which will be “confiscated and made available to the public in May on a pre-purchase basis.” The sale assumes that the NUG will claim control of the country from the junta, at which point it would deliver on the promised asset.

Proceeds from the sale will be donated to the opposition movement and used to compensate victims of junta arrest and torture, rehabilitate members of the Civil Disobedience Movement who left state jobs in protest of the coup, and assist people whose homes have been burned in arson attacks by junta forces, the ministry said.

The NUG said that its plan to seize junta assets “is to discourage likely dictators who want to abuse power from illegally taking over state-owned land and properties in the future.”

‘No legal right to confiscate’

Lawyers and political analysts told RFA that while the sale of the former military guesthouse involved returning public property to the people, the military has no legal right to confiscate and sell private assets.

A spokesman for the Thailand-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) called the junta’s announcement a form of “retaliation” against democracy and human rights activists, adding that many of the homes belong to people whose trials have not been ruled on by the courts.

“The law does not allow for the confiscation of properties of innocent people,” they said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“Some of the houses they sealed off were not even owned by the person they arrested. Now we are seeing family-owned properties being confiscated too. It’s a form of revenge.”

High Court lawyer Kyee Myint, who assists with human rights cases, told RFA that the junta plan to sell private property is in violation of the law.

“I am very pleased that the NUG has said it will auction off the former military guesthouse on Inya Road, now taken over by Min Aung Hlaing. But how can it be legal for them to retaliate against us,” he asked.

“They are robbers. The courts are now under their control. The chief justice is a military officer. The judiciary in our country has been destroyed for a long time. It is a violation of the law to seize properties of ordinary politicians.”

Well-known singer Chan Chan, who has a warrant out for her arrest on charges of incitement, said in a May 1 post to her Facebook page that she heard the junta is preparing to sell her house in the port city of Thanlyin near Yangon and urged fans to protest.

Other properties seized by the junta are owned by artists, anti-junta activists, members of the deposed National League for Democracy and paramilitaries with the prodemocracy People’s Defense Force.

On May 3, authorities sealed off the family home of Myint Zaw Oo, an NLD member of Parliament in Sagaing region’s Kanbalu township.

“They have no rules or laws. They just act blindly,” he said.

“They think we may be demoralized if they do these things. It is seen as a kind of psychological warfare. But we have already thought of the consequences of our actions, so it doesn’t matter whether they seize our property or even burn it.”

According to the AAPP, authorities have killed 1,825 civilians and arrested some 10,545 since February last year, mostly during peaceful anti-junta protests. The group said the junta has confiscated more than 570 homes and buildings since the coup.

Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.

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

A location data firm said Wednesday that it would no longer sell information about people who visit abortion clinics after reporting on the company's sales raised alarm, but privacy advocates warned that strict regulation is needed to protect patients from such sales—particularly in light of news that abortion rights are likely to be rolled back by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Vice reported Tuesday that data firm SafeGraph has sold sets of aggregated location data regarding people who have visited abortion clinics including Planned Parenthood, showing where patients travel from, how much time they spend at the healthcare centers, and where they go afterwards.

"All of those nightmare 'Abortion Bounty Hunter' laws? They'll be powered by our data revolution."

The report sparked outcry from rights advocates including Frederike Kaltheuner, director for technology and human rights at Human Rights Watch, who said activities like SafeGraph's represent "what lack of data regulation means in practice."

Through a product called Patterns, company obtains location data from apps on users' cell phones, with many people unaware that their apps are sending such information to third parties.

SafeGraph sells the aggregated data to anyone on the open market and sold data about visitors to abortion clinics, including more than 600 Planned Parenthood medical centers, over a one-week period in April for just $160 to Vice, according to the outlet.

The data collected by the company includes an analysis of where users appear to live, based on where their cell phones generally are overnight.

"This is how you dox someone traveling across state lines for abortions—how you dox clinics providing this service," Zach Edwards, a cybersecurity researcher, told Vice.

According to CNBC, SafeGraph said Wednesday that its Patterns product will no longer collect data "for locations classified as NAICS code 621410 ('Family Planning Centers')...  to curtail any potential misuse of its data."

In a piece at Wired titled "Tech Companies Are Not Ready for a Post-Roe Era," Alejandra Caraballo of the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic warned on Wednesday that cell phone and app users may well be unknowingly tracked and targeted via their devices. She wrote:

Companies that traffic in personal, geolocation, advertising, or other data could become digital crime scenes for eager prosecutors armed with subpoenas... There may also be a reckoning for fertility- and menstruation-tracking apps that often sell user data. These apps could be a gold mine for states looking to target pregnant people with surveillance or even institute requirements for pregnancy registration. This idea is not far-fetched; it was proposed in Poland after a similar backsliding of abortion rights led by its conservative judiciary.

"These companies must take active steps to ensure that their technology is not used as a further tool to marginalize pregnant people," wrote Caraballo.

With the Supreme Court's right-wing majority set to overrule Roe v. Wade, wrote Joseph Cox at Vice, "people seeking abortions who live in conservative states and can afford to are likely to start traveling to get an abortion. Location data could play into whether and how that travel is identified, making it even more urgent for regulators and lawmakers to consider how location data is collected, used, and sold."

Under laws like one that's currently being debated in Missouri, which would allow residents to sue women who leave the state to obtain abortion care, "location data like this could be used to build the case against a woman," said Democratic strategist Max Burns.

"All of those nightmare 'Abortion Bounty Hunter' laws?" Burns said. "They'll be powered by our data revolution."

Cox noted that forced pregnancy advocates have already proven savvy at using technology to harm women who seek abortion care, with anti-choice groups using location data to send targeted ads to women sitting in Planned Parenthood clinics to pressure them out of obtaining care.

"It's too easy for anyone to take advantage of data brokers' stores to cause real harm," said Electronic Frontier Foundation. "That's why the U.S. needs comprehensive data privacy regulation more than ever."

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

A location data firm said Wednesday that it would no longer sell information about people who visit abortion clinics after reporting on the company's sales raised alarm, but privacy advocates warned that strict regulation is needed to protect patients from such sales—particularly in light of news that abortion rights are likely to be rolled back by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Vice reported Tuesday that data firm SafeGraph has sold sets of aggregated location data regarding people who have visited abortion clinics including Planned Parenthood, showing where patients travel from, how much time they spend at the healthcare centers, and where they go afterwards.

"All of those nightmare 'Abortion Bounty Hunter' laws? They'll be powered by our data revolution."

The report sparked outcry from rights advocates including Frederike Kaltheuner, director for technology and human rights at Human Rights Watch, who said activities like SafeGraph's represent "what lack of data regulation means in practice."

Through a product called Patterns, company obtains location data from apps on users' cell phones, with many people unaware that their apps are sending such information to third parties.

SafeGraph sells the aggregated data to anyone on the open market and sold data about visitors to abortion clinics, including more than 600 Planned Parenthood medical centers, over a one-week period in April for just $160 to Vice, according to the outlet.

The data collected by the company includes an analysis of where users appear to live, based on where their cell phones generally are overnight.

"This is how you dox someone traveling across state lines for abortions—how you dox clinics providing this service," Zach Edwards, a cybersecurity researcher, told Vice.

According to CNBC, SafeGraph said Wednesday that its Patterns product will no longer collect data "for locations classified as NAICS code 621410 ('Family Planning Centers')...  to curtail any potential misuse of its data."

In a piece at Wired titled "Tech Companies Are Not Ready for a Post-Roe Era," Alejandra Caraballo of the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic warned on Wednesday that cell phone and app users may well be unknowingly tracked and targeted via their devices. She wrote:

Companies that traffic in personal, geolocation, advertising, or other data could become digital crime scenes for eager prosecutors armed with subpoenas... There may also be a reckoning for fertility- and menstruation-tracking apps that often sell user data. These apps could be a gold mine for states looking to target pregnant people with surveillance or even institute requirements for pregnancy registration. This idea is not far-fetched; it was proposed in Poland after a similar backsliding of abortion rights led by its conservative judiciary.

"These companies must take active steps to ensure that their technology is not used as a further tool to marginalize pregnant people," wrote Caraballo.

With the Supreme Court's right-wing majority set to overrule Roe v. Wade, wrote Joseph Cox at Vice, "people seeking abortions who live in conservative states and can afford to are likely to start traveling to get an abortion. Location data could play into whether and how that travel is identified, making it even more urgent for regulators and lawmakers to consider how location data is collected, used, and sold."

Under laws like one that's currently being debated in Missouri, which would allow residents to sue women who leave the state to obtain abortion care, "location data like this could be used to build the case against a woman," said Democratic strategist Max Burns.

"All of those nightmare 'Abortion Bounty Hunter' laws?" Burns said. "They'll be powered by our data revolution."

Cox noted that forced pregnancy advocates have already proven savvy at using technology to harm women who seek abortion care, with anti-choice groups using location data to send targeted ads to women sitting in Planned Parenthood clinics to pressure them out of obtaining care.

"It's too easy for anyone to take advantage of data brokers' stores to cause real harm," said Electronic Frontier Foundation. "That's why the U.S. needs comprehensive data privacy regulation more than ever."

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

Macri, a Democrat, was new to climate policy, having worked mainly on housing and health care, and she was compelled by the simplicity of Metz’s idea. It wasn’t tied to abstract, hard-to-grasp metrics around fuel efficiency or emissions reductions. “Everyone can understand that in 2030, if you buy a new car, if you register a new car in our state, it has to be electric,” she told Grist. “It was like, OK, this is a policy I can understand, that I can talk to my constituents about and they can understand.” 

Macri started pushing to introduce the policy when the Washington state legislature convened in 2019. According to Macri, her Democratic colleagues discouraged her, saying the idea was too radical. “It was like, ‘Well, that’s nice for you to say, you’re an urban liberal Democrat, but this is pretty inflammatory in suburban areas and other areas where people are far more car-dependent,” Macri said. She remembers one Democrat telling her that introducing the bill would make her “the downfall of the Democratic Party.”

Legislators who were working to pass other climate measures, like a clean fuel standard, said she should wait to introduce the bill, warning that a mandate could spark legal backlash and distract from the rest of their agenda. It was the same year that Washington ended up passing a package of bills that would move the state to a fossil fuel-free grid, expand electric vehicle incentives, and build out the state’s network of chargers. Jake Fey, the state’s House Transportation Committee chair and a fellow Democrat, told Grist that his priority was more about “actions that accomplish things” than setting goals, which are too often abandoned “without a strategy to actually make it happen.”

For most people at the time, it seemed beyond belief that the internal combustion engine was on its way out. But in just the span of a few years, the switch to electric cars has become less like a futuristic vision and more like an impending economic reality. Fast forward to today, and Washington state has officially taken on the 2030 target, after almost adopting it last year. Governor Jay Inslee signed the broader “Move Ahead Washington” transportation package into law at the end of March, setting a deadline for all new cars registered in the state to be electric. 

It’s not a mandate, but the timeline is the most aggressive in the country. California, by contrast, is on its way to finalizing a mandate to ban the sales of gas cars by 2035, with implications for more than a dozen other states that follow its emissions standards, including New York, Colorado, and Pennsylvania. President Joe Biden has called for half of new car sales to be electric by 2030.

The adoption of electric cars is speeding up, even as it runs into obstacles like backlogged supply chains and a lack of charging infrastructure. Consider, for example, that the majority of the world’s electric vehicles on the road today were added in the last year and a half.

“It’s not really a question of, at this point, where’s the market going?” said David Reichmuth, a senior engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists’ clean transportation program. “It is more of a question of how fast we can get there.”

So what happened to turn the end of gasoline-powered cars from a radical idea into a legislative reality? Experts told Grist that economic, political, and cultural factors have been colliding to create the conditions for this seemingly sudden shift. 

1. The growing market

In the first three months of 2022, the only automakers to report sales gains in the U.S. were all-electric companies like Tesla and Polestar, as well as the outlier BMW. Most automakers saw sales drop by double digits while Tesla’s sales rose 88 percent compared to the same quarter last year. Car companies are looking at Tesla, the world’s 6th most valuable company on the market at a recent $902 billion, and want to show investors that “if they’re not there yet, they have a plan to get there,” Reichmuth said. Companies that have started producing EV models, like Ford, have found they can’t build them fast enough to keep up with demand.

“The auto companies are seeing that electric is the future,” Reichmuth said. Many are promising to sell only electric options in the coming years, with Jaguar aiming for 2025, Volvo for 2030, and General Motors for 2035. But some of the biggest companies, like Toyota and Volkswagen, are still dragging their heels.

2. Lower costs

Electric vehicles require energy-dense, rechargeable batteries — technology that used to be very expensive. Since 2010, prices for lithium-ion battery packs have sunk 89 percent, though a shortage of key ingredients like cobalt and lithium carbonate are nudging them back up. Electric cars still tend to be more expensive than gas cars upfront: An average EV model runs about $70,000, compared to $48,000 for a gas car. That high price is thanks in part to a trend toward flashy, high-end models like Tesla’s Model 3, but electric cars are usually cheaper over the long term. That’s something Americans may be keeping in mind as they’ve watched gas prices climb to $5 or $6 a gallon in parts of the country this spring.

3. The global picture

Electric cars are no longer niche products for liberal-minded Americans. China and Europe are leading the switch to electric cars, accounting for 85 percent of worldwide EV sales last year. Some 3.2 million were sold in China and 2.3 million in Europe, compared to only 535,000 in the United States. 

“Automakers, I think, are realizing that to be globally competitive they just have to have a very strong EV presence, otherwise they’re gonna miss out,” said Janelle London, the co-executive director of Coltura. Canada, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Ireland, and the United Kingdom, among other countries, aim to ban new fossil fuel-powered cars by 2030, on the same timeline as Washington state. 

4. More regulation

In April, the California Air Resources Board introduced a plan to ban the sale of new gas-fueled cars by 2035, following an executive order from Governor Gavin Newsom in 2020. “There’s broad consensus that phase-out policies, both in Europe and even what’s going on like California and Washington and all that effort, have actually been decisive in getting automakers to shift,” Metz said. “Without that, it wouldn’t have happened.

Concerns about climate change and air pollution are driving the policies to phase out gasoline. Transportation accounts for about 30 percent of the country’s emissions, with the majority of that coming from gas-powered passenger vehicles. Gas cars are also a huge health hazard, spewing particulate matter and carbon monoxide out of tailpipes. Concentrations of toxic chemicals are even higher inside cars, where Americans get their biggest daily exposure to air pollution.

5. More choices

Ten years ago, there were just eight electric vehicle models to pick from in the United States, like the Tesla Model S or the Nissan Leaf. Over the course of 2022, the number of models is jumping from 62 to 100. “A lot of people are waiting for the type of model that they are looking for,” said Larry Chretien, the executive director at the Green Energy Consumers Alliance. “You know, not everyone wants a small car. Not everyone can afford a Tesla. They’re looking for something that’s bigger than small and moderately priced. And that’s all coming.”

The electric version of the Ford F-150, the top-selling vehicle in the U.S., just arrived last week, with a starting price around $40,000 and the promise of going 230 miles on one charge. Ford had to cap the waitlist at 200,000 in December, which translates to a three-year backlog. “People are not going to care if they’re red state, blue state — they’re going to want this thing,” London said.

6. More visibility

It takes time to get used to new technology. With more electric vehicles on the road, and with chargers to support them popping up at grocery stores and office buildings, it’s easier for more people to imagine sitting behind the wheel of an EV themselves. “Your neighbor might have an electric vehicle, or somebody on your kid’s soccer team, or at school, at work,” Reichmuth said. “That makes it easier for people to get comfortable with a switch to an electric vehicle.”

7. A changing public attitude

Americans are beginning to grasp that the era of gas cars may be coming to an end. A poll commissioned by Coltura last October found that 55 percent of voters in the U.S. supported requiring new cars to be electric by 2030. And about half of people who were thinking of buying a car in the next five years said it was “somewhat” or “very” likely that they’d go electric. This was even before the onslaught of EV commercials during the Super Bowl this year.

“People are understanding that it’s coming fast,” Chretien said. “They’re getting ready. They anticipate that they will be able to buy an electric car soon.”

Of course, the shift to electric vehicles won’t be smooth. There are a number of barriers in the way, like an uncertain policy landscape and a lack of charging infrastructure. Macri says her constituents are concerned about the number of charging spots available at their apartment buildings or out on the street where they park their cars. Washington state’s newly approved transportation package directs the state to create a road map by the end of the year to figure out how to reach the 2030 target. “We’re not thinking about getting there until somebody says you have to, and then you start to figure out, ‘Oh, these are the five steps you need to do to get there,’” Macri said.

Looking back, she observed just how much had changed. A few years ago, ending sales of gas-powered cars by 2030 “was truly seen as very, very, radical,” Macri said. “We’ve just seen a huge amount of progress.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Ending the sale of gas cars by 2030 was a radical idea. What changed? on May 2, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Kate Yoder.

Congressional candidate Nina Turner declared Friday that she is "not for sale" and suggested her primary opponent, Democratic Rep. Shontel Brown, is after federal filings revealed that a billionaire-funded super PAC has spent more than $1 million in support of the incumbent in Ohio's 11th District.

"Let's be clear, those corporate interests don't make donations, they make investments."

"See, there is a clear difference in this race. One of the candidates in this primary is for sale," Turner, a former Ohio state senator, wrote on Twitter. "I am not for sale. Cleveland is not for sale."

Turner, who has pledged to reject campaign cash from lobbyists and corporate PACs, was responding to reporting from The Intercept spotlighting the financial support Brown has received from Protect Our Future, a super PAC launched this year with the backing of cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried.

Federal Election Commission (FEC) disclosures show that Protect Our Future—which reportedly plans to pour $10 million into Democratic primaries this cycle—has spent more than $1 million over just the past week on ads in support of Brown's campaign.

In a statement on Thursday, Turner's campaign accused Brown of failing to "bring a single penny home" to Cleveland—part of Ohio's 11th Congressional District and the poorest big city in the U.S.—but managing to "flag down dark money that will be used to attack Nina Turner."

"All over the country, the flood of corporate money into electoral politics is corrupting our democracy," said Kara Turrentine, Turner's campaign manager. "Sadly, right here in Ohio 11, those same corrupt interests are pumping money into campaigns and super PACs because they know Nina Turner and progressives like her aren't going to Washington to be a partner with them."

"Let's be clear, those corporate interests don't make donations, they make investments," Turrentine added. "And they expect a return on those investments."

The May 3 Democratic primary in Ohio's 11th Congressional District is a rematch of a heated special election that took place less than a year ago. Brown, backed by a torrent of corporate cash and prominent members of the Democratic establishment, defeated Turner by around 6%.

At the time of the 2021 race, the largest donor to Democratic Majority for Israel—a super PAC that spent big against Turner—was an oil and gas executive.

On Wednesday, the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) PAC stirred outrage by endorsing Brown, a member of both the CPC and the corporate-friendly New Democrat Coalition. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the CPC, endorsed Turner over Brown in last year's special election.

The CPC PAC's endorsement of Brown came just a day after Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—the lone Senate member of the CPC—formally endorsed Turner, praising her as "a real leader who fights for higher wages, Medicare for All, and affordable prescription drugs."

"With Nina, we know that she will not be afraid to take on the corporate interests that are driving up the price of gas, food, and just about everything else," Sanders said in a statement. "Nina knows the job is more than just voting the right way. It's about leadership."

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

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Adam Bychawski.

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

The auction lasted for three days as bids rose higher and higher, closing out at a total of $4.37 billion on Friday afternoon. Bight Wind Holdings, a subsidiary of National Grid, won the rights to the largest tract for a whopping $1.1 billion, or $9,600 per acre. Other winning bids came from subsidiaries of oil and gas companies like Shell and Total, as well as international renewable energy companies like EDF Renewables. Only one U.S.-grown company, the wind energy powerhouse Invenergy, snagged a lease. 

It’s a new era for wind development, with the per-acre lease price coming in at more than nine times the amount companies paid in the most recent U.S. offshore wind auction in 2018. Aaron Barr, a wind analyst at the energy consultancy firm Wood Mackenzie, told Grist the high bids were “a clear signal that offshore wind developers and investors are convinced of the sound business case for offshore wind in the United States.”

That’s mainly thanks to declining costs and increased state and federal policy support for the burgeoning industry. In 2020, Congress created a new 30 percent investment tax credit for offshore wind projects that begin construction before 2026. When President Joe Biden stepped into office last year, he set a national goal of having 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power — enough to power 10 million homes — installed by 2030. At the state level, New York has vowed to purchase 9 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2030, and New Jersey has a goal of 7.5 gigawatts by the same date. Both states are also investing hundreds of millions of dollars in new ports to support offshore wind construction and maintenance, as well as manufacturing and supply chain infrastructure.

But while the case for investing upwards of $9,000 per acre in wind leases may be strong for investors and developers, the blockbuster sale might have a downside for residents in the region if it leads to higher electricity rates. Before wind companies move forward with their development plans, they will contract the power they expect to produce out to states for a set price. That price will ultimately be passed along to consumers.

Willett Kempton, associate director for the University of Delaware’s Center for Research in Wind, said higher electricity prices are possible, but the effect would likely be small — he estimates the unexpectedly high lease bids could result in power costing roughly 20 percent more than it otherwise would. But at the same time, he noted that the costs of development are still declining and that competition among wind companies to win contracts with states like New York and New Jersey could also exert downward pressure on electricity rates. 

Fred Zalcman, director of the New York Offshore Wind Alliance, an industry advocacy group, thinks it’s too early to tell what the bids will mean for future consumer prices. He said that turbine efficiency is increasing and that there is also a growing supply chain for offshore wind that will help bring down development costs. “So, yes, this is one input,” he said, “but there are many other factors and I think it’s premature to assume this will lead to higher prices.”

Zalcman added that the high lease prices don’t just reflect the strong business case for wind — they indicate a mismatch between demand for wind energy and the supply of lease areas. “I think if we develop more lease areas, that will help relieve some of the upward pressure on these lease prices,” he said.

Today, there are only two offshore wind farms in operation — the Block Island Wind Farm in Rhode Island and the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind pilot project — and they fulfill less than 1 percent of Biden’s 30-gigawatt vision. But the number of projects in the pipeline is substantial. The Department of Energy reports that offshore wind farms totaling more than 10 gigawatts are in the permitting stage, and lease areas that could support an additional 11 gigawatts have been sold. This week’s auction adds the potential for another 5.6 gigawatts of wind energy. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management estimates that wind farms on the six new lease areas could supply electricity to nearly 2 million homes.

Still, the timeline for Biden’s goal is tight. It takes years for a project to move from the leasing phase to construction, and then to operation. Chelsea Jean-Michel, a wind industry analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, told E&E News that the earliest she expects the new projects to come online is 2030.

Between now and then, the industry is set to be a huge driver of jobs and economic development in the Northeast. A Wood Mackenzie study from 2020 found that wind development in the New York Bight could support as many as 32,000 jobs a year while wind farms are being constructed between 2025 and 2030, and up to 5,800 jobs annually in the decades following. Many are likely to be union jobs — this week’s lease sale came with stipulations requiring developers to “make every reasonable effort to enter into a project labor agreement” for construction jobs. It also included financial incentives for developers to procure and assemble the major components of their wind farms domestically.

The six lease areas are located between 23 and 80 miles offshore and could eventually support hundreds of turbines. But East Coasters are unlikely to notice them too much — a visual impact analysis conducted for the South Fork Wind Farm off the coast of Long Island found that beginning at about 25 miles offshore, turbines tend to be visible from land only under ideal viewing conditions, and at about 40 miles they disappear from sight completely.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A record-breaking offshore wind lease sale signals a new era for development on Feb 25, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Emily Pontecorvo.