Backed with a commitment of more than 2 million in taxpayer funds, the firm sprang into action. One of the early orders of business was studying the opposition. In June 2024, an assistant attorney general sent an email to numerous state government colleagues and Penna Powers staffers that contained a video from the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, or TRCP, in which the well-known hunter and media personality Randy Newberg described the dangers of transferring federal land to state control. “It doesn’t matter how many promises are made,” warned Newberg, “the financial realities would force states to sell off our public lands.” 

Noting that organizations like TRCP are good at connecting with “traditionally conservative” audiences, the Utah official told his colleagues that “our PR efforts will largely depend on how well we can anticipate and effectively respond to these expected criticisms.” 

“That definitely helps us know what we need to counter the opposition,” added Redge Johnson, director of Utah’s Public Lands Policy and Coordinating Office, or PLPCO, which has played a central role in organizing the state’s campaign to seize federal land.  

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Throughout 2024, Penna Powers put together an elaborate PR and media campaign to do just that — counter the opposition and build support for Utah’s efforts. They churned out videos, newspaper ads, social media spots and more. They hired actors, ran focus groups and helped prominent Utah politicians write talking points. In at least one instance, Penna Powers relied on AI to help create voice-overs in videos. In another instance, PLPCO staffers warned Penna Powers not to use too much scenic imagery in the campaign for fear it might undermine their efforts. They called the campaign Stand for Our Land, and those who worked on it were required to sign nondisclosure agreements. “The Office of the Attorney General is taking this NDA extremely seriously,” wrote one government official. 

Hundreds of records reviewed by Public Domain shed light on the key players involved in this campaign and the strategies they used to persuade the public in their favor. Among other themes, their campaign relentlessly portrays the federal government as an absentee landlord that mismanages land and cuts off access to the public domain. Utah, on the other hand, is painted as a benevolent force working to ensure public land access. The campaign — like the lawsuit it was meant to support — seeks one principal outcome: federal land disposal. Utah has identified some 18.5 million acres of federal land within the state’s boundaries that are currently administered by the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, on behalf of all Americans — and it wants those lands for itself.  

Penna Powers, meanwhile, landed a big pay day. The contract between the PR firm and PLPCO runs until 2029 for a total cost of some $2.6 million. 

In response to queries, PLPCO in a written statement said that “Utah believes in protecting access to public lands for all users of all ages and abilities, and we are committed to actively managing these lands for generations to come. Utah is home to five national parks, several national monuments, and many other natural wonders. The state has always welcomed, and will continue to welcome visitors from around the world to visit and enjoy all that this great state has to offer.” Penna Powers did not respond to requests for comment. 

Meanwhile, critics of the Utah PR effort called it a “propaganda” campaign meant to mislead Utahns and the general public. 

“Penna Powers worked hand-in-hand with the state of Utah to craft a misleading message about the state’s land grab lawsuit,” said Kate Groetzinger, communications manager at the Center for Western Priorities, a conservation group. “They made it seem like forcibly taking ownership of public lands would help recreationists and ranchers, when the real goal of this lawsuit was to increase extraction and privatize national public lands in Utah. This campaign is the very definition of propaganda — misleading political messaging paid for by taxpayers.”

Utah’s effort to take control of federal lands kicked off in earnest in 2012, when Utah’s then-Governor Gary Herbert signed into law the Utah Transfer of Public Lands Act, demanding state control of the majority of federal public land in Utah. “This is only the first step in a long process,” Herbert said at the time, “but it is a step we must take.” In 2018, Senator Mike Lee, a leading proponent of the land transfer movement, shared similar sentiments during a speech to the conservative Sutherland Institute in Salt Lake City. The campaign for land transfer, he said, “will take years, and the fight will be brutal.” Indeed, just last week, Lee put forward a proposal in the GOP’s massive reconciliation bill that would force the sell off of millions of acres of federal land in the Western U.S. 

Utah’s actions to seize control of federal land have only grown more aggressive as the years have progressed. In August last year, it filed a lawsuit directly with the Supreme Court seeking to strip federal ownership over some 18.5 million acres of BLM land within Utah. It claims these lands are “unappropriated,” a novel argument meant to create a legal distinction between national parks, forests and monuments, and large swaths of BLM land across the West. If successful, Utah’s lawsuit would deprive the vast majority of Americans of their ownership stake in such BLM lands. Tribal nations, meanwhile, have been staunch opponents of Utah’s lawsuit, which the Ute Indian Tribe described as an “existential threat” to the tribe and its reservation lands. 

In January this year, the Supreme Court declined to hear Utah’s case. It remains unclear whether Utah will refile its lawsuit in lower court, but its efforts to seize federal land are a generational project. 

Regardless, Utah faces a major public opinion hurdle. A large majority of Western voters are opposed to the idea of state control over federal public lands, according to Colorado College’s annual polling. Even in Utah, some 57 percent of voters oppose public land transfers. That is where Penna Powers comes in. The firm worked to reshape public opinion in the state’s favor, with a focus on building support among Utah residents as well as key decision makers at the national level. 

“The Stand for Our Land public education campaign is informing Utahns about the management of public lands, and how federal agencies are restricting access to public lands and ignoring local concerns,” wrote PLPCO in a statement. “The Bureau of Land Management closed over 2,000 miles of Utah roads on public lands in the past two years.”

A centerpiece of Penna Powers’ effort has been glossy videos that portray federal land agencies as an exclusionary force bent on keeping people off the public domain. In one video, Penna Powers and PLPCO hired a voice actor to portray a  “disabled camper” in a wheelchair on a camping trip with her family. “Because of my disability I need to reach campsites in a motorized vehicle,” the actor said. “If I lose road access, I lose the ability to do something I love with my family. That’s why I think Utah should be managing Utah land.” The actor who was selected to voice the video does not appear to use a wheelchair or mobility aid in social media posts and other records reviewed by Public Domain. PLPCO appears to have had many of those involved in its video shoots also sign NDAs. A talent agent for the actor in question did not provide comment at the time of publication. 

Redge Johnson, the executive director of PLPCO, was particularly keen on the “disabled camper” storyline, among others. He asked about a video that combined the “disabled camper” story with one about an off-highway vehicles  business. “I really want that video in the folder, it tells a great story,” he wrote to Penna Powers staffer Allyse Christensen, who worked on the Stand for Our Land campaign. 

Others, like disability community advocate Syren Nagakyrie, said Utah’s use of a “disabled camper” storyline to promote its political agenda is “disingenuous.” 

“This video the first time I watched it I just said out loud: ‘That is fake,’” said Nagakyrie, the founder and executive director of Disabled Hikers, a nonprofit dedicated to advocating for the disability community in the outdoors. “Looking at some of these legislators’ past voting records, it is obvious they do not actually care about the disability community. They just want to get these roads open.”

In another video produced for the campaign, a family is driving in their RV to go camping on federal land, only to find a giant “No Entry” sign that has been strung across the road by the federal government. “You are losing access to Utah roads and trails,” the video declared. “Let Utah manage Utah lands.” 

This video may have required some stagecraft too. According to internal PLPCO emails, a state official advised Penna Powers and its producer to create their own “exaggerated” version of road closure signage to feature in the campaign’s messaging. 

“Do we need the closures to look exactly like this?” wrote Penna Powers staffer Spencer Lawson, referencing the bland brown signs that the Bureau of Land Management typically uses to keep motorized vehicles off certain parcels of land. “Or are we able to exaggerate it a bit more?”

“Spencer, we can exaggerate it,” replied Dillon Hoyt, a PLPCO staffer and Utah state official. “I’ll leave those details up to your group and the producer,” he added. In the end, the Stand for Our Land video about camping closures featured a large fictional road closure sign strung across heavy metal chains.

There were other instances in which Penna Powers and PLPCO massaged reality to better fit their message. In at least one case, Penna Powers used artificial intelligence to recreate the voice of an interview subject who had failed to say specific talking points for a video. The video in this case featured Utah state legislator Carl Albrecht, critiquing the sluggish timeline for building a transmission line on federal lands and arguing for state control.

“Redge, you’ll remember Carl had a hard time with ‘That’s why I think Utah should manage Utah lands …’ and we didn’t capture him saying it,” wrote Penna Powers staffer Jenny Snyder to Redge Johnson in an August 2024 email. As a result, they used AI. “We should let Carl know that we did that for him as well,” wrote Snyder.

In a later email, Snyder told Albrecht that “we did have to adjust your voiceover using AI to get the last line, please let us know if you have any issues with that.”

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PLPCO officials were also wary of featuring too many scenic vistas in their ad campaign. Commenting on a batch of photos and b-roll that Penna Powers compiled for the campaign, PLPCO official Dillon Hoyt wrote, “I’m held up thinking ‘how scenic is too scenic.’ Those are some great scenery shots, but I think they are what Redge wants us to avoid.”

In another instance, Hoyt was even more explicit. “I would like to use a video clip that is a little more desert and sagebrush than redrock. If the footage is too pretty and scenic people will start to agree that we should ‘conserve’ (meaning protect) these landscapes with PLR,” a reference to the BLM’s Public Lands Rule, which sought to put conservation on par with other public land uses. “We view ‘conserve’ as active land management,” he added. 

Groetzinger at the Center for Western Priorities criticized PLPCO and Penna Powers for “using underhanded tactics like artificial intelligence when their interview subjects didn’t say exactly what they wanted them to say, and they knowingly misled Utahns about the scenic value of the lands in question. The entire ‘Stand for Our Land’ campaign is a slap in the face to Utahns.”

In a written statement, PLPCO said that it “followed the state of Utah’s rigorous and competitive procurement process to select the right firm to partner with on the public education campaign. Throughout the production of campaign materials and content, we have acted in accordance with best industry practices and highest ethical standards. 

“We are proud to educate Utahns about public land management and entirely stand behind our efforts to increase access to public lands,” the agency added. 

The target audience of Utah’s ad campaign spanned the nation. According to a copy of the campaign’s media plan for 2024, it included ads in major Utah newspapers, on highway billboards, and on local TV stations and social media. It also targeted influential audiences at the national level, including the use of “geo-fencing of government buildings” in Washington D.C. to send targeted ads aimed at government officials. The campaign also ran ads in national publications like the Washington Post and the National Review, pitched stories to a wide range of outlets, bought airtime on the journalist Bari Weiss’ popular podcast, and purchased Facebook, Instagram, and X ads. 

Meanwhile, Penna Powers staff had access to some of the highest officials in the Utah government. Apart from the PLPCO officials who helped shape the PR campaign, Penna Powers staff had numerous meetings with top state leaders, including the Utah Attorney General’s office. And it helped craft talking points and op-eds on the land seizure campaign for a variety of state officials, including talking points for Utah Governor Spencer Cox to deliver a press event.

On the day Utah announced its land transfer lawsuit, Penna Powers joined PLPCO officials and other state decision makers at the state Capitol building. 

“Let’s do this thing!” wrote Penna Powers operative Allyse Christensen in an email to her colleagues and Utah officials as she prepared to print out press kits the evening before the announcement.  

Dillon Hoyt of PLPCO replied, “Go team!”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Inside Utah’s PR campaign to seize public lands on Jun 29, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jimmy Tobias, High Country News.

During the raid Tuesday morning, the TV station temporarily suspended operations, and employees were barred from entering their offices. According to IvanovoNews, a sister outlet in the same media group, authorities seized a computer case and documents from Kustov´s work office. Kustov returned to work after the raid on his home.

“This latest raid and criminal case against Russian broadcaster Bars and its editor-in-chief, Sergey Kustov, is a blatant act of intimidation and censorship,” said Attila Mong, CPJ’s Europe representative. “Russian authorities must stop using defamation laws and other criminal charges to silence journalists who report on matters of public interest and should immediately return all confiscated materials and stop harassing Kustov.”

The raid was part of a criminal investigation into alleged defamation, which IvanovoNews reported is linked to a February report by Bars on missing Russian soldiers in Ukraine. The case may also relate to the use of the slang term “менты,” a derogatory word for police, in the report, the outlet said.

“This case is directly related to our journalistic work,” Bars’ editorial staff told CPJ.

Kustov, who said he had received threats in the days leading up to the raid, wrote on his Telegram channel Wednesday that he had been “very wrong to take it as just psychological pressure.” He added that “there was no slander in the publication.”

On February 12, Kustov was fined 100,000 rubles (US$1,114) for discrediting the armed forces. In March 2024, he was beaten while covering a plane crash and sent to jail for 10 days on charges of disobeying police orders.

CPJ filled out an online form requesting comment Russia’s Ministry of Interior, but did not immediately receive any reply.

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

A damning new report reveals how Israel is systematically making Gaza unlivable. The independent news outlet +972 Magazine has spoken to Israeli soldiers who describe how they have been using bulldozers and explosives to intentionally flatten Gaza.

In the southern city of Rafah, 73% of buildings are completely destroyed, with only about 4% of the infrastructure remaining undamaged. “The real aim is to make it impossible for the Palestinians to return to these areas,” says Meron Rapoport, co-author of the +972 Magazine report.

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

Fadl Al-Mawla was a well-known local journalist who may have been deliberately killed by the RSF as the group routinely targets prominent media and political figures when seizing new areas, a journalist familiar with the case told CPJ on condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal.

“We are shocked by the killing of Hassan Fadl Al-Mawla, a dedicated journalist who gave his life to report from the ground in Sudan’s civil war,” said CPJ Regional Director Sara Qudah. “Those responsible for Al-Mawla’s death must be held to account and journalists must be respected as they document this brutal conflict.”

Fadl Al-Mawla was a presenter at West Kordofan Radio, and a correspondent for the state-owned Sudan National Radio Corporation and independent Beladi 96.6 FM,according to the Sudanese Journalists Syndicate and the journalist who spoke to CPJ.

The journalists’ union condemned Fadl Al-Mawla’s killing as “a grave violation against journalists who continue to serve their communities amid the dangers of war,” and praised Fadl Al-Mawla’s professionalism and dedication to public service journalism.

Fadl Al-Mawla and eight other journalists have been killed since war erupted between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the RSF in April 2023. 

CPJ’s email to the RSF seeking comment on Fadl Al-Mawla’s death did not receive a response.

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

Fadl Al-Mawla was a well-known local journalist who may have been deliberately killed by the RSF as the group routinely targets prominent media and political figures when seizing new areas, a journalist familiar with the case told CPJ on condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal.

“We are shocked by the killing of Hassan Fadl Al-Mawla, a dedicated journalist who gave his life to report from the ground in Sudan’s civil war,” said CPJ Regional Director Sara Qudah. “Those responsible for Al-Mawla’s death must be held to account and journalists must be respected as they document this brutal conflict.”

Fadl Al-Mawla was a presenter at West Kordofan Radio, and a correspondent for the state-owned Sudan National Radio Corporation and independent Beladi 96.6 FM,according to the Sudanese Journalists Syndicate and the journalist who spoke to CPJ.

The journalists’ union condemned Fadl Al-Mawla’s killing as “a grave violation against journalists who continue to serve their communities amid the dangers of war,” and praised Fadl Al-Mawla’s professionalism and dedication to public service journalism.

Fadl Al-Mawla and eight other journalists have been killed since war erupted between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the RSF in April 2023. 

CPJ’s email to the RSF seeking comment on Fadl Al-Mawla’s death did not receive a response.

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

Nearly 250 years after our nation’s founders rebelled over abused property rights, Americans are once again being subjected to taxation without any real representation, all the while the government continues to do whatever it likes—levy taxes, rack up debt, spend outrageously and irresponsibly—with little concern for the plight of its citizens.

Nothing has changed for the better with Donald Trump. Indeed, it’s getting worse by the day.

Having inherited one of the strongest economies in the world, President Trump—whose credentials as a businessman include multiple failed business ventures, bankruptcies, and a mountain of debt and unpaid bills—has managed to singlehandedly torch the economy with his misguided tariffs and self-serving schemes, which are being carried out without any oversight or checks from Congress.

Yet it is Congress, not the president, that holds the authority to control government spending.

This is spelled out in the Appropriations Clause, found in Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 of the Constitution, which establishes a rule of law about how the monies paid to the government by the taxpayers are to be governed, and in the Taxing and Spending Clause of Article I, Section 8, Clause 1. In a nutshell, Congress is in charge of accounting for those funds and authorizing how those funds are spent (or not spent).

The founders intended this regulatory power, referred to as the “power of the purse” (to determine what funds can be spent and what funds can be withheld) to serve as a potent check on any government agency that exceeds its authority, especially the executive branch.

As law professor Zachary Price observes, “Given how strong this check is, it may not be surprising that presidents have sought ways to get around it.”

Yet while past presidents have sought to expand their authority under the guise of national emergency declarations, Trump has taken this executive overreach to unprecedented extremes.

Price explains how various presidents from Obama to Biden to Trump have attempted to subvert that same congressional power to press their own agendas, whether by funding the Affordable Care Act, advancing student debt, or as in Trump’s case, by dismantling and defunding agencies funded by Congress.

Executive orders and national emergencies have become a favored tool by which presidents attempt to govern unilaterally. As the Brennan Center reports, presidents have access to 150 such emergency powers, which essentially allow them to become limited dictators with greatly enhanced powers upon declaration of an emergency.

Because the National Emergencies Act does not actually define what constitutes an emergency, presidents have an incredible amount of room to wreak constitutional mischief on the citizenry.

While presidents on both sides of the aisle have abused these powers, Trump is attempting to test the limits of these emergency powers by declaring a national emergency anytime he wants to sidestep Congress and quickly impose his will on the nation.

Trump’s liberal use of emergency powers to sidestep the rule of law underscores the danger they pose to our constitutional system of checks and balances.

Since taking office in January 2025, Trump has used his presidential emergency powers in a multitude of ways in order to mount brazen power grabs thinly disguised as concerns for national security, thereby allowing him to justify tapping into the nation’s natural resources, rounding up and deporting vast numbers of migrants (both documented and undocumented), and imposing duties and tariffs against longtime allies and trade partners.

Thus far, the Republican-controlled Congress, which has the power to terminate an emergency with a two-thirds vote, has done nothing to rein in Trump’s dictatorial tendencies.

These unchecked powers aren’t just a threat to the balance of government—they have immediate, devastating consequences for the economy and working Americans.

Economists fear the ramifications of Trump’s latest national emergency, which he claims will usher in “the golden age of America” through the imposition of heavy tariffs on foreign nations, could push the U.S. and the rest of the world into a major recession by inciting a global trade-war, isolating America economically from the rest of the world, and flat-lining businesses that had expected to boom.

Fears of a recession are growing stronger by the hour.

In addition to sabotaging the economy, laying off tens of thousands of federal employees and dismantling those parts of government which serve the interests of working-class Americans, as well as its aging, disabled and homeless populations, Trump and his cabal of billionaire buddies are dismantling the few remaining checks on public and private corruption—fueling corporate greed at every turn.

This is how the man who promised to drain the swamp continues to mire us in the swamp.

Meanwhile, taxpayers—whose retirement savings have taken a nosedive—are expected to foot the bill to the tune of tens of millions of dollars for Trump’s frequent golf trips to his own golf courses (he’s also charging exorbitant rates to Secret Service to stay at his properties while protecting him), his multimillion-dollar photo ops at the Super Bowl and the Daytona 500, his desire to redo the White House gardens and build a $100 million ballroom, and his latest demand for a costly military parade in honor of his 79^th birthday.

While President Trump may talk a good game about his plans for making America richer, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the only person he’s making richer—at taxpayer expense—is himself.

This fiscal insanity, coupled with Trump’s imperialistic and tyrannical ambitions, echoes the very abuses that drove America’s founders to rebel against King George III.

In other words, the government is still robbing us blind.

Trump hasn’t reined in the government’s greed—he’s just been using a different playbook to get the same result: beg, borrow or steal, the government wants more of our hard-earned dollars any way it can get it.

Indeed, Trump, the self-proclaimed “debt king,” has presided over one of the most reckless expansions of government spending in modern history while posturing as a fiscal conservative.

This isn’t governance. It’s looting—by legislation, debt, and design.

We’re being robbed blind so the governmental elite can get richer.

This is financial tyranny.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if you have no choice, no voice, and no real say over how your money is used, you’re not free.

You’re being ruled.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

A rebel army and allied forces near Myanmar’s northwestern border with India have seized towns that were previously under the junta control, sources told Radio Free Asia.

The Chin Brotherhood captured Chin state’s second largest town of Falam, located near the border of Mizoram state in India, according to residents.

The rebel group, which is comprised of six allied Chin insurgent armies, began attacks on Falam on Nov. 5, 2024 and seized the junta’s remaining Battalion 268 on Monday.

“We’re continuing clearance operations now,” said an official from the Chin Brotherhood, declining to be named for fear of reprisals. “Tomorrow and the following day, we’ll release details.”

More than 10,000 residents fled into India to avoid the clash, he added.

Separately, Indaw People’s Defense Force also seized control over the town of Indaw in northern Sagaing region, capturing prisoners of war during the battle, said a junta soldier, who declined to be identified for security reasons.

“The battle for the town has been ongoing since Aug. 16, they captured it today on April 7,” he said. “There were casualties on both sides and about 40 of our soldiers were taken prisoner.”

The group also seized heavy weapons, a cannon and ammunition, he added.

Indaw is located on the Mandalay-Myitkyina highway and is an entry point into Kachin state, making it strategically important, locals said.

Insurgent armies are present in six of nine townships in Chin state, including Paletwa, Matupi, Mindat, Kanpetlet and Tonzang.

The junta has not commented.

Calls to the junta spokesperson Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun and Chin state’s spokesperson Aung Cho went unanswered.

According to data published by Myanmar Peace Monitor, a website that documents peace and conflict situations in Myanmar, insurgent groups have captured 95 towns nationwide.

On March 28, 2025, a powerful 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck central Myanmar, causing widespread devastation. As of Monday, the death toll has risen to 3,600, with over 5,000 injured and 160 still missing.

Amid rescue efforts, the junta announced a 20-day ceasefire on Wednesday, which was preceded by ceasefire offers from a major rebel group, the Arakan Army, and the exiled civilian National Unity Government, comprised of members of the democratic government ousted in a 2021 coup.

But the junta’s airstrikes and military checkpoints have hampered rescue efforts, residents told RFA.

The junta’s top military official said on Monday that international aid groups who want to provide assistance to earthquake-hit areas of Myanmar must gain prior approval from junta authorities.

Translated by Kiana Duncan. Edited by Taejun Kang.

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

Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

President Donald Trump’s threats against Canada and Mexico are providing both countries with unprecedented opportunities to free themselves from U.S. influence.

By threatening to annex Canada, send troops into Mexico, and impose sweeping tariffs on both countries, the president has led Canadians and Mexicans to question their longstanding ties to the United States. Upsurges of nationalism in both countries may lead them to take actions that weaken the dominant position of the United States in North America and the world.

“Our allies across the world will look at America and see a country in decline under Donald Trump,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said on March 3.

A Powerhouse Island

In Washington, it has long been taken for granted that the United States has acquired unparalleled advantages from its relations with Canada and Mexico. Officials have prided themselves on positioning the United States as the dominant center of a regional system in which Canada and Mexico reinforce U.S. power from the periphery. The three countries form “a powerhouse island,” as former Secretary of Defense James Mattis once called it.

Geography provides the United States with unique advantages. Not only is the United States insulated from threats to its security by the oceans along its coastlines, as Trump himself has recognized, but it shares borders with countries to the north and south that pose no military threat. By maintaining close relations with Canada and Mexico, the United States has acquired geopolitical security that is the envy of great powers across the world.

A U.S.-centered North America has also provided the United States with economic advantages, as Trump has recognizedin the past. Under the North American trading system, which was formalized under NAFTA and revised by the first Trump administration as USMCA, the United States receives a constant flow of raw materials and finished products from Canada and Mexico.

USMCA “will ensure our region remains the world’s economic powerhouse,” a senior State Department official insistedduring the first Trump administration.

The Trump Effect

Since Trump’s re-election in 2024, however, he has made several moves that have thrown the North American system into question. His calls to make Canada the 51st state and his threats to launch military operations in Mexico have sparked a backlash. Many Canadians and Mexicans have turned against the United States, alarmed by Trump’s hostile threats to impose 25 percent tariffs on their countries.

Trump has made numerous claims to justify his demands, many based on the notion that Canada and Mexico are taking advantage of the United States, but his charges have been rejected. Outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has accused Trump of being dishonest, dismissing his attempt to link Canada to drugs as “completely bogus, completely unjustified, completely false.”

More broadly, Canadians and Mexicans have been responding with upsurges of nationalism. Canadians have been participating in a “Buy Canadian” movement, and Mexicans have been rallying behind a “Made in Mexico” campaign.

Trump’s critics in the United States have largely focused on how tariffs may affect corporate profits and consumer prices, but the U.S. foreign policy establishment remains most concerned about the implications of Trump’s threats for the U.S.-centered North American system. Strategists have long feared the potential for nationalist movements to shift their countries away from the United States, perhaps even leading them out of the U.S. orbit altogether.

Several U.S. lawmakers have expressed dismay at Trump’s treatment of Canada and Mexico, sensing only lies and danger in his efforts to appear tough and bend the world to his will.

“He plays as the world’s biggest bully and hits our closest allies with tariffs,” Representative Robin Kelly (D-IL) said on March 11.

Options for Canada and Mexico

Faced with such high tariffs, Canada and Mexico may consider multiple responses. One basic approach would be to decouple their economies from the United States, just as the United States is doing with China. Given that Canada and Mexico maintain trading relationships with countries across the Atlantic and Pacific regions, they have multiple options for sending their exports to other parts of the world.

Another possibility is for Canada and Mexico to embrace alternative models of economic development. If they no longer want to focus on exporting raw materials and assembled goods to foreign markets, then they can shift toward industrialization, just as many Latin American countries attempted during the Cold War. By protecting their industries with retaliatory tariffs against the United States, Canada and Mexico can opt for independent industrial development, perhaps enabling both countries to one day rival U.S. economic power.

In pursuing more nationalist approaches, Canada and Mexico might even nationalize industries, just as Mexico did in the 1930s with its oil industry. Currently, the Mexican government’s “Plan Mexico” provides it with a starting point for reinvigorating the country’s manufacturing industry and making it more independent of the United States.

Any of these changes would have major implications for U.S. power. Not only would the United States lose some of its most important supply chains, but it would find it more difficult to coerce Canada and Mexico into reinforcing U.S. geopolitical power from the periphery.

Appeasement or Independence

For now, the leaders of Canada and Mexico are moving carefully, reluctant to make any moves that may lead to a rupture in relations with the United States. Their strategy has been to appease Trump, for instance by sending military forces to their borders in response to his menacing rhetoric about drugs and migrants. Although they have displayed a willingness to enact retaliatory tariffs, they have indicated that they want to avoid a trade war.

Whatever the leaders of Canada and Mexico decide over the long term, however, Trump’s actions have generated burstsof nationalism that provide both countries with opportunities to make fundamental changes in their relations with the United States. As long as Trump continues to threaten Canada and Mexico, both countries will find it possible to implement transformative policies that move them away from their subordinate positions on the U.S. periphery.

Given that U.S. global power is so strongly rooted in North America, Trump has effectively put Canada and Mexico into a position to make decisions that may determine the future of the American empire.

This first appeared on FPIF.

The post Will Canada and Mexico Seize the Opportunity to Break Free From U.S. Domination? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Edward Hunt.

We do not know if the Trump administration, Russia and Ukraine will be able to achieve a lasting peace in Ukraine. We encourage diplomacy, however, rather than fear it. We want the killing to stop as soon as possible. For three years we have been calling for a ceasefire, negotiations and an end to US weapons shipments that fuel the war. We are encouraged that in this moment there is a possibility of real progress towards peace.

Successive U.S. administrations insisted on expanding NATO – an anti-Russia military alliance – to Russia’s very borders, despite warnings by senior U.S. diplomats, academics, and secretaries of defense that NATO expansion was unnecessary and would likely provoke a war.  President Biden shares particular responsibility, because he was President Obama’s point man on Ukraine in 2014, and because the Biden administration rejected multiple chances for peace, both before and after Russia’s invasion. A less aggressive U.S. foreign policy would have prevented the deaths of hundreds of thousands of young soldiers and saved hundreds of billions of dollars.

Misinformation about the Ukraine war is rampant. There is no evidence whatsoever to support the oft-repeated contention that Russia intends to invade other European countries. Even now the word “unprovoked” is dutifully repeated throughout the U.S. media sphere.

By hitching itself to the tragically flawed policy of the Biden administration, the Democratic Party is now seen by many as “the war party.” This does not mean that the Republican Party has morphed into the party of peace. One need look no further than U.S. facilitation of Israel’s blatant genocide in Gaza to see that both major political parties have blood on their hands.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Peace in Ukraine Coalition.

“The police seizure of Malaysiakini executive editor RK Anand’s laptop is a clear and gross violation of press freedom,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative. “The computer should be returned to him unconditionally and this type of coercion must stop immediately.”

Police confiscated the computer and took a statement from Anand after Malaysiakini reported remarks that former health minister Khairy Jamaluddin made about two ministers on his podcast, according to news reports. Jamaluddin is under investigation for defamation for those comments.

The regulatory Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) also demanded access to Malaysiakini’s content management system (CMS), used to publish content on the outlet’s website, those sources said.

CPJ was unable to confirm whether Malaysiakini complied with the media regulator’s request.  

Neither Malaysiakini nor the MCMC immediately replied to CPJ’s emailed requests for comment.

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

Ethnic minority guerrillas in Myanmar’s Rakhine state have seized a major stronghold from the military, a spokesperson for the group said on Monday, another step towards their goal of controlling the entire state, while rejecting a junta call for talks.

The Arakan Army, or AA, which is fighting for self-determination in Myanmar’s western-most state, is one of the country’s most powerful forces battling the junta that seized power in 2021.

The insurgent force controls about 80% of the state, where China has extensive energy interests, and it fully captured the 12th of the state’s 17 townships before dawn on Saturday.

“We managed to seize control of Operational Command Center No. 5 in Toungup township,” said AA spokesperson Khaing Thu Kha. “That means the Arakan Army has been able to completely seize the township.”

RFA attempted to contact military spokesperson Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun for comment but he did not respond by the time of publication.

Hours after the insurgents captured the base, the junta chief, Senior General Ming Aung Hlaing, called on the AA and two of its allies to agree to ceasefires and talks to end the war.

“You can’t achieve your aims by demanding them through armed conflict, you must come to the political table,” Min Aung Hlaing said in a speech on the 50th anniversary of Rakhine State Day.

“I urge you to give up the way of conflict so that we can peacefully solve our problems and arrive at a good path,” he said.

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The AA and the two allied groups, both based in Shan state on northwestern Myanmar’s border with China, launched a stunning offensive late last year, seizing large areas from junta troops including major towns and bases.

Under pressure from China the two Shan state groups – the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, or MNDAA, and Ta’ang National Liberation Army – have recently declared ceasefires and agreed to talks.

A delegation from the MNDAA met representatives of the Myanmar military in the Chinese city of Kunming on Sunday, a source close to the military told Radio Free Asia, adding that Chinese officials also attended.

But the AA rejected the junta’s call for a ceasefire, Khaing thu Kha said.

“I consider it a dishonorable and brazen thing to say because in Myanmar, the military are the real violent ones,” he said.

“Nobody in Myanmar supports them … they can not represent Myanmar anymore. The terrorist military should apologize to the public and surrender their weapons as quickly as possible,” Khaing Thu Kha said.

The AA spokesman said his forces were closing in on another major military base in Rakhine state, its Western Command near Ann town, while junta forces were defending Gwa, in the far south of the state, with air power and fire from navy vessels, he said.

“The situation is good, we can say that we’ll capture it soon,” the AA spokesperson said of the Ann base.

Translated by Kiana Duncan. Edited by RFA Staff.

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

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Texas leaders have shown a decadeslong antipathy toward Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program that covers millions of low-income and vulnerable residents.

They declined additional federal money that, under the Affordable Care Act, would have allowed Medicaid to offer health care coverage to more low-income families. The state was among the last to insure women for an entire year after they gave birth. And when the federal government last year ended a policy that required states to keep people on their Medicaid rolls during the coronavirus pandemic, Texas officials rushed to kick off those they deemed ineligible, ignoring persistent warnings that the speedy process could lead to some people being wrongfully removed.

Come January, when Donald Trump assumes the presidency for the second time, Texas leaders could get another opportunity to whittle down the program — this time with fewer constraints.

Trump has not shared any plans to cut Medicaid, which covers about 80 million Americans, and his campaign did not respond to requests for comment. Health care advocates and experts, however, say that his past efforts to scale back the program, as well as positions taken by conservative groups and Republican lawmakers who back him, indicate that it would likely be a target for severe reductions.

“We expect the Republicans to move very quickly to cut Medicaid dramatically and indeed end its guarantee of coverage as it exists today,” said Joan Alker, executive director of Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families in Washington, D.C.

Currently, the federal government picks up, on average, nearly 70% of Medicaid spending, with states assuming the remaining costs. (A state’s share varies based mostly on what percentage of its residents are impoverished.) Any decisions to cut federal spending would likely lead states to shrink the number of people they deem eligible and the care that enrollees are entitled to receive, Alker and other experts said.

That would be particularly devastating in Texas, which already has one of the country’s lowest percentages of residents covered through Medicaid and where officials lack the political will to make up the difference in funding with state money, experts say. Parents with two children, for example, must earn less than $285 monthly to qualify for Medicaid for themselves.

“Our elected officials would have to decide whether they want to cut health care for pregnant women, kids, people with disabilities, or seniors because that is essentially who Medicaid covers in Texas,” Adriana Kohler, a policy director for Texans Care for Children, a statewide nonprofit that advocates for families, said in a statement.

Spokespeople for Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, and the state’s Health and Human Services Commission did not respond to repeated requests for comment. During Abbott’s prior role as the state’s attorney general, he helped to lead a successful lawsuit against the federal government, ensuring that states did not risk losing Medicaid funding entirely if they didn’t want to cover more residents as part of the Affordable Care Act.

Even when Texas does offer Medicaid coverage to its most vulnerable residents, state officials enabled a system that creates often insurmountable barriers to receiving care. A 2018 Dallas Morning News investigation found that some of the insurance companies Texas hired to administer Medicaid benefits systematically denied expensive and, at times, life-saving treatments to bolster profits. Critics say problems with the system persist despite legislative reforms spurred by that series of stories.

Texas insures more than 4 million residents through Medicaid, which amounts to a smaller percentage of its total population than almost any other state. But given its sheer size, the state still covers the third most people in the nation, behind only California and New York. The program provides health care for 3 in 8 children, 3 in 5 nursing home residents and 2 in 7 people with disabilities in Texas, according to KFF, a national health policy research organization. It is the top funder for nursing homes and long-term care services for the disabled and elderly, and it pays for nearly half of all births in the state.

Michael Morgan, a 75-year-old retired nurse who lives in Fort Worth, is among those who worry that if Trump caps or cuts the amount of money the federal government spends on Medicaid, the state could make it even harder to get coverage for his daughter Hannah. She has Down syndrome and schizencephaly, a brain malformation, and she is deaf and partially blind, she doesn’t speak, and she needs assistance to walk and eat.

Morgan is depleting his limited savings to pay for Hannah’s health care expenses after she lost Medicaid coverage earlier this year when she turned 19. He submitted a new application for her in May — she should qualify for Medicaid because of her disabilities. State officials denied her coverage in November, arguing that Morgan did not meet the deadline to return a form providing his consent for the agency to access his daughter’s medical and financial records. Morgan, who plans to appeal the denial, said in an interview that he received the form a day before the deadline.

“I don’t know how much more they can cut it,” he said of Medicaid in Texas.

During his first term, Trump tried unsuccessfully to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which provides health coverage to 45 million Americans. His administration also repeatedly supported spending caps for Medicaid, including block grants that would give states a fixed amount of federal funding, no matter how many people needed the insurance or how much their health care cost. Currently, Medicaid covers all people who qualify, no matter the expense.

While those efforts did not significantly advance during Trump’s first term, Republicans will hold majorities in both the House and the Senate come January, and they have signaled an openness to impose caps on spending and establish requirements that most adults in the program hold jobs. They argue that Medicaid spending is unsustainable and that the program is susceptible to waste, fraud and abuse.

Republicans who have supported such measures include U.S. Sen. John Cornyn and U.S. Rep. Jodey Arrington, a Lubbock Republican who leads the House Budget Committee.

GOP policy primers — including Project 2025, published by the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, and one from the Republican Study Committee, a conservative congressional caucus — have also called for cutting Medicaid.

Arrington, whose spokespeople did not respond to repeated requests for an interview, told reporters last month that he supported a “responsible and reasonable work requirement.” Harvard University health professors who studied a previous work mandate in Arkansas that Trump allowed during his first term found that most adults using Medicaid were already employed or qualified for an exemption, but thousands of residents still lost health care, at least in part because of the onerous process of continuously proving their eligibility.

This is not the first time Arrington has pushed work requirements and sought to lower the share of health care costs that the federal government pays to states. He previously proposed cutting federal Medicaid spending by more than a quarter, or $1.9 trillion.

Cornyn, whose spokespeople also repeatedly declined to comment, said last month that he would not support cuts to Medicare, the federal health insurance program for seniors and the disabled, or to Social Security. Still, he suggested that Medicaid cuts were on the table.

“We can’t just keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them,” Cornyn told Politico Pro, adding that “block grants make a lot of sense.”

William T. Smith, a 65-year-old retired construction worker who lives along the U.S.-Mexico border in Brownsville, said that he voted for Trump partly because he agrees that “there’s too much fat” and supports cutting some federal programs.

Smith has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which affects his lungs and makes it difficult to breathe. He said he also has bipolar disorder, sleep apnea and chronic pain after decades of performing manual labor.

Smith said Medicaid, which he has been trying to get since the summer, should not be where the federal government looks to reduce expenses. Instead, he said, the federal government should take savings from cutting other programs and put the money toward more people’s care.

“I don’t think they’re going to yank health care away from people,” he said. “If they do, I’d be really angry.”

Caught in Texas’ Medicaid and Food Stamp Application Backlog? Know Someone Who Is? Help Us Report.

Dan Keemahill contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Lomi Kriel and Jessica Priest.

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Donald Trump is entering his second term with vows to cut a vast array of government services and a radical plan to do so. Rather than relying on his party’s control of Congress to trim the budget, Trump and his advisers intend to test an obscure legal theory holding that presidents have sweeping power to withhold funding from programs they dislike.

“We can simply choke off the money,” Trump said in a 2023 campaign video. “For 200 years under our system of government, it was undisputed that the president had the constitutional power to stop unnecessary spending.”

His plan, known as “impoundment,” threatens to provoke a major clash over the limits of the president’s control over the budget. The Constitution gives Congress the sole authority to appropriate the federal budget, while the role of the executive branch is to dole out the money effectively. But Trump and his advisers are asserting that a president can unilaterally ignore Congress’ spending decisions and “impound” funds if he opposes them or deems them wasteful.

Trump’s designs on the budget are part of his administration’s larger plan to consolidate as much power in the executive branch as possible. This month, he pressured the Senate to go into recess so he could appoint his cabinet without any oversight. (So far, Republicans who control the chamber have not agreed to do so.) His key advisers have spelled out plans to bring independent agencies, such as the Department of Justice, under political control.

If Trump were to assert a power to kill congressionally approved programs, it would almost certainly tee up a fight in the federal courts and Congress and, experts say, could fundamentally alter Congress’ bedrock power.

“It’s an effort to wrest the entire power of the purse away from Congress, and that is just not the constitutional design,” said Eloise Pasachoff, a Georgetown Law professor who has written about the federal budget and appropriations process. “The president doesn’t have the authority to go into the budget bit by bit and pull out the stuff he doesn’t like.”

Trump’s claim to have impoundment power contravenes a Nixon-era law that forbids presidents from blocking spending over policy disagreements as well as a string of federal court rulings that prevent presidents from refusing to spend money unless Congress grants them the flexibility.

In an op-ed published Wednesday, tech billionaire Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who are overseeing the newly created, nongovernmental Department of Government Efficiency, wrote that they planned to slash federal spending and fire civil servants. Some of their efforts could offer Trump his first Supreme Court test of the post-Watergate Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which requires the president to spend the money Congress approves. The law allows exceptions, such as when the executive branch can achieve Congress’ goals by spending less, but not as a means for the president to kill programs he opposes.

Trump and his aides have been telegraphing his plans for a hostile takeover of the budgeting process for months. Trump has decried the 1974 law as “not a very good act” in his campaign video and said, “Bringing back impoundment will give us a crucial tool with which to obliterate the Deep State.”

Musk and Ramaswamy have seized that mantle, writing, “We believe the current Supreme Court would likely side with him on this question.”

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The once-obscure debate over impoundment has come into vogue in MAGA circles thanks to veterans of Trump’s first administration who remain his close allies. Russell Vought, Trump’s former budget director, and Mark Paoletta, who served under Vought as the Office of Management and Budget general counsel, have worked to popularize the idea from the Trump-aligned think tank Vought founded, the Center for Renewing America.

On Friday, Trump announced he had picked Vought to lead OMB again. “Russ knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end Weaponized Government, and he will help us return Self Governance to the People,” Trump said in a statement.

Vought was also a top architect of the controversial Project 2025. In private remarks to a gathering of MAGA luminaries uncovered by ProPublica, Vought boasted that he was assembling a “shadow” Office of Legal Counsel so that Trump is armed on day one with the legal rationalizations to realize his agenda.

“I don’t want President Trump having to lose a moment of time having fights in the Oval Office about whether something is legal or doable or moral,” Vought said.

Trump spokespeople and Vought did not respond to requests for comment.

The prospect of Trump seizing vast control over federal spending is not merely about reducing the size of the federal government, a long-standing conservative goal. It is also fueling new fears about his promises of vengeance.

A similar power grab led to his first impeachment. During his first term, Trump held up nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine while he pressured President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to open a corruption investigation into Joe Biden and his family. The U.S. Government Accountability Office later ruled his actions violated the Impoundment Control Act.

Pasachoff predicted that, when advantageous, the incoming Trump administration will attempt to achieve the goals of impoundment without picking such a high-profile fight.

Trump tested piecemeal ways beyond the Ukrainian arms imbroglio to withhold federal funding as a means to punish his perceived enemies, said Bobby Kogan, a former OMB adviser under Biden and the senior director of federal budget policy at the left-leaning think tank American Progress. After devastating wildfires in California and Washington, Trump delayed or refused to sign disaster declarations that would have unlocked federal relief aid because neither state had voted for him. He targeted so-called sanctuary cities by conditioning federal grants on local law enforcement’s willingness to cooperate with mass deportation efforts. The Biden administration eventually withdrew the policy.

Trump and his aides claim there is a long presidential history of impoundment dating back to Thomas Jefferson.

Most historical examples involve the military and cases where Congress had explicitly given presidents permission to use discretion, said Zachary Price, a professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco. Jefferson, for example, decided not to spend money Congress had appropriated for gun boats — a decision the law, which appropriated money for “a number not exceeding fifteen gun boats” using “a sum not exceeding fifty thousand dollars,” authorized him to make.

President Richard Nixon took impoundment to a new extreme, wielding the concept to gut billions of dollars from programs he simply opposed, such as highway improvements, water treatment, drug rehabilitation and disaster relief for farmers. He faced overwhelming pushback both from Congress and in the courts. More than a half dozen federal judges and the Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the appropriations bills at issue did not give Nixon the flexibility to cut individual programs.

Vought and his allies argue the limits Congress placed in 1974 are unconstitutional, saying a clause in the Constitution obligating the president to “faithfully execute” the law also implies his power to forbid its enforcement. (Trump is fond of describing Article II, where this clause lives, as giving him “the right to do whatever I want as president.”)

The Supreme Court has never directly weighed in on whether impoundment is constitutional. But it threw water on that reasoning in an 1838 case, Kendall v. U.S., about a federal debt payment.

“To contend that the obligation imposed on the President to see the laws faithfully executed, implies a power to forbid their execution, is a novel construction of the constitution, and entirely inadmissible,” the justices wrote.

During his cutting spree, Nixon’s own Justice Department argued roughly the same.

“With respect to the suggestion that the President has a constitutional power to decline to spend appropriated funds,” William Rehnquist, the head of the Office of Legal Counsel whom Nixon later appointed to the Supreme Court, warned in a 1969 legal memo, “we must conclude that existence of such a broad power is supported by neither reason nor precedent.”

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

“CPJ is deeply alarmed by the British counter-terrorism police raid on journalist Asa Winstanley’s home and the disturbing pattern of weaponizing counter-terrorism laws against reporters,” said Attila Mong, CPJ’s Europe representative. “These actions have a chilling effect on journalism and public service reporting in the United Kingdom. Authorities must immediately end this practice and return all devices seized back to Winstanley. Instead of endangering the confidentiality of journalistic sources, authorities should implement safeguards to prevent the unlawful investigation of journalists and ensure they can do their work without interference.”

Officers with the Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command arrived around 6 a.m. and served Winstanley, associate editor at The Electronic Intifada news site, with a warrant authorizing them to seize his electronic devices. The operation cited potential offenses under sections 1 (Encouragement of Terrorism) and 2 (Dissemination of Terrorist Publications) of the United Kingdom’s 2006 Terrorism Act, which carry a maximum sentence of 15 years’ imprisonment.

Earlier in August, police detained freelance journalist Richard Medhurst for 24 hours on similar offense, searching and questioning him at Heathrow Airport, and seizing his electronic devices. He told Turkey’s Anadolu Agency that he believes he was held due to his reporting on Palestinians. 

CPJ emailed the Metropolitan Police Service’s press department requesting comment on the raid but did not receive a reply.

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

Allied insurgent forces in northern Myanmar have captured a main junta post  near the border with China, an officer of the anti-junta Kachin Independence Army told Radio Free Asia on Tuesday, the latest setback for the military in the resource-rich region.

The Kachin Independence Army, or KIA, is based in Myanmar’s northernmost state and is one of the most powerful groups battling for autonomy. It has made significant progress over the past year, capturing  rare earth and jade mines as well as routes for border trade with China. 

KIA information officer Naw Bu told RFA the latest junta position to fall was the Border Guard Post No. 1003, on the Waingmaw-Kan Paik Ti road, from where junta forces defend nearby towns.

“Forces captured the camp that was providing security to Kan Paik Ti town. After that, they also captured the camp in between Border Guard Posts No. 5 and 6,” he said. 

“Also along the Bhamo-Momauk road, junta soldiers have been fighting intensely for two days after coming up with armored cars.”

Kachin state has long been one of Myanmar’s opium growing regions and Naw Bu said junta troops were stationed near hundreds of acres of poppy fields in the area.

RFA tried to telephone Kachin state’s junta spokesperson, Moe Min Thein, for information about the situation but calls went unanswered. 

A resident of the area who declined to be identified for security reasons said fighting was still going on near the poppy fields forcing about 1,000 villagers to flee to Kan Paik Ti town for safety.

“As for Kan Paik Ti, there are still junta soldiers, militia members and border guards there. Residents are worried about fighting there,” the resident said.

Last week, KIA and allied forces captured military positions near the border town of Pang War, to the northeast of Kan Paik Ti and a major rare earth mining center.

In response to the fighting, China closed border gates under KIA control late on Friday, refusing to allow civilians fleeing the area to enter, and trapping about 1,000 people.

Since July, KIA and allied forces have captured 12 towns, including Mabein, Chipwi and Lwegel, as well as 220 camps across Kachin and northern Shan states. 

Translated by Kiana Duncan. Edited by RFA Staff. 

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

Authorities in China are moving to seize more than 3 billion yuan (US$435 million) in assets belonging to a former high-ranking official from the northeastern province of Heilongjiang who has fled to the United States, claiming to be a persecuted critic of the government.

According to the Mudanjiang Intermediate People's Court, former Jixi vice mayor Li Chuanliang stands accused of holding illegal assets including real estate, companies and engineering equipment worth 3.1 billion yuan, according to details it published in the Oct. 11 edition of the People's Court Daily, a specialist legal newspaper.

Li, 61, who has served as vice mayor of both Jixi and Hegang cities, stands accused of embezzling public assets, accepting bribes and appropriating public funds by awarding contracts to companies he secretly owned, the state-run China Daily newspaper reported.

Li fled China in 2018, two years before China issued an international "red notice" arrest warrant for him via Interpol.

But unlike many former officials targeted by ruling Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign, Li has fought back, lawyered up, had the red notice canceled, and claims he is being persecuted because he witnessed widespread official corruption during his time in office.

Now, the authorities are moving to confiscate what they say are his "illegal gains," something that usually takes place only after a person has been convicted of corruption by a court.

"Since the investigation began in 2020, authorities have frozen over 1.4 billion yuan (US$197 million) of his funds and seized 1,021 properties, 27 parcels of land, eight forest plots, 38 vehicles and 10 sets of mechanical equipment," the China Daily reported.

The confiscation of the assets will go ahead if Li fails to present himself for trial within the next six months.

‘Let the bullets fly’

But Li told Radio Free Asia that he hasn't received any legal papers regarding the alleged case against him.

"They haven't actually taken any action against me," he said in an interview on Tuesday.

"The point of weaving this yarn about these assets and these apartments is firstly revenge, secondly, robbery, thirdly, to intimidate and fourthly, to send out a warning," Li said. "Let the bullets fly -- I'm a free agent now and have the opportunity to clarify and explain."

"I think the whole system is rotten to the core, and that these officials are lawless," he said. "I definitely want more democracy, more freedom, more transparency, more openness, and more justice in China."

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While the investigation began in 2020, Li hasn't even been able to hire a lawyer in China to represent him.

"They would need to formally prosecute me and notify me before I can hire a lawyer," Li said. "But they never have."

Since Li fled the country, the authorities have prosecuted dozens of Li's relatives and former associates instead, according to a lawyer representing one of them, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals.

The lawyer said that the authorities are acting illegally, and that many of the accused had done nothing wrong.

"You say this person has committed a crime, so you need to convict him first," a lawyer representing the family who asked not to be identified told RFA Mandarin in a recent interview. "Only then can you start the process for confiscating his assets, according to the Criminal Procedure Law."

"Right now, they're trying to confiscate his assets before the trial has even been held, which is totally illegal," the lawyer said, adding that they are worried the authorities could try him in absentia.

Online searches by RFA Mandarin turned up no cases against Li filed by the Heilongjiang provincial state prosecutor's office, which approved his formal arrest in absentia in September 2020. 

Guilty by association

The sheer scale of the allegations has sparked a storm of outrage on Chinese social media platforms, but Li claimed many of the properties listed were legitimately owned and operated by him and his relatives.

"A lot of those funds and assets were run in total compliance with the law and regulations by either myself, my relatives or my friends," Li told Radio Free Asia. But he said he had never heard of many of the assets listed by the Mudanjiang court.

"I don't know anything about a lot of them, but they may belong to my partners or their affiliated companies," he said. "All of the assets I know about are unproblematic."

The lawyer said some of the properties listed were part of a residential complex developed by Li but still unsold, but that the authorities had listed each apartment separately, giving the impression of a much longer list.

He said the government appears to be considering the assets of anyone connected to Li as fair game, as if they were guilty by association.

"How come everyone else's money is all included in there?" he said. 

Xia Ming, politics professor at New York's City University, said Xi Jinping's anti-corruption drive typically targets Xi's political rivals, rather than seeking to root out rampant graft throughout the system.

"Xi Jinping wants to enhance his personal reputation and build his legitimacy by playing the anti-corruption card, but I don't think it's working," Xia said, adding that public anger is simmering over the current economic downturn.

"This decline has done damage to everyone, and people are disgusted," he said. "They link the current failure of Xi's anti-corruption campaign to the incompetence and hypocrisy throughout the Communist Party system."

Criticizing the Chinese government

In a 2022 statement, Li's U.S. lawyer Michelle Estlund said he was being targeted for giving media interviews criticizing the Chinese government after he arrived in the United States.

Li fled to the United States in 2020 with the assistance of the U.S.-based Chinese Democratic Party, Estlund's law firm said in a news release at the time. 

"Upon his arrival to the United States, Mr. Li spoke out against the Chinese government and its corruption," the statement said. "He gave multiple interviews, criticizing both the CCP and the Chinese government’s corruption and its attempts to cover up certain aspects of the COVID-19 outbreak."

The authorities filed the first charges against Li "a few weeks" after his first media interview, it said.

In 2020, Li gave an interview (in Chinese) to RFA Cantonese, in which he spoke about rampant official corruption during his tenure, with officials snapping up confiscated private-sector assets like coal mines after targeting the owners with allegations of corruption or other wrong-doing.

"The local leaders have the final say in who gets investigated; they are selectively anti-corruption," he said. "Take a look at some of these departments and check out their families' assets; take a look at what they're wearing, what kind of car they drive, where they live and what kind of food they eat."

Li is now challenging the Chinese authorities to take him to court in the United States, and make all of the evidence against him public.

"I just want everything to be made public, for an open trial, and for the chance to defend myself in public," he said.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Joshua Lipes.

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

Ethnic Kachin rebels have seized control of a key military base in northern Myanmar’s Kachin state near a Chinese rare-earth mine and other Chinese-led projects, according to residents and a rebel official.

Rebel control of these mines could potentially disrupt shipments of these lucrative rare earths, which are used in cell phones, cars and other products.

It would also give the Kachin Independence Army, or KIA, more leverage in dealing with China, which has seemed to favor the military junta in power, including possible future peace talks that might be brokered by China.

China is keen to see an end to the turmoil following the military’s 2021 coup d’etat in Myanmar that threatens its economic interests, which include oil and natural gas pipelines from the Indian Ocean coast.

In recent weeks, Beijing has pressed insurgent forces along the countries’ shared border to agree to halt their offensives against the junta, although neither side appears ready to lay down their arms.

On Monday, the KIA took control of the military’s No. 105 Infantry Battalion base near Chipwi township – a major hub for rare-earth mines in Myanmar – in addition to five other junta outposts in Chipwi and neighboring Tsawlaw township the rebel group had seized earlier.

A resident of Chipwi told RFA Burmese that the KIA had effectively assumed control of the township, which is home to more than 20,000 people and located around 65 km (40 miles) from the Chinese border.

"It is confirmed that the KIA has taken over the [township] police station and the junta’s combined forces in [nearby] Lay Maing village,” said the resident who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on condition of anonymity due to security concerns.

“Chipwi is an administrative town with mostly public servants and fewer members of the armed forces,” he said. “At this point, the KIA and anti-junta forces control it.”

The resident said that the military has been conducting airstrikes in a bid to retake control of the territory.

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KIA spokesperson Colonel Naw Bu confirmed to RFA that his group had seized control of junta outposts near Chipwi.

“We have taken over the military outpost [No. 105 Infantry Battalion] and the police station in Chipwi township,” he said, although he could not confirm “full control of the entire area.”

Hundreds flee town center

Anti-junta forces began attacking the Chipwi police station, a junta outpost in nearby Sha Ngaw village and a checkpoint controlled by the military in Lay Maing village on Sunday, as well as the junta’s No. 298 Infantry Battalion base in Tsawlaw township.

A resident, who also declined to be named, said that shops and markets were closed in Chipwi’s town center – located just 1.5 km (1 mile) from the military’s No. 105 Infantry Battalion base – after around 2,000 civilians, or some two-thirds of the urban population, fled ahead of the fighting.

Another resident of Chipwi told RFA that junta artillery fire had killed a 15-year-old girl in the area.

Attempts by RFA to contact Moe Min Thein, the junta’s Social Affairs Minister and spokesperson for Kachin state, went unanswered Monday, as did efforts to reach China’s embassy in Yangon

According to a May 23 report by Global Witness, which monitors global natural resource mining, rare-earth exploration in Kachin state’s Pang War and Chipwi townships increased 40% to more than 300 mining blocks from 2021-2023.

China’s Customs Department said that China imported more than US$1.4 billion worth of rare-earth minerals from Myanmar in 2023. China is the world’s top processor of rare-earth minerals, which are used in consumer electronics and military equipment.

In addition to rare-earth mines, China also runs the Chipwe Nge Hydroelectric Plant, which provides power to the Kachin state capital Myitkyina and nearby Waimaw township, and which is located about 10 km (6 miles) south of Chipwi.

Since the beginning of 2024, the KIA and its joint forces have seized around 220 junta outposts in eight Shan and Kachin state townships.

Translated by Aung Naing. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

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

Myanmar has produced oil in the Irrawaddy River valley since the 19th century but its offshore gas fields are a much more important source of revenue for the junta that seized power in a 2021 coup.

Pro-democracy insurgent members of milita’s known as People’s Defense Forces, or PDFs, in the Magway region seized the Thagyitaung-Sabal oil field in Pakokku township on Tuesday following a pre-dawn assault on about 50 soldiers defending it,  a PDF spokesman told RFA. 

“We’ve been holding the field and have soldiers cutting off the ground route,” said Pauk township’s PDF information officer Ko Sit.

“Six junta soldiers were killed and two were arrested during the fighting,” he said. He gave no information on casualties among PDF fighters.

PDF fighters seized weapons and ammunition, and about six million kyat (US$1,000) in cash, he said.

The military responded with airstrikes and sent reinforcements to a police station in nearby Pauk township, Ko Sit said, adding that fighting continued into Wednesday as junta forces tried to regain control of the field.

RFA tried to contact Magway region’s junta spokesperson Myo Myint for comment but he did not return calls. 

The oil field, operated by the junta-owned conglomerate Myanma Oil and Gas Enterprise, or  MOGE, produced 119 barrels of crude oil and 2.5 million cubic feet (71,000 cubic meters) of natural gas per day in 2018, according to the Ministry of Electricity and Energy.

Resource-rich parts of Myanmar have seen heavy fighting this year as rebel groups try to capture them. Kachin state in northern Myanmar has jade and rare earth mines while parts of Shan state in the northeast has rich ruby mines.

PDF groups captured Myaing township’s Kyauk Khwet oil field on March 2 and Pauk township’s Letpanto oil field on April 19. On Aug. 15, PDF forces occupied the Pu Htoe Lon oil field in Gangaw township. 

RFA was not immediately able to contact the MOGE for comment about the latest loss of an oil field.  

The U.S. Treasury Department has described the MOGE as “the largest single source of foreign revenue for Burma’s military regime, providing hundreds of millions of dollars each year.” Last October, it announced sanctions against MOGE, banning companies from providing it with financial services.

Magway region has no privately owned oil fields, after the junta ordered their closure in June last year. Although it gave no reason, owners and workers said the junta was worried that profits were being used to fund PDFs.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Kiana Duncan and Mike Firn. 

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

Ismail al-Ghoul, an Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent who was held for 12 hours at Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital, says Israeli forces rounded up Palestinian journalists at the facility and made them kneel on the ground for hours, while naked and blindfolded.

“The occupation forces handcuffed and blindfolded us for about 12 hours from the early morning to the afternoon, until the arrival of Israeli military intelligence units,” he said, according to reports by Al Jazeera.

“They interrogated the journalists that work at this location. We were left in the room we were kept in, where we stayed for several hours, in cold conditions, naked and blindfolded.”

• READ MORE: 103 journalists killed in 150 days in Gaza: a tragedy for Palestinian journalism
• Journalist casualties in the Israel-Gaza war
• Silencing the messenger: Israel kills journalists, while the West merely censors them – David Robie

Al-Ghoul, who was also reported as having been “severely beaten”, said he had heard that some of his colleagues had been released but he did not have enough information on their whereabouts.

The journalists were seized in a fresh attack on al-Shifa hospital after the medical facility had been previously targeted last November. The hospital has been sheltering thousands of Gazans taking cover from the five-month war.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has condemned the detention of al-Ghoul and his team.

“Journalists play an essential role in a war. They are the eyes and the ears that we need to document what’s happening and with every journalist killed, with every journalist arrested, our ability to understand what’s happening in Gaza diminishes significantly,” said Jodie Ginsberg, chief executive officer of the CPJ.

UN condemnation
UN Secretary-General António Guterres’s spokesperson Farhan Haq also condemned the detention of the journalists.

Replying to questions from Al Jazeera correspondent Biesan Abu Kwaik, Haq said: “We stand against any harassment of journalists anywhere in the world. And certainly we do so in this instance.

“Our sympathies go to your colleague as well as to all the other journalists who suffered from any violence during the course of this incident.”

The Plight of Palestinian Prisoners –– documentary.   Video: Al Jazeera

Another Al Jazeera Arabic journalist, Usaid Siddiqui, said Ismail al-Ghoul was just one of many journalists in Gaza targeted by Israel

“After speaking to him, I can say he is doing fine,” Siddiqui said.

“He had been blindfolded and handcuffed for 12 hours [by Israeli forces] and was taken away for interrogation.

“Journalists are one of the main focuses of the Israeli military campaign in Gaza.

“Ismail has been reporting on Israeli attacks in Gaza since day one of the fighting.

“He has been able to continue reporting despite all the ongoing efforts by the Israeli military to silence the narrative of Palestinians around the world.”

Stormed at dawn
When interviewed by Al Jazeera after his release, al-Ghoul said Israeli forces had stormed al-Shifa Hospital at dawn during intense fighting.

“They started by destroying media equipment and arresting journalists gathered in a room used by media teams,” he said.

“The journalists were stripped of their clothes and were arrested and placed in a room inside the medical compound. They were forced to lie on their stomachs as they were blindfolded and their hands tied.”

Al-Ghoul said Israeli soldiers would open fire to “scare us if there was any movement”.

After about 12 hours, they were taken for interrogation.

Following waiting in line for investigation, an elderly man had been released from inside the hospital and he needed help to leave the compound.

The journalist said he had volunteered to help the man and was able to accompany him until they both got out the compound and he was free.

Al-Ghoul later heard that some of his colleagues had been released but said he did not have enough information about where they were.

ComGen @UNLazzarini: the highest number of people ever recorded as facing human-made famine, along with mass killings, constant harm & creation of conditions that gut life of humanity has a name: Genocide.

Israel wants no witnesses, no truth-tellers.

Respect & solidarity. https://t.co/jeZ7RL24AF

— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) March 18, 2024

Israel wants ‘no truth-tellers’
Meanwhile, the UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories said Israeli authorities were preventing entry of a top UN official into the Gaza Strip to “hide their violations of international law”.

“The highest number of people ever recorded as facing human-made famine, along with mass killings, constant harm and creation of conditions that gut life of humanity has a name: Genocide,” Francesca Albanese said in a post on X.

“Israel wants no witnesses, no truth-tellers,” she said, referencing Israel’s blocking of Phillipe Lazzarini, the head of UNRWA, from entering Gaza.

Pacific Media Watch has compiled this media freedom report from Al Jazeera and other news services.

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

The seizures took place largely at MBC offices in Blantyre, Lilongwe, and Mzuzu following a complaint by MBC’s management about the creation of a “fake” Facebook page bearing the corporation’s name and logo, which the outlet had not approved, according to the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA), the journalists, and police search warrants reviewed by CPJ. The complaint accused the 14 journalists of “spamming,” which carries a maximum penalty of two million Malawian kwacha (about US$1,190) and imprisonment for five years under section 91 of Malawi’s Electronic Transactions and Cybersecurity Act.

As of March 8, police returned three laptops and nine phones to the journalists, according to a journalist who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal. The journalist, whose phone has been returned, is concerned that the device has been compromised while in police custody and will no longer use it.

Another journalist, who also spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal, said some MBC colleagues received email notifications about attempts to log into their Instagram and X accounts while their devices were in police custody.

Malawi police spokesperson Peter Kalaya told CPJ in a late February 2024 phone interview that the police investigation was being conducted in response to a legitimate complaint, and police had obtained a warrant before seizing and searching the devices. 

“The investigation is not targeting journalists, it is targeting people who we suspect to be responsible” for the Facebook page, Kalaya said, but he declined to explain how the police had determined which individuals were suspects. 

“We have a forensics laboratory and sometimes we use other institutions’ forensic laboratories,” Kalaya told CPJ, but declined to give specifics about the technologies used to search the journalists’ devices. “Our search in the gadgets is going to be restricted to those apps that we believe or that we suspect were used in the commission of the crime,” Kalaya told CPJ, adding that the journalists whose devices had been seized should trust the professionalism of the investigating officers. “Why should a police officer go to contacts, to [the] photo gallery when what he is looking for is not there, or if he does not suspect it will be there?” he said.

In January 2024, the local Platform for Investigative Journalism (PIJ-Malawi) reported that Malawian authorities had obtained the Universal Forensic Extraction Device (UFED), a powerful technology designed to access and extract information from electronic devices and sold by the Israel-based company Cellebrite. The Malawi police sought to further expand its investigative capacity with similar tools, according to the report. In response to CPJ’s questions about which tools, including those sold by Cellebrite, police used to search the devices of MBC journalists, Kalaya declined to give specifics.

CPJ has previously documented the use of Cellebrite’s UFED by police in Botswana to search journalists’ phones and has raised the issue of privacy concerns when law enforcement seizes devices and has access to such technology. 

MBC director general George Kasakula declined to comment until the police investigation into the alleged spamming concludes at an unknown date.

On February 15, five police officers looking for Greyson Chapita, MBC’s suspended controller of news and programs, arrived at his daughter’s home. The officers told family members there to call Chapita and tell him that his daughter was sick to lure him there, the journalist told CPJ, adding that his family obliged, and he arrived shortly after. Once Chapita arrived, police officers told him that he was a suspect in a murder and requested to search his phone and laptop, but he initially refused.

Chapita told the officers that he would not comply until he verified that they were police officers, and he went with them to the local police station to confirm their identities. Once confirmed by a senior officer, Chapita returned with them to his home, where the officers showed him the same warrant citing MBC management’s complaint, and he opened his laptop and entered his password, he told CPJ. The officers then looked through his Facebook account for 30 minutes without further explanation as Chapita watched.

“[T]hey checked my Facebook account and took screenshots. They made me sign a document showing that they searched my laptop and did not find anything, so they didn’t take it. They couldn’t see my phone because it is not a smartphone,” the journalist added.

When asked about the police officers’ tactics used to summon Chapita and search his computer, Kalaya told CPJ that he could not comment on the specifics of the incident, but he said the journalist could file a complaint. 

“What I can assure you is that our investigators are very professional and whatever they are doing is very professional,” Kalaya said.

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

Troops shot 21-year-old Khin Soe Wai while she fled her village in Mandalay township, locals said. 

Over 50 soldiers stormed Kan Swei village following a clash with local resistance forces on Sunday. Mandalay and Myingyan People’s Defense Forces attacked junta troops with drones only half a mile away.

After shooting Khin Soe Wai, villagers said the column occupied the village’s monastery, interrogating more than 100 villagers on Tuesday and burning down three homes. 

Troops took more than 30 of them to a village in nearby Natogyi township.

After arriving in Na Nwin Taw Bo, soldiers arrested over 300 more villagers, who have not been released yet, Myingyan-based defense forces member Bo Moe Kyo told RFA on Wednesday.

"On the fifth, a woman from Kan Swei who ran away was shot dead,” he said. “About 150 villagers in Kan Swei were detained in the monastery. They were beaten and tortured. About 30 of them were taken by the junta troops.”

Since the raid, some 5,000 residents from eight villages in Myingyan township and Natogyi township have been forced to flee due to the junta column, he said.

“Na Nwin Taw Bo was raided by the column again. There were no casualties. But they arrested everyone they met: children, adults and women,” he said. “More than 300 villagers were arrested. They are still being held as hostage."

Calls by RFA to Mandalay’s junta spokesperson Thein Htay to learn more about the raid went unanswered on Wednesday. 

In January, four women and five men from Mandalay region's Myingyan township were arrested and killed by junta troops.

As of Feb. 6, over 4,400 people across the country have been killed since the military seized power three years ago, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.

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

The attack marked the latest blow to Myanmar’s military in Rakhine state, where the ethnic Arakan Army, or AA, ended a ceasefire in November that had been in place since the junta assumed power in a Feb. 1, 2021, coup d’etat.

The AA took control of the Taung Pyo Let Yar outpost in Maungdaw township on Sunday afternoon, taking prisoners and prompting nearly 60 fighters with the Border Guard Force, or BGF, to flee towards the border, the Three Brotherhood Alliance – of which the AA is a member – said in a statement.

The statement by the alliance, which also includes the Ta’ang National Liberation Army, and the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, said that AA fighters were killed in the battle, although it did not provide details of the number of casualties.

It said the AA is also attacking a nearby BGF outpost called Taung Pyo Let Wae.

The two outposts, located just north of the seat of Maungdaw township, are vital to the junta and each were manned by at least 100 soldiers, residents told RFA Burmese.

Photos and videos of the battle posted to social media appeared to show BGF troops running towards the Bangladesh border amid volleys of gunfire, as well as wounded BGF fighters.

Media reports cited officials in Bangladesh as saying that at least 95 Myanmar border guards, some of whom are wounded, have fled across the border over the last few days. Reports said the Myanmar border guards had been provided shelter at Bangladesh Border Guard outposts and that at least 24 of them had been sent to hospitals in neighboring Cox’s Bazar district to be treated for their wounds.

Fierce fighting continued in the area on Monday, residents said, and the military sent a jet fighter to carry out an airstrike.

One resident of Maungdaw who declined to be named due to security concerns said the AA began attacking the outposts on Saturday, forcing villagers to flee to the border for safety.

“Some local residents fled to Bangladesh, while others dug bunkers and took shelter,” he said. “Fighting is ongoing … so [people] don’t dare stay there. A plane came and attacked two or three times.”

More than 1,000 people live in the Taung Pyo area, including residents of nearby Thin Baw Hla and Mee Taik villages who were displaced by fighting between the military and anti-junta forces in 2022.

The junta has not released any information about the attacks on the BGF outposts in Maungdaw or troops fleeing to Bangladesh. Calls by RFA to Hla Thein, the junta’s attorney general for Rakhine state, went unanswered Monday.

Fighting spills across border

At least two people in Bangladesh – a Bangladeshi woman and a Rohingya refugee – were killed on Monday when a mortar shell fired from Rakhine exploded on the woman’s house in Bandarban district near where the fighting was happening, media reports said, citing Bangladeshi government officials.

Police identified the two victims who died in the mortar explosion as Hosne Ara, 50, a local resident, and Nobi Hossain, 65, a Rohingya laborer who was working at her house.

“Firing and shelling had intensified since the morning. Suddenly, a mortar shell landed in my sister’s house and exploded. She died,” Shah Alam, Hosne Ara’s brother, told BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated news outlet, on Monday.

Iman Hossain, the son of the dead Rohingya laborer, said his family had received the news that his father was killed in the explosion.

“We came to Bangladesh from Myanmar to save our lives. But my father died in a Myanmar mortar shell [explosion]. What else can be more painful than this?” Nobi Hossain told BenarNews.

Some 1 million ethnic Rohingya refugees have been living in Bangladesh since 2017, when they were driven out of Myanmar by a military clearance operation.

‘AA will press further’

Another resident of Rakhine’s Maungdaw township, who also spoke on condition of anonymity citing fear of reprisal, said only 10 BGF battalions and three BGF tactical forces remain there and in nearby Buthidaung township.

“I believe the AA will press further,” he said. “If the outposts of Taung Pyo are captured, I think that [cross-border] trade will resume in Rakhine state. Also, I think, the rest of the outposts in the area will be attacked, too.”

The resident said the AA is likely targeting outposts along the border to reestablish trade routes with Bangladesh, which had been blocked by the military.

“When the junta blocked the roads to Rakhine, all goods became scarce, so the AA feels they have the responsibility to reopen them,” he said. “Therefore, it can be assumed that the main reason for the attacks in Maungdaw are to reestablish trade with Bangladesh.”

The AA announced in December that it had captured more than 60 BGF outposts since November, when fighting resumed in Maungdaw township. The group claimed that junta troops retreated from most of the outposts because they were “afraid of being attacked.”

The AA has launched offensives against junta bases in Buthidaung, Maungdaw, Mrauk-U, Minbya, Kyauktaw, Rathedaung, Ponnagyun and Ramree townships.

Rohingya refugees

Meanwhile, in Rakhine’s Taung Nyo township, where clashes between the military and the AA are now raging, the junta has set up temporary camps to receive some of the Rohingya refugees who have been living in Bangladesh.

Khin Maung, an aid worker who is assisting the refugees, told RFA that the return of the Rohingyas is still “a long way off,” due to intense fighting in the area.

“How will the Rohingya return to an area where this kind of fighting is going on?” he asked. “We ran away in the past because we couldn’t live in such a situation. Now the situation has returned to the way it was before, so how can we go back? There is no favorable situation to return.”

Amid the worsening conflict, the United Nations Security Council planned to meet Monday to discuss the crisis in Myanmar.

Britain, France and the United States – three permanent Security Council members – and six other countries issued a joint statement on Monday expressing concern about what they called the “dire” situation in Myanmar, where the U.N. says some 2.6 million people have been displaced by fighting since the coup.

Specifically, they noted that conditions in Rakhine state had “further deteriorated” and called for “the voluntary, safe, dignified, and sustainable return” of the Rohingyas and internally displaced persons.

Translated by Htin Aung Kyaw. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news outlet.

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

The entrance to Harvard Yard in Cambridge, Mass., on Jan. 2, 2024.

Should Claudine Gay have resigned as president of Harvard? Are conservatives right that a rabidly pro-Hamas left has captured Harvard? Are liberals correct that the fascistic right has launched an all-out assault on academic freedom, at Harvard? The New York Times has explored these questions (about Harvard) over the course of almost 17,000 articles.

These are indeed fascinating topics. However, they ignore a key issue: That for anyone with a progressive perspective, Harvard should neither be reformed (to eliminate its wokeness) nor protected (from the forces of reaction). Rather, it should be razed to the ground.

Then, after Harvard has been razed, we must salt the earth, Carthage-style, so a new Harvard does not grow in its place. Next we have to destroy the rest of the Ivy League. Finally, anyone with enough energy left over should sail an emissions-free ship through the Panama Canal to California and obliterate Stanford.

Let’s start with a story that explains why I’m so personally committed to this cause. Then we can move on to a more rational explanation of why you should be too.

On January 16, 1991, I was a senior at Yale. That night at 9 p.m., George H.W. Bush, president of the United States and Yale alumnus, announced the commencement of the first Gulf War.

This was a time of such barbarism that there was no internet. Almost no students had a television in their room. So the only way I could find out what was happening was to go to my dorm’s common room, which did have a big TV.

When I got there that night, there was a single person there. She was not a Yale student, and she was not a Yale professor. She was a woman who worked in the dining hall. Anyone familiar with Yale and New Haven, Connecticut, will know this means she was likely either Italian American or African American; she was African American.

She was watching CNN with fervent concentration. I soon learned this was because her son was in the Marines and was stationed in Saudi Arabia on the border with Kuwait, and she was (she did not say this) terrified that he was about to die. I had never before seen a human being whose every atom was vibrating with fear.

It was impossible for me not to think about the debate about the coming war I’d already had with Yale friends. Some supported it; some didn’t. But we all wanted to talk about whether we would be willing to fight in it if the draft was reinstated. I finally said: This is all moot. If things go so badly that they have to draft people out of Yale, the U.S. government will wrap it up. The people who run America don’t care about this so much that they’d risk their own children.

This sounds like a nice tale about how sensitive and wise I was as a young man. There’s more to it, though. As I watched Baghdad being bombed, and untold numbers of humans being converted into wet, red scraps of flesh, a tide of emotion swept over me unbidden. It was exultation.

I had no idea before that moment that this potential existed inside of me. I knew nothing at all of the history of the Middle East or the specifics of that war. So this didn’t emerge from my cerebrum, the part of our brains that thinks. It was from my amygdala, the part of our brains that probably hasn’t changed much since we were Homo erectus a million years ago. I had unknowingly absorbed a vague sense that there were these dusky foreigners out there, led by a two-bit dictator who’d gotten too big for his britches, who thought that they could defy us, and were being taught that they could not. 

The “us” part was key. Us didn’t mean America, but rather the small group of people in charge of America. And I had unconsciously come to believe that, as a Yale student, I was a member of this group’s junior varsity.

I find this excruciating to think about today. But I’m glad I experienced it, because it gave me a visceral sense of how the world feels to the people who ultimately run places like Harvard and Yale.

So that’s my personal animus. But it should be shared by everyone who’d like the U.S. to be a real democracy.

Here’s a measure of the stranglehold the Ivy League has over the commanding heights of the U.S. political system: From 1989 to 2021, a period covering 32 years, five presidents, and eight presidential terms, every U.S. president went to an Ivy League school as an undergraduate or graduate. Even more incredibly, for 28 straight years from 1989 to 2017, the president went to either Harvard or Yale — or, in the case of George W. Bush, both. Then the Harvard/Yale streak was broken by Donald Trump, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. Joe Biden went to the non-Ivy University of Delaware.

Over this time, Americans rarely had the option to vote against the Ivy League. It’s not just that all of the candidates who won the elections between 1988 and 2016 went to Ivy League schools: Six of the eight candidates who lost went to Harvard or Yale. The two exceptions were Bob Dole in 1996 (Washburn University) and John McCain in 2008 (U.S. Naval Academy).

Then look at the Supreme Court. Eight of the current nine justices went to law school at either Harvard or Yale. The one exception, Amy Coney Barrett, replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who went to Harvard Law.

On its face, our era of Ivy dominance is the sign of a society that’s calcified. You need access to America’s networks of money and power to rise to the tippy top, and going to an Ivy League school is now a requirement for that access.

This gatekeeping would be bad enough if these schools — or anyone — could reliably measure some type of “merit.” People change all their lives, and we shouldn’t have to rely on a cohort of 50-year-olds who fit through an incredibly narrow aperture when they were 18 or 22.

But of course Ivy League colleges don’t actually admit students based on anything recognizable as merit. Anyone who’s attended one knows they look for young people who are 1) extremely good at figuring out what the rules are and then faithfully following them, and 2) clubbable and ingenuous with their elders.

I don’t agree with Reihan Salam, the head of the conservative Manhattan Institute, about much. (Christopher Rufo, the right-wing activist instrumental in bringing down Claudine Gay, is “senior fellow and director of the initiative on critical race” there.) But Salam — Harvard ’01 — once argued, “Kids who attend elite schools are a mixed bag, and the vast majority are crashing bores. The admissions process tends to select for crashing bores.” He was correct. 

Harkness Tower stands on the Yale University campus in New Haven, Conn.

This doesn’t mean progressives should join in the current conservative crusade against Harvard. The right opposes education in general, because they realize that people thinking for themselves is the only thing that could make their greatest fear — a democratization of the U.S. — come to pass. And they recognize that even at Ivy League schools there is a danger this kind of thinking can occasionally happen.

Progressives should not defend Harvard. We could defend the concept of academic insulation from donor pressure, but this is a concept much more than a reality. Harvard’s $50 billion-plus endowment makes it one of the 10 largest hedge funds in the U.S. Above all, we have to understand Harvard will never defend us; it will always be on the side of the money. 

However, our program of destroying Harvard and its brethren should be in service to a larger, positive agenda. What we want is a country of education for everyone: high-quality public universities open to people of all ages and incomes, beautiful public schools for everyone before that, and enormous libraries in every American neighborhood.

If you went to an Ivy League school, you know enough to nod knowingly when anyone mentions this famous James Madison quote: “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

But what’s not taught in class is that this was from a letter Madison wrote to a friend about the importance of public education of all forms everywhere, including in Kentucky specifically. “Learned Institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty & dangerous encroachments on the public liberty,” he wrote. “They multiply the educated individuals from among whom the people may elect a due portion of their public Agents of every description.”

What Madison didn’t say was, “Let’s just have a few colleges like the place I went, Princeton, and choose every president from them.” We can recover Madison’s vision, but first we need to bulldoze the institutions in its way.  

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Jon Schwarz.

The advance is the latest success in what experts are saying appears to be a turning point in the country’s nearly three-year civil war, with rebel armies taking control of several key cities in northern Shan state and junta soldiers surrendering.

Since the Arakan Army and two other ethnic rebel armies launched Operation 1027 – named after the Oct. 27 military actions that started it – as part of the “Three Brotherhood Alliance,” junta troops have been on the retreat in many areas, leading junta chief Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing in late November to issue a rare acknowledgement of the rebel’s successes.

Nearly 400 junta soldiers – including two full battalions – and 56 junta police officers surrendered in battles across Myanmar in November alone, while around 100 other members of the junta’s forces were arrested last month, according to the country’s shadow National Unity Government, or NUG, made up of former civilian leaders and anti-junta activists.

The victories are piling up. Just this week, the Arakan Army, or AA, said it had seized more than 40 military sites, including Ta Ron Aing and Hnone Bu bases, located in Chin’s Paletwa township around 16 kilometers (10 miles) from India’s Mizoram state, and Done Nyo and Kha Htee Hla bases, in Rakhine’s Maungdaw township along the border with Bangladesh. 

The advances come a month after the AA attacked guard police outposts and junta convoys in Rakhine’s Rathedaung and Minbya townships, ending a ceasefire brokered one year ago on humanitarian grounds.

The AA claimed to have also seized Done Paik and Chein Khar Li – two border guard bases on Myanmar’s main trade route with Bangladesh.

Key bases

A resident of Rakhine who, like others RFA interviewed for this report, spoke on condition of anonymity due to security concerns, explained the importance of the bases to the junta.

“Ta Ron Aing and Hnone Bu … are the gates of Myanmar and Rakhine to India,” he said, adding that the two bases are also located near the main site of the Kaladan Road Project – a US$484 million bid to connect eastern India’s port of Kolkata with the port of Sittwe in Rakhine.

“These bases are geographically very important, and seizing the outposts of Done Paik and Chein Khar Li means that the Maungdaw-Sittwe highway is now controlled [by the AA].”

The two ethnic offensives – and a third launched by the Karenni Army, Karenni National Defense Force, and anti-junta People’s Defense Force, or PDF, paramilitaries on Nov. 11 – are part of a much wider conflict that have seen ethnic armed organizations and the PDF capture 22 townships and military outposts in the past two months in Shan, Chin, Kayah, and Rakhine states, as well as Sagaing and Bago regions.

Political commentator Than Soe Naing told RFA he believes battles for control of Myanmar’s townships will lead to a political turning point in coming months.

“Under attack in multiple regions, the junta has a shortage of forces and its soldiers have poor morale,” he said. “They don’t have the confidence to protect [the capital] Naypyitaw, so many of them simply surrender after battles. I expect significant changes will occur in the coming months.”

Armed clashes are escalating across the country. A Dec. 8 report by the Institute for Strategy and Policy-Myanmar, an independent research group, found that armed conflict is taking place in just over two-thirds of Myanmar’s territory. At least 261 of Myanmar’s 330 townships have been caught up in fighting since the military’s Feb. 1, 2021, coup d’etat that triggered the civil war.

Predicted outcomes

Observers told RFA that as the country’s armed conflict has widened, the junta has increasingly ceded power.

“The resistance forces have captured territories, outposts and towns, while the junta can’t even prepare for a defensive war,” said Pe Than, a veteran ethnic Rakhine politician and former lawmaker. “Junta soldiers have surrendered and the military is gradually collapsing.”

Pe Than said he also sees the possibility that other military officers will sideline junta chief Min Aung Hlaing.

But others warned of possible setbacks to the armed resistance.

Political commentator Sai Kyi Zin Soe said that, provided they establish good ties and mutual trust, he believes the ongoing conflict will end in the anti-junta forces’ favor.

“If they could maintain these things, there will be more advantages in negotiation as the resistance forces have demonstrated military superiority,” he said.

If they do not, “it will lead to a split within the armed resistance.”

Military experts told RFA that the longer the conflict lasts, the higher the risk that anti-junta forces will run out of the funding necessary to acquire arms and ammunition.

“It’s not easy to supply a conflict,” said Aung Myo, a former military officer. “Even a national-level organization [like the NUG] can face difficulties obtaining such supplies, and we predict that the anti-junta forces cannot afford a long war.”

China-based political commentator Hla Kyaw Zaw said that, as an institution firmly entrenched in nearly all aspects of life in Myanmar, the military will not go quietly.

But he said he believes that the regime “will surely fall,” and that it is simply a matter of how soon.

“Its immediate or gradual collapse will depend on both the resistance forces and the people, and their endurance,” he said. “But the military has toned down its rhetoric and their position has weakened.”

Growing displacement

Meanwhile, the number of internally displaced persons, or IDPs, in Myanmar is increasing by the hundreds of thousands as the country’s armed clashes intensify.

Among the IDPs, Lom Mi and her family have been taking shelter at a Christian orphanage in Shan state’s Lashio township since Nov. 7, when the military shelled their village of Namhu along the Lashio-Hsenwi highway.

She said that she and her relatives fled because they fear an escalation in fighting, and what it might mean for the young and elderly in their village.

Lom Mi said she hopes that no one else will have to experience the clashes that came to Namhu, but she knows that many IDPs are experiencing similar hardships.

“Ordinary people have suffered many losses in both their farming and livestock businesses [due to the fighting],” she said. “In some villages, the locals could not harvest their crops or take their animals as they fled their homes … I hope this situation will end in one or two months, but I cannot imagine what will happen next.”

Since the start of fighting between the military and the AA in Rakhine state last month, thousands have fled their homes. But they represent the tip of the iceberg in Myanmar’s long-running conflict.

Last week, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or UNOCHA, reported that some 578,000 civilians had fled their homes since the start of Operation 1027 alone, bringing the total number of displaced since the coup to 1.9 million people, or nearly one out of every 30 people in Myanmar.

Mya Than Win, a 53-year-old woman from Nyaung Chaung village, in Rakhine’s Buthidaung township, is one of those who have left their homes to escape the fighting raging throughout the country.

“[The junta has] made our lives difficult and now we live in very poor conditions because of the many problems they have caused,” she said. “I feel terrible for the sacrifices so many Rakhine people have made. We want them to leave.”

Translated by Htin Aung Kyaw and Aung Naing. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

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

A junta military camp in Sagaing region’s Tamu township was abandoned by troops in November when it was captured by resistance groups, local People’s Defense Forces said. While attempting to recapture their lost base, junta troops positioned themselves in Kampat city’s orphanage on Sunday. Forty people were in the orphanage at the time, including 36 children and four teachers. 

On Sunday, junta soldiers launched an attack on People’s Defense Forces from outside the building, according to a resistance group official, adding that the troops used heavy and small weapons, as well as airstrikes. 

However, the resistance group removed the teachers and children from the orphanage on Monday, the official added. 

“That orphanage is near the military camp on the hill. The junta troops regained control of that camp on the hill using the orphans as human shields,” he told RFA, asking to be kept anonymous for fear of reprisals. 

“Both the children and the adults in that orphanage tried to escape, but they did not succeed. So they were evacuated by our People’s Defense Forces at around 12 yesterday. Now they are in a safe place.”

The orphanage is owned by a Christian church in No. 1 neighborhood of Kampat city. Nearby are a police station and a temporary military camp on the hill, residents said, which troops regained control of after the battle. 

Intense fighting on the India-Myanmar border near Kampat city has been constant since the end of October. People’s Defense Forces claim to have captured Kampat on Nov. 7.

Almost a month later on Wednesday, junta troops launched an offensive to recapture the city, defense force officials told RFA. Since then, fighting has continued.

On Sunday, the military junta carried out an aerial attack around the Kampat Police Station near the orphanage, he added. 

Calls by RFA to Sagaing region’s junta spokesperson Sai Naing Naing Kyaw seeking comment on the incident went unanswered Tuesday.

Nearly 5,000 residents from four neighborhoods in Kampat city and surrounding villages have fled on Tuesday, some to the Indian border. Fighting has also intensified near Tamu city, making it difficult for locals to find a place to seek shelter, residents said.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.

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

Mlozoa had been assigned to cover an anti-government demonstration by a group calling itself Malawi First in the Mangochi district, about 150 miles southeast of the capital, Lilongwe, Gabriel Kamlomo, ZBS’ director of news and current affairs, told CPJ.

Police officers stopped Mlozoa as he photographed them arresting a demonstrator, seized the journalist’s phone, and deleted his photographs of the incident before returning his device, according to a news report and a statement by the Malawi chapter of regional press freedom group, Media Institute of Southern Africa.

“Authorities should hold accountable the Malawi police officers who forcibly deleted the photos of police conduct from journalist Raphael Mlozoa’s phone and ensure that such blunt censorship never happens again,” said Muthoki Mumo, CPJ’s sub-Saharan Africa representative, in Nairobi. “Journalists in Malawi should be permitted to cover demonstrations and other events of public interest without fear of harassment or intimidation.”

Kamlomo told CPJ that ZBS filed a police complaint about the officer’s conduct toward Mlozoa.

CPJ’s calls and questions sent via messaging app to Malawi police spokesperson Peter Kalaya and Mangochi Police Station publicist Amina Tepani Daud received no response.

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

The country's National People's Congress Standing Committee passed the Foreign State Immunity law on Friday, in a move state media said would "safeguard China's sovereignty, security and development interests."

The law, which takes effect Jan. 1, 2024, allows Chinese, Hong Kong and Macau authorities to seize or freeze the assets of foreign states in situations where the government concerned has already taken similar action against Chinese assets on foreign soil, state news agency Xinhua reported.

"Once a foreign state abolishes, restricts or downgrades the immunity it has granted to China, China will have the right to take necessary countermeasures in accordance with the principle of reciprocity," Xinhua said.

But the law doesn’t affect privileges and immunities enjoyed by foreign diplomatic missions, consular posts, special missions, missions to international organizations, delegations to international conferences, nor the privileges accorded to foreign heads of state, heads of government, foreign ministers, and other officials of comparable status.

Analysts said the law is part of a slew of recent legislation targeting foreign entities and individuals in China that includes recent amendments to the Counterespionage Law, and a Foreign Relations Law.

Elastic definition

Chinese authorities have typically employed a highly elastic definition of what constitutes a state secret, and national security charges are frequently leveled at journalists, rights lawyers and activists, often based on material they posted online.

"This kind of legislation means they have another tool they can use ... to bring a lot of diplomatic pressure to bear to achieve their aims," Hong Kong lawyer and current affairs commentator Sang Pu commented on the law. "They can claim that they are only acting in accordance with their laws."

"This is an important part of China's Wolf Warrior diplomacy, and another step forward in its diplomatic bullying of other countries," Sang said. "It's part of a comprehensive foreign policy intended to confront Western liberal democracies."

Under the law, a foreign state will be deemed to have consented to the jurisdiction of Chinese courts if it files a lawsuit, or if it is named as a plaintiff or a defendant in a lawsuit accepted by a Chinese court.

Commercial activities by foreign states could spark legal action in China if the actions "have had a direct effect in Chinese territory even though they took place outside Chinese territory."

That includes transactions of goods or services, investments, borrowing and lending, and other acts of a commercial nature that do not constitute an exercise of sovereign authority, according to the China Law Translate website.

Lunghwa University of Science and Technology assistant professor Lai Jung Wei said the ruling Chinese Communist Party appears to believe that foreign countries are busy infiltrating China, much as their agents and supporters are infiltrating other countries.

"A lot of their state-owned enterprises take the guise of private enterprises to infiltrate the rest of the world," Lai said. "They do this because the party has to be in control of everything – it's a party-state."

"And they use the same logic to view the rest of the world, and they are worried that the rest of the world is going to start doing it to them," he said.

‘Hostage diplomacy’

Lai said it's another card Beijing – which has repeatedly hit out at sanctions against its officials over its human rights record – can play in future diplomatic wrangles.

"[They're saying] if you refuse to back down, we can use this against you, or as a form of retaliation if you do similar things to us," he said. "But the legislation is inseparable from party rule."

"To put it bluntly, it's a form of political security for the Xi Jinping dictatorship," he said.

China was widely criticized for its "hostage diplomacy" when it arrested and jailed Canadian nationals following the arrest of a top Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver on Dec. 1, 2018 pending a U.S. extradition request.

Sang said it's noteworthy that the law will be enacted in Hong Kong and Macau as well as in mainland China, suggesting that there is now scant difference between the three jurisdictions.

"Hong Kong is getting more and more similar to mainland China," he said.

Reports emerged last year that China was trying to obtain floor plans for all properties used by foreign missions in Hong Kong, amid an ongoing crackdown on dissent under a draconian national security law imposed on the city by Beijing.

Simon Cheng, a former employee of the British Consulate General in Hong Kong, told Radio Free Asia that Chinese state security police were insistent that he draw a floor plan of the consulate for them during his interrogations during a 15-day detention in August 2019.

Cheng warned in an October 2022 interview that Beijing will continue to tighten control on what it views as potentially hostile "foreign forces" that it blames for inciting the 2019 protest movement in Hong Kong.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

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

Police and soldiers arrested Dr. Mya Than, who ran the Tet Nay Lin Ophthalmology Clinic in the city, along with his wife Myint Myat Khaing, an associate professor at Mandalay University’s department of distance education and their son Yan Naung Tun, 

Myint Myat Khaing was a member of the CMD, a popular strike movement that at its peak brought the administrative machinery of the military regime to a halt.

A Mandalay resident, who spoke on condition of anonymity for safety reasons, said the clinic was sealed off on Thursday morning.

Another local, who also declined to be named, said the junta is rounding up pro-democracy activists in the city.

“Teachers who opened a private school in Maha Aung Myay township were arrested the day before. The school was also sealed off,” they said.

“Arrests for allegedly supporting People Defense Forces have become frequent these days in Mandalay.”  

The junta has released no statements on the arrests and their Mandalay region spokesperson Thein Htay did not answer RFA’s phone calls.

Pro-junta Telegram messaging group channels posted photographs of the three along with pictures of police and soldiers at their condominium. 

Comments on the channels included death threats towards anyone supporting anti-junta People’s Defense Forces and the National Unity Government, a shadow government formed by members of the civilian administration ousted in the 2021 coup.

One CDM doctor who didn’t want to be named for fear of reprisals told RFA the regime is targeting hospitals and clinics to try to put CDM health staff out of work.

Last week, the junta ordered the closure of Mandalay’s largest private hospital for three months starting this Friday. They said the Mingalar Private Hospital in Maha Aung Myay township allowed two CDM doctors to work there.

In May, authorities revoked the business licenses of three private hospitals, accused of allowing CDM health staff to work there.

And last December, CDM professor Dr. Win Khaing, from Mandalay Medical University, was arrested while working at the Palace Private Hospital in Chanayethazan township.

Some 853 doctors and other health workers have been arrested nationwide since the military seized power in Feb. 2021, according to the CDM Medical Network.

It added 557 CDM doctors have had their medical licenses revoked for one year since the start of last year.

However, it said more than 45,000 health workers continue to participate in the non-violent CDM.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang.

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

Papua New Guinea police have arrested three men and seized a stockpile of unlicensed firearms, ammunition, explosives and other illegal items in a raid in Western Highlands province last week.

The arrests identified a further seven men who were alleged to be part of a blackmarket network who move the illegal items from Western Highlands into the upper Highlands provinces. They were also arrested.

About 800 rounds of ammunition, firearms, explosives and other illegal items were  confiscated from the trio, including a Winchester shotgun, shotgun belts, sniper scopes, a Glock pistol and a hand grenade.

• READ MORE: Other PNG crime reports

Deputy Commissioner of Police-Operations Dr Philip Mitna confirmed that a security operation had been carried out.

“Illegal firearms and drug trade is an ongoing issue in the highlands,” he said.

Firearms and live ammunition are smuggled into many border provinces linked by the Okuk Highway.

“A security team in Hela had made surveillance on firearms and ammunition. They visited Hagen (travelling in from Tari) and engaged with Hagen police, who organised raids and executed two search warrants on July 30, 2023, and effected several arrests,” Deputy Commissioner Mitna said.

Regular arms supply
According to information received by the Post-Courier newspaper, there is a regular ammunition and firearms supply arriving from illegal dealers in the Highlands eastern end and this is supplied to the western end, which includes Hela, Enga and Southern Highlands.

“With the continued tribal fights in Hela and Enga provinces and other criminal activities involving firearms, the intelligence had confirmed most of the ammunition was being bought from Jiwaka and Mt Hagen dealers,” Deputy Commissioner Mitna said.

“So far, the number of people being detained has increased to 10, and we anticipate more arrests. Among those arrested included a prominent businessman and security firm owner in Mt Hagen.”

According to the findings and assessment by security personnel, the Western Highlands share has built up to 80 percent of illegal ammunition and has been supplying other provinces.

The team tracked persons of interest from Tari to Mt Hagen and sought assistance, leading to several search warrants being executed by police with support from the PNG Defence Force Reconnaissance Unit.

The arrests of the 10 men came as the operations were executed in two-week intervals and continued last month.

The arrest of a local man in Hides started an investigation into the proliferation and movement of firearms and ammunition within the Highlands region.

Allegedly involved in kidnappings
The man who was picked up in Hides was allegedly involved in the recent series of kidnappings and ransom and incidents in Mt Bosavi, Southern Highlands, and parts of Western Province.

The arrest of the man in Hides and nine more in Mt Hagen led to the uncovering of a large stash of unlicensed firearms and varieties of live ammunition, including a hand grenade as well as several other illegal items at a home in Newtown, Mt Hagen.

According to reports, the intelligence gathered led to the arrest of the main suspect  who was apprehended in Mt Hagen. He is alleged to be the main supplier and distributor of unlicensed weapons and ammunition in the tribal fighting zones in the Highlands region as well as other parts of PNG.

On Tuesday, August 1, 2023, the main suspect was formally cautioned and formally charged with 10 counts under the newly Amended Firearms Act 2022 and two counts under the Explosive Act (chapter 308) respectively.

The charges are:

• Two counts of unlawfully in possession of unlicensed Firearms under section 65 (c)(ii) of the Amendment Firearms Act, 2022;
• Eight counts of unlawfully in possession of unlicensed live ammunitions under the section 65A (a) of the Amendment Firearms Act, 2022; and
• Two counts of unlawfully in possession of unlicensed explosive under the section 14(1) of the Explosive Act, Chapter 308.

The other nine men were still being interviewed and were being processed.

Police investigations were continuing.

Republished with permission.

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

On Tuesday, May 16, police searched the apartment of Mullayeva, a freelance reporter, in Kazan, the capital of Russia’s Tatarstan republic, according to multiple news reports and the journalist, who communicated with CPJ via messaging app.

Law enforcement seized two mobile phones, a laptop, and two SIM cards, and said the journalist was a witness in an investigation into an anti-war comment posted in a public group on the Russian social media platform Vkontakte, left by a man identified as Pavel Chumakov, which allegedly discredited the Russian army. Mullayeva told CPJ that the confiscated equipment had not been returned as of May 17.

Mullayeva told CPJ that she was not familiar with Chumakov and has no connection to the group, and told independent news outlet SOTA that she believed the case was a pretext for the mass seizure of equipment from opposition-minded residents of Kazan.  She is also a political activist and member of the Tatarstan branch of the Libertarian Party of Russia.

Mullayeva said she was unsure whether the legal harassment was related to her work as a journalist or her activism, adding that she had not participated in political activism for over a year, saying, “I honestly don’t understand what they want from me.”

“Russian authorities should drop all attempts to intimidate journalist Nailya Mullayeva,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Authorities should immediately return all equipment confiscated from her and stop putting legal pressure on the few independent journalists remaining in the country.”

Mullayeva runs BIRDS, a Telegram channel with 190 subscribers that reports on social issues and politics in Tatarstan, and works as a freelance reporter for multiple media outlets, including SOTA, SOTA editor Aleksei Obukhov told CPJ via messaging app.  

Mullayeva left Russia in September 2022 and returned to Kazan in early May 2023 for a personal trip. That same day her apartment was raided, authorities searched two local activists’ apartments, those news reports said.

“This is the trick of the Kazan law enforcers: to create rubber criminal cases and rob journalists and activists every few months,” Obukhov told CPJ.

In March 2022, authorities searched Mullayeva’s apartment, and in September, she was detained in Kazan while covering an anti-mobilization protest for independent news outlet Sota.Vision.

The May 16 search warrant stated Mullayeva had been previously charged with participating in protests and discrediting the Russian army. In December, Mullayeva returned to Kazan and was arrested for six days for reposting information about an anti-mobilization protest and fined 30,000 rubles (US$480) for allegedly discrediting the Russian army. At that time, authorities also searched her parents’ apartment in connection to a case of “justifying terrorism” and seized her passport.

CPJ’s email to the Russian Investigative Committee’s Tatarstan branch did not receive a response. CPJ was unable to find contact information Chumakov.

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

Police took the two-ton, eight-meter copper “Pillar of Shame” sculpture in honor of the victims of the June 4, 1989, crackdown by the People's Liberation Army from storage in the northern district of Yuen Long, they said.

"The National Security Department ... conducted searches with a warrant this morning. An exhibit related to an 'incitement to subversion' case was seized," police said in a statement, but didn't clarify whom the charges were being brought against.

"The organization concerned attempted to make misleading comments and request for the return of the exhibit under the guise of artistic freedom, and unreasonably condemned and maliciously smeared the lawful enforcement actions of the Police," a Security Bureau spokesman said in a statement posted to the government's website.

The move comes in the run-up to the politically sensitive anniversary of the bloodshed, which was marked for three decades by thousands of people crowded across several soccer pitches in an annual candlelight vigil in Hong Kong's Victoria Park.

But the event has now been banned amid a citywide crackdown on public dissent and protest under the 2020 national security law.

In December 2001, authorities at the government-run University of Hong Kong removed the “Pillar of Shame” and placed it under guarded storage, saying they had taken "legal advice" regarding potential risks for the university.

Days later, authorities at the Chinese University of Hong Kong took down a 6.4-meter bronze replica of the "Goddess of Democracy" figure used in the Tiananmen Square protests, while Lingnan University removed or painted over two public art works commemorating the victims of the massacre.

Symbolic of wider suppression

Danish sculptor Jens Galschiøt, who created the monument, said he is considering legal action to have his property returned to him.

"In my view they kidnapped my sculpture," Galschiøt told reporters. "I'm not the person who has [committed] a crime. Hong Kong [University] ... have [committed] a crime against private property in Hong Kong."

Galschiøt said the entire approach to the artwork was symbolic of the suppression of freedom of expression in Hong Kong under an ongoing crackdown by the ruling Communist Party.

"Hong Kong takes a symbol of freedom of expression, puts it in a container, puts a guard around it for one-and-a-half years, and now they've moved the same container ... to a Hong Kong police station [where] the symbol of the Tiananmen crackdown and the symbol of freedom of expression in Hong Kong is in a sealed container," he said.

"[The police actions] could be a kind of artwork," he said. "Maybe this is symbolic of what's happened in Hong Kong."

He said the ongoing censorship of public art in Hong Kong was "a big problem for the city."

Galschiøt said he hasn't ruled out taking legal action to have the sculpture, which had been on loan to candlelight vigil organizers who had placed it on the University of Hong Kong campus, returned to him.

"This is my private property, and it cost a lot of money, this sculpture,” he said. “So of course if they take and kidnap the sculpture then I will sue them to get it out.”

"There is still a law about private property in Hong Kong. I really hope there is," he said. "Otherwise they can take your apartment, they can take your money, they can take everything you have, if they take the sculpture."

‘New low’

A Hong Kong Security Bureau spokesperson linked the seizure of the sculpture to an unnamed "organization" that it accused of trying to "confuse the public, demand the return of relevant evidence under the guise of artistic freedom, and unreasonably condemn and maliciously smear" the legitimate actions of the police, without giving names.

The Prague-based art and cultural non-profit organization NGO DEI, which had been trying to assist Galschiøt with the retrieval of the “Pillar of Shame,” hit out at its seizure by police.

"The government is not only limiting the freedom of artists but also setting a new low point for freedom in Hong Kong," the group said in a statement on the petition site Change.org. 

"Hong Kong should be a culturally diverse and open place that respects artistic freedom, and protecting freedom of speech has always been a core value of Hong Kong people," it said. 

"The government should not limit artistic freedom and should not use the National Security Law to arbitrarily restrict the freedom of speech of Hong Kong people," it said.

Meanwhile, Hong Kong's Chinese-language Ming Pao newspaper quoted the Danish foreign ministry as saying that it had raised the matter with Beijing, and that it will continue to provide assistance to retrieve the artwork.

Authorities announced last week that the area of Victoria Park where the vigil was once held would be "closed for maintenance."

The now-disbanded Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Democratic Patriotic Movements of China led the annual June 4 vigils for more than three decades, the only public commemorations of the 1989 bloodshed to take place on Chinese soil.

The 32-year-old Alliance now stands accused of acting as the agent of a foreign power, with Chow, Albert Ho, and Lee Cheuk-yan all held on suspicion of "incitement to subvert state power," while the group's assets remain frozen.

The group was among several prominent civil society groups to disband following investigation by national security police under the national security law that took effect from July 1, 2020.

The annual Tiananmen vigils the Alliance hosted on June 4 often attracted more than 100,000 people, but the gatherings have been banned since 2020, with the authorities citing coronavirus restrictions.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Lee Yuk Yue and Raymond Cheng for RFA Cantonese.

The loss of the camp is the latest blow to the military, which launched a far-reaching offensive after taking power in a February 2021 coup d’etat, but has encountered staunch resistance from anti-junta People’s Defense Force paramilitary groups and ethnic armies in recent months, despite outclassing them in training, equipment and manpower.

The KNU’s military wing, the Karen National Liberation Army, attacked the camp in Hpapun district’s Mel Kha Hta at around 5:00 a.m. on Tuesday because of its strategic importance to the military, KNU Foreign Affairs Officer Padoh Saw Taw Nee told RFA Burmese, noting that it had a key role in supplying troops with food and other necessities.

“It can be said that the camp is the largest among those located along the Thanlwin River – that’s why it’s important,” he said. “This is the last large camp left, as most of the junta camps like this one have been shut down.”

Padoh Saw Taw Nee said that there were more than 60 junta soldiers stationed at the camp, which the military “defended vigorously” over the course of nearly two hours using small and heavy weapons.

Details of the battle had yet to be confirmed, he added.

A member of the KNLA in an area controlled by Brigade No. 5 said his group had killed at least 10 junta soldiers and seized military equipment in the clash. Two KNLA soldiers were injured in the fighting.

The KNLA set fire to all of the buildings in the military camp, he added, and the two sides are continuing to monitor one another.

Large camp housed dozens of soldiers

A Myanmar refugee sheltering in Thailand across the Thanlwin River from the Mel Kha Hta camp told RFA that he saw smoke billowing above the area for about an hour after the battle.

“I think the camp was set on fire around 7:00 in the morning,” he said. “As the smoke continued to rise, I saw that their camp had been captured, but I couldn't see any junta soldiers running away.”

The refugee confirmed that the camp “is a big one” and said junta soldiers who had fled when the KNLA recently captured the nearby Thaw Le Hta military camp were sheltering there.

A source who lives in the vicinity of the camp said he saw two Mi-35 military helicopters circling the area at around noon on Tuesday. He said that by the afternoon, no one remained at the camp.

Other residents of the area told RFA that before the camp was seized, the KNLA had warned the junta soldiers stationed there to join the nationwide Civil Disobedience Movement that has seen tens of thousands of government employees leave their jobs in protest of military rule.

The military had yet to make any announcements regarding the capture of the camp as of the time of publishing.

Saw Khin Maung Myint, the economic minister and junta spokesman for Kayin state, told RFA that he had heard the camp was seized, but was unable to provide any details.

Nearly 1,000 villagers from areas near the Mel Kha Hta camp fled to safety on Tuesday out of fear that the junta might use airstrikes to retaliate against the rebels, residents told RFA.

According to the KNU News and Information Department, more than 8,000 clashes have taken place in the areas controlled by the KNU during the two years of military rule.

Thousands flee Magway offensive

Reports of the border clash came as RFA learned that thousands of residents of Magway region’s Pakokku township have been forced to flee their homes since the beginning of a military offensive in the area on Feb. 11.

Residents said that around 300 junta soldiers have been stationed in the Myit Chay-Kyun area’s historic Tant Kyi Taung Pagoda, a power plant, a pharmaceutical factory and Let Pan Chaung village since the start of the offensive. 

They said that over the last six weeks, the soldiers have been raiding and firing heavy artillery at 15 nearby villages located at the foot of Tantkyitaung Mountain and across the Ayeyarwaddy River from the ancient city of Bagan.

A resident of Aing Gyi, one of the villages that came under attack, said that not only have civilians had to flee the military offensives, but also have nowhere to shelter due to junta travel restrictions.

“Some of us could not bring our national registration cards when we had to run and now can’t go to other cities, as we need the card to do so,” said the resident who, like other sources RFA spoke with, declined to be named citing security concerns.

“That’s why we have nowhere to stay but here in this open area and are forced to run in the opposite direction any time the junta troops come.”

The resident said that junta troops have also cut off their access to food, water, and electricity.

Aing Gyi’s entire population of around 3,000 people have been constantly on the run for the 10 days since the raid on their village, he said.

Other residents who fled the 15 villages told RFA they are only able to eat one meal a day and that children and the elderly are “in desperate need of medicine.”

Raids increased in March

A resident of Let Pan Chaung village said the displaced are concerned about the approaching rainy season as they have no stable place to shelter.

The resident said that the military arrested five people from his village in March. While two have been released, junta troops “are torturing a 17-year-old and two men in their 50s” for information about the area’s armed resistance.

Some 2,000 people – nearly the entire population of Let Pan Chaung – are on the run while the military remains stationed at the village, he added.

Other residents said that the raids had become even more regular since March 5, when the anti-junta People’s Defense Force paramilitary group used landmines to attack junta troops entering Myo Soe village – another of the 15 tracts that have come under attack since Feb. 11.

The number of homes in each of the 15 villages varies from 200 to 600, and while sources told RFA that “many residents” had been arrested during the raids, the exact number remains unclear.

Attempts by RFA to contact junta Deputy Information Minister Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun about the raids in Pakokku township went unanswered Tuesday, as did inquiries to the military press team.

Junta chief Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing has said that Myanmar’s military does not destroy civilian villages, but RFA reporting suggests otherwise. Sources regularly relate stories of soldiers engaging in looting, arson, torture and killing during the raids as part of a scorched earth offensive by the military.

According to the latest situation reports published by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs on March 4 and March 21, the number of war refugees in Myanmar increased by more than 100,000 throughout the country in the two weeks from Feb. 27 to March 13 alone.

The latest additions – most of whom live in Kachin, Kayah, and Shan states, as well as eastern Bago region – bring the number of those displaced by conflict in the country to more than 1.7 million people, UNOCHA said.

Translated by Myo Min Aung. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

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

This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation with Andrea Chalupa and Sarah Kendzior and was authored by Andrea Chalupa & Sarah Kendzior.

Mississippi’s Republican majority in the state Legislature has put forth a slew of bills in recent months to put the majority-Black capital of Jackson under a white-led superstructure. Under the proposed bills, the Capitol Police would be expanded and given greater authority over much of Jackson without being accountable to local leaders or residents, and a separate court system would be set up in the city, composed of judges appointed directly by white state officials. This comes after Jackson suffered a number of water crises in recent years stemming from systematic disinvestment by the state, and after the federal government approved $600 million late last year to address the city’s infrastructure problems. “These bills are an attack on Black leadership, a way to seize power of a majority-Black city which cannot be seized democratically through an election,” says Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba. We also speak with community activist Makani Themba, who described the state’s plans in a recent piece for The Nation as “Apartheid American-Style.”

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

An armed group has taken an Australian professor and three colleagues hostage in a remote region of Papua New Guinea, reports ABC Pacific.

The ABC’s Port Moresby correspondent Natalie Whiting reported that the professor and colleagues were in the Highlands region doing field study when they were taken hostage.

As well as the Australian academic, the group included a Papua New Guinean programme coordinator and two University of PNG graduates.

• READ MORE: Further details from ABC News
• NZ pilot held hostage in neighbouring Papua

PNG Prime Minister James Marape told reporters in Port Moresby today there were “running conversations” between PNG authorities and the kidnappers, the ABC report said.

“I just want to inform the families of those taken hostage that we have been at work and contact has been made with people in the bush,” he said, according to the ABC report.

“We’ve got police and military on stand-by to assist. But, in the first instance, we want those criminals to release those who are held in captivity.

“We have been keeping this under close wraps because of the sensitivity and the need for us to get our friends [who were] captured, get them alive and safe.”

The ABC reported that it had chosen not to name the kidnapped Australian at this stage and had asked Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) for comment.

NZ hostage pilot
Earlier this month, in a separate incident across the border a group of West Papuan rebels fighting for independence in the western half of Papua New Guinea island seized a New Zealand pilot as a hostage on February 7.

They also set fire to his Susi Air plane at the remote highlands airstrip of Paro near Nduga.

Indonesian authorities have sent a negotiation team to make contact with the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB) group led by Egianus Kogoya group to seek the release of the 37-year-old pilot Philip Mehrtens.

The rebels were demanding negotiations with the Indonesian government for independence for the Melanesian region.

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

The area where northern Laos converges with Myanmar and Thailand at the confluence of the Mekong and Ruak rivers is a haven for crimes including prostitution, online scamming, and narcotics trafficking, by organized criminal networks. 

The Lao government and a Chinese-owned company, Kings Romans Group, set up a special economic zone in the Lao section of the Golden Triangle in 2007, hoping to generate economic development in the relatively poor country. But the level of crime and the area’s reputation as a hub in the synthetic drug trade have brought problems, such as local drug addicts.

The four alleged criminals nabbed on Feb. 7 told Bokeo province police that they were only drivers, and not smugglers, said the officer, who like others in this report requested anonymity so as to speak freely. 

Meanwhile, police are still searching for a drug lord in charge of the operation, he said.

“We couldn’t catch the big fish who is behind this drug haul,” the police officer told Radio Free Asia. 

Police have charged the four detained men with allegedly smuggling the crystal methamphetamine from Myanmar to Bokeo province, he added.  

Authorities have stored the bags of drugs in a police warehouse where they will be used as evidence during the trials, but once the court renders verdicts, the meth will be burned, the police officer said.

Illegal drug trafficking has been a long-standing problem in Bokeo and other provinces.

In October 2021, police intercepted a haul of 55 million methamphetamine tablets and over 1.5 tons of crystal meth in the Golden Triangle region, after stopping a beer delivery truck for inspection in Bokeo. At the time, the United Nations called it the largest single drug bust in Asia. 

Lao authorities seized another significant haul of 259 kilos of crystal meth in Luang Prabang province in September 2022.

Authorities in Bokeo’s Tonpheung district, where the latest arrests occurred, were also part of the seizure operations and handed the bags over to provincial police, said a Tonpheung official. 

“The Bokeo Province Police Department has been assigned to the Investigation and Interrogation Unit to investigate and look for the drug lord of this drug-smuggling ring,” he said.

Bokeo province’s mountains and jungles, which provide a nearly undetectable transit route for drug smugglers, pose a significant challenge for law enforcement officers, said a provincial official.

“Our provincial police force has set up many police checkpoints and is working closely with our residents who often give us some good tips,” he told RFA. “We have arrested some smugglers thanks to the tips from our communities.”

Laotians living in nearby districts say authorities must do more to curtail the area’s drug trade.

A resident of Houayxay district said police should crack down on drugs harder at the village level after residents report to the police that their sons and daughters are involved in narcotics use or trafficking.

Village authorities don’t arrest or try to reform them, because police are only going after the traffickers and smugglers, he said.

The illegal narcotics trade is not limited to Bokeo province. Bolikhamxay province in central Laos has also seen an increase in drug trafficking and local drug addicts.

“The most vulnerable group is our youth, not only in our district but in others as well,” said a resident of Kham Keut district. “If our authorities were more serious in cracking down on drugs, then drug use and trafficking would be reduced.”

Translated by Max Avary for RFA Lao. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Paul Eckert.

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

Pro-independence rebels in Indonesia’s Papua province have seized a New Zealand pilot as hostage after setting a small commercial plane on fire when it landed in a remote Highlands airstrip earlier today, say news agency reports.

A police spokesperson in Papua province, Senior Commander Ignatius Benny Adi Prabowo, said authorities were investigating the incident claimed by a militant West Papuan group at Paro airstrip in Nduga.

Police and military personnel have been sent to the area to locate the pilot and five passengers, the news agencies report.

• READ MORE: Other West Papuan conflict reports

“We cannot send many personnel there because Nduga is a difficult area to reach. We can only go there by plane,” Commander Prabowo said.

AP reports that rebel spokesperson Sebby Sambom said independence fighters from the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB), the military wing of the Free Papua Organisation (OPM), had stormed the plane shortly after it landed.

“We have taken the pilot hostage and we are bringing him out,” Sambom said in a statement.

“We will never release the pilot we are holding hostage unless Indonesia recognises and frees Papua from Indonesian colonialism.”

Unclear about passengers
A military spokesperson in Papua, Lieutenant-Colonel Herman Taryaman, said it was unclear if the five accompanying passengers had also been abducted.

The plane, operated by Susi Air, landed safely early this morning, before being attacked by the rebel fighters, authorities said.

The TPNPB made no mention of the passengers in its statement, but said this was the second time the group had taken a hostage. The first incident was in 1996.

The New Zealand embassy in Jakarta and the Indonesian Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

A struggle for independence in the resource-rich Indonesia’s Melanesian provinces has been waged since Indonesian gained control in a vote overseen by the United Nations in 1969, but condemned by many West Papuans as a “sham”.

New Zealand pilot taken hostage in Indonesia, say Papua rebel group https://t.co/1JGHhNHKou

— ST Foreign Desk (@STForeignDesk) February 7, 2023

The conflict has escalated significantly since 2018 with a build-up of Indonesian forces and  with pro-independence fighters mounting deadlier and more frequent attacks.

Susi Air founder and former Indonesian Fisheries Minister Susi Pudjiastuti said on Twitter she was praying for the safety of the pilot and passengers.

Mohon dukungan & dia semoga pilot kami di Nduga Paro diberikan lindungan Alloh SWT .. bisa kami jemput selamat https://t.co/iR71EzAjnL

— Susi Pudjiastuti (@susipudjiastuti) February 7, 2023

RNZ has approached the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in New Zealand for comment.

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

West Papua National Liberation Army claims kidnapping of NZ pilot #terrorism https://t.co/nOZZN1E5xo

— Phil Gurski (@borealissaves) February 7, 2023

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

On Tuesday morning, police officers in the southwestern city of Freiburg searched the newsroom of Radio Dreyeckland and the homes of managing editor Andreas Reimann and editor Fabian Kienert, and seized devices and documents relating to the station’s reporting, according to media reports, a report by the station, and Reimann, who spoke to CPJ in a phone interview.

Authorities are investigating the station and its editors over an article published in summer 2022 on the outlet’s website covering legal proceedings against Linksunten.Indymedia, a banned far-left group, according to those sources.

Prosecutors allege that the broadcaster had disseminated the ideology of a banned group by including a link in that article to a publicly available archive affiliated with Linksunten.Indymedia, as well as an image depicting graffiti voicing support for the organization, according to the station’s report and a joint statement by the Freiburg police and the Karlsruhe prosecutor’s office.

Reimann told CPJ that he and Kienert deny any wrongdoing. If charged and convicted, the editors could face up to three years in prison or a fine under the Section 85 of the German criminal code.

“German authorities must immediately stop harassing Andreas Reimann and Fabian Kienert of Radio Dreyeckland, drop any investigation into their work, and return all documents and equipment seized from the journalists,” said Attila Mong, CPJ’s Europe representative. “Furthermore, authorities should investigate how German police committed such shocking actions and provide a public explanation for this harassment, which has no place in Germany or any EU member state.”

The search was conducted under a warrant issued by the public prosecutor’s office in the nearby city of Karlsruhe, and approved by a Karlsruhe court, according to the joint statement.

Reimann told CPJ that police searched his and Kienert’s homes at about 6:30 a.m. on Tuesday, January 17, and confiscated documents, a desktop computer, laptops, and phones, as well as multiple digital storage devices that held information relating to the journalists’ private lives and Radio Dreyeckland’s work and finances.

During the apartment searches, officers questioned both journalists about the authorship of that 2022 article and the broadcaster’s editorial process, Reimann said. Police then searched the station’s offices and requested access to its computer system; at that point, Kienert told them that he had authored that article, and police stopped their search, Reimann told CPJ.

Reimann said that he and Kienert filed a complaint against the investigation, calling for police to immediately return all items seized from their homes and to stop examining the journalists’ documents. He said that the search was a “shocking and serious attack on the protection of journalistic sources and press freedom.”

CPJ emailed the prosecutor’s office in Karsruhe the Frieberg police for comment, but did not immediately receive any replies.

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

Hun Sen, who has ruled Cambodia since 1985, made the threats on Monday while speaking at the opening ceremony for National Road No. 7 in Kampong Cham province, targeting Candlelight Party advisor Kong Koam. 

The Candlelight Party secured around 19% of votes in last June’s nationwide local elections while Hun Sen’s ruling Cambodian People’s Party secured around 80% of the contested seats. 

"What do you think? I want to ask you. There are two choices, one is using the law, the other is using a stick [violence]. Which one do you take?” Hun Sen said during the speech. 

“I would like to warn you, we will not let you accuse us of being thieves for life. I want to tell you that we must end the culture of protest after the election,” he said. “The CPP cannot accept the word 'vote fraud’. Whoever dares to say this, we must sue.”

Kong Koam's son, Kong Monika, a senior official of the Candlelight Party, said that Hun Sen’s remarks threatening his father are meant to instill fear among the opposition.

“The threats, blackmails and the seizure of other properties’ to stop them from criticizing the government and ruling party are dirty means,” Kong Monika said. 

“For me, as a politician of the new generation, I want to see older politicians in Cambodia act as role models for the new generation of politicians, and the next generation of politicians can compete on an equal footing and have a free and fair electoral system,” he said.

Activists and citizens told RFA that the legal threats will only serve to worsen the political climate ahead of parliamentary elections scheduled for July 23.

“[Hun Sen] became a dictator, who uses the law as a tool to persecute the opposition. Because he is afraid of losing the election through free and fair elections,” former opposition lawmaker Oum Sam told RFA. 

“He is afraid that he will not successfully transfer power from him to his son, Hun Manet,” he added. 

Hun Sen has repeatedly dodged questions about whether he is setting up his son to succeed him as prime minister, but many in Cambodia fear that Hun Manet will take office after his father is no longer in office. 

Courts used by Hun Sen

Cambodia’s court system has long been dominated by Hun Sen loyalists, and the prime 

minister has repeatedly used the judicial system to target his political opponents. 

In one of the more prominent examples, Cambodian opposition leader Sam Rainsy, who has challenged Hun Sen’s leadership in previous elections, has been barred from returning to Cambodia. The government has also targeted opposition members it accuses of supporting Sam Rainsy’s return. 

The Candlelight Party was formed by various opposition groups seeking to compete in Cambodia’s communal elections. Previously, the Cambodian National Rescue Party was the main opposition, but it was dissolved by Cambodia’s Supreme Court in November 2017. 

Dr. Meas Ny, a Cambodian social development researcher, told RFA that Hun Sen’s strategy could eventually backfire. 

“The ruling party should review its conduct, whether the results of such threats can gain popularity from the masses or not. Sometimes it does not mean that suppressing such threats is profitable,” Mean Ny said. “Sometimes the more frequent the threats, the greater the loss of popularity, and the concerns of the ruling party will only get worse in the future."

He added that the CPP’s suppression will likely continue in the runup to the 2023 elections. 

Courts in Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh ruled in favor of the CPP’s defamation claim against Candlelight Party Vice President Son Chhay after he told “The Cambodia Daily” that the 2022 election was rigged. 

The courts ordered Son Chhay to pay damages of more than U.S.$1 million to the CPP and the National Election Commission. Son Chhay refused to pay, saying he stood by his right to make those comments. The courts then ordered the seizure of his two houses, one in Phnom Penh and another in Siem Reap. Son Chhay has since filed an appeal to Cambodia’s Supreme Court. 

Translated by Sok Ry Sum. Written in English by Nawar Nemeh. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

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

David Hathaway, the sheriff in southern Arizona’s Santa Cruz County, is offering a simple solution to stop Republican Gov. Doug Ducey’s illegal wall of shipping containers along the border: Federal agents should begin seizing vehicles associated with the project.

Hathaway’s county sits directly west of Cochise County, where Ducey’s has been dropping containers for the past month and a half despite federal officials repeatedly telling him that his actions are unauthorized and unlawful. With federal authorities doing nothing to act on those warnings, Hathaway has vowed to arrest the governor’s contractors if they cross the county line into his turf.

That scenario would be unlikely, as the contract for the project has the governor’s wall stopping just shy of Hathaway’s jurisdiction. Convoys of Ducey’s contractors have, however, been racing through communities in Santa Cruz County for weeks now, hauling 40-foot shipping containers behind multi-ton pickup trucks at dangerous speeds. Hathaway said his department has received complaints from residents in the town of Elgin of Ducey’s drivers “barreling through town,” ignoring stop signs, and “flying past children.”

“The way you would end this right away is you go get a seizure sticker, and you slap it on the side of one of those $200,000 trackhoes.”

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“This is disgusting and ugly.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Devereaux.

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

• House gives final Congressional approval to federal law protecting same sex marriage
• Russia releases WNBA star Brittney Griner in prisoner swap
• Federal marshals seize KPFA bank account to pay defamation judgment against its New York sister station
• Tribes and officials celebrate impending removal of four Klamath River dams
• House Democrats urge binding ethics rules for Supreme Court justices

Image: Lorie Shaull, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

The post Same sex marriage bill heads to President Biden for signature; WNBA star Brittney Griner freed in prisoner swap; Federal marshals seize KPFA assets to satisfy a judgment against its parent Pacifica Foundation: The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – December 8, 2022 appeared first on KPFA.

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

About 50 children from war-torn Kachin State in northern Myanmar were sheltering in the building when it was raided, according to locals.

The single story building was sealed with a roll of yellow tape and made off-limits, a resident told RFA on condition of anonymity for safety reasons.

“They pulled the children out overnight and sealed off the building at the same time,” the local said.

“We still don’t know where the children were taken … They put a vinyl notice on the building saying it had been seized.”

The notice said the building was connected to PDFs, so no one could enter or try to sell the building or the land, which had been confiscated by the state, the local said.

At around 7 p.m. the same night the power supply to the entire neighborhood was cut and remained off for the entire night, according to residents.

The orphanage was also being used as a private kindergarten, which opened five years ago, according to a woman who used to send her child there. She said the orphans had been brought there over the past two years. Although locals said it was a Christian orphanage they were unclear about which church was running it.

RFA’s calls to junta regional spokesman, Economic Minister Thein Htay, went unanswered on Thursday.

Pyigyitagon’s Ward F administrative office, close to where the orphanage is located, was attacked with a grenade on Tuesday, injuring five people, including the administrator. That night there were explosions in various places around the neighborhood. The junta reacted by removing three shops, and 10 temporary stalls near the administrative office that are normally open in the evening.

At least 786 residential buildings have been sealed off and seized since the Feb. 1, 2021 military coup through to the end of October this year according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma).

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

Around 9 p.m. on September 12, four armed men in uniforms resembling those of the Congolese army forced their way into the office of the privately owned faith-based radio station in Oicha, the capital of the Beni territory in North Kivu province, threatened two technicians, beat one on the back with the butt of a gun, and seized three computers, a recording device, and two mobile phones belonging to the technicians, according to media reports and Faustin Saumbire, the broadcaster’s editor-in-chief, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app. The station stopped broadcasting after the attack and equipment seizures.

In May 2021, the Congolese government imposed military governance known as the “state of siege” over the country’s eastern North Kivu and Ituri provinces; repeated attacks and harassment of journalists in those regions have followed.

“Congolese authorities should conduct a thorough and transparent investigation into the attack on the office of Radio Evangélique Butembo-Oicha, ensure those responsible are held to account, and work to bring the broadcaster back on air,” said Muthoki Mumo, CPJ’s sub-Saharan Africa representative, in Nairobi. “Attacks on the press in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo by armed men in government military uniforms are far too frequent. They are grim indicators for freedom of the press in the country.”

Saumbire said the technicians, Delphin Sibaminya and Ishara Siwako, told him that the armed men broke down the office door and threatened to harm them if they tried to stop the attackers from seizing the broadcaster’s equipment. They also confiscated their phones to prevent them from contacting others. When Sibaminya objected, the armed men hit him on the back with the butt of a gun and then began taking the equipment. Saumbire said Sibaminya received treatment at a local hospital the next day for a small wound on his back. Siwako was not physically injured in the incident.

As their phones were taken in the incident and the station is not operating, CPJ has been unable to reach Sibaminya or Siwako.  

Station director Caleb Wanzire, told CPJ by phone that he filed a complaint about the incident on Thursday, September 15, on behalf of the radio station, to the offices of Charles Ehuta Omeonga, military administrator of the Beni territory, and Nicolas Kambale Kikuku, mayor of Oicha.

Contacted by CPJ via messaging app, Ehuta said he heard about the attack but had not received a complaint. He said he would investigate as soon as the complaint was received.

Reached by phone, Kambale told CPJ that the incident was deplorable and was discussed in a security meeting of Oicha officials held on Thursday, September 15. “I condemn this attack and during (the) security meeting, we deplored and analyzed this situation by seeking effective solutions to stem general insecurity in Oicha and above all to discipline the soldiers,” Kambale told CPJ. “Investigations are ongoing to find out more.”

Pascal Mapenzi, media coordinator for Beni territory, told CPJ by phone that, in solidarity with the station, Beni journalists gave local authorities 48 hours to find the armed men and return the materials taken from the broadcaster. However, that deadline expired and there were “days without information” on Saturday, September 17, and Monday, September 19, according to Mapenzi and a local Radio Oasis report.

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

The post The US Response to the World’s Worst Humanitarian Crisis: Seize and Privatize appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Andrés Arauz.

During the height of the coronavirus pandemic, when South Africa, India, and many lower-income countries requested a special waiver on the enforcement of patents that would allow them to manufacture cheap Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutic medicine, the U.S. pharmaceutical industry snarled.

American drug executives and lobbyists countered that the U.S. should not only vigorously oppose any patent sharing, but also move to sanction any country that dared to violate corporate patent rights.

“Patents are the reason that Covid-19 vaccines exist. Waiving them would undermine our response to this pandemic and future health emergencies,” wrote Michelle McMurray-Heath, a top biotech lobbyist and head of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, or BIO, in an opinion column scorning the South Africa-led waiver request.

McMurray-Heath, in her column, referenced the success of Moderna Inc., in which “licensing technology, not abrogating patents” made vaccines possible.

That tough talk belies an unprecedented suspension of patent enforcement granted to select pharmaceutical and medical device companies — including Moderna.

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President Donald Trump signs an executive order during an Operation Warp Speed vaccine summit at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 8, 2020.

Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Once Moderna began producing Covid-19 vaccines, the company “simply used the patented technology without paying for it or even asking for a license.”

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This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Lee Fang.

The war in Ukraine must end urgently. The longer it continues, the greater the ghastly consequences will be and more challenging the obstacles to peacemaking.

A narrow window for a diplomatic end to the war may be ahead as both sides are exhausted, making a pause conceivable. Although initially a ceasefire would freeze Ukraine’s current territorial losses, that would be preferable to the war continuing indefinitely. Subsequent peace negotiations would address the ceasefire’s unjust outcome.

While the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a flagrant violation of international law, it is nonetheless the consequence of a monumental failure of diplomacy. Russia’s decades old differences with Ukraine and the West, particularly about the expansion of NATO, should have been the subject of dialogue rather than scorn. Instead, the United States continued to encourage Ukraine’s NATO ambitions, including in November 2021. An urgent resumption of dialogue between the United States and Russia is essential for ending the war in Ukraine.

While the war is being fought between Russia and Ukraine, in Moscow it is seen as a war with the United States. Russia aims to deter Ukraine from joining NATO, to protect the “people’s republics of Donbas” — the Eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk — and to consolidate a land bridge between Donbas and Crimea. Ukraine aims to preserve its territorial integrity and sovereignty, and “defeat Russia.” For both sides, the war is existential.

Already in its sixth month and not showing any sign of ending, the war has caused immense human suffering and destruction in Ukraine. The war has claimed more than 100,000 Ukrainian casualties and displaced more than 14 million. Ukraine’s reconstruction costs are estimated to total a staggering $1 trillion. On the Russian side, estimates put losses at 75,000 dead and injured. These are shocking numbers.

The combined impact of war, refugees, unprecedented sanctions on Russia, and diminishing Russian energy supplies are causing high inflation and fuel shortages in Europe. Moreover, the war has prevented the export of agricultural products from Russia and Ukraine to developing countries, causing food insecurity. Most ominously, the war has shattered a red line in international relations: nuclear “saber-rattling.”

Yet, an astounding number of Western policy hawks are urging more aggressive military assistance to Ukraine to take back territories currently under Russian occupation. They equate appeals for negotiation to appeasement. These pundits disregard the consequences of their advice and the facts on the ground.

A game changer would be if the United States and the European Uunion consider tangible incentives such as accelerated E.U. membership for Ukraine and incremental sanctions easing for Russia conditioned by a ceasefire and good faith negotiations for a lasting peace agreement.

In mid-June, a Ukrainian leader tweeted that the country needs thousands of heavy artillery, rocket launchers, tanks, and drones, confirming the scale of additional Western assistance needed to reverse Russian advances. But, even if Ukraine could prevail, Russia is likely to come back with another invasion next year.

Thus, whether the war escalates to gain back territories, or a stalemate ensues, Ukraine will require continued Western support in perpetuity. In Russia, the impact of sanctions will deepen, gradually draining its war capacity, also impacting the general population. If the war continues longer, the staggering human, material, and political costs will increase not only for the two warring sides, but also for Europe and the world beyond.

On March 29, Ukraine and Russia reached a landmark agreement on arguably the most contentious issue — Ukraine agreeing not to join NATO. Further, the future of the Ukrainian territories then under Russian military control or already annexed to Russia would have been the subject of extended multilateral negotiations. The proposed agreement was not concluded, and the parties are further apart now.

Indeed, opposition to negotiations is formidable in Ukraine — an opinion poll in May revealed that 82 percent of Ukrainians opposed any territorial concessions to reach a peace agreement. Understandably, the Ukrainian government will be hard pressed to agree to a peace deal that does not include restoring at least part of its territorial integrity. Additionally, Ukrainian concessions must be submitted to a popular referendum. The Russian side does not seem interested in an agreed settlement either.

For both sides, negotiations will require dialogue with a demonized enemy. This would not be an exception in peace making history. Recent negotiations between Russia and Ukraine regarding the exchange of prisoners of war and facilitation of grain exports are encouraging.

A game changer would be if the United States and the European Uunion consider tangible incentives such as accelerated E.U. membership for Ukraine and incremental sanctions easing for Russia conditioned by a ceasefire and good faith negotiations for a lasting peace agreement. Additionally, the agreement must reimagine future relations between the United States and Russia as well as between the E.U. and Russia. Thus, each side would have appealing incentives to stop the war and discourage the resumption of fighting. Wise diplomacy and statesmanship must ensure that neither side is humiliated in the process.

Such an initiative will require a Herculean diplomatic effort to get it off the ground. Current and former world leaders, particularly from the global South, with trusted access to the presidents of Russia and Ukraine could undertake the initial heavy lifting to persuade them that a negotiated end to the war is possible and preferable. The U.N. Secretary-General, using his considerable moral authority, could mobilize these peacemakers.

With the slow and costly military advances that both sides have managed to secure in the past months, they are likely approaching a point in the war when stopping it may be conceivable. That moment may come before winter starts in October. By then, Russia either would take over the entire Donbas region or, having taken most of the region, pursuing the remaining parts of Donbas would prove too prohibitive for its forces. Russia could then declare “mission accomplished” for its “special military operations.” The Ukrainian armed forces are using precision, multiple-launch weaponry that the United States provided in June, exacting a heavy price on the Russian side. Currently, Ukraine is aiming to take back Kherson in the south. They may succeed. Thus, a narrow window for peacemaking will likely open in October making an immediate ceasefire possible followed by peace negotiations.

Inevitably, the ceasefire will produce an unjust outcome initially. However, the future of Ukrainian territories under Russian control at the time of a ceasefire will be determined during extended multi-lateral negotiations, which would restore Ukraine’s territorial integrity to the extent possible, preserve its sovereignty, provide security against any future incursions, guarantee Ukraine’s non-NATO and non-nuclear status, create a multilateral infrastructure for reconstruction, and support the country’s accelerated accession to the E.U.

Washington has a vital role in this peacemaking effort. As the driving force behind the transatlantic coalition supporting Ukraine’s resistance and as the principal architect of sanctions imposed on Russia, the United States must assume responsibility for preparing the ground for eventual negotiations between the warring parties. In the first place, the United States must return urgently to dialogue with Russia. In this vein, designating Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism, as the U.S. Congress is threatening and Ukraine is urging, would be tantamount to burning all bridges with Russia for the foreseeable future and condemning Ukraine to interminable war.

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

On June 21, police in the southern town of Foggia summoned Pesante, managing director of the news website L’Immediato, to appear for questioning the following day, according to reports by L’Immediato and the media watchdog website Ossigeno, as well as Pesante, who communicated with CPJ via email.

During questioning on June 22, police told Pesante that he was a suspect in a leak investigation over a May 18 L’Immediato article based on security footage from cameras at a Foggia prison, the journalist said. Officers questioned Pesante about his sources and how L’Immediato acquired that footage, and Pesante told CPJ he refused to answer, citing journalistic privacy.

Officers released Pesante without charge, but confiscated his cellphone at the request of the local prosecutor’s office, the journalist said. His lawyer, Michele Vaira, was quoted in news reports saying that authorities searched messages stored on the phone related to that security footage.

Authorities returned Pesante’s phone on June 23, he said. If charged and convicted of disclosing state secrets, Pesante could face up to five years in prison, according to the Italian penal code.

“Italian authorities should drop any criminal investigation into journalist Francesco Pesante at once, and cease harassing members of the press for their work,” said Attila Mong, CPJ’s Europe representative. “The seizure of Pesante’s phone violated basic principles of press freedom, and threatened his ability to protect his sources. Such measures have no place in an EU country, and authorities should instead encourage and support journalists reporting on organized crime.”

In that May 18 article, L’Immediato reported on a man who was shot and killed while returning to a prison in Foggia after participating in a work-release program. Several other Italian outlets covered the killing and also relied on the prison’s security footage, Pesante said.

Authorities are also investigating two unnamed police officers over the leaked footage, according to Pesante and news reports.

Pesante told CPJ via email that the prosecutor’s action “deeply disturbed” him, as “no reporter should be pressured to reveal their sources.” L’Immediato regularly covers organized crime, according to CPJ’s review of the outlet’s website.

CPJ emailed the Foggia prosecutor’s office for comment, but did not receive any reply.

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

Papua New Guinean security forces have intercepted and stopped seven trucks carrying seven containers containing sensitive election material in the Southern Highlands after it was found that the containers had been allegedly tampered with.

“Manager Alwyn Jimmy called police in SHP to stop the trucks,” Southern Highlands commander Chief Inspector Daniel Yangen said.

“Seven trucks were stopped and taken to Mendi police station where the seven drivers were interviewed.

• READ MORE: Other PNG election reports

“The EC officer from POM was found in Mt Hagen and was taken to the Mt Hagen police station where I arrived at 11pm on Saturday night and took him back to Mendi at 10am on Sunday.”

Papua New Guinea goes to the polls next month between July 2 and July 22.

Upon initial interviews it was found that the man allegedly admitted to tampering with the containers by removing serial numbers and EC stickers on the containers, Chief Inspector Yangen said.

“The officer is expected to be arrested and charged.”

Stopped the trucks
Jimmy said in an interview: “The trucks were sent to Hela, Southern Highlands and Enga province.”

The container containing materials for Southern Highlands was sent to Hela, I asked the security personnel who went after the trucks, stopped the trucks and told the trucks to return to Mendi, he added.

He said that the containers were removed and were now in custody of the police.

In Wabag, another container is now being kept by police after it was found that the container was supposed to go to Mendi.

Enga Police commander Acting Superintendent George Kakas said: “When we were informed of the incident in Southern Highlands, I ordered that the containers not be opened.

“We will await the arrival of the SHP Election team to come to Wabag and check the containers.”

Investigations by the Post-Courier have pointed out that no election materials have been shipped. All materials have been flown into the provinces in one day.

Sensitive election materials
All sensitive election materials are not supposed to go on transport that is more than a day:

• Ballot papers and indelible ink are not supposed to be shipped as they are sensitive materials;
• Ballot papers are supposed to be airlifted to all destinations and provided security; and
• Police are supposed to accompany sensitive materials like ballot papers and ink anywhere.

Pictures obtained by the Post-Courier show that containers have been kept by security forces at Mendi and Wabag police station.

The Post-Courier understands that the officer who allegedly tempered with the containers has been questioned by police and allegedly admitted to the diversion of the trucks.

Police continue their investigations.

Republished with permission.

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

The June 4 operation in Bokeo province’s Huayxi district blocked delivery of the drugs to the Lao capital Vientiane, with police also seizing guns and cell phones from the suspects, police sources told RFA on Tuesday.

Arrested were a member of the Lao Hmong ethnic group, age 30 and a resident of Bokeo, and a 29-year-old Lao resident of the northern province of Luang Namtha, one source told RFA, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

Both are citizens of Laos and told police they had been hired by a dealer in Bokeo’s Tonpheung district to move the drugs for around $70,000 U.S. dollars in cash, RFA’s source said.

“Everything is now being handled by officials, and we are carrying out an investigation to find out where these drugs came from. Nothing is clear at the moment,” he said.

Also declining to be named, a second police official in Bokeo said the suspects’ attempt to take the drugs to Vientiane in pickup trucks had failed because of the many police checkpoints set up along the road.

“Most of the drugs we seize come from the northern part of Laos, but we can’t say for sure yet whether these drugs also came from the north. This is still under investigation,” he said.

“The suspects are Lao citizens and will be punished according to the law.”

A villager in Bokeo’s Tonpheung district told RFA on Tuesday that police have been unable to end the drug trade in the area, where many young people become addicted and then turn to selling drugs themselves, he said.

“If the police let things go on like this, our own children and grandchildren will also become bad people someday. I want the authorities to crack down on this problem,” he said.

Police involvement with drugs has also slowed efforts to control the trade, another Tonpheung villager said, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

“If the police were really serious about solving this problem, all of it would be gone,” he said. “The problem still exists because sometimes the police will get drugs from the dealers and then sell them themselves.”

The June 4 seizure of drugs in Bokeo was the fourth major haul reported in the province this year, with large quantities of amphetamine pills also seized in January and March, according to Lao media sources.

On May 30, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reported that the trade in synthetic drugs continues to expand in East and Southeast Asia, “with production and trafficking hitting record levels in 2021.”

Drug labs in the Golden Triangle area of Thailand, Laos and Myanmar are the major sources of production, “and the supply continues to surge,” the UNODC said.

Translated by Phouvong for RFA’s Lao Service. Written in English by Richard Finney.

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

Allies of former President Donald Trump sought to have voting machines seized by armed private contractors in the weeks after the 2020 election, according to new reporting.

As the Los Angeles Times reported Saturday, draft executive orders dated December 16 and 17, 2020 regarding the seizure of voting machines appear to have started as an "authorizing letter" written on November 21.

"A private sector organization has no authority to go and seize state government equipment... And we are looking at a document that says that's okay."

The letter was written by "supporters on the fringes" of Trump's circle to three people who were involved in the former president's numerous failed attempts to find evidence that President Joe Biden's victory in the election was fraudulent.

The document sought to grant authority to three companies—including two which were also involved in auditing the election results—to send armed workers to seize all voting machines and election data at will.

The letter called for the U.S. Marshals to be involved in the effort and for people involved to be armed "since most of the operations would be conducted under hostile conditions."

The request "implies that whoever drafted this... views this as some sort of warlike event," Christopher Krebs, the former U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director who Trump fired for affirming that the election had been secure, told the Times.

The Times reported on the previously undisclosed letter less than a week before the congressional committee investigating the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol is scheduled to begin public hearings.

The document is likely to be among the previously unseen material that will be revealed in the primetime hearings, according to the Times.

The draft executive order which was ultimately presented to Trump on December 18, 2020 by attorney Sidney Powell, former national security advisor Michael Flynn, and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne shocked government watchdogs when it was reported earlier this year.

That draft did not include language regarding armed workers from private companies seizing the machines and election data, but did call for assistance from the military.

Trump ultimately did not sign the executive order.

Still, the existence of the letter showing how the former president's allies approached their efforts to circumvent the democratic process was called "chilling" by Krebs.

"You're talking about issuing letters of marque effectively to a private sector organization to go do some sort of activity on behalf of that executive office of the president," Krebs told the Times. "A private sector organization has no authority to go and seize state government equipment. The federal government doesn't even have that authority, particularly in the context of administering elections. And we are looking at a document that says that's okay."

Aimee Allison, founder of pro-democracy group She the People, said the letter is new evidence that the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol when lawmakers were certifying the 2020 election results, was "a failed coup."

"And these people are still plotting," she said.

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

Since the Mountain Valley pipeline was announced eight years ago, the proposal to transport fracked natural gas from West Virginia to export terminals in southern Virginia has faced regulatory hurdles and local opposition. The main concern is that the project runs through environmentally sensitive waterways and farmlands, putting them at risk of spills — while further promoting the development of fracking throughout West Virginia.

Now, after nearly a decade of lobbying, the energy crisis sparked by Russia’s war in Ukraine appears to have turned the tide, with federal regulators supporting a construction route that could bring the pipeline into service as early as next year.

Filings show that the pipeline’s boosters were quick to capitalize on the Ukraine crisis to sway policymakers. In federal appellate courts last month, attorneys for the pipeline project argued that with the U.S. ban on imports of Russian natural gas, “domestic supplies will become all the more important to the nation’s energy needs.” Completing the pipeline, the attorneys wrote, “indisputably would provide a meaningful step toward building out U.S. oil and gas infrastructure, freeing up additional natural gas for domestic consumption and export to Europe.” Other pipeline supporters, including Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., heavily cited the war in Ukraine to press administration officials to swiftly approve the project as a matter of national security.

In recent weeks, more and more fossil fuel interests have piled on.

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This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Lee Fang.

While the ruling class does shape and maintain consent in civil society, the latter also possesses a relative autonomy from political society. This derives from the internal mechanisms of the bourgeoisie’s hegemonic project: to gain consent, the ruling class has to interact with the many demands arising from the class conflicts that are constitutive of capitalist society. In this process, the collective structures of civil society are given a bivalent character. On the one hand, they serve as the instruments through which the elite exercises consensual power. On the other hand, insofar that the bourgeoisie has to maintain a power equilibrium through the extension of concessions to subalterns, the organisms of civil society also function as the principal vehicle for the actions of these oppressed. The specific composition of this duality can change depending on the course of class struggle.

In the words of Michele Filippini, while the two-pronged function of civil society institutions remains invariant, “the prevalence of the one over the other in their everyday course of action, or rather, the political capacity to subordinate one interest to another through hegemonic action” is subject to the dynamics of resistance. That is why these structures can be “‘made to operate’ both as organic mechanisms rebalancing the power system and as an independent expression of subaltern, potentially revolutionary demands.”  However, the relative autonomy of civil society does not mean that socialist activism can be reduced to a gradual process of winning cultural influence in one sphere of society after another. Politics cannot be reduced to pedagogy. The differences between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks can help illustrate this point.

Alan Shandro writes: “[their] contrasting approaches to the struggle for hegemony yielded opposing readings of the soviets: both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks knew them as organizing committees for a general strike, but where the former conceived of them as the site of a kind of proletarian model parliament, Lenin attributed to them the potential of embodying an alliance of workers and peasants and assuming state power. Thus in 1905, where the Bolsheviks sought to organize insurrection through the soviets, the Mensheviks supposed that a focus on insurrection would undermine the process of working-class self-education”. In other words, Bolsheviks gave a concrete character to proletarian education by considering it as part of the contestations involved in the bourgeois-democratic revolution, which could either result in the destruction of Tsarism or a transition dominated by a landlord-bourgeois coalition.

The Russian experience explains that civil society is intimately tied with relations of force. It can’t be understood as a “battle of ideas” in which the working class has to merely present its own ideology to bring about a revolution. On the contrary, civil society has to be considered as an unequal terrain of ideological war, constituted by the ruling class with the help of various hegemonic apparatuses. Consent, in other words, in an effect of the materiality of state institutions. The structural presence of these material apparatuses is ignored by those socialists who vainly search for an external vantage point from which they can launch a struggle for the educational emancipation of the proletariat. In contrast, Lenin – to use Shandro’s words – “conceived the “self-knowledge of the working class” …as inherently bound up with a theoretical-practical understanding of every class and stratum in society; he situated the hegemonic political project, correspondingly, in the context of a strategic matrix of struggle around state power. The independent activity of the working class is expressed by impressing its interests upon the course of class struggles.”

Since civil society is an extension of the state – conditioned by the exigencies of the mode of production – it can’t be considered as an unproblematic area of socialist struggle. Instead, we need to comprehend how the private ensembles of civil society are internally linked to the politically confined system of the modern state; a viewpoint that overlooks these linkages will eventually come up against the limits of the bourgeois state. These limits are established by the many institutional complexes possessed by the state. In §83 of Notebook 7, Gramsci notes: “Public opinion is the political content of the public’s political will that can be dissentient; therefore, there is a struggle for the monopoly of the organs of public opinion – newspapers, political parties, parliament – so that only one force will mold public opinion and hence the political will of the nation, while reducing the dissenters to individual and disconnected specks of dust.”

A viable socialist perspective has to recognize the fact that unless the state is taken over by the proletariat, elements of resistance and mass movements in civil society will remain embryos, susceptible to fragmentation and dispersion. So, while the consciousness of the subaltern is contradictory, split by the diverse rhythms of the opposing class projects found in civil society, the coherence and submissiveness of the subject is ultimately guaranteed by the juridical-political practices of the state. The Left, instead of trying to escape from this reality of state power, has to sap it through a concrete movement of contradictions that identifies the vulnerabilities of the state. As Peter D. Thomas argues:

It is…not a question of subtracting the deformations of the existing political society in order to reveal a hard core of ‘politics’ in the Real, be it in social antagonism, civil society or an indeterminate place beyond it.  On the contrary, in so far as the hypostatized forms of the bourgeois political really do determine the conceptual space in which politics in this social formation can occur…it is much more a case of determining the particular forms of practice, even and especially in their conditions of subalternity to or interpellation by the existing political society, that are capable of rupturing its material constitution from within.

To sum up, if full-fledged consent is to be gained for the socialist project, the proletariat must occupy and transform the political society. In one of his articles for the Italian socialist weekly “The New Order”, Gramsci said that a revolution ceases being an “empty bladder of demagogic rhetoric…when it embodies itself in a type of State, when it becomes an organized system of power…the guarantee of permanence and of the success of every social activity”. But this focus on the seizure of power should not reach excessive proportions. Otherwise, the Left will lose sight of the need to engage in pedagogical work on the terrains of civic, social and cultural life. Therefore, the struggle for the control of political society has to be combined with the cultural struggle in civil society.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Yanis Iqbal.

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Former President Donald Trump has officially endorsed a plan, created by a man who has self-identified with the Oath Keeper militia, that aims to have Trump supporters gain control of the Republican Party.

The plan, known as the “precinct strategy,” has been repeatedly promoted on Steve Bannon’s popular podcast. As ProPublica detailed last year, it has already inspired thousands of people to fill positions at the lowest rung of the party ladder. Though these positions are low-profile and often vacant, they hold critical powers: They help elect higher-ranking party officers, influence which candidates appear on the ballot, turn out voters on Election Day and even staff the polling precincts where people vote and the election boards that certify the results.

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“Just heard about an incredible effort underway that will strengthen the Republican Party,” Trump said Sunday in a statement emailed to his supporters. “If members of our Great movement start getting involved (that means YOU becoming a precinct committeeman for your voting precinct), we can take back our great Country from the ground up.”

Trump’s email named Dan Schultz, an Arizona lawyer and local party official who first developed the precinct strategy more than a decade ago. Schultz spent years trying to promote his plan and recruit precinct officers. In 2014, he posted a callout to an internal forum for the Oath Keepers militia group, according to hacked records obtained by ProPublica.

“Why don’t you all join me and the other Oath Keepers who are ‘inside’ the Party already,” Schultz wrote under a screen name. “If we conservatives were to do that, we’d OWN the Party.”

Federal prosecutors in January charged the leader of the Oath Keepers and 10 of its other members with seditious conspiracy in last year’s attack on the U.S. Capitol. One of them pleaded guilty, as have several members of the group in related cases who are cooperating with the investigation. The group’s leader, Stewart Rhodes, pleaded not guilty.

There is no indication that Schultz had any involvement in the Capitol riot.

Schultz told ProPublica he never became a formal member of the Oath Keepers organization.

“I have taken oaths to support and defend the Constitution as a West Point cadet, as a commissioned U.S. Army officer and as a practicing attorney,” Schultz said in a text message. “Those oaths do not have expiration dates, by my way of thinking, and I have kept my oaths. In that sense, I am an ‘oath keeper.’”

According to experts on extremist groups, the Oath Keepers recruit military and law enforcement veterans using the idea that their oath to defend the Constitution never expired. The group then urges people to resist what they say are impending orders to take away Americans’ guns or create concentration camps.

“I don’t ever want to be pulling the trigger on an AR-15 in my neighborhood,” Schultz said in a 2015 conference call with fellow organizers, referring to the semi-automatic rifle. “Oath Keepers, I love them for instilling the oath. But what they need to do also, I think, is spread the message that hey, we can do stuff politically so we never get to the cartridge box.”

In more recent interviews on right-wing podcasts and internet talk shows, Schultz has repeatedly described his precinct strategy as a last alternative to violence.

“It’s not going to be peaceful the next go-round, perhaps,” Schultz said in a June interview with the pro-Trump personality David Clements. “But it ought to be, and the way to ensure that it will be is we’ve got to get enough of these good decent Americans to take over one of the two major political parties.”

It was not clear whether Trump or his aides were aware that Schultz has self-identified with the Oath Keepers. Trump’s spokesperson, Liz Harrington, did not respond to requests for comment.

Schultz has spent months trying to get his idea in front of Trump. Steve Stern, a fellow movement organizer, told ProPublica that he met a former Trump administration official for lunch at Mar-a-Lago, the ex-president’s private club in Palm Beach, in December. While there, Stern said, he got a chance to briefly mention the project to Trump.

Then, last month, Schultz and Stern landed an interview on a talk show hosted by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO who promotes conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. Lindell said he would discuss the plan with Trump personally. Schultz and Stern followed up with a conference call with Harrington and Bannon, according to Stern. Harrington previously worked at Bannon’s “War Room” website.

“I know the president’s very jacked up about it,” Bannon said on his podcast, speaking with Schultz after Trump released the endorsement. “Help MAGA, help the America First movement, right? Help the deplorables, help President Trump, help yourself, your country, community, your kids, grandkids, all of it. Put your shoulder to the wheel.”

Bannon, who led Trump’s 2016 campaign, originally lifted the precinct strategy to prominence in a podcast interview with Schultz last year. After the episode aired, thousands of people answered Bannon’s call to become precinct officers in pivotal swing states, according to data compiled by ProPublica from county records and interviews with local party officials.

As of last August, GOP leaders in 41 counties reported an unusual increase in sign-ups since Bannon’s first interview with Schultz, adding a total of more than 8,500 new precinct officers. The trend appears to have continued since then. New precinct officers started using their powers to remove or censure Republican leaders who contradicted Trump’s election lies and to recruit people who believe the election was stolen into positions as poll watchers and poll workers.

Bannon received a last-minute pardon from Trump after the former adviser was charged with financial fraud. He has pleaded not guilty to contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. Bannon’s spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.

In addition to Bannon and Lindell, the precinct strategy has won support from pro-Trump figures such as former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who urged Trump to impose martial law, and lawyers Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, who led some of the lawsuits seeking to overturn the election results. Right-wing groups such as Turning Point Action, which organized buses to transport rallygoers on Jan. 6, also joined the effort to recruit precinct officers.

While Stern said he’s thrilled about Trump’s written statement endorsing the precinct strategy, he said he hopes to hear it from Trump’s own lips at an upcoming rally. Stern said he plans to be there with tables to sign more people up.

Jeff Kao and Mollie Simon contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Isaac Arnsdorf.