Every year, an unknown but potentially large amount of plastic waste continues to be traded in the form of “refuse-derived fuel,” or RDF, ground-up packaging and industrial plastic waste that gets mixed with scrap wood and paper in order to be burned for energy. Environmental groups say these exports perpetuate “waste colonialism” and jeopardize public health, since burning plastic emits hazardous pollutants and greenhouse gases that warm the planet. 

Many advocates would like to see the RDF loophole closed as a first step toward discouraging the development of new RDF facilities worldwide. They were disappointed that, at this spring’s biannual meeting of the Basel Convention — the 1989 treaty that regulates the transboundary movement of hazardous waste — RDF went largely unaddressed. “It’s just frustrating to witness all these crazy, profit-protecting negotiators,” said Yuyun Ismawati, co-founder of the Indonesian anti-pollution nonprofit Nexus3. “If we are going to deal with plastic waste through RDF, then … everybody must be willing to learn more about what’s in it.”

RDF is a catch-all term for several different products, sometimes made with special equipment at material recovery facilities — the centers that, in the U.S., receive and sort mixed household waste for further processing. ASTM International, an American standard-setting organization, lists several types of RDF depending on what it’s made of and what it’s formed into — coarse particles no larger than a fingernail, for example, or larger briquettes. Some RDF is made by shredding waste into a loose “fluff.”

Although RDF contains roughly 50 percent paper, cardboard, wood, and other plant material, the rest is plastic, including human-made textiles and synthetic rubber. It’s this plastic content that makes RDF so combustible — after all, plastics are just reconstituted fossil fuels. According to technical guidelines from the Basel Convention secretariat, RDF contains about two-thirds the energy of coal by weight. 

One of the main users of RDF is the cement industry, which can burn it alongside traditional fossil fuels to power its energy-intensive kilns. Álvaro Lorenz, global sustainability director for the multinational cement company Votorantim Cimentos, said RDF has gained popularity as cities, states and provinces, and countries struggle to deal with the 353 million metric tons of plastic waste produced each year — 91 percent of which is never recycled. Some of these jurisdictions have implemented policies discouraging trash from being sent to landfills. Instead, it gets sent to cement kilns like his. “Governments are promoting actions to reduce the amount of materials being sent to landfills, and we are one solution,” he said.

Lorenz said RDF makes his company more sustainable by contributing to a “circular economy.” In theory, using RDF instead of coal or natural gas reduces emissions and advances companies’ environmental targets. According to David Araujo, North America engineered fuels program manager for the waste management and utility company Veolia, RDF produced by his company’s factory in Louisiana, Missouri, allows cement company clients in the Midwest to avoid 1.06 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions with every ton of RDF burned. The ash produced from burning RDF can also be used as a raw material in cement production, he added, displacing virgin material use.

RDF is also attractive because it is less price-volatile than the fossil fuels that cement production would otherwise depend on. In one analysis of Indonesian RDF production from last year, researchers found that each metric ton of RDF can save cement kiln operators about $77 in fuel and electricity costs.

Lorenz said that the high temperatures inside cement kilns “completely burn 100 percent” of any hazardous chemicals that may be contained in RDF’s plastic fraction. But this is contested by environmental advocates who worry about insufficiently regulated toxic air emissions similar to those produced by traditional waste incinerators — especially in poor countries with less robust environmental regulations and enforcement capacity. Dioxins, for example, are released by both cement kilns and other waste incinerators, and are linked to immune and nervous system impairment. Burning plastic can also release heavy metals that are associated with respiratory and neurological disorders. A 2019 systematic review of the health impacts of waste incineration found that people living and working near waste incinerators had higher levels of dioxins, lead, and arsenic in their bodies, and that they often had a higher risk of some types of cancer such as non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

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“Before they convert it into fuel, the chemicals are still locked inside the [plastic] packaging,” said Ismawati. “But once you burn it, … you spray out everything.” She said some of her friends living near an RDF facility in Indonesia have gotten cancer, and at least one has died from it.

Lorenz and Araujo both said their companies are subject to, and comply with, applicable environmental regulations in the countries where they operate. 

Lee Bell, a science and policy adviser for the International Pollutants Elimination Network — a network of environmental and public health experts and nonprofits — also criticized the idea that burning RDF causes fewer greenhouse gas emissions than burning traditional fossil fuels. He said this notion fails to consider the “petrochemical origin” of plastic waste: Plastics cause greenhouse gas emissions at every stage of their life cycle, and, as a strategy for dealing with plastic waste, research suggests that incineration releases more climate pollution than other waste management strategies. In a landfill, where plastic lasts hundreds of years with little degradation, the nonprofit Center for International Environmental Law has estimated greenhouse gas emissions at about 132 pounds per metric ton. That rises to about 1,980 pounds of emissions per metric ton when plastic is incinerated.

Bell said he’s concerned about the apparent growth of the RDF industry worldwide, though there is little reliable data about how much of the stuff is produced and traded between countries each year. Part of the problem is the “harmonized system” of export codes administrated by the World Customs Organization, which represents more than 170 customs bodies around the world. The organization doesn’t have a specific code for RDF and instead lumps it with any of several other categories  — ”household waste,” for example — when it’s traded internationally. Only the U.K. seems to provide transparent reporting of its RDF exports. In the first three months of 2025 it reported sending about 440,000 metric tons abroad, most of which was received by Scandinavian countries.

Nearly all of the world’s largest cement companies already use RDF in at least some of their facilities. According to one market research firm, the market for RDF was worth about $5 billion in 2023, and it’s expected to grow to $10.2 billion by 2032. Other firms have forecast a bright outlook for the RDF industry in the Middle East and Africa, and one analysis from last year said that Asia is “realizing tremendous potential as a growth market for RDF” as governments seek new ways to manage their waste. Within the past year, new plans to use RDF in cement kilns have been announced in Peshawar, Pakistan; Hoa Binh, Vietnam; Adana, Turkey; and across Nigeria, just to name a few places.  

Araujo, with Veolia, said his company’s RDF program “has grown exponentially” over the past several years, “and we recently invested millions of dollars to upgrade equipment to keep pace with demand.” A separate spokesperson said Veolia does not send RDF across international borders, and a spokesperson for Votorantim Cimentos said the company always sources RDF locally.

Dorothy Otieno, a program officer at the Nairobi-based Centre for Environment Justice and Development, said investment in RDF infrastructure could create a perverse incentive for the world to create more plastic — and for developing countries to import it — just to ensure that facility operators earn a return on their investment. “Will this create an avenue for the importation of RDFs and other fossil fuel-based plastics?” she asked. “These are the kinds of questions that we are going to need to ask ourselves.”

At this year’s Basel Convention conference in May and June, the International Pollutants Elimination Network called for negotiators to put RDF into the same regulatory bucket as other forms of mixed plastic — potentially by classifying it as hazardous waste. Doing so would prohibit rich countries from exporting RDF to poor ones, and make its trade between developing countries contingent on the receiving country giving “prior informed consent.”

Negotiators fell short of that vision. Instead, they requested that stakeholders — such as RDF companies and environmental groups — submit plastic waste-related comments to the secretariat of the Basel Convention, for discussion at a working group meeting next year. Bell described this as “kicking the cans down the road.” 

“This is disappointing,” he added. “We appear to be on the brink of an explosion in the trade of RDF.”

The next Basel Convention meeting isn’t until 2027. But in the meantime, countries are free to create their own legislation restricting the export of RDF. Australia did this in 2022 when, following pressure from environmental groups, it amended its rules for plastic waste exports. The country now requires companies to obtain a hazardous waste permit in order to send a type of RDF called “process engineered fuel” abroad. Although RDF exports to rich countries like Japan continue, the new requirements effectively ended the legal export of RDF from Australia to poorer countries in Southeast Asia.

Ultimately, Ismawati said countries need to focus on reducing plastic production to levels that can be managed domestically — without any type of incineration. “Every country needs to treat waste in their own country,” Ismawati said. “Do not export it under the label of a ‘circular economy.’”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This fuel is 50% plastic — and it’s slipping through a loophole in international waste law on Jul 15, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Joseph Winters.

There is no philosophy in the sense of an overarching set of principles or an ethic that serves as a filter for the work. The exigency is: work or die. Do the work. The work itself asks and answers the questions necessary to its existence. Dig in and find out what’s what. Shut everything else out. Let the work speak through you. It’s been hiding there, just behind the air, all along.

You’ve written music, lyrics, fiction and nonfiction. What do you see as common threads in your work?

After hundreds and hundreds of songs and stories and various other writing over the course of four-plus decades I guess one obvious answer is the mind of the author behind all this work. But now I’m not so sure of even that. The author himself is suspect, if he exists at all. I question the existence of self, or at least my own self specifically. So maybe a common thread is erasure. I’m always struck by how an adamant statement or proclamation contains inside it its own opposite, which is equally and simultaneously true, and this friction between the two opposite poles serves the function of a positive negation. For all the talk of love, desire, frustration, hatred, contempt, compassion, transcendence, it’s all just phenomena, suspended and rearranging itself in space, all at once, past and future quivering on the same plane simultaneously. But musically, sonically, I guess a common thread has been to find a sound that is so all-consuming that I, and by extension the audience or the listener, disappears inside it, at least for a moment. The obvious analogy to that is the beautiful, selfless act of true sexual love. To me, that’s where God lives.

You’ve worked in collaboration with many musicians, including Swans and Angels of Light, and you’ve written many songs on your own. What do you see as the pros and cons of collaboration versus the creative control of working by yourself?

There are no pros or cons, and it’s all a mystery to me how anything happens at all. Here’s how I see the process. I’ll tell it as a story: Alone in my room, I pick up my old and beaten and broken contraption made of wood and wires and I thrum the thing, waiting for resonance. When eventually a sound evokes meaning I search for another sound, and before long I have a collection of chords. Through repetition, an invisible, shimmering mist of sound envelops me completely, and before long I notice a portal opening and I walk through it and I suddenly find myself in an unfamiliar room, similar to a prison cell without windows. I scratch words onto the wall of this cell, and those words become the lyrics to a song. This is the first stage of elation, and it is solitary. I sing the song over and over by myself until it inhabits me completely.

Then, excited at my discovery, I gather my friends and collaborators in a rehearsal space and together we unfold billowing waves of sound that grow outwards, way beyond my initial childish discoveries. We’re led through the vaulting archways of cathedrals where dancing fractal shards of light sing down to us from above. We’re ushered through tunnels of sound into new chambers connected endlessly, one to another, where the echoes stretch out and reverberate infinitely. We breathe in and exhale the magical dust that is the intangible substance of these echoes, and we’re transformed from within. We travel around the world, making sound in this fashion.

Over time, the music continues to grow of its own accord, and we follow it where it wants to go. We’re helpless inside it. By the end of a tour the songs bear little resemblance to their shape at the beginning, and you’d be hard pressed to recognize the original songs I wrote alone in my room. Finally, we find ourselves in a vast underground cavern and we no longer know ourselves, who we are or where we’ve been. We’re drained and spent, and the songs are then finished and forgotten completely and never performed again. Then, time for something new, and the process starts over. I want to be sure to mention here the current musicians in Swans who so tirelessly devote themselves to this often arduous spiritual quest: Dana Schechter, Norman Westberg, Kristof Hahn, Larry Mullins, Christopher Pravdica and Phil Puleo.

You’ve also produced albums for other musicians, like Devendra Banhart and Akron/Family. What do you enjoy about that process, and what have you learned from it?

What have I learned from it? NEVER AGAIN! I absolutely love Devendra. I have never met anyone so preternaturally talented and magical as he was in those days. He literally quivered with light. Akron/Family were also tremendously gifted and unique, and fine people too. I remember seeing them live a few times and thinking “They’re the Beatles!” or “They’re Led Zeppelin!”–they were that good. But I am temperamentally not suited to working on other people’s music. I care too much and invest too much in the process psychically and it’s draining for all involved. Worse, I’m selfish as regards my own artistic pursuits, and I inevitably committed too much of what should be a personal store of energy into those projects, to the ultimate detriment of all involved.

You could say that I’m too intense, especially when I get into the studio. It’s a sort of spiritual crucible for me, and it’s not correct to involve that level of personal feeling in the work of others. Of course I’m proud of the work we did together, but never again. The only thing that would induce me to produce someone else’s music again would be if they were to buy me, fully paid off in advance, a modest house along the strand in Hermosa Beach, California, where I could finish my days with sand on my feet and salt on my lips. This is a hopeless dream of course, since the Hermosa Beach of my childhood memories doesn’t exist anymore, but there you go.

You moved around a lot as a teenager. How do you think that prepared you for life as a touring musician, and how do you think it widened your creative perspective?

My personal motto used to be, “I’m only happy when I’m leaving.” When I was 15, I ran away from my father in Germany and hitchhiked down through Yugoslavia to Greece to Istanbul, then got to Israel somehow, where I stayed for close to a year as an itinerant hippie kid. Then, when I returned to LA I took off again and hitchhiked across North America twice, with almost no money, sleeping on the side of the road in the woods or the fields, or with people that would put me up, giving me work sometimes. Through all these various experiences I never had the sense to be afraid. I just threw myself out into the wind. It’s what I still do, musically. I have no idea what I’m doing! I just dive in and figure it out along the way. But as for touring, it’s the opposite of adventurous travel. You drive some random long and boring distance, you arrive at the venue, you unload, then set up, then sound-check, then wait a bit, then perform the show, then sleep, then repeat. Rarely do I get the chance to get out and experience whatever city we’re in, and these days I carry my agoraphobia with me, and I sleep and hide as much as possible when not performing.

You’ve said you took a lot of LSD during this period as well. How do you think that affected your creativity?

Actually, my experiences with drugs began much earlier. I had a completely unsupervised, pretty horrible childhood, from an early age. This is decades upon decades ago, so my memory is hazy, but I must have started taking drugs as early as 11 years old, first with inhaling glue, gasoline and spot remover, then barbiturates and amphetamines and ultimately by 12 or 13 on to LSD, which was ubiquitous at the time. So right at the age when one is first discovering or formulating who they are, developing what we call an identity, I took rather large quantities of a hallucinogen that said instead, “No, actually, you are NOTHING” and I still don’t necessarily disagree with that realization. The thing about LSD, or at least the versions of it that existed back then, is that it came at you in waves, washing over you and dispersing your self and your molecules out into the surrounding world, so that there was no separation between you and everything else. I used to lie on the beach late at night and stare up at the stars and feel myself rushing up and out through the universe, vividly conscious and unconscious simultaneously. Paradoxically, this kind of vision or experience imbues you with a sort of faith, or a certainty of the interconnectedness of all phenomena, and I suppose I’ve since sought out that experience in various ways throughout my life, perhaps especially through music.

You went to art school at one point. What was that experience like for you, and what did you learn from it?

Once I discovered, in my late teens I guess, that I had a natural facility for drawing, I threw myself into it absolutely, drew constantly, and it became a sort of religion for me. Pretty quickly I knew that this would be my path in life—to be an artist. I had no idea what this entailed, how one might go about it in their life, but I’d found something that gave me a conduit to meaning. So I ended up in art school, where my most productive time was spent in the library, devouring art books and reading art magazines. I don’t recall teachers imparting me with any special knowledge or technical skill, other than to perhaps point me towards artists I might not have otherwise known about. Gradually, I discovered that contemporary art was considered to be a profession, replete with its own specialized, recondite language, and that if one were to succeed at it a certain amount of social skill and networking would be involved, and that I, generally feeling like a leper amongst other people, wanted no part of it. I might as well become a lawyer. Around this time Punk Rock happened. I quit art school and threw myself into that milieu, for better or worse. I started a band, and it failed. Then I eventually moved to New York City, where Swans was soon formed.

How do you deal with writer’s block, either musically or with the written word?

For me, that’s an ironic question because I have never known anything other than writer’s block. I liken my process to trying to carve an image in a granite cliff face with a steel toothpick. But through persistence, something eventually emerges.

You’ve spoken of a voice that channels through you called “Joseph” that you credit with many of your songs. What can you tell us about him, and how would you describe your relationship with him?

That’s just a trope I’ve used a few times to depict the unknown entity that reaches into the back of my head somehow and writes the words through me. I have no idea how else to describe it. I sit for hours sometimes staring at a blank page, but eventually when I give up completely something gets written. In the best instances, I don’t really feel like I wrote the words myself at all.

You’ve written two collections of short stories, published nearly 25 years apart. What do you like about writing fiction, and why do you think the impulse to do it (or at least publish it) came at such a vast interval?

I have always written, for as long as I can remember. I suppose I started doing it at the same time I started drawing. I hesitate to call the writing “stories,” since in most instances very little happens, there are no clearly drawn characters, and certainly no plots. I don’t even know who the narrator is—it’s certainly not me personally. It’s more like a disembodied mind dissecting itself, taking a scalpel to itself, tearing apart and arranging and rearranging memories and sensations, putting them in a form that makes an intuitive sense. The collections you mention occurred only when I felt there was enough compelling material to include. My primary focus has been music. It takes up all of my time.

You’ve also published a collection of Swans lyrics/stories/journals. What was that process like for you? In reviewing your own lyrics and experiences, did you learn anything about your own creative process?

During Covid, like everyone else, I had an overabundance of free time. I decided to use the opportunity to finally go through the trunks of journals and ephemera I’d collected over the decades. These plastic trunks had traveled with me from abode to abode over many years, usually residing, never opened, in a basement wherever I lived at the time. I lugged the onus of my past along with me wherever I went. When I opened the lids to these containers, I was sickened to discover a thick carpet of mold over everything, and it permeated the journals, staining the pages. It reeked and was toxic. I have asthma, so the effect was not insubstantial.

Nevertheless, I was determined to go through the writing. I was forced to wear a respirator, eye protection and surgical gloves as I worked. A fitting metaphor for the writing that I encountered! In much of the early writing and unused song lyrics I hardly recognized the author. Truly a maniacal, but focused and determined character. It was interesting to see. I definitely lived in a world of my own making in those days, very solipsistic and self-obsessed, and unapologetic about it. After a long, slow period of trying to type the stuff up for future editing I finally found an obvious solution and took hundreds of pictures of worthwhile pages with my cell phone and was then later able, unencumbered by my ridiculous hazmat protections, to go through the material, type it up and edit it.

Fittingly, as the decades approached more current times, the mold was less pervasive, and eventually of course the writing took place on a computer and was easily accessible, though about a decade was lost when a computer was stolen. But what did I learn? I don’t know. Maybe that work is what matters, just doing the work. The early writing was done during a period of extreme hardship and poverty and general isolation, but I persisted, and then here now is this much older person with an entire life history behind him, and certainly no longer hungry, going through this stuff and mining it. In the end, I used a relatively small portion of what I found, and I excised the material that I thought too personal. There’s tons of it left, enough to fill another book. But my hope is to find the courage to take all those trunks, the entire mess, to the public dump and dispose of it once and for all.

Do you read reviews of your own work?

I have read reviews in the past, yes. It’s always a mistake. A bad review can be misguided and stupid, which has hardly any effect. Or a bad review can contain some truth, and that can be devastating, but perhaps productive in the long run. The worst is a good review, because it can foster complacency and self-satisfaction, which equals death.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by J. Bennett.

“The Lennon Wall is an important collective memory for us (Hong Kongers),” said Hong Kong artist Kacey Wong, who moved to Taiwan’s Taichung city in 2021. “From 2014 to 2019, it was the place where we spread our democratic demands. Now the Lennon Wall and democracy and freedom in Hong Kong are gone.”

Hong Kong’s Lennon Walls – named after musician John Lennon’s peaceful activism and inspired by Prague’s Velvet Revolution of the 1980s – became iconic features of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, transforming public spaces into canvases for democratic expression.

Filled with colorful displays of sticky notes, posters, artwork, and messages such as “We Hong Kongers never give up”, Hong Kong’s Lennon Walls allowed ordinary citizens to express their political views and demonstrate their solidarity.

Lennon Walls sprouted on available public spaces across Hong Kong, including underground tunnels and on pillars outside railway stations, during the 2014 Umbrella Movement and again in 2019, during the anti-extradition movement when millions took to the streets to protest a proposed legislation that would allow criminal suspects to be extradited to mainland China.

In Taiwan, the Lennon Wall in Taichung’s pedestrian underpass is the only such publicly accessible wall in the region, and Hong Kong exiles in the democratic island are keen to preserve it, even as they look to establish more such walls, including one in capital Taipei.

Among them is Wong, who with his friends on Thursday marked the anniversary of the anti-extradition movement with a visit to the Lennon Wall in Taichung and sang before it the protest anthem of the 2019 pro-democracy protests, “Glory to Hong Kong.”

Earlier this year, part of the Lennon Wall in Taichung was reportedly cleared during a regular cleanup and maintenance of the underpass by volunteers. This prompted a statement from city officials who said they respect the wall as a symbol of public expression and that any future cleaning must be reported in advance.

Wong now leads efforts to preserve and refresh the display on the Lennon Wall in Taichung, particularly in the cleared sections, viewing it as both an act of commemoration and resistance.

“Crisis brings opportunity. As a curator, I want to turn the cleaned sections into art spaces,” said Wong, who comes to the Lennon Wall in Taichung every week and pays out of pocket to reprint and post high-quality artworks.

“If someone tears it down again, I’ll repost it — just like we did during the 2019 protests. That persistence is the resilience of resistance,” he said.

(Credit: AFP)

Another Hong Kong exile Fu Tang is currently looking for a location in Taipei to establish a permanent Lennon Wall in the city. He believes that protecting these spaces represents core Taiwanese values too.

“The Lennon Wall represents the right to freedom of expression of diversity and tolerance,” Fu said. “Protecting the Lennon Wall is not only about protecting the freedom of expression of Hong Kong people in Taiwan, but also about protecting the important values of peace and tolerance in Taiwan.”

Fu believes the establishment of a permanent Lennon Walls in Taiwan will also serve as reminders for the Taiwanese people to cherish their existing freedoms. “It also tells the world that Taiwan is not part of China, because there is no room for Lennon Walls in China,” added Fu.

Taiwan, which China claims as its territory, has welcomed Hong Kong refugees through various humanitarian programs, and many Hong Kongers who participated in the 2019 anti-extradition protests have now made the democratic island their home.

Among them is Tsai Chih-hao, who was one of the protestors who stormed Hong Kong’s Legislative Council in 2019.

“As a protester, I am very happy that I can still see the Lennon Wall in Taiwan,” Tsai said. “There are still people willing to maintain it and allow people who come to Taiwan to visit it. This means that there are still people who remember the 2019 anti-extradition movement and the efforts made by the people of Hong Kong for democracy.”

Translated by Rachel C. Edited by Tenzin Pema.

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

We get an update from the Madleen, the Freedom Flotilla ship sailing to Gaza with vital humanitarian aid for Palestinians. Brazilian activist Thiago Ávila, one of 12 people on the ship, says “spirits are high” despite the constant presence of drones overhead and threats from the Israeli government. “Palestine is now the strategic place for all peoples to unite and fight against oppression, exploitation and the destruction of nature,” says Ávila. “People’s power is the ultimate power, and love and solidarity can beat any hateful, racist and supremacist ideology, like Zionism.” Earlier this week, the ship made a detour to respond to a mayday call to help dozens of migrants aboard a deflating vessel. The Madleen is expected to reach Gaza on Monday, though Israeli officials have said they will not allow it to land.

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

In my family, there was always an audience—intended, intimate. Most often, it was one another. On the hardest days, this meant holding up a mirror to our losses. On good days, it was shared pleasure, a way of keeping each other sharp, a means of subverting power.

For example, I was still in grade school when my sister went off to college—the University of Southern Mississippi. In her composition class, they had to write a short story. Hers imagined the rapture: blood and guts and boobs. When she came home, she gathered us around the kitchen table over morning coffee and cigarettes and read it aloud. I remember the professor’s droopy red marks across her pages. He hadn’t been generous. But we were the real judges.

When she reached the last line, my grandmother paused then tipped her head back and released that deep, marvelous smoky laughter. A triumph. We were all delighted—not because we believed it, we didn’t believe a word, but because a story could be outrageous, gory, unapologetically feminist, hungry, horny, and still wield power. A-fucking-plus. My grandmother said the professor had a boring, potentially weak constitution. That settled it. Then we ate donuts.

Among my mother and her sisters, there was always something in the works. Not quite a competition—more a communal craft, a tacit ritual. Well, maybe a competition. The ghost stories were ongoing, threaded and revised. When we gathered from our various homes in Mississippi and Louisiana, the latest installments were shared. Whoever’s story was the most uncanny, won. The prize was respect. To be the one who held the room in a charged pause before the end. To be believed, if only for a moment, in the intensity of the invisible.

There’s a place in Natchez, Mississippi, called the Devil’s Punch Bowl—a vast, sunken Kudzu bayou. My grandparents lived in an antebellum farmhouse on its edge for some years and we sometimes lived there, too. I didn’t learn the bayou’s full history until I was an adult and moved away—it certainly wasn’t taught in my eight grade Mississippi History class. After emancipation, a military encampment was established there. Thousands of formerly enslaved Black Americans were forced into the basin and left to die from disease and starvation. There are estimations that twenty thousand died. Most local historians predictably dispute this as anti-southern propaganda. Wild peach groves grow in the Punch Bowl, and there are stories—if you eat the peaches, you’ll fall ill. These stories aren’t entirely untrue, but they’re also something else: a way for dominant white culture to mythologize the site of its own violence. To shroud atrocity in legend. Storytelling can work that way, too. It can conceal. It can carry memory—or displace it.

I ask myself often: What story am I telling—both to myself and to the world? Most of the time, it runs just beneath overt awareness, like the ambient sound in a hotel lobby, a soft murmur, a water feature you stop hearing. Then one day, you catch it. You really listen. And you realize: this is what’s been playing on a loop. Now, I try to be responsible for the texture of my thinking. Not in pursuit of perfection, but as a daily practice—a quiet vow: to become, thought by thought, more hospitable to the invisible and less bound to the performance of a self I once believed others required.

I’ve let go of the idea of a unified identity. What draws me now is something closer to cogency—not a fixed core, but a constellation of what I love: people, practices, questions. What gathers there, hums.

In my divination practice, there’s a group of cards I call the poverty cards. They speak to the ways we dim our light. There are many reasons why we do this—we are conditioned to, yes. But sometimes, especially when we’re young, we do it to survive. When we break our contracts with the lie that we are not enough as we are, we begin to believe we deserve to be seen, to be heard, and something opens. A kind of radical creative potential is unlocked.

Now “home” has a lot to do with a regulated nervous system. I was always scandalized by the fact that in higher ed, in critical creative graduate programs, we expect students to travel to the dirt floor of their guts under poverty conditions, make art, and bring that back as a meaningful story path for the community. We don’t talk about the nervous system, or how to take care, or why.

As a professor in the University, I learned about the importance of boundaries. The lessons were hard and I’m a long-suffering student. My conflicts often centered on the division of labor. I was told, again and again, that it had nothing to do with gender. Nothing to do with queerness. And yet, when I left, I was the only woman and the only queer Full Professor in my department. When I asked why, I was offered the usual deflections: timing, coincidence. Never structure. Never the systems that normalize delay and invisibility. I was eligible for promotion likely seven years before I was encouraged or supported to apply. That’s not just lost income, it is labor rendered invisible.

I am grateful for all that my academic position made possible, and I do not regret the work. And I mourn—mourn—what is being dismantled—the slow disintegration of institutions like the University, hollowed out under the rising pressure of authoritarianism. But I no longer mistake endurance for belonging. And I no longer offer my devotion to systems incapable of loving me back.

Leaving academia requires the reconfiguration of a self. In the blogosphere, it’s often likened to leaving the military or a cult—and while the comparison is a bit theatrical, point taken. Academia is not just a profession—it’s an identity structure, a social ecology. It confers class standing, vocabulary, access.

To leave is to forfeit a kind of legibility. You are no longer fluent in the codes that once organized your days. And more disorienting still: you are no longer fluent to yourself. To walk away is to rupture the narrative that taught you how to be seen—and in doing so, how to see. It is a break in the mirror. And yet, in that refusal, a different kind of thrilling recognition begins.

Writing is not just an act, but an approach to the day. A commitment to awareness. I hope I would write and do my work anywhere. I often think of the Dutch Jewish writer and mystic, Etty Hillesum, murdered by the Nazis in 1943. Her workshop was located in the ditches of suffering. She met annihilation with an unyielding devotion to bearing witness as an act of resistance and love. Refusing numbness, she upheld the soul’s sovereignty, even in the relentless hell devised by men with small, failed imaginations.

I’ve discovered that the more care I invest in my mental health, my spiritual practices, and my emotional integrity, the more I can take radical creative risks. We don’t get sick alone, and we don’t heal alone. Healing is relational—woven through bodies, systems, and stories. But too often, pain becomes privatized, packaged into progress narratives that protect the very structures doing harm.

How many times must a person tell their story—whether they move through the system or refuse it? The raped person is asked to repeat. And even when not asked, the mind repeats. Trauma loops. It engraves. The nervous system circulates the wound, restimulating it— until, through the slow, aching labor of loving ourselves, and of living anyway, it becomes a powermark. There is something in repetition—not only as symptom, but as structure. A kind of refrain. The same refrain that holds our pain also carries our prayers, our celebrations, our names. Repetition is not only what binds us to trauma. It can provide the conditions for emergence, a place from which we can begin to sing.

Healing has reconfigured my relationship to the sentence—the sentence as a threshold, a site of encounter. It has made my language more permeable to silence, more exacting in its care. It has made me a better writer. It has taught me how to let the wound speak without becoming a spectacle. I write differently now—because I listen differently.

One of the things I have learned from disasters, personal and collective, is a quiet prayer I carry: May I and my loved ones be on the fortuitous side of the interruption. Disasters and oracles share a compositional instinct: they love juxtaposition. Rupture beside pattern. The visible pressed against the unseen. And the altar—turns out—is wherever we are.

As my friend Lou Florez reminds me, the ancestor altar begins at the cellular level. We carry the archive in our blood. We sit at the table of our own becoming, and sup with the star that made us and the great-great-great-grandmother who kept the fire lit. We are always in conversation with what preceded us, and with what has yet to arrive.

My mother taught me, in her way, to cultivate a poignant relationship with impermanence and uncertainty. She was right to do so. I’m learning to stay close to both—not to conquer or resolve them, but to let them shape me into something more honest.

I’ve been on a long journey of learning to understand descents—initiations into the holy darkness of the underworld. I love a good catacomb. I feel at home there. There’s a kind of orientation that I sense that only becomes possible in the dark.

Once, I was walking the catacombs outside Rome and I’d fallen to the back of the group. There were two torchbearers—one at the front, one at the end. You have to stay close. A few weeks before our visit, a Boy Scout had gotten lost in those tunnels. Not temporarily. Entirely. The lesson is simple and unrelenting: we do not make it through alone. We walk together. We take turns carrying the light.

Story is a kind of torch. It holds us. It marks the passage. I am lucky—for those who love me, who call me back when I begin to slip behind, who remind me: stay. Not for the certainty. Not for the resolution. Not even so that, at last, things might make sense. But to dwell—open, wanting—in the radiant complexity of being alive—with others. With you.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Mairead Case.

We’ve visited Ground Zero. Not once, but three times. But for generations, before these locations were designated as such, they were the ancestral home to the people of the Marshall Islands.

As part of a team of Greenpeace scientists and specialists from the Radiation Protection Advisers team, we have embarked on a six-week tour on board the Rainbow Warrior, sailing through one of the most disturbing chapters in human history: between 1946 and 1958, the United States detonated 67 nuclear bombs across the Marshall Islands — equivalent to 7200 Hiroshima explosions.

During this period, testing nuclear weapons at the expense of wonderful ocean nations like the Marshall Islands was considered an acceptable practice, or as the US put it, “for the good of mankind”.

• READ MORE: The Rainbow Warriow — synonymous with breaking boundaries and fearless campaigning
• Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior
• Eyes of Fire – the Little Island Press education microsite on the Rongelap voyage

Instead, the radioactive fallout left a deep and complex legacy — one that is both scientific and profoundly human, with communities displaced for generations.

Between March and April, we travelled on the Greenpeace flagship vessel, the Rainbow Warrior, throughout the Marshall Islands, including to three northern atolls that bear the most severe scars of Cold War nuclear weapons testing:

• Enewetak atoll, where, on Runit Island, stands a massive leaking concrete dome beneath which lies plutonium-contaminated waste, a result of a partial “clean-up” of some of the islands after the nuclear tests;
• Bikini atoll, a place so beautiful, yet rendered uninhabitable by some of the most powerful nuclear detonations ever conducted; and
• Rongelap atoll, where residents were exposed to radiation fallout and later convinced to return to contaminated land, part of what is now known as Project 4.1, a US medical experiment to test humans’  exposure to radiation.

This isn’t fiction, nor the distant past. It’s a chapter of history still alive through the environment, the health of communities, and the data we’re collecting today.

Each location we visit, each sample we take, adds to a clearer picture of some of the long-term impacts of nuclear testing—and highlights the importance of continuing to document, investigate, and attempt to understand and share these findings.

These are our field notes from a journey through places that hold important lessons for science, justice, and global accountability.

Our mission: why are we here?
With the permission and support of the Marshallese government, a group of Greenpeace science and radiation experts, together with independent scientists, are in the island nation to assess, investigate, and document the long-term environmental and radiological consequences of nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands.

Our mission is grounded in science. We’re conducting field sampling and radiological surveys to gather data on what radioactivity remains in the environment — isotopes such as caesium-137, strontium-90 and plutonium-239/240. These substances are released during nuclear explosions and can linger in the environment for decades, posing serious health risks, such as increased risk of cancers in organs and bones.

But this work is not only about radiation measurements, it is also about bearing witness.

We are here in solidarity with Marshallese communities who continue to live with the consequences of decisions made decades ago, without their consent and far from the public eye.

Stop 1: Enewetak Atoll — the dome that shouldn’t exist

At the far western edge of the Marshall Islands is Enewetak. The name might not ring a bell for many, but this atoll was the site of 43 US nuclear detonations. Today, it houses what may be one of the most radioactive places in the world — the Runit Dome.

Once a tropical paradise thick with coconut palms, Runit Island is capped by a massive concrete structure the size of a football field. Under this dome — cracked, weather-worn, and only 46 centimetres thick in some places — lies 85,000 cubic metres of radioactive waste. These substances are not only confined to the crater — they are also found across the island’s soil, rendering Runit Island uninhabitable for all time.

The contrast between what it once was and what it has become is staggering. We took samples near the dome’s base, where rising sea levels now routinely flood the area.

We collected coconut from the island, which will be processed and prepared in the Rainbow Warrior’s onboard laboratory. Crops such as coconut are a known vector for radioactive isotope transfer, and tracking levels in food sources is essential for understanding long-term environmental and health risks.

The local consequences of this simple fact are deeply unjust. While some atolls in the Marshall Islands can harvest and sell coconut products, the people of Enewetak are prohibited from doing so because of radioactive contamination.

They have lost not only their land and safety but also their ability to sustain themselves economically. The radioactive legacy has robbed them of income and opportunity.

One of the most alarming details about this dome is that there is no lining beneath the structure — it is in direct contact with the environment, while containing some of the most hazardous long-lived substances ever to exist on planet Earth. It was never built to withstand flooding, sea level rise, and climate change.

The scientific questions are urgent: how much of this material is already leaking into the lagoon? What are the exposure risks to marine ecosystems and local communities?

We are here to help answer questions with new, independent data, but still, being in the craters and walking on this ground where nuclear Armageddon was unleashed is an emotional and surreal journey.

Stop 2: Bikini — a nuclear catastrophe, labelled ‘for the good of mankind’

Unlike Chernobyl or Fukushima, where communities were devastated by catastrophic accidents, Bikini tells a different story. This was not an accident.

The nuclear destruction of Bikini was deliberate, calculated, and executed with full knowledge that entire ways of life were going to be destroyed.

Bikini Atoll is incredibly beautiful and would look idyllic on any postcard. But we know what lies beneath: the site of 23 nuclear detonations, including Castle Bravo, the largest ever nuclear weapons test conducted by the United States.

Castle Bravo alone released more than 1000 times the explosive yield of the Hiroshima bomb. The radioactive fallout massively contaminated nearby islands and their populations, together with thousands of US military personnel.

Bikini’s former residents were forcibly relocated in 1946 before nuclear testing began, with promises of a safe return. But the atoll is still uninhabited, and most of the new generations of Bikinians have never seen their home island.

As we stood deep in the forest next to a massive concrete blast bunker, reality hit hard — behind its narrow lead-glass viewing window, US military personnel once watched the evaporation of Bikini lagoon.

On our visit, we noticed there’s a spectral quality to Bikini. The homes of the Bikini islanders are long gone. In its place now stand a scattering of buildings left by the US Department of Energy: rusting canteens, rotting offices, sleeping quarters with peeling walls, and traces of the scientific experiments conducted here after the bombs fell.

On dusty desks, we found radiation reports, notes detailing crop trials, and a notebook meticulously tracking the application of potassium to test plots of corn, alfalfa, lime, and native foods like coconut, pandanus, and banana. The potassium was intended to block the uptake of caesium-137, a radioactive isotope, by plant roots.

The logic was simple: if these crops could be decontaminated, perhaps one day Bikini could be repopulated.

We collected samples of coconuts and soil — key indicators of internal exposure risk if humans were to return. Bikini raises a stark question: What does “safe” mean, and who gets to decide?

The US declared parts of Bikini habitable in 1970, only to evacuate people again eight years later after resettled families suffered from radiation exposure. The science is not abstract here. It is personal. It is human. It has real consequences.

Stop 3: Rongelap — setting for Project 4.1

The Rainbow Warrior arrived at the eastern side of Rongelap atoll, anchoring one mile from the centre of Rongelap Island, the church spire and roofs of “new” buildings reflecting the bright sun.

n 1954, fallout from the Castle Bravo nuclear detonation on Bikini blanketed this atoll in radioactive ash — fine, white powder that children played in, thinking it was snow. The US government waited three days to evacuate residents, despite knowing the risks. The US government declared it safe to return to Rongelap in 1957 — but it was a severely contaminated environment. The very significant radiation exposure to the Rongelap population caused severe health impacts: thyroid cancers, birth defects such as “jellyfish babies”, miscarriages, and much more.

In 1985, after a request to the US government to evacuate was dismissed, the Rongelap community asked Greenpeace to help relocate them from their ancestral lands. Using the first Rainbow Warrior, and over a period of 10 days and four trips, 350 residents collectively dismantled their homes, bringing everything with them — including livestock, and 100 metric tons of building material — where they resettled on the islands of Mejatto and Ebeye on Kwajalein atoll.

It is a part of history that lives on in the minds of the Marshallese people we meet in this ship voyage — in the gratitude they still express, the pride in keeping the fight for justice, and in the pain of still not having a permanent, safe home.

Now, once again, we are standing on their island of Rongelap, walking past abandoned buildings and rusting equipment, some of it dating from the 1980s and 1990s — a period when the US Department of Energy launched a push to encourage resettlement declaring that the island was safe — a declaration that this time, the population welcomed with mistrust, not having access to independent scientific data and remembering the deceitful relocation of some decades before.

Here, once again, we sample soil and fruits that could become food if people came back. It is essential to understand ongoing risks — especially for communities considering whether and how to return.

This is not the end. It is just the beginning

Our scientific mission is to take measurements, collect samples, and document contamination. But that’s not all we’re bringing back.

We carry with us the voices of the Marshallese who survived these tests and are still living with their consequences. We carry images of graves swallowed by tides near Runit Dome, stories of entire cultures displaced from their homelands, and measurements of radiation showing contamination still persists after many decades.

There are 9700 nuclear warheads still held by military powers around the world – mostly in the United States and Russian arsenals. The Marshall Islands was one of the first nations to suffer the consequences of nuclear weapons — and the legacy persists today.

We didn’t come to speak for the Marshallese. We came to listen, to bear witness, and to support their demand for justice. We plan to return next year, to follow up on our research and to make results available to the people of the Marshall Islands.

And we will keep telling these stories — until justice is more than just a word.

Kommol Tata (“thank you” in the beautiful Marshallese language) for following our journey.

Shaun Burnie is a senior nuclear specialist at Greenpeace Ukraine and was part of the Rainbow Warrior team in the Marshall Islands. This article was first published by Greenpeace Aotearoa and is republished with permission.

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

“People definitely noticed that they were able to get out onto the lake less,” said Liu, who’s now a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon. “However, they didn’t necessarily connect this trend to climate change.”

When the university’s alumni magazine featured her research in the winter of 2021, the comment section was filled with wistful memories of skating under the moonlight, pushing past the crowds to play hockey, and drinking hot chocolate by the frozen lakeside. Liu began to wonder: Could this kind of direct, visceral loss make climate change feel more vivid to people?

That question sparked her study, recently published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, that came to a striking conclusion: Boiling down data into a binary — a stark this or that — can help break through apathy about climate change. 

Liu worked with professors at Princeton to test how people responded to two different graphs. One showed winter temperatures of a fictional town gradually rising over time, while the other presented the same warming trend in a black-or-white manner: the lake either froze in any given year, or it didn’t. People who saw the second chart perceived climate change as causing more abrupt changes. 

Both charts represent the same amount of winter warming, just presented differently. “We are not hoodwinking people,” said Rachit Dubey, a co-author of the study who’s now a professor of communications at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We are literally showing them the same trend, just in different formats.”

The strong reaction to the black-or-white presentation held true over a series of experiments, even one where a trend line was placed over the scatter plot of temperatures to make the warming super clear. To ensure the results translated to the wider world, researchers also looked at how people reacted to actual data of lake freezing and temperature increases from towns in the U.S. and Europe and got the same results. “Psychology effects are sometimes fickle,” said Dubey, who’s researched cognitive science for a decade. “This is one of the cleanest effects we’ve ever seen.”

The findings suggest that if scientists want to increase public urgency around climate change, they should highlight clear, concrete shifts instead of slow-moving trends. That could include the loss of white Christmases or outdoor summer activities canceled because of wildfire smoke.

The metaphor of the “boiling frog” is sometimes used to describe how people fail to react to gradual changes in the climate. The idea is that if you put a frog in boiling water, it’ll immediately jump out. But if you put it in room-temperature water and slowly turn up the heat, the frog won’t realize the danger and will be boiled alive. Although real frogs are actually smart enough to hop out when water gets dangerously hot, the metaphor fits humans when it comes to climate change: People mentally adjust to temperature increases “disturbingly fast,” according to the study. Previous research has found that as the climate warms, people adjust their sense of what seems normal based on weather from the past two to eight years, a phenomenon known as “shifting baselines.”

Many scientists have held out hope that governments would finally act to cut fossil fuel emissions when a particularly devastating hurricane, heat wave, or flood made the effects of climate change undeniable. Last year, weather-related disasters caused more than $180 billion in damages in the United States, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Yet climate change still hasn’t cracked into the ranks of what Americans say they’re most concerned about. Ahead of the 2024 election, a Gallup poll found that climate change ranked near the bottom of the list of 22 issues, well below the economy, terrorism, or health care.

“Tragedies will keep on escalating in the background, but it’s not happening fast enough for us to think, ‘OK, this is it. We need to just decisively stop everything we’re doing,’” Dubey said. “I think that’s an even bigger danger that we’re facing with climate change — that it never becomes the problem.” 

One graph about lake-freezing data isn’t going to lead people to rank climate change as their top issue, of course. But Dubey thinks if people see compelling visuals more often, it could help keep the problem of climate change from fading out of their minds. Dubey’s study shows that there’s a cognitive reason why binary data resonates with people: It creates a mental illusion that the situation has changed suddenly, when it has actually changed gradually. 

The importance of using data visualizations to get an idea across is often overlooked, according to Jennifer Marlon, a senior research scientist at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. “We know that [data visuals] can be powerful tools for communication, but they often miss their mark, partly because most scientists aren’t trained, despite the availability of many excellent resources,” Marlon said in an email. She said that binary visuals could be used to convey the urgency of addressing climate change, though using them tends to mean losing complexity and richness from the data.

The study’s findings don’t just apply to freezing lakes — global temperatures can be communicated in more stark ways. The popular “climate stripes” visual developed by Ed Hawkins, a professor at the University of Reading in the U.K., illustrates temperature changes with vertical bands of lines, where blue indicates cold years and red indicates warm ones. As the chart switches from deep blue to deep red, it communicates the warming trend on a more visceral level. The stripes simplify a gradual trend into a binary-style image that makes it easier to grasp. “Our study explains why the climate stripes is actually so popular and resonates with people,” Dubey said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Scientists just found a way to break through climate apathy on May 5, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Kate Yoder.

Thich Minh Tue, who departed on a multi-nation journey from Vietnam four months ago, was stopped in his tracks by Sri Lankan police last week who cited a letter from Vietnam’s state-sanctioned Buddhist sangha – or Buddhist religious association – describing him as posing a threat to public order.

His group, which also includes 10 volunteers, has since been provided temporary accommodation at a temple. They were given permission only to meet and receive food from visitors and well-wishers outside the temple, northeast of the capital Colombo, but were barred from continuing their hike, the source, who requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive issue, told RFA.

When it became clear that the group would not be allowed to continue their walk in Sri Lanka, the group decided to immediately leave for India instead, he said.

“They don’t give us a green light to resume walking … on the road,” said Phuoc Nghiem, a close associate of Thich Minh Tue, during a YouTube livestream on Wednesday.

The source said Thich Minh Tue is expected to arrive in India’s capital New Delhi by flight from Sri Lanka at around 5:00 a.m. on Friday. From there, he is expected to fly to Bodh Gaya, the place where Buddha attained enlightenment, and will continue his walk there.

(RFA)

Thich Minh Tue became an unlikely internet sensation last year in Vietnam where his simple lifestyle has struck a chord. He undertook barefoot walks that went viral and well-wishers came out in droves. But authorities treat him with some suspicion as he is not officially recognized as a monk.

Last December, he set out from his homeland on what was meant to be a 2,700-kilometer (1,600 mile) journey by foot through several Asian nations.

Since leaving Vietnam, he and his companions have traveled through Laos and Thailand, and then took a detour to Malaysia after he ran into problems trying to enter Myanmar. He had intended to cross that war-torn country to get to India. After Malaysia he went to Sri Lanka and had intended to walk to the north of the South Asian nation and take a ferry to India.

A copy of the letter from a representative of the Vietnamese sangha that was cited by Sri Lankan police has been viewed by RFA. It accuses Thich Minh Tue of impersonating a Buddhist monk, attempting to establish a dissident sect, and posing threat to public order and national reputation.

Edited by Tenzin Pema and Mat Pennington.

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

Poly Sam was 11-years-old when the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh on the same day as the traditional Khmer New Year holiday.

“It was meant to be a day of celebration, but it turned out to be a very, very bad day, and the beginning of a very bad time for many Cambodians,” he recalled recently.

April 17 marks the 50th anniversary of the Khmer Rouge’s victorious arrival in Cambodia’s capital. For Cambodians, it’s a day remembered for its horrific beginnings.

Within a handful of years, as many as 2 million people would be dead at the hands of the Pol Pot-led regime.

“You know, for me, there’s a lot of negative memories,” Poly said. “But it’s a memory that I can share with people because we don’t want anyone to go through this again.”

From Khmer Rouge survivor to a Thai refugee camp, and later as a teenage migrant to the United States, Poly encountered more than most people over five decades.

He witnessed unspeakable acts and extreme deprivation. And he survived when so many others did not.

“I’m lucky,” he said. “A lucky son of bitch.”

Before the Khmer Rouge, Poly’s brother, Sien Sam, was a school teacher who later became a soldier for Cambodia’s short-lived Lon Nol regime – the military dictatorship that was ousted in 1975.

Sien was one of the first to die as the Khmer Rouge forced everyone to walk out of Phnom Penh and into the countryside, Poly said.

Outside of the city, Khmer Rouge soldiers marched Sien away to be “re-educated.” Only later as the “disappeared” grew in number, never to return, did people begin to understand what was happening, according to Poly.

“He was probably killed in the first or second week. But we don’t know; nothing could be verified,” he said. “Until this day, we still don’t know where he died.”

(Courtesy Poly Sam)

Tricks for survival

Today, Poly lists why he is lucky: Lucky to have only lost four or five members of his family. Lucky to have never been tortured. And lucky to have endured.

“It’s very fortunate for a kid. You are in the field all the time, so you are able to scavenge a lot of things,” he said.

“You learn a lot of tricks on how to survive. For example, you catch the fish, you wrap the leaf around the fish, and you put it under the ground and you burn a fire on top. When nobody is around you pull it out and eat it.”

Surviving the Khmer Rouge was one thing, but escaping from Cambodia to Thailand was another.

He begged his mother to allow him to try to flee his country. She had lost her oldest son to the Khmer Rouge. Her two other sons were already living in the United States, and now she feared she was about to lose her last born.

(DC-CAM)

Poly risked his life to flee the country, carefully making his way across Cambodia from one internally displaced person’s camp to another.

The last hurdle was the greatest: sneaking into a refugee camp on the Thai border that was tightly controlled by Thai soldiers authorized to shoot anyone on site.

The only way in was under the cover of darkness. Poly described his most dangerous moment and the lengths and depths of what it took to survive as a teenager.

The first hurdle was slipping under the barbed wire fences without being noticed by the Thai soldiers. Once inside the camp, the next challenge was to hide out of sight until United Nations workers took over control of the camp during daylight hours.

Poly hid in the one spot that no one would look: the communal pit latrine. He threw himself into it and waited for hours until it was safe to emerge.

‘Nobody can undo it’

After four years in the camp. Poly was brought to the United States in 1983. More than 100,000 Cambodians settled in the United States between 1979 and 1990. A total of more than 1 million fled Cambodia during the years of civil war and turmoil.

An American family informally adopted Poly, sent him to high school, and later helped him obtain a social worker degree at college.

He worked at that for seven years before joining Radio Free Asia’s Khmer service in 1997. He now leads the Khmer service as its director.

Can he forgive?

“Whatever happened in the past, nobody can undo it. We have to look to the future, so I will forgive,” he said.

“I have forgiven the Khmer Rouge. Some of them were victims themselves. So there’s no need to hold grudges against them.”

But he says it is a different story for former Khmer Rouge cadres who continue to hold and abuse power in Cambodia today: “It is very difficult to forgive them.”

Edited by Matt Reed

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Ginny Stein for RFA.

Federico Avalos is an Argentine poet. 

But he does not write the words. He recites them.

He walks the white sands, weaving through the sunbathing crowd that lays near the turquoise waters of the Atacama ocean.

“Would you like to roll the literary dice?” Federico asks.

He wears a large smile, behind a salt and pepper beard, a brimmed hat and a blue flowered shirt. 

He holds a large homemade die in his hand, numbers written on all sides. 

He hands it to a little girl who laughs and tosses it into the air. It lands on the number 6.

He opens a book with a black and white cover. The drawing of a silhouette of people marching. The words “Nunca Mas,” “Never Again,” written across it. 

He begins:

“If you can keep your head when all about you
   Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
   But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
   Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating…

These are the opening lines to Rudyard Kipling’s “If,” a poem about believing and hope. And making the impossible into reality.

It is cliche, but time stands still. The seagulls stop crying. The lapping of the water at the shore ceases. A boy kicks a soccer ball and it’s frozen in midair. The laughter from a group nearby pauses. 

All that is left are the words. And the images and ideas painted by Federico’s rich, deep voice. 

Federico’s arms move to the cadence of each line, as though he’s reciting to a crowd of thousands on a Victorian stage somewhere long ago, and far away.

This is both Federico’s job and his activism. A theatrical intervention. A temporal break from the digital monotony: The selfies, the tweets, the posts, the likes, the comments and the follows.

This is Federico’s resistance. Standing up to the cyber mayhem. 

Breathing art into the void. Magic. Reflection.

“I didn’t used to read much poetry,” he says. “I had a hard time. I was too distracted. In poetry, you can’t be thinking about something else. It needs your undivided attention.” 

“That’s what I like about it,” he says.

Not every poet is right for this occasion. Federico carries a book of poems by Jorge Luis Borges. But Borges is too heady. Too intellectual. Too hard to decipher under the hot sun after a glass, or two, of Chilean Pisco Sour, or while building a sand castle with your daughter.

Uruguayan great Mario Benedetti is more palatable. But there are so many. Ruben Dario, Pablo Neruda, James Joyce, Joao Pessoa.

Federico’s repertoire shifts like the tides. Rising and falling. Growing and changing. He’s adding a collection of women authors.

Federico used to work in education. That was before his family planned a road trip, and the car broke down in another country, far from home. And they ran out of money to fix it. And now, they’re camped on the edge of town and he had to find a way to survive and he began reciting poems.

“I don’t usually have that many good ideas,” he says, tossing his die in the air. “This was one of them.”

“Would you like to roll the literary dice?” He asks.

###

Thanks for listening. I’m your host, Michael Fox.

This is episode 21 of Stories of Resistance, a new podcast series co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Each week, I bring you stories of resistance and hope like this. Inspiration for dark times.

April is National Poetry Month, in the United States. I am taking advantage of it to feature three stories of resistance about poets and authors this week.

If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment or leave a review. You can support my work and find exclusive pictures and background information on my Patreon: patreon.com/mfox.

As always, thanks for listening. See you next time.

This is episode 21 of Stories of Resistance — a podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange’s Human Rights in Action program. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

April is poetry month in the United States. We are taking advantage to feature three stories about poetry and writing this week. This is the second of those three.

If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment, or leave a review. You can also follow Michael’s reporting and support at www.patreon.com/mfox.
Written and produced by Michael Fox.

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

In the town of Vallenar, in Chile’s Southern Atacama region, a group of families live in rows of striped circus tents, on the edge of the highway under a never-ending heavy sun.

Theirs is a life on the edge. Always on the edge.

They are Chilean — their ancestors arrived here more than a century ago. 

And they are foreigners.

Somewhere in between. Always in between.

“Where are you from?” we ask.

“From everywhere,” they respond, in Spanish accents that carry in their cadence the spray of far away oceans and the chill of distant mountains.

When they are alone, they speak their own language, Romani.

A language carried with them, when they came with their belongings and their memories.

Some of their people have left behind their ancestor’s ways.

But not them. They are Roma and they will not give in.

In the day, the men work, and the women read palms, sell trinkets and give blessings.

Their young children are with them, in the shade on the edge of a busy gas station parking lot. One of the few for a hundred miles.

The locals walk quickly past. They try to avert their eyes, as if these women in colorful dresses, and their children, were as bright as the sun, or as dark as the night. Or a plague. Or a virus that might catch them up and carry them away, or their kids.

The locals grip their children’s hands. They hold their pocketbooks close. They skitter to their cars, locks their doors and drive away.

They are afraid.

They should be. These women carry the strength of generations fighting to survive. When they look at you, their eyes do not waver. They stare into your soul.

They carry weight. They carry truth, though they keep it hidden. Their gestures are smooth and defiant.

They speak magic passed down from parents and grandparents.

Real magic. Magic for the receiver. And magic that will also line their pockets.

They live in a world on the borders of society. On the edge. Their homes are malleable, like their lives — made of tarp and fabric.

They have to be. It is their means of survival. To dance on the edge of the acceptable. To give and to take. To defend their own. To hold on to their culture, their language, and their way of life.

To resist.

This is the 17th episode of Stories of Resistance. This project is co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Each week, we bring you stories of resistance and hope like this. Inspiration for dark times.

Tomorrow, April 8, is the International Day of the Roma, or Romani, people. It takes place each year to focus attention on the discrimination and marginalization of Roma communities across the world.

Stories of Resistance is written and produced by Michael Fox. You can support his work and see exclusive pictures of many of these stories on his patron. 

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

While I have tried to limit them as much as possible, these reviews may contain spoilers.

The East, directed by Zal Batmanglij; starring Brit Marling, Alexander Skarsgård, and Elliot Page (2013)

The East tells the gripping story of Jane, a young woman (played by Brit Marling) who is employed at a private intelligence company, and who is awarded the sought-after assignment of infiltrating a radical environmental organization called The East. Like many Americans who have “good jobs,” Jane is zealously devoted to her career and devoid of a moral compass. Her unbridled ambition is on full display when Jane is told by her boyfriend that she’s still a winner to him if she doesn’t get this coveted commission (the details of which are unbeknownst to him), to which she responds, “I’m only a winner if I get it.”

When Jane infiltrates the group, which she is able to do because of her youth and because of certain strategies she employs to gain the group’s trust, she realizes that she is unable to intellectually counter any of their arguments regarding ecological degradation caused by unfettered corporate power. Indeed, Jane is a conformist, and like many highly credentialed Americans has never learned to think for herself. This raises the possibility of her potentially becoming a double agent.

The environmentalists are exquisitely cast, and the leaders of the group possess remarkable depth. They are also well educated, having come from privileged families and having attended elite schools. Their dilemma is that they have managed to retain firm moral convictions making them unemployable.

In a more democratic and civilized society, the leaders of The East would likely hold positions of power and influence. Instead, they live as outcasts. The time Jane spends with the radical collective forces her to reexamine her preconceived understanding of success. Is true success possible without principles and ideals?

The two worlds Jane navigates, the ruthless corporate world of violence and skulduggery and an America enraged at corporate malfeasance, shake the foundation of her identity and sense of reality. The East’s methods for combatting corporate villainy – actions they call “jams” – are extreme and of dubious legality, further straining the protagonist’s sense of right and wrong. What happens to the rule of law when what is legal and what is moral no longer coincide?

Having never spent time around articulate people who value honor over money (in stark contrast with her pitiless boss and hard-driving colleagues), the time Jane spends with the collective catapults her into an existential crisis where her value system is upended and she is forced to make extremely difficult and life-altering choices.

Wendy and Lucy, directed by Kelly Reichardt; starring Michelle Williams (2008)

No film in the post-New Deal era embodies the tragic destruction of the American working class more than Wendy and Lucy. In this harsh world millions have been left without jobs, health insurance; or in the case of the film’s protagonist, Wendy, even a family member to crash with.

Caught up in a tempest of economic devastation, Wendy is left with nothing except a few hundred dollars, a jalopy which serves both as makeshift home and means of transportation, and her beloved dog Lucy – her only companion.

The grave circumstances of her situation are tragic and soulful cinema viewers will all feel a deep sense of compassion for her increasingly dire situation. As she passes through flyover country the lack of communities and economic life almost resemble that of a post-apocalyptic tale. Deindustrialization, the outsourcing and offshoring of countless jobs, and the financialization of the economy have cut millions of Americans adrift, of whom our suffering protagonist is one.

Wendy and Lucy is the antithesis of mass market Hollywood cinema where everyone seems to magically have friends and money. Wendy’s brother-in-law and an elderly security guard she meets feel pity for her plight, yet they are also “strapped” and are in no meaningful position to assist her.

How many trillions of dollars have been spent on wars, cannibalistic proxies, and on maintaining hundreds of bases around the world while destitute Americans drown in a sea of oligarchic avarice?

Having heard that there is work there, Wendy is headed to Alaska. Yet when her car breaks down and events threaten to separate her from Lucy her poverty, loneliness, and despair become almost unbearable. Instead of job opportunities, friends, and family she is enveloped by a shroud of silence.

Margin Call, directed by JC Chandor; starring Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Demi Moore and Zachary Quinto (2011)

Perhaps the best movie ever made about Wall Street, Margin Call tells the story of the financial crash of 2008. The story, which unfolds over a 24-hour period, revolves around a powerful Wall Street investment bank, and one of the key motifs of the film is not only how these demonic corporations treat their fellow Americans, but how they treat their own workers.

When an entry-level analyst is covertly handed a flash drive by his recently fired boss, he discovers that the firm is in danger of going bankrupt due to having invested too heavily in unstable mortgage-backed securities whose value is rapidly deteriorating.  He alerts his superiors and senior management calls an emergency meeting in the dead of night. The firm’s CEO (brought to life in an unforgettable performance by Jeremy Irons), whose helicopter makes a dramatic landing on the roof of their skyscraper, reminds everyone that his motto is, “Be first, be smarter, or cheat.” Only concerned with self-preservation, he is prepared to do virtually anything to prevent the firm from going under, and this rabid tribalism supersedes loyalty to one’s country and even to the financial services industry itself whose fellow vultures they are preparing to swindle.

The firm is infested with sociopaths like New York City garbage is crawling with cockroaches. At one point a young analyst is found crying in the bathroom after being notified that he will shortly be let go, and one of the senior managers indifferently takes note of his distress while simultaneously shaving with a cold-blooded hauteur and likely pondering ways to unload “The biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled in the history of capitalism” (to quote their CEO). Here, apart from one’s ability to generate significant profits, human life has no value. There are only “winners” and “losers,” and the “winners” are the ones that continue to make the big bucks.

No less disturbing are instances where employees are not allowed to quit, such as one Kafkaesque situation where the firm sends its people scouring the bars of lower Manhattan to try and find the recently laid off and now distraught head of risk management, who they learn has important insights into how they ended up in this disastrous situation in the first place, yet who was cruelly fired after nineteen years of devoted service with even his phone being shut off. Despite his wife informing the firm that her husband doesn’t want to speak to them, he is eventually located and forced to return to work when threats are made to revoke his severance package.

There is a scene where one of the senior managers played by Kevin Spacey comes out of his office applauding after a huge number of the firm’s employees were just laid off. Participating in this death cult ritual, his obsequious subordinates mimic his behavior. Speaking of those recently sacked, he says, “They were good at their jobs. You were better.”

Spacey’s character is later treated in a similar fashion when he returns to his former home to bury his dog (whom he evidently cares for far more than the small business owners undoubtedly run into the ground by his firm), only to be told by his ex-wife that, “You don’t live here anymore,” and that, “The alarm is on so don’t try to break in.” In a mirroring of how he has long treated his employees, his wife has replaced him with another husband.

Margin Call vividly portrays a diseased America that is at war with the world and at war with itself.

Martha Marcy May Marlene, directed by Sean Durkin; starring Elizabeth Olsen, Sarah Paulson, and John Hawkes (2011)

Dying societies invariably become a field of lost souls, and no soul is more lost than the protagonist of Martha Marcy May Marlene, a profound examination into how a disintegrating society can facilitate the rise of cults that prey on, ensnare, and entrap vulnerable human beings. The lead character, Martha, is renamed Marcy May by the cult leader (who is reminiscent of Charles Manson), while Marlene is the name female cult members use when answering the phone and following a script designed to attract new followers.

In a neoliberal America where people increasingly no longer identify themselves as Americans but by their profession, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, Martha no longer has any idea who she is, thereby offering easy prey to the cult. All the ties that may have once bound her to an American history or a personal history have been severed, making her as impressionable as a small child.

Part of the cult’s seductive nature is how it makes use of a vaguely anti-capitalist language. However, its raison d’être is ultimately to annihilate all vestiges of privacy and individuality, resulting in a violent and authoritarian existence for the cult’s members who are taught to share their clothes, their beds; and ultimately, their bodies. The protagonist has many names, and yet no name. For her lack of a cultural value system has dissolved her sense of self.

Initiation into the cult is done by drugging a young woman so that she can be raped by the cult leader, yet the protagonist is told that this is actually a good thing, revealing a Tartarean world where ethics are amorphous and reality is something that can be invented. (To quote Hamlet: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”)

Martha represents millions of young Americans who grow up without a loving family, a real community, and are denied a proper humanities education. Indeed, she is a shell of a human being, a cultural amnesiac devoid of reason, a sense of the past, and a sense of the sacred.

The only place Martha can seek refuge is with her sister and brother-in-law, shallow people concerned only with money and accumulating possessions. Their crass consumerism and indifference to serious socio-economic problems is cultlike in and of itself, offering Martha no clear way to escape from this existential crisis she finds herself in.

The harrowing tale unfolds in a disjointed and fragmented manner, which mirrors the fragmented psyche of the suffering protagonist – and in many ways, of American society itself.

The Girlfriend Experience, directed by Steven Soderbergh; starring Sasha Grey, Chris Santos, and Philip Eytan (2009) 

Steven Soderbergh’s thought-provoking film The Girlfriend Experience (not to be confused with the mini-series) takes us on a journey through another dark circle of this second Gilded Age, where sexual relations have been rendered largely transactional and thereby stripped of tenderness and romance.

Chelsea (Sasha Grey), the film’s protagonist, works as a high-end prostitute for an affluent Manhattan clientele, while her boyfriend is employed as an honest athletic trainer earning a small fraction of what she makes – an all too common paradox, yet one which also serves as a metaphor for how incomes are typically doled out in 21st century America.

In this nihilistic culture that places profit-making over all other considerations, the protagonist has come to believe that one’s sex partner is no different than one’s tennis partner, and that her life as a prostitute for jet-setters will lead to freedom and liberation.

Chelsea worships wealth and will do anything to be with those who have it. In a country where the masses are saddled with trillions of dollars of household debt while a small group of plutocrats enjoy unbridled power, there is virtually no moral barrier she won’t violate in order to spend time with the mega rich, even if it means becoming their plaything and forgoing all traces of dignity.

The film raises disturbing questions about the nature of a hyper-privatized America and its impact on social relations. If a society ceases to hold anything sacred, is it still a real society? Is it possible to retain one’s humanity when one regards people as mere commodities to be used and then discarded? Due to its adoration of materialism and emotionless sexual encounters, is contemporary Western feminism compatible with love?

Chelsea’s hapless and no less delusional boyfriend initially approves of her degenerate lifestyle, and only insists that she doesn’t go on any trips with her “clients,” which, during one heated quarrel, she condemns as “selfish.” Like his wayward would-be lover, he has been taught by the media and education system that his girlfriend can work as a prostitute and that this somehow won’t inevitably destroy their relationship.

The Girlfriend Experience depicts a dystopia where people are incessantly using one another for material gain and real communities have been eradicated under a deathly hand of relentless exploitation, job destruction, and hyper-consumerism which for many Americans have swept away all traces of trust and love.

Michael Clayton, directed by Tony Gilroy; starring Tom Wilkinson, Tilda Swinton, and George Clooney (2007)

There is a riveting scene in Michael Clayton that unfolds in a lower Manhattan neighborhood I know all too well, where Arthur Edens (in a role masterfully executed by Tom Wilkinson), one of his law firm’s lead litigators, is berating Michael Clayton (George Clooney) for continuing to blindly follow their firm’s orders, to which a defensive Clayton says, “I’m not the enemy.” To which Arthur replies, “Then who are you?” Michael Clayton is a story about a society drowning in corporate savagery and two men who are consciously or subconsciously trying to reclaim their humanity.

Arthur represents U-North, an agricultural corporation that has polluted the environment with a carcinogenic weed killer. The problem – at least for his law firm and the corporation they are defending – is that Arthur knows that he has squandered years of his life defending diabolical corporations and, wracked with guilt, has decided that he is tired of fighting on the side of these dastardly forces. To the amazement of his colleagues, one day he suddenly snaps and goes rogue, turning on U-North, which his law firm has been hired to defend in a multibillion dollar class action lawsuit. While initially exasperated, Michael can’t help but be influenced by his friend’s strange behavior, and his amoral ethos is challenged.

Of great significance are the unhappy private lives of Michael, Arthur (who lives alone in an enormous dimly lit Soho loft), and the loyal corporate soldier Karen Crowder (performed chillingly by Tilda Swinton), all of whom make significant six figure salaries yet live lonely lives devoid of meaning and a sense of purpose.

Michael Clayton underscores the catch-22 that many Americans find themselves in, where those who are able to break out of the ignominious cycle of debt slavery and modern serfdom often do so by selling their souls and relinquishing all semblance of morality and freedom of speech, while many of those who have “made it” don’t have time to think about anything other than their extremely demanding jobs which devour every waking moment. Leaving this information bubble by exploring alternative news sources in an attempt to search for answers to these troubling times can lead to thinking, thinking can lead to posting heretical thoughts, which in turn can only lead to being ostracized from elite circles, unemployment, and death – professional, or even literal. And so it pays not to think.

In one haunting scene Clayton is driving in a rural area in upstate New York when he suddenly exits his car to approach three mysterious and strikingly beautiful horses. Like the inversion of the three witches in Macbeth, the animals seem to be calling on him to abandon a life of ambition and to return to a simpler and more humane existence devoid of materialism, dissembling, and relentless competition. The mysticism and primordial timelessness of this moment mesmerize the mind of a man who has lost his way in a brutal world, and serve as a clarion call to reclaim a life that is more dignified and honorable before it is too late.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by David Penner.

The move offers a rare glimpse into the running of China’s “grid” system -- the close-up monitoring of every aspect of its citizens' lives to mediate disputes, influence public opinion and minimize protests and dissent.

“We in Beibei district have fully pressed the fast-forward button to promote the construction of ... a digital Chongqing [and] deepened networked governance ... to build a smart grassroots governance system,” Lin Xuyang, delegate to the National People’s Congress and secretary of Chongqing’s Beibei District Committee, told delegates in Beijing on March 10.

The annual gathering of delegates from across the country ends Tuesday.

“There is certainly no single way to govern, but precision is definitely one of them,” Lin said, likening the local grid monitoring and surveillance systems to “fine needlework.”

“The key to governance lies in people,” he said, adding that interconnected grids have now been extended from district to residential compound level, employing a “grid leader,” full- and part-time grid members to coordinate “more than 10,000 party member volunteers” and other volunteers.

Monitors report on residents' activities

In July 2021, China empowered local officials at township, village and neighborhood level to enforce the law, as well as operating a vastly extended “grid management” system of social control in rural and urban areas alike.

According to directives sent out in 2018, the grid system carves up neighborhoods into a grid pattern with 15-20 households per square. Each grid has a monitor who reports back on residents' affairs to local committees.

(Thomas Peter/REUTERS)

China’s “red armband” brigade of state-sanctioned busybodies have been dubbed the biggest intelligence network on the planet by social media users, and have supplied information that has also led police to crack major organized crime, according to state media.

Neighborhood committees in China have long been tasked with monitoring the activities of ordinary people in urban areas, while its grid management system turbo-charges the capacity of officials even in rural areas to monitor what local people are doing, saying and thinking.

These local forms of surveillance and social control are known in Chinese political jargon as the “Fengqiao Experience.”

They have also been used to target potential trouble before it emerges, with officials told to use big data to pinpoint people with marital difficulties or other grievances in the wake of the Zhuhai car killings.

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A former employee of a residential compound in Chongqing who gave only the surname Yang for fear of reprisals said the cameras are mostly used to monitor the activities of local residents.

“This kind of surveillance has existed for a long time -- its official name is SkyNet,” Yang said. “In rural areas, it’s known as Project Xueliang.”

“Its purpose is to monitor what’s going on in every corner of a district,” Yang said. “People’s every move takes place under their watchful gaze.”

Aim of reducing costs

A resident of the central province of Henan who gave only the nickname Lao Wan said local governments are struggling to afford the staffing costs of the “grid” surveillance system, so are installing automated, digital equipment to monitor people instead.

“There are two main reasons for [these cameras],” Lao Wan said. “One is they can’t afford to pay their grid workers, and on the other, they want to reduce administrative costs.”

“That’s why they have mobilized civilians and volunteers to do this work, such as older men and women who have nothing else to do,” he said. “They seem to be just being friendly towards their neighbors, but in fact, they’re monitoring your every word and deed.”

The revelations about Beibei district come after the ruling Communist Party’s official newspaper, the People’s Daily, reported that authorities in the southeastern port city of Xiamen have set up “neighborhood supervision” stations in 11 streets and 144 residential communities in Tong’an district, in a bid to improve “grassroots governance.”

Legal affairs commentator Lu Chenyuan said local governments are struggling to pay wages, so are coordinating older people as volunteers to implement the government’s “stability maintenance” system.

“It’s a way to reduce administrative expenditures and maintain stability amid a sharp fall in tax revenues,” Lu said.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

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

It happens twice a year, every year. I complain about it — often to you! — twice a year, every year. It’s the semi-annual switch between “Standard Time” and “Daylight Saving Time.”

Fall back! Spring forward! In most of the United States, we just did the latter. Again.

The clock on my desktop computer and the clock in my brain are announcing two different times, an hour apart, and my body just doesn’t want to accept the differential.

As usual, that makes me grumpy.  But I’m one of those lucky people for whom grumpiness is pretty much the maximum negative side effect.

I work from home, and  in theory I set my own schedule. In theory, I could just ignore the fake time change. The various things I do would look like they were an hour “off”  to the world, if the world watched me closely, but it doesn’t watch me closely and there aren’t any damsels in distress, tied to tracks and counting down to to meetings with trains that I mustn’t be late to interrupt or anything like that.

In fact, ignoring the switches between “Standard Time” and “Daylight Saving Time” would impact even my boring, semi-house-bound, life.

I’m married. I’ve got kids. I’ve got friends and co-workers. I occasionally, grudgingly, shop offline at physical stores with set hours of business. I’ve even been known to visit a bar now and again. Ignoring the fake time changes would put me out of phase with all those people and things. It would disrupt morning coffee with my wife, screw up planned interactions with my kids, get me to stores, happy hours, and medical appointments early or late, etc. So I grimace and comply.

Others have it far worse. Every year, tens of commuters die in excess car accidents because the fake time changes throw people off their bodies’ preferred adherence to circadian rhythms. Others show up late or tired, to work, reducing productivity to the tune of billions of dollars.

If a natural disaster or terror attack had that kind of impact, Congress would pass yet another disastrous and ineffectual version of the USA PATRIOT Act and social media would provide a whole new category of “never forget” memes.

The Daylight Saving Time scheme isn’t a natural disaster, but it is a century old semi-annual terror attack.  Congress and the president COULD address this particular attack effectually, by picking a single version of time (“Standard” or “Daylight Saving”) to stick to year-round.

A month before his second inauguration as president, Donald Trump promised his party would use its “best efforts” to eliminate the fake time changes:  “Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.”

Now in office, he’s unwilling to address it after all, calling it a “fifty-fifty issue …. I assume people would like to have more light later, but some people want to have more light earlier because they don’t want to take their kids to school in the dark.”

So much for strong-man “leadership,” I guess.

The post Yawning Through the Rites of Spring appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Thomas Knapp.

For nearly half a century, Papua New Guinea has been more than just a home for Laurence “Rocky” Roe — it has been his canvas, his inspiration, and his great love.

A master behind the lens, Rocky has captured the soul of the nation through his photography, preserving moments of history, culture, and progress.

He bid farewell to the country he has called home since 1976 in June 2021 and is now retired and living in Australia. We reflect on the extraordinary journey of a man whose work has become an indelible part of PNG’s visual history.

• WATCH: The Malum Nalu’s full interview with Rocky Roe
• Other Malum Nalu articles

A journey born of adventure
Rocky Roe’s story began in Adelaide, Australia, where he was born in 1947. His adventure in Papua New Guinea started in 1976 when he arrived as a mechanical fitter for Bougainville Copper. But his heart sought more than the structured life of a mining camp.

In 1979, he took a leap of faith, moving to Port Moresby and trading a higher salary for a passion — photography. What he lost in pay, he gained in purpose.

“I wanted to see Papua New Guinea,” Rocky recalls. “And I got an opportunity to get paid to see it.”

Capturing the essence of a nation
From corporate photography to historic events, Rocky’s lens has documented the evolution of Papua New Guinea. He was there when leaders rose to prominence, capturing moments that would later adorn national currency — his photograph of Grand Chief Sir Michael Somare graces the K50 note.

His work went beyond the formal; he ventured deep into the Highlands, the islands, and bustling townships, preserving the heart and spirit of the people.

With each shot, he chronicled the changing landscape of Port Moresby. From a city of well-kept roads and modest housing in the 1970s to its present-day urban sprawl, Rocky witnessed and documented it all.

The evolution of photography
Rocky’s career spanned a transformative era in photography — from the meticulous world of slide film, where exposure errors were unforgiving, to the digital revolution, where technology made photography more accessible.

“Autofocus hadn’t been invented,” he recalls. “Half the world couldn’t focus a camera back then.” Yet, through skill and patience, he mastered the art, adapting as the industry evolved.

His assignments took him to mine sites, oil fields, and remote locations where only helicopters could reach.

“I spent many hours flying with the door off, capturing PNG from above. Looking through the camera made it all feel natural. Without it, I might have been scared.”

The man behind the camera
Despite the grandeur of his work, Rocky remains humble. A storyteller at heart, his greatest joy has been the connections he forged—whether photographing Miss PNG contestants over the years or engaging with young photographers eager to learn.

He speaks fondly of his colleagues, the friendships he built, and the country that embraced him as one of its own.

His time in Papua New Guinea was not without challenges. He encountered moments of danger, faced armed hold-ups, and saw the country grapple with law and order issues. Yet, his love for PNG never wavered.

“It’s the greatest place on earth,” he says, reflecting on his journey.

A fond farewell, but not goodbye
Now, as Rocky returns to Australia to tend to his health, he leaves behind a legacy that will live on in the countless images he captured. Papua New Guinea will always be home to him, and its people, his extended family.

“I may come back if someone brings me back,” he says with a knowing smile.

Papua New Guinea bids farewell to a legend, a visual historian who gave us the gift of memories frozen in time. His photographs are not just images; they are stories, emotions, and a testament to a life well-lived in the pursuit of beauty and truth.

Farewell, Rocky Roe. Your work will continue to inspire generations to come.

Independent Papua New Guinea journalist Malum Nalu first published this article on his blog Happenings in Papua New Guinea as part of a series leading up to PNG’s 50th anniversary this year. Republished with permission.

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

On a cold winter afternoon, naturalist and educator Mary Colwell guided visitors on a chilly tour of the Volo Bog Natural Area in northern Illinois. 

Crouching down from a boardwalk that runs through the wetland, Colwell pointed to one of the stars of the tour: sphagnum moss. With her encouragement, the group touched the little branch-like leaves of the pale green moss growing at the base of a nearby tree.

“Then in warmer weather, this is so soft,” Colwell said. “It’s unreal.”

Bog ecosystems are some of the most efficient carbon-storage ecosystems in the world. They cover just 3 percent of the earth’s surface, yet hold up to 30 percent of global carbon.

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The bog’s keystone species, sphagnum moss, plays a key role in its storage capacity. Sphagnum acts like a sponge — it holds up to 20 times its weight in water.

“Sphagnum moss itself is incredible,” Colwell noted. “It’s very slow growing.”

It grows so slowly, in fact, that it can take thousands and thousands of years for a peat bog to develop. Volo Bog started to form from a glacial lake more than 6,000 years ago. It’s still encroaching on the center of the lake, called the “eye” of Volo Bog.

But while bog ecosystems provide habitat, filter water, and store carbon, they have been disappearing for decades. In Illinois alone, more than 90 percent of wetlands have been lost. There are about 110 million acres in the United States, with more than half in Alaska — but nearly 70 percent have been drained and developed over the past 100 years. 

Unlocking sphagnum moss’s secrets 

Scientists think sphagnum moss may hold important lessons about carbon dioxide sequestration, but there’s much they don’t know. 

Sona Pandey is the principal researcher at the Danforth Plant Science Center in the St. Louis suburbs, and is part of a team researching sequestration and bogs. 

“The first time I saw a peat moss under the microscope I just literally fell in love with it,” Pandey said. “That’s the only way to describe it. It’s beautiful to look at.”

Pandey’s research team is growing moss in a lab, studying its DNA, and trying to figure out how it is threatened by climate change — and how it could be a solution. 

Moss excels at storing carbon. It thrives in waterlogged, acidic conditions. It doesn’t decompose, acting almost like a giant mat of living carbon. 

But when it’s threatened, that carbon has to go somewhere. The main threat to bogs — draining for development and agriculture — exposes these waterlogged species to air, which kickstarts the decomposition process from microbes. 

“It is a possibility that all the carbon which is stored in peat bogs at the moment will be released to the atmosphere,” Pandey said, noting how it will become a greenhouse gas.

She said if we understand these mosses on a microscopic level, scientists and conservationists can better protect and restore them on a larger scale. Her research could lead to making informed decisions about which species would be more successful to reintroduce as part of potential restoration projects.

Protecting what’s left 

Historically, bogs have been undervalued, often drained to make land more usable.

Trisha Atwood, an associate professor and ecosystem ecologist at Utah State University, said people are slowly beginning to see them in a new light.

“There have been substantial changes in people’s perception of these wetlands just because they don’t typically hit people’s Top 10 Most Beautiful Places,” Atwood said. “Governments are starting to realize that they have these other benefits.”

While forests and forest soil often get attention for their carbon sequestration, Atwood said wetlands are even more important, storing 30 to 50 times faster and at a higher rate than other systems.

“They’re like no other ecosystem on Earth,” she said.

Even as some aspects of wetlands are seen as more valuable, a 2023 Supreme Court decision rolled back most existing protections for these ecosystems. The Sackett v. EPA decision ruled that the Clean Water Act doesn’t protect wetlands that aren’t continuously connected to bigger bodies of water. The decision has been criticized for putting ecosystems like bogs at risk. 

Rebecca Hammer is an attorney for the freshwater ecosystems team at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group. She said peat bogs are particularly affected by the Sackett decision because they are mostly isolated from larger bodies of water.

“They generally begin their life as a lake that doesn’t have a drainage or connection to another water body, which allows vegetation and plant material to collect,” she said, “and the sphagnum mosses that grow there to collect over thousands of years.”

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About half of U.S. states have existing legal protections for wetlands, but these ecosystems in 24 states are left without any protections, legal or otherwise.

There are bogs scattered throughout the Mississippi River basin all the way down to the coast. 

Hammer said the decision could have a near-permanent effect on bogs.

“When peat bogs are destroyed or polluted, affected by development, we lose all of those benefits,” she said. “We really can’t replicate peat bogs. They take thousands of years to form. So once they’re gone, they’re gone.”

Colwell, who takes visitors on tours at the Volo Bog, says more needs to be done to protect what’s left. 

“We’re trying to restore these natural systems,” she said, “and when we restore them, they can increase the amount of CO2 that they will take.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri, in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Bogs hold a key to climate solutions through carbon sequestration, but many have been drained on Feb 15, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jess Savage, WNIJ.

There were a number of personnel changes in the convocation that started Sept. 18, 2024, the most important of which was the elevation of Lam’s longtime protege and former deputy minister of public security, Nguyen Duy Ngoc, to the Politburo.

Upon his election as general secretary, following Nguyen Phu Trong’s death in July 2024, Lam appointed Ngoc to be the head of the Central Committee Office.

This is not a sexy position, but it is the absolute nerve center of the Communist Party, responsible for setting up, drafting documents and agenda-setting for party plenums, as well as a host of other personnel issues. If one wanted loyal eyes and ears ahead of a party congress, the Central Committee Office is as good a place as any.

Lam did meet some resistance when he tried to quickly elevate Ngoc as the standing chairman of the Secretariat, when Luong Cuong was elected president in August 2024. There appears to have been some concern at the time that Lam was amassing too much power. But at the 10th Plenum, Ngoc was elected to the Politburo.

This is surprising, because under Party rules, one is only eligible to be on the Politburo after one full term on the Central Committee. Ngoc only joined the 13th Central Committee in January 2021.

That speaks volumes about the trust To Lam has in him, as well as the lock Lam has on the Politburo and the Central Committee.

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Lam is governing with a sense of pragmatic urgency, fearful of falling into the middle income trap.

He is pushing ahead with a major government re-organization that will lead to roughly one-fifth of civil servants losing their jobs and 10 ministries being folded into just five. That shakeup is meant to improve government efficiency, and speed up decision-making.

But to get all that done, Lam needs to put in place loyal supporters of his agenda, and remove corners of resistance.

(Yin Bogu/Xinhua via Getty Images)

Agenda supporters needed

To that end, another big personnel announcement at the 10th Plenum was that Tran Cam Tu would relinquish his position as standing chairman of the Central Inspection Commission, or CIC, in order to concentrate his time and energy as a head of the Party Secretariat.

Tu has been seen as a potential impediment to Lam. As the head of the CIC he controls the one investigative apparatus focusing on central-level officials that Lam did not have full control over; and no one used anti-corruption investigations to take down rivals more effectively than Lam, himself.

Ngoc has assumed control over the CIC, while the Ministry of Public Security is firmly in the grips of another protege, Luong Tam Quang. Now both men are on the Politburo. Lam has control over the two key investigative agencies ahead of the 14th Party Congress, which will allow him to disqualify and neutralize rivals with dispatch.

The Central Committee’s Organization Commission, which is in charge of personnel issues for the Party, is already in the hands of another Lam loyalist, Le Minh Hung. Hung’s father, was a former minister of public security where he oversaw Lam’s rise.

Moving to the Secretariat is Deputy Prime Minister Tran Luu Quang, which adds a much needed voice with economic experience to the Party’s day-to-day operations center.

There are a few other things to note about the personnel choices.

This increases the number of Politburo members who came out of the Ministry of Public Security, currently seven out of 16, or 44%. That seems to reinforce the inherent insecurity of the Communist Party of Vietnam, or CPV.

Second, Ngoc hails from Lam’s home province of Hung Yen, creating an even greater concern about a provincial faction. If the Nghe An provincial faction was dominant a few years ago, they have been clearly supplanted by the boys from Hung Yen.

To Lam recently appointed another protege from Hung Yen to head Dong Nai province, who will likely be elevated to the Central Committee.

Third, the expansion of the Politburo makes some inherent sense for Lam going into the 14th Congress. The CPV is a conservative body and by tradition, no more than 50% of the body is replaced.

So we might see the gradual expansion of the Politburo in the coming year so that Lam has more wiggle room to push aside rivals. If he were able to get the Politburo up to 18, then the retirement of eight or nine would create the opportunity to clear out more dead wood.

(Nhac Nguyen/AFP)

Courting the South

Ahead of the 10th Plenum, though, was another event that had important political implications. To Lam awarded the highest party honor to former Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung.

Dung had vied to become the CPV General Secretary at the 12th Congress in January 2016, but lost to Nguyen Phu Trong. The two men despised each other.

Dung promoted a vision of growth based on market reforms. Trong saw that as not only a betrayal of socialist values, but as a policy that would enhance inequality and corruption, leading to the party’s loss of legitimacy.

Although out of central decision making, Trong could never make corruption allegations against Dung stick. Meanwhile, Dung quietly positioned his American-educated son for advancement. Now the minister of construction, Nguyen Thanh Nghi, was recently made the deputy party chief of Ho Chi Minh City.

Lam quickly and publicly courted Nguyen Tan Dung upon being elected general secretary. It was not just the simpatico of former Ministry of Public Security officials.

While Lam’s lock on the party apparatus is very strong, he has one shortcoming: Southerners are really under-represented on the Politburo and other central-level bodies. In part, this is because Trong really worked to purge the southern party apparatus, which he deemed as too free wheeling.

At present, only three of the 16 Politburo members are southerners — two are from the central region, while the remainder are northerners. Southerners are demanding greater representation on the 14th Politburo and Central Committee.

Key to winning southern support is Nguyen Tan Dung, the most politically connected and savvy politician in the south. As such, his son, Nguyen Thanh Nghi is likely to be elevated.

So while Dung’s Gold Star medal clearly signals the end of the Nguyen Phu Trong era, it also reflects the one key bloc that To Lam is actively courting so that he can put in place a leadership team of his making, not the traditional balances amongst factions and regions.

Zachary Abuza is a professor at the National War College in Washington and an adjunct at Georgetown University. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the position of the U.S. Department of Defense, the National War College, Georgetown University or Radio Free Asia.

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

Offerman and NRDC collaborated with Morgan Sackett, who also directed The Good Place and Parks and Recreation, on the video. Both Sackett and Offerman grew up in small towns and know the struggles of farming, which Sackett said inspired their creative approach. “Learning through comedy is like the old saying: take a spoonful of sugar, and it makes the medicine go down. I think that is true,” Sackett said. “Even [for] the documentaries we do that are not funny, we always say make them entertaining, and then people will want to learn more about things.” 

But how entertaining are hurricanes, droughts, and heat waves — or the fears that come with them? Historically, not very. From 2016 to 2020, just 2.8% of TV and film scripts included any mentions of climate change or related keywords, according to a 2022 study by nonprofit consultancy Good Energy. 

Over the past couple years, however, comedy creators and entertainers have increasingly explored climate — from mentions in the blockbuster Barbie to the hit sitcom Abbott Elementary. Just as we find relief in political satire on late-night TV, climate-themed comedy is now part of a growing effort to help us cope with the doom and gloom that can settle in when we grapple with climate change. “If we don’t find healthy ways to cope, we can’t take steps to move forward,” said Katy Jacobs, NRDC’s director of entertainment partnerships. 

Jokes can help people process even the toughest topics — and open up about them, Jacobs added. “We are normalizing talking about the climate crisis and dealing with the feelings that come with it,” she said. “I think being able to laugh can get people out of their own heads, and bring them together.”   

Building an audience ready to take collective action has been one of NRDC’s most time-tested strategies for success over the course of its 50-plus-year history as an international environmental nonprofit. From there, the organization can help push the needle through its policy advocacy. 

Social media creators and other laugh-getters have also been key parts of the strategy, helping the conversation reach wider, and often more diverse, new audiences. Pattie Gonia’s Instagram stories, for instance, had the environmental drag queen urging the Biden Administration to stop new oil and gas leases before announcing its proposed 5-year plan for the Outer Continental Shelf — and reached LGBTQ+ viewers and beyond in the process.

TikTok content creator Kaden Kerns made a provocative video for his nearly 3 million followers, encouraging viewers to tell P&G to stop clear-cutting the climate-critical boreal forest to make toilet paper. And in 2023, comedic YouTuber Rollie Williams called for viewers of his Climate Town channel to tell the EPA “yes, yes, a million times yes” to proposed rules reducing power plant pollution.

Whether through a central theme or background issue, a film or TV show can help climate become an everyday topic that audiences can’t shut out. Towards that end, the NRDC Climate Storytelling Fellowship lends financial and creative support to screenwriters developing clever work that offers new perspectives on climate change. Past fellows have written half-hour comedy pilots and worked with screenwriters like Mike Schur, known for his work on Parks and Recreation and The Good Place, and Pamela Adlon, writer and star of Better Things and Babes. 

Schur also appeared at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival with prominent comedy creator Quinta Brunson, who wrote and stars in the Emmy-winning sitcom Abbott Elementary. In Abbott’s second-ever episode, the climate crisis is the subject of jokes, like when a warmer-than-usual February is described as “hotter than the devil’s booty-hole.” The episode, among others, was a topic of discussion at the Sundance panel “The Last Laugh: Comedy in the Age of Climate Change.” The panel was produced by NRDC’s Rewrite the Future initiative.

“I remember when I was writing the pilot of Abbott, it felt good to talk about climate change,” Brunson said at the panel. “I was approaching it from the comedic standpoint, and I like to approach things [by] finding the most universal thread for everyone first.” Climate change makes that easy, she added. After all, “If the planet doesn’t survive, it kind of affects everyone?” she joked.

Jokes themselves are universal, and so humor is effective at engaging different kinds of folks, according to Sackett. “There were certainly people who were like, I don’t need to hear this b.s. from some actor — you’re always going to get that,” he said. “But I think you’re really trying to get to the people whose lives are full and they’re busy and they haven’t dug into this stuff. And this might give them a little way in.”

NRDC’s Climate Storytelling Fellowship, produced in partnership with The Black List, CAA Foundation, NBCUniversal, and The Redford Center, supports screenwriters with pilot or feature scripts that engage with climate change in a compelling way. Fellows each receive $20k and creative mentorship from an established screenwriter. Past mentors include Brit Marling, Daniel Scheinert, and Mike Schur.

To make entry accessible for all, submission is free and includes one free evaluation and month of hosting on the Black List, an industry-facing website showcasing unproduced screenplays. The next cycle opens in April 2025. Reach out to rewritethefuture@nrdc.org with any questions!

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Moving from climate doomerism to optimism through humor on Jan 28, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Grist Creative.

I never lived in a huge city. I grew up in Belleville, [Ontario] and when I started coming out here, I would just sit in the grass and chill. I felt like something began to shift in me. Before moving out here, I lived in Ottawa, and felt slightly out of control and wasn’t a settled person. The scenery helps me feel calm. Every once in a while, I enjoy leaving and being in the busy cuckoo stuff.

Every time I go to your place, I have a deep exhale moment. Do you find your environment conducive to making music and art?

The lack of distractions helps. That was something that I struggled with when I was living in Ottawa. As far as distracting cities go, it’s pretty low on the list, but I was always somehow distracted anyway. I’ve definitely made more stuff out here. I also think having a kid has really put my ass in gear because I only have a couple of windows of opportunity when I can get work done.

When is that window?

Gem, my son, just started kindergarten, so I try to get work done when he’s at school. When he first started, I struggled with my sense of purpose. I have this little bit of depression surrounding someone else looking after my baby and me being without him. Challenging myself to write while he’s away has been a good exercise. There’s always the 2 p.m. cutoff time, which gives me a sense of structure.

I know you produce your own music. Can you share your process?

I like to record using my 8-track. I’ll have an idea, grab a guitar or bass, plug right in, and go. Usually, I hear a bass melody and start there. It’s quick and easy, and I’m comfortable with it. After I have a structure, I will take those tracks into the big studio, add drums, and maybe redo vocals. My recording is my writing of the song.

Historically, I’ve worked alone, but I started recently collaborating with my buddy Phil Charbonneau. He has a project called Scattered Clouds and is a really lovely friend and a very interesting musician. I showed him some of the stuff I was working on, and he said, “You should come to my new studio space. I’ve got lots of vintage synths and drum machines.” I’ve wanted this clump of songs to be a bit more synthy, so I went to him and we added some LinnDrum, which is a drum machine that’s really fancy and old. I’d never worked with others, so having someone support an idea was eye-opening. Experiencing someone else’s enthusiasm is so much more fun.

Do you have specific people in your life from whom you ask for feedback?

I like showing songs to Gem. His interpretations and feelings are just so true and blunt. I also always go to my siblings, and that’s really challenging because they never fake their opinions. I think I can often avoid sharing songs because they’re so precious. It’s a tough space.

Do you have any hopes and dreams for Gem’s relationship with music?

He is a very musical little person, but I hope he does whatever it is he wants to do. I just want him to be free, happy—well, maybe not always happy—and confident. He wakes up in the morning and sits in bed, and literally for an hour straight, he’ll sing songs stream-of-consciousness style. He’s so into it and isn’t even necessarily using words. And he’s always had really good rhythm.

What’s his band name again?

Night in the Dark.

How did he come up with that?

He just said it. He’s the best. We record songs together sometimes. I plug him into the 8-track and he’s made some really sweet stuff.

How long have you been working on this recent song clump?

It’s been around two years. I just got into playing with the band I’ve been working with, and the live situation feels so good. Iggy Pop’s album The Idiot was a significant reference for sounds. I’m hoping to record more songs with the live band in mind eventually. It’s totally dependent on grant funding, but that would be a dream.

Do you feel supported by grants?

I am still figuring out how to tap into the grants situation. I’ve gotten a couple over the last few years and traveled to the UK, thanks to Canada Council. I release my records independently, though, and I tend to want to press vinyl, and am stubborn about how I want the songs to come across live, so I play with a band. For example, if there are two guitar parts, we need two guitars… and a synth, and all these expenses can add up quickly. It makes me feel delusional.

Wanting to have vinyl and play with a full band is so normal! The problem is the system, which makes us feel like even the basics are unattainable due to a lack of resources.

Yes, paying a band is really freaking hard when it’s out of your pocket.

It’s brutal —everyone’s juggling side hustles. I know you’re working, too. How do you manage to balance work and music?

My serving job is quite easy for me. I pour people pints; that’s literally it. I feel quite independent in my job setting, and the owners respect me and allow me a lot of freedom in terms of giving me time off to go play shows, which is pretty sweet. That’s the positive to working a serving job.

What parts of your life enter into your lyrics and songwriting?

I actually have many songs about my regulars at work now, and I like to reference mundane, workday things. This community of characters really means a lot to me. In the past, I felt like my writing had always been pretty depressing. I’ll write when I’m in a rut, so much of my music is pretty sad-sack stuff. I feel a little bit self-conscious of that at this point in my life and don’t always want to be like, “woe is me.”

Caylie, your songs are compelling and don’t sound “sad-sack.” One of my favorite lyrics is, “If you’re hearing this, I probably opened for you and I will again and again,” from the song “In Public.” Very relatable and funny to me.

Okay, well that’s good. I try to make them a little bit funny too, because I want to take the piss out of my sad-sack self. That song I wrote when I was listening to a lot of Cate Le Bon. I just picked up a guitar, started playing this funny little riff, and that’s how that started. I was wondering if I could maybe deliver this vocal in a croony way. That was my feeling as I sat and recorded in front of the wood stove on the floor.

Do you think your writing style has changed since Bad Mantras?

Definitely. I also read a lot more now and am a bit more conscious of putting words together. On My Dread I started to come out of my vague writing style. Before then, I’d always written lyrics in an intentionally vague style because I’m self-conscious. Making them less obvious made me feel safer. When it comes to writing lyrics, I go through phases. There’s a certain point in the month when I start thinking differently—maybe it’s when I’m ovulating. It’s like words start entering my mind and I start thinking in a more creative space of my brain. I also took the Adrianne Lenker songwriting course this past winter, which was quite inspiring.

I took it, too! I feel like everyone and their dog took it. It was so beautiful. Did you like it?

Before I started, I felt all this pressure, and I was really stressed out about it. It ended up being so helpful that it became a discipline. I loved having two classes a week and having assignments.

You are planning on releasing music soon. What is your current mind state pre-release?

I still have this feeling that it is incomplete, which is a struggle. It’s been so long now since I made it that I’ve listened to these few damn songs thousands of times. It’s making me fucking crazy. The only thing I can do now is give them away.

Because you’re not attached to a label, do you feel free to release things according to your own terms?

I feel lucky in that I make stuff when I want to, and there’s literally no pressure from anyone aside from myself. At the same time, if anyone wanted to put my record out ever, sick.

Is there any question that you have always wanted to be asked and never have been?

I don’t know. I like being asked how I am.

How are you, Caylie?

Now? I’m really great.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Lauren Spear.

I try to use the form as a method of curiosity. If curiosity is the spark, then I’m just figuring out which tools work. Playing around with the tools is really an experimental way of being curious about how the form can tell a story. What’s underneath the rock of a story I thought I knew, and what can I learn from the form?

How does your writing process differ for each genre? So how do you start an essay versus how do you start a poem? Or do you go into it not really knowing?

A little of both. Sometimes I have a skeleton of something. For both essays and poems, the conception process is very similar. So there definitely were some essays that started as poems. It’s just about realizing what the best container is for the thought. Sometimes I need more of an argument, even if it’s an argument with myself, but what’s cool is that I can think about utilizing those techniques no matter what form. It’s about exercising, learning how an essay thinks, and then being able to apply that to a poem if I need to or want to.

It is a learning process, but I love how you’re like, “What skills can I grab from either genre?”

Part of my draw to other genres is just—there’s a fascination with language and with the word and what it can do. That’s me as a poet. Just—what is possible? And where are the limits, if there are any? When I approach craft as a whole, and my career, that’s the spirit I’m carrying. When I’m looking at other forms, it’s, how can this thing stretch? What can language do here? I’m trying to think about all those techniques as available no matter what I’m working on.

What did you set out to explore with You Get What You Pay For? What was the inspiring idea, and how did you decide it was going to be a collection of essays?

It took some time for the book’s identity to reveal itself to me. I had an idea of what topics and references would be swirling around in there, but it was down to the wire of, what is the story? What’s the arc of it?

It really started with an essay that I wrote about my depression, being in therapy, and this argument for therapy as reparations. I was like, what if I play that out and try to make that claim and use myself as a case study. It really was this experience of being in therapy and realizing how much of what I had held as my own neuroses were by design and influenced by politics and racism. Thinking about this undoing of white supremacist thought, a psychological liberation.

That hope, that desire for psychological un-chainment for Black Americans was really what drove everything else. I wanted that to be the central argument or plea. Essays are cool because I like research and I wanted to include some other voices. I do that in my poems some, but being in conversation with another text felt like something that I could do in an essay.

It wasn’t that I wanted it to be this academic argument, but in the spirit of a personal essay, a creative nonfiction book is in conversation with a lot of thoughts out there about reparations and mental health of the Black community. And then there’s the other part—the evidence that I’m using from my life. I am backtracking in order to follow through the line that ends with me. What are all the systems and steps that were taken to create the psychological turmoil that I am in and have been in? I took this wider lens and presented pieces of my past and my story, but also brought in conversations about the larger systems that are inextricable from my story.

That makes it sound a little bit drier than it is. There’s a whole other piece about a slave ship—my way of explaining what the Black American condition is, and the problem of talking about the economics of us. I’m putting pieces of my story next to these larger ideas. I wanted to have it building through the book and have a lot of different threads following up on each other and have pieces work almost like in a poem where a different image shows up again and again—utilizing those poetic techniques to build more of an essay format argument. It was a big project in my mind, but the gut impulse of it was very clear.

You’re bringing up some of the themes that I’ve found in your work since There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé. Did writing this feel different than some of your previous books? Or did it feel like you were getting closer to what you set out to write? I guess I’m asking–

Am I in conversation with myself a little bit? Yes.

Writing this was frustrating. I was like, I already done said this to y’all. It taught me a lot about the poetic form, and it taught me a lot about prose and the sentence, because it was almost like self-translation. I feel like I could go from my first book and annotate, and it would be a nonfiction book. I already put this thought out there. It’s just that I did it in these three lines instead of 20 pages.

It was an interesting practice in, “what’s the other way of saying this?” At first, I was like, poems are the best. Why can’t everyone understand that I already said all that? I just put an image of a slave ship and an image of Big Pimpin’ and we’re done. But here I have to spend 20 pages talking about it.

So to then pull it apart and connect all the dots, dot by painstaking dot, the more I pulled it out, the more I’m like, but that also relates to this. And then I’m bringing in the Bible. The more you expand it, the more it expands. But the process of going through that gave me a newfound respect for each form and the different ways I can approach the same thought. It also forced me to double back and unpack those themes and see what I left out, and see what all the supporting cast members look like.

In a way, it is deepening what I’ve covered already and also pushing forward a little bit in the way that only prose maybe can do. And there’s value in repetition, obviously. The other frustrating part is that I’m saying these things that I already said, but then I’m also quoting people from 1901 saying it. So I’m like, well, what are we doing here?

That’s how writing is a lot of the time, especially when you’re dealing with past sources and other texts. If that person said it in an even better way, and that was 50 years ago when people were still acting a fool, then what am I up to? There’s also this sense of translating and updating these ideas and presenting them in a different context with different evidence and different examples—such as myself—and to a different audience. There is value in that. Sometimes it’s got to be said for 50 years, a million different kinds of ways. In a poem, in song, in skits. Maybe we just need to be hearing the same shit.

We as artists get so caught up in fresh and new, and this book taught me more than anything that the freshest shit is the oldest shit. We don’t look back enough.

How do you manage to weave cultural criticism and research into your work? And how can other writers practice this? You make it sound easy, but I imagine that it’s very difficult.

I mean, yes and no. It was, but my brain works that way. I really do like researching. Everything I’m learning applies to everything that I’m thinking about. The process of reading widely and reading specific things, and then living in the world through the lens of those things, makes the conversation with those texts a little bit more natural. I’m inserting these ideas into my own world versus trying to operate in some kind of academic or critical vacuum. When I started writing poems, I was in college and I double majored in creative writing and cultural anthropology. For that reason, I’ve always taken influence from other disciplines and used that in my work and used that as a launchpad to get ideas for my work.

In a lot of the cultural criticism that I’m doing, that comes in handy because I’m able to take a wider political view. Understanding my identity as a writer, and understanding the role of an ethnographer, was very critical, and it really shaped my writing practice. I was calling this book auto-psychologic ethnography. It’s like an auto-ethnography of my brain, of my mind.

That is a mode of my writing process. When I say writing process, I mean the collection of the ideas and not just typing stuff. The way that poems form in my head, they are interacting with larger ideas about the human condition and how we organize ourselves and bigger thoughts like that.

Mental health has played a large role in your work, especially in your YA novel. Tell me more about what made you be open with your mental health and how you continue to shape that writing.

Looking back, I’m like, Who Put This Song On? is a really sweet way to think about an Ars Poetica because I had to hide myself so much. The hero’s journey of that book is that she’s able to speak about it. And the conclusion is me. In the book, which is based on real life, of me writing this essay about my depression for my high school yearbook–to put that in fiction was a turning point for me and almost a pledge to myself that if I’m going to be living, I’m going to be writing about what I’m living through. And I can use my voice, so I will.

After having finished You Get What You Pay For, I’m really almost consciously not at the behest of therapists, et cetera. Everyone’s like, take a break, my dude. But I feel the weight of how long I was uncomfortable doing so and how ashamed I felt. So there’s a little bit of just wanting to avenge a teen version of me who didn’t feel like she could talk about these things.

It’s a guiding principle that I won’t sugarcoat my mental health journey. Because it’s not fair to me. Honestly, I don’t have time to play this game that I’m not disabled. It is what it is. I don’t want to stop talking about it because this is a real thing. It’s not, oh, it’s over because the book is over.

We want to see me as a character, but I am indeed myself, the author, and real people don’t have arcs. To that end, my artist statement that I live by is trying to describe to the reader as best I can—using all the tools I have—how it feels to be in this body during this time in this place. Just get as close as I can to reporting. To do that, you can’t just leave out a big old part or you can’t just diminish it. There isn’t any getting away from it. I never want to feel like I’m preaching a topic, but I do want to feel like I am bearing witness to myself. I think I owe that to myself if nothing else.

What has writing about Black womanhood, mental health, culture, and feminism taught you about yourself both as a person and as a writer?

I am part of something. I exist in a lineage. That is what I have found. I have found the ineffability of Black womanhood across ages. I hesitate to call it strength, even though it feels like strength, but that word just doesn’t feel right for us anymore.

But it’s a type of power for sure. There is something that I have gotten from reaching back into lineages and seeing how we’ve done it that allows me to be bigger than myself. There’s an elevation that we can get from each other, and that has been a really important lesson for me moving through the world, but also sitting at the typewriter or at the computer. I don’t always write alone.

How do you balance writing and discovering what to write about, with the exhaustion that sometimes comes with being a Black woman?

I am not a person who writes every day. I’m not good at doing that. I am also, once again, mentally ill, and I don’t necessarily like writing when I’m really depressed. In those times, that is where the typewriter comes in. I’m allowed to type because I want to hear the bell. I’m engaging in the exercise, but I’m not going to force myself to go there emotionally if it doesn’t feel safe.

In the past few years, I’ve had really long chunks where I was like, I don’t feel good. The world doesn’t feel good. I got nothing good to say. I’m not excited about language, and for me, it doesn’t work to write from that. It is a way of trying to first assess what I can make of this feeling, but sometimes the answer is nothing or I don’t want to. If I still feel like I need to exercise some kind of creative release, then I allow myself to, and I also allow that to not be writing. I am not a good visual artist, but I did get into doodling for that reason, because it’s a creative release and ain’t nobody checking for my drawings. There’s no pressure around it, and there’s very little politics around me drawing a plant.

Finding freedom in that and cleaning my typewriter. I also try to take in art in that time. I go record shopping and listen to records all day, stuff like that that feeds me. If I can’t release it, then at least I’m getting fed. I’m just reading June Jordan over and over and over trying to store up, basically.

I love the idea of storing up. Sometimes you just need to read for a month.

I always talk about my writing process in stages, and the first one is what I call the collecting stage, which is just living. Living, going to museums, watching movies, listening to records, reading liner notes. Just collecting, storing up, and then eventually it arranges itself and comes out as text, but you don’t really know how long that stage is going to take.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Arriel Vinson.

“This marks a new milestone in global temperature records and should serve as a catalyst to raise ambition for the upcoming climate change conference, COP29,” said Samantha Burgess, Copernicus’ deputy direction, in a press release. Burgess called the announcement “virtually certain” because, barring an extreme event like a volcanic eruption that blocks the atmosphere’s excess heat, it’s nearly impossible for temperatures to fall enough for 2024 not to break the record. 

It’s against this backdrop that world leaders, policymakers, and activists are descending on Azerbaijan for the 29th United Nations Climate Conference of the Parties, to tout their new climate goals and negotiate funding for vulnerable countries affected by climate change. Back home, many of their countries will still be recuperating from this year’s floods, fires, and other natural disasters. At the last conference in December 2023, governments agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions with the aim of trying to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial temperatures. 

“2024 is the hottest year on record, and nothing can change that at this point,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, which, due to slight variations in their model, found last year exceeded 1.5 degrees C too. “It’s not about a single year passing that that 1.5 level. It’s more important to consider the longer term average of human contribution to climate change.”

There are half a dozen groups, including Berkeley Earth, Copernicus, and NASA, that calculate the progress of global warming, and each has its own approach to filling in data gaps from the beginning of the century when records were less reliable, leading to different estimations of how much the Earth has warmed since then. The average of these models is used by international scientific authorities like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the World Meteorological Organization. This is the first year, Hausfather says, that this communal average also shows the 1.5C threshold has been passed. 

“1.5 degrees is not a magic number. Each degree matters,” said Andrew Dessler, director of Texas A&M University’s Texas Center for Climate Studies. Because each part of our climate system has different thresholds for tolerating the excess heat, small changes in temperature can have major consequences, and push ecosystems past their tipping points. “The world is engineered for the climate of the 20th century,” he said, “and we’re just now exiting that climate. We’re maladapted.” 

Global warming alone can’t account for all the excess heat from these past two years. At least some of the super-charged temperatures and the disasters they catalyzed can be chalked up to a strong El Niño — a cyclical upwelling of warm water in the Pacific Ocean that shifts weather patterns across the globe. Although the most recent El Niño cycle was expected to give way to the cooler La Niña pattern this summer, the heat has persisted into the end of the year.

Once El Niño’s effects ease up, there’s a chance that coming years may dip back below the 1.5C mark. Hausfather notes that only once the planet’s temperatures have remained above the 1.5 degrees C threshold for a decade or more will scientists consider international emissions agreements to be breached. “A big El Niño year like this one gives us a sneak peek as to what the new normal is going to be like in a decade or so,” he said.

And the new normal isn’t pretty. In addition to the widespread demise of coral reefs, the year brought record-setting heat waves in the Arctic and Antarctica that melted sea ice to near-historic lows, stoking concerns that sea levels would rise faster than anticipated. During summer months, some 2 billion people, a quarter of all humans on Earth, were exposed to dangerously hot temperatures, including 91 million people in the United States and hundreds of millions in Asia. 

The extra heat fueled disasters throughout the year. Deadly wildfires raged in South America, burning millions of hectares across the Amazon Basin and Chile. Arctic forests in Russia and Canada went up in flames too, spewing record amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Catastrophic flooding killed hundreds in Spain, Africa, and South Asia. And recently, hurricanes Helene and Milton, catalyzed by hot ocean temperatures, tore through the Caribbean and the American South. Meanwhile, droughts gripped communities in nearly every continent.

“Those impacts are unacceptable. They’re being felt by those who are most vulnerable, which also happen to be, in general, those that are least responsible,” said Max Homes, president and CEO of the Woodwell Climate Research Center.

At the U.N. conference in Azerbaijan, organizations like the Woodwell Climate Research Center and the World Wildlife Fund are given the platform to speak directly to country representatives and showcase their research on climate change. There, activists hope that wealthy countries shore up their commitments to support poorer countries in their efforts to cope with the climate crisis, develop clean energy, and restore ecosystems.

“People shouldn’t think the game is over because we passed 1.5 degrees,” Dessler said. “The game is never over.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline It’s already official: You’re living through the hottest year on record on Nov 11, 2024.

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

On an early morning in late July, a luxury expedition cruise ship, boasting the latest in high-end Arctic travel, made a slow approach to the docks of Ny-Ålesund, a remote settlement in Norway’s Svalbard Islands.

At 79 degrees north latitude, Ny-Ålesund is the northernmost inhabited outpost on Earth. Isolated in the Arctic’s desolate winter, it hosts just 30 year-round residents.

Newayer, a Chinese travel agency, chartered the vessel for 183 tourists from Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing. Each passenger paid at least $13,000 for a two-week “Three Arctic Islands” tour, marketed as an exclusive opportunity to reach the “top of the Earth,” complete with “the luxury of Chinese hospitality.”

Clad in matching red jackets bearing a polar bear logo, the travelers disembarked at their first stop: China’s Yellow River Research Station in Ny-Ålesund.

There they marked the 20th anniversary of the station – one of several research facilities established on Svalbard by different nations. More than 100 Chinese tourists waved national flags beneath a Chinese Communist Party-style banner hung on the research station’s door. The travel agency’s blog likened the celebration to “raising the Chinese national flag during the Olympics.”

Among the participants, a woman in a People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, uniform was seen saluting and posing for photos. A PLA Ground Force patch is visible on her right arm, two professional cameras are slung over her shoulders.

The episode has raised serious alarm in Norway, according to experts and government discussions reviewed by RFA and NRK. Military function and symbolism on Svalbard is highly restricted, and a treaty that governs foreign presence on the island forbids military activity.

Yet Chinese interests have blatantly disregarded these prohibitions, in what experts say is a prime example of China’s increasing willingness to push the bounds of legal acceptability to exert its influence and power.

Indeed, RFA and NRK can reveal that at least eight tourists on the cruise were PLA veterans, with at least one still appearing to hold an on-going (though not active duty) role with the Chinese armed forces. The PLA-linked tourists participated in a co-ordinated display of nationalism in the Arctic while on board their cruise ship and on Svalbard.

The jingoistic displays align with what experts regard as “gray zone” tactics employed by Beijing, in which blurry lines between civilian and military actions are exploited to exert influence.

It comes as China-watchers warn that the West is ill-prepared to address the geopolitical consequences of this flexing of power.

“The big picture of China’s ambitions in the Arctic is that it reflects a clear, long-term strategic goal: China wants to be a significant presence in the Arctic,” says Isaac Kardon, a senior fellow for China Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington D.C. think tank.

Since declaring itself a “near-Arctic state” in 2018—despite lacking territorial claims—China has steadily built its presence through legal, military, commercial, and individual channels.

Svalbard has become the latest frontline.

An Arctic Battleground for Great Powers

A remote Norwegian archipelago roughly twice the size of Hawaii, Svalbard lies less than 1,000 kilometers from the North Pole, some 650 kilometers north of mainland Norway.

A land of dramatic peaks and glaciers, its location is of strategic as well as scientific importance. Its proximity to Russia’s Kola Peninsula—home to the Russian Northern Fleet and nuclear submarines—positions it as a critical focal point for military and resource interests.

Radar data collected from Svalbard can aid in missile trajectory calculations and satellite calibration. Experts caution that, in the event of a war, missile routes could increasingly traverse the Arctic skies—covering the shortest distance from Beijing to Washington.

“The role Svalbard might play in a large-scale conflict involving the Arctic cannot be ignored,” warns a recent report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

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“If tensions with the United States continue to worsen, the Arctic becomes the only other viable route (for China) to Europe for significant volumes of energy,” says Kardon.

As melting ice opens up new shipping lanes, the waters around Svalbard are set to become even more pivotal in global trade and shifting geopolitical dynamics.

In the face of these changes, governance of Svalbard-- until now a sleepy affair-- has come into focus.

A 1920 treaty granted Norway sovereignty over the archipelago while allowing signatory nations to engage in peaceful scientific and economic activities. The treaty prohibits any “warlike purposes,” and gives Norway authority to enforce these restrictions on the islands.

Russia has had a decades-long presence, first with mining operations during the Cold War. Today, there is still an active mining town, Barentsburg, and a Russian research station.

China joined the Svalbard Treaty in 1925 but didn’t establish a scientific presence until 2004; the founding of the Yellow River Research Station marked a significant step forward in its Arctic ambitions.

According to China’s official website, the station supports scientific observation, monitoring, and research in glaciology, and conducts research in ecology, space physics, atmospheric studies, and geographic information. Its goal is to “contribute to global efforts in addressing climate change and other challenges,” the website says.

Not everyone is convinced that it is all benign.

“The fact is, when we’re talking about Russia and China, we are talking about authoritarian states. There’s no such thing really as a completely civilian, independent agency, especially one with very strong strategic implications,” says Marc Lanteigne, a Political Science professor at The Arctic University of Norway.

“Any activity, regardless of how civilian in nature it is, will produce information which will get back to the Chinese military.”

Last year, Russia held what Norwegian officials described as a militaristic parade in Barentsburg—something never before seen on Svalbard—in support of Moscow’s troops in Ukraine. Dozens of trucks, tractors, and snowmobiles moved through the town waving Russian flags. A Russian company was fined for unauthorized use of a Mi-8 helicopter that flew overhead.

Norway is concerned about the rise of Russian—and now Chinese—nationalist displays on the island, says Lanteigne.

An internal report from the Norwegian Polar Institute, the governing authority on Svalbard Island, sounded alarm over the high-profile July celebration staged by the cruise ship tourists in front of the Chinese research station.

The report, seen by RFA and NRK, found the activities “particularly problematic” as they showed a clear disregard for regulations. A month before the event, Norwegian authorities had explicitly denied the station permission to hang a celebratory banner given its nationalistic nature-- but the station displayed it anyway, with Chinese scientists photographed posing in front of it.

The Institute noted that tourists appeared “well-prepared” with Chinese flags and stickers, and that photographs were organized in such a way that “it is likely that the photos will be used by the Chinese authorities.”

It made specific mention of the woman in the military fatigues, which they identified as PLA garb. The report noted that the authority was unsure what to do.

Camilla Brekke, Director of the Norwegian Polar Institute later told RFA and NRK: “New Ålesund is a Norwegian research station, and we do not see it as useful for the various institutions that rent premises there to hang banners, as we want a unified research nation.”

“It would not be a successful practice if various research institutions in Ny-Ålesund start hanging such banners on the houses they rent.”

Some experts fear the government has been caught on the back foot.

“I get the feeling that the Norwegian government is still playing catch-up on this,” says Lanteigne.

The government’s overall silence about its geopolitics has consequences according to Andreas Østhagen, a Senior Fellow at The Arctic Institute think tank. “When it comes to Svalbard and foreign and security policy, Norway’s strategy has been to sit quietly and do nothing,” he wrote.

“The less frank and transparent Norway is about issues pertaining to Svalbard, the more misunderstandings and conspiracy theories are likely to emerge, even among close allies.”

Following its internal report, the Norwegian government said its representatives had met with the Chinese embassy in Oslo and reiterated the expectations for international guests, emphasizing that “all activities in Ny-Ålesund must be civil.”

They requested an explanation of the person in military dress and were told that the person “was a private citizen or cruise tourist wearing military-style clothing deemed appropriate for the Arctic wilderness,” they told RFA and NRK.

The Chinese embassy in Norway said that the cruise passengers were private tourists visiting Svalbard independently. “The Chinese scientific team in Ny-Ålesund did not invite any tourists to participate in the relevant celebration activities,” the embassy told RFA and NRK.

“China has always actively participated in Arctic affairs in accordance with international law,” it said.

It did not directly address the questions of why banners and flags were displayed despite prior warnings and why military dress was allowed.

Entering the ‘gray zone’

Fan Li, the CEO of Newayer, the tour agency, told RFA and NRK that their tour group informed the research station of its plans to stage a celebration at Yellow River, and to hang banners and wave Chinese flags outside the station. The station never objected or even raised it as an issue.

“The staff at the Yellow River Station came out to engage with us, and everyone was quite happy about that,” Li told RFA and NRK.

A video of the tour group’s celebration was posted to Newayer’s social media account. It further features eight guests telling the camera that they are PLA veterans and perform coordinated military salutes to China while a patriotic song plays as a soundtrack. Afterward, passengers gathered to share their stories of service in the PLA.

Li said that the presence of veterans on board was merely a “coincidence” and that when Newayer realized the connection, the company organized a ceremony and incorporated the clip into its video.

According to Li, all of those featured were retired, as it’s difficult for active military members in China to travel abroad.

However, one cruise participant, who identifies herself in the video as Yin Liu, was photographed wearing military garb bearing the insignia of the PLA on Svalbard. On camera, Liu says she enlisted in 1976 and fought in Vietnam in 1984 and gave the name of her unit.

Ying Yu Lin, an expert on the PLA at Tamkang University in Taiwan, identified Liu’s fatigues as a “Type 21” training uniform issued by China’s Ministry of Defense in 2023. It is restricted to military personnel and would not be accessible to civilians, Lin said. The “Type 21” uniform can be seen on the Chinese Defense Department website.

Lin added that based on her age, the uniform, and other descriptions, it was likely that Liu was a member of a local militia unit. Militia units are one of three branches of the Chinese armed forces, the other two being the PLA and the People’s Armed Police, or PAP.

Attempts to reach Liu were unanswered by press time.

But regardless of her status or those of other PLA-linked tourists, “the sight of Chinese veterans waving national flags and performing salutes in the Arctic serves as an effective piece of internal propaganda,” says Lin. “While foreign observers may overlook it, within China, it symbolizes the assertion of influence in a geopolitically significant region.”

He added: “It’s about operating within legal ambiguities—pushing boundaries without directly violating laws. This time, we see veterans in PLA uniform; next time, it could be active-duty soldiers without the uniform, gradually testing international responses and how far they can go.”

These displays represent “classic ‘gray zone’ activity—conduct that doesn’t overtly breach regulations but pushes boundaries,” according to Kardon. “On one hand, it may appear as patriotic tourists expressing national pride; on the other, it subtly normalizes a more visible Chinese presence, legitimizing scientific activities that can serve dual purposes, like gathering environmental data and military intelligence.”

Such incidents can serve to gauge reactions, particularly from Norway and other Arctic nations, helping China understand which behaviors are tolerated, he said. “Given the strategic importance of the Arctic to the U.S., Russia, and increasingly China, there is little doubt that this expanding presence is deliberate.”

Questions of diplomacy

But sources familiar with diplomatic discussions say that Norway is unlikely to take a leading role in pushing back against China.

“Like many countries, Norway just doesn’t have a lot of equities in its dealings with China,” says Kardon. Overt criticism or perceived slights can cause notable damage, like in 2010, when Beijing banned imports of Norwegian salmon after its Nobel committee awarded the Peace Prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo.

But as long as that’s the case, room for more muscular tactics in the Arctic will grow. Last month as China celebrated the 75th anniversary of the People’s Republic, the Chinese Coast Guard engaged in joint operations with Russian forces in the Arctic. This was preceded in September by a meeting of Russian and Chinese officials in Beijing to discuss economic development and resource extraction in the region, and earlier, a Chinese and Russian meeting in Svalbard to explore opening a joint research center in Pyramiden, a former Soviet mining hub on the islands.

“So if you’re looking for a pattern here, I would say this is the latest version of what China and Russia are trying to do—find a way to get to the red line without crossing it,” says Lanteigne, referring to the Yellow River celebration incident. “It is a very subtle signal, one that really demonstrates that China is now starting to deviate more directly from Norway regarding what is and is not proper activity on Svalbard.”

Lanteigne views this as a pressing challenge that the Norwegian government must confront head-on.

“I think there needs to be the understanding that with the Arctic beginning to militarize as a whole, Svalbard is caught in it, whether it likes it or not.”

Edited by Boer Deng

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Jane Tang for RFA Investigative.

I find it easier. It’s almost difficult to turn that part of my brain off because, for me, writing music is therapeutic. It’s like journaling. It’s a part of my day that I enjoy and it helps me process and feel things. So, I think, both that and my love of hip-hop. I feel like a lot of hip-hop artists just release whenever they want to release. That allowed me to go, “Instead of maybe hoarding songs that are about a moment in time for four or five years until it’s the right time to release them, what if I started releasing music that sort of, I don’t know, related to or spoke to the times that they were about?” That’s why I write music so fast, because I want the music to feel like it is reflective of the time that it was written.

Do you find that music you’ve released a few years ago, you don’t really relate to as much anymore? Or does it kind of change in relatability for you?

Honestly, I try to write open-ended or write in such a way that, hopefully, me 10 years from now revisiting a song I wrote today will have something to learn from it. The shows that we’re playing right now, we play music from pretty much every one of my albums. It’s just sort of a whole… like a retrospective, in a sense. And I just connect to it all. They were all written from real places that I can sort of pinpoint where I was when I had the idea for each one. I have a relationship with my songs in that I write to help myself process and help myself grow, and I want that to continue long after a song is finished. I want to be able to find goodness in it way after it’s been out.

What was your earliest musical memory and how did that shape you?

Earliest musical memory was probably listening to Genesis with my dad as a kid, or my dad would put something on the record player. He’s a lyrics guy, so he likes to break down lyrics and be like, “I like this song because it says this.” And so when I was a kid, I would just basically sit at my dad’s feet while he told me about all his favorite songs and bands. I say a lot that I’m a fan of music.

Genuinely, I approach being a musician as a fan would, in a sense, of like, “Sick. I can’t wait to listen to songs,” and I just happened to be making the songs. I think, because my earliest moments in music were just about listening and processing and enjoying, I still find that’s my goal with music, is to just really let it, I don’t know, just let it be itself and not overthink it.

You mentioned that your dad was very into lyrics. Did that help shape how you approached music? And was that also encouraged for you as an art form growing up?

Yeah, definitely. My dad being such an active listener to music, it definitely turned me into the person and fan that I am. To this day, I’ll put on a record, and I’ll sit on the floor, and I’ll cross my legs, and I’ll just listen. I can be entertained and encapsulated by music really easily. The influence that my dad’s fandom has had on my music-making and the way I love music is just like, it’s just down to when you see a show, when you see me side stage at a friend’s concert, you’re just watching someone who loves… I just love songs, and I just love being able to listen to music and to make it. It all starts with just being a listener.

When did you first start writing songs or knowing you wanted to be a musician?

I started writing songs when I was a kid, probably 10 or 11. That’s when I got my first guitar. My parents were very supportive of it as an outlet, but they’re like, “Obviously, this is not a job. This is something you do when you get home from being a doctor.”

I spent a lot of time as a kid… We weren’t allowed to watch TV Monday through Friday, so I would do my homework, and then I would play music. I would just play guitar. I would write. My parents were really encouraging of that just in the sense of like, I played sports and I did other stuff, but in terms of focus, like a hobby that I focused on and really sunk my teeth into, making music and writing music was the first thing that they saw me stick with. Growing up, my parents were like, “Yeah, if you want to play, we’ll help you buy your first guitar. We’ll help you do whatever you need because we can tell that you love it.”

Was there a specific moment for you where it kind of clicked that, “This isn’t just a hobby,” or that you convinced them, “This is more than just that?”

They have to have that wake up call every few years. One of the first times I got invited to play a festival in Liverpool, and I brought my parents with me, them seeing me perform live to a room full of people made them go, “Oh.”

Especially with the internet, most of what my parents knew about my career was like, “Oh, look at our child playing guitar in front of their phone for work.” I think for them to be at a show and to see people interact with the music and to see me play music was really, really eye-opening for them. And then random things, like they heard me on NPR. One of my songs was on, This Is Us. They have little touchdown moments where they go, “Oh, this is work. She’s working.”

You mentioned a little bit about the internet, and I am pretty sure you grew up maybe in the late ’90s, early 2000s. I’m wondering if there were any artists specifically you stumbled upon yourself and that helped you realize you wanted to be a musician?

I’ve always had relatively older taste. I was a big Bob Marley fan growing up. My dad was a Bob Marley fan, but I gravitated to Bob Marley’s music in a way that I didn’t gravitate to a lot of other stuff that my dad, that anybody showed me. I honestly think it was because it was like this guy with locs and smoking a bunch of weed, singing about sitting outside with his friends in a better world. For me, I just feel like Bob Marley is one of those people. Bob Marley, Nina Simone… I’m trying to think of contemporaries. Janelle Monáe is a person I find myself inspired by. The people who just seem to be like, “I’m going to be myself and also make music.”

The cool thing about growing up with the internet is if I heard, I don’t know, like [an] Uncle Kracker song on the radio, or if I heard “Little Wing” by Jimi Hendrix, I could go to Google and be like, “I heard this song with these words.” I could find it and sort of immerse myself in that person’s story. That’s something I still do today. I heard a cover of “Blues Run the Game” yesterday, and I spent the rest of the day researching the guy who covered it just because.

How do you typically start the process of creating a song?

It just depends on the situation. Sometimes, I do the co-writing thing where you sort of have a writing appointment with someone else. I go at like 11:00 AM and we write until we have something. Because it becomes such a part of my processing in my day-to-day, if I feel inspired by something, I’ll just grab my notebook and just write it down, or grab my phone. I tend to do music and lyrics at the same time, so I’ll literally just hash it out.

For me, it’s almost like music is a language in which my brain sort of speaks and thinks. Yesterday, I got off stage and immediately went to write something really quick because I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I just try to keep an openness to whenever I feel that sense of inspiration, whether that’s setting a time and being like, “I’m going to write,” or making space in a busy moment to just let my brain express itself.

It can definitely take a little bit. I finished a new record a couple weeks ago, and I produced it all myself. A lot of times, when I’m writing something, I sort of hear everything all at once. I hear drums, guitar, all that different stuff like that. The challenge that I went through making something myself from scratch was sort of knowing, one, when to stop, and two, knowing what type of clothes that the song actually wants to wear versus my brain just being its crazy creative self. I sort of have been trying to find this balance of letting the mind go wild, but also finding ways to harness that in a way that feels usable.

You’ve spoken about your relationship with religion changing from growing up to now, both in interviews and through songs, including your one, “Questions, Chaos, and Faith,” from earlier this year. Has that impacted the way you approach music, if at all?

I’m always going to have a spiritual view of music. To me, I feel like what you put on, the type of music you can put on can set your mood. I make music for people who, if, at some point, they want something slightly encouraging to listen to on their way to work or if they want to hear a friend say, “Hey, I get that life is shitty, too.” That’s sort of what my music provides for people.

Other people would give us like dancing and goofing off. The hope that I have as an artist and as a person is that my music shapes other people’s lives in the same way that music shapes mine. In the same way that maybe religion can provide comfort or guidance, and again, I’m not like a cult leader or a weirdo, but I want people to be able to go, “I don’t have to go to church, but I can feel something inspiring,” or “I can think about god,” or “I can think about doubt.”

There are people who make music for shaking ass, and I make music for stoners at 3:00 AM who are talking about whether they believe in god or not. What I like about my music is that I’ve been able to hold on to the spirituality of it and sort of harness it into something that feels more honest. It’s something that feels real, that doesn’t feel like it’s maybe prescribed by a religion or something.

One of your other songs that I was personally very struck by was “Trying.” I’m wondering, as a musician, is there ever sort of a fear of being too vulnerable or too open? Or do you think it helps build a community of those who relate to what you’re singing about?

It helps build a community. I think that, if anything, it may hinder the heights to which I may scale, because I don’t think people want to think about their problems that bad. But there’s a value. When someone’s vulnerable in front of me, I feel like it opens me up to be like, “Oh, I can be vulnerable, too.” That is sort of the service I offer as a rock star. You’re going to come to a show and you’re going to see someone be human in front of you for 90 minutes. Truly, that’s literally, I think, all that I offer as a musician.

It can be scary to be vulnerable, but I’ve seen such great value come from me being vulnerable in all these different types of room with different types of people and having people sort of process their own vulnerability and their own openness, and also how they relate to people different than them in the world.

What is one piece of advice that has stuck with you, and what’s something you also wish you had been told about making music?

Jason Isbell told me once that it’s my name on the sign. Essentially what he’s saying is like, you have a band and you have a team, but at the end of the day, they represent you. I think it’s different than maybe The Doors or The Beatles where it was all of them together. They were all in it together. For me, it’s like I have a band, but the shows are my shows. And finding a balance. If I could go back and be in a band at the time of like the Grateful Dead, I think that would be my peak. That’s probably when I would thrive the most.

What do you hope listeners will take away from your new music?

That they are not alone in feeling like the world has become a little bit more confusing to navigate, or just, period, that they’re not alone. I think I bring a sort of simple everyman thing to the table with my songs. This next collection of songs, honestly, is written from the perspective of someone who hates their job a lot. And I think everybody can relate to that. Life is hard and I make music for people who feel the difficulty of that.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Lexi Lane.

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

Over the years, I’ve come to understand that my fascination with identity is rooted in being my mom’s primary subject. My mom is an oil painter, and I grew up with her putting me in different costumes and setting me up in different scenarios, like baking a loaf of bread, playing a piano concert. She’d dress me up in a bonnet and clothes from the 1800s and have me walk on the beach with a bucket. Her paintings were all around her studio and our house, and in her gallery, where I started selling her paintings when I was eight years old. My mom would also paint herself, and she would also have her identical twin sister, who is also an impressionistic oil painter, be her subject. I didn’t realize until I started looking backwards that I grew up thinking that’s just what you did if you were an artist: you used yourself, or the people around you, as your subjects and as your muses.

How did embodying all these different roles make you feel about your own identity?

I felt like a subject, like a doll. Like criticism and tweaks were necessary to my existence as a human. Sometimes my mom would frankenstein two photos of me for one painting. There was a general sense of almost perfect but not quite. My mom would ask for my feedback on her work. There was a lot of talk about feminine beauty, and what picture was more beautiful, or what features were more beautiful. I think I always just felt the responsibility of wanting to be a beautiful female subject, in one still frame.

Do you think your interest in auteur filmmaking comes from wanting to have control over how you’re seen by others, rather than having someone else impose these different visions on you?

Yes.

Nailed it.

Filmmaking has allowed me to process my childhood and my mom’s way of being an artist—by adding another layer, another lens. Making films, I’m able to have maximum control and tell a more nuanced story. I get to step out of the painting and into a moving picture. There’s a lot of darkness and heaviness, but there’s also humor and levity there.

What’s more real to you—movies or life?

As a kid, movies were my escape, my hope, and my fantasy. Like a lot of kids of the ’90s, I bought VHS tapes and would rewatch them, rewatch them, rewatch them. There are certain movies that raised me, certain families that I wished could be my family—I wished I could jump into the screen and live in the movie instead of my own life. There really is a blurriness, and a longing to escape. I think that I wanted to take control and make my reality into a movie. Literally, to make myself the protagonist character in a film.

This might be a good time to add that I grew up in Laguna Beach, California. I had a graduating class of 150 kids, and I was in high school when MTV showed up on my quad one day and started casting for the soon-to-be hit reality TV show, Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County. So my peers on the show, who I’ve known since kindergarten, became the popular kids of the nation. Watching the way MTV blurred the lines between reality and fiction with people I knew, and watching my peers have their image altered—that affected me and the way I understand identity too.

I want to talk about your film Can, which just came out online. It’s about your experience navigating Stage 4 breast cancer—and the way serious illness dictates both how you’re seen by others and your own sense of self. Was writing Can a way of protecting your identity from cancer?

It wasn’t about writing it, or even making it. It was about the end product. I had a vision of being on the other side of cancer, watching the finished film in a theater of people, and being like, “I did it.” The only way I knew how to process being sick was to think about it in terms of a finished art project. It was a strange time, because I went underground, and I didn’t really tell many people, except for my closest friends and family. I knew that I would eventually want to share, because generally, I tend to be a pretty open person, but I retreated to get through the hardest parts. I thought, okay, I’m gonna have to reemerge at some point. How do I do that?

I was really worried about you when you were shooting. I was like, she needs to rest. But now I get how healing it was for you to be surrounded by people who shared that vision of you being on the other side of this with a film in hand.

Obviously it felt different from other projects I’d done in the past. This starting point was me calling up friends and saying, “hey, I want to make a movie, I really want you to be involved, and I have cancer.” I was outing myself in that way. The days themselves were shorter than a regular 14-hour indie film. So, that helped. Looking back now, it feels pretty insane that I did that, and that we did that. But, it ignited a deep purpose in me. My bliss point is being on set, especially on a set where it’s a passion project and some of my favorite people are there, and we’re bringing an idea to life together. There’s no better feeling in the world. So to be in that ecstasy, surrounded by people I love and trust, that was the juice that got me through it.

In all my experiences being on a set with you, everyone’s really happy to be there—even if there’s no money, and even if the hours are shitty, because you’re good at making people feel like they’re part of something bigger. Your day one pep talks are incredible. How did you learn to do that, and what advice would you give to other filmmakers about how to cultivate that feeling?

What comes to mind is watching other people be leaders, but not necessarily in a filmmaking or creative space. My mom would teach aerobics classes to old ladies when I was a kid, and I would be dragged along. I’m using some of that experience and then adding a wink-smiley. Being self-aware about the Kumbaya of it all. I also worked as a 1st AD when I moved to LA, so I gave a lot of pep talks and safety meetings. At first I didn’t know what I was doing, so I just made it up. So, it also comes from a place of “fake it till you make it” and hoping to start strong.

How do you motivate people to join you? What’s your advice for getting a potential collaborator to say yes? I mean, saying “I have cancer” probably helps.

Saying “I have cancer” definitely opened up, let’s just say, a free location. But I do best when I’m in person with people. I just try to be super real and honest, and get to the heart of whatever story I’m trying to tell. When I share that, I naturally get excited. And if someone’s open to that kind of energy, usually they’re just like, “wow, hell yeah.” And if it’s not a hell yeah, then it’s a no, and that’s okay.

Something particularly challenging about the kind of filmmaking you do is the jump between the solitary and the collaborative. You start by sitting alone and writing a story about the most difficult time in your life—and then you have to get buy-in from a lot of other people. How do you switch gears?

Well, writing for me is the hardest part of the process, because I’m an idea collector, and the ideas need to be organized, and brought together. Sometimes that feels difficult. I’m a perfectionist, and I really want things to be right. I have a hard time allowing for messiness in writing. So, it can feel lonely and painful and hard. Once there’s a script, I feel really happy to move on to the next stage, and then once I start interacting with other humans, even in pre-production, the rest of it feels less lonely.

Can is a unique case, because you were writing about something you were experiencing in real time. You were making this film in the middle of treatment, and you didn’t know how it was going to work out. How did you balance the uncertainty of your own story with the actual, concrete demands of making a film with a beginning, middle and end?

Well, the film is about me having an identity crisis, mid-health crisis, and those two things were still happening while I was making it. We ended up reshooting some scenes, which was a mindfuck, and then post was an evolving, unique process. My existential spiral was shifting. It felt like, how do I keep up with this? My health was changing too. There was a point where I had to accept that cancer, for me, isn’t going to be black and white. It’s not going to be like, “I did cancer, and it’s over.” It’s going to bleed into the rest of my life. It’s just a part of my life. I had to accept that the story goes on, which sounds corny. But, it’s true, and it’s a big acceptance.

It’s been really interesting, as your friend, watching you navigate the post-cancer experience. You’re in this new category now of “survivor.” Your cancer hospital just did a little news segment about you—you’re good PR. It feels like it’s become this other thing, where your illness is being instrumentalized by other people.

I do kind of feel like a breast cancer spokesperson now, and it’s a lot. Part of that is about celebrating the medical miracles that happened with me. Part of it is feeling unintentionally reduced down to being someone who was sick and got through it, which feels, in a way, like such a blip of my human experience. That’s something I’m starting to navigate now that the film is out. Other humans who are going through cancer, or went through cancer, or have someone that they love who went through cancer, feel really willing to share with me. When I’ve shown the film, people come up to me afterwards, and in an instant, go so deep so fast about whatever their life experience is, and it’s intimate and beautiful and amazing, but it’s also new and a lot.

There’s this other layer of reality that you have access to now. You see into everyone’s pain.

Some people talk to me like, “Man, it’s crazy you’ve been to the edge of life and back—that’s priceless. You figured it all out.” When it’s your lived experience, it doesn’t feel that way. I don’t think about it like that. But through my cancer experience, I am able to look at some things differently. You usually don’t know what’s actually going on with other people, and they don’t know what is going on with you. Holding that actually allows for there to be a lot more openness and compassion when interacting with people.

Is there anything you know now that you wish you’d known when you first got your diagnosis?

When I was first diagnosed, I knew nothing about cancer. Learning about how long and how intense the treatment was, I remember being like, this is two fucking years of my life. I can’t put my life on hold for this! This is crazy. This is ridiculous, what these people want me to do. I remember my surgeon said, “This is the plan, but throughout this process, what you want, what your expectations are, and what you’re going to ultimately feel good about as your end result might change.” I didn’t understand what he meant by that. Now I do. It’s hard to articulate, but there is a feeling of acceptance for what currently is, even though it’s so different than what used to be, and so different than what I could have ever imagined, or that I would ever write for myself as a character in a movie. There are so many feelings held up in that at once: sadness and grief and joy and beauty and ugliness. Somehow it can all coexist. At the beginning, I kept a little journal for my close friends, and I wrote, like, “At the end of this, I’m gonna be profoundly changed.” I knew that. You go into something like this knowing it’s going to be big. Now on the other side, I’m like, yeah, dude: it was big.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Claire L Evans.

China, India, and Russia provide high purity quartz as well, but what’s mined there does not match the quality or quantity of what lies beneath the Blue Ridge Mountains. With Spruce Pine among the scores of Appalachian communities reeling from Hurricane Helene, the sudden closure of quartz mines that have supplied chip manufacturers for decades has rattled the global tech industry. But this quartz is vital to the solar industry too. And while industry experts expect companies to withstand the temporary closure of the town’s two mines, it highlights the precarity of a clean energy economy that relies on materials produced at a single location — especially in a world of increasingly ferocious natural disasters.

Helene’s impact on Spruce Pine “absolutely lays bare the danger of having a monopoly in any part of the supply chain,” said Debra DeShong, head of corporate communications at solar manufacturer QCells North America. QCells, which manufactures photovoltaic panels in Georgia and is building an additional facility that will manufacture the components needed to assemble them, is evaluating whether the Spruce Pine mine closures will impact it.

The industry relies on quartz primarily to make polysilicon, a highly refined type of silicon that forms the sunlight-harvesting cells in most photovoltaic panels. But the quartz from Spruce Pine serves another purpose: It is used to make the crucibles in which molten polysilicon crystallizes into cylindrical or rectangular ingots. Those rods are cut into the solar wafers that are further processed to produce the cells within panels.

Forming solar ingots requires heating polysilicon to over 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Only the highest purity quartz sand provides the thermal stability needed to create the crucibles capable of enduring such heat, and the best of it is found in western North Carolina.

“Spruce Pine is a very unusual quartz deposit and it is incredibly pure,” said Jenny Chase, the lead solar analyst at energy consultancy BloombergNEF. 

BloombergNEF estimates that Spruce Pine supplies more than 80 percent of the ultra-pure quartz sand used to manufacture crucibles for both the solar and the semiconductor industry, as well as for optical and lighting applications. (There isn’t any public data on how much of the town’s quartz is used by each sector, but BloombergNEF estimates that in China, the world’s leading producer of photovoltaic panels, 80 percent of the high purity quartz it uses goes into solar applications.) Spruce Pine dominates this market, and supplies nearly all of the material that lines the inside of solar crucibles, which come in direct contact with molten silicon. There, purity is particularly important for ensuring high ingot yields and long crucible lifespans.

The amount of quartz required to support solar crucible production is fairly small. Chase says that Spruce Pine produced about 20,000 tons of high purity quartz sand last year — more than enough to satisfy the demands of the solar industry. That same year, global polysilicon production stood at 1.52 million metric tons. Producing that much polysilicon likely required about 3 million metric tons of quartz, according to Chase. All of which is to say, Spruce Pine is, she said, “quite a small cog” in the solar supply chain.

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Still, a small cog can become a big problem if there are no contingencies when it breaks down. But Chase suspects that most crucible manufacturers — an industry based largely in East Asia — have stockpiles of high purity quartz. May Haugen, who leads communications at The Quartz Corp, a Norwegian company that produces high purity quartz sand at Spruce Pine, confirmed this in an email to Grist.

“The Quartz Corp operates in long value chains where everybody has learnt through Covid the importance of sizable safety stocks,” Haugen wrote. “Between our own safety stocks which are built in different locations and the ones down in the value chain, we are not concerned about shortages in the short or medium term.”

In preparation for Hurricane Helene, The Quartz Corp halted all mining operations in Spruce Pine on September 26th. So did the Belgian firm Sibelco, the town’s other producer.

It is unclear when either company will resume mining: In an October 2 statement, The Quartz Corp wrote that while its plants do not seem to have been seriously damaged by the storm it is still “too early to tell” when they will reopen, “as this will also depend on the rebuilding of local infrastructure.” In an October 4 statement shared with Grist, Sibelco wrote that its facilities appear to have sustained “minor damage” and that the company hopes to “restart operations as soon as we can.”

“Our dedicated teams are on-site, conducting cleanup,” the statement noted. “Our final product stock has not been impacted.” The company declined to say how the hurricane could impact its plan to double production capacity in Spruce Pine by 2025.

Even if both mines remain shuttered for months, the solar industry could adapt, Chase said. The Japanese firm Mitsubishi Chemical Group manufactures high-purity synthetic silica for the semiconductor industry, and the material meets the standards required for solar crucibles, according to Chase. 

However, production would need to ramp up. Mitsubishi Chemical Group representative Kana Nuruki told Grist in an email that the company currently does not have enough synthetic quartz to support the solar industry, and what it does produce is “considerably more expensive” than the real thing.

Paying a premium for synthetic quartz would be a challenge for the price-sensitive solar industry, Chase said. “But if it had no choice, it would do it.” 

Developing alternative supplies of high purity quartz, even ones that cost more, could help fortify the solar supply chain against the next climate-fueled disaster. “As solar becomes a larger piece of our electrification, it’s going to be increasingly important that we ensure we have a stable supply chain,” DeShong of QCells said.

Still, manufacturing both semiconductors and solar panels in America is a key priority of the Biden Administration, and it seems unlikely that Washington will want to see a critical cog in both supply chains move overseas. A spokesperson for the US Department of Energy told Grist that the agency “is closely monitoring Hurricane Helene’s effects [on] the supply chain” while “advancing efforts to maintain the stability of America’s energy systems.”

Spencer Bost, executive director of the community development organization Downtown Spruce Pine, said that quartz mining is the largest private employer in the county and restarting it quickly is “very important from a local economy perspective.” If the federal government cares about building clean energy in America, Bost said, “we have all the stuff here.” 

“We have the people who need the jobs here,” he added. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The solar supply chain runs through this flooded North Carolina town on Oct 8, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Maddie Stone.

We speak with V, the playwright formerly known as Eve Ensler, about “How We Do Freedom: Rising Against Fascism,” a daylong educational event to be held at New York City’s Judson Memorial Church on Saturday. V is the founder of the global activist movements V-Day and One Billion Rising that is organizing the event. “The rise of fascism, from India to Italy, from Afghanistan to U.S., [is] the most pressing concern everywhere,” says V, who ties the crisis to growing loneliness and isolation. “One of the antidotes to fascism we know is community, is solidarity, is coming together, is talking, is being part of something that is bigger than yourself.”

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

The Doors in 1968. Photo: Elektra Records.

I was at university when I first heard the Doors.  It was springtime, coming on summer.  I was living on campus, my first year, and I was eighteen.  I was in a housemate’s room, waiting for him to get back for some reason I don’t recall now.  The building we lived in was a little run down, the rooms were shabby, but I remember that day – the sunshine streaming through the windows, the dust embers in the air glinting and dancing.  Our campus was situated in the lap of a large valley, and in the distance, I could see the green of the hills.  Maybe it was late morning or early afternoon; knowing my habits at that point in my life, I probably hadn’t been up all that long.  I was sleepy and a little bored so I began to thumb through my housemate’s CD collection.

I took out a CD, ‘The Best of the Doors’.  It’s the one with a black and white cover, the lead singer Jim Morrison, his arms extended sideways like some sort of rock and roll Jesus, the shaggy mane tumbling down from the sides to frame a face which is statuesque and perfect, eyes vacant and yet melancholy somehow too.  But I only glanced at the cover, dismissing it.  I pretty much figured it was music from the 60s.  I knew music from the 60s; growing up my father had record and CD collections spread around the house, and when he’d get drunk he’d pelt them full blast keeping everyone awake.

I liked some of that stuff though. I liked the cheeriness of rock and roll rhythms and the sentimentality of some of those old crooning love songs.  They seemed of another time.  A self-contained world that had none of the sophistication or irony of modern music, music which tended to reflect darker and more fitful realities.  These were the vague prejudices I felt, rather than thought upon.

But for some reason – perhaps it was that boredom again – I ended up putting on that first Doors CD.  I went to a random song and pressed play.  And listened while the sunlight streamed in and I could hear the vague chatter from people passing outside. And then it just … melted away.  There are certain times in one’s life when you have an existential aesthetic experience, something which feels almost life-changing, and yet it is wholly accidental.   Flicking TV channels late at night, coming to rest sleepily on a film, and eventually finding yourself drawn in, gripped and awakened, only to remember that film for the rest of your days.   This was a little like that.

The song was ‘The Crystal Ship’.   Whatever I had been expecting it wasn’t anything like what I heard.  I had thought of 60s music as being old-fashioned, but this seemed much more modern.  Only modern is not the right word.  Timeless.   The first few words of the song are acapella, this voice intoning in the dark – ‘Before … you … slip …’ and then it is joined by what I can only describe as fairground music.   A faint shimmering symbol, a fluttering rhythm which gives way before the gentle but steady piping of a distant organ, and that voice continues, diaphanous and hypnotic – ‘Before you slip …. into unconsciousness … I would like another kiss, another flashing chance at bliss … another kiss’

As that carousel music flows onward in the background, that voice continues to intone.  That voice.  I’d never heard anything like it.   It was so perfect as to be almost hollow, so fine as to be almost toneless.  There was something inhuman about it, ethereal; more like a Platonic Form – a shimmering transcendental archetype – than something living and breathing; and yet, in the same moment, it carried such human loneliness, such longing – ‘the days are bright and filled with pain … enclose me in your gentle rain.’    It was haunting. It was hurting.   I imagine that if a ghost had a voice – a spirit imbued with all the regrets of a life now gone – it might sound something like that.  It might sound the way Jim Morrison sounded to me that day, in that room, all those years ago.

And perhaps that is the fundamental miracle of music.  It is, more than anything, an activity of ghosts.  Someone has lived a life, and at some point along the line, they poured that life into words and music.   Eventually, that life must be lost to time.  And yet, the medium preserves the sound – the record, the cassette, the CD, the MP3 – it allows what once was to play out again, to call out across time – as a plea, a lament – bridging one existence with another, the past with the future, the living with the dead.

I have never experienced that aspect of music – the sense of its ghostly eternity – with the intensity and power with which his voice stole over me that early afternoon. Neither before nor since.  I replayed the ‘The Crystal Ship’ over and again, marveling at its ephemeral beauty, feeling a physical sense of loss when that voice died out.  When my friend returned, I asked him if I could borrow the CD (we were not particularly close) and I recall the anxiety that shot through me at the thought of being parted from the sound if only for a few hours.   He was, however, kind enough to lend me the collection, and later that evening I smuggled it into my room like contraband, like something otherworldly, something precious.

The late comic and rather wonderful human being Robin Williams once said ‘I used to think that the worst thing in life was to end up alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel all alone.’  I like this quote because it hits on something deeper, something that is a fundamental part of modern existence.  The sense that loneliness isn’t simply about separation but also about togetherness.

Many of us live in cities populated by millions, some of us live in tenement blocks or towers, hundreds of people are packed together in these great concrete fortifications, and yet we rarely ever speak to, or even know the names of, our closest neighbors.  In modern life, the individual existence unfurls in the midst of the crowd and yet this sometimes serves to emphasize the crystalline quality of loneliness all the more sharply.

At university, I felt like that.  My evenings were often busy and filled with people – having done various awful part-time jobs to pay the bills, I eventually resorted to selling weed, which was more fun, despite the nocturnal hours.  But I felt a distance from the people around me.

The students I knew on campus were often public school boys or international students.   The public-school boys fascinated me, they had an affected drollness, they would all address one another by their second names, as if they were practiced professionals conducting business scenarios in a board meeting or gentleman’s club – the ridiculousness of their affectations betrayed only by a twinkling, knowing smile.

They would banter ostentatiously, with wry grins, and their humor was droll in a wink-wink, nod-nod type of way.  And they would drink like medieval aristocrats – and though their politics were as awful as you might expect – they could be very funny, taking each other down ruthlessly, and yet with the underlying affection that comes from the recognition of another member of your same tribe.  What I remember most was how at home they were in the world, how comfortable they seemed in their own skins.

The international students were different again; beautiful boys and girls with olive skins and honeyed eyes, young men and women from Greece, Spain, Italy and France whose rooms smelt faintly of incense and coffee, of olive oil and pot, and who would spend nights under a candle-lit glow holding forth on politics and philosophy, passionate and amused.  Even their conversation was impossibly continental and exotic; magical names floated across the air like incantations, names I had never heard before – ‘Foucault’, ‘Derrida’, ‘Deleuze’ ‘Levinas’ – mysterious and enigmatic figures whose esoteric thoughts and theories it seemed to me these students had at their fingertips.

They seemed so knowledgeable and in the ease with which they moved through life, so casually sophisticated and supremely adult.   And this they shared with their public-school brethren – a sense of being entirely at home in the world.

I did not feel at home in the world.  I don’t think I ever have.   And in the summers, the public-school boys would take to the snowcapped mountains of Switzerland and France for skiing holidays and the international students would decamp for a summer spent island hopping around the Mediterranean, and I would return home to do factory work or spend the summer pushing trolleys in Tesco feeling vaguely that life was leaving me behind.

And in the nights, I’d drink whiskey and smoke and listen to the Doors.  Their music seemed to speak to me of loneliness in that hauntingly modern way.  When one listens to a song like ‘People Are Strange’ it is paradoxical.   On the one hand, it has that carnivalesque sound; when the song reaches its chorus, the music is jaunty almost cheerful – ‘When you’re strange … faces come out of the rain’.  It has the rhythmic tempo of a New Orleans marching band, it is rousing, upbeat, and you want to clap along with it.  But this is offset by the otherworldliness of that distant voice and the lyrics themselves which provide a masterclass in the poetry of alienation: ‘When you’re strange, faces come out of the rain … When you’re strange, no one remembers your name …. When you’re strange, when you’re strange …’

This is the loneliness of modernity; a loneliness which is filtered through other people, only they are not other people at all, but apparitions – those ‘faces’ which ‘come out of the rain’ are as specters materializing from the nighttime mist.   It is the loneliness of the streets where there is an insuperable divide between one’s inner life and thoughts, and the people you encounter in the darkness. ‘People Are Strange’ provides a ribald, Gothic-esque carnival, blending the excitement of the city at night and all those unimagined lives with the infinite distance that opens up between each and every one.

Such music – encompassing both the stark alienation of urban realities along with the gothic sound of an eerie and ghostly carnival – offers a tissue of contradictions; the upbeat works in tandem as a musical refrain with an underlying pulse of despair, the baroque plays out alongside the contemporary, isolation and anomie is refined in and through the noise of the crowd. As the author Melissa Ursula Dawn Goldsmith comments on ‘People Are Strange’, the song employs an ‘expressionist’ sense of ‘alienation and distanciation’ in order to express the positive aspect of social life as something ‘strange’.[1]

‘Alabama Song’ – perhaps one of the best peons to getting drunk ever penned – operates in a similar fashion; that ‘Show me the way to the next whiskey bar … Oh show me the way to the next whiskey bar!’ again works in terms of a marching rhythm, a call to action, the need to seek out Dionysian excess, to drive the pleasure principle to its apex but of course such ‘positivity’ eventually yields a chaos and a senselessness and a lack of meaning – ‘oh don’t ask why’.  The antinomies of pleasure and pain, of joy and hopelessness that are the syncopated rhythms driving the soundtrack to the existence of every alcoholic, every drug abuser, are – in Morrisons’s hands – rendered as vivid and raw as the train tracks that streak down a heroine addict’s arm.

As is well documented, Jim Morrison was both an alcoholic and a drug addict, though toward the end of his brief existence, the former mostly outweighed the latter.  That Jim Morrison should have indulged in booze and drugs is hardly surprising; indeed it would have been more shocking had a young man of his age and time been a teetotaller, especially given the relationship drugs and drink played in the context of a social rebellion that saw conservative mores challenged not simply by direct action and political protest but also by a cultural revolution.

In their comprehensive, insightful and well-written biography of Jim Morrison, authors Jeffery Hopkins and Danny Sugerman describe how the teenage Morrison was drawn into the burgeoning counterculture of the 1950s, how he was able to escape the stifling small-town conservatism of Alameda – where the family was based – by hopping on a bus and making for North Beach.  North Beach was a neighborhood in San Francisco that had become a beacon for counterculture through the new breed of literature and records which were beginning to describe the adolescent experience as it tore itself away from the expectations of the ‘greatest generation’.  Expectations which had been marked by a certain unremarked stoicism, a silent duty to the family and the state and perhaps also a quiet desperation; all aspects of a way of life whose insularity and conservatism had grown out of the trauma of war and the memory of economic depression.

But if that generation had played out the events of its life in a monochrome black and white, then the generation of the 1950s was the first to explode into technicolor.   As the teenage Morrison strolled down North Beach Broadway, he’d encounter a hectic clutter of bright, neon-lit shops whose contents gave voice to the new spirit of youth and self-expression starting to emerge from the grey fug of small-town suburbia, for here, among other things, was the ‘world headquarters for the beatniks’.[2]    Morrison would frequent the ‘City Lights Book Store’ with its alluring promise of ‘Banned Books’, and he would pore over the work of the beatnik poets – ‘Ferlinghetti was one of Jim’s favorites, along with Kenneth Rexroth and Allen Ginsberg.  Ginsberg made the greatest impact’.[3]

But the most potent influence on the teenage Morrison and his sense of self came in the form of the great bohemian, beatnik novel On the Road, the nomadic flavor of its wandering freedoms and most of all, its invocation of the character of the wild and free-spirited Dean Moriarty and its blurring of the lines between freedom and madness – ‘He was one of Kerouac’s “mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn burn burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars’.[4]    Indeed the teenage Morrison was so enamored by the fictional character that ‘he began to copy Moriarty right down to his “hee-hee-hee-hee” laugh.’[5]

It was unsurprising, then, that the adolescent Jim Morrison would get drunk and dabble with pot, not just because these things provide goofy and fun experiences for many a teenager, but on a more profound level, they were part and parcel of the cultural milieu and the kind of archetype of youthful freedom and rebellion that Morrison was intuitively and aesthetically drawn toward.  For the same reason, it is no coincidence that this developing cultural consciousness, the rituals of drinking and getting high, and the exploration of the counter-culture aesthetic through beatnik literature would also coincide with Morrison’s first forays into writing himself:

Jim was becoming a writer.  He had begun to keep journals, spiral notebooks that he would fill with his daily observations and thoughts … and as he entered his senior year, more and more poetry.  The romantic notion of poetry was taking hold: the “Rimbaud legend,” the predestined tragedy, were impressed on his consciousness, the homosexuality of Ginsberg and Whitman and Rimbaud himself; the alcoholism of Baudelaire, Dylan Thomas, Brendan Behan; the madness and addiction of so many more in whom the pain married with the visions.  The pages became a mirror in which Jim saw his reflection.[6]

The connection between alcohol and creativity has a seasoned lineage.  In ancient Greek times, the grape was not just a symbol of Hellenic identity in the same way as the olive vine, nor just a richly traded commodity and mere object of consumption, but moreover something which had a significant aesthetic and religious usage in its form as alcohol.   The Greek word Pneuma (πνεῦμα) translates into ‘spirit’ – but it also has the meaning ‘breathed’; it was conceived that the ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ was something ‘breathed’ into the individual from a divine source, and that inebriation was a way of opening up the spirit to its origins, to bringing oneself into contact with the infinite once more.

And, as the late Christopher Hitchens pointed out, ‘the very word “spirit”’ also preserves an intuition of the ‘“inspired” that was detected by the Greeks when they hit upon fermentation’[7] and used its results in their creative endeavors, not least of which was the production of music and art.   The counterculture movement of the 50s and 60s revived this notion and deepened it; the idea that alcohol and drugs could provide a gateway to a deeper essence, the conscious-altering-means which could provide a sublime encounter with the transcendental reality.  Whilst at UCLA, Morrison became fascinated by the ancient Greek world, particularly in and through his readings of the eloquent and savage reactionary philosopher Fredrich Nietzsche.

In particular, Morrison would come to identify with the figure of ‘the long-suffering Dionysius’, for in the ancient Greek god, Morrison found something more primordial, an archetype that hinted at a buried and elemental reality through the experience of both suffering and excess.  Dionysius, in Nietzsche’s philosophy of art, became a symbol for the darker, unrestrained and irrational impulses that lurk just below the depths of the psyche and come to power that aspect of aesthetic creation which is chaotic, instinctive and unconscious.

Morrison combined this sense of art, with a broader philosophical vision; the poet’s suffering, the poet’s creativity – heightened by the use of alcohol and drugs – could work toward an ‘ecstatic dissolution of personal consciousness’.[8]   If this was achieved – if personal consciousness with all its distortions and peccadillos was somehow transcended – then true reality could be glimpsed in its eternal and elemental guise; or as the great religious poet William Blake put it, ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.’[9]

This type of philosophy precipitated an artistic journey, the use of drink, drugs and aesthetic activity in combination to seek out the ‘infinite reality’, the ‘primordial nature of the universe’, or as Jim Morrison and his college friends would come to call it, ‘the universal mind’.[10]  This intuitive, emotional and sometimes frenzied quest would bleed into other intellectual trends and cultural preoccupations; both psychology and shamanism became key moments defining the focus of Jim Morrison’s poetry and eventually the music of the Doors.

Jung was a key fit, for instance; his theory of primeval archetypes tessellated nicely with the idea of a ‘universal mind’ which was veiled by the paraphernalia of the empirical and everyday, while shamanism, provoking altered states of consciousness often through hallucinogens as a way of transitioning into the invisible realm of spirits and ghosts, conceived of reality in the same dualistic fashion; a physical world behind which lay a more fundamental spiritual essence which could be encountered given the correct intellectual strategies and spiritual activities.

A note of caution should be sounded. These intellectual trends easily shade into the worst forms of cod philosophy and trite spiritualism; who hasn’t had to endure that bore at a party describing an experience of taking mushrooms in the Amazon and touching a dolphin in order to become ‘one’ with nature, or Gary from Peckham off his nut on a ‘vision quest’ having snorted a good bump of crystal?

And the idea that there is any hard and fast connection between aesthetic creativity and the use of drugs and alcohol is a treacherous one to say the least.  As a functioning alcoholic, I can say that a moderate amount of drinking certainly can grease the wheels and allow for a more unincumbered creative flow.  At the same time, I’ve gone over the next day some of the stuff I’ve written while fully flushed (stuff I thought was brilliant in the moment) and it’s nearly always read wincingly self-indulgent and all-over-the-place in the sober light of day.

I suppose what I want to say is that although people rightfully laud the explosion of political and aesthetic creativity provided by the counterculture that emerged in the 50s and 60s, it did have its distortions and deficits.   Many of the rambling stream-of-consciousness poems unleashed by those beatniks who thought they were harmonizing with infinite realities were simply onanistic, annoying, and completely meaningless.

And the hippy movement, which many of the beatniks would flow into, was problematic.   The hippies of the early 1960s famously played an important and effective role in the anti-war movement in their capacity as flower-power-promoting pacifists, but in terms of the possibilities of challenging the status quo and the political forms of exploitation back home, it is important to remember that there was a streak of conspicuous individualism which ran through much of the movement, and made it resistant to radical social change. As Devon Van Houten Maldonado observes, the hippies were in the ‘majority white, middle-class group of young people’ whose wealthy backgrounds most often meant that they had ‘had less at stake than those fighting for civil rights’.[11]

The material luxury many of the hippies enjoyed set the basis for a cultural indulgence; on the one hand, they loathed the militarism and the straight-laced conservatism of their parent’s generation, and yet, the solution to many of the political problems of the age for them became the expansion of the mind through drugs and the adoption – in crude outline – of various tenets of mysticism and eastern religions such as Buddhism or Hinduism.

But the search for nirvana or brahman was also the movement of the isolated and private consciousness as it turned in on itself; the great social and political problems of the age faded before one’s own spiritual journey of individual discovery.  This kind of esoteric spiritualism – so attractive to many a hippy – allowed the individual in question to feel as though they were posing a radical affront to the status quo, that their higher consciousness had transcended the material and base imperatives of a capitalist economy such as consumerism and the never-ending drive toward accumulation and profit, and yet, in the same moment, such an isolated and aloof spiritual purview left intact the social structures and forms of capitalist organization and oppression which set the stage for the ‘consumerist’ society in the first place.

For the struggle for ‘nirvana’ would never necessitate the joining of the trade union, or the radical organization, or the revolutionary party; it would never require the one who sought it to siphon their efforts into the practical transformation of society at the socio-economic level in and through collective action – through strikes and committees.  For this reason, the ‘rebels’ could ‘rebel’ against their parents’ generation – against their concern with material goods, their unquestioning fidelity to the government and country, the conservatism of a conventional bourgeois existence more broadly – while at the same time their own basis in a substantial degree of material privilege which sustained such a ‘rebellion’ was left wholly undisturbed.

As a consequence, hippies could often ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’ in a way that would never have been feasible for civil rights activists and besieged radicals such as the Black Panthers, for the struggle of the latter was most often an ‘existential’ one – i.e. they could not afford to ‘drop out’ as their politics flowed from the fight for their very existence.  And in this way, the hippy movement was always inclined toward an aspect of trite and superficial spirituality, a cultural luxuriant that overlaid a more fundamental accommodation of the status quo.  As a long-deceased journalist once opined, scratch the surface of a hippy, and you will nearly always glimpse a conservative on the inside.

How much of the music of the Doors was infused with this hippy-esque sense of saccharine spirituality, camouflaging a more conventional and conservative mindset?  While Jim Morrison shared much of the hallucinatory ‘LSD’ culture which hoped to cleanse ‘the doors of perception’ and allow the user to gaze into the infinite beyond (the name of the band was lifted from Blake’s phrase siphoned through Huxley), there were also important points at which Morrison eschewed the hippy ethic and reacted against it.

The song ‘Five To One’, for instance, seems to draw attention to the futility of the hippy lifestyle: ‘Night is drawing near/Shadows of the evening crawl across the years.  You walk across the floor with a flower in your hand.  Trying to tell me no one understands’.  The ‘flower in your hand’ hints at that flower-power generation which is increasingly unmoored from the political realities as time creeps on – ‘shadows of the evening’.  The conclusion?  Morrison seems to suggest that radicalism will eventually and inevitably be traded for renumeration – ‘Trade in your hours for a handful of dimes.’[12]; the youthful hippy protestor will eventually morph into a figure of comfortable middle-class entitlement.

In an interview from 1970, Jim Morrison was more explicit in his antipathy to the hippy movement – ‘The hippie lifestyle is really a middle-class phenomenon … and it could not exist in any other society except ours, where there’s this incredible surfeit of goods, products, and leisure time.’[13] In another interview given that same ‘[u]n year, he was even more vehement, describing how the young hippies at Woodstock had ‘seemed like a bunch of young parasites, being kind of spoon-fed this three or four days of … well, you know what I mean.’[14]

Hopkins and Sugerman also emphasize Morrison’s spiritual and intellectual distance from the hippy movement, ‘[un]like the prototypical “hippy”, Jim thought astrology was a pseudoscience, rejected the concept of the totally integrated personality, and expressed a distaste for vegetarianism because of the religious fervor often attached to the diet.  It was, he said, dogma, and he had no use for that.’[15]  And, as Christopher Crenshaw argues, the Doors were ‘not part of the “love generation.” … were not influenced by folk-rock, and Jim Morrison’s lyrics did not often encourage listeners to “feel good.” Listeners were more likely to call them “evil” than look to them for peace and love.’[16]

For Crenshaw, the Doors embodied another aspect of the sixties counter-culture revolution, a ‘side of the resistance experience, a side fascinated with self-expression, darkness and release, sex and death.’[17]  The music journalist Max Bell, writing for Classic Rock magazine expresses a similar sentiment, writing that ‘Morrison’s neo Gothic croon and Manzarek’s ghostly, cathedral-like organ spoke of murkier climes than those offered by the Beatles’ brand of polychromatic pop.’[18]  For Bell, the music of the Doors was the darker palliative to much of the happy-go-lucky music of the 60s, ‘the symphonic high art’ of the Beatles for instance; for Bell, the Doors ‘gave the lie to such positivism, drawing on the growing feeling of ‘us against them’ that pervaded a generation of young Americans in fear of the draft to Vietnam’.[19]

But perhaps the music has a deeper historical resonance still.   As Hopkins and Sugerman write, one of the things which inoculated Morrison against some of the worst aspects of hippy-esque counterculture was the fact of his own background as a ‘college graduate instead of a dropout, a voracious reader with a highly catholic taste …[w]hether he liked it or not, he was the obvious product of a Southern upper-middle class family: charming, goal-orientated, and in many ways politically conservative.’[20]

Again there are deep and underlying contradictions here.  From an early age, Morrison seems to have intuited the hypocrisy, the façade of respectability that cloaks the lives of the well-to-do – his mother Clara, an aspirant social climber, vividly exampled it.  And she was keen to impress standards of respectability and decorum on her often wild and wayward eldest child, and when he failed to meet her expectations, she was not shy about letting him know.  Jim’s father was a navy man, away living on distant bases for most of his childhood, so Jim saw him infrequently.   The times he did, however, were turned into significant occasions as when Jim was invited to visit a ship carrier his father had recently been promoted to run.

By this point, Jim Morrison was a young man, a college student who had a keen sense of his own developing identity, but this was something his mother could neither comprehend or respect, demanding instead that he cut his hair before the important visit: ‘There are three thousand men on that ship and your father has their respect, and he has that respect because he is a fine disciplinarian.  How would it look if his son, his very own son, showed up looking like a beatnik?’[21]

Jim attended the event with his hair shorn as requested, but the bitterness over these kinds of incidents never really left him.  A few years later, he would sever all links with his parents, brutally sudden, and he seems to have never looked back.   From his earliest days when he used to torment his little brother, there was an aspect of cruelty, of coldness, about Jim Morrison – something that was on display in later life particularly in terms of the parade of women he scorned, mistreated and sometimes even brutalized.  His parents, despite their faults, clearly loved him, and put a lot of effort into trying to raise him, albeit according to their parochial and conservative values.  The manner in which he suddenly and abruptly discards them does seem unnecessarily cold and cruel, however on another level, it also makes a certain sense.

For the spiritual and political distance that opened up between them was immense.   Clara, for Jim, represented something more than the stifling, shaming probations enforced by a parent on her child.  She became more generally an emblem of the lower-middle-class world; the faux sense of respectability that thinly disguised the calculating aspiration and the snobbish superiority which lay underneath.

And if his mother was the prim package in which the values of the lower-middle class were decorated, then his father represented a more direct archetype – the distant disciplinarian with a military gait, someone in whom words and self-expression were always subordinate to the unthinking and unquestioning devotion to duty, a figure in which the state and the status quo could locate a steadfast guardian, someone of the lower orders who had thoroughly imbibed the tonic of patriotism and hierarchy, whose whole being was sheened red, white and blue, and would devote his existence to the shoring up of American military power and the project of globalism and mass murder which that entailed.

I believe that, for Jim Morrison, his parents became more than just figures whose authority he resented as part and parcel of adolescent rebellion; they were emblems, personifications almost, of aspects of the decadence and decay of the American society in the late twentieth century, the point at which historical development was reaching its twilight.

It is well-chronicled that Morrison claimed his earliest memory to be from when he was four years old, and he was traveling with his parents on the highway from Santa Fe.   The scene is recreated in the film The Doors, directed by Oliver Stone, the dusty highway, the expanse of desert and mountain, the arid heat but with the greys and purples of storm clouds brewing in the background.  The family passes an overturned truck and the young boy glimpses the injured and dying Pueblo Indians who have been thrown from the vehicle and onto the asphalt by the force of the accident.  The child, witnessing the horror, exclaims ‘I want to help, I want to help … They’re dying! They’re dying!’ to which his father responds in a comforting murmur, ‘It was a dream, Jimmy, it didn’t really happen, it was a dream.’[22]

In later years, his parents’ account of the incident differed from Morrison’s own.   With no small dose of imagination and some hyperbole, Jim Morrison probably exaggerated the details of the accident, the number of victims, even going as far as to say that he had, as a four-year-old child, felt the soul of one of the dead Indians pass into his body.  But whatever embellishments Morrison gave to the incident in retrospect, it is clear what happened was something that left an indelible mark on who he was, who he became – he would later describe it as ‘the most important moment of my life’.[23]

And this is significant on several levels.  In the most immediate sense, it was a traumatic, unsettling and harrowing experience for any small child.  But it also became, I think, a philosophical allegory of a broader political and social vision.  The victims of the accident were native Americans – the ingenious people whose displacement, ethnic cleansing and murder on a vast scale constituted perhaps the nation’s ‘original sin’ (it preceded the transatlantic slave trade in this respect).  It is not altogether insignificant that Morrison’s father was a military man, someone who rose high in the ranks of the same power which oversaw much of the ethnic cleansing that had been interwoven with the nation-building project of the past.   And that whisper – ‘it was a dream … it didn’t really happen’ – isn’t that the refrain of every white conservative in the political establishment seeking to diminish or disappear historical memory?

The idea of the US as a long smooth highway, a journey of sleek, technological progress and civilization, an untrammeled and unproblematic voyage into the future that works to disguise the wreckage of persecution, slavery and mass-murder which one glimpses momentarily through a window as those details rapidly recede into the rearview of the past; this acts as a potent metaphor for history, for society, for the family unit.  I think the veneer of respectability that overlaid the often spiteful, ruthless and acquisitive values of the lower-middle class suburban existence became blurred in Jim Morrison’s aesthetic consciousness with broader social and historical horizons, the modern nation – its values of liberty, fraternity and equality – papering over the deeper primeval darkness at work beneath the surface of respectability and decorum.

I think too this is why he came to despise his parents so absolutely; not only did they sense in him the antithesis of their own respectability and accommodation to the status quo, but he located in them – unconsciously, indirectly perhaps – the ciphers of a broader system, a system which despite its claims to progress had yielded repression and apartheid and naked children running through streets in lands far away, skins burnt off by napalm.   His parents, of course, couldn’t be held responsible in some purely personal capacity for the scope and entirety of these broader historical trends, but they could be held responsible for turning away, they could be held responsible for denial, for psychological repression, for the same social amnesia exhibited by an entire generation of older conservatives who papered up the cracks of darker realities by retreating into religious tradition and the parochial values of the ‘decent Christian family’.

In one of his most controversial works, Sigmund Freud extended his theory of the ‘Oedipus complex’ to the historical plane; in Totem and Taboo he argued that the latent desire of the son to kill the father provided the motive force for the transition from the rural world of tribes and gens to the earliest emissions of cities and modern civilisations.  The young men whose hungers and freedoms had been suppressed by rigid hierarchy of the ‘totemic’ clan would eventually coalesce as a repressed group which, in turn, would enact a terrible revenge on the ancient patriarchy: ‘the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end of the patriarchal horde. United, they had the courage to do and succeeded in doing what would have been impossible for them individually.’[24]

To be blunt, Freud’s analysis doesn’t have a leg to stand on in terms of providing a persuasive or even vaguely accurate description of the way in which the first civilizations came into being, historically speaking. But what is interesting about it is the way it explicitly equates the destruction of a family unit by the unleashing of Oedipal tendencies on an individual scale with the destruction of a whole social order.  In perhaps the most disturbing verse of all, in possibly the Doors’ most evocative and starkly poetic song, Jim Morrison gives full credence to Freudian sensibilities and the Oedipal Complex in a sinister meditation on the ancient and the repressed, on sex and death:

The killer awoke before dawn
He put his boots on
He took a face from the ancient gallery
And he walked on down the hall
He went into the room where his sister lived, and then he
Paid a visit to his brother, and then he
He walked on down the hall, and
And he came to a door
And he looked inside
“Father?” “Yes, son?” “I want to kill you”
“Mother? I want to… “

This verse is about the half-way point in the song which, in its finalized form, is almost eleven minutes long.  Naturally, this section caused deep controversy – in the live performances, Morrison sometimes erased the ambiguity of that final truncated sentence by concluding with visceral intent – ‘Mother?  I want to … fuck you!’.   But over time, the outrage has melted, and, for some, what remains is simply the sense of a band being shocking for the sake of shock, the Freudian aspect smuggled in as a way to be fashionably intellectual and visibly subversive.  And yet … I would have to demur.  For the song itself reveals much deeper layers and complexities.

The ‘killer’ who awakes before dawn is strangely anonymous – an archetype rather than a person, someone who conforms to the primitive, primeval image selected from the ‘the ancient gallery’ that the Jungian collective consciousness encompasses.  At the same time, the killer has a contemporary bent, he puts ‘his boots on’ – one can imagine he is a serial killer – that dark and sadistic symptom of modern anomie and a staple of American culture in the 60s and the 70s from the Manson murders to the Zodiac.  The damage this killer inflicts on his family is explicitly Freudian, but Morrison is not addressing his own family in the verse but rather the more universal example they had set – for they had become an emblem of the respectability of an American dream which overlaid an American nightmare, a crisis of civilization drawn out through global war and authoritarian repression, a crisis which was reaching its apex in the 1960s.

And so, when Jim Morrison ‘kills’ his father and ‘fucks’ his mother, what he is really alluding to is not just the destruction of a family, but the destruction of a civilization – a civilization which has inculcated the very death drive that seeks to obliterate it.    ‘The End’ is, at its core, a song about the end of an epoch, a collapse, and its form is modernist and fragmented for precisely this reason.    Like Elliot’s The Wasteland we seem to be hearing fragments of different voices at different times.   In the beginning, for instance, the song opens up with the most beautiful, aching melancholy … ‘This is the end. Beautiful friend. This is the end, my only friend, the end. Of our elaborate plans, the end. Of everything that stands, the end. No safety or surprise, the end. I’ll never look into your eyes again’.  Its apocalyptic but also intimate – someone addressing a lover before they unclasp hands for the final time.  Soft, gentle, and so painfully beautiful.

Another voice, however, speaks in a colder way, a soulless way, almost as though someone is speaking through him.  It invokes the aspect of the shaman, of the ancient peoples who lived on the land and who propitiated their animal gods long before they were displaced by Europeans brandishing crosses – ‘Ride the snake, ride the snake to the lake, the ancient lake … He’s old and his skin is cold’.  This sense of ancientness is pronounced in another section, this time in the form of a madness which has fallen upon a modern culture – ‘Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain. And all the children are insane’.   And joining these, is the voice of the preacher of the prairies with his promise of rapture and millennialism – ‘Can you picture what will be?  So limitless and free’.

And then there is our serial killer, of course, who takes a face from the ‘ancient gallery’, and here one can’t help but wonder whether such a disguise – such a mask – might also represent the uniform so many young men were forced to don when they were sent off to kill in Vietnam at the behest of their parents’ generation.  And finally, all these competing voices die down in favour of just the one, again that haunting refrain, ‘this is the end ….’

This achingly beautiful poem/song gives voice to various images of repressed and maddened presences that exist below the surface of ‘Americana’ in some kind of primordial and chaotic state of flux that ultimately suggest the collapse of civilisation itself.    When I listen to ‘The End’ I think it is much more than just a rambling stream of consciousness by a beat poet and hippy-transcendentalist.   Rather it has its roots in the dark terminus of all empires, that seed of degeneration which was present from the beginning, that speck of decay and death which great powers carry with them unbeknownst, the dark shadow at the edges that was so potently diagnosed by the playwrights of the past such as Aeschylus who used his play ‘The Persians’ as a prophetic allegory, the ominous portent which would herald the destruction of Athens at the hands of Sparta, or the poet Shelley as he poignantly referenced the tragedy of the great Ozymandias, that colossal wreck gradually sinking into the sands of time.

In the American context, we might call to mind the work of the artist Thomas Cole and his ‘The Course of Empire’, a set of five paintings which portrays the rise and fall of civilization.   It depicts the origins of humanity in the forms of the early hunter-gatherers who eventually grow into an innocent and pastoral way of life where human beings live in a gentle harmony with nature.

The third painting shows how civilisation itself has succeeded these earlier moments, it renders a resplendent harbour overlooked by ivory palaces and pantheons.   The civilisation – though it certainly has Roman and Greek trappings – is glorious but also generic, it is a placeholder for a concept of empire more generally, as the copper tinted water is festooned with glorious golden ships of war on the verge of departing for battle.  Inevitably, the final paintings in the quintuple describe the apocalyptic downfall of the civilisation and the return to nature once more, shattered ruins overwhelmed by creeping vines and sprouting trees as nature reclaims the landscape.

In a song such as ‘Yes, the River Knows’, the Doors bring across that early stage of pastoral innocence, of people communing with nature; the river itself is personified in an animist tradition – ‘the river told me, very softly’.  The river represents the very heart of being, and yet at the same time it is also ephemeral, like the flow of time itself: ‘Free fall flow, river flow’.  The song describes that early arcadia, the spontaneous and immediate unity with nature which was the province of our most ancient ancestors – ‘breathe underwater to the end’ – and yet time is always at work, ‘On and on it goes’.  It is a gentle poetic meditation, with just the slightest hint of foreshadowing, and in this way it has a similar aesthetic effect to those early paintings of Cole, the sense that innocence in its very essence is something that must inevitably be lost, that history will always find a way of turning the page.

And that sense of loss is also so much a part of ‘The End’, on a personal level in terms of the lover or ‘beautiful friend’ who is being addressed, but also at the level of a whole historical epoch.  It is, perhaps, no coincidence that Francis Ford Coppola used the song to such eerie and crepuscular effect in the opening to Apocalypse Now.  We begin with the sinister whirring of helicopter blads which then elides into that famous intro – ‘This is the end, my only friend the end. Of our elaborate plans, the end. Of everything that stands, the end’.

While this is going on, we see the thickets and trees of a great jungle, the shadow of a helicopter motors by, and then everything is engulfed by great plumes of flame. From that fire materialises the image of a soldier’s shell-shocked face as he gazes up into the ceiling while in the background the inferno continues to rage, punctuated only by the sleek skeletal shadows of burnt-out trees.  It is one of the most powerful introductions to any film I think, not only because of the aesthetic and technical merits of the camera work, but because the music and the images have a real historical resonance, the logic of empire driven to its demented and insensible peak, that heart of darkness which is the engine of great war and cataclysmic collapse.

Morrison and Coppola were of a similar age, cut from the cloth of the same generation, they even attended the same film school.  They were brilliant, quizzical, troubled bright lights of a generation whose lives played out against a backdrop of empire and abuse of power that yielded an epoch-changing war; they were not the type of prophets, Nostradamus-like, who used their art to predict the end of the world, rather – for their generation at that time – it seemed more like something they were actually living through.  Ultimately ‘The End’ carries an intense sadness, the sadness of youth – of children not yet grown – thrust into the terminal freefall of an end of days, and the terrible knowledge which comes with it, a bitter, beautiful lament to innocence lost.

+++

… It is perhaps five or six years after that day, when I discovered the Doors for the first time in that light-riven campus dorm.  It is perhaps only five or so years, but it already feels like a lifetime away.  Now I am living in Latin America, in Ecuador, and I share a flat with a best friend.  We both teach English at the local university.   It is Friday night, and I am meeting her partner for the first time.  It’s often awkward meeting the partner of a dear friend, for a kind of enforced proximity occurs, where you both, as strangers, have to frantically try and gel for the sake of her, so I am a little anxious.

But I shouldn’t be.  Ruben is soft-spoken, gentle, with a brilliant but random and chaotic bent of mind that disappears down rabbit holes and roams across the stars.  And, like me, he enjoys a drink or two.  But the most wonderful thing of all is – as evening merges into night – I discover he is the biggest Doors fan I have ever met.  From that moment on we are friends in our own right.   And together we will savor their music on many more occasions, many more late nights spent drinking and indulging our obsession.

To paraphrase Tolstoy, one of the fundamental miracles of music is the way it expresses the soul of the musician and infects the soul of the listener.  But the relationship isn’t a purely passive one.  For just as the musician breathes color into the lives of future generations, the listener can use music to breathe life into the past too.  I am middle-aged.  I haven’t seen my friend Ruben for many years, and those people I knew at university are as shadows seen from a great distance now.  But when I play the Doors, it brings me back so swiftly, so sweetly, to those moments in the past, to the memory of friends and laughter played out once more under faraway skies, and the ghost of a younger, long-lost self.

Notes.

[1] Goldsmith, Melissa Ursula Dawn (November 22, 2019). Listen to Classic Rock! Exploring a Musical Genre. ABC-CLIO. pp. 93–94.

[2] Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, No One Here Gets Out Alive (Plexus Publishing, London: 2011) p.11

[3] Ibid., p.12

[4] Ibid., p.12

[5] Ibid., p.12

[6] Ibid., p.18

[7] Christopher Hitchens, ‘Living Proof’, Vanity Fair March 15^th 2003: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2003/03/hitchens-200303

[8] Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, No One Here Gets Out Alive (Plexus Publishing, London: 2011) p.45

[9] William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)

[10] Jim Morrison cited in Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, No One Here Gets Out Alive (Plexus Publishing, London: 2011) p.45

[11] Devon Van Houten Maldonado, ‘Did the hippies have nothing to say?’ BBC Culture 29th May 2018: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180529-did-the-hippies-have-nothing-to-say

[12] ‘Five To One’  The Doors 1968

[13] Jim Morrison cited in Christopher Crenshaw, ‘Five to One: Rethinking the Doors and the Sixties Counterculture’, Music & Politics 8, Number 1 (Winter 2014), ISSN 1938-7687. Article DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/mp.9460447.0008.101

[14] Ibid.

[15] Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, No One Here Gets Out Alive (Plexus Publishing, London: 2011) p.155

[16] Christopher Crenshaw, ‘Five to One: Rethinking the Doors and the Sixties Counterculture’, Music & Politics 8, Number 1 (Winter 2014), ISSN 1938-7687. Article DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/mp.9460447.0008.101

[17] Ibid.

[18] Max Bell, ‘The Doors: the story of Strange Days and the madness of Jim Morrison’, Classic Rock 12 November 2016: https://www.loudersound.com/features/the-doors-the-story-of-strange-days-and-the-madness-of-jim-morrison

[19] Ibid.

[20] Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, No One Here Gets Out Alive (Plexus Publishing, London: 2011) p.155

[21] Clara Morrison cited in Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, No One Here Gets Out Alive (Plexus Publishing, London: 2011) p.40

[22] Cited in Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, No One Here Gets Out Alive (Plexus Publishing, London: 2011) p.6

[23] Jim Morrison cited in Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, No One Here Gets Out Alive (Plexus Publishing, London: 2011) p.6

[24] Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (Norton and Company, New York: 1950) p.176

The post Break on Through: Finding The Doors appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Tony McKenna.

But the claim is false. Evergreen vessels have not passed through the Red Sea since December 2023.

A video of a cargo ship was posted on Chinese social media Bilibili on Aug. 17.

“A cargo ship belonging to China’s Taiwan-based Evergreen Group passed through the Red Sea flying the five-star red flag without incident. Previously, the Houthis have repeatedly attacked passing ships in the Red Sea, but ships flying the Chinese and Russian flags have usually been able to pass through safely,” the video’s caption reads. 

The 12-second video shows multiple scenes, including China’s national flag, the Five-star Red Flag, and a cargo ship with an “EVERGREEN” sign on it. 

Separately, a photo of what appears to be Evergeen’s cargo vessel was shared on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Aug. 18, alongside a caption that reads: “The Evergreen Hotel refused to fly the Chinese flag, but Evergreen Marine flew the Chinese flag when it passed through the waters under the jurisdiction of the Houthis in the Red Sea.”

The claim began to circulate online after Chinese social media users criticized a decision by a branch of the Taiwanese Evergreen Laurel Hotel in Paris to refuse to fly China’s national flag during the Olympics.

Some users further criticized the Evergreen Group, the hotel’s parent company, for what they said was double standards after several of its ships passed through the Red Sea in July while flying the Chinese flag for protection. 

Evergreen Group is a Taiwan conglomerate with businesses in shipping, transport and associated services such as energy development, air transport, hotels and resorts.

Taiwan has been self-governing since it effectively separated from mainland China in 1949 after the Chinese civil war, but China regards Taiwan as a renegade province that should be reunited with the mainland, by force if necessary.

However, the claim about the Evergreen vessels flying the flag is false. 

Vessels in question

Reverse image searches found the two vessels seen in the Bilibili video and the photo on X are Evergeen’s EVER ALP and EVER BUILD. 

According to the ship tracking service Marine Traffic, both vessels are under the jurisdiction of Panama. 

Since the internationally recognized United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea stipulates that a ship must sail under the flag of the state to which it is registered, those ships should fly Panama’s flag. 

According to a contingency plan issued by Evergreen in December 2023, all of its cargo vessels originally scheduled to pass through the Red Sea  between Asia, Europe and the eastern United States would be rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope due to the threat of attacks on merchant ships.

Since the release of the contingency plan by Evergreen, the EVER ALP has not passed through the Red Sea, while the EVER BUILD has only sailed between northeast China and Thailand, nowhere near the Red Sea.

Records from the ship tracking service Marine Traffic also show that neither the EVER ALP nor the EVER BUILD has sailed through the Red Sea since the group issued its contingency plan. 

A representative of Evergreen told AFCL that it had not changed its company-wide shipping reroute around the Cape of Good Hope, and the company required its vessels to follow the international and industry practice of flying the flags of the country under whose jurisdiction they sail. 

Hoisting a different country’s flags

A former Taiwanese Coast Guard official told AFCL that, in practice, there are cases when a ship might fly a different country’s flags. 

It is common for ships to fly another country’s flag alongside their own registered state flag to show goodwill when passing through that country’s territorial waters, the official said. 

In disputed waters, ships from one country involved in the dispute might fly the flag of the other country to reduce the risk of interference from the rival state’s authorities or militias.

Lastly, ships from smaller or less powerful nations often fly the flag of a more powerful country when passing through pirate-infested waters to create a deterrent, the official explained, adding that Taiwan did not legally permit ships under its jurisdiction to engage in the second or third scenarios.

Translated by Shen Ke. Edited by Shen Ke and Taejun Kang.

Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) was established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. We publish fact-checks, media-watches and in-depth reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of current affairs and public issues. If you like our content, you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Dong Zhe Asia Fact Check Lab.

I was kidnapped on November 19th (2023), and I was released on November 21st. I stayed in the hands of the Israelis handcuffed and blindfolded for about 53 hours. During that time, I was in constant fear for my wife’s and my children’s lives—I did not know where they went. I was worried about the safety of my parents and my siblings, who I left behind in northern Gaza. And when I was temporarily placed in a tent along with other kidnapped people from Gaza, I could hear the artillery firing shells into the parts that I evacuated [from].

Thanks to everyone who wrote about me, I think a lot of pressure was put on the Israelis to release me. So, I was released and I was really surprised because it was very quick. The second day I was called by some Israeli soldiers to go out. And then it took them a few hours to drop me at the same checkpoint where they kidnapped me from, and that would be the next journey for me to find my wife and my children. I did not know where they were, there was no internet connection, there was no phone signal. So, I started to look for them and it took me about three hours to find them. And luckily they were staying with my wife’s relatives in a school shelter in the south of the Gaza Strip.

The moment I was released, I was [contacted] by The New Yorker editors, especially David Remnick, who asked me to write about this. So, of course, immediately I started writing down everything I could remember.

Did you know right away that you wanted to write about this experience?

I’m the kind of person who—I don’t know if I’m lucky or unlucky—reflects on his experiences. Because these experiences are not superficial. These experiences have been imprinted in my heart, and I felt every bit of it. So, I found myself retelling the story from the time we decided to leave North Gaza. We were, of course, scared to take the journey because the Israelis could bomb us any time. That had happened with a few families. So I started to narrate these stories of some of the bombings that happened the night before we decided to leave North Gaza. My wife’s grandparents and her uncles were in a school that was bombed in the early morning one day before we left. That was one reason why we decided to leave.

I have these stories with me. The hard part was about reflecting on my feelings, not my experience. There are two parts to any story, the experience and the feelings. The emotions that come with this experience. And this is what poetry is to me.

So, I started writing everything down. I wrote about half of the piece in [the shelter] I was in. I sometimes had to walk in the street to look for an internet connection. I was sitting in the street along with hundreds of other people. Then the second half [of drafting] and editing process took place in Cairo.

Did the experience of writing this essay helped you to process what had just happened to you?

Whenever I write, whether it’s poetry or essays, or even a short story in the Arabic language, the fact that I’m writing about myself is also representative of what other people are going through. Writing about these things helps me to relieve some of the pain that I’m feeling for myself and for others.

Writing about the collective story, the story of so many people who were killed, or who lost their parents—I know of two people who are still buried under the rubble of their house. And I met with two survivors of that airstrike, which killed at least 40 people and destroyed the building. They were in Egypt. They told me that they wanted to go back to Gaza, and I [asked], “Why? A lot of people pay money to go out in Gaza.” She said, “I want to go back and retrieve the body of my father and my sibling.” So, the fact that I’m writing about these people gives me a sense of victory that I am still alive to tell these stories. My life has a meaning not only to me, but also to other people.

It sounds like along with feeling that you’ve survived, there is also maybe a sense of responsibility to share those stories of the people who have been lost?

Yeah, the fact that I am alive is one thing, and the fact that I can continue to write is another, because many people survive atrocities. It’s not that they kept silent, but they were forced to be silent, either because they’re still traumatized. I myself am traumatized. I still have nightmares. And also my children have nightmares. For me, it’s about writing about myself, whether it’s something that happened to me last year, last month or yesterday, or things that other people experienced, but they did not survive to tell us the rest of the story. So, my position as a poet is to either rewrite the story or to complete it.

How and when did you find poetry as a vehicle for sharing your creative identity or words with the world?

I was born in 1992 in a refugee camp. I’ve never seen a foreigner who came to visit Gaza for the sake of visiting. I mean, the only foreigners that would come to Gaza were journalists, or doctors, or human rights activists. No one came to Gaza to talk to the people of Gaza. So, the first time I found myself writing, I didn’t realize what I was writing, that it had some effect on people, and it had some art in it. It was in 2014. I was posting about everything that I was witnessing, every feeling that I felt. I think having a platform [on] Facebook at the time helped me realize how important my work would be, because people started to follow me and to comment on my posts and compliment my writing.

The fact that there were some people who were listening encouraged me to continue holding my pen and penning more and more pieces of writing. I wouldn’t call them poems at the time.

When I write in Arabic, I’m talking to myself about myself. I’m talking about humanity addressing myself or trying to understand it. But when it comes to writing in the English language, of course I’m not talking to myself because it’s not part of me. I was not born with it. I found it in me later. So, writing in the English language means that I’m talking to someone else, because the people outside are eager to learn. Having that audience in front of me meant that I should continue addressing these people, and that’s where poetry came from.

You’ve emerged as one of the most prominent voices responding to the war in Gaza through poetry. Why is poetry needed in times like these?

I think poetry is one of the most successful mediums for someone to reflect on the horrors of war. I can’t imagine a painter painting something about the war these days. I can’t imagine someone writing a novel these days about the war. But when it comes to poetry, because poetry is about the experience and emotions, we are quick. I mean, writing a poem could take me five minutes or 10 minutes because it’s just there. It just needs a pen or maybe a table to start and write it.

So, I think poetry is maybe one of the only tools that emerges from under the rubble of a bombed city. Israel is not only killing houses or neighborhoods, they are killing the city itself. Because if you look at Gaza, it doesn’t look like a city. It looks like a graveyard, really. I think poetry is the most direct way of communicating the horrors of the war and the siege.

In terms of using poetry to push for change, is there any advice that you’d like to share with other writers?

I think a poet does not have too many options. The poet can find themselves talking to the human in others. So, I’m not talking about the history of Palestine [or] Israel, I’m talking about now. I’m just talking about this moment. Let’s put history aside and talk about the central issue, which is humanity. Humanity comes first here.

So, in moments of war, and when it comes to writing about us as human beings, put everything aside. Just talk about what has been brought to every single one of us human beings, not as a Palestinian, not as a Christian or a Muslim or a Jew. Just forget about these things. These things came to us after we were born. I was not born Palestinian. I mean, I was in my mother’s womb without knowing Arabic or Islam, or knowing even my name. The priority should be to every single human being in this world. So, I think poetry’s focus should be on the I. Not on he, or she, or they, or it. I, let’s protect the I.

Yeah. It sounds like part of your advice is to find the universals of humanity that can take us beyond all the boxes that we use to define and categorize humans.

Exactly. If I’m going to read a poem about what happened to Native Americans or what happened to Jews in the Holocaust, I’m going to relate to everything. If I’m going to read a memoir that was written about the genocide in Bosnia, I’m going to relate to everything. I mean, what is the purpose of writing if we are not going to learn from it?

Our readers are largely American artists. And I was wondering if you have any messages or requests that you’d like to convey to working American artists in this political moment?

We are both part of this world. Not only are [Palestinian artists] the ones who are supposed to document the horrors of what’s happening in Gaza, but everyone. Not only artists, but everyone, everyone in the outside world who is witnessing this. Whether they’re watching news, looking at images, photos, and videos that are emerging from under the bombardment. Everyone is supposed to reflect on what they see. Because not only am I in pain as a Palestinian, but everyone who’s watching us [is] also in pain.

So, their part comes here. Everyone in the outside world needs to be part of this moment. Because this attack is not only against the Palestinian people, it’s also against the people who see value in the lives of the Palestinians.

Can you tell me about your plans for the future?

Of course, I’m writing more and more poetry. I have a poetry book that’s forthcoming from Knopf in October this year. It’s called Forest of Noise. I’m writing an essay for The New Yorker about [being] a Palestinian, trying to travel from one country to another, from one state to another. And I think my next project would be a memoir. This is a big project, but I haven’t yet started on it. I can imagine myself writing about so many things.

I have some short stories in the Arabic language, but I don’t think that I’m going to work on this right now. There is no urgency or any necessity, especially during these times. But rather, I think talking and addressing the outside world, especially the English-speaking world. I mean, I talk about the English-speaking world, because the Balfour Declaration, which unjustly promised Palestine to the Jews in 1917, was written in the English language. So, unfortunately, the English language is of course the language of colonialism, and not only for the Palestinian people, but for many, many nations.

It’s interesting to think about using the language of colonization and imperialism in an effort to combat them. It seems like is part of what you’re doing through writing in English is using it as a way to reach the people who are in those seats of colonial power.

Yes, exactly. I hope that my first book and my second book will be read by people who are unfortunately contributing to the misery and the devastation of my country. My message is peace and justice in this poetry. I think that in times of atrocities, the people who should speak to the public, speak on TVs, should be the poets and the artists—not politicians, not political analysts.

At the end of your New Yorker essay, you talked about the concept of raising hope, and likened it to cultivating crops. And I feel like when I read your poetry, I see so much resilience and hope in your work. How do you cultivate hope?

Hope lies in the fact that we are here and there are things around us that wish us to continue growing. When I see the thousands, hundreds of thousands and millions of people taking to the streets and asking, demanding a ceasefire, I can see hope here. Because these younger generations are the generations who hopefully will be leading the world in 10, or 15, or 20 years from now.

These people who are taking to the streets and who [made the] encampments give me hope because they are watching the history in front of them. They’re not reading about the past. No, they are watching the present. So, I see hope in that generation. And I see hope in the fact that Palestinians love life. I can tell about my father who planted some plants in our bombed garden, and he’s eating some eggplant, some pepper, some cabbage. I mean, we are planting this hope next to the rubble of our bombed house. [The Palestinians] continue to plant. And this is what hope is to me. They continue to plant their hope next to a bombed building. Here lies hope for me.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Rene Kladzyk.

Mountain biker carving a corner on the Bonneville Shoreline Trail north of Ogden on the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest in Utah. Forest Service photo by Eric Greenwood.

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed…”

— Wallace Stegner

The goal of the Wilderness Act, now celebrating its 60th birthday, was to set aside a small proportion of public land in America from human intrusion. Some places, the founders said, deserved to be free from motorized, mechanized and other intrusions to protect wildlife and wild lands.

But now, a handful of mountain bikers have partnered with a senator from Utah to gut the Wilderness Act.

This June, the Sustainable Trails Coalition, a mountain biking organization, cheered as Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee introduced a bill (S. 4561) to amend the Wilderness Act and allow mountain bikes, strollers, and game carts on every piece of land protected by the National Wilderness Preservation System. Stopping these intrusions would take each local wilderness manager undertaking a cumbersome process to say “no.”

The U.S. Congress passed the Wilderness Act, and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law on September 3, 1964, to “preserve the wilderness character” of 54 wilderness areas totaling 9.1 million acres. Today, this effort has become a true conservation success story.

The National Wilderness Preservation System now protects over 800 wilderness areas totaling over 111 million acres in 44 states and Puerto Rico, making it America’s most critical law for preserving wild places and the genetic diversity of thousands of plant and animal species. Yet designated wilderness is only 2.7% of the Lower 48, and still just about 5% if Alaska is included.

The protections of the Wilderness Act include a ban on logging, mining, roads, buildings, structures and installations, mechanized and motorized equipment and more. Its authors sought to secure for the American people “an enduring resource of wilderness” to protect places not manipulated by modern society, where the ecological and evolutionary forces of nature could continue to play out mostly unimpeded.

Grandfathered in, however, were some grazing allotments, while mining claims were also allowed to be patented until 1983. Many private mining claims still exist inside designated wildernesses.

Senator Lee’s bill is premised on the false claim that the Wilderness Act never banned bikes, and that supposedly, the U.S. Forest Service changed its regulations in 1984 to ban bikes. But bicycles, an obvious kind of mechanized equipment, have always been prohibited in wilderness by the plain language of the law.  (“There shall be…no other form of mechanical transport….”) The Forest Service merely clarified its regulations on this point in 1984 as mountain bikes gained popularity.

Unfortunately, bikers in the Sustainable Trails Coalition are not the only recreational interest group that wants to weaken the Wilderness Act. Some rock climbers, for example, are pushing Congress to allow climbers to damage wilderness rock faces by pounding in permanent bolts and pitons rather than using only removable climbing aids. In addition, trail runners want exemptions from the ban in wilderness on commercial trail racing. Drone pilots and paragliders want their aircraft exempted from Wilderness Act protections, and recreational pilots want to “bag” challenging landing sites in wilderness.

The list of those seeking to water down the Wilderness Act is growing.

Most of these recreational groups say they support wilderness, understanding how important it is when most landscapes and wildlife habitats have been radically altered by people. At the same time, they want to slice out their own piece of the wilderness pie.

Must we get everything we want in the outdoors? Rather than weakening the protections that the Wilderness Act provides, we could try to reinvigorate a spirit of humility toward wilderness. We could practice restraint, understanding that designated wildernesses have deep values beyond our human uses of them.

Meanwhile, in response to growing demand for mountain biking trails, the Bureau of Land Management invites over a million mountain bikers each year to ride its thousands of miles of trails. And the U.S. Forest Service already has a staggering 130,000 miles of motorized and nonmotorized trails available to mountain bikers.

Do mountain bikers and others pushing for access really need to domesticate wilderness, too?

Let’s cherish our wilderness heritage, whole and intact. We owe it to the farseeing founders of the Wilderness Act, and we owe it to future generations.

The post Mountain Bikers Push to Ride Through Wilderness appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kevin Proescholdt.

Four athletes representing Laos competed in Paris, but there was little expectation they would bring home a medal. So viewers in Laos have also taken an interest in Thai athletes and other Southeast Asian competitors. 

“I know well that Lao athletes have very little chance to win a medal,” a Vientiane resident told Radio Free Asia. “But I’m still closely following the Olympic games.”

She cheered on Panipak Wongpattanakit from Thailand, who won a gold medal in the taekwondo women’s flyweight division.

“I remember that she also won a gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics too,” she said, referring to the games held in 2021. “I would say ‘congratulations’ to her.”

Laos’ television channels didn’t have enough advertising sponsors to show a live broadcast of the Paris games, an official from Laos’ Olympic committee said. 

Instead, committee officials who are in France have been posting results from Lao athletes on social media platforms and have also done a few Facebook Live broadcasts to talk about the events, he said.

Fans in Laos have also just been enjoying the track and field, soccer and gymnastic events no matter who is competing, another Lao citizen told RFA.

“I watch almost everything,” he said.

Laos hasn’t won a medal since it first sent athletes to the Olympics in 1980, when the games were held in Moscow. 

Four athletes represented Laos in Paris: Silina Pha Aphay, a Lao-born 100-meter sprinter; Praewa Misato Philaphandeth, a rhythmic gymnast who is of Lao, Thai, and Japanese descent; and Ariana Southa Dirkzwager and Steven Insixiengmay, both of whom are Lao-American swimmers.

Pha Aphay was briefly in the spotlight during a preliminary heat of the women’s 100-meter race. She was seen helping another sprinter, Lucia Moris of South Sudan, who fell to the ground during the race after an apparent injury. 

After crossing the finish line in sixth place, Pha Aphay ran back to Moris as she lay on the track in pain. She stayed with her as medics strapped her onto a stretcher.

“Once I saw her on the ground in pain, it was in my mind that I must finish my race first,” she told RFA. “Then I asked permission from the referee if I could help her. The referee said yes, then I rushed to help her.”

Translated by Phouvong. Edited by Matt Reed.

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

For 13 straight months now, the planet has been notching record temperatures, from hottest year (2023) to hottest month (last July). And what was a daily temperature record eight years ago has now become worryingly commonplace. “What is truly staggering is how large the difference is between the temperature of the last 13 months and the previous temperature records,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of the European Union’s Copernicus service, in a statement. “We are now in truly uncharted territory and as the climate keeps warming, we are bound to see new records being broken in future months and years.”  

The territory may be uncharted, but the causes of this heat are abundantly clear. For one, there’s the steady rise of global temperatures due to carbon emissions. Since 1850, the Earth’s temperature has risen by 0.11 degrees F per decade on average, but that rate of warming since 1982 has jumped to 0.36 degrees per decade. Last year was already the hottest year on record by far, while 10 of the warmest years have all happened in the last decade. Copernicus also notes that before July 2023, the daily global average temperature record was 62.24 degrees F, on August 13, 2016. But since July 3, 2023, 57 days have exceeded that mark. Uncharted territory, indeed.

The world may also be feeling the lingering aftereffects of El Niño this summer. That’s the band of warm Pacific Ocean water off the coast of South America, which sends additional heat into the atmosphere that raises temperatures and influences weather patterns. The most recent El Niño peaked around the new year, then faded through this spring. “The atmosphere knows no boundaries,” said Shang-Ping Xie, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. “We’re still under the influence of El Niño. Not to mention that North Atlantic warming is one of the reasons that this Atlantic hurricane season is expected to be very active.”

So while July 21 might have been sweltering for landlubbers, the parts of the Atlantic Ocean where hurricanes form are also extremely hot. Those warm waters are what fuel cyclones like Hurricane Beryl earlier this month, which slammed into Texas and left hunger in its wake. Scientists have forecasted five major hurricanes and 21 named storms this season, thanks in part to those high ocean temperatures.

There might also be some natural variability thrown into the mix this summer: Some years are just hotter than others even in the absence of human-caused warming. And this time of year is when global average temperatures naturally peak, as the Northern Hemisphere summer starts to mature. (More landmasses in the North absorb and emit the sun’s energy, versus all that ocean area in the South that helps cool things down. 

“It just so happened that we had a spike on top of what is typically the warmest climatological week of the entire year,” said Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth, which does its own climate analyses. “This is the warmest day on record, but also July is now — at least in my analysis — almost certain to not be the warmest July on record.” That is, the 13-month streak of records may well come to an end. Last July was so hot, it set a very high bar for future Julys to beat.

At the same time, by Hausfather’s calculations, there’s a 95 percent chance that 2024 will edge out 2023 as the hottest year ever. “It’s just been so warm in the first six months of the year that even if we don’t set new records for the second six months, we’re still very likely going to end up above 2023,” Hausfather said. “We’ve just built up that much of a lead already.”

Back in the Pacific Ocean, though, relief may be on the way: With El Niño gone, its cold-water counterpart, La Niña, could form in the coming months. That may help bring down global temperatures in 2025, and maybe even beyond. “The last La Niña was a three-year event,” Xie said. “That is of course very rare, but has extraordinary effects on the climate.”

Regardless of El Niño and La Niña, though, the past year has been exceptionally hot — an ominous sign that the planet hasn’t just entered uncharted territory, but an increasingly perilous one. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Earth just sweltered through the hottest day ever recorded on Jul 23, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Matt Simon.

Despite the many challenges faced by Pacific journalists in recent years, the recent Pacific International Media Conference highlighted the incredible strength and courage of the region’s reporters.

The three-day event in Suva, Fiji, earlier this month co-hosted by the University of South Pacific, Pacific Islands News Association (PINA) and the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN), was the first of its kind for Fiji in the last 20 years, marking the newfound freedom media professionals have been experiencing in the nation.

The conference included speakers from many of the main newsrooms in the Pacific, as well as Emmy award-winning American journalist Professor Emily Drew and Pulitzer-nominated investigative journalist Irene Jay Liu, as well as New Zealand’s Indira Stewart, Dr David Robie of APMN and Moera Tuilaepa-Taylor of RNZ Pacific.

• READ MORE: Other Pacific Media Conference reports

Given Fiji’s change of government in 2022, and the ensuing repeal of media laws which threatened jail time for reporters and editors who published stories that weren’t in the “national interest”, many spoke of the extreme challenges they faced under the previous regime.

And two of Fiji’s deputy prime ministers, Manoa Kamikamica and Professor Biman Prasad, also gave keynote speeches detailing how the country’s newly established press freedom is playing a vital role in strengthening the country’s democracy.

Dr Robie has worked in the Pacific for several decades and was a member of the conference’s organising committee.

He said this conference has come at “critical time given the geopolitics in the background”.

Survival of media
“I’ve been to many conferences over the years, and this one has been quite unique and it’s been really good,” he said.

“We’ve addressed the really pressing issues regarding the survival of media and it’s also highlighted how resilient news organisations are across the Pacific.”

Dr David Robie talks to PMN News on the opening day.   Audio/video:PMN Pacific Mornings

The conference coincided with the launch of the 30th anniversary edition of Pacific Journalism Review, which is the only academic journal in the region that publishes research specifically focused on Pacific media.

As founder of PJR, Robie says it is heartening to see it recognised at a place — the University of the South Pacific — where it was also based for a number of years.

“It began its life at the University of Papua New Guinea, but then it was at USP for five years, so it was very appropriate to have our birthday here. It’s published over 1100 articles over its 30 years, so we were really celebrating all that’s been published over that time.”

Climate change solutions
RNZ Pacific manager Moera Tuilaepla-Taylor spoke on a panel about how to cover climate change with a solutions lens.

She says the topic of sexual harassment was a particularly important discussion that came up and it highlighted the extra hurdles Pacific female journalists face.

“It’s a reminder for me as a journalist from New Zealand and something I will reinforce with my own team about the privilege we have to be able to do a story, jump in your car and go home, without being tailed by the police or being taken into barracks to be questioned,” she says.

“It’s a good reminder to us and it gives a really good perspective about what it’s like to be a journalist in the region and the challenges too.”

Another particular challenge Tuilaepa-Taylor highlighted was the increase in international journalists coming into the region reporting on the Pacific.

“The issue I have is that it leads to taking away a Pacific lens on a story which is vitally important,” she said.

“There are stories that can be covered by non-Pacific journalists but there are really important cultural stories that need to have that Pacific lens on it so it’s more authentic and give audiences a sense of connection.”

But Dr Robie says that while problems facing the Pacific are clear, the conference also highlighted why there is also cause for optimism.

“Journalists in the region work very hard and under very difficult conditions and they carry a lot of responsibilities for their communities, so I think it’s a real credit to our industry … [given] their responses to the challenges and their resilience shows there can be a lot of hope for the future of journalism in the region.”

Justin Latif is news editor of Pacific Media Network. Republished with permission.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shipments in the north

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Translated by Phouvong. Edited by Matt Reed.

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

We continue our July 5 special broadcast by revisiting our recent conversation with Christian Cooper, author of Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World and host of the Emmy Award-winning show Extraordinary Birder. We spoke with Cooper after New York City’s chapter of the Audubon Society officially changed its name to the New York City Bird Alliance as part of an effort to distance itself from its former namesake John James Audubon, the so-called founding father of American birding. The 19th century naturalist enslaved at least nine people and espoused racist views. Christian Cooper is a Black birder and a longtime board member of the newly minted New York City Bird Alliance. In 2020, he made headlines after a white woman in Central Park called 911 and falsely claimed Cooper was threatening her life. Cooper also shares stories of his life and career, including his longtime LGBTQ activism and how his father’s work as a science educator inspired his lifetime passion for birdwatching.

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

An exhibition from Tara Arts International has been brought to The University of the South Pacific as part of the Pacific International Media Conference next week.

In the first exhibition of its kind, Connecting Diaspora: Pacific Prana provides an alternative narrative to the dominant story of the Indian diaspora to the Pacific.

The epic altar “Pacific Prana” has been assembled in the gallery of USP’s Oceania Centre for Arts, Culture and Pacific Studies by installation artist Tiffany Singh in collaboration with journalistic film artist Mandrika Rupa and dancer and film artist Mandi Rupa Reid.

• READ MORE: Other Pacific International Media Conference reports

A colourful exhibit of Indian classical dance costumes are on display in a deconstructed arrangement, to illustrate the evolution of Bharatanatyam for connecting the diaspora.

Presented as a gift to the global diaspora, this is a collaborative, artistic, immersive, installation experience, of altar, flora, ritual, mineral, scent and sound.

It combines documentary film journalism providing political and social commentary, also expressed through ancient dance mudra performance.

The 120-year history of the people of the diaspora is explored, beginning in India and crossing the waters to the South Pacific by way of Fiji, then on to Aotearoa New Zealand and other islands of the Pacific.

This is also the history of the ancestors of the three artists of Tara International who immigrated from India to the Pacific, and identifies their links to Fiji.

expressed through ancient dance mudra performance.

The 120-year history of the people of the diaspora is explored, beginning in India and crossing the waters to the South Pacific by way of Fiji, then on to Aotearoa New Zealand and other islands of the Pacific.

Support partners are Asia Pacific Media Network and The University of the South Pacific.

A journal article on documentary making in the Indian diaspora by Mandrika Rupa is also being published in the 30th anniversary edition of Pacific Journalism Review to be launched at the Pacific Media Conference dinner on July 4.

Exhibition space for Tara Arts International has been provided at the Oceania Centre for Arts, Culture and Pacific Studies at USP.

The exhibition opening is next Tuesday, and will open to the public the next day and remain open until Wednesday, August 28.

The gallery will be open from 10am to 4pm and is free.

Published in collaboration with the USP Oceania Centre for Arts, Culture and Pacific Studies.

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

We continue our conversation with Christian Cooper, author of Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World and host of the Emmy Award-winning show Extraordinary Birder. Cooper shares stories of his life and career, including his longtime LGBTQ activism and how his father’s work as a science educator inspired his lifetime passion for birdwatching. “Birding forces you outside of yourself [and] whatever your woes are,” says Cooper. “It makes you feel connected to the whole planet. It engages your senses, your intellect. It is incredibly healing. … For people whose history is about being enslaved, for us to be able to relate to this bird, it’s liberating.”

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

Aisha Khalid and Imran Qureshi (Pakistan), Two Wings to Fly, Not One, 2017.

Half of the world’s population will have the opportunity to vote by the end of this year as 64 countries and the European Union are scheduled to open their ballot boxes. No previous year has been so flush with elections. Among these countries is India, where a remarkable 969 million voting papers had to be printed ahead of the elections that culminated on 1 June. In the end, 642 million people (roughly two-thirds of those eligible) voted, half of them women. This is the highest-ever participation by women voters in a single election in the world.

Meanwhile, the European Union’s 27 member states held elections for the European Parliament, which meant that 373 million eligible voters had the opportunity to cast their ballot for the 720 members who make up the legislative body. Add in the eligible voters for elections in the United States (161 million), Indonesia (204 million), Pakistan (129 million), Bangladesh (120 million), Mexico (98 million), and South Africa (42 million) and you can see why 2024 feels like the Year of Elections.

Alfredo Ramos Martínez (Mexico), Vendedora de Alcatraces (‘Calla Lily Vendor’), 1929.

Over the past few weeks, three particularly consequential elections took place in India, Mexico, and South Africa. India and South Africa are key players in the BRICS bloc, which is charting a path towards a world order that is not dominated by the US. The nature of the governing coalitions that come to power in these countries will have an impact on the grouping and will certainly shape this year’s BRICS Summit to be held in Kazan (Russia) in late October. While Mexico is not a member of BRICS and did not apply for membership during the expansion last year, the country has sought to relieve itself of the pressures from the United States (most Mexicans are familiar with the statement ‘Poor Mexico: so far from God, so close to the United States’, made by Porfirio Diaz, the country’s president from 1884 to 1911). The Mexican government’s recent aversion to US interference in Latin America and to the overall neoliberal framework of trade and development has brought the country deeper into dialogue with alternative projects such as BRICS.

While the results in India and South Africa showed that the electorates are deeply divided, Mexican voters stayed with the centre-left National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), electing Claudia Sheinbaum as the first woman president in the country’s history on 2 June. Sheinbaum will take over from Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), who leaves the presidency with a remarkable 80% approval rating. As the mayor of Mexico City from 2018 to 2023 and a close ally of AMLO, Sheinbaum followed the general principles laid out in the Fourth Transformation (4T) project set out by AMLO in 2018. This 4T project of ‘Mexican Humanism’ follows three important periods in Mexico’s history: independence (1810–1821), reform (1858–1861), and revolution (1910–1917). While AMLO spoke often of this 4T as an advance in Mexico’s history, it is in fact a return to the promises of the Mexican Revolution with its call to nationalise resources (including lithium), increase wages, expand government jobs programmes, and revitalise social welfare. One of the reasons why Sheinbaum triumphed over the other candidates was her pledge to continue the 4T agenda, which is rooted less in populism (as the bourgeois press likes to say) and more so in a genuine welfarist humanism.

George Pemba (South Africa), Township Games, 1973.

In May of this year, thirty years after the end of apartheid, South Africa held its seventh general election of the post-apartheid era, producing results that stand in stark contrast to those in Mexico. The ruling tripartite alliance – consisting of the African National Congress (ANC), South African Communist Party, and Congress of South African Trade Unions – suffered an enormous attrition of its vote share, securing just 40.18% of the vote (42 seats short of a majority), compared to 59.50% and a comfortable majority in the National Assembly in 2019. What is stunning about the election is not just the decline in the alliance’s vote share but the rapid decline in voter turnout. Since 1999, less and less voters have bothered to vote, and this time only 58% of those eligible came to the polls (down from 86% in 1994). What this means is that the tripartite alliance won the votes of only 15.5% of eligible voters, while its rivals claimed even smaller percentages. It is not just that the South African population – like people elsewhere – is fed up with this or that political party, but that they are increasingly disillusioned by their electoral process and by the role of politicians in society.

A sober appraisal of South Africa’s election results shows that the two political forces that broke from the ANC – Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) and Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters – won a combined 64.28% of the vote, exceeding the vote share that the ruling alliance secured in 1994. The overall agenda promised by these three forces remains intact (ending poverty, expropriating land, nationalising banks and mines, and expanding social welfare), although the strategies they would like to follow are wildly different, a divide furthered by their personal rivalries. In the end, a broad coalition government will be formed in South Africa, but whether it will be able to define even a social democratic politics – such as in Mexico – is unclear. The overall decline in the population’s belief in the system represents a lack of faith in any political project. Promises, if unmet, can go stale.

Kalyan Joshi (India), Migration in the Time of COVID, 2020.

In the lead-up to the election in India, held over six weeks from 19 April to 1 June, incumbent Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) said that his party alone would win a thumping 370 seats in the 543-seat parliament. In the end, the BJP could only muster 240 seats – down by 63 compared with the 2019 elections – and his National Democratic Alliance won a total of 293 (above the 272-threshold needed to form a government). Modi will return for a third term as prime minister, but with a much-weakened mandate. He was only able to hold on to his own seat by 150,000 votes, a significant decrease from the 450,000-vote margin in 2019, while fifteen incumbent members of his cabinet lost their seats. No amount of hate speech against Muslims or use of government agencies to silence opposition parties and the media was able to increase the far-right’s hold on power.

An April poll found that unemployment and inflation were the most important issues for two-thirds of those surveyed, who say that jobs for city dwellers are getting harder to find. Forty percent of India’s 1.4 billion people are under the age of 25, and a study by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy showed that India’s youth between the ages of 15 and 24 are ‘faced with a double whammy of low and falling labour participation rates and shockingly high unemployment rates’. Unemployment among young people is 45.4%, six times higher than the overall unemployment rate of 7.5%.

India’s working-class and peasant youth remain at home, the sensibility of their entire families shaped by their dilemmas. Despair at everyday life has now eaten into the myth that Modi is infallible. Modi will return as prime minister, but the actualities of his tenure will be defined partly by the grievances of tens of millions of impoverished Indians articulated through a buoyant opposition force that will find leaders amongst the mass movements. Among them will be farmers and peasants, such as Amra Ram, a leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and All India Kisan Sabha (‘All India Farmers’ Union’) who won decisively in Sikar, an epicentre of the farmers’ movement. He will be joined in parliament by Sachidanandam, a leader of the All India Kisan Sabha and Communist Party of India (Marxist) from Dindigul (Tamil Nadu), and by Raja Ram Kushwaha, a leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation from Karakat (Bihar) and the convenor of the All-India Kisan Sangharsh (‘All India Farmers’ Struggle’) Coordination Committee, a peasant alliance that includes 250 organisations. The farmers are now represented in parliament.

Nitheesh Narayanan of Tricontinental Research Services writes that even though the Left did not send a large contingent to parliament, it has played an important role in this election. Amra Ram, he continues, ‘enters the parliament as a representative of the peasant power that struck the first blow to the BJP’s unquestioned infallibility in North India. His presence becomes a guarantee of India’s democracy from the streets’.

Heri Dono (Indonesia), Resistance to The Power of Persecution, 2021.

The idea of ‘democracy’ does not start and finish at the ballot box. Elections – such as in India and the United States – have become grotesquely expensive. This year’s election in India cost $16 billion, most of it spent by the BJP and its allies. Money, power, and the corrosiveness of political dialogue have corrupted the democratic spirit.

The search for the democratic spirit is at least as old as democracy itself. In 1949, the communist poet Langston Hughes expressed this yearning in his short poem ‘Democracy’, which spoke then to the denial of the right to vote and speaks now to the need for a much deeper consideration of what democracy must mean in our times – something that cannot be bought by money or intimidated by power.

Democracy will not come
Today, this year,
Nor ever
Through compromise and fear.
I have as much right
As the other fellow has
To stand
On my two feet
And own the land.

I tire so of hearing people say,
Let things take their course.
Tomorrow is another day.
I do not need my freedom when I’m dead.
I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread.

Freedom
Is a strong seed
Planted
In a great need.
Listen, America—
I live here, too.
I want freedom
Just as you.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

Is it just me or is it not more than a little odd that coverage of current events in New Caledonia/Kanaky is dominated by the inconvenience of tourists and rescue flights out of the Pacific paradise.

That the events are described as “disruption” or “riots” without any real reference to the cause of the actions causing inconvenience. The reason is the armed enforcement of “order” is flown into this Oceanic place from Europe.

I guess when you live in a place called “New Zealand” in preference to “Aotearoa” you see these things through fellow colonialist eyes. Especially if you are part of the dominant colonial class.

• READ MORE:  Macron says ‘peace, calm and security’ his top priority for New Caledonia
• LISTEN TO RADIO WAATEA: Interview with Jessie Ounei and David Small
• Liberation for New Caledonia’s Kanak people ‘must come’, says media educator — Audio
• President Emmanuel Macron to fly to New Caledonia within hours
• ‘You are not alone’ Pacific messages of solidarity for Kanaky
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia crisis reports

How different it looks if you are part of an indigenous people in Oceania — part of that “Indigenous Ocean” as Damon Salesa’s recent award-winning book describes it. The Kanaks are the indigenous Melanesian inhabitants of New Caledonia.

The indigenous movement in Kanaky is engaged in a fight against the political structures imposed on them by France.

Obviously there are those indigenous people who benefit from colonial rule, and those who feel powerless to change it. But increasingly there are those who choose to resist.

Are they disrupters or are they resisting the massive disruption which France has imposed on them?

People who have a lot of resources or power or freedom to express their culture and belonging tend not to “riot”. They don’t need to.

Not simply holiday destinations
The countries of Oceania are not simply holiday destinations, they are not just sources of people or resource exploitation until the natural resources or labour they have are exhausted or no longer needed.

They are not “empty” places to trial bombs. They are not “strategic” assets in a global military chess game.

Each place, and the ocean of which they are part have their own integrity, authenticity, and rights, tangata, whenua and moana. That is only hard to understand if you insist on retaining as your only lens that of the telescope of a 17th or 18th century European sea captain.

The natural alliance and concern we have from these islands, is hardly with the colonial power of France, notwithstanding the apparent keenness of successive recent governments to cuddle up to Nato.

A clue — we are not part of the “North Atlantic”.

We have our own colonial history, far from pristine or admirable in many respects. But we are at the same time fortunate to have a framework in Te Tiriti which provides a base for working together from that history towards a better future.

Those who would debunk that framework or seek to amend it to more clearly favour the colonial classes might think about where that option leads.

And when we see or are inconvenienced by independence or other indigenous rights activism in Oceania we might do well to neither sit on the fence nor join the side which likes to pretend such places are rightfully controlled by France (or the United States, or Australia or New Zealand).

Rob Campbell is chancellor of Auckland University of Technology (AUT), chair of Ara Ake, chair of NZ Rural Land and former chair of Te Whatu Ora. This article was first published by The New Zealand Herald and is republished with the author’s permission.

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

BJP Uttar Pradesh youth wing social media head Richa Rajpoot shared the video, claiming that those using Instagram and Facebook would be made millionaires by emptying the pockets of wealth creators.

इंस्टाग्राम चलाओ फेसबुक चलाओ
और 10-10 बच्चे पैदा करो कांग्रेस आएगी तो मिडिल क्लास और वेल्थ क्रिएटर्स की जेब से निकाल के सबको लखपति बनाएंगे pic.twitter.com/rvUu4USgxI

— Dr. Richa Rajpoot (Modi ka Parivar) (@doctorrichabjp) April 21, 2024

‘Megh Updates‘, an X handle that has been found sharing misinformation several times in the past, amplified the clip, claiming that youth doing the tedious work of browsing Instagram and Facebook would automatically receive Rs. 8,500 into their bank accounts every month.

Right-Wing propaganda account ‘The Hawk Eye‘ also posted the video of Rahul Gandhi, stating that youths watching Facebook and Instagram reels would be given a sum of Rs. 1 lakh.

Fact Check

Alt News performed a reverse image search of a frame taken from the viral video. This led us to a longer version of this video uploaded on Rahul Gandhi’s YouTube channel on April 20. According to the title, this video is from the party’s 2024 Lok Sabha elections campaign in Bhagalpur, Bihar.

At the 10:58 mark of this video, the Congress leader states, “Our second scheme is called ‘Guaranteed First Job.’ Now let me explain what ‘Guaranteed First Job’ means. It means we are going to give all the graduates and diploma holders of India the right to entrepreneurship. Applaud a little more, and I’ll explain it to you. The right to entrepreneurship means that every youth of India will be given the right to the first job by our next government. Just as we gave the right to employment in MGNREGA, similarly, we will give the graduates the right to their first job. The right to the first job means that all the graduates of India and diploma holders will get a one-year entrepreneurship opportunity for a sum of Rs. 1 lakh per year, or Rs. 8,500 per month, into their bank accounts. They will be trained, and if they perform well in the first year, they will be given a permanent job. These jobs related to entrepreneurship will be in the private sector, in public sector units, as well as in the government. So millions of youths will be trained, and India will get a trained workforce. And the youth who are wandering on the streets today, browsing Instagram and Facebook, will receive Rs. 1 lakh annually, Rs. 8,500 per month, and a promise from our government.”

The last sentence of the above-mentioned part of Gandhi’s speech was shared without context, giving the false impression that Rahul Gandhi promised to deposit Rs. 1 lakh annually or Rs. 8,500 monthly into the bank accounts of youths sitting idle and browsing Facebook and Instagram. Whereas, in reality, the politician was talking about providing a one-year entrepreneurship opportunity to all graduates and diploma holders.

To sum it up, during the election campaign in Bhagalpur, Bihar, Rahul Gandhi spoke about providing a one-year entrepreneurship opportunity to all graduates and diploma holders. Several BJP leaders and Right-Wing influencers shared a clipped version of this speech without context, claiming that he promised to deposit Rs. 1 lakh annually or Rs. 8,500 monthly into the bank accounts of youths sitting idle and browsing Facebook and Instagram.

The post Did Rahul Gandhi promise Rs 1 Lakh to youth browsing through Facebook, Instagram? Clipped video viral appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Abhishek Kumar.

Last week a United States federal judge rejected a request from Indigenous nations to stop SunZia, a $10 billion dollar wind transmission project that would cut through traditional tribal lands in southwestern Arizona. 

Amy Juan is a member of the Tohono O’odham nation at the Arizona-Mexico border and brought the news of the federal court’s ruling to New York last week, telling attendees of the the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, or UNPFII, that she was disappointed but not surprised. 

“We are not in opposition to what is called ‘green energy,’” she said. “It was the process of how it was done. The project is going through without due process.”

It’s a familiar complaint at Indigenous gatherings such as the one this week, and last, at the U.N., where the general consensus among Indigenous peoples is that decision makers behind green energy projects typically don’t address community concerns. 

According to Pattern Energy, the Canadian-owned parent company of SunZia, the wind transmission project is the largest clean energy infrastructure initiative in U.S. history, and will provide power to 3 million Americans, stretching from New Mexico to as far as California.

Now on track to be finished in 2026, the transmission pipeline is a cornerstone of the Biden administration’s transition to green energy. 

The 550-mile high-voltage line has a 50-mile long section that cuts through the San Pedro Valley and Indigenous nations that include the Tohono O’odham, Hopi, Zuni and San Carlos Apache. 

The suit against the U.S. Bureau of Land Management was filed in January. The lawsuit called the valley “one of the most intact, prehistoric and historical … landscapes in southern Arizona,” and asked the court to issue restraining orders or permanent injunctions to halt construction.

The tribes fear the pipeline will irreversibly damage the land both ecologically and culturally.

The federal court chided the tribes for not filing suit earlier, noting they had a window of six years to file from 2015, when the project was originally approved. “Plaintiffs’ 2024 challenge to the [project] is therefore untimely,” the judge’s decision read. 

The tribes had been actively pushing for alternative routes and for more in-depth reviews of the land in question for years. Their argument is that the six-year timeline began last fall, not earlier.  

Juan said these miscommunications or differing interpretations of the law can be compounding factors that stand between Indigenous rights and equitable green energy projects.

“There is really no follow through when tribes express their concerns.” she said.

Back at the U.N. the ruling was a reminder that the U.S. doesn’t recognize the tenets of “free, prior and informed consent” as outlined in the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. Those tenants are meant to insure that Indigenous land isn’t used without input and permission from the Indigenous peoples involved.

Andrea Carmen, who is Yaqui, was at the U.N. forum on behalf of the International Indian Treaty Council, a group that advocates for Indigenous rights around the world. The council is advocating for a moratorium on green energy projects for all U.N. entities “until the rights of Indigenous peoples are respected and recognized.”

“It’s hard to convince governments and businesses to deny these big energy projects without outside intervention,” she said. 

“They are doing the same thing as fossil fuel,” she added. “It’s just more trendy.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A gigantic wind project will cut through Indigenous lands in the Southwest on Apr 22, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Taylar Dawn Stagner.

The Gaza Collective Photo Essay project, organized by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), collected work from 14 Palestinian photographers who were each asked to share one image that captured the devastation of the Gaza Strip over the last six months. We speak with Charlotte Cans, head of photography at OCHA, about the project. “It’s one thing to say there’s a war and it’s horrible, and it’s another thing to see an image of a child being pulled out from the rubble. It really hits you differently,” Cans says of the motivation behind the project. “It was really important to elevate the stories coming from Palestinian photojournalists, who are the only window into what is going on in Gaza.”

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

The post Male Birth Control Gel Progressing through Clinical Trials appeared first on Project Censored.

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

Kickstarter reached out because they seen the work I was doing and they wanted to lend a hand and help. I was hesitant at first because I serve the people a lot, and I don’t like asking for a lot in return, because I do it out of my heart. I was trying to find a way that aligned and worked and was an easy ask for me. If I’m going to ask for something, I’ll just ask for a dollar since there’s a million people following me and, hopefully, that can align and people will get together.

It was a spur-of-the-moment thought. I sat down and drafted some different ideas that I could do, and this was the one I landed on, “Let me hold a dolla.” It’s some shit we say in the community. You hear people at the liquor store, “let me hold a dolla.” It was dope to use something that’s a cultural monolith to us and take it to the world.

My ears, eyes, and heart are always open to the world around me. Growing up, I’ve always been a sponge. I’m always trying to figure out a way to integrate culture sustainably and show up as a Black man and an independent artist in a way that isn’t vulture-ish or inauthentic, and my community allows me to do that.

The campaign really is not just about you. It’s also about funding initiatives that support other artists. How does supporting other artists fuel your own creative process?

Helping other artists helps me cultivate my creativity because when I find an artist I love and believe in, I have to find ways to help them that may not be the same fashion that worked for me. I have to find new ways that work for them, and I did that through my Good Compenny platform and live sessions. I’ve done it through visualizers. I help artists with their business. It’s an extension of my creativity.

How has not going major-label and instead staying independent allowed you to build infrastructure for everyone around you to be creative, and for you to be creative by helping them be creative?

It’s very hard to loan resources you don’t own, and I’ve been able to loan resources because I own it and I built it. I don’t have to get someone’s approval or ask someone to use their stuff for me to help someone else. I split royalties and revenue with my team and with the people who helped me, and I can only do that because I own everything I’ve created. I’m able to do deals in a way that isn’t traditionally done. I’m able to do business in a way you can’t do traditionally because I own the assets. I own the home, meaning I could allow whoever I want to stay there. I could let them rent it however they need. I could do whatever renovations I want to make it fitting to what I need to accomplish.

My independence has allowed me to create infrastructure that’s just non-existent within the major label system. Seldom do you find artists in the major system who has their own infrastructure because they’re so reliant on the person who feeds them.

On your Instagram, you’ve talked about lending yourself. Do you mean this as lending yourself to other folks’ creativity, lending yourself to work in the gig economy, or both?

All of the above. I’ve lent myself and my cultural equity to platforms and startups that now have millions of dollars in valuation. I’ve lent myself to platforms and publications that do interviews that are new or just starting, where they get to use the cultural equity of LaRussell to pitch a story and sell it. I’ve lent myself to brands who want cultural equity, and beyond that to artists. It’s like me lending my time. That lend can come in the form of my time, camera, or team, or even monetarily. I invest in a lot of people, so lending myself is all-encompassing. It depends on what way I need to lend myself for it to work with whoever I’m partnering with.

You have 1.1 million Instagram followers. How did you build this online community?

I just showed up every day. I built a [metaphorical] Walmart in the middle of a community, and after five years everyone starts to go shop at Walmart because it’s there, and they see it every day and that’s just their home store. That’s exactly what I’ve done. I showed up every day and I was of service. I post content that people can learn from. I post content that people could smile about. I post content that people could heal from because they’re going through a certain life, and I’ve become their source for inspiration. I’ve become their local store. It’s really nothing beyond that. The numbers are the numbers. You can’t do nothing but show up, and the people who love what you offer are the people who are going to keep coming back.

Growing your online presence, making yourself an important pillar in the community—can you make music without that?

For me, I can’t because it’s connected. I don’t have a character. Me making my music is the same guy that people see in the community, the same guy feeding the people at Momo’s, the same guy walking down the street picking his daughter up from school. It’s not separate for me. They kind of intertwine.

Me making music is me cultivating community and the presence and building that. But in general for artists, I don’t think you have to. It depends on the kind of career you wish to build. You could just make music and never cultivate community and still be successful. But you will not be a Tupac or a LaRussell or a J. Cole. There’s just certain things you have to give to get certain things.

I’ve read that you’ve put out 19 albums since 2018. If that’s correct, how have you kept that pace going?

I’ve put out 31 since 2018. The pace is really set by life. I don’t make the music. The music makes itself. It just comes to me and flows out of me, and one day, the well won’t have any water left in it, so I’m just using the water that’s in the well while it’s there.

I don’t know how it keeps coming to me. I keep living life, and different things keep happening, and I’m growing as a human and experiencing different emotions. I have no choice but to let it out and speak about it. It just keeps flowing, so until the well’s empty, that’s just what it’s going to be.

I talk to musicians decently often, and when I ask about their songwriting process, they say, “I don’t really write songs. I’m more like a song catcher. An idea will exist and come to me, and I just help bring it to life, but I don’t come up with the idea.” Is that what you’re saying?

Yeah. I’m a messenger. I call them downloads. I’ll make songs and listen to them months later, and sometimes, I’m like, “Oh shit, I said all that?” Because I don’t really write them. They write themselves. They come to you through the universe, and I’m really just a jukebox. You play a beat. You put a coin in, and something comes out, and we either love it or we don’t, but I don’t have too much control over that. There’s a message that gets sent through and I’m the one who has to deliver it.

This makes me wonder to what extent editing is a part of your creative process.

I don’t edit songs at all, honestly. Most of my songs are done in one take. Once I leave the booth, I’m generally done with it unless there’s a song that we’re like, “Nah, this is really good. We need this.” But for the most part, if you go through my catalog, it’s just one take. I walk in and the verse usually comes to me within 10 minutes. I walk in and I lay it down, and we’re pretty much done with it.

You live in Vallejo. I’m curious how its proximity to artistic hubs as huge as San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley has taught you creative lessons. I ask this as somebody who isn’t as familiar with Vallejo as those other cities.

Vallejo is actually—it’s funny because it’s the smallest, and it’s the city you don’t often look at, but Vallejo is the epicenter of creativity in the Bay Area. If you look at most of our Bay Area greats…you think of E-40, Mac Dre, H.E.R. SOB was one of the biggest groups that ever [came] out. Even in terms of the slang, the way we speak and talk, a lot of that originated from Vallejo artists. We’re the epicenter of a lot of the culture that exists within the Bay. I’m influenced by every region, but I’m directly in the source of where a lot occurs.

Is that part of why the Backyard Residency is among what you’re supporting with the campaign?

Of course. I’ve been doing the Backyard Residency for two years, but it was definitely something special to add because every year we do it and it sells out, and people fly in from all over the world. We’ve had people from China, France, and every-fucking-where in the world come to these shows. As part of this campaign, it was only right to add it because the demand is so high and there’s no finite way to get to a Backyard show.

I was looking through your social media, and I saw your advice to “just make great art.” To you, what is great art?

Art that makes you feel good, or art that makes you feel, is great art. Art that impacts you, that changes your perspective, that alters your life a bit is great art.

Do you have the thought “this is great” when you’re in the booth letting things flow out of you, or is that a concern for later?

I try to reserve those feelings. I don’t often like to make that determination, but every now and then, I write something so incredible that I can’t do nothing but feel that energy and bask in it. I get excited when I make a game-winning bucket and it’s some shit that’s apparent. But for the most part, I stay away from that. I just make the art.

I remember I was in a studio one time with a producer and they were making a beat, and I wasn’t really enjoying it, and I almost told him, “Nah, we should probably make something else.” But I just sat back and let him do his thing without spewing my opinion, and it ended up being one of my favorite songs. I think it’s very important to not judge the art and to just let it flow.

To what extent is collaboration part of how you create your music?

Every part. I write the verses. Someone else makes the beats and plays the pianos, and someone else mixes and masters. There was a point of my career where I did every part. I [would] produce it, write it, mix it, master it, distribute it and everything. But now the entire process is collaborative. Beyond me writing my own words that come from my heart, all of it is collaborative and I love it. It’s like when I do a live show. I have live instruments and every instrument has a human behind it. There’s mistakes and nuances that exist that can only happen because there’s another human with another beating heart there.

At what point in your creative arc did you go from somebody who had a day job to being able to do everything you do now as your whole life, and how?

Man, it’s so funny. I pulled up to my mom’s house the other day, and I just sat in the car for a bit and took a deep breath and was just like, “Damn, I don’t have a job and I haven’t had a job in a long time. But I work every day.”

I was able to leave my job in 2019, and fortunately, I haven’t been back since. The universe kind of just pulled me. You never know when it’s time. Life kind of just tells you when it’s time. Once it got to a point where it was in the way of what I truly wanted, it was time for me to get up out of there.

I think there’s tiers of people. There’s people who are supposed to work at [the metaphorical] Walmart. There’s people who’s supposed to run Walmart, and then there’s people who build Walmart. Whenever you find out which type of person you are, you have to go into that lane and start cultivating.

It’s interesting that 2019 was when you left your job, because then 2020 happened, which was obviously not a good year for anything.

I remember we ended 2019 on such a high. I had a big group meeting. It was in December, and I was like, “Man, we’re going to take this year on and we’re going to do this, this, this.” And then Covid hit.

[The lockdown era] was a special moment in my life. I got bigger than I’ve ever been. I created a live performance platform, and throughout [lockdown], we put those masks on and just got to work. I ended up blowing up a lot of artists and helping a lot of locals through that time because a lot of people couldn’t perform or create content, but I was still making a lot of content and going viral, and [I] started live-streaming my rehearsals. I just found a way to navigate it. It was a blessing in disguise for me.

It sounds like a lot of the infrastructure you built then is what’s still there today and what you’re helping to fund with the campaign.

Exactly. That was the makings of everything I have today.

That’s a nice note to end the conversation on, but if you have anything else you want to say about creativity, about community, let me give you the floor.

He who is willing is who will. Nothing can stop someone who wants. Only you can get in your way. And I think it’s very important for us to support and rally behind the people that we believe are doing great things, even if it’s only a dollar.

I still owe you that dollar, so thank you for the reminder.

No, you don’t owe it to me. You owe you that dollar. That’s your tithe. That’s the justice that you supposed to do in this world. You owe it to yourself to invest in something that’s special.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Max Freedman.

Photograph Source: Dati Bendo – CC BY 4.0

On March 19, 2024, the head of France’s ground forces, General Pierre Schill, published an article in the newspaper, Le Monde, with a blunt title: “The Army Stands Ready.” Schill cut his teeth in France’s overseas adventures in the Central African Republic, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, and Somalia. In this article, General Schill wrote that his troops are “ready” for any confrontation and that he could mobilize 60,000 of France’s 121,000 soldiers within a month for any conflict. He quoted the old Latin phrase—“if you want peace, prepare for war”—and then wrote, “The sources of crisis are multiplying and carry with them risks of spiraling or extending.” General Schill did not mention the name of any country, but it was clear that his reference was to Ukraine since his article came out just over two weeks after French President Emmanuel Macron said on February 27 that NATO troops might have to enter Ukraine.

A few hours after Macron made his indelicate statement, the U.S. president’s national security advisor John Kirby said, “There will be no U.S. troops on the ground in a combat role there in Ukraine.” This was direct and clear. The view from the United States is bleak, with support for Ukraine diminishing very fast. Since 2022, the U.S. has provided over $75 billion in aid to Ukraine ($47 billion in military aid), far and away the most important assistance to the country during its war against Russia. However, in recent months, U.S. funding—particularly military assistance—has been held up in the U.S. Congress by right-wing Republicans who are opposed to more money being given to Ukraine (this is less a statement about geopolitics and more an assertion of a new U.S. attitude that others, such as the Europeans, should shoulder the burden of these conflicts). While the U.S. Senate passed a $60 billion appropriation for Ukraine, the U.S. House of Representatives only allowed $300 million to be voted through. In Kyiv, U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan implored the Ukrainian government to “believe in the United States.” “We have provided enormous support, and we will continue to do so every day and every way we know how,” he said. But this support will not necessarily be at the level it was during the first year of the war.

Europe’s Freeze

On 1 February, the leaders of the European Union agreed to provide Ukraine with €50 billion in “grants and highly concessional loans.” This money is to allow the Ukrainian government to “pay salaries, pensions, and provide basic public services.” It will not be directly for military support, which has begun to flounder across the board, and which has provoked new kinds of discussions in the world of European politics. In Germany, for instance, the leader of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the parliament—Rolf Mützenich—was taken to task by the parties of the right for his use of the word “freeze” when it comes to military support for Ukraine. Ukraine’s government was eager to procure Taurus long-range cruise missiles from Germany, but the German government hesitated to do so. This hesitation and Mützenich’s use of the word “freeze” created a political crisis within Germany.

Indeed, this German debate around further arms sales to Ukraine is mirrored in almost all the European countries that have been supplying weapons for the war against Russia. Thus far, polling data across the continent shows large majorities against the continuation of the war, and therefore against the continuation of arming Ukraine for that war. A poll conducted for the European Council on Foreign Relations conducted in February shows that “an average of just 10 [percent] of Europeans across 12 countries believe that Ukraine will win.” “The prevailing view in some countries,” the poll analysts wrote, “is that Europe should mirror a U.S. that limits its support for Ukraine by doing the same, and encourage Kyiv to do a peace deal with Moscow.” That view is beginning to enter the discussions even of the political forces that continue to want to arm Ukraine. SPD parliamentarian Lars Klingbeil and his leader Mützenich both say that negotiations will need to start, although Klingbeil said it would not happen before the U.S. elections in November, and until then, as Mützenich had said, “I think that the most important thing now is that [Ukraine] get artillery ammunition.”

Military Not Climate

It no longer matters whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden wins the U.S. presidential election in November. Either way, Trump’s views on European military spending have already prevailed in the United States. The Republicans are calling for U.S. funding for Ukraine to be slowed down and for the Europeans to fill the gap by increasing their own military spending. This latter point will be difficult since many European states have debt ceilings; if they are to increase military spending this would be at the expense of precious social programs. NATO’s own polling data shows a lack of interest from the European population in a shift from social to military spending.

Even more of a problem for Europe is that its countries have been cutting back on climate-related investments and increasing defense-related investments. The European Investment Bank (set up in 2019) is, as the Financial Times reported, “under pressure to fund more projects in the arms industry,” while the European Sovereignty Fund—set up in 2022 to promote industrialization in Europe—is going to pivot toward support for military industries. Military spending, in other words, will overwhelm the commitments to climate investments and investments to rebuild Europe’s industrial base. In 2023, two-thirds of the total NATO budget of €1.2 trillion was from the United States, which is double what the European Union, the UK, and Norway spent on their militaries. Trump’s pressure for European countries to spend up to 2 percent of their GDP on their armies will set the agenda even if he loses the presidential election.

Can Destroy Countries, but Can’t Win Wars

For all the European braggadocio about defeating Russia, sober assessments of the European armies show that European states simply do not have the ground military capacity to fight an aggressive war against Russia let alone defend themselves adequately. A Wall Street Journal investigation into the European military situation bore the stunning title, “Alarm Grows Over Weakened Militaries and Empty Arsenals in Europe.” The British military, the journalists pointed out, has only 150 tanks and “perhaps a dozen serviceable long-range artillery pieces,” while France has “fewer than 90 heavy artillery prices” and Germany’s army “has enough ammunition for two days of battle.” If they are attacked, they have few air defense systems.

Europe has relied upon the United States to do the heavy bombing and fighting since the 1950s, including in the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Due to terrifying U.S. firepower, these Global North countries are able to flatten countries, but they have not been able to win any wars. It is this attitude that produces wariness in countries such as China and Russia, who know that despite the impossibility of a Global North military victory against them there is no reason why these countries—led by the United States—will not risk Armageddon because they have the military muscle to do so.

That attitude from the United States—mirrored in the European capitals—produces one more example of the hubris and arrogance of the Global North: a refusal to even consider peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia. For Marcon to say things like NATO might send troops into Ukraine is not only dangerous, but it strains the credibility of the Global North. NATO was defeated in Afghanistan. It is unlikely to make great gains against Russia.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

The post Europe Sleepwalks Through Its Own Dilemmas appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

Under a program that Beijing says is aimed at poverty alleviation, high-level Chinese policy and state planning documents call for intensified employment requirements targeting Uyghurs, according to research conducted by German scholar Adrian Zenz published in a report by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington-based think tank.

But activists and experts say the program is thinly-disguised forced labor: Uprooting Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities from their homes and forcing them to work in factories producing everything from textiles and chemicals to car parts.

Longer-term, Beijing is using the program to achieve a larger goal, Zenz told Radio Free Asia -- controlling the Uyghur people, undermining their culture and ultimately assimilating them into Chinese society.

“Uyghur society is going to be changed in the long term through labor transfer,” he said. “It's a long-term strategy, and that’s why China is doubling down on it.”

“China is intensifying it because with labor transfer you can achieve cultural assimilation,” said Zenz, director of China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington. 

“You can achieve linguistic assimilation,” he told RFA. “You can break apart communities – traditional communities – and break apart families.”

Corporate scrutiny

The report comes out amid intensifying pressure on multinational companies with operations in the region to cut their ties.

Earlier this month, German chemical giant BASF said it is pulling out of its joint ventures in Xinjiang. That came after a German newspaper in November reported close ties between the labor transfer program and a regional partner of BASF.

Meanwhile, automaker Volkswagen also has told RFA that it is in talks with its joint venture partner, SAIC-Volkswagen, over the future of its Xinjiang operations. 

A report issued in early February by Human Rights Watch suggested that Volkswagen may be using aluminum made by Uyghur forced labor in China, and has failed to minimize this possibility.

The United States has called on China to end Uyghur forced labor practices and has enacted legislation to prevent the import of products made with forced labor. 

The European Union lacks strict regulations that target goods made with forced labor, but is working on the adoption of a law that would hold large companies to account for their human rights and environmental impacts across their global supply chains. 

Separately, Germany has a supply chain law that requires large companies to ensure that their suppliers and partners respect all human rights and subjects the companies to a comprehensive due diligence obligation covering the entire supply chain.

Two systems

Authorities in northwestern China’s vast Xinjiang region operate the world’s largest system of state-imposed forced labor under two systems targeting Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples, Zenz’s report says. 

The first one is forced labor connected to “re-education” camps, where an estimated 1.8 million Uyghurs and others have been detained against their will beginning around 2017. There they received coercive skills training and were forced to work in on-site or off-site factories. 

Zenz’s report says that evidence indicates that since early 2020, this policy is no longer active, although authorities still arbitrarily detain Uyghurs and others.

The second separate system, the Poverty Alleviation Through Labor Transfer policy, coercively trains and transfers non-detained rural laborers from the agricultural sector into secondary sector work that transforms raw materials into goods for sale or consumption, and tertiary sector work that involves the sale or trade of services. 

The United States and other Western governments have expressed deep concern about the repression and arbitrary detentions of Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in Xinjiang, with some declaring that China’s actions amount to genocide and crimes against humanity.

‘Groundless accusation’

On Feb. 17, at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi was asked by an interviewer about the forced labor accusations in Xinjiang in light of the recent company news about BASF and Volkswagen. 

“The so-called forced labor is only a groundless accusation,” Wang said in response. 

“Isn’t there any right to work for minority ethnic groups such as the Uyghurs in Xinjiang?” he asked. “If you make them unemployed, unable to work, and unable to sell their products under the pretext of forced labor, is this humane?”

Wang said that the growth of Xinjiang’s Uyghur population from less than 2 million in 1955, when the autonomous region was established, to 12 million today was proof that the “so-called genocide is a sheer fabrication and a lie.” 

However, the actual Uyghur population in China was 3.64 million, according to official data from the country’s first census conducted in 1953, while Xinjiang’s population was less than 3.4 million. Also, the Han Chinese population in Xinjiang was only 6% in that census but now is more than half as many Han Chinese have migrated to the region.

Wang also said China has safeguarded human rights in Xinjiang as demonstrated by an increase in the average lifespan of Uyghurs from 30 years to 75.6 years, and that religious freedom and ethnic languages and cultures were well-protected by the Chinese government in the region.

Dolkun Isa, president of the World Uyghur Congress, said Wang’s dismissal of allegations of the Uyghur genocide and forced labor signaled “a concerning intent to persist with genocidal policies” in Xinjiang. 

“Merely a week prior, one of Germany’s largest chemical companies, BASF, issued international apologies and announced their withdrawal from the Uyghur region due to their association with Uyghur genocide implications,” he told RFA.

“Similarly, other major corporations like Volkswagen face mounting international pressure over their involvement in Uyghur forced labor, with discussions underway for their withdrawal from the Uyghur region,” Isa said. “Given the substantial evidence at hand, Wang Yi's denial of these allegations is untenable.”

Zenz said that there is still personal testimonies and documentary evidence that Uyghur forced labor exists.

“The Chinese think they can openly lie and propagate an alternative reality because they can control access to Xinjiang,” he said.

Additional reporting by Irade from RFA Uyghur. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Roseanne Gerin for RFA.

The spotlight

When Kristy Drutman attended the U.N. climate negotiations in Poland in 2018, she was struck by how impersonal everything felt. As a climate storyteller, educator, and social media influencer (who was featured on our 2022 Grist 50 list), Drutman’s work heavily emphasized people and connections. “It just felt like people were really disconnected from each other,” she said of the conference. She thought the climate movement as a whole could benefit from putting a greater emphasis on relationships.

Three years later, she returned to the U.N. conference and set up a table with a sign: “Looking for love? Come on a climate speed date.” People seemed to like it. “We actually had people that were in the negotiation rooms — policy people from different countries participated in it,” she said. Last fall, she turned the idea into a more intentional matchmaking setup; she started hosting filmed meetups in New York and posting episodes of the show — called Love and Climate — on Instagram, TikTok, and Youtube.

In the first few months of the project, Drutman says no bona fide couples have yet emerged — but several pairs have gone on second and third dates. “They told us we gave them a better match than Tinder or Bumble,” she said. “So I was like, ‘You know what? We’re better than dating apps, hell yeah.’” But even on the apps, young people are increasingly looking for matches who share their climate concerns. According to data from OKCupid, climate change was the top issue that daters cared about in 2022, with a 368 percent increase over the previous five years in climate and environmental terms on users’ profiles.

Out in the wild, Drutman has met several “climate couples” who got to know each other through their work or collaborations or even going to a climate march — “I’ve heard that story a few times,” Drutman said.

In this Valentine’s Day newsletter, we’re sharing stories of couples, friends, and collaborators who met through some form of climate work. Somewhat like the contestants on Drutman’s speed-dating show, many of these folks found each other because they were looking for companionship — in their work, in a new place, or in solidarity around a particular issue. They all found meaningful relationships that enriched their climate work, and their lives. Their stories serve as reminders of the joy that can be found in taking action and building community around a shared dedication to a clean, green, and just future.

Eileen Liu had been an environmental activist since middle school. When she moved to a new town for high school, “I didn’t know anyone or have any friends,” she said. “But I knew the current climate crisis was an issue many other youth my age were passionate about solving.” Last January, as a sophomore, she started the Menlo-Atherton Reusables Club — a student group focused on policy changes that target plastic waste in San Mateo County, California. “Through the reuse community I have met so many inspiring people, and formed the closest friendships,” Liu said. The club now has about 20 members, and Liu describes it as “one big friend group.”

But a few connections stand out — including her now best friend, Ella. “When I was planning the logistics of the club back in July of 2022, I was acquaintances with Ella,” Liu said. “After she joined the club, we found out that we actually share a lot of hobbies — aside from environmentalism — such as writing pen pal letters, being fangirls of BlackPink and Grey’s Anatomy, and photography!” Ella is now one of the leaders of the club, as are two of Liu’s other closest pals. When they aren’t busy advocating for reusables or listening to BlackPink, the two like to wake up early to hike the Stanford Dish (a nearby trail on Stanford University’s campus) — they love spotting turkeys and other wild animals in the hills.

Earyn McGee also met a close friend after a move — for her, it was moving back home to Los Angeles after finishing her Ph.D. in natural resources conservation. McGee (who was featured on the 2021 Grist 50 list) had been passionate about nature and wildlife (especially lizards) since she was a child — and she had also become an educator and advocate for BIPOC representation in the outdoors. She was one of the original organizers behind Black Birders Week, and when she moved to L.A. in 2022, she was invited to a local meetup as part of the third annual Black Birders Week. “It was just a lot of fun — everybody was looking at birds and chatting and having a good time,” McGee said. And it was there that she met T’Essence Minnitee.

“It was funny — we met and she told me that we were gonna be friends, and I was like, ‘Alright, I believe you!’” McGee recalled. “We had a lot of shared interests and values. You know, you just click with somebody — that’s kind of what it was like.”

They’ve enjoyed going to other green events together, like radical clothing swaps and climate-themed dinners, as well as non-climate-centric hangouts. “She’s one of those people where I can always just hit her up about anything. Having her friendship is just so meaningful for me.”

Among other roles, Minnitee is the director of strategic partnerships at Black Girl Environmentalist, and McGee now works as the coordinator of conservation engagement at the L.A. Zoo — and they also hope to collaborate professionally, McGee said. “Hopefully this summer, we’ll start putting together a couple of events around getting Black women and other women of color and gender non-conforming people into conservation, environment, and climate change careers, and creating resources in those ways.”

Jenni Vanos and David Hondula first met at the 2011 International Congress of Biometeorology in Auckland, New Zealand. They were both there to present research from their Ph.D. studies in atmospheric and environmental sciences, respectively. It was Vanos’ first time attending the conference, and she recalled that Hondula was very welcoming and friendly. “We both realized we were staying a few days longer in New Zealand so did some sightseeing together to a few of the islands, including climbing a volcano on Rangitoto Island,” she said. “We obviously got along really well from the start.”

At the time, she was studying at the University of Guelph in Canada, and he was at the University of Virginia. “We actually were good colleagues and friends for about three years before we started dating,” Vanos said. They kept in touch through their work, and saw each other at other conferences and workshops. When they did decide to take things to the next level, Vanos lived in Texas and Hondula was in Arizona. Their relationship was long-distance for about four years before Vanos was able to get a job at Arizona State University, where they are now both associate professors. (Hondula also leads Phoenix’s Office of Heat Response and Mitigation.)

“We are both very passionate about the work we do, but we have a lot of other hobbies and interests we do together and with our family and friends,” Vanos shared, including traveling and all manner of outdoor sports — and, now, taking care of their growing family. Their son, Evan, is 2 years old, and their second little one is due in May.

And bringing things full circle, last year, the pair helped host the 23rd annual Congress of Biometeorology at ASU.

Thelma and Fenton on their wedding day, taking in the view of the Fijian mountains. Ropate Kama

“Our story is one of multiple cyclones,” said Thelma Young Lutunatabua. She first met her husband, Fenton Lutunatabua, in 2015 when they were both working for 350.org — she was based in New York, and he was based in Fiji. “The first time I ever heard his voice was when he called me in the middle of the night after a cyclone hit Vanuatu and asked if I could help with building a missing-persons tracking system.” After that, they collaborated on a number of storytelling projects focused on frontline solutions and resistance in the Pacific. But things shifted when Cyclone Winston, a Category 5 storm, hit Fenton’s homeland of Fiji.

“That’s when we started calling each other and checking in more, and having deeper conversations especially around the emotional side of disaster response work,” Thelma said. They also exchanged personal numbers, and began talking more about life outside of work.

This remote friendship progressed for a few months, with a flirtatious undertone. They finally had the opportunity to meet in person in May of 2016, at 350’s all-staff retreat in Spain. “There was definitely that energy of expectation and hopefulness,” Thelma said. “He met me at the airport in Barcelona and picked me up, and then we walked around the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona together.” It didn’t take long for them to know that there was something more there. “Our final night in Barcelona, we just, like, got pizza and we were talking and he was like, ‘You should come to Fiji.’” And later that year, she did.

Thelma and Fenton are now happily married — they eloped in the mountains of Fiji, during a surprise downpour — and are parents to a 14-month-old son, Anders. “We met through storytelling and we’re both still actively doing that, both with our jobs and our own creative practices,” Thelma said. “And we’re both still committed to telling the full truth about climate — that it’s not just about despair and destruction, but there’s so much hope in the process as well.”

— Claire Elise Thompson

More exposure

• Read: more stories of climate couples who have found love in shared work and passions (Atmos)
• Read: an essay about why we need more tales of love and romance in climate fiction (Outside Magazine)
• Read: more about Kristy Drutman’s Love and Climate speed dating show (The Guardian)
• And watch: full episodes of Love and Climate on Youtube
• Read: a poem, “Love in a Time of Climate Change,” from the eco-poetry collection Habitat Threshold by Craig Santos Perez

A parting shot

For some, climate connections are more than one person, but a whole community. Leo Goldsmith (another Grist 50 honoree, whom we’ve interviewed in Looking Forward about his research into climate impacts on queer populations) told us about his experience on the board of OUT for Sustainability. “Before I joined, I met a couple of the members through a research paper we wrote together on climate-related disaster impacts on LGBTQIA+ communities,” Goldsmith said. “Being a part of OUT4S now has allowed for these relationships, and new ones, to grow. Through our mutual goal of working toward climate justice for LGBTQIA+ communities, we collaborate as a community to uplift each other and the communities we hope to serve through advocacy, resources, and education.” The board is shown here during a gathering in the summer of 2022.

IMAGE CREDITS

Vision: Grist

Spotlight: Ropate Kama

Parting shot: OUT for Sustainability

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate connections: Four stories of relationships forged through climate action on Feb 14, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Claire Elise Thompson.

For the Feb. 14 general election too, like every five years, he and other poll workers in his Long Bagan district delivered ballots and equipment to remote villages along the Mahakam River with a longboat their only means of transportation.

“It takes us eight hours to get to the farthest village. We often have to camp on the riverbank because of the distance,” he told BenarNews on Thursday.

Damianus recalled a previous election period during which his longboat packed with election paraphernalia capsized while crossing a rapid that deceptively looked like a waterfall. He and his team managed to save the election materials, but lost some of their personal belongings.

“Hopefully, everything will go smoothly this time,” he said.

Luhat is one of the millions of election workers who are preparing for Indonesia’s general election next week, which will be the largest and most complex single-day vote in the world.

It is gargantuan and complicated because eligible voters will be casting their ballots not just to elect a president and vice president, but also to vote for members of the national and regional legislatures. 

And because nearly 205 million people are eligible to vote, officials have to set up more than 800,000 polling stations across the sprawling archipelago.

The presidential race is a three-way contest between Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto, Anies Baswedan, a former Jakarta governor and ex-Central Java Gov. Ganjar Pranowo.

Standing for the 580 seats in the House of Representatives will be a total of 9,917 candidates from 18 national parties, according to the General Elections Commission. And around 250,000 candidates will compete for 20,000 seats at the regional level.

For all these contests the election commission needs to print ballots and transport them across the length and the breadth of the country along with ballot boxes and items such as envelopes, and candidate lists.

And to make things just a tad more difficult, the 1.2 billion ballots the commission has had to print aren’t all the same. They vary depending on the number of candidates and electoral districts. 

The commission has enlisted more than 5.7 million workers and volunteers to help with the election.

The logistics of this election are staggering, considering it will be held across a vast archipelago of more than 18,000 islands with diverse geographies and infrastructure. 

Take the case of the Mentawai Islands, a group of four islands off the coast of Sumatra.

Election workers have to travel on foot for hours through hilly and forested areas to reach some of the polling stations on these islands, said Saudara Halomoan Pardede, the head of the election commission in the region.

“Our areas are separated by sea and some parts are very difficult to reach. We also have to deal with the rivers and the weather,” he told BenarNews.

The timing of the elections in February, the rainy season, has added to the challenges. 

In Central Sulawesi’s Pagimana subdistrict, four policemen, a soldier and several poll workers left Thursday for a three-day journey on foot to deliver election supplies to a village that is inaccessible by any vehicle.

They will have to traverse forest trails, navigate steep slopes and wade across bridgeless rivers, all under uncertain weather conditions, said Frets Adolof Rombot, one of the policemen.

“We hope we won’t face any troubles or dangers like heavy rain or wild animals,” he told Benar News.

The complexity of the elections also poses challenges for the voters, who have to cast multiple ballots with scores of candidates, some of whom they may not know much about.

Indonesia’s elections are among the most complex in the world, according to Khoirunnisa Agustyati, executive director of the Association for Elections and Democracy (Perludem).

“The electoral districts are large, the system is open proportional, the voters are numerous, and the geographic diversity is also vast,” Khoirunnisa told BenarNews.

Aspirants compete for a seat with other parties’ rivals as well as their own. And support for a political party doesn’t necessarily mean a vote for its presidential nominee.

Khoirunnisa said that this confusion led to a high number of invalid votes in the 2019 elections, which was 11.12% or 17.5 million of the total votes cast for the House of Representatives. The number of invalid ballots for the Regional Representative Council, a parliamentary chamber similar to the Senate in the United States, was even higher, at 19% or 29 million ballots.

She said that the public is generally more interested in the presidential election, because the media publicizes it more.

“The legislative elections receive less attention and the voters have limited information about the candidates’ profiles,” she said.

One such voter is Agung Budiyanto, a 37-year-old private employee in Tasikmalaya regency in West Java.

“I don’t even know whom to vote for besides the president and vice-president,” he told BenarNews.

He did not receive any information about the election or the candidates in his area, he said.

“There are too many people on the banners and billboards. But I don’t know any of them. I will just vote randomly,” he said.

First-time voter, 17-year-old Taghsya Rizqita Putri Amany from Jakarta, said the candidates’ programs were unclear, because their campaign materials showed only their faces and slogans. 

Taghsya also feels overwhelmed by the various candidates she will have to vote for because of the various elections taking place simultaneously.

“I worry that my future will be ruined if I pick the wrong people as leaders,” she said.

Nazarudin Latif in Jakarta and Taufan Bustan in Palu, Indonesia, contributed to this report.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Pizaro Gozali Idrus for BenarNews.

The explosion destroyed her home and killed her neighbour in Jabalia, a densely populated refugee camp in the north of the enclave. Abdel Raheem had no choice but to flee south with her husband, sisters and grandchildren.

They were among 1.1 million Palestinians who heeded Israel’s command to evacuate northern Gaza, an order that may amount to the forced transfer of a population, which is a war crime.

“We left and didn’t have time to take anything from our home. Everything around us was destroyed,” Abdel Raheem, 63, told Al Jazeera from Rafah, a city in the southern Gaza Strip.

Abdel Raheem has lived through several wars but none as devastating as Israel’s current onslaught on Gaza. UN experts, rights groups and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) have all warned that Palestinians in Gaza face a real risk of genocide unless Israel halts its attacks against them.

Since Hamas’s surprise attack on Israeli communities and military outposts on October 7, in which 1,139 people were killed and 240 taken captive to Gaza, Israel has retaliated by punishing the entire population of Gaza, according to experts and Palestinians.

Abdel Raheem recalled her exodus from northern Gaza as well as the deaths of loved ones killed by Israeli bombing, which has flattened nearly everything in the besieged enclave.

“The occupying [Israeli] forces carry responsibility for destroying all our homes and all our trees and for killing our children,” Abdel Raheem told Al Jazeera. “Why don’t any of the Arab or European countries care about the Palestinian people? Palestine is being destroyed.”

Another Nakba?

Abdel Raheem had not been born yet when 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homeland to make way for the creation of Israel in 1948 – an event referred to in Arabic as the Nakba, or catastrophe. But, like all Palestinians, she grew up learning about the Nakba and always yearned to return to her family’s village.

She never imagined that she would live through another mass exodus. However, as she was fleeing Jabalia, Abdel Raheem sensed that history was repeating itself.

The post Israel’s assault on Gaza, through Mona’s eyes appeared first on Al-Shabaka.

This content originally appeared on Al-Shabaka and was authored by Shatha Abdulsamad.

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Over the last decade, police departments across the U.S. have spent millions of dollars equipping their officers with body-worn cameras that record what happens as they go about their work. Everything from traffic stops to welfare checks to responses to active shooters is now documented on video.

The cameras were pitched by national and local law enforcement authorities as a tool for building public trust between police and their communities in the wake of police killings of civilians like Michael Brown, an 18 year old black teenager killed in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. Video has the potential not only to get to the truth when someone is injured or killed by police, but also to allow systematic reviews of officer behavior to prevent deaths by flagging troublesome officers for supervisors or helping identify real-world examples of effective and destructive behaviors to use for training.

But a series of ProPublica stories has shown that a decade on, those promises of transparency and accountability have not been realized.

One challenge: The sheer amount of video captured using body-worn cameras means few agencies have the resources to fully examine it. Most of what is recorded is simply stored away, never seen by anyone.

Axon, the nation’s largest provider of police cameras and of cloud storage for the video they capture, has a database of footage that has grown from around 6 terabytes in 2016 to more than 100 petabytes today. That’s enough to hold more than 5,000 years of high definition video, or 25million copies of last year’s blockbuster movie “Barbie.”

“In any community, body-worn camera footage is the largest source of data on police-community interactions. Almost nothing is done with it,” said Jonathan Wender, a former police officer who heads Polis Solutions, one of a growing group of companies and researchers offering analytic tools powered by artificial intelligence to help tackle that data problem.

The Paterson, New Jersey, police department has made such an analytic tool a major part of its plan to overhaul its force.

In March 2023, the state’s attorney general took over the department after police shot and killed Najee Seabrooks, a community activist experiencing a mental health crisis who had called 911 for help. The killing sparked protests and calls for a federal investigation of the department.

The attorney general appointed Isa Abbassi, formerly the New York Police Department’s chief of strategic initiatives, to develop a plan for how to win back public trust.

“Changes in Paterson are led through the use of technology,” Abbassi said at a press conference announcing his reform plan in September, “Perhaps one of the most exciting technology announcements today is a real game changer when it comes to police accountability and professionalism.”

The department, Abassi said, had contracted with Truleo, a Chicago-based software company that examines audio from bodycam videos to identify problematic officers and patterns of behavior.

For around $50,000 a year, Truleo’s software allows supervisors to select from a set of specific behaviors to flag, such as when officers interrupt civilians, use profanity, use force or mute their cameras. The flags are based on data Truleo has collected on which officer behaviors result in violent escalation. Among the conclusions from Truleo’s research: Officers need to explain what they are doing.

“There are certain officers who don’t introduce themselves, they interrupt people, and they don’t give explanations. They just do a lot of command, command, command, command, command,” said Anthony Tassone, Truleo’s co-founder. “That officer’s headed down the wrong path.”

For Paterson police, Truleo allows the department to “review 100% of body worn camera footage to identify risky behaviors and increase professionalism,” according to its strategic overhaul plan. The software, the department said in its plan, will detect events like uses of force, pursuits, frisks and non-compliance incidents and allow supervisors to screen for both “professional and unprofessional officer language.”

Paterson police officials declined to be interviewed for this story.

Around 30 police departments currently use Truleo, according to the company. In October, the NYPD signed on to a pilot program for Truleo to review the millions of hours of footage it produces annually, according to Tassone.

Amid a crisis in police recruiting, Tassone said some departments are using Truleo because they believe it can help ensure new officers are meeting professional standards. Others, like the department in Aurora, Colorado, are using the software to bolster their case for emerging from external oversight. In March 2023, city attorneys successfully lobbied the City Council to approve a contract with Truleo, saying it would help the police department more quickly comply with a consent decree that calls for better training and recruitment and collection of data on things like use of force and racial disparities in policing.

Truleo is just one of a growing number of such analytics providers.

In August 2023, the Los Angeles Police Department said it would partner with a team of researchers from the University of Southern California and several other universities to develop a new AI-powered tool to examine footage from around 1,000 traffic stops and determine which officer behaviors keep interactions from escalating. In 2021, Microsoft awarded $250,000 to a team from Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania to develop software that can organize video into timelines that allow easier review by supervisors.

Dallas-based Polis Solutions has contracted with police in its hometown, as well as departments in St. Petersburg, Florida, Kinston, North Carolina, and Alliance, Nebraska, to deploy its own software, called TrustStat, to identify videos supervisors should review. “What we’re saying is, look, here’s an interaction which is statistically significant for both positive and negative reasons. A human being needs to look,” said Wender, the company’s founder.

TrustStat grew out of a project of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research and development arm of the U.S. Defense Department, where Wender previously worked. It was called the Strategic Social Interaction Modules program, nicknamed “Good Stranger,” and it sought to understand how soldiers in potentially hostile environments, say a crowded market in Baghdad, could keep interactions with civilians from escalating. The program brought in law enforcement experts and collected a large database of videos. After it ended, Wender founded Polis Solutions, and used the “Good Stranger” video database to train the TrustStat software. TrustStat is entirely automated: Large language models analyze speech, and image processing algorithms identify physical movements and facial expressions captured on video.

At Washington State University’s Complex Social Interactions Lab, researchers use a combination of human reviewers and AI to analyze video. The lab began its work seven years ago, teaming up with the Pullman, Washington, police department. Like many departments, Pullman had adopted body cameras but lacked the personnel to examine what the video was capturing and train officers accordingly.

The lab has a team of around 50 reviewers — drawn from the university’s own students — who comb through video to track things like the race of officers and civilians, the time of day, and whether officers gave explanations for their actions, such as why they pulled someone over. The reviewers note when an officer uses force, if officers and civilians interrupt each other and whether an officer explains that the interaction is being recorded. They also note how agitated officers and civilians are at each point in the video.

Machine learning algorithms are then used to look for correlations between these features and the outcome of each police encounter.

“From that labeled data, you’re able to apply machine learning so that we’re able to get to predictions so we can start to isolate and figure out, well, when these kind of confluences of events happen, this actually minimizes the likelihood of this outcome,” said David Makin, who heads the lab and also serves on the Pullman Police Advisory Committee.

One lesson has come through: Interactions that don’t end in violence are more likely to start with officers explaining what is happening, not interrupting civilians and making clear that cameras are rolling and the video is available to the public.

The lab, which does not charge clients, has examined more than 30,000 hours of footage and is working with 10 law enforcement agencies, though Makin said confidentiality agreements keep him from naming all of them.

Much of the data compiled by these analyses and the lessons learned from it remains confidential, with findings often bound up in nondisclosure agreements. This echoes the same problem with body camera video itself: Police departments continue to be the ones to decide how to use a technology originally meant to make their activities more transparent and hold them accountable for their actions.

Under pressure from police unions and department management, Tassone said, the vast majority of departments using Truleo are not willing to make public what the software is finding. One department using the software — Alameda, California — has allowed some findings to be publicly released. At the same time, at least two departments — Seattle and Vallejo, California — have canceled their Truleo contracts after backlash from police unions.

The Pullman Police Department cited Washington State University’s analysis of 4,600 hours of video to claim that officers do not use force more often, or at higher levels, when dealing with a minority suspect, but did not provide details on the study.

At some police departments, including Philadelphia’s, policy expressly bars disciplining officers based on spot-check reviews of video. That policy was pushed for by the city’s police union, according to Hans Menos, the former head of thePolice Advisory Committee, Philadelphia’s civilian oversight body. The Police Advisory Committee has called on the department to drop the restriction.

“We’re getting these cameras because we’ve heard the call to have more oversight,” Menos said in an interview. “However, we’re limiting how a supervisor can use them, which is worse than not even requiring them to use it.”

Philadelphia’s police department and police union did not respond to requests for comment.

Christopher J. Schneider, a professor at Canada’s Brandon University who studies the impact of emerging technology on social perceptions of police, said the lack of disclosure makes him skeptical that AI tools will fix the problems in modern policing.

Even if police departments buy the software and find problematic officers or patterns of behavior, those findings might be kept from the public just as many internal investigations are.

Because it’s confidential,” he said, “the public are not going to know which officers are bad or have been disciplined or not been disciplined.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Umar Farooq.

Jill Edwards, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, said Wednesday that she had written to the authorities in China calling for an investigation before evidence is admitted in court.

“I am deeply concerned that evidence that is expected to be presented against Jimmy Lai imminently, may have been obtained as a result of torture or other unlawful treatment,” Edwards said in a statement.

“An investigation into these allegations must be conducted immediately, before any evidence is admitted into these present proceedings.”

Edwards alleged that a key prosecution witness was tortured during his detention in a prison in China between 2020 and 2021, when the evidence was obtained.

Torture and other coercive techniques, including the use of fixed restraint chairs, to force confessions have been well-documented in China, she noted.

“The absolute prohibition of reliance on evidence obtained as a result of torture or other ill-treatment in any proceedings is a fundamental protection,” she said. 

“I have urged the Chinese government to undertake an investigation into these claims. I also reminded China of its duty to investigate all allegations of torture, prosecute or extradite suspects, punish those responsible and provide remedies to the victims.”

China has ratified the U.N.’s Convention against Torture.

Special rapporteurs appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council are unpaid experts who operate independently and do not represent the official voice of the U.N.

Edwards’ statement came after lawyers acting for Lai appealed to the U.N to investigate, saying a key witness for the prosecution was tortured before “confessing” to conspiring with Lai.

Lai's international legal team in London filed the appeal with the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment over the treatment of Andy Li, among a group of 12 Hong Kong protesters captured by China’s Coast Guard as they tried to flee to democratic Taiwan by speedboat.

“Credible evidence is emerging that Andy Li was tortured when in prison in China before confessing to allegedly conspiring with Jimmy Lai to collude with foreign entities to endanger national security,” Lai’s lawyers said in a statement on Jan. 4.

“Andy Li’s evidence against Jimmy Lai – which it is suspected was coerced and obtained after he endured torture, inhuman and degrading treatment in Chinese detention, with the knowledge of the Hong Kong authorities – is central to the prosecution’s case,” it said at that time.

Lai, 76, founder of the now-defunct Apple Daily, a Chinese-language tabloid renowned for its pro-democracy views and criticism of Beijing, pleaded not guilty on Jan. 2 to “sedition” and “collusion” under the sweeping national security law imposed by Beijing on Hong Kong in 2020.

His trial, which began in late 2023 following over 1,100 days in jail, has faced widespread international condemnation, though Beijing has dismissed such criticisms as external interference. The British national is being tried without a jury and was not permitted to choose his preferred lawyer. 

Edited by Elaine Chan and Mike Firn

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

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, donated around $95,000 to Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., in November, according to The Intercept’s analysis of Federal Election Commission records. The pro-Israel lobbying group was Johnson’s top donor in 2023, pouring money into his campaign coffers just after he led the passage of a $14 billion aid package to Israel.

AIPAC’s political action committee donated a total of $104,000 to Johnson last year, with the majority of payments coming since the start of the Gaza war and after Johnson was elected House Speaker in late October. That’s more than four times the roughly $25,000 the group donated to his last congressional campaign, when it was also his top donor, as The Intercept previously reported.

AIPAC is a major powerbroker on Capitol Hill, where it gives money to lawmakers from both major political parties in order to preserve or enhance pro-Israel policies. In recent years, the group has become a more partisan actor, training its sights on Democratic critics of Israel. It has recruited primary challengers to progressive members of Congress and launched a super PAC, the United Democracy Project, through which it has spent millions of dollars to help defeat Democratic candidates who express concern or support for the people of Palestine in any way.

James Zogby, the founder and president of the Arab American Institute, said that the group’s campaign contributions have two purposes: to “reward candidates who vote their way” and as “a cudgel that is used to keep people in line,” citing AIPAC’s past attack ads against Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Summer Lee, and Rep. Jamaal Bowman. 

Stephen Walt, the co-author of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” told The Intercept that U.S. policy toward the Middle East is the foreign policy issue on which lobbyist groups have the most influence. “In terms of foreign policy, this is probably the one issue where money in politics has had the greatest negative effect,” said Walt, a professor of international relations at the Harvard Kennedy School.

AIPAC and Johnson did not respond to requests for comment.

According to the FEC records, Johnson received several small donations from AIPAC in late October, ranging from $10 to $500 a piece. These donations greatly increased the following month however, when Johnson received a total of 71 payments of up to $5,000 each, starting on November 5 and ending on November 29.

The cash influx came shortly after Johnson, then the newly minted speaker, led the House passage of a $14 billion aid package to Israel — a proposal he fought to fast-track by separating the bill from the tens of billions in aid earmarked for Ukraine and using IRS funds to finance it. Once the bill made it through the House, Johnson urged the Senate to approve it as quickly as possible. 

“This is necessary and critical assistance as Israel fights for its right to exist,” he said.

AIPAC, too, had loudly supported sending additional aid to Israel. In a late October tweet, the group described the bill as an effort to “fully fund critical security assistance for Israel.” In early November, the group targeted lawmakers who voiced their opposition to aiding Israel’s military or spread awareness of the growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Johnson, a steadfast supporter of Israel, started off his speakership by telling the Republican Jewish Coalition’s conference in Las Vegas that “God is not done with America yet, and I know he’s not done with Israel.” In the same speech, he said that the Squad’s solidarity with the people of Palestine reflected “an alarming trend of antisemitism,” before going on to quote renowned antisemite and British philosopher G.K. Chesterton.

During a trip to Israel in 2020, which was sponsored by a mysterious nonprofit called the 12Tribe Films Foundation, Johnson also claimed that it’s “not true” that Palestinians “are oppressed in these areas, and have these terrible lives,” adding, “we didn’t see any of it.” On his trip, Johnson visited the West Bank city of Hebron, which is notoriously segregated and home to hundred of Israeli settlers. His first trip to Israel, in 2017, was funded by the American Israel Education Foundation – AIPAC’s sister organization whose delegations to Israel are considered a rite of passage in Congress. 

Even as a growing number of Democrats is willing to buck the pro-Israel consensus in Washington and reject AIPAC’s influence, they remain heavily under-resourced. “The key is there’s no comparable groups on the other side,” said Walt. “There’s no set of pro-Palestinian or Arab American political action committees with anywhere near the same resources.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Catherine Caruso.

U.S. and British forces have hit Iran-backed Huthi rebel military targets in Yemen -- -- an action immediately condemned by Tehran -- sparking fears around the world of a growing conflict in the Middle East as fighting rages in the Gaza Strip.

U.S. President Joe Biden said in a statement that the move was meant to show that the United States and its allies “will not tolerate” the Iran-backed rebel group’s increasing number of attacks in the Red Sea, which have threatened freedom of navigation and endangered U.S. personnel and civilian navigation.

The rebels said that the air strikes, which occurred in an area already shaken by Israel's war with Hamas, a group designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. and European Union, totaled 73 and killed at least five people.

"Today, at my direction, U.S. military forces -- together with the United Kingdom and with support from Australia, Bahrain, Canada, and the Netherlands -- successfully conducted strikes against a number of targets in Yemen used by Huthi rebels to endanger freedom of navigation in one of the world’s most vital waterways," Biden said in a statement.

“These strikes are in direct response to unprecedented Huthi attacks against international maritime vessels in the Red Sea -- including the use of anti-ship ballistic missiles for the first time in history,” Biden said of the international mission that also involved Australia, Bahrain, Canada, and the Netherlands.

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Biden approved the strikes after a Huthi attack on January 9. U.S. and British naval forces repelled that attack, shooting down drones and missiles fired by the Huthis from Yemen toward the southern Red Sea.

Kirby said the United States does not want war with Yemen or a conflict of any kind but will not hesitate to take further action.

"Everything the president has been doing has been trying to prevent any escalation of conflict, including the strikes last night," he said.

The UN Security Council called an emergency meeting for later on January 12 over the strikes. The session was requested by Russia and will take place after a meeting to discuss the situation in Gaza.

Huthi rebels have stepped up attacks on vessels in the Red Sea since Israel launched its war on Hamas over the group's surprise cross-border attack on October 7 that killed some 1,200 Israelis and saw dozens more taken hostage.

The Huthis have claimed their targeting of navigation in the Red Sea is meant to show the group's support for the Palestinians and Hamas.

Thousands of the rebels held protests in Yemen's capital, Sanaa, where they chanted “We aren’t discouraged. Let it be a major world war!”

The White House said Huthi acts of piracy have affected more than 50 countries and forced more than 2,000 ships to make detours of thousands of kilometers to avoid the Red Sea. It said crews from more than 20 countries were either taken hostage or threatened by Huthi piracy.

Kirby said a "battle damage assessment" to determine how much the Huthi capabilities had been degraded was ongoing.

Britain said sites including airfields had been hit. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who is still hospitalized following complications from prostate cancer surgery, said earlier the strikes were aimed at Huthi drones, ballistic, and cruise missiles, as well as coastal radar and air surveillance capabilities.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said the strikes were "necessary and proportionate."

"Despite the repeated warnings from the international community, the Huthis have continued to carry out attacks in the Red Sea," Sunak said in a statement.

Iran immediately condemned the attacks saying they would bring further turbulence to the Middle East.

"We strongly condemn the military attacks carried out this morning by the United States and the United Kingdom on several cities in Yemen," Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kannani said in a post on Telegram.

"These arbitrary actions are a clear violation of Yemen's sovereignty and territorial integrity, and a violation of international laws and regulations. These attacks will only contribute to insecurity and instability in the region," he added.

A Huthi spokesman said the attacks were unjustified and the rebels will keep targeting ships heading toward Israel.

The Huthis, whose slogan is "Death to America, Death to Israel, curse the Jews and victory to Islam," are part of what has been described as the Iran-backed axis of resistance that also includes anti-Israel and anti-Western militias such as Hamas and Hezbollah.

Huthi rebels have fought Yemen's government for decades. In 2014, they took the capital, Sanaa.

While Iran has supplied them with weapons and aid, the Huthis say they are not Tehran's puppets and their main goal is to topple Yemen's "corrupt" leadership.

With reporting by Reuters and dpa

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

It’s quite a big relief. It took me a long time to make this record so it felt like a really big climb to get it to the release. By the end of it, I was really proud of it, but I’d gone through so many different seasons of feelings with it that it was nice to not have to think about it in the same way anymore. All the decisions have been made and I can’t change anything about it now and it is fully out of my hands.

I am hoping that my brain becomes creatively open again because I had tunnel vision when making the record. It hasn’t happened yet, but when it does, it will feel good. I haven’t had any negative feedback, which might just mean that it hasn’t reached me, but I’m really just relieved at how it’s been received so far. It feels surprisingly nice.

This album feels like an ongoing conversation with yourself. Based on the lyrics in “Divine Fault Line,” “Letting Go,” and “Saturn Returning” it sounds like you moved through a lot of pain and are now self soothing. Does that resonate with you?

Yeah, that’s 100% it. In the writing process I was trying to physically manifest lightness in my body as a kind of exercise. During a specific hard period of my life, I was so dysregulated. At this time, I didn’t know anything about my nervous system or my subconscious mind and I was learning about the power of those things and how important it is to understand them. I used the songs as a way to kind of rewire myself. I just needed to get out of this dark place and I also needed to make a record, so those things were married together. It wasn’t really what I expected the record to be, but that is what it ended up being. I was trying to be really nice to myself.

That definitely translates. It comes across as a very hopeful album.

Thanks so much, that means a lot. I had a big meltdown after recording it in the vein of, “What if no one wants to hear this? No one needs to hear me soothing myself.” I had a big creative fear moment around it, but it didn’t matter in the end because it was what I needed.

During the time the album was written, I was reading a book about how our subconscious brain is quietly feeding negative words to us. It was a self-help book technically and in it the author urges the reader to tune into this inner narration. I started doing it and became so overwhelmed by how often something negative was going on in my head. I used to really just write myself around in circles and then feel better afterwards. At this time, I was so deeply lost. I felt like I was at the rock bottom, and so my regular writing pattern wasn’t going to work. I was like, “I can’t stand it here. I can’t stay here.”

Learning that was a big influence on some of the songwriting because I realized that I wanted to plant something else in my brain and bring it into the conscious world and be in my body. I hadn’t thought about songwriting that way before so it was unfamiliar territory. In the past, I would process the sad thing and write about exactly what was happening. This shift was different because I was trying to conjure something new.

Is there a push and pull between writing for yourself and writing for others?

I think on some level but it doesn’t drive decision-making. There’s some songs like “Letting Go” where I wanted to create an energy that met the message of the song. I considered the audience experience when I decided on what the BPM would be and what the rhythm sections would do. I definitely pictured what performing the song on stage would be like energetically.

I think what I’m struggling with is my own opinion of myself. It’s so hard to know what an audience is going to think or what anyone else is going to think so I’m trying not to be conscious of it because it feels made up. The worst thought that someone could have would only affect me if it was something that I also believed about myself. It always just seems to come back to self-worth anyway.

One of my favorite songs on the album is called “Fish.” In this song, you say “I was squeezing your self-esteem like dirt coming outta your skin.” I feel like some songwriters have a tendency to paint themselves in a good light whereas this song seems very honest. I’m wondering what you decide to keep in a song and what you keep for yourself?

I think it’s one of my favorites on the record as well. In regards to what I would filter out, I guess anything that feels like it might do harm to someone else and also to myself. In my experience so far, looking honestly at myself has not caused harm. It’s almost the opposite—denying mistakes or bad decisions or toxic behaviors is what causes more harm. In that song, for whatever reason, it just came easy. It doesn’t always come easy.

I was trying to be brave and have respect for my growth. I wanted the people around me to look gently, but honestly and be like, “What kind of decisions have you been making lately?” To make changes, I had to name them. It relates to this wider thing that I was going through over the past couple of years. I was reading a lot about Buddhism and came across this idea about hopelessness and defeat and how important it is to accept that your mindset isn’t working and just get completely fed up with it. I found this really important because it stopped giving me a place to hide. In experiencing total acceptance, I was like, “This is how I am, and this is how things are right now. It’s painful and it’s uncomfortable.” That became my way through and I found things becoming less painful. In the song, and in the record generally as well, I made this goal to be honest and then let that be a relief.

I really love this topic of rules that you have for yourself. I know some songwriters won’t include signifiers of modern time in their lyrics, but you mention Fireball Whiskey and The Walking Dead in a couple of your songs. Can you tell me about that choice?

I almost wish I was better at writing about modern time. I find it a little bit jarring sometimes in my own writing if there’s too much of it and so when there is a window to insert it, I get excited. I’m like, “Oh, that’ll fit there, because there’s all this other poetry around it.” It’s fun and feels real. I guess it just comes back to the honesty thing, it feels more authentic. I have tried to be a super poetic songwriter before, and it just sounds so fake and it doesn’t really work for me. Those things are my anchors in reality and reminders that I’m in the present. I don’t try to pretend otherwise. There are songs and artists that I love who would never drop The Walking Dead in a song. For me, I am at risk of taking myself too seriously sometimes or taking the job too seriously, so I feel like humor adds lightness.

What is your relationship with truth in songwriting?

Have you listened to the podcast Broken Record? There is one episode where they interview Mary Gauthier and she says something like, “you know in your body when the song is true and that doesn’t mean that it is word for word exactly what happened. It doesn’t need to be full reality, it could be 100% fiction, but if there’s a true feeling then it’s true.” Sometimes truth means following the flow of the song or the idea that wants to be born. I think the beauty of the job is you get to craft an idea. I don’t know if I could confidently say that my songs are 100% true either, but if they fulfill the intention to open myself up more or touch my fear then they are true to me.

Do you subscribe to the idea that some songs are already written and that you just have to coax them out of wherever they are waiting?

I would like to because that would probably make things easier. I’ve definitely felt a song tumbling over itself and I don’t know if that’s just because some ideas come more formed. So maybe I do subscribe to that idea, but not all the time. I think that would be too easy.

Over the course of this conversation, you’ve mentioned being inspired by various texts and people. Do you feel like you glean song ideas through other writers?

I think I’m always collecting, in large part to try and find understanding for myself. It doesn’t necessarily always feel like it’s about songwriting, a lot of the time it feels like I’m trying to find emotional understanding and answers about life. The songwriting is parallel to that and those things tend to live in the songs as well. I definitely go through seasons where I am writing very consistently and then, in the other seasons, I’m gathering my seeds.

I think what I realized when I had a second record looming and a life crisis happening at the same time was that I didn’t know enough about the nature of fear, or the nature of the body and the mind. I became really interested in psychology and that really did inform this body of work. Part of my goal has become to be really self-compassionate. Being a songwriter and an artist sometimes can come with so much self-loathing and shame. The way that I try to be really gentle with myself and my thinking, is to remind myself that everything is feeding the songwriting. Everything I do throughout the day is going to inform that purpose that I have and it’s going to show up in my art. That’s become really important—to be open to just sitting and reading a book, and walking, and relaxing into life. I try to think about it all as being related to the songwriting, because it helps me not be really mean to myself.

How do you find separation between your private life and your songwriting?

It probably comes back to the idea of trying not to cause harm and recognizing that a lot of my pain has to do with my own shit. I feel like in my experience when those things have overlapped and caused upset in my personal life, it is because of being too candid in the public forum of the art, without considering whether I would put that into a conversation in a public place, like a private group of people. I think I’ve learned from that. There were some songs that I wrote for this record that I didn’t put on, because I knew that they were just too personal. I’m trying to just rise to the challenge of that, rather than be disappointed by it. I can take a song that is personal and rewrite it so it doesn’t cause pain to someone else. It’s been an interesting journey.

I’m also trying to practice not assigning blame to people in songs. When I was a younger songwriter, I would do it that much easier. Now, it’s a little bit more challenging because I want to be honest about when people cause pain, but also recognize that a lot of our pain has to do with our own shit. Even if you’re not writing from a blame space, I think it’s important to remember that it could be really painful for someone else if you were to start singing it to however many people while you promote your record. Sometimes it is necessary to upset the system and piss people off, it’s an important part of activism obviously, but at least with the content of these songs I didn’t want to hurt people close to me just because I was hurting.

I don’t think a lot of people think about the ethics of songwriting. There is power in being able to say your point of view, take the microphone and be like, “This is the version of the story.” It becomes an uneven power dynamic when the other side isn’t given that same platform. It’s nice to hear you consider that, because I know for a fact it’s not always considered.

Yeah, you’re right. You’re in a position of power and that’s a beautiful thing and also something to be intentional about. I don’t want to be insolent about it and be like, “Oh, well I have every right. Me, this white woman, to say whatever the fuck I want, because I’m an artist.” That’s bullshit. I don’t think I’ve nailed it or anything, but I am trying to be intentional. When someone else has a narrative that feels so different from your own, I guess that’s just life. We all have our different versions of events, but if I’m going to go real hardcore on a certain narrative about something, it better be balanced. I aim to be understanding about the fact that everyone is human, and not be so arrogant as to think, “Oh, just because I’ve figured out how I feel about this, that means it’s the only truth.”

Do you have any lyrics that you wish people paid more attention to?

If I felt like there was an important line, I would just repeat it. One of the lines that rings the most true every time I sing it, is at the end of “Black Eye.” It goes “I’m trying to balance everything.” That just feels like an affirmation, and an apology, and a reassurance. It is a kindness to myself every time I sing that line.

I think the songs that aren’t singles still feel important to me. Like, “I’m Already Enough.” That song is really just about that line more or less, it’s about getting to scream that. I think that is a central theme of the record as well—trying to convince and insert an idea into my consciousness, and bring it into reality so I can let it live in my muscles and my body.

The last one that comes to mind is, “Staying Down Low.” At the end of the song all the different backing vocals start singing, “Staying down low,” and saying things all at once. Gradually they bounce off of each other in canon, and then eventually it’s all of the voices united saying something powerful and affirmative. I wanted it to feel like all the voices in your head are finally agreeing on something. It felt like a rare moment of euphoria.

I know you’re touring soon. Do the songs change when you are sharing them in a public space in real time?

I am trying to see live shows as an opportunity to create some lightness and generate some energy. When writing the songs, I was imagining a time when I was not locked in my house and able to be playing gigs again. I feel like I planted that intention seed way back when, which was, if I can be in the room with people, I really want to be present and open, and share this hopeful, soothing vibe. I haven’t got to do it much, so I’m really excited to go on tour. It’s also really expensive and terrifying in the world we’re in, but I’m really excited. That’s kind of the only thing I want to do now. I’ve forgotten that version of myself, so I’d like to get back to her again.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Lauren Spear.

It’s quite a big relief. It took me a long time to make this record so it felt like a really big climb to get it to the release. By the end of it, I was really proud of it, but I’d gone through so many different seasons of feelings with it that it was nice to not have to think about it in the same way anymore. All the decisions have been made and I can’t change anything about it now and it is fully out of my hands.

I am hoping that my brain becomes creatively open again because I had tunnel vision when making the record. It hasn’t happened yet, but when it does, it will feel good. I haven’t had any negative feedback, which might just mean that it hasn’t reached me, but I’m really just relieved at how it’s been received so far. It feels surprisingly nice.

This album feels like an ongoing conversation with yourself. Based on the lyrics in “Divine Fault Line,” “Letting Go,” and “Saturn Returning” it sounds like you moved through a lot of pain and are now self soothing. Does that resonate with you?

Yeah, that’s 100% it. In the writing process I was trying to physically manifest lightness in my body as a kind of exercise. During a specific hard period of my life, I was so dysregulated. At this time, I didn’t know anything about my nervous system or my subconscious mind and I was learning about the power of those things and how important it is to understand them. I used the songs as a way to kind of rewire myself. I just needed to get out of this dark place and I also needed to make a record, so those things were married together. It wasn’t really what I expected the record to be, but that is what it ended up being. I was trying to be really nice to myself.

That definitely translates. It comes across as a very hopeful album.

Thanks so much, that means a lot. I had a big meltdown after recording it in the vein of, “What if no one wants to hear this? No one needs to hear me soothing myself.” I had a big creative fear moment around it, but it didn’t matter in the end because it was what I needed.

During the time the album was written, I was reading a book about how our subconscious brain is quietly feeding negative words to us. It was a self-help book technically and in it the author urges the reader to tune into this inner narration. I started doing it and became so overwhelmed by how often something negative was going on in my head. I used to really just write myself around in circles and then feel better afterwards. At this time, I was so deeply lost. I felt like I was at the rock bottom, and so my regular writing pattern wasn’t going to work. I was like, “I can’t stand it here. I can’t stay here.”

Learning that was a big influence on some of the songwriting because I realized that I wanted to plant something else in my brain and bring it into the conscious world and be in my body. I hadn’t thought about songwriting that way before so it was unfamiliar territory. In the past, I would process the sad thing and write about exactly what was happening. This shift was different because I was trying to conjure something new.

Is there a push and pull between writing for yourself and writing for others?

I think on some level but it doesn’t drive decision-making. There’s some songs like “Letting Go” where I wanted to create an energy that met the message of the song. I considered the audience experience when I decided on what the BPM would be and what the rhythm sections would do. I definitely pictured what performing the song on stage would be like energetically.

I think what I’m struggling with is my own opinion of myself. It’s so hard to know what an audience is going to think or what anyone else is going to think so I’m trying not to be conscious of it because it feels made up. The worst thought that someone could have would only affect me if it was something that I also believed about myself. It always just seems to come back to self-worth anyway.

One of my favorite songs on the album is called “Fish.” In this song, you say “I was squeezing your self-esteem like dirt coming outta your skin.” I feel like some songwriters have a tendency to paint themselves in a good light whereas this song seems very honest. I’m wondering what you decide to keep in a song and what you keep for yourself?

I think it’s one of my favorites on the record as well. In regards to what I would filter out, I guess anything that feels like it might do harm to someone else and also to myself. In my experience so far, looking honestly at myself has not caused harm. It’s almost the opposite—denying mistakes or bad decisions or toxic behaviors is what causes more harm. In that song, for whatever reason, it just came easy. It doesn’t always come easy.

I was trying to be brave and have respect for my growth. I wanted the people around me to look gently, but honestly and be like, “What kind of decisions have you been making lately?” To make changes, I had to name them. It relates to this wider thing that I was going through over the past couple of years. I was reading a lot about Buddhism and came across this idea about hopelessness and defeat and how important it is to accept that your mindset isn’t working and just get completely fed up with it. I found this really important because it stopped giving me a place to hide. In experiencing total acceptance, I was like, “This is how I am, and this is how things are right now. It’s painful and it’s uncomfortable.” That became my way through and I found things becoming less painful. In the song, and in the record generally as well, I made this goal to be honest and then let that be a relief.

I really love this topic of rules that you have for yourself. I know some songwriters won’t include signifiers of modern time in their lyrics, but you mention Fireball Whiskey and The Walking Dead in a couple of your songs. Can you tell me about that choice?

I almost wish I was better at writing about modern time. I find it a little bit jarring sometimes in my own writing if there’s too much of it and so when there is a window to insert it, I get excited. I’m like, “Oh, that’ll fit there, because there’s all this other poetry around it.” It’s fun and feels real. I guess it just comes back to the honesty thing, it feels more authentic. I have tried to be a super poetic songwriter before, and it just sounds so fake and it doesn’t really work for me. Those things are my anchors in reality and reminders that I’m in the present. I don’t try to pretend otherwise. There are songs and artists that I love who would never drop The Walking Dead in a song. For me, I am at risk of taking myself too seriously sometimes or taking the job too seriously, so I feel like humor adds lightness.

What is your relationship with truth in songwriting?

Have you listened to the podcast Broken Record? There is one episode where they interview Mary Gauthier and she says something like, “you know in your body when the song is true and that doesn’t mean that it is word for word exactly what happened. It doesn’t need to be full reality, it could be 100% fiction, but if there’s a true feeling then it’s true.” Sometimes truth means following the flow of the song or the idea that wants to be born. I think the beauty of the job is you get to craft an idea. I don’t know if I could confidently say that my songs are 100% true either, but if they fulfill the intention to open myself up more or touch my fear then they are true to me.

Do you subscribe to the idea that some songs are already written and that you just have to coax them out of wherever they are waiting?

I would like to because that would probably make things easier. I’ve definitely felt a song tumbling over itself and I don’t know if that’s just because some ideas come more formed. So maybe I do subscribe to that idea, but not all the time. I think that would be too easy.

Over the course of this conversation, you’ve mentioned being inspired by various texts and people. Do you feel like you glean song ideas through other writers?

I think I’m always collecting, in large part to try and find understanding for myself. It doesn’t necessarily always feel like it’s about songwriting, a lot of the time it feels like I’m trying to find emotional understanding and answers about life. The songwriting is parallel to that and those things tend to live in the songs as well. I definitely go through seasons where I am writing very consistently and then, in the other seasons, I’m gathering my seeds.

I think what I realized when I had a second record looming and a life crisis happening at the same time was that I didn’t know enough about the nature of fear, or the nature of the body and the mind. I became really interested in psychology and that really did inform this body of work. Part of my goal has become to be really self-compassionate. Being a songwriter and an artist sometimes can come with so much self-loathing and shame. The way that I try to be really gentle with myself and my thinking, is to remind myself that everything is feeding the songwriting. Everything I do throughout the day is going to inform that purpose that I have and it’s going to show up in my art. That’s become really important—to be open to just sitting and reading a book, and walking, and relaxing into life. I try to think about it all as being related to the songwriting, because it helps me not be really mean to myself.

How do you find separation between your private life and your songwriting?

It probably comes back to the idea of trying not to cause harm and recognizing that a lot of my pain has to do with my own shit. I feel like in my experience when those things have overlapped and caused upset in my personal life, it is because of being too candid in the public forum of the art, without considering whether I would put that into a conversation in a public place, like a private group of people. I think I’ve learned from that. There were some songs that I wrote for this record that I didn’t put on, because I knew that they were just too personal. I’m trying to just rise to the challenge of that, rather than be disappointed by it. I can take a song that is personal and rewrite it so it doesn’t cause pain to someone else. It’s been an interesting journey.

I’m also trying to practice not assigning blame to people in songs. When I was a younger songwriter, I would do it that much easier. Now, it’s a little bit more challenging because I want to be honest about when people cause pain, but also recognize that a lot of our pain has to do with our own shit. Even if you’re not writing from a blame space, I think it’s important to remember that it could be really painful for someone else if you were to start singing it to however many people while you promote your record. Sometimes it is necessary to upset the system and piss people off, it’s an important part of activism obviously, but at least with the content of these songs I didn’t want to hurt people close to me just because I was hurting.

I don’t think a lot of people think about the ethics of songwriting. There is power in being able to say your point of view, take the microphone and be like, “This is the version of the story.” It becomes an uneven power dynamic when the other side isn’t given that same platform. It’s nice to hear you consider that, because I know for a fact it’s not always considered.

Yeah, you’re right. You’re in a position of power and that’s a beautiful thing and also something to be intentional about. I don’t want to be insolent about it and be like, “Oh, well I have every right. Me, this white woman, to say whatever the fuck I want, because I’m an artist.” That’s bullshit. I don’t think I’ve nailed it or anything, but I am trying to be intentional. When someone else has a narrative that feels so different from your own, I guess that’s just life. We all have our different versions of events, but if I’m going to go real hardcore on a certain narrative about something, it better be balanced. I aim to be understanding about the fact that everyone is human, and not be so arrogant as to think, “Oh, just because I’ve figured out how I feel about this, that means it’s the only truth.”

Do you have any lyrics that you wish people paid more attention to?

If I felt like there was an important line, I would just repeat it. One of the lines that rings the most true every time I sing it, is at the end of “Black Eye.” It goes “I’m trying to balance everything.” That just feels like an affirmation, and an apology, and a reassurance. It is a kindness to myself every time I sing that line.

I think the songs that aren’t singles still feel important to me. Like, “I’m Already Enough.” That song is really just about that line more or less, it’s about getting to scream that. I think that is a central theme of the record as well—trying to convince and insert an idea into my consciousness, and bring it into reality so I can let it live in my muscles and my body.

The last one that comes to mind is, “Staying Down Low.” At the end of the song all the different backing vocals start singing, “Staying down low,” and saying things all at once. Gradually they bounce off of each other in canon, and then eventually it’s all of the voices united saying something powerful and affirmative. I wanted it to feel like all the voices in your head are finally agreeing on something. It felt like a rare moment of euphoria.

I know you’re touring soon. Do the songs change when you are sharing them in a public space in real time?

I am trying to see live shows as an opportunity to create some lightness and generate some energy. When writing the songs, I was imagining a time when I was not locked in my house and able to be playing gigs again. I feel like I planted that intention seed way back when, which was, if I can be in the room with people, I really want to be present and open, and share this hopeful, soothing vibe. I haven’t got to do it much, so I’m really excited to go on tour. It’s also really expensive and terrifying in the world we’re in, but I’m really excited. That’s kind of the only thing I want to do now. I’ve forgotten that version of myself, so I’d like to get back to her again.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Lauren Spear.

The post Light through the Slats appeared first on Project Censored.

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

Cover Art for the book Beyond Orientalism Ahmad ibn Qasim al-Hajari between Europe and North Africa by Oumelbanine Nina Zhiri.

When I first encountered the fascinating Moroccan polymath Ahmad ibn Qâsim al-Hajarî (c. 1569 – c.1640), I realized how the many threads of his life and career formulated a different understanding of the early modern Mediterranean, unsettling some of the assumptions of Orientalism.

As I chronicle in my new book Beyond Orientalism: Ahmad ibn Qasim al-Hajari between Europe and North Africa, this Morisco, also known in Spain as Diego Bejarano, fled his homeland and its persecutions of Moriscos in 1599, a decade before this minority of Muslim origins was expelled. In Marrakech, his linguistic skills help him find a position in the government of the Saadi Sultan Mûlay Zaydân. There, he translated diplomatic correspondence for the Sultan and his successors. The cultured Zaydân also tasked him to Arabize European cultural texts, mostly in the fields of geography and cosmography.

Ahmad al-Hajarî traveled through Europe in 1611-13, where he represented Moriscos who had been robbed by ship captains in the French courts, and where he met with Maurits of Nassau, the Stathouder of the Dutch Republic in the Netherlands. During his time in Europe, he befriended and assisted famed intellectuals, especially scholars of Arabic who were in the process of laying down the foundations of this field in the academic and publishing worlds. In 1634, he left Morocco to accomplish the hajj—the pilgrimage to the holiest cities of Islam—and stayed in Egypt, where he became friends with a famous scholar who urged him to write an account of his travels and encounters. This autobiography is a principal source on his life and career. Returning from his travels in the East, he settled in Tunis, where he continued to be intellectually active, revising his main text and translating religious and technical texts.

Studying the rich life and career of Ahmad al-Hajarî helped me think through the development of Orientalism in the early modern period. A full account of his travels and work shows how many subjects of non-European countries helped the Orientalists of their time acquire a better knowledge of the language and the cultures. I also had to address the relation between Islam and Christendom, as al-Hajarî was raised as a crypto-Muslim and outwardly Christian subject of the Spanish Empire. One important moment was his participation in deciphering the Lead Books of Granada, a fascinating forgery situated on the frontier between religions.

Beyond this, the story of al-Hajarî is an example for studying travel narrative as a cultural form—and its connection with autobiography. For examining the vast question of the awareness of the early modern European expansion in the other parts of the world, and of its influence on non-European cultural productions. For translation studies, of course. And for observing the shared material culture between Europe and North Africa, through the lens of science and technology studies.

What is remarkable to me in retrospect, is that all these different topics could be brought together by following the career of this one, admittedly exceptional, individual, Ahmad ibn Qâsim al-Hajarî. He was a man of so many different facets and skillsets that he became an unvaluable guide to explore how the borders of the early modern world were quite porous, allowing for deep cultural connections even between antagonistic regions. To follow Ahmad al-Hajarî in his many trajectories was a long, complex, and wonderful journey.

The post Understanding the Early Mediterranean Through the Life of the Moroccan Polymath Ahmad bin Qasim al-Hajari appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Oumelbanine Nina Zhiri.

Quentin Matsys (The Netherlands), The Tax Collectors, c. 1525–1530.

Within the United Nations, there is a little-known debate about the status of global tax regulation. In August 2023, UN Secretary-General António Guterres released a draft document called ‘Promotion of Inclusive and Effective International Tax Cooperation at the United Nations’. This document comes out of a long debate led by the Global South about the unregulated behaviour of transnational corporations (especially the ways in which they avoid taxation) and about the fact that discussions regarding regulations have been dominated by Global North countries (notably those in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, an intergovernmental platform largely made up of the richest countries in the world). In October of last year, the government of Nigeria spearheaded a resolution in the UN General Assembly (UNGA) that advocated for an international tax cooperation treaty and proposed that the UN take over jurisdiction of the debate about tax regulation. In December 2022, the UNGA passed the resolution, which asked Guterres to move forward with a report on the topic and develop a new international tax agenda.

Guterres’s August 2023 report affirmed the need for an ‘inclusive and effective’ tax treaty, arguing that the two-pillar solution laid out in the OECD and G20’s Inclusive Framework on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting is insufficient. The second pillar in this solution discusses the development of a global minimum effective tax on ‘excess profits’. However, this tax would be levied on a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction basis, which would open the entire process to chaos. Furthermore, even though the OECD-G20 policy has been developed by a minority of countries, it is intended to become the global norm for all countries. Even when the OECD and G20 ask for inputs from other countries, Guterres writes, ‘many of those countries find that there are significant barriers to meaningful engagement in agenda-setting and decision making’. This, Guterres said, is unjust. The UN should be the site where a new international taxation treaty is created – not a site for arbitrary bodies such as the OECD and the G20 to impose their agendas.

Arturo Rivera (Mexico), El Encuentro (‘The Meeting’), 2016.

To be fair, the OECD has developed a number of important proposals, including a global tax deal in 2021 that was agreed upon by 136 countries. However, due to pressure from transnational corporations (and the United States government), the implementation of this agreement was delayed until 2026. Nonetheless, leaks from illicit tax havens (such as the Paradise Papers, beginning in 2017, and the Luxembourg Leaks, beginning in 2014) brought the issue of regulating of financial flows to the fore, pressuring the OECD and the G20 to act on its promises. An outcome statement from the OECD in July 2023 put the issue back on the table, with the two-pillar tax regime coming into effect in 2024. This regime institutes a global tax of at least 15% on transnational corporations’ profits that exceed €750 million in each jurisdiction. Even here, the regulations offer transnational corporations a safe harbour until June 2028 through practices such as a simplified effective tax rate, a routine profits test, and a de minimis test – all instruments that require some accounting training to properly understand. In other words, the system designed to regulate transnational corporations merely creates business opportunities for global accounting firms that help these companies continue to shield their profits. In 2022, the main four accounting firms earned between $34 and $60 billion each in revenues, and Deloitte alone earned $64.9 billion in 2023 (a 9.3% increase since last year).

The Tax Justice Network’s annual report, published in July 2023, noted that the entire debate over taxes ‘boils down to one number: $4.8 trillion. That is how much tax we estimate wealthy corporations and individuals will avoid and evade over the next decade under the current direction of OECD tax leadership’. The data shows that ‘higher income countries lose the greatest amounts of revenue in absolute terms and also that they are responsible for the greatest share of the problem, globally’. The top ten contributors to global tax theft are, in descending order, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, the Cayman Islands, Saudi Arabia, Luxembourg, Bermuda, the United States, Singapore, Ireland, and Hong Kong (it is worth noting that both the Cayman Islands and Bermuda are British territories). Lower income countries, however, ‘incur the most intense losses, losing by far the greatest share of their current tax revenues or public spending needs’. For instance, as the OECD report Tax Transparency in Africa 2023 shows, the continent loses up to $88 billion each year due to illicit financial flows. In its report, the Tax Justice Network issued a clarion call:

Countries have a choice to make: forfeit the money now, and with it our future, to the wealthiest handful of people in the world, or claim it, and with it a future where the power of the wealthiest corporations and billionaires, like the kings and barons before them, is reined in by the march of democracy. A future where tax is our most powerful tool for addressing the challenges our societies face and for building a fairer, greener, and more inclusive world.

Wifredo Lam (Cuba), El Tercer Mundo, 1965–1966.

In 1975, the United Nations established the Information and Research Centre on Transnational Corporations (UNCTC). Two interconnected events led to its inception: first, the UNGA’s passage of the New International Economic Order (NIEO) in 1974, and second, the coup against the Popular Unity government of Chilean President Salvador Allende in September 1973. By 1972, Allende had taken leadership of the process to create the NIEO to allow countries such as Chile sovereignty over their raw materials. Allende spoke forcefully on these issues at the UNCTAD III meeting in Santiago in April 1972 and at the UNGA in December 1972 (which we discuss in more depth in our dossier The Coup Against the Third World: Chile, 1973). The coup against Allende strengthened the will in the Third World to oversee and regulate transnational corporations such as the former telecommunications giant International Telegraph and Telephone Company (ITT) and copper firm Anaconda, both of which played a decisive role in the coup in Chile. The UNCTC was, therefore, the child of both the NIEO and the coup.

The UNCTC’s mission was straightforward: build an information system about the activities of transnational corporations, create technical assistance programmes that help Third World governments negotiate with these firms, and establish a code of conduct that these firms would need to abide by with respect to their international activities. The UNCTC, with thirty-three employees, did not begin its work until 1977. From the start, it found itself under pressure levied by the International Chamber of Commerce as well as various US-based think tanks, which lobbied the US government to prevent it from functioning.

Nonetheless, in its fifteen years of existence, UNCTC staff produced 265 documents that covered areas such as bilateral investment treaties and the social impact of transnational corporations. The UNCTC’s work was slowly inching toward creating a code of conduct for transnational firms, which would have hampered the ability of these firms to create a system of financial plunder through illicit financial flows (including transfer pricing and remittance of profits). In 1987, the UNGA urged the UNCTC to finalise the code of conduct and hold a special session to discuss the code.

That same year, the Heritage Foundation, based in the US, argued that the UNCTC had a ‘deliberate anti-West and anti-free enterprise motive’. In March 1991, the US State Department sent a démarche to its embassies to lobby against the code of conduct, which it saw as a ‘relic of another era, when foreign direct investment was looked upon with considerable concern’. The session to finalise the code of conduct never took place. The US pushed the incoming UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to abolish the UNCTC, which he did as part of a broader UN reform agenda. This was the sunset of tax regulation. When the OECD picked up the mantle, it did so almost to ensure that a patina of liberalism would remain in place while transnational corporations operated in a largely lawless global environment.

In 1976, the radical Peruvian poet Magda Portal (1900–1989) wrote ‘A Poem for Ernesto Cardenal’ (a Nicaraguan poet). The poem acknowledged that inequality and misery had been in our towns for centuries, but that what the ‘transnational corporations and their henchmen’ are doing is worse. As she wrote:

On this side of America, you can feel the nauseating and toxic breath of those who only want our mines, our oil, our gold, and our food.
…
Never was more torment spread over the sleepless earth.
It was not more execrable to continue living without shouting at the top of
our lungs in a howl, the protest, the rejection, the demand for
justice. To whom?

How can we continue living like this on a daily basis,
ruminating on food, loving and enjoying life when
hundreds of thousands of condemned people on
Earth are drowning in their own blood? And in Black Africa, with its apartheid
and its Sowetos, and in Namibia and Rhodesia, and in Asia,
in Lebanon and in Northern Ireland, on the rack
of the executed? Can we continue living like this
when a single scream of horror runs through
the vertebrae of the world?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

New York Times (12/13/23)

This week on CounterSpin: UN Climate talks have ended with an agreement that, most importantly—New York Times headlines would suggest—”Strikes Deal to Transition Away From Fossil Fuels.” Headlines, all that many people read, are often misleading, and sometimes they aggressively deflect from the point of the story, which in this case is that everyone who wasn’t a polluting corporate entity came away from COP28 angry, worried and frustrated at the way that fossil fuel companies have been able to endanger everyone with their actions, but also hornswoggle their way into media debate such that we’re all supposed to consider how to balance the life of humanity on the planet with the profit margins of a handful of billionaires.

Corporate news media have a lot to answer for here, in terms of public understanding of climate disruption, what needs to happen, why isn’t it happening? Few things call more for an open public conversation about how to best protect all of us. Why can’t we have it? Well, mystery solved: The entities that are to blame for the problem have their hands in the means we would use to debate and conceivably address it.

Put simply: We cannot have a public conversation about how fossil fuels cause climate disruption within a corporate media moneyed by fossil fuel companies. We know that, and they know that, which is why one of the biggest outputs of polluting corporations is PR—is management of our understanding of what’s going on.

CounterSpin discussed fossil fuel corporations’ brazen lie factory almost precisely a year ago with Richard Wiles, director of the Center for Climate Integrity. We hear some of that conversation again this week.

Also: When you talk about climate, a lot of folks go in their head to a picture of clouds, butterflies and wolves. Climate policy is about money and profit and the meaninglessness of all those beautiful vistas you might imagine—at least, that’s how many politicians think of it. We addressed that with Matthew Cunningham-Cook from the Lever in August of this year. And we hear some of that this week as well.

Climate disruption reality as filtrated through corporate media, this week on CounterSpin.

Featured image:  Extinction Rebellion climate protest. Photo: VladimirMorozov/AKXmedia

The post Richard Wiles & Matthew Cunningham-Cook on Climate Disruption Filtered Through Corporate Media appeared first on FAIR.

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

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

Singh ultimately made it to his first engagement with just a minute to spare. Over the next half hour, he led a group of protesters in chants demanding that the world’s richest countries contribute to a new “loss and damage” fund to help vulnerable countries pay for the irreversible costs of climate change. “What do we want? Fill the fund!” his voice boomed. “When do we want it? NOW!”

Singh is the head of global political strategy at Climate Action Network International, or CAN, an environmental group. While CAN is one of some hundreds of environmental advocacy groups that descend on COPs to try to sway climate policy, it’s among the more influential — in part because of its size: The umbrella organization has more than 1,900 member groups in over 130 countries.

As a result, an official CAN position often represents broad agreement among its diverse member base. When national negotiators look for civil society groups’ approval for the positions they take at COP, they are typically looking to CAN. As such, Singh’s work for CAN at COP28 provides a rare window into the ways that the thousands of COP attendees who don’t directly negotiate on behalf of U.N. member states — the vast majority of those at the conference — nevertheless make their voices heard in closed-door negotiations.

CAN has a two-pronged strategy, working both in the halls of power and outside of it. On the one hand, CAN members are constantly trying to make inroads with people in power, setting up one-on-one meetings with government officials to make their case. But in the streets, members engage in direct action and media campaigns like “Fossil of the Day,” a satirical award given to countries seen as blocking climate action. The award invariably results in negative press, motivating officials in all sorts of countries to work with CAN to avoid winning the award. 

“Some countries don’t want to be seen as blockers, and it’s a tool CAN uses to highlight some of those instances,” said Nathan Cogswell, a research associate at the World Resources Institute, a research nonprofit.

In addition to his role at CAN, Singh is the global engagement director for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, and he runs an organic farming business with his wife near New Delhi, India. At CAN, he wears many hats: He helps craft the organization’s policy priorities, puts pressure on political leaders, and engages with the media. Over the course of the day I spent with Singh earlier this week, he did all of these things, while also barely eating and constantly getting lost in the sprawling venue. And he continued to run late.

Just after the protest, he was 10 minutes behind for the start of CAN’s Political Coordination Group meeting, a key part of his day. As the head of global policy, Singh is pulled in many directions and doesn’t have time to follow all aspects of COP negotiations, which take place in different groups on parallel tracks. His colleagues are his eyes and ears, and every morning a core group tracking the negotiations meets to discuss where the fault lines are, who is blocking progress, and how to strategically pressure countries to adopt ambitious climate targets. 

That morning, Singh hadn’t seen the agenda for the day. As soon as he took his seat, advocates began to report their observations from various negotiations. Over the next hour, CAN members discussed which countries were holding up negotiations and an overall advocacy strategy, including setting up one-on-one meetings with national representatives. 

“I can’t tell you the number of bilaterals we do,” Singh said later, referring to those one-on-ones. “That’s how we influence.”

The meeting ended with a call for nominations for Fossil of the Day. A few days prior, CAN issued the award to Japan for providing public finance for fossil fuels. Advocates had been trying to meet with Japanese officials and were hitting a wall. But when Japanese media picked up the story, the government was forced to respond, and suddenly CAN advocates secured a meeting with officials.

After the meeting and a quick huddle with colleagues, Singh had a 20-minute break. He scarfed down a palm-sized cheese sandwich he packed into a metal lunchbox from the breakfast buffet at the hotel in the morning — a common strategy among COP veterans. It was the first thing he’d eaten since his breakfast, a single banana. “Whenever I get time, I just eat on the way,” he said.

After an interview with an Axios reporter and another journalist, Singh rushed to speak at a 1:30 p.m. panel about the role of faith in climate action. He suspected he’d be crunched for time, he told me as he sprinted, but he’d been invited by the Brahma Kumaris Environment Initiative, the environmental arm of a spiritual movement that originated in India, and he couldn’t say no. Singh is Sikh and deeply spiritual.

“It’s not then about whether the timing is perfect and journalists are going to be there,” he said as we raced across the hot pavement. “They want me with them, so I said yes.”

After the panel, Singh set off to CAN’s daily meeting. Unlike the coordination meeting in the morning, which is open to a small group of members who follow the negotiations closely, this meeting is open to the broader group — and is also where the Fossil of the Day is decided. Singh was more than 15 minutes late to the meeting. He snuck in and stood off to the side, charging his phone and munching on whole cloves and cardamom he pulled out of his backpack. “It’s antibacterial,” he told me, hoping to ward off the sickness that can accompany a week like this. 

After a round of voting, CAN members crowned Brazil Fossil of the Day for announcing that it will join OPEC+, the international oil cartel, and gave South Africa a dishonorable mention for expanding coal mining operations. The process is surprisingly democratic for such a large group: Members vote through a show of hands at the meeting, and those from the region of a nominated country can veto a nomination.  

Next up was a two-hour memorial for Saleem Huq, a longtime champion of loss and damage funding for vulnerable countries, and a close friend of Singh’s. Huq picked up social media in his 60s and insisted on daily selfies with him, Singh told the crowd at the memorial, which was organized by Huq’s son. “He was an embodiment of adaptation,” Singh said.

By 4 p.m. Singh was showing no signs of slowing down. He was still running on a banana and a small cheese sandwich, but he picked up an iced Americano and sat down at a bench near the Saudi Arabia pavilion to take a break. Suddenly, he spotted someone walking in the distance, ended the conversation with me mid-sentence, yelled “Emma!” and sprinted off.

He’d spotted Emma Fenton, team leader on international climate policy with the Scottish government. Scotland was the first developed country to formally acknowledge that wealthy countries should help developing countries shoulder the costs of climate change. Singh and the current Scottish first minister, Humza Yousaf, had met at an event earlier this year and built a rapport, Singh later told me. Now he wanted to leverage the connection for a formal meeting with the minister. Yousaf was flying out from Dubai that night, but Cabinet Secretary for Net Zero and Just Transition Màiri McAllan would “obviously like to talk to you,” Fenton told Singh, agreeing to set up a meeting. 

Later in the evening, Singh received a Whatsapp message from Fenton, asking him to moderate a panel on loss and damage funding with McAllan. The event clashed with CAN’s daily press conference, but McAllan was the priority — Singh was trying to enlist countries to sign on to the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, and this looked like a good opportunity to make some headway, given Scotland’s leadership on other climate justice issues. “Not bad,” Singh muttered. “In any case, we want a meeting with Màiri to discuss the fossil fuel treaty, so she’s the right person.” 

After getting off the train back to his hotel, Singh was ready for a beer. Not all restaurants in Dubai serve alcohol, and he insisted that we find one that does. He ordered a Peroni and promptly returned his attention to his phone to promote social media posts, respond to Whatsapp messages and emails, talk to journalists, and figure out his schedule for the next day. 

Singh reached his hotel lobby around 9:30 p.m., but his day wasn’t close to over. Over the next four hours, he updated CAN leadership and a Scottish CAN member about his conversations with Fenton. He also talked to the editor of Eco, a CAN newsletter published daily during COPs, which targets negotiators and is handed out at the entrance of the COP28 venue early in the morning as decision-makers walk in. Later, when Singh got to his room, he messaged a producer at the independent TV news program Democracy Now! about his big takeaways from COP28 and the key points he wanted to emphasize in a segment he’d record with host Amy Goodman in the coming days. 

By the time he hit the bed, it was a little past 1 a.m. He was ready to do it all over again the next day.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘I’ll just eat on the way’: A climate activist’s 18-hour sprint through COP28 on Dec 8, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Naveena Sadasivam.

• "[T]ens of thousands" of baseless searches "related to civil unrest" in a one-year period
  • including 141 racial justice protestors and thousands of January 6 suspects.
• Searches for individuals an NSA analyst had met on an online dating site, and a prospective tenant."
• Searches for a state court judge who reported civil rights violations to the FBI.
• Searches for places of worship that were intentionally hidden from oversight.
• Searches for a member of HPSCI and a US Senator.
• A "batch" search for 19,000 Congressional donors.
• "Batch" searches that included current and former federal government officials, journalists, and political commentators.
• Searches for people who came to the FBI to perform repairs.
• Searches for victims who came to the FBI to report crimes.
• Searches for business, religious, and community leaders who applied to participate in the FBI's "Citizens Academy."
• Searches for college students participating in a "Collegiate Academy."
• Searches for family members and colleagues.
• Searches for police officer candidates.
• Searches for an individual employed by a defense attorney.
• Searches for a wrongly accused American academic.
• Searches based on a witness's report that two men "of Middle Eastern descent" were loading cleaning supplies into a truck.
• Searches for a local political party.
• "Batch" searches for 1600 Americans "who had flown through an airport during a particular date range and were either traveling to or returning from a foreign country"
• 2,000 searches for "the names and dates of birth of individuals who were registered competitors in an athletic event."

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

Unlike other climate change-focused reports that are released annually, the National Climate Assessment comes out once every four years. The length of time between reports, and the volume of research each report contains, allow its authors to make concrete observations about climate-driven trends unfolding from coast to coast and island to island. 

In the previous installment of the report, released in 2018, the government warned that rising temperatures, extreme weather events, drought, and flooding threatened to unleash a surge of fungal pathogens, toxic algal blooms, mosquito- and tick-borne illnesses, and other climate-linked diseases. The new report, published on Tuesday, demonstrates that this prediction is unfolding right on schedule. 

“Health risks from a changing climate,” the report says, include “increases in the geographic range of some infectious diseases.” West Nile virus, dengue fever, Lyme disease, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, rabies, and Valley fever, carried by mosquitoes, ticks, mammals, and soil, are among the infectious diseases the report has identified as “climate sensitive.” Climate change isn’t the only reason more people are being affected by these illnesses — urban sprawl, deforestation, cyclical environmental changes, and other influences are also at play — but it’s a clear contributing factor. 

Here are a few of the diseases that the Fifth National Climate Assessment warns are spreading into new parts of the country as a changing climate sends their carriers creeping into different areas.

Ticks

In the U.S., the vast, vast majority of reported cases of vector-borne disease — defined as diseases spread by blood-sucking invertebrates such as ticks, mosquitoes, and fleas  — can be traced to ticks. Lyme disease, which has long been prevalent in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic, is becoming endemic to the Midwest as winters in that region become milder. Western black-legged ticks, which can carry Lyme, are even creeping into Alaska, where conditions have historically been too harsh for the eight-legged bloodsuckers to survive. The costs of treating Lyme, which can cause effects that range from flu-like symptoms to neurological disorders, are “substantial,” the report says. One analysis puts the annual cost of treating Lyme, which affects some half a million Americans each year, at $970 million.

Lyme isn’t the only tick-borne illness expanding in range and severity across the U.S. The Gulf Coast tick, which carries multiple diseases, has been expanding through the Southeast. Deadly illnesses such as Rocky Mountain spotted fever, babesiosis, and alpha-gal syndrome, all spread by different kinds of ticks, could reach new areas as temperatures continue to rise, the report says. 

Mosquitoes

Much like ticks, mosquitoes are benefiting from milder winters and longer breeding seasons. The uptick in flooding across major swaths of the country, brought on by a warmer, wetter atmosphere, can also be a boon to the winged insects. Every part of the contiguous U.S. is seeing changes in the geographic range and prevalence of mosquito-borne illnesses. 

West Nile virus, a disease carried by Culex mosquitoes, is expanding in the Northeast and becoming a bigger threat in other parts of the country, like the Southeast, as the planet warms. “Black and under-resourced neighborhoods in Chatham County, Georgia, were identified as hotspots for West Nile virus,” the report says. The majority of people who contract West Nile experience no symptoms, but people who are immunocompromised, elderly, or pregnant, or who have comorbidities, often have severe symptoms and can even die. 

Dengue fever, a deadly viral infection, is becoming a bigger risk in the contiguous U.S., Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Hawaiʻi, and the U.S.-affiliated Pacific Islands. Malaria, a parasitic mosquito-borne illness that was eradicated from the U.S. in the 1950s, is now a burgeoning threat in the Southeast and Pacific Islands regions. 

Bacteria

Climate change is helping to spread a bacteria called Vibrio, which proliferates in warm ocean water and causes an illness called vibriosis. Symptoms include vomiting, diarrhea, and a rash that can progress into an infection called necrotizing fasciitis, or flesh-eating disease. Bad cases, usually caused by eating contaminated shellfish, can lead to death. You can also get sick by swimming with an open wound or accidentally splashing contaminated water into a cut. 

Under an intermediate warming scenario where temperatures rise up to 2.6 degrees Celsius (4.7 degrees Fahrenheit), climate change-associated cases of vibriosis are expected to rise 51 percent by 2090. Warming ocean temperatures along the coasts of the continental United States are allowing Vibrio to flourish and expand further north, particularly in the Northeast and the West. Three people died in New York and Connecticut this past summer after contracting the illness. 

But Vibrio isn’t the only type of bacteria benefiting from rising temperatures. Leptospirosis, an illness caused by a waterborne pathogenic bacteria that can infect humans and other animals, is spreading in Hawai‘i and the U.S.-affiliated Pacific Islands as ocean temperatures rise and tropical storms challenge this region’s water and sanitation infrastructure. Fecal coliform bacteria, which can lead to dysentery, typhoid fever, and hepatitis A, are also a climate-driven risk in this region, according to the report. 

Foxes, fungi, and amoebae

The report also identifies some unexpected drivers of illness that are cropping up in states from Texas to Alaska. 

In the Southwest, a fungal disease called Valley fever, which occurs when fungal spores take root in people’s lungs and cause painful symptoms such as lumps, rashes, fever, and fatigue, is spreading. As the continental U.S. warms, the fungus will move north into states where it has rarely been seen before, such as Oregon and Washington. If climate change continues completely unabated, cases of the disease will rise 220 percent by the end of the century, according to the report. 

In Alaska, rabies is popping up in foxes and other animals, raising concerns about the potential for human cases. There is no cure for rabies and the fatality rate, nearly 100 percent, is the highest of any disease on earth. In the winter spanning 2020 and 2021, Alaska reported 35 cases of rabies in animals, up from an average of four to five cases in the preceding years. Researchers say melting sea ice and changing prey patterns could be reasons for the spike. 

Naegleria fowleri, often referred to as the brain-eating amoeba, causes a deadly brain infection when the amoeba gets into the nose canal and, from there, into the brain. A toddler in Arkansas died after contracting the disease playing in a splash pad in September. An adult in Texas also contracted a fatal case of disease this year. Based on these limited cases and other scattered deaths that have occurred in recent years, the authors of the Fifth National Climate Assessment think the disease may be spreading north. “More research is needed,” they write.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline It’s not just extreme weather: ‘Climate-sensitive’ diseases are spreading through the US on Nov 16, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Zoya Teirstein.

• A deluge of Israeli airstrikes today on a refugee camp near Gaza City has demolished apartment buildings, leaving craters where they once stood; at the same time, Israeli ground troops battled Hamas militants across northern Gaza.
• Jacob Lew confirmed as US Ambassador to Israel.
• The UN Human Rights Commission released a new report on the October 5 strike in the Ukrainian village of Hroza, urging Russia to acknowledge responsibility for the missile strike that killed over 50 civilians earlier this month.
• Documents released by a Maine sheriff’s office gave a newly detailed timeline of the warning signs and failed efforts to stop the gunman who killed 18 people and wounded 13 others at a bowling alley and bar last week.
• Fire officials are battling a wildfire in Southern California fueled by gusty Santa Ana winds that’s ripping through rural land southeast of Los Angeles.
• Federal and state fishery agencies are scrambling to save some of the last populations of Central Valley spring-run Chinook Salmon. In an urgent effort to help save their unique genetic heritage, juvenile salmon are being captured and transported to their new homes in a hatchery complex at U.C. Davis. The emergency action was triggered by extremely low numbers of salmon that returned to their creeks of origin to spawn this year.

Members of the Jamul Fire Dept., out of San Diego County, look for hot spots while fighting the Highland Fire Tuesday, Oct. 31, 2023, in Aguanga, Calif. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)

The post Fire officials are battling a wildfire in Southern California fueled by gusty Santa Ana winds that’s ripping through rural land southeast of Los Angeles – Tuesday, October 31, 2023 appeared first on KPFA.

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

"We all are calling on our elected officials to find a new way forward together, through unbreakable solidarity motivated by our humanity."

Israeli officials said more than 1,400 Israeli civilians and soldiers were killed in the Hamas-led surprise attacks of October 7.

The staffers said they "join in mourning the loss of... Israelis murdered by these acts of terrorism and in prayer for those injured and the around 200 hostages in Gaza, including our fellow Americans, whose safe return is a priority for us all."

"We join members of Congress and the international community's denunciation of the horrific war crimes Hamas has committed," the letter states. "At the same time, we mourn for the Palestinian civilians who are enduring catastrophic suffering at the hands of the Israeli government. As of this writing, more than 6,000 bombs have been dropped on the Gaza Strip. More than 4,000 Palestinian civilians, including entire families, have been slain, and about 12,500 are injured."

"Palestinians in Gaza are facing critical shortages of medicine, food, drinking water, fuel, and electricity following the Israeli government's brutal blockade," the staffers noted. "As Muslims, Jews, and allies, we believe that denying these basic resources violates the tenets of our faiths, values, and our humanity."

"We are tired of reliving generational fears of genocide and ethnic cleansing," they added. "We are tired of leaders pushing us to blame each other, exploiting our pain and our histories to rationalize political agendas and justify violence. We all are calling on our elected officials to find a new way forward together, through unbreakable solidarity motivated by our humanity."

The staffers' letter follows the introduction earlier this week of a resolution led by Reps. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and co-sponsored by 13 other House progressives urging the Biden administration to push for an immediate cease-fire.

In the Senate, Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Wednesday blocked passage of Republican legislation to prohibit American aid to Gaza until President Joe Biden certifies that the funds won't benefit members of Hamas or any other U.S.-designated terrorist organization.

"We have got to do everything that we can to make sure that not one nickel goes to the murderous Hamas organization," Sanders explained. "But at the same time, we have got to stand with the innocent women and children in Palestine who are suffering today and are facing an almost unprecedented modern humanitarian disaster."

In stark contrast with the progressive lawmakers' call for an immediate cease-fire, the United States on Wednesday vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning violence against civilians in Israel and Gaza and calling for "humanitarian pauses" to allow aid to enter the besieged Palestinian territory. The U.S. was the only Security Council member to oppose the measure.

A U.S.-brokered deal to allow 20 truckloads of humanitarian aid into Gaza from Egypt was announced late Wednesday, although the details were still being hammered out on Thursday.

Also on Wednesday, Josh Paul, who spent 11 years as director of congressional and public affairs for the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, tendered his resignation over U.S. military aid to Israel during what numerous critics have called its "genocide" against Palestinians.

"I made myself a promise that I would stay for as long as I felt the harm I might do could be outweighed by the good I could do," Paul explained in his resignation letter. "I am leaving today because I believe that in our current course with regards to the continued—indeed, expanded and expedited—provision of lethal arms to Israel—I have reached the end of that bargain."

Huffpostreported Thursday that one State Department staffer described tensions in the agency as "basically a mutiny brewing... at all levels."

Throughout the Biden administration, staffers—especially Muslims—are sounding the alarm on a "culture of silence" stifling voices critical of Israel's onslaught or advocating a policy of restraint.

Biden is set to discuss "Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel, the need for humanitarian assistance in Gaza, [and] Russia's ongoing brutal war against Ukraine" during a prime-time televised address Thursday evening.

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

The post The Only Way Out is Through Protest appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Howard Lisnoff.

There is this concept, I think, that everything you write is entirely different, and the way you must approach them is entirely different. For some writers, that is absolutely true. But for me, there is no difference between writing a novel and writing non-fiction and writing podcast episodes, in terms of the actual drafting. When it comes to research and the way that you build the story, there are differences—but the actual writing itself is the same. The way I write my tweets is the same way I write my novel, which is: word vomit it out and then deal with it later.

For the actual workload portion of it, I don’t believe in forcing yourself to do work that you don’t like, or that you think is exciting but aren’t ready to do yet. There’s kind of a mantra in journalism that you don’t actually have writer’s block, you’re just not done reporting. I think that that’s true for every kind of writing. Sometimes you try to write an essay and you’re getting blocked and blocked and blocked, and the problem isn’t that you have writer’s block; it’s that you haven’t fully emotionally processed the thing that you’re trying to write about, or you haven’t read enough things that are going to inspire you to help you do it. My balance mechanism is: Do the thing that you’re the most excited about at that moment, and intake more than you output.

Your podcast Normal Gossip is based on true stories, but your team anonymizes them. Did your experience writing your novel impact the way you think about the gossip stories you tell?

There are two ways that are major for the podcast, both of which came from my book editor, Jessica Williams at HarperCollins. She’s so good at plotting. My first novel is not a heavy plot book—it’s a feelings book. And the problem with feelings books, often, is that they lose momentum. So Jessica Williams told me every chapter needs to be asking a question and revealing something. They’re not the same question and reveal—the question you ask at the front of the book is the reveal at the end, or in the climax, or whatever. But in each section, you need to be doing that, because that’s what keeps a reader interested. Something we talk about a lot when we’re working on the [podcast] scripts is: What kind of questions are we setting up, and when do we reveal them?

The second way is how everyone says, “Show, don’t tell”—it’s a mantra for a reason, but I think about that a lot when we’re working on the podcast. Can we ask another question and get a little bit more information here? Like, we know you hate your mother-in-law in this scenario that you’ve sent in, but can we email you and ask for other instances? What’s the backstory here?

It’s a perfect storm in the podcast, because we’re reporting out stories that are being sent in, and we’re restructuring them through the lens of having all the pieces of a fiction puzzle.

That’s interesting—I wanted to also ask about how your work as a reporter influences the podcast, but maybe that answers that question?

All the skills work with each other. You asked before about the balance of my perception of myself as a creative individual, which I think is something that people struggle with a lot—that I struggle with a lot—when you’re working for money. When I wrote my first novel, I wrote it on yellow legal pads in my terrible apartment in my free time, and it was easier to think about it as a creative pursuit, because there was no dollar amount attached to it.

Part of it, for me, is thinking about what I need to think of myself as to do the work best. Sometimes, the things I like are not necessarily what this book, this article, this story, this podcast episode needs to work best. So then, what do I need to think about myself as in order to give the stories what they need? For me, that answer has always been that I’m a storyteller.

My instincts and what I would like as a listener are sometimes different from what the listeners are going to actually like, and you have to know that and be able to modify for that. But it’s hard, because even as I say that, I know that you do have to make decisions for the work to succeed on its own. There’s an extrapolation of that, which is, “Make whatever people want from you.” The problem with that is that people don’t know what they want. People say, “We want an episode of the podcast every single day. We want a book from you every year. We want all of this stuff.” And the reality is, if you do that, you will die, and then there will be no work, or you will live, and all of it will be mediocre. [laughs] So, having an innate, internal scale of what makes something good in your own eyes is what then allows you to say, “Can I make it good by the standard of, for example, this old episode—and not by what I as a consumer want?”

You have to find the balance between trusting yourself—your own taste, your own ability to produce—and trusting the audience, or what the audience is interested in.

Part of this, too, is that podcasting is a really interesting medium, because it is perceived externally as a team sport. People know that there’s a producer who’s putting sound effects in there, that we have an editor, that we have a production assistant. And people don’t perceive novels and non-fiction and journalism the same way, because they say, “Oh, your byline is stamped on the front of this, and therefore you did it alone”—the solitary genius myth.

I think you can trust your instincts and work in a team. Every book is worked on in a team: you have an agent, you have an editor, you have a copy editor, all of these people whose hands go into the thing. So it’s knowing your own judgment well enough and having little enough of an ego to know when someone else says something right. So that when someone says, “This isn’t working,” and you know in your gut that that’s true, do you have the ability to overcome the ego that says, “But I’m good at it”?

You know, I actually feel like it has taken a while for listeners to perceive podcasts as a team effort. It’s heartening to hear that you feel that perception is changing.

We’re trying. It is true that often I have to email people and be like, “You need to credit Alex [Sujong Laughlin, Normal Gossip’s co-creator and supervising producer].” These very basic things that no one would ever have to do for me, because it’s my voice on the podcast. But I think the longer we act like the things that we do are solitary acts of genius, the easier it is for us to be exploited as workers. When you’re saying, “I did this by myself,” what you are saying is, “Pay me — only me, because everyone else is replaceable,” and that’s never true on any kind of art project. The people working with you at every level are important to the success of the project. And so, by giving them credit, you are creating a structure in which everyone can succeed.

You’re also a co-founder of Defector, which is an employee-owned media company. What are some of the differences you’ve noticed between working in that environment vs. a more traditional media structure?

Having the stability of knowing that you cannot be fired without a staff revolt against you gives the space for creative work to actually happen. In the past, I did not realize how much of my mental capacity was being spent on looking for jobs, pitching editors, worrying about whether publications were going to close. And you know while it’s happening, “Oh my god, this is taking up all of my energy and all of my time.” But to actually feel [that worry] be lifted—it’s awful, because I realized I’ve spent all of these years so worried about where my money was going to come from—whether I would have money to pay my rent, whether or not I would have money for healthcare—that I wasn’t doing great work. I was doing a lot of work that I wasn’t proud of because it paid $2 per word. And that work all takes time, and that’s all time that you could be spending doing stuff that you’re proud of, which sucks.

The second thing is that when you work for a worker-owned cooperative, there are no standards outside of…Well, since we’re subscriber based, the metric standard is how many subscribers we have. But as long as we have enough subscribers, the standard is: Is the work good? Which means that you don’t have some suit person coming into your editorial room and saying, “Everyone’s going to write SEO headlines now”—which is what happens at every media publication—and then, instead of doing the work that you know you can do, you’re doing this kind of vague work that a suit says is important.

There have been a lot of times when I will go to our VP of business, Jasper Wang, with the kind of apologetic tone of someone who has been traumatized in other media companies. And I’m like, “I’m so sorry, but my flight got canceled and I need to rent a car and it’s going to be $700. Is that okay?” And he’s always like, “Yes! You need that to do your job. What do you mean, ‘Is it okay?’” And that is a complete difference of life: not having to worry about whether or not the people in charge are going to destroy you for something small.

When Alex and I wanted to make Normal Gossip, Defector took it to all the big media companies and said, “Do you want this?” And they all said, “Well, it’s an unproven concept.” Which it was—nobody had made a gossip podcast before. Now, you’ll notice that there are dozens of them, and that’s because it is a proven concept—ours was successful, so now these companies are willing to produce them, because there’s no risk involved. But that also means that everything’s the same, and that means that consumers don’t have options, because everything is copying something else. We have the freedom to not do that, which is a huge blessing.

I know that you and Alex are also really intentional about avoiding burnout in the making of the show. Can you tell me why that is important to you and what guardrails you use to avoid burnout?

Everywhere I’ve ever worked has seen potential as a reason to drive you to an early grave. They think you’re talented, and therefore you write all the time, constantly. Some of that is good; you get reps in. But we want the podcast to be good, and we learned very early on that the podcast being good is dependent on the two of us having fun doing it. When we get in silly, goofy mode, the art is better. Because we’re like, “What if we made this a murder themed episode? And we just go fully in on that?” Those kinds of ideas come because you have the space to have them, instead of thinking logistically all the time. So that’s why; the “why” is actually more business-focused than I think a lot of people think—it’s that we want the product to be good.

The “how” is that we don’t have a weekly podcast. That’s a huge thing. Everyone wants us to have a weekly podcast, because that’s how math works: if you have more episodes, you can sell more ads and make more money. But we take breaks from doing it. And some of those are working breaks—like right now, we’re not putting out new episodes, but we’re on tour and we’re in writers’ rooms for season five. So we are working, currently, but in August we won’t be. We have a whole section of August blocked off where—well, I am going to do other work, unfortunately, but take a break from [the podcast], and let my brain reset, so that I can come back fresh.

In thinking about all of your work, I was struck by this relationship between sustainability and ambition. It feels applicable both to your own career and what it means to run a business. How do you think about that balance?

Another big difference in working at Defector is that we have no infinite goal. There’s a popular tweet that’s like, “Our goal as a company is to drain the oceans and kill god.” And we make fun of it all the time, because we’re not trying to drain the oceans and kill god. We’re not trying to make a billion dollars. We’re trying to fund people to do the kind of work they want to do, and that’s a modest goal. We’re doing it! We’re successful. So we’re not trying to grow the company, really —we’re trying to maintain the company where it is, which is a totally different kind of goal. So I’m talking a lot about quality, which is obviously a subjective measure, but in my own ambition, it is no longer quantitative. I’m not like, “Oh, I want to write five books.” I would love to write five books, if I had five good books in me—but I can’t guarantee you those are there, at this point. It takes time to know what you have inside yourself.

And so, for me, the sustainability portion is connected to the ambition portion. If your ambition is to make things that you’re proud of, at a scale that allows you to eat dinner out once a week, that is a manageable goal, because it isn’t, “I want to be a millionaire and write Hollywood screenplays and do all of this other stuff.” It’s that each day, you’re trying to do things that you feel good about.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Marissa Lorusso.

Today, Sunrise Movement along with 50+ national organizations – including key service, youth and environmental organizations – shared a letter calling on President Biden to establish a Civilian Climate Corps that would put young Americans to work serving their communities and fighting the climate crisis. The full text of the letter and its signatories are below.

“This summer, our country saw heatwaves, wildfires and floods that destroyed communities, uprooted families and claimed hundreds of lives,” the signed organizations wrote. “While previous Executive Orders and legislation under your administration demonstrate tremendous progress toward meeting our Paris climate goals and your campaign promises, this summer has made clear that we must be as ambitious as possible in tackling the great crisis of our time. We encourage your administration to create a Civilian Climate Corps through existing authorities, with existing climate funding, that can coordinate across relevant federal agencies.”

The letter highlighted the significance of what this could mean for young voters, in particular, a vital voting bloc for Democrats.

“Young voters widely support this vision. Half of all voters under 45 say they would consider joining the Climate Corps if a job was available to them,” the organizations note. “In 2020, young people helped ensure your election to office. After high profile approvals of fossil fuel projects, it’s time to deliver for this critical constituency and show that you and your administration are serious about an all out mobilization to confront the climate crisis. We urge you to support this historic investment in jobs and justice.”

This comes during Climate Week and after the March to End Fossil Fuels, which saw 75k participants – including tens of thousands of students – take to the streets calling for bold climate action from the Biden administration. Many of the same organizations leading the protest have signed the letter.

The letter also highlighted four key principles for a Civilian Climate Corps initiative created through Executive Action:

• The Civilian Climate Corps must take a whole-of-government approach to the climate crisis.
• The Civilian Climate Corps must prioritize equity in the communities it serves and the Corps members it trains.
• The Civilian Climate Corps must provide a pathway to long-term employment through good-paying union jobs.
• The Civilian Climate Corps must center the needs and leadership of local communities in order to achieve its national mission.

Sunrise Movement will be doubling down on its efforts to push for a Civilian Climate Corps through executive action. They've already spoken to their 100+ hubs and chapters about restarting a national campaign and increasing pressure on the administration to get this done.

The full text of the letter is as follows:

September 18, 2023

The Honorable Joseph R. Biden, Jr.
President of the United States of America
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear President Biden,

We, the undersigned organizations, write to express our support for an Executive Order establishing a Civilian Climate Corps that would put young Americans to work serving their communities and tackling the climate crisis.

This summer, our country saw heatwaves, wildfires and floods that destroyed communities, uprooted families and claimed hundreds of lives. While previous Executive Orders and legislation under your administration demonstrate tremendous progress toward meeting our Paris climate goals and your campaign promises, this summer has made clear that we must be as ambitious as possible in tackling the great crisis of our time. We encourage your administration to create a Civilian Climate Corps through existing authorities, with existing climate funding, that can coordinate across relevant federal agencies.

Tapping into enthusiasm for the sweeping social programs of the New Deal era, the possibility of a modern Civilian Climate Corps remains a popular and exciting strategy in our country’s plan to combat climate change. Americans want the opportunity to serve their communities, address the most pressing threat facing our country, and get experience that can lead to long-term, good-paying union employment. The Civilian Climate Corps would let them do so, through national service work that ranges from improving energy efficiency to supporting disaster resilience and recovery. With high workforce development standards and strong environmental justice requirements, an ambitious Climate Corps would train a generation of climate leaders, kickstart the climate workforce mobilization, and directly combat systemic racial injustice by prioritizing resources and job creation in underserved communities.

Young voters widely support this vision. Half of all voters under 45 say they would consider joining the Climate Corps if a job was available to them. Like the COVID recovery package’s $1,400 checks, putting young people into high-quality national service positions to tackle climate change and on pathways to good-paying, union jobs would make precisely the kind of visible policy change in Americans’ lives that can demonstrate the power of government to serve its people.

Strong workforce standards will be essential in realizing the full potential of the Civilian Climate Corps. It is critical that the Civilian Climate Corps set corps members up for success during and after their year of service, and that this holds true across all national service programs. A fully established and appropriated Civilian Climate Corps should provide a life-sustaining wage for all corps members, plus healthcare, childcare, and educational benefits that would help corps members and their families thrive. Corps members should also receive technical and vocational training during their service, including through pre-apprenticeships in partnership with local union chapters, to open pathways to stable careers in the clean economy.

The Civilian Climate Corps must also advance environmental justice and correct the racially exclusionary practices of the original Civilian Conservation Corps. It must be a viable opportunity for all young Americans, and it must address the disproportionate burden on communities of color across the country from the overlapping harms of toxic pollution, economic disinvestment, and other structural inequities. The Civilian Climate Corps can be a force to directly combat those inequities and support these communities. To that end, any new Civilian Climate Corps program should strive to direct half of corps investments into overburdened communities, and recruit at least half of its corps members from those same places, using the authority under the Justice 40 initiative and additional efforts. The program should also ensure gender equality, provide opportunities for corps members of a range of ages and abilities, give corps members opportunities regardless of immigration status, protect tribal sovereignty and prioritize the needs and leadership of the communities it serves. By prioritizing local recruitment and engaging in local consultation on project design and implementation the CCC can ensure that its climate action is sustainably driven from the bottom-up.

We know that when you hear the words climate change, you think jobs. Establishing a Civilian Climate Corps is a key opportunity to invest in the workforce of tomorrow and clearly demonstrate that climate action and job creation are inextricably and positively linked. Going big on the Civilian Climate Corps and ensuring that it centers job creation, environmental justice, and direct community investment will be an essential step in our collective fight to adapt to and mitigate climate change.

In 2020, young people helped ensure your election to office. After high profile approvals of fossil fuel projects, it’s time to deliver for this critical constituency and show that you and your administration are serious about an all out mobilization to confront the climate crisis. We urge you to support this historic investment in jobs and justice.

Sincerely,

Americas Service Commissions
Blue America
Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund
Chesapeake Climate Action Network
Chiron Communications
CivicWell
Conservation Trust for North Carolina
Dayenu: A Jewish Call to Climate Action
Debt Collective
Evergreen Action
Farallon Strategies
Food & Water Watch
Gen Z for Change
GreenFaith
GreenLatinos
GRID Alternatives
Healthy Communities of the Capital Area
Hip Hop Caucus
IfNotNow
Justice Democrats
Labor Network for Sustainability
League of Conservation Voters
Maine Conservation Voters
Main Farm & Sea to School Network
Maine Farm to Institution
March for Our Lives
Marked by Covid
Milwaukee Riverkeeper
National Wildlife Federation
Next100
NextGen America
OIC of America, Inc.
Oil Change International
Our Hawaii
Partnership for the CCC
Path to Progress
People’s Action
Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada
ReImagine Appalachia
RuralOrganizing
Service Employees International Union
Serve Washington
Service Year Alliance
Sierra Club
States for Service Coalition
Sunrise Movement
The Climate Initiative
The Climate Reality Project
The Corps Network
US High Speed Rail Association
WildEarth Guardians
Working Families Party

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

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Looking to deepen relationships with local newsrooms, ProPublica has opened up applications for five new two-year partnerships that would focus on abuses of power in their communities.

Since 2018, ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network has supported individual projects over the course of a year. We’ve worked on 90 projects with more than 70 newsrooms.

This new group of partnerships will be different. We are seeking to build sustained relationships with reporters and newsrooms that have a proven track record of investigative reporting and impact.

Successful applications will demonstrate past ability to execute investigative stories, strong reporting ties to the community and a range of story ideas that the reporter might take on over the two-year partnership. The new partnerships are supported by a grant from the Abrams Foundation and will begin on Jan. 2, 2024.

The Local Reporting Network is part of ProPublica’s local initiative, which includes offices in the Midwest, South, Southwest and Northwest, plus an investigative unit in partnership with The Texas Tribune.

As part of the program, ProPublica will pay each full-time reporter’s salary (up to $80,000), plus an allowance for benefits. We will also provide extensive support and editorial guidance, including collaboration with a senior editor and access to ProPublica’s expertise with data, research, engagement, video and design. Local reporters will work from and report to their home newsrooms; their work will be published or broadcast by your newsroom and simultaneously by ProPublica.

Applications are due Oct. 17, 2023, at 9 a.m. Eastern time.

Since its founding, several reporters have partnered with the Local Reporting Network for multiple years. Those sustained relationships have allowed us to deliver high-impact reporting to communities that urgently needed journalistic attention.

Since 2019, Kyle Hopkins at the Anchorage Daily News has delivered a stunning range of stories: His stories on the lack of law enforcement in rural parts of Alaska prompted a national emergency declaration from the U.S. attorney general; his reporting on the actions of two state attorneys general prompted their resignations; and his coverage of the work environment at the Anchorage library system was followed by the resignation of the library’s deputy director. Hopkins’ law enforcement coverage was recognized with the Pulitzer Prize for public service and other major journalism awards.

Molly Parker, reporting in southern Illinois, joined the program in 2018; her most recent project looked at deplorable conditions at a remote state facility for people with developmental disorders and mental illnesses. Documenting abuse and neglect of residents, the reporting also showed how staff had covered up their actions and continued to work with relative impunity. Since the reporting began, the state announced its intention to remove half of the residents from the facility, passed a new law increasing penalties for staff who cover up abuse and replaced the facility’s director. The project, done in collaboration with Lee Enterprises Midwest and Capitol News Illinois, received a Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award in 2023.

Applications should be submitted by newsroom leaders and will ask for the following information:

• The reporter whom you envision spearheading the work and the annual salary you would need to pay them. (Please provide an exact figure, not including benefits.) This could be someone on staff or a freelancer with whom you hope to work. (Freelancers must submit a joint application with an eligible news organization willing to publish their work.) The person must have an investigative track record to be considered for this position.
• A personal statement by the reporter explaining their interest in and history with investigative reporting.
• Three clips and an accompanying explanation of the backstory: particular challenges or successes; the role the reporter played; any impact; and journalistic lessons learned.
• A resume.
• A memo of stories you’d like to pursue during two years of intensive partnership with ProPublica. These should be stories that would benefit from a collaboration, potentially including data, research and engagement reporting resources we can provide. These may include big stories, an ongoing series of shorter stories, text, audio, video or something else. All of them should have the potential to resonate with both local and national audiences. We recognize these may shift over the two-year program: The point is to get to know your reporter, their interests and how they approach their work. But we would like to know at least one story that seems like a solid starting point for the partnership.

ProPublica editors are available to answer questions or to give you feedback on your application before you submit it. Please reach us at Local.Reporting@propublica.org.

Please submit your proposal by Oct. 17, 2023, at 9 a.m. Eastern time. Entries will be judged principally by ProPublica editors. Selected proposals will be announced by early December.

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

Only 20 countries, led overwhelmingly by the United States, are responsible for nearly 90 percent of the carbon-dioxide (CO2) pollution threatened by new oil and gas fields and fracking wells planned between 2023 and 2050. If this oil and gas expansion [1] is allowed to proceed, it would lock in climate chaos and an unlivable future, according to Planet Wreckers, a new report by Oil Change International.

The research is released days ahead of United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres’ Climate Ambition Summit in New York City, where more than 10,000 people will march in protest of inaction against fossil fuels. Guterres has called for countries to show up with commitments to stop oil and gas expansion and plan a phase out of existing production in line with the 1.5°C limit.

If these 20 countries, which the report dubs “Planet Wreckers”, halted their planned new oil and gas extraction, 173 billion tonnes (Gt) of carbon pollution would be kept in the ground. This is equivalent to the lifetime pollution of nearly 1,100 new coal plants, or more than 30 years of annual U.S. carbon emissions. On top of oil and gas extraction from already operating sites worldwide, this amount of new carbon pollution would make it impossible to hold temperature rise to 1.5°C.

Five global north countries with the greatest economic means and moral responsibility to rapidly phase out production are responsible for a majority (51%) of planned expansion from new oil and gas fields through 2050: the United States, Canada, Australia, Norway, and the United Kingdom.